The Baudo Pirate Yacht

[ant]

When I started running my game one of my players wanted to be a smuggler and have a ship. His character had been a co-pilot to another smuggler and was saving up to buy his own when the ship was captured by Imperials. He was off ship at the time and got away, but the ship, his captain, and most of his money were gone. All he had was his clothes, a blaster, 2k credits, and a malfunctioning maternity droid (another player) that he'd bought because it'd been dirt cheap and thought he might find a use for.

Our intrepid captain in waiting was approached by a member of the alliance who had known his captain and was looking for someone to help with a local gang of pirates. No pay offered, but there would be assistance in the form of contacts and information, and he could take their ship if he won. Of course he took the offer (it may have helped that the person asking was a Hapan female, though maybe just female would have been enough )

So was born the Baudo Pirate Yacht, I was pretty pleased with it. It was a Baudo Star Yacht that the pirates had stolen and re-purposed (free to them, and really, who expects to be pirated by a yacht?). It was a total mess inside, and mostly stock (though walls had been knocked out to increase storage). It had what I called "The Leech", extendable porting device that could attach to the side of a ship, cut a port hole in it and pump poison gas in, a 4D laser turret, and the coup de grace... a capitol scale forward facing ion cannon, disguised to not be obvious.

Very cool, ship, probably more than a newbie should be allowed, but...

In their first space battle they decide to try out their new toy, no one has capital ship gunnery, of course, but hey, how hard can it be. First shot is a miss, darn. But wait... why did everything turn off? The power draw is so great that all the ship's systems shut down for 2-3 rounds during the recharge... oops! That definitely put a damper on it. It helped in space battle a couple of times but never quite as much as you'd expect.

Later they went on a mission to take on some SkyPray Blastboats, since I told them they could re-purpose the power generators from one of those to power their gun, they succeeded and actually had the upgrade done, but not long after that the pilot tried to dodge under a large ship full out and rolled very badly with a 1 on the wild die. I graciously allowed him to climb through the joining of the two mashed ships and steal one of their escape pods (the Wookiee with him lost a hand to exposure since there were no proper space suits for him), but alas, the ship, and the ship it hit, were lost. Luckily by then he had a second ship which the rest of the party were watching the excitement from.

[garhkal]

IMO cause of their poor hull rating, the Baudo makes for a poor pirate ship.
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[crazydanny1]

This is just my opinion...

I personally would only use a Baudo as a smuggler vessel, a recon ship, or a courier, other than a combat vessel. While they have a cool look, there are other ships out there just as cool looking that are built for combat.

I agree with Garhkal. The shielding and hull alone wouldn't even stand up to a big TIE fight. Unless you've got a Han Solo type pilot or a veteran PC that can fly the wings off of ships, I'd stick with something more conventional.

The biggest issue I have with the above mentioned Baudo is the Cap-scale Ion cannon. What the heck is powering it to begin with for someone to get the idea to mount it on a yacht? It could be done, but would take one hell of a engineer and a vast amount of credits to do.
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[ant]

Yeah, it was more for the fun of it than anything else. I couldn't give him a super awesome ship since it was just the start of the game, but at the same time I wanted to make it interesting. The Yacht had OK cargo space, fantastic sublight speed and the cap scale ion cannon seemed really awesome until you fired it and the whole ship shut down

I took away about 5-10 tons of cargo space due to the weapon... it's never really clear how much space/weight things like that cost and it was my first time GMing the game (after about a 16 year hiatus from playing). In the end it worked out better than I could have hoped because with their low stats at capital ship gunnery and the drawbacks of the ship it didn't overbalance the game.

And actually the Skypray Blastboat (which seems a little broken to me, but oh well) supports the design. It's a bit shorter than the Baudo and has three fire linked medium ion cannons at capitol scale for 4D of damage, and still claims 20t of cargo capacity.

[ant]

Besides, I try to keep it reasonably fun and light rather than technically strict, though I try to at least keep it somewhat reasonable

[garhkal]

Well, tramp freighters lists the heaviest ion cannon (SF Scale) as 7d damage, but 5 tons of space. Depending on what damage level this is cap scale, i could easily see 10 or more tons needed.
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[crazydanny1]

The Skipray Blastboat was constructed around a high-output reactor for the specific task of being a gunship that was a hybrid of a capital-starfighter.

I doubt the Baudo was ever considered for hardcore combat. I know you wanted to have fun, and to each his own. This is just something I personally wouldn't do. Even by draining the power system (which is a nice quirk to throw at them), an ingenius player will find a way to get around that and use it for more than you might have intended. I know I would.

My main take would be that the ship could never sit down on a civilized planet. No BoSS official is going to be crazy enough to give a Arms Loadout Permit to a captain flying a yacht armed with capital-scale weaponry. I'm glad to see you took the ship away before it turned into a bigger problem for you as a GM.
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