On the other hand, if they pin down the details of exactly what the ship is capable of for Battle for Nova Rush, would those stats still work for Guilt of the Grave World?
How about any and all future adventures that get published? Would those same stats that they decide on today still work sufficiently well for adventures in the future?
Why would it not work to leave the capabilities of Nova Rush ambiguous and undefined in general, and allow each adventure (official publication or homebrew campaign) to decide the details of the ship for that specific adventure?
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On the other hand, if they pin down the details of exactly what the ship is capable of for Battle for Nova Rush, would those stats still work for Guilt of the Grave World?
How about any and all future adventures that get published? Would those same stats that they decide on today still work sufficiently well for adventures in the future?
Why would it not work to leave the capabilities of Nova Rush ambiguous and undefined in general, and allow each adventure (official publication or homebrew campaign) to decide the details of the ship for that specific adventure?
In SF1e, other than Starfinder Society scenarios, each AP had its own ship or ships. In Starfinder Society, there were 4 ships you could choose from, and each of those has stats for different level ranges. I think the only reason the Nove Rush doesn't have stats is that none of the starship rules were written when it came out.
In a home game, you could use the same ship between shorter APs. Customizing your ship as you level up is what would make it work, but for that, you need full ship-building rules that we don't have yet. Guilt of the Grave World uses Cinematic Starship Scenes, which are balanced on a per-encounter basis, which is hard to make work outside of prewritten adventures or pre-planned home game encounters. To use the Nova Rush in Guilt of the Grave World, I would use the ship's stats from Guilt of the Grave World for the Nova Rush, at least for the combat parts.
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Starship wise everything you need to run the adventure as written is in it. Note: Battle for Nova Rush was written before the Player Core was even out, and full starship rules won't be out until we get Tech Core in October. Since there is a flip mat for it, the ship, I'm hoping we get started at some point too.
- How much Bulk might the ship be able to store in cargo
If you are using the map from the adventure, it looks like there is room for a few vehicles, mechs, or small starfighters in the back storage area. Note the flip map cover on the Paizo store looks to be about 1/3 smaller (same map, different spacing of the 5 root grid). As far as bulk for personal items, there's enough room; it should never matter. If you need more storage room the shape of the ship looks like it's designed to pick up large external cargo containers.
- is it streamlined for atmospheric entry
It's small enough to land on a planet. How aerodynamic it is has never been something Starfinder has considered.
- how effective is the medbay (e.g. item bonus?)
No bonous listed, but there is items in the medbay the party can find and use.
- are their facilities for crafting (none explicitly specified in BfNR)
- is there a UPB-based fabricator on board?
The entire adventure takes place during a starship battle; there's not really time for long downtime crafting. If you use the ship to continue this adventure, then the party could install one later, or you can just give it to them.
- using surplus power to recharge batteries
Unless the party is in the wilderness, recharging batteries in Starfinder should be as easy as charging your cell phone. The power drain from the ship's reactor core to charge a battery shouldn't be measurable.
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If you are just running Battle for Nova Rush on its own, most of your other questions shouldn't come into play. For communication ranges, a commercial handheld comm unit has a planetary range. Beyond that is system-wide communication ( hours) and then intergalactic (weeks to months). Most of the things you are looking for would either need to be converted from SF1e, Make yourself, or wait for Tech Core.
It's not treated as a tool to put to use, but as a highly constrained intermittently-available plot device that entirely ceases to matter outside those scenes.
Yes. That is exactly what it is. If by 'scenes' you mean 'published adventure' such as Battle for Nova Rush and Guilt of the Grave World.
The capabilities of the ship in Battle for Nova Rush are plot devices that are specific for that adventure. The ship in Guilt of the Grave World has different capabilities that are needed for that specific adventure.
So there is no one universal set of capabilities that are going to satisfy both of those two adventures and all of the future adventures created.
It's like... well, it'd be very very odd if I told players that they'd found a seemingly non-magical backpack stuffed with -things- but they would only be allowed to know each -thing- is once they reach specific scenes where it was intended to be used, no?
To continue the analogy, what you are asking for is:
It's like if you had one backpack that has three specific items in it. There are hundreds of possible things that could have been put in the pack - really cool and awesome things. But you only get those three specific things. Those three things are also really cool and awesome, but they are the only things you get to play with for all of your adventures.
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By "scene", I mean specific encounter or situation, not an entire adventure.
Things are not perfectly consistent between scenes. For instance, between the first ship combat in GGW and the last ship combat in GGW, the player's ship has more than doubled in HP and the same is true for its firepower. An additional role (captain) has even been added.
The first CSS in GGW is level 1, and the last is level 4, which reflects the party advancing in level. The CSS rules in the GM Core use creature-building rules for balancing and leveling starship encounters.
The starship description says (but can be customized at GM discretion)
So you can add the captain role if you like. I frequently borrow non-weapon roles from other CSS. Also, the PC's actions are not limited to the listed ship actions. The GM Core has some guidelines and suggested extra actions the PCs can take.
Conversely, its maximum shield capacity is completely unchanged. *shrug*
Looking at the CSS building rules in the GM Core, HP scales much faster than shields, and there is a difference between shields between the 2 encounters. Both have shields 5, but the shield regeneration rate changed from 3 per round to 5 per round.
As far as I can tell, the only references of any serious modification to the ship between those GGW scenes refer obliquely to "additional security features" and the addition of navigation data for a specific, obscure route in order to bypass certain defenses. Those additional security features do not appear to be explained or even referenced anywhere other than that brief mention; perhaps it means a slight increase in the ship's Will saves for countering hacking etc, but that save actually increased the least of all three saves between scenes.
The ship's stats need to level up as the PCs level up. If the adventures don't explain that satisfactorily for you and your players, that's something you can add to the adventure. Stats improving could be physical upgrades, software updates or tweaking, or the PCs are just getting better at flying the ship and using its weapon systems.
The ship is "rigged for remote piloting" over halfway through the book, but that is done while the ship is in -space-, so this sounds more like tweaking software configurations in a way that they could have performed since the beginning (the one who shows how to do this is, in fact, on the ship for the entire AP), not the result of an actual upgrade. This is the only place in the book where the phrase "remote pilot" appears, to be used in this one specific time and place. "Remotely pilot" also appears exactly once, in reference to a specific shuttle unrelated to the party ship.
Ship description says In other words, it's not their ship, so I'm not surprised they don't know everything it can do at the beginning. Tweaking software is certainly a good explanation for adding remote piloting.