So many ships with no weapons

[chiron0224]

So the basic rules don't include rules for ship design. I'm not really thrilled about that, but it is what it is. But here's the thing, so many of the ships have no weapons on them. Like the free trader, far trader, etc.

Now I get that these ships are initially built without weapons but come on. Everyone knows that Free/Far traders get weapons mounted on them by Travellers all the time. How else can you ply the dangerous Spinward Main alone? So here's where it gets just plain weird. I scoured the rules looking for how to mount weapons on them (something that would certainly come up) and I had a hell of a time finding it. Then I found the rules for how many turrets a ship could have and at what cost and the costs and stats of the ship board weapons and they were.........in the space combat chapter? Wouldn't it make infinitely more sense to put that in the intro to Common Spacecraft?

 

[chiron0224]

Since Mongoose seems determined to have the ship design rules in a second book, and since I can't imagine any group being ok with taking weaponless ships out to space, another possibility that occurred to me was to have another variant of the Free/Far trader and of the subsidized merchant that have been retrofitted with weapons (since, in universe this retrofitting happens all the time). Also something I noticed is that some of the ships descriptions list the turrets without listing specific weapons for them. That's fine. It lets players decide for themselves what weapons to put in them but again, you will find those weapons buried in the ship combat section for some reason and then there's no listed power requirements. So if you just have the CRB you still can't have weapons on most of the ships that a starting group would end up with unless you buy a second book.

 

[allanimal]

Power requirements of spacecraft weapons are on a table on p. 144.
Weapon costs and damage are in the table at the bottom of p.158

It would be nice to have a consolidated table, but the info is all there.

 

[phavoc]

Power requirements of spacecraft weapons are on a table on p. 144.
Weapon costs and damage are in the table at the bottom of p.158

It would be nice to have a consolidated table, but the info is all there.

Perish the thought!