Just feel like I really need to respond that I really like the idea of three arcs for ships. With the arc's you specify, hitting the behind may give you the benefit that the hexes directly behind fall in both arcs so that when targeted from behind like that, the attacker can choose if they want to damage the starboard or port sides.
It also give the potential for Fore-centric and Aft-centric ships. Blockade runner ships might actually be aft-centric and have stronger shields specifically on the aft, because of the mentioned perspective they try to keep their enemies behind them as much of the time as they are hostile as possible.
A simplification of rules which gives the added benefit of also presenting opportunities for some slight variations that can be meaningful. (yet remaining relatively simple as a whole)
I wouldn't be against some potential variations on turrets either. Have early level turrets only cover 2 arc (maybe even with the secondary taking circumstance penalty) and even more advanced full circle turrets might have a blind (can't target) or weak (circumstance penalty) spot going one width hex path in a particular direction (like direct rear). As an example... option rule could be available to ignore turret traits such as that, but it gives extra flavor once realized and provides extra tactical factors.
I also agree that one weapon mount/turret should be able to be controlled by one gunner. (but generally only one gunner) Multiple weapon mounts might be triggered by a single gunner but would have something like MAP applied if not also Circumstance penalties. Barring specialized equipment, two gunners shouldn't be able to spit up and use different weapons on a single mount/turret separately. I might imagine a dual-gunner station, where one gunner assists the other gunner, but technically the weapons would all be being shot together as per one person not individually picked by the specific gunners.
Sorry, I meant to just respond to the idea of liking the idea of vehicles having three 3 arcs for firing and targeting. Thoughts just quickly spilled over to mounts and turrets options.
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I've been pretty dissatisfied with Starships in SF1E, but I'm also far from confident that Paizo will execute them well in SF2E. They do know what the issues are, but their track record on "additional" rules systems has not been great based on my own personal experience. Generally they tend to be undertested and therefore end up with some big holes in them. I've been pondering how to overhaul SF1E's starships for years on and off without really reaching a satisfying result, so it seems like a tough nut to crack.
The recent discussion has got me thinking again, so here are some of my own pain points and preferences:
We definitely need lighter weight rules for Starship combat and (especially) construction.
Part of the reason that starship building gets assigned to the one person who cares in SF1E is that the rules are complex and difficult to implement into a viable ship design. There's not just a barrier to entry in understanding how they work, but a barrier in knowing how to make a good ship with them. Worse, they're entirely separate from the normal rules. It's like having to learn a whole additional game. And on top of that, you may use these rules one out of every 10 sessions, so they're never fresh in your mind. While Waterslethe's suggestion to split up that barrier to entry by having each person "build" their own station is good, I think it'd be even better to just simplify things down. Less customization, less math, easier to remember and play.
When I say simplify, I'm thinking:
- Ship frames that give you all the stats you need for the ship (likely scaling with tier), so you don't have to do any math or work out the right balance between investing in one feature over another. Basically, your team chooses if you want to be fast and weak, slow and strong, or how tricksy your ship is.
- The option to slot a few things in and out on each frame, such that building a starship is 5-10 choices that can be discussed at the table rather than between sessions. You'd pick a weapon for each mount, then add several utility "units" or "systems", that would primarily give your ship new things to do in and out of combat, above and beyond the baseline.
- Starship roles that each have a few good qualitatively impactful (and therefore memorable) actions each, with fewer actions that require die rolls to resolve.
Starship Stats should probably be independent of character stats
I hate getting into a starship combat in SF1E when playing a solarion. You just feel like such an obvious second-string contributor. One solution for this is to just make roles that work for all 6 of the attributes. But that just pigeonholes your character into the role that matches their class. A technomancer might want to do magic, but not always be the engineer or science officer. You could also make roles flexible, allowing multiple skills or attributes to work. Ultimately though, I found myself gravitating toward just divesting character stats from starships entirely. It gives people the most flexibility to pick the roles they like to play, and allows them to not need to reference both their character sheet and their starship sheet at the same time.
"Tactical" starship combat is utterly uninteresting against single targets in open space, and that probably won't change if Paizo sticks to compatibility with PF2Es normal combat system
Imagine in PF2E that 50% of combats were a single PC Fighter, specialized as an archer, vs. a single enemy archer in an open field. That's SF1E's starship combat in a nutshell. There's no real decision making. You point your biggest gun at the enemy, aiming at their most damaged quadrant if you won initiative, and fire.
If you want one-on-one dogfights to be fun, the starship combat rules need to have proper dueling mechanics that add some play/counterplay and tension. The current system of firing arcs and flight movement absolutely does not accomplish this. There are TTRPGs that do dueling well, and generally what I've seen is that the keys are: the ability to attack and defend on multiple fronts (HP, morale, or other resources, and the individual status of limbs/systems), the ability to choose variable levels of risk when you take actions, and the existence of actions that counter other actions so you're encouraged to not be predictable or rely too much on any one tactic.
If introducing robust one-on-one combat rules is not reasonable (probably because it tends to be complicated), then the best solution is to have far more complex objectives and arenas. I've been playing Lancer recently, and one of its strongest features is that most encounters have "defeat all foes" as only a secondary or backup objective. This means players are constantly challenged to approach encounters differently, adjusting their loadouts or focusing on different tactics. Leaning into this approach as "default" for starship combat would do a lot to keep it fresh even with a simple ruleset and fairly open hex maps.
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I've been pretty dissatisfied with Starships in SF1E, but I'm also far from confident that Paizo will execute them well in SF2E. They do know what the issues are, but their track record on "additional" rules systems has not been great based on my own personal experience. Generally they tend to be undertested and therefore end up with some big holes in them. I've been pondering how to overhaul SF1E's starships for years on and off without really reaching a satisfying result, so it seems like a tough nut to crack.
I posted this in a thread I started but should have titled it differently. The idea isn't to use character creation rules to make playable ships as characters. Someone came up with a fully developed way to use the normal PF2e character creation rules and normal combat with very little adjustment to make and run starship combat.
for example, a ship's Frame is its Ancestries which determines the ship's stats. Feats are the ship's modifiers, and the ship's class gives it abilities and actions that the crew uses by using interact action. It's as easy and diverse as making characters and mostly uses normal combat and action economy.
This could be used for Mechs and Vehicles too, which means all types of combat could be run using the same system.
We most def NEED more than 4 ship roles regardless, most of my Starfinder groups are 6 strong!! Plus, how many classes will we get... way more than 4, and class should play a part in this in some form one would hope.
Tom
In 40 years of people trying to make an enterprise bridge crew spaceship game, no ones managed to do it apparently.
Just ditch the paradigm and give everyone their own ships.
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I'm curious about potential cross-pollination with PF2. What are the implications of these rules for things like ships, carriages/carts/wagons/chariots, boats, barges, etc?I posted this in a thread I started but should have titled it differently. The idea isn't to use character creation rules to make playable ships as characters. Someone came up with a fully developed way to use the normal PF2e character creation rules and normal combat with very little adjustment to make and run starship combat.
for example, a ship's Frame is its Ancestries which determines the ship's stats. Feats are the ship's modifiers, and the ship's class gives it abilities and actions that the crew uses by using interact action. It's as easy and diverse as making characters and mostly uses normal combat and action economy.
This could be used for Mechs and Vehicles too, which means all types of combat could be run using the same system.
I suppose it would depend on what complaints PF2e players have about making and using the things you listed in combat. I have played PF2e but only in organized play and have only encountered using anything you listed as just transportation. Also would any of those benefit from the depth and diversity of being built like a character? Just counting in the SF Core Rulebook and the Starship Operation Manual, building a Starship has 44 pages of rules and options. The Starship combat rules are complex enough to have their own 100-card rules reference deck. So the idea I linked to could solve a lot of issues with Starship in Starfinder, but I don't know enough about Pathfinder 2e to know how or if that would also benefit the things you listed, maybe a simplified version might?
So currently at least in 1st edition rules there are seven starship roles that people can fill, of which as far as I can tell only two are limited to only allowing one person to fill the role each round.
The two limited are Captain and Pilot.
The other roles, people could each choose whichever one they want to do, including potentially choosing to all chose the same role if they happened to choose to.
Those roles being:
Gunner
Engineer
Science Officer
Magic Officer
Chief Mate
Noting that while I admit that the Chief Mate name sounds like they are a Chief therefore only one, when looking at the the text of its actions they refer to the role occupant a generic, person filling a role as a chief mate, not the role of chief mate. Actions for Pilot and Captain say refer to the person filling the Role of Pilot, or the Captain.
Also when I first saw chief Mate role I was ecstatic because it gave a way for more brutish characters to participate in space combat more seemingly integrated. After a bit I started realizing in a way some of the items were great for the occasional, wow, you were able to help in this circumstance. But if using my often leaning more toward the Harder SciFi when thinking these storylines they get a little harder to imagine them 'always' being your contribution. However, I try to keep in a more Guardians of the Galaxy vibe for the story and it helps me. But I can't wonder if others run into the same flavor catching them a bit off guard. So I both love the Chief Mate role, and also admit that little bit of hesitancy regarding it.
I don't necessarily see them reducing the roles for second edition, unless they simply make the individuals more directly affecting the space combat than before without having to go through such generic roles.
A part of me wonders about having the characters all roll their own initiative, and have the starship kind of act like a minion. The pilot turning in personal actions to Pilot, which turn into Vehicle movement actions. It might for instance require 3 vehicle movement actions to preform most stunts. Only one person is allowed to turn in actions to get vehicle movement actions in a particular round for that vehicle.
Only one person can control/fire weapons from any individual given turret. Weapons in simpler weapon mounts only able to be fired by the same person who fired them that particular round. But multiple gunners could select separate mounted weapons/turrets between themselves, however many gunners there are. (Although I'd be ok with ships having a max number of gunnery stations, I imagine it shouldn't normally be something that would typically limit a party.
Something I do think is important is that we have specific 'technological' sensors of different sensors that can be installed with different tiers for starships, but magic officers have similar abilities, but just get a bonus from an arcane lab. I think that sensors should be able to be be defined as either magical, or technological, or even perhaps hybrid, with different tiers. And it should even be possible to have both technological sensors and magical divination sensors. So maybe the default configuration of PC ships would either be Hybrid sensors (using both magic and technological sensors) allowing the operator to choose to use magic or computers to operate it. Or other ships might simply have both types of separate sensors.
And with that thought, I think it would be neat to include more definition of magic/technology in the ships. Engines being primarily magic powered, or they could be primarily Technology driven, and even others, especially the more powerful ones frequently Hybrid. The type of systems on the ship might generate a circumstance bonus/penalty when being scanned by specific types of sensors between Tech/Magic/Hybrid options for instance. This creates some extra variance and also adds flavor to the spacecrafts.
I also have to admit that I like the idea of that light/agile starship weapons might actually be able to be fired multiple times in one round, each time probably taking an action. Some weapons might only take one action to fire, and do more damage, but may only be able to be fired once per round. Other weapons might take more than one action to fire. And I would be fine with the idea of some weapons requiring an inactive round between shots, be it just cooling, or even something like requiring reloading which might even take a gunners action to instigate and verify. Or some weapons might require an initial -charge- action before actually making the attack. thus requiring actions spent over a course of two rounds to fire much larger weapons. (or for instance if launching long ranged missiles had a launch action that happened the first round, but they missile wouldn't actually activate until the next round, where the gunner who launched the missile would have to preform a targeting action to target the enemy. It would make variety in the weapons much more meaningful. Also it would be nice if they avoided the preponderance of 'Limited Fire 5' weapons, and providing more variety on the number of limited shots and some means to increase the magazine size so to speak.
A part of me wonder if core space combat will begin more like the Narrative Combat, and they would put out a later Tactical book with more detailed ship construction and combat rules to give them more time to get all the pieces right.
How do you make sure that a small ship with six staff members isn't 3x as powerful as a small 2 seat craft, just because they have extra bodies on board. How do we make sure that larger ships actually seem to have more to them. And ideally, at certain points it should be clear that at certain sizes roles are explicitly 'teams' of people represented by a leader, unless some option is added/selected to provide extra automation, or simplifications.
(i.e. a huge ship that is a 'living ship' that has bio-automation that takes care of engineering for the engineer, following their lead. (but potentially requiring some bioengineering feat or skill rank to leverage), or a huge ship that is just a giant,simple barge, so the first engineering 'role' can be handled by a single person despite it being a huge ship. But larger ships need to get larger, and their options that you choose should be default be getting larger as they change size categories. (i.e. a large ship with four cargo bays should have less cargo space than a huge ship with three cargo bays, for instance.)
How do you make sure that a small ship with six staff members isn't 3x as powerful as a small 2 seat craft, just because they have extra bodies on board. How do we make sure that larger ships actually seem to have more to them. And ideally, at certain points it should be clear that at certain sizes roles are explicitly 'teams' of people represented by a leader, unless some option is added/selected to provide extra automation, or simplifications.
I have been thinking about the size issue ever since Driftbourne talked about ship size in a December 23 comment.
In face-to-face combat the combat strength of the party grows linearly with the size of the party. A party with six members is 3 times as powerful as a party of the same level with two members on the ground. Why shouldn't starships be the same way? A medium-frame explorer ship with a combat crew of six makes sense as 3 times as powerful as a tiny-frame fighter ship with a combat crew of two.
On the other hand, crowding six party members into a tiny-frame fighter ship designed for a combat crew of two should result in most party members being stuffing into a storage compartment just to fit. They won't be able to contribute to combat. The ship has to be the right size for the party.
Let's look at starship sizes in Starfinder 1st Edition by Base Frame and the number of crew on each ship size.
Tiny Drone 0, Racer 1, Statikete 1, Interceptor 1, Fighter 1-2,
Small Pioneer 1-3, Shuttle 1-4, Light Freighter 1-6, Light Hauler 1-6, Tug 1-2,
Medium Explorer 1-6, Transport 1-6, Oma 1-6,
Large Tanker 4-10, Destroyer 6-20, Heavy Freighter 6-20, Heavy Hauler 6-20, Vermelith 6-20
Huge Bulk Freighter 20-50, Cruiser 20-100
Gargantuan Supertanker 10-40, Carrier 75-200, Battleship 100-300
Colossal Dreadnought 125-500, Base Ship 150-100,000
Supercolossal Ultranought 250-500
Much of the crew in the larger ships would not be combat crew. A heavy freighter with a crew of 20 would have several cargo handlers, a purser, and a cook, people who don't know how to pilot a ship, shoot a ship's coilgun, or patch together engines hit by enemy fire. Instead, the essential minimum crew of six would be the people who can fight.
A robust way to define the size of the combat crew is with combat stations. It is a variant of WatersLethe's notion that each party member has a section of the ship that they are in charge of, but the idea comes more from the Star Trek bridge. In Star Trek the Original Series, the two navigators Chekov and Sulu sit at their navigation stations, the science officer Spock stands at a science station, the communications officer Uhura sits at a communications station, etc. Of the combat crew, only the engineers and the medical officers routinely work off the bridge. And the medical officers are healing support in the aftermath rather direct combat, so we can ignore them. If we add an engineering station for each engineer, then we can have one station for each crew member who is supposed to be contributing to starship combat. A ship of the right size would have one station for each party member.
And the combat power of the ship would be directly proportional to the number of stations, assuming that each station is properly manned.
Starfinder 2nd Edition would need more base frames so that we can have ships with 1 station, ships with 2 stations, etc. I am dropping the names "tiny," "small," "medium," "large," etc., because those sizes refer to creatures on a 5-foot square grid rather than interstellar vehicles that would occupy a dozen times as many squares. I will borrow nautical terms instead.
New Base Frames
One Seat 1 station, 1 forward light weapon mount, 1 basic mount, no bays
Twin Seat 2 stations, 1 forward weapon mount, 2 basic mounts, 1 bay
Skipjack 3 stations, 1 forward weapon mount, 1 turret light weapon mount, 2 basic mounts, 2 bays
Sloop 4 stations, 1 forward weapon mount, 1 turret weapon mount, 2 basic mounts, 3 bays
Ketch 6 stations, 1 forward weapon mount, 1 turret weapon mount, 1 port light weapon mount, 1 starboard light weapon mount, 3 basic mounts, 4 bays
Frigate 8 stations, 2 forward weapon mounts, 1 turret weapon mount, 1 port weapon mount, 1 starboard weapon mount, 4 basic mounts, 5 bays
Cruiser 12 stations, 2 forward weapon mounts, 2 turret weapon mounts, 1 port weapon mount, 1 starboard weapon mount, 6 basic mounts, 6 bays
In my system a 6-station ketch with 6 combat crew members would be 3 times as powerful in combat as a 2-station twin-seat ship with 2 combat crew members. On the other hand, a 4th-tier twin seat would be as powerful as a 1st-tier ketch due to the better higher-tier weapons, shields, sensors, and hull points. Each base frame uses its number of stations as a multiplier to determine the number of hull points, so my system would have a chart for the number hull points for a one-seat ship based on tier.
An extra station can be installed in a bay ("expansion bay" in Starfinder 1st Edition nomenclature) so that a five-member party can use a sloop rather than upgrading to a ketch. This would not increase the weapons or the hull points, so perhaps a ketch would be the better option.
My base frames are a lot simpler than Starfinder 1st Edition base frames. The ketch matches the Starfinder 1st Edition explorer.
Explorer
Size Medium
Maneuverability good (+1 Piloting, turn 1)
HP 55 (increment 10); DT —; CT 11
Mounts forward arc (1 light), port arc (1 light), starboard arc (1 light), turret (1 light)
Expansion Bays 4
Minimum Crew 1; Maximum Crew 6
Cost 12
However, the ketch is about size while the explorer is about build points. Building a starship with build points and power core units is unnecessarily complicated as other people have pointed out in this thread. Instead, I imagine starting with a base frame and adding weapons, sensors, and thrusters to its mounts, features to its bays, and specialty panels to its stations. Each player can customize the panels on their stations, so that they have their individual choices for their PCs.
For example, a spellcaster might add a Spellcasting Channel panel to their station so that they can cast spells on the ship or against enemy ships. A melee martial character could add a Manual Gunnery panel to their station so that they can use their Strength instead of their Dexterity for attack rolls with one ship weapon (requirement: the station must be adjacent to the weapon).
The panels are the equivalent of feats. The players need feats for ship combat, but asking them to select ship-combat feats for their characters before the party acquires a starship would be a burden. Instead, I decided that the ship-combat feats should be built into the starship itself, with each player selecting their panels like they would select feats. A 1st-tier starship would allow one Tier 1 panel on each station. A 2nd-tier starship would allow an additional panel on each station up to Tier 2. No extra panels for 3rd tier. A 4th-tier ship would allow an additional panel on each station up to Tier 4. In other words, for each class feat the PCs would get at their level, their station of the same tier (i.e., level) gains a panel.
I think that would maintain balance while also providing customization to the players.
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Feats for ship station actions differently could work and it keeps it closer to how regular combat works. The idea I linked to near the top of this page went a bit further and used ancestries, classes, and feats to build ships like you would characters. But just using feats for the ship stations works too.
I've been thinking more about ship size too. one though is the ship size that the PC is most likely to use should depend on map size. for example, a medium-sized ship should have a max size that would fit on a 24x30-inch flip map. Small and tiny ships portioned down from there. next size up Large ship no bigger than 2 or 3 24x30 flip maps being the largest size you could reasonably print 3 normal size flip maps, or on one map that is 30 ft square. Then all other ships are capital ships scalining up from there.
From my experience playing Star Wars X-wing and Armada, it's possible to have large and smaller ships play well together as single sips and rules. Which is what X-wing does. Armada tiny ships are groups of tiny ships and along with medium ships have different rules than larger capital ships. So my recommendation is to focus on large and smaller ships at least for the core rules.
Battle Over Endor Scenario Pack for Star Wars X-Wing comes out in late February. From the preview, it looks like it will be letting you take individual tiny fighters against a star destroyer. It looks like the star destroyer is the playing surface the smaller ships fly over. This could have the same interesting implication for Starfinder. Attacking a ship by directly flying over it, and trying to hit targets on the ship, like gun turrets. or the main bridge is no different than flying over a battlefield and shooting at mech or ground vehicles, or a building. It also means you could land a mech or tank on the surface of a large starship and then attack the starship. In a lot of ways, in a battle like this, the large ship is like a castle and the battle is like a castle siege with dragons flying around. So maybe battles like this could work for PAthfder as well.
A random thought I've been having is in Star Wars the type of character most associated with droids is not mechanics is pilots especially when dealing with pilots of tiny ships that don't have room for another crew member. Since pilots are not a class maybe a ship's drone could be attached to the ship instead of the player. Also could be a heritage option for SROs
How are people enjoying the starfinder enhanced narrative starship rules?
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How are people enjoying the starfinder enhanced narrative starship rules?
I've been meaning to a make narrative starship play-test scenario to run in play-by-post but haven't gotten to it yet. I've been looking into PBtA games lately to get a better feel for what narrative combat even is. I'm intrigued by the idea. My first thought without playing it is it looks good for short encounters like if you are going to point A to B and some ship gets in the way but is not the main battle.
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We already have Starship-sized creatures you can fight in ship combat. How about starships vs land-based kaiju, or kaiju that can only fly in an atmosphere? This makes building an encounter where the PCs are likely to lose more interesting than getting stranded in the vastness of space. Losing a fight against a kaiju would at least leave you stranded on a planet.
I guess this would be true of ship-to-ship combat in closer to the ground. And if the PCs shoot down the other ship say in a thick forest. Landing after the battle and searching for the wreckage could be fun. Dealing with the survivors on the ground could lead to more combat or other situations.
I think in general ship combat might be more interesting if blowing up the opponent wasn't the end of the encounter but instead, some of the sometimes led to having to deal with survivors, or searching for and salvaging useful things from the ship, and or gathering info from the ship.
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Is there currently a mechanic where people can look at a map of the galaxy or look at the sky and point to a star and find a path to that system? Like blind exploration? Right now it is you just follow beacons and get to your destination, but what if I see a Type K star "here" and want to go explore it, do some calculations and enter the drift.
Is there currently a mechanic where people can look at a map of the galaxy or look at the sky and point to a star and find a path to that system? Like blind exploration? Right now it is you just follow beacons and get to your destination, but what if I see a Type K star "here" and want to go explore it, do some calculations and enter the drift.
That's perfectly possible in SF1. Traveling from point A to point B when neither points are themselves a drift beacon is common, and Absalom Station is a unique drift beacon that's super fast to travel to.
The conceit in SF1 is that areas of space are split into Near Space and the Vast, where Near Space is just areas with a certain concentration of drift beacons. You can travel to a star in the Vast with no drift beacons using the Drift, it just takes longer.
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Is there currently a mechanic where people can look at a map of the galaxy or look at the sky and point to a star and find a path to that system? Like blind exploration? Right now it is you just follow beacons and get to your destination, but what if I see a Type K star "here" and want to go explore it, do some calculations and enter the drift.
Pointing on a map wasn't possible until last year when Port of Calls came out with the first map of the galaxy.
As far as exploring empty space to find what is out there, the Galaxcy Exploration Manual has rules for exploring the galaxy for new star systems and rules for exploring star systems themselves. The deck of many worlds is a great tool for making up new planets on the fly.
Hmmm...
A good, robust "systems getting damaged" system would at least provide a natural role for the more STR-focused characters. It can make sense that trying to shove stuff back in place or drag heavy replacement parts from one place to another or drag a semi-broken weapons turret around by sheer force of arm or other acts like that might be strongly based on str and/or athletics in an appropriately cinematic-spaceships universe.
...and having your str-based characters suddenly take on some of the party healer role somehow feels cool and twisty and appropriate.
It would also give your Mechanic a reason to be Doing Mechanic Things in mid-combat, which feels cool. Like, sure, they start out massaging the power core to convince it to give just a little bit more... and then something breaks and it's time for the desperate attempts to bolt on kludge-fixes as fast as you can and hope they'll hold long enough to make it out the other side of the fight.
There was a thematic idea I remember someone mentioning in another thread - that fights don't have to be to the death, and that in a world like Starfinder, that maybe shouldn't even be a particular emphasis. Having some extra focus on "can we disable them enough to complete the mission before they disable us enough that we can't" rather than "can we low them out of the sky" fits in with that pretty well.
...though... there *is* the matter of money. Like... if the players manage to capture the enemy ship and bring it in as a prize... that's potentially quite a lot of money-equivalent. Might want to put some thought into how to make the economies make at least some kind of sense before pulling the trigger on "disabling a ship without destroying it is actually surprisingly easy"
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I think Garrett Guillotte has lots of great ideas, but to make them work in organized play most of the scenario could fill an entire scenario. Starfinder Society Scenario #4-08: Precious Cargo is one of the few if not the only one I can think of that does that. Maybe if we had more scenarios like that we could over time string together a starship dedicated organized play adventure. Maybe every 3 or 4th scenario like this could be about fixing and upgrading the ship as the party levels up. This would give us some ship-oriented scenarios that have more time on the ground but still focus on using starships.
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...though... there *is* the matter of money. Like... if the players manage to capture the enemy ship and bring it in as a prize... that's potentially quite a lot of money-equivalent. Might want to put some thought into how to make the economies make at least some kind of sense before pulling the trigger on "disabling a ship without destroying it is actually surprisingly easy"
There were a few things I did in campaigns to subvert this.
First, the players started the campaign in _deep_ debt. Any money they made past equipping themselves and their ship went toward servicing their debt, until they became powerful enough that money in general wasn't their biggest concern. Flipping that around, you could have them sponsored by someone or something with enough money that they don't need a ton of money of their own. In either scenario an NPC will have either a strong case to take a significant cut of a captured ship's profit, or a reason to complicate selling it.
Second, most ships that were good enough for the players to even want to keep belonged to a larger organization. ...
I remember when statting out the starship Clutch for my Starfinder mini-campaign, I read every rule and guide on starship design that I could find. I cannot find the quote again, but someone explained that starships don't cost credits, because throwing in a reasonable price for a starship into a party's finances would totally unbalance the economy of Starfinder. I did find a similar sentiment in Starfinder Core Rulebook pg. 305, Refitting and Upgrading Starships, "As the PCs go on adventures and gain experience, they need an increasingly powerful starship to face tougher challenges. When the characters’ Average Party Level increases, so does the tier of their starship." The party, simply by leveling up, gains more build points to upgrade their starship to the next tier. No money is actually spent.
And since starships don't cost money in the game mechanics, I apply the same principal to taking a starship as a prize. The players cannot sell a starship for money. Nor can they sell it for build points. Starships come and go for plot reasons.
In Skitter Shot my PCs had the tier-2 starship Clutch, owned by their employer Nakonechkin Salvage. But the PCs were also founders and stockholders of Nakonechkin Salvage, so they partially and indirectly owned the Clutch. They rescued the Trendsetter Expeditions starship Emerald Empyrean, but that gave them a reward rather than a claim on the Emerald Empyrean. They disabled the pirate ship Nova Witch, but the authorities confiscated the pirate ship as evidence rather than letting the PCs claim it. In Skitter Crash they had a new starship Helping Hand, purchased with the unspecified reward money and other company profits. It promptly ran into a disaster and was destroyed. Okay, I altered the plot for MORE SCIENCE and they recovered the Helping Hand and the other pirate ship Nova Warlock. So now Nakonechkin Salvage owns three starships: the Clutch, the Helping Hand, and the Nova Warlock. But the party gets to use only the Helping Hand. And the next chapter, Skitter Home, is on the surface of Vesk 3 with no starships will be involved.
Thus, the Nakonechkin Salvage company lets me sweep all starship costs and revenues under the rug and into a plot hole.
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Is there currently a mechanic where people can look at a map of the galaxy or look at the sky and point to a star and find a path to that system? Like blind exploration? Right now it is you just follow beacons and get to your destination, but what if I see a Type K star "here" and want to go explore it, do some calculations and enter the drift.
A fairly large chunk of the Dead Suns AP is predicated on not being able to astronavigate to a visible star via the Drift without the system's Drift coordinates.
On the other hand, explorers have to be able to go to an unexplored system somehow, and explorers like the Pact Worlds and the Azlanti visiting their closest galactic neighbors first doesn't sound like a coincidence.
So, presumably, some kind of "blind" Drift navigational calculation is possible, but it's likely to require extensive, time-consuming number crunching. And it may be that real-world distance adds to the complexity, making it, say, difficult but reasonable to calculate a Drift course to the nearest unexplored star, but exponentially more difficult to reach some dot on your starmap of the far side of the galaxy.
The Gap could factor into this. Real-world star maps are based on light and radio emissions traveling at the speed of light. If you're chasing a star, and the light from that star left it before the end of the Gap, the light you're seeing now might be wrong.
On the other hand, explorers have to be able to go to an unexplored system somehow, and explorers like the Pact Worlds and the Azlanti visiting their closest galactic neighbors first doesn't sound like a coincidence.
its entirely possible you can get to A system without being able to get to a particular system.
My thoughts on desires for improved starship combat based on my experience with SF1 starship combat:
1) Meaningful choices for all players, not just the pilot.
I'm hoping that one is fairly obvious that it is needed.
Implementing it is much more difficult.
2) Make crippling ships easier than destroying them.
When the outcome of losing a starship battle is TPK, that is a problem.
It also leads to moral decisions about what to do when you have an enemy starship disabled.
Most likely, this is going to be implemented by having the hull integrity HP be a separate and larger value than the HP of individual ship systems such as the engines, thrusters, sensors, and weapons. And allowing targeting of individual enemy ship systems. That will make taking out the enemy's engines (for example) easier than destroying the ship.
It is probably also best for some of the systems to have various levels of operating ability that degrades as they take damage. For example, the main thrusters may have 4 different speed levels that they can provide and will drop from level 4 to level 3 after taking a certain amount of damage - causing the ship to not be able to fly as fast. Weapons on the other hand, may be a single operating/broken state and the ship needs to have multiple separate weapons available if they want to continue fighting after one of their weapon components gets broken.
3) Shields as HP buffer needs to go away.
Shields themselves are fine, they just need to do something besides be the first line of HP that protects the entire ship from all damage until depleted.
Something like being a method of increasing AC makes sense. Or even some amount of damage reduction.
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With the economy being that ships do not cost money and cannot be sold for money, the economy would need to significantly change to make more sense to me.
As it stands, the galaxy pretty much is at a point of post-scarcity, so that there is no fundamental reason why anyone could just not own a ship and parse the galaxy through the drift. Heck, the entire Fly Free AP, all you end up getting is build points, which cannot be exchanged for credits, thus you cannot really get wealthier.
This to me is the fundamental problem with the Starfinder Economy. No one goes hungry, UPBs cost 1 credit so there is no real reason to ever get credits because you can make/buy anything with the magic pieces of nanotech.
With the economy being that ships do not cost money and cannot be sold for money, the economy would need to significantly change to make more sense to me.
Game mechanics are created for gameplay and game balance. They don't always make IRL sense.
If you wanted starships to cost something that would prevent the general population from owning one, then they would only become available at character levels greater than 1.
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I am about to run into the flip side of the starships not falling into line with the rest of the players' equipment economy.
I will be starting the Free RPG Day module Skitter Warp, after having run the PCs through Skitter Shot, Skitter Crash, and Skitter Home. As party of this module, they defend a a research station called Helix Lyceum from a mob of infernal creatures that want to destroy it.
However, they arrived at the lyceum in their Tier 5 starship, the Helping Hand. What happens when they turn the starship's weapons on the invading creatures? What are the effects of starship weapons on creatures rather than starships?
EDIT: I found the rules.
SHOOTING STARSHIPS
Starship weapons and regular PC-level weapons work on different
scales and aren’t meant to interact with each other. If characters
choose to shoot at a starship with their laser rifles (or cast a spell
on it) while it is on the ground, the GM should treat the starship as
an object (a particularly massive one, at that). At the GM’s discretion,
if starship weapons are ever brought to bear against buildings or
people, they deal Hit Point damage equal to 10 × their listed amount
of damage. However, starship weapons are never precise enough to
target a single individual (or even small group) and can, if the GM
decides, be simulated as deadly hazards instead of weapon attacks.