I’m glad I could help you.
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Hey p47 in your opinion would a ship be better served with ion cannons or laser cannons?
Depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re looking purely for DPS as a fraction of target threshold, most ships have a lower System Strain Threshold than Hull Trauma Threshold, but Ion Cannons deal less damage than equivalent Laser Cannons.
If you want to disable an enemy ship, ion cannons are best. If you want to kill an enemy ship, laser cannons are best.
If you’re using my houserules, where shields provide ablative protection at the expense of System Strain, a hybrid approach is very effective because Ion Cannons drastically reduce the efficacy of shields by disincentivizing their use and reducing directly how many times the shields can be used.
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Wow those are very good points. Any other type of armament you would recommend for a Yt-1930?
A concussion missile launcher is unexpected and provides significant punch. It’s expensive, and the ammo is expensive, but it would be a significant boost to your lethality (seeing as the base model, according to Wookieepedia Legends, has only a single medium laser cannon).
An ion cannon would give you flexibility, but mixing ion cannons with laser cannons would tend to do more harm than good on this scale. With a capital ship (in my houserules), you can mix a few ion cannons in and actually make your other weapons more effective pound-for-pound against shields and with critical hits, and you can (whether using my houserules or RAW) output enough damage to reliably disable small targets with just the ion cannons. However, a small ship mixing a single laser cannon with a single ion cannon will just have a harder time neutralizing most threats because the damage is spread across two thresholds, essentially doubling the damage you have to deal.
Something else you might want to look at is the quad laser cannon, which is only 5 damage but has Linked 3 and Accurate 1. That’s what the Millennium Falcon has, and the Lancer frigate, which is the most potent anti-fighter ship in the game.
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Dude p47 you’re the best man. Thank you for that comprehensive response and as always taking the time to answer all my questions I’ll definitely have to look into all this.
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You’re very welcome! I’m glad I could help you.
Also if you expect to fight in your ship often and will have multiple guns the Advanced Targeting Array is an incredible 1 hard point boost.
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Thanks rat I’ll have to look into that. Appreciate your input.
Any ships of colossal size that really stand out among the bunch that would make a good “Flagship” so to speak. Something that can really take a punch and deliver one back?
This thread is really supposed to be about changing the stats of official items. To continue this discussion or for other questions, please start a new thread. You can call it “P-47’s Advice Column” if you wish. :D
To give you a short answer, yes, but I can’t tell you any. I don’t know what size constitutes a “flagship” for you since ships range as large as the Executor Super Star Destroyer, or larger if you want to count the Death Star. I need more information before I can give you a good answer.
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Lets say I pair two quad lasers or Quad ion cannons, what is the stat of my new monstrosity?
Those weapons are already linked weapons. The rules were written with the “basic” weapons in mind, single-barreled conventional cannons and missile launchers.
I would generally just say that you don’t link those, but we can take the octuple barbette turrets from the ISD as an example and make them alternate fire.
However, that isn’t useful for weapons without the Slow-Firing quality, and you’d be better off with multiple turrets.
Not sure if this has been brought up before, but the silhouette of some of the smaller star fighters has been bothering me. I will admit I might be spliting hairs over this, but the Miy’til fighter being sil 2, while the A-Wing or the Eta-2 are sil 3 kind of bothers me. I know sil is an abstraction, considering the VCX-100 and the CR-90 are both sil 5.
For comparison, on wookiepedia, Miy’til is 7 meters long, while the Eta-2 is about 5 meters.
No, you’re right. The silhouette system is good, but they misuse it in a few places. In my spreadsheet, I make several suggestions to adjust various ships (but am unfamiliar with the stats for the Miy’til).
Generally speaking, I think a vehicle’s silhouette should be in accordance with its role in game (i.e., “how it would be expected to perform”), with only extreme size examples stepping outside the normal bounds.
In defense of the Miy’til being sil 2, it’s pretty spindly and the actual “center mass” is quite small, and while the Eta-2 is similar, the Eta-2 has a more “solid” core. However, silhouette is not only for targeting and plays a significant role in piloting checks. I would—almost without exception—maintain sil 3 as the minimum for fighters. The Eta-2 is the closest I come to saying it should be sil 2.
Just to look at the math, a corvette targeting an ordinary fighter (sil 3) has a difficulty of Hard, unless I’m misremembering the tables (I use my own houserules that target based on Speed and a new mechanic called “targeting silhouette”), but that becomes Daunting against a silhouette 2 fighter, for what is a fairly minor difference in “real” size. With a moderate skill of YYG (average Rival, moderate Minion Group), that changes a 58% chance to a 47% chance.
The difference between silhouettes 4 and 5 is even more stark since that totally changes how the vessel operates—the VCX-100 is the poster boy for poor silhouette decisions.
The main rule of thumb for sil 4 vs. 5 is not so much size, but “does it fly like the Falcon, or like a corvette?”
The spindly comment reminds me of the weirdness of the Mando Fang fighter. It’s sil 3, but the rotating wings give it a reduced sil at close range. Also a fair point on star fighters being at least sil 3 just cause of all the stuff needed to be added to a tin can to let it fly through space with a pilot.
Also from an economic standpoint, the miy’til is 210,000 credits. Which at that price point you could get 2 Z-95 heavies with the ECM attachment. Not sure how familiar you are with the stats, but the z-heavy, has armor 3, ht 12, ss 8 and the miy’til has armor 2, ht/ss 7. Also nearly identically weapons.
…making the sil 2 a major selling point of the vehicle. Yeah. Questionable design decisions all around.
The Miy’til might have some other points in its favor (such as speed, handling, or intangibles), but I’m not familiar with the craft and so couldn’t say. But there is the occasional product that is just a poorer product at a higher price point due to economic constraints, and the Miy’til as a Hapan vessel may simply be that, making it financially inviable for navies with access to other options.
As for the Fang, I think that’s the appropriate way to handle a “hard to hit” fighter.
This thread is far too useful and far too much fun to languish in obscurity, so it’s time to give it some love.
Panther Police Interceptor
Far Horizons has this as a land speeder with a max altitude of 10 meters, despite it’s being shown in the source material to be able to travel the skylanes on coruscant with no issue. Speed 4 is also generally more in line with an airspeeder than a groundspeeder.
IIRC the upper skylanes are on higher altitude than most buildings, and a quick google says than many buildings on the planet are 6,000 meters tall. So I’d say that’s a good lower limit for max altitude. That is, unless the skylanes are some kind of “invisible road” that lets repulsor vehicles travel at higher altitudes than they normally would (I have seen nothing mentioning such a thing) or that coruscant has a thicker atmosphere than earth at that altitude (we never see anyone having trouble breathing on balconies, rooftops or in open speeders on Coruscant, unless Vader is around) and that lets repulsorlifts travel higher than normal… but that feels like too much of a “hard scifi”-approach and would rend all max altitudes relative to the planet (and the less we discuss Cloud City and where to measure altitude from, the better 
).
The most similar vehicle would be a civilian airspeeder, but the listed max altitude for that varies between 1 and 300 km. 300 km is high enough to be considered low orbit, and probably much too high for what is a flying police car. 1 km is probably a bit too low, given the altitude of skylanes.
My suggestion is a max altitude of 10 km, or about the altitude of your average airline flight. The separate cockpit canopies of the Panther suggest to me that it’s pressurized and designed for fairly high altitudes, so it might even be higher, like 50-100 km, but 10 should be more than enough.
Other thoughts? Is my (probably over-thought) reasoning sound here?
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Thanks! :D
Everything you say here is perfectly reasonable. All I have to add is that I just handwave those altitudes anyway since the exact number is rarely useful or relevant (unless playing “nyah-nyah, you can’t catch me!”). Is it a “landspeeder”? It hovers a little bit off the ground. Is it an “airspeeder”? It can fly like a plane.
Your suggestion of 10km is sound, and should I ever need that precise a number it’s what I would use.
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Agreed for the most part, but I tend to make general distinctions between “just over the ground” - flying car - airplane - low orbit shuttle. Kinda useful for making the distinction of being able to clear obstacles, fly up into the sky and to be able to meet up with ships in orbit.
Also, if the system asks me for a specific number, I want to make that number as correct or reasonable as I can. 
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