How do you determine how much encumbrance a vehicle is, for transporting a vehicle on a larger ship? For example, how many Silhouette 3 AT-STs can you fit in the cargo hold of a Dreadnaught with an encumbrance capacity of 7,500?
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Welcome to the forum!
Technically, vehicles do not have an encumbrance. Generally, you’d just use a hangar bay’s max silhouette capacity. However, I know this isn’t a satisfying answer, especially because that’s not always clear and it doesn’t include the ability to shove land vehicles into a spare cargo bay.
I generally just multiply silhouette by 10, +10*(sil-2 [to a minimum of 0]). So that’d be 40 for an AT-ST.
With something as big as a Dreadnought Heavy Cruiser, I would say you have enough freedom to bring as many as you think makes sense (or however many the commander might cram in), and you shouldn’t rule out modification to expand space. But if we say an AT-ST is 40 encumbrance, that doesn’t mean a Dreadnought can carry 187 of them, because encumbrance isn’t intended for vehicles, but generally something like crates of supplies, blaster rifles, prefabricated military structures, etc.
With something smaller, if you have a better idea how much space you have available, you can more practically plot out how many it could carry regardless of encumbrance. Is the bay tall enough to fit AT-STs? If yes, then you just plot out the footprint of an AT-ST and work out how many you’d be able to fit, accounting for spacing, access, etc.
Most often, I apply vehicle encumbrance with silhouette 2 craft like a speeder bike for loading it into a starship or the back of a truck, with space still being an important concern beyond the numerical value.
I hope this answer helps!
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The game’s writers just pulled answers of this kind from either published Star Wars sources (including prior RPG products) or just straight out of their netherholes. This is very much a situation where best guess is best.
This bugged me a bit also. Perhaps more detailed then you want, but I took a crack at it. Follow the link below, select Vehicle Ops: Cargo Handling, then scroll to page 6.
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Being the stickler for details geek I am, I sat down with the rulebooks, wikipedia, and a calculator, and made the following deductions. Note: I am using Legends/Pre-Darth Mouse details on Wookiepedia and all Feet Measurements are rounded of to the nearest 5’…
Okay, looking at the above comment , and using the RETROFITTED HANGER BAY attachment as a starting point, a Hanger Bay on a Silhouette 7 starship can hold 60 Silhouette Points (SP) of vehicles SP 5 or smaller. The Usual Complement of a Dreadnought is 12 (3SP) Tie-Fighters, plus 1 (or More) Shuttle (SP4), for a total of 40SP, leaving another 20SP available for more vehicles, fighters, or shuttles. Using the description of the Dreadnought: “Depending on configuration, the Dreadnought cruiser could carry … and 28,000 personnel for encumbrance” I can further extrapolate that if it can carry an additional 28,000 personnel in the space for 7,500 Encumbrance Points (EP), you can carry 3-4 personnel per EP. You can estimate a 5’ Squared (a square with 5’ sides) per personnel plus their gear, so each EP would represent a 10’ square. According to Wookiepedia, The length of a 74-Z Speederbike (2SP) is 3 meters or 10’, the length/width footprint of a Tie-Fighter (3SP) is 6.4 meters squared, or 20’ squared, a Shuttle (SP4) is 20 meters squared or 60’ squared.
Now, the hard part is actually determining the dimensions of the cargo hold, since cargo crates are usually stacked, while personnel and vehicles are not, unless you count Tie (not the cloth neck pieces) racks which allow you to hang them from the ceiling.
I would also like to further note, that while a speeder bike is 10’ long, it is rather narrow, so realistically, 3 speeder bikes side by side would reasonably fit in a 10’x10’ square, or in the space slotted for a 2SP vehicle.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re deducing here, but no. Living quarters and cargo space is very much different, you can’t easily just convert it over like that.
Besides, 1 encumbrance is like a datapad. Say 3-4 personnel=1 Encumbrance makes 0 sense.
Not necessarily. The Dreadnought doesn’t have a retrofitted hangar bay, but a stock hangar bay. Most likely, it can only carry the twelve TIEs it is currently outfitted with.
One factor you do not consider at all here is the location of the cargo bays and whether or not AT-STs could even access them, leaving aside whether a given cargo hold is tall enough to hold one.
Another factor is that you can’t just cram in vehicles side-to-side and fore-to-aft. They need space, infrastructure, and access.
This game uses very abstracted numbers of size, shape, and weight, and CANNOT be used absent practical judgement. I think you’re being overly literal with the numbers and overlooking the other factors involved.
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This answered a question I was mulling, thanks sentient killing machine!
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