SWN Rules Explained: How Starships Work in Stars Without Number

Rules Explained

Aug 6

This episode covers starships in Stars Without Number: hull classes, fittings and hardpoints, crew requirements, and the maintenance costs that keep a ship flying between sessions. Brian pulls his case study from Episode 28, "I'm Not Angry, I'm Disappointed," where the Scapegoat has to dock at the derelict Causeway 3 station and Felix spacewalks out to hack the exterior control panel by hand. He breaks down what a ship's stats actually mean at the table, what happens when repairs get skipped for too long, and why a GM can usually just grab a pre-built ship instead of designing one from scratch.

[00:00:03] Brian: access approved hey there dark star adventure cast listeners from this side of the verse to the other and thanks again for joining me for another episode of stars without number rules explained the dsa mini series that focuses more on the rulings and adjudications that play a huge part of every tabletop role-playing game Once again, as usual, I'm Brian, the voice of Captain Thorn, Assistant Star Master, occasional backup Game Master, and your host on this short segment where we get into the gritty details of the rules and systems that power the exciting stories of every AdventureCast episode. We don't always spend a lot of time in the main episodes talking about how things work or why they work that way. But for many players and listeners, myself included, those are a big part of what makes role-playing games fun. If you'd like to know how a rule or a ruling potentially affected a scene from the show, or if you just want tips on how to run your own stars without number sessions, then this is the place for you. The choices for today's topics were based on feedback from listeners, as well as the events of the most recent AdventureCast episode, I'm Not Angry, I'm Disappointed. After what seems like an eternity in the inhospitable sandball that was Sibylen, the crew follows a mysterious code that appears to have been left for them by their missing friend. What will they find out there when they follow it? Well, if you haven't already listened to that episode, go do that first and find out. We're talking about spaceships today, one of the most important facets of just about any sci-fi adventure. In some media, the party's transportation vessel becomes a sort of crew member of its own over time. So in order to make sure the scapegoat gets its own chance in the spotlight, we'll be talking about how to make ships, and of course how to maintain and modify them in your adventures. While I'm sure many sci-fi TTRPG sessions and campaigns have been played at a single location in their respective fiction, it's hard to deny that most space adventures don't truly get off the ground until the crew finds a ship of their own. Sometimes it's baked into one character's backstory, or it's something that the team acquires early on in their adventures, maybe even on the first mission, in the first session. Sometimes it's something the characters save up their credits to buy by doing quests and odd jobs. But more than likely, there are going to be spaceships at some point in most sci-fi games. So let's talk about the important parts that make up a spaceship in Stars Without Number. Star ships, as they're called in the Stars Without Number revised rulebook, have their own chapter that starts on page 93. It's packed full of useful tables and advice on using ships in your games, including a big list of sample pre-built ships that a player or a game master could easily just grab and use in a pinch. But when your players have a ship of their own, it starts to gain a personality over time, and the crew is likely going to want to make modifications of their own. Starships are essentially made up of three or four main parts. The hull, the fittings and defenses, and the hardpoints. When choosing or building a ship, those are the pieces that you'll need to think about. The hull determines the base stats of the ship, its size, its speed, armor, how much it can hold. Fittings and defenses are installed into a hull based on the ship's available mass and power, and hardpoints are the ship's weapons, which work more or less the same. On page 95 of the revised rules, there's a table that lists all the basic hull types. There's about a dozen of them, each representing a different type of ship. But just because two ships are both shuttles doesn't mean they have to have the same fittings or even look remotely similar. The players and the GM should work together when designing a ship for the party to make sure they all agree on what it looks like. Are there multiple levels with metal ladders? Is it a long ship with a series of bunkers along each side? Maybe there's a lift you can take to get to the engine room? All of this is up to your group's own interpretation, and the book won't provide any specific layouts for you to use. What it does provide, though, are the stats that you'll need for outfitting the ship and using it in gameplay. First of all, each hull type has a base cost. We'll note it down, but there'll be additional costs for all the fittings and hardpoints as well before we can calculate the total cost. Next we should look at the hull's class. This is a general description of how large the ship is, but it also has a mechanical effect when calculating the costs of your weapons and fittings. Usually a bigger ship requires a bigger system, so the costs scale with hull class. From smallest to largest, they are fighter, frigate, cruiser, and capital ship. Ship hull types also tell you the ship's hit points, armor, armor class, and speed, the basic essential stats you'll need when dealing with ship-to-ship encounters. HP and AC work just like they do for characters, where incoming attacks must meet the armor class to hit, and then each point of damage the ship takes is deducted from the total hit points. Armor reduces incoming damage by a flat amount to a minimum of zero damage. Any small, character-sized weapons or primitive heavy weapons will have no effect on a starship's hull, but heavy weapons and explosives of TL4 and up will deal half damage, minus the ship's armor if the attacks are coming from the outside. When a ship reaches 0 HP, it explodes or becomes otherwise inoperable. The speed value is a relative measurement of the hull's speed and maneuverability. In close quarters combat on a grid, each point of speed could represent a single square or hex. Anytime the ship's pilot makes a pilot skill check, they also add the ship's speed to their rolls. This can make a big difference when trying to escape combat or take evasive maneuvers. The next ship hull value is the crew. The crew is written as two numbers, x slash y, that tell you first the minimum number of crew needed to operate the ship successfully, and then the maximum number of people the ship's life support systems can support in a two-month time span. If a ship has more or less crew than that, the life support lasts proportionately shorter or longer. Mechanically, there isn't much else to enforce about the amount of crew a ship has, but in combat each crew member can only act for a single station each turn, so having enough crew for every station on the ship will give the party a better action economy. Check out the previous Rules Explained segment on space combat for more details on how all that works. Thematically, though, the book mentions a few interesting restrictions around crew. Generally, any ship attempting to make a spike drive to travel between star systems will need a crew of at least three unless the pilot's going to be flying 24-7, in which case they may need some pharmaceuticals to keep them focused. Crewing a ship costs money, so merchants tend to run with no more than twice the minimum crew to save on wages, while on the other hand, a warship would seldom run with less than 75% of the maximum crew. An average crew member is paid about 100 credits per day, and it costs an additional 20 credits or so per day to feed and supply them. When you're preparing to build a ship for gameplay, think about how it's going to be crewed. An adventuring party may have no need for any additional crew, so they might not need to pay any wages, but they still need food and stores on board. If an enemy pirate crew is going to attack the players in an upcoming session, the game master might not really care exactly how each pirate is paid or exactly how the enemy ships are crewed. Just lean into the systems that are useful and feel free to only use the minimum of what you need otherwise. Finally, the last pieces of the ship hull's stats are the mass, power, and hardpoints values. The mass tells you how much extra stuff a ship can hold in addition to the basic hull and what it needs to fly. This includes additional cargo, as well as any fittings or hardpoints the ship has installed. Each fitting and hardpoint also has a mass value that you'll use to calculate what the ship can fit. Power is very similar to mass on paper, it's the amount of leftover energy the ship will have to power fittings and hardpoints. Just like mass, each fitting and hardpoint has a power value that you'll deduct from the hull's power. The book is not specific on what happens if these values are exceeded, but you can assume a ship over its weight load can't get into the air, and a ship over its power load can't get started. Make sure to pay close attention to the hash marks and asterisks next to the cost and mass values of any hardpoints and fittings, because they'll tell you how the costs are modified based on the hull's class. And finally, hardpoints are the last limitation on what the hull can install. Most weapons just take up a single hardpoint, but other larger ones may take more. Once you have a hull picked out, it's time to peruse the list of fittings, defenses, and weapons to figure out exactly how you want your ship outfitted. I'm not going to go through every option, but keep in mind that the credit costs, the mass, and the power to make sure whatever you want to fit does fit onto your ship. Also keep an eye on the class since some fittings can only be installed on hulls of a certain size. Fittings can cover all sorts of things from med bays to workshops, improved spike drives, cargo bays, cabins, and more. Defenses are rare on non-military ships, but they include things like armor plating and ECM that can improve a ship's AC or HP. Weapons should be self-explanatory, but ship weapons also have certain qualities, like ammo, AP, or flak, that modify the attack or damage rolls with that weapon or otherwise affect how the weapons work. The fittings are listed in a table on page 97, defenses are on page 101, and weapons on page 103. The weapon qualities are all described on page 102. With everything picked out, you now know the ship's stats and base cost. An average shipyard can build about 25,000 credits worth of work in a day, so you can use that to determine how long it would take to install new fittings or apply modifications. Just like weapons and equipment, ships can be modified, but an engineer needs to perform regular maintenance to keep the mods and the systems they modify functioning properly. Check out the rules explained segment about weapon and equipment mods for more info on how that works. A list of example ship mods can be found starting on page 108. Every 6 months a ship needs to be taken in for regular maintenance as well. This 6 month maintenance cost costs 5% of the total value of the ship excluding the crew costs. If a ship goes for more than six months without getting its required tune-up, any skill checks or attack rolls made related to the ship are at a minus one penalty for every maintenance period that gets skipped. At minus four, the ship gains a 10% chance each month of breaking down completely. Day-to-day repairs can be done on board the ship itself if the parts are available, but they take four times as long without a shipyard. One unit of mass can hold about 10,000 credits worth of generic spare parts, and those spare parts can be used to repair destroyed systems, but also to restore the ship's hit points. Fuel generally costs 500 credits per tank. Starships do not recover HP over time, and they need to be manually repaired. It costs 1,000 credits in parts per hit point restored, and a ship can restore hit points equal to the lead engineer's fix skill each day. Disabled systems can be brought back online for one quarter of their original cost, and one day of work per 25,000 credits. They can also be jerry-rigged to get them working again for only one-tenth of the original cost. But if they're disabled again in this state, then they are completely destroyed and must be replaced. Sometimes during space combat, a character will do something that restores ship HP or restores the functionality of a system. If this happens, the costs do not need to be paid again or later redone. It is assumed that the problem was resolved before it had a chance to get too bad, and no more attention is needed. Once you have your repair costs noted down, your ship is complete. Of course, this could be a lot of work designing and calculating the costs of a ship every time you want to use one in your adventures. Unless it's really important that the ship be customized to your liking, a GM can easily just grab a sample ship from the list that starts on page 104. There's an example ship for every hull type, so you can snag them when you need them, and if you want to make some adjustments, you can always swap out one or two fittings or hardpoints here and there to keep things interesting. And with that, we have come to the end of our time. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Stars Without Number Rules Explained. If you like this sort of content, then stay tuned for Star Master Jeff's Star Master Log, where he discusses the decisions that he makes when planning and designing the game sessions and campaign, plus interviews with the cast about their characters and their decisions. If you want to support us, the best way is to leave a like and a comment wherever you're listening and share the AdventureCast with your friends. If you want to get access to new episodes two weeks earlier, you can also check us out on Patreon at patreon.com slash darkstaradventurecast. We'd love to hear any comments or feedback from you there. So from me and from every one of us at DSA, thank you again for listening and for all of your support. And as always, keep following that signal.