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Hey Gamer Nation

My players have recently acquired a rather large ship (A Medium Transport pg 111 of Starships of the Galaxy). They went about making some conversions, but we were all amazed at the strange conversion rate for adding things like hangar space into a ship.

According to the rules it takes more and more cargo space/area to add a hangar as the size of the ship goes up. However this makes no sense to us as by the time you get to
say DEATH STAR size, it takes a space the size of two football fields to have a hangar for a single Tie Fighter!

The rules seem to make if physically and financially impossible to make a ship like say the Normandy from Mass Effect, or even the Serenity from Firefly.

Can anyone help with some home rules?

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It does take more cargo space to add hangers as ship size increases BUT you also get more hanger space for that. Assuming you are using SotG the EP cost is the same but a bigger ship has a higher conversion rate for EP to Cargo space. The thing about the Hanger Bay modification is that the number of "units" you get is based on the ships cost modifier which means a bigger ships gets more units for the same number of EP.

Using the rules as written you could spend 8 EP to add a Hanger bay but this is what provides:

Frigate size ship: 500 cr. for 1 unit of hanger space which can hold just one TIE fighter.
Station size ship: 50000 cr for 100 units of hanger space which can hold 100 TIE fighters.
The EP cost is the same but the credit cost and what you get changes dramatically. It all breaks down to 500 cr. for 1 unit of hanger space but that unit takes 8 EP on a Frigate Sized ship but just .08 EP on a station size ship IF the GM allowed fractional upgrades.

I will note that "hanger space" is a BIG issue for all kinds of things. For starters it seems like it takes way too much space (EP) to have room to hold a couple starfighters and if those are gargantuan starfighters, or heaven forbid colossal ship like a light freighter, the "hanger unit" requirements are huge. Going the other way I have seen may people "break" the EP system by saying they can "strip" a codex ship's hangers for EP using the equations in reverse and making sure they figure the biggest ships possible (ie all "shuttles" are colossal sized and fighers are assumed to be gargantuan sized).

When it comes to "adding" hanger space I will change the number of units provided to "Cost modifier/10" instead of "cost mod./50" which means each modification gives five times as many hanger units. When I do this I increase the unit requirements of a Huge ship to two units instead of one. I do NOT allow cannibalization of hanger space of codex ships for EP except at an unfavorable rate; ie. a ship that holds a dozen fighters I would assume huge fighters instead of colossal and I am not assuming shuttles to be colossal ships.

The rules in SotG work pretty well when it comes to MODIFYING an existing starship but they do not work so well when creating a brand new class of ship. If you're the GM I suggest you just write up the ship as you think is appropriate. I'll point out that Codex ships are taken from canon sources but some (many?) of the people who have written them out have NO IDEA how such a ship could actually work. The Neb-B carrying two full squadrons of X-Wings plus is just a little bit crazy depending on what stats you want to use for the ship's dimensions.

As far as adding hanger space, remember that it's not just a place to park the ship. It's also launch capabilities to deploy the smaller ship while the primary ship is in flight as well as take things apart to perform repairs and ensure that it's securely locked down during hyperspace travel. Think less of a car garage and more of an aircraft carrier. Further, a lot of the modification options listed in SotG are after-factory upgrades, and thus not easy to add to a ship that's not designed for it. Kinda like adding monster truck tires and a high-performance racing engine to mid-size family sedan; it can be done with enough time, money, and parts, but it's not easy.

That said, I did include a tweak to the Hanger Bay option in my house rules file, which reads as such:



This way, it's not quite as pricey for a Colossal ship to have a small hanger bay for a small shuttle or two, but it's not something that's going to be done very often either. Then again, a case could be made that the Firefly-class transports are on the smaller end of Colossal (Frigate) rather than simply being Colossal size transports.

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I would also make this contention. It's more like an Action-series than a YT-series. Inara's shuttle would be more the Colossal-sized ship (though, again, on the smaller side I would think).

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Besides actual "hanger bays" didn't I once see a suggestion in a Jedi Council article about a "docking slip" or something similar? It isn't a full sized "hanger" but rather was a "protected parking spot" for some specific kind of ship. It took up a lot less space then a "real" hanger but was also much more limited.

When it comes to "shuttles" there have been many made using gargantuan or even just huge stock ships. Barely more then life pods they'd still function perfectly well getting a character from a ship to a near by point and back provided things weren't too hazardous.

I'd say Gargantuan would probably work best for those kinds of "short-range shuttles" like the one Inara used in the Firefly 'verse.

I seem to recall something about "starship slips" as well, though I want to say those would be more akin to docking clamps, or maybe it's something listed in Scum & Villainy, which had a fair number of starship upgrades as well.

_________________
"If you've never seen an elephant ski, then you've never been on acid."
- Eddie Izzard

Contributing Author of the GSA
Dono's Gaming & Etc Blog
Follow me on Twitter at @donovan421

A "huge" sized shuttle wouldn't be for much more then going from ship to ship or ship to shore and certainly would be anything that could be considered "long range". I'll agree that Inara's "shuttle" would be gargantuan as it should have enough space for some kind of proper quarters for which she could use to conduct business.

I know docking clamps are an alternative to hanger space but there was something on the website that offered something in between full hangers and the meager docking clamp.

A little over a month, but felt this might be relevant. In Jedi Counseling #115, it talks about storing vehicles as cargo instead of a hanger. Of course it takes about 1 minute to actually get it ready, if the entire mechanic crew works at it. Otherwise, I can't find any other JC's. Wish I could, as I've only got 105-115, and I imagine there were more goodies for the RPG in them.