Starfinder General /sfg/

I wanna play a one-armed character

...

Hi Sweagle.

Did you end up making that MEC Trooper you wanted to make?

How about one bay for fighters, and for tiny/small ships you can get one of a small selection but it has to be accessed from outside, to represent things like the missile-generator being repurposed to produce drugs or the like? You gotta land or EVA since there's no room to walk around though, but the software and capabilities can be installed?

My absolute fucking nigger holy shit

There's two of them, gods save us!

Tell me about environments, what does it mean if a planet's atmosphere is "Thin?" Better yet, where can I find this information in the CRB, anyone got a page?

>Einhander pic
My Mwangi.

Environment rules start on p. 394, thin atmosphere specifically is on 396.

Mechanically, it means a DC 15 Fort save per hour, +1 for each repetition, vs. fatigue. Even thinner atmospheres mean a DC 25 fort save vs. 1 damage to all ability scores the first time you fail the repeating DC 15+ save. Fluff-wise, if you're looking for clear cutoffs between "normal" and "thin," I don't think you're going to find it.

Awesome, thank you! I'm just curious because I wanted to know how fucked my character would be for long periods of time on that mountain resort planet listed in the Vast.

anyone actually running a game of this?

Hard to with no bestiary or anything else

I downloaded the book for the setting, and when my current campaign is done, I intent to run my next game in the setting, though I won't be using the system.

Going to start C with 11 str but I might boost my str up to 15 for heavy weapons so might end up looking more like J. Planning on building Mechanic (Exocortex, yeah I know it's not great but it fits my concept best)

Getting a campaign together as we speak, gonna be using mostly NPCs and other humanoids for encounters until the Alien Archive comes out. Even then, I'm not above homebrewing some aliens and monsters to throw at my party.

What's wrong with ship size anyways

All the numbers attached to them. Larger ships start to have insanely low masses, don't have anywhere near enough expansion bays to reasonably accommodate what a ship that size could do, and have insanely low crew capacities. A modern Nimitz aircraft carrier can have a total crew reaching somewhere around 5000 and over 80 ships, while a colossal Starfinder ship, presently limited to the Dreadnought frame, is at minimum 13 times larger, has a maximum crew one tenth the size, an absolute maximum fighter capacity of 40, and apparently has a minimum tonnage of 8000 tons vs. the Nimitz's 101,600. Cargo capacity is similarly nonsensical.

I haven't checked the numbers to see where exactly it really starts breaking down on the size chart, but at some point it crosses over from functional tiny ships to batshit insane.

Nimitz can have over 80 aircraft, not ships. I'm literate, I swear.

Fun fact, even if you use all the expansion bays on a dreadnought you can't have enough escape pods to evacuate even a minimum crews.

As one more note, someone on the Paizo forums figured out a silhouette comparison. According to the numbers in the CRB, the black starship - a gargantuan battleship right on the gargantuan/colossal threshold - and the red US Destroyer are equivalent in mass and crew.

That's what's wrong with Starfinder ship size.

How long did it take for them to get banned for suggesting that Paizo made a mistake?

The thread's still up, people are defending Paizo saying it's a "nod to sci-fi books that get those things wrong all the time."

I suspected as much.
So this requires a full overhaul of the sizes then.

We need new tables, new crew numbers and new expansion slots.

Two questions then: is 20-60ft fine for tiny, and should a nimitz-class carrier be "huge" (800-2000ft) or Colossal (tonnage-based)? To get an idea of the ranges here...

How about if an aircraft carrier was the level for Gargantuan, leaving space for shit like supercarriers?

H = J > A

L is pretty great too, but she looks stuck up.

Just glancing at some things, Tiny may actually be mostly fine, though with some fuzziness on the border. Continuing with the Nimitz theme, the Boeing Super Hornet is ~60 feet (and an inch) at weighs in at 32k pounds empty, 47k loaded. It'll swing up or down over that tiny/small line, but hey, it's at least in the ballpark. Glancing over Wiki's list of other planes usually on the Nimitz, it's kind of the same there - 60ish feet, give or take, and in the general range of 20-25 tons loaded. A whole lot more variability unloaded, though. I'm sure someone more military minded could come in and tell me how I'm wrong about everything, but that's what I'm seeing.

Tiny could use tweaking, but compared to real world planes, I think it's broadly fine. Small and up, though... Small doubles length on the upper end, and only doubles mass, so that looks to be where things start down the path to madness. And for fixing that, I'm honestly not sure which would be best. But I feel like we should definitely be able to get something Dreadnought sized, so I lean toward Nimitz still just being huge.

This does all answer one thing, though. Apparently the reason huge and larger ships can't land on a planet is because they're probably lighter than air.

If anyone's getting banned, it's probably over in the queer thread rather than the number crunching threads. I didn't see anyone getting culled over this.

>tfw the most popular thread about Starfinder on the Paizo forums is about how gay you can get the game

>Mechanically, it means a DC 15 Fort save per hour, +1 for each repetition, vs. fatigue. Even thinner atmospheres mean a DC 25 fort save vs. 1 damage to all ability scores the first time you fail the repeating DC 15+ save. Fluff-wise, if you're looking for clear cutoffs between "normal" and "thin," I don't think you're going to find it.

You can get acclimatized to Thin atmospheres if you spend a month in them!

One big factor in mass on aircraft is the ordnance and *fuel*. So depending on what shit runs on in the future, being 5 tons lighter than current aluminum frames when you run on fusion (energy density of even a fission engine's uranium is magnitudes larger than the equivalent mass of JP-8) and don't have to worry about hitting a plate of metal at high speed in a storm makes a lot of sense.

Well, it's space. So, how about mass be the real deciding factor, and let length follow?

Would it be a reasonable simplification of the square-cube law to only double length every time if we're tripling mass every time?

>L is pretty great too, but she looks stuck up.
Stuck up is fine for a roll in the hay, though. Princess types are always looking for somebody below them to go slumming with.

Yeah, I can see that. The lower end of the weight range doesn't conform, to square/cube based on the upper end, but at least there you could argue that it's just the weight of components like the reactor and engines that you can't functionally make much smaller than that.

I think mass multiplying by 8 per category is fine. It works for creatures, so it's clearly something we can handle. I don't see how violating that would improve things either, since that's exactly how we got such bad numbers in the first place.

I say "per category" but looking at the chart reminds me that the scaling from one end of a size to the other is incredibly inconsistent. Tiny triples, small doubles, medium is a 1.5 range, large is 2 and a third...

Every little thing I notice here just makes the default size chart worse. I can't even tell what the reasoning behind these size ranges is supposed to be. Creature sizes are based on the upper end being twice the lower end, but apparently ship sizes are based on pixie dust and bullshit.

Mass should increase by 8 every time length doubles, if the rest of the ship follows, but everything about size looks like it needs to be rewritten. Which follows with rewriting all the expansion bay capacities, which leads to considering whether to rewrite prices for bays, at which point you start wondering whether to rewrite tier budgets, and...

God, fixing this potentially means rewriting pretty near the whole chapter if you really follow through on it.

Well I was already well into doing that anyways...
How's this for a new chart:

Tiny: 4-25 tons, 20-60ft
Small: 25-200 tons, 60-120ft
Med: 200-1500 tons, 120-250ft
Large: 1500-12k tons, 250-500ft
Huge: 12k-95k tons, 500-1000ft
Garg: 95k-750k tons, 1000-2000ft
Colos: 750+ kilotons, 2000+ feet

Just some occasional very small rounding to keep the table divisions looking cleaner and easier to remember, but otherwise pretty much x8 every time on mass and x2 on length.

This puts an aircraft carrier at the low end of Gargantuan (a nimitz-class is about 105 kilotons and 1060 feet long). A Galaxy-Class Starship would in comparison be Colossal (it's over 2100ft long and because it's so fat and made of high-density materials is apparently over 4.5 megatons)

The lowest end of the scale is 4 tons since things like an old P-51D were between 3 and 4 tons depending on loadout. A Super-Tucano is 5.5 tons max takeoff weight.

A 5-ton 20ft starship is more compact (it DOES have less aerodynamics to worry about, can easily cut off the tail) being only as long as the smaller u-haul rental trucks.

...

...

Yeah, rounding a little bit is fine - creature sizes do it anyway. I just didn't want to go too far and leave square/cube in the dust. Madness lies down that path.

It definitely doesn't get as large as Colossal does RAW, but that's probably fine - there's always going to be room for a bigger ship, so if it came to it, Colossal+, ++, etc., could just be winged if really needed. With Tiny being the starting point in that range, I think that chart looks fine. But now comes the issue of fixing things like cargo capacity, expansion bay count, the implicit balance in expansion bay count and fighter capacity, as if Paizo even really considered that too deeply...

If you can keep your head on straight long enough to work your way through all of that, more power to you. It's definitely a mess.

Indeed. I just wanted to get the most glaring fuckup out of the way.

And of course Paizo didn't consider those things too deeply. Take a look at those expansions: That 15000ft dreadnought can carry.... 500 tons of cargo.

Could be balanced by BP costs, or by changing the rules for the bays to scale values with the ship size category.

I know that my houserules are changing the Tier scaling to go by size category, so this would be logical.

Meant to reply to as well.

I'm thinking that in addition to the increase in number of expansion bays, what each one is worth could change by size (though how much one cargo is worth needs some consideration).

So one of the labs or workshops can be taken as a limited-bay on a tiny ship: letting one person work on one project/item per day if the ship's not under acceleration (and preferably landed and secured somewhere). Meanwhile on a Gargantuan vessel that same Arcane Lab can have 4 different items being built at the same time with 4 workers at a time, with enough crew that there's probably three shifts putting in their 8 hours apiece.

Likewise, one colossal expansion bay's worth of escape pods should cover a whole lot more than like six crew...

so uh, anyone know what page the size modifiers are on?
like... how big is a tiny character? do they get bonus AC?

That sounds like a good way of doing it. And it's probably the way it should have been done in the first place.

They did away with the size change stat screwery shit.

>Expansion bays are now based on size. While the number of bays available grows slowly - representing a measure of role specialization - the value of each bay increases, though the PCU requirements are multiplied as well.

>Many ships save on costs and complexity by shutting down multiple non-essential systems including a majority of non-critical expansion bays. This 'jump-dimming' is a common sight on commercial vessels or older military models whose cores may not have kept up with mid-life retrofit upgrades.

>Cargo Bay:
>While relatively spacious, Cargo-Bays are designed for long-term storage of packed-in and locked-down materials. While their capacity does mean a Dreadnought could carry eight snub-fighters, for example, these are disassembled across several transport crates and the cargo bay itself ill-equipped to prepare them for proper use.

>Particularly large Capital Ships may store spare starfighters and shuttles in a state of Limited-Assembly for 20t and 100t of cargo respectively. These may be transferred to empty hangars and readied for launch in 10 minutes, effectively following the Limited-Fire recovery rules.
>Tiny: 0.5t, Small: 2t, Large: 5t, Huge: 20t, G: 50t, C: 200t

I'm a little skeptical of those values still, since the RAW cargo hold is 25 tons and that was giving some very questionable results already. It's going to really depend on what you do with expansion bay numbers. You also appear to have left Medium out, so I don't know how that affects your intended scale.

I don't much care to go digging around for cargo ship capacities tonight, but I can do that later to get a better ballpark for final target numbers that might be worth aiming at.

One problem with that cargo thing was that a shuttle with three cargo expansions was carrying 75 tons of cargo... While a dreadnought with 3 cargo expansions was also carrying 75 tons of cargo.

At this point the frames themselves would need rewriting too.

alright, so I have looked over the books for Starfinder, but apparently, PAIZO in all of its fucking brilliance didn't think someone would like to play a doctor/medic/chemist of any kind.

I wanted to play a Ysoki doctor that said "fuck that shit" to the Hippocratic oath and started making custom made viruses and diseases to put in syringes and to shoot them with a syringes gun at enemies or make healing poultices to shoot allies with.

the general feel of my character design is Ana from Overwatch mixed with Twitch from League of Legends. Can someone help me out with this? preferably no homebrew because i don't feel like overwhelming the GM since he's new to Starfinder as well

iirc there's darts that'll let you fill'em up with chems

ok, that's a start. can I load said darts into a dart gun/crossbow thing of some kind?

I'll take C and L.

The rest are lower class degenerates. I'll leave them for you peasants.

Yeah, Injection Pistol/Rifle.

Finally a nigger with some taste.

Anyone have the pdfs for Starfinder Society Scenarios #1-00 to 1-03?

Looking forward to checking them out.

Which contract would your character/party take user? And how do you end up dead?

Why is a hygiene kit bulk 1?

That's 5-10 pounds.

What could possibly be inside it?

>shampoo
>conditioner
>body soap
>toothpaste
>toilet paper
>douche
>enema
>condoms
>lube
>spermicide
>pregnancy test
>genetic compatibility test
>q-tips
You never know what you're gunna fug in space, user.

I do, but I hate you. I will only allow you one of them, so pick which.

a crate of tampons, an econo-pack of pads, a toothbrush, half a pound of toothpaste, six bars of soap, enough mouthwash to black-out a dozen homeless, and one of those tiny hotel-room bottles of shampoo

Why the hate user? We used to be goodfriends.

I choose #1-00. I'll keep questing for the others.

it's just three seashells

mega @ #!OM0T1D7C!aeuwz-GI4u_h-XE0lqzs7LaMSwBSs5W6wpIITKYaa1M

My heart is still scarred over the old wars in /pgg/, the wounds burn every time I see a page 4 thread war start. Perhaps in time we can mend, but until now, all I can leave you is this.

I look forward to that day then. The wild frontiers of /sfg/ is rich and unexplored, we mustn't let the wounds of the old world hold us back.

Thanks for being true to your word. Fly safe out there.

What did he mean by this?

Here are Into the Unknown, 1-00: Claim to Salvation, 1-01: The Commencement (this is the adventure including the milk run for a sugar pop band's new album, to help a shirren soldier who has a crush on an android mechanic), and 1-02: Fugitive on the Red Planet. I am having difficulty downloading 1-03: Yesteryear's Truth.

dropbox.com/s/iu6fce1gcf16b42/Starfinder Society Scenario - Into the Unknown.pdf?dl=0

dropbox.com/s/919z18o6obvafpa/Starfinder Society Scenario 1-00 - Claim to Salvation.pdf?dl=0

dropbox.com/s/3ga1prv2zmwgmzg/Starfinder Society Scenario 1-01 - The Commencement.pdf?dl=0

dropbox.com/s/2kqu4i1pj9mwdio/Starfinder Society Scenario 1-02 - Fugitive on the Red Planet.pdf?dl=0

I am disgusted at your helping people but I suppose if it's all being shared I might as well complete it.

Here's 1-03, mega @ /#!3QcDzagL!LuMA3lKmc4i3piUlH7XBwqZTe5QBU25rx0ZyRfsTA6I

I tried making a let's make a starfinder race thread but was sent here. Anyone interested?

The basic idea is: Orks have geentic knowledge of technology, Moonbunnies have a genetic knowldge of biology. Stranded on a desert planet they are able to grow a shoggoth in a matter of weeks.
Being gene-geneers this genetic knowledge was inserted by themsleves. They are the end results of genetic experiments of parents on their children.

Moonbunnies are small creatures covered in white fur that most galaxy dwellers consider incredibly adorable.

They are midly racist, enough to insult other races by calling them ugly and impefect but not enough to refuse collaboration.

Moonbunnies do not sleep, instead for 10 hours out of a 24h cycle they turn off their higher brain functions and turn into home pets:
They start chewing cables, purr and mildly annoy the ship crew. Upon waking up they do not rememeber what did they do in such a state.

They live on the moon of their home planet. No Moonbunny would willing touch the soil of the planet below despite a breathable atmosphere and friendly flora. This fear is due to an experiment gone wrong many generation ago. Which is also the reason of the taboo of growing any intellignet life forms.

What we need to define now:
Flesh out their culture.
What do their spaceships look like?
Interactions with other races and roles on spacships.
Do we want to leave their worship of cute things?

Thank you for completing the set.

thats hilarious, tho to be fair these are space ships not ocean ships. an equal vomue space ship should be much much lighter than a ocean ship
youd' think they would actually goto wikipedia or something to find stuff on cargo capactiy and tonnage of ships.

>he doesn't know how to use the three seashells

Thanks for sharing!

Saturn V: 33ft diameter, 363ft long, 2970 metric tons

Koln-class Frigate: 360ft overall length, Beam 36ft, 2750 tons full load.

dude, are you seriously trying to compare a chemical rocket to a fucking fantasy space ship? come on. get real

might as well compare the density of starfinder ships to the density of rocket fuel fi you do that

You're the one claiming a spaceship should be "much much" lower density than an oceangoing vessel.

Not to mention that anything leaving the confines of planetary magnetic fields with humans onboard is gonna need some fairly significant armor, and that's not even considering the mass required of the various cooling systems if you plan to fire fucking lasers out in space.

Yeah we wouldn't want that superheavy 70.8 kg/m3 hydrogen to skew our results in favor of the rocket being lighter than an 8050 kg/m3 chunk of steel hull.

You'd need to be under 1/113th of the volume of steel to match that rocket fuel in mass.

Do you guys think I could do a Shadowrun campaign, but with Starfinder?
Is it possible?
How hard would it be and could I eventually transition it to Starfinder?
What things would I have to get rid of or add?

>steel
>in a space ship
you ignorant nigger.
furthermore, most of the volume of starfinder ships is air.

That progression still seems a bit iffy. Remember your square-cube law. If it has the same proportions a ship twice as long will also be twice as tall, and twice as wide so it'll have 8 times the mass and volume. And when making bigger ships you don't necessarily need to scale up each system proportionally. On a ship for 4 people you might need 1 coffee pot but for a ship of 400 you probably won't need 100 coffee pots. And you'll likely have something on the bigger ship that's alot more efficient for that scale than the one coffee pot for the small ship was.

even carbon nanotubes are 22.59887 times as heavy as liquid hydrogen. A Nimitz entirely made of that instead of steel would still be roughly 21 thousand tons.

Part of the considerations when designing a seagoing vessel is density. Heavier than the amount of material that you displace, and you're floating like a rock. Something that doesn't need to do water landings is likely to be far more compact for the same mass, especially when attempting to reduce its RCS.

Don't forget however to alter the starting point for mass before all those multiplications.

The same volume of steel vs aluminum vs graphene are very different values.

Depending on the materials involved, 20 tons for 60ft could be ridiculously high, even if a 15000ft ship would certainly not be 8000 tons if 60ft is 5t.

Base construction may need deciding, though at the same time ever-larger ships and crew take up an increasing amount of space for non-mission-critical affairs; an aircraft carrier has an operating theater, but also a shop, a dentist and a couple of barbers.

>He doesn't have a wife whom he his fully faithful to
Get out of my thread you barbarian.

I wonder how much of the space in a starship is dedicated to automation for the systems, hydroponics, filtration and other survival oriented stuff that only needs periodic checkups.

Stuff like that can take up a lot of space that wouldn't be taken up on an oceangoing cruiser that doesn't have to worry about any of those things. We still ship tons of food, air, water and other supplies to the actual space station, which has less people in an area that is comparable to a cruise ship.

Has anyone figured out the crew-to-size ratio of the space station yet? Some actual, real data might be useful before you decide that the unrealism is overwhelming.

Starting mass doesn't matter if we assume a similar % of the ship is being devoted to this room. The mass and volume will scale at the same rate, 8 times for ever 2 times 'size'. And if you are concerned about the variance in mass from one material to the next why use mass as your measurement instead of volume to begin with? Also there is a reason massive bulk cargo freighters are used instead of smaller ones, they are more efficient.

Though I assume you could just add two time as many rooms per category jump to make up for the fact each room can only hold 4 times as much.

925,000: How much the ISS weighs in pounds (419,600 kilograms), the equivalent of more than 320 cars.

4: The tons of food required to support a crew of three for about six months (3,630 kg). The ISS crews' favorites include shrimp cocktail, tortillas, barbecue beef brisket, breakfast sausage links, chicken fajitas, vegetable quiche, macaroni and cheese, candy-coated chocolates and cherry blueberry cobbler. Lemonade is the most popular drink.

7: the current number of crew on the space station.

That's about 8470kg for 7 people for 6 months, or roughly 201kg of food per person per month.

It's rather processed and packaged to save on weight, too; would likely be 300kg at the grocery store.

Still don't understand why people weren't fond of that dried ice-cream though.

On a fascinating note, there are serious restrictions on what food can be sent to the ISS. Namely they can't have a strong odor since it's an enclosed environment the smells could practically never dissipate.

So 462.5 tons of spaceship with 7 crew, without hydroponics, power systems aside from solar, a motive system, oxygen generation, gravity generation, etc.

I'm thinking Paizo did their math better than anyone is giving them credit for. Again.

Hmm...what do people feel about PBTA-style effects in Starfinder? I'm working on something non-combat to make a class I'm homebrewing a REALLY good detective but it's rather PBTAish, in order to pull off the 'Hello I'm Sherlock Holmes and I already know about you' style of trick.

Light shining through(Ex) (13+): There is little you have not seen at this point, little that can surprise you. The slightest tell in a person’s movements makes them an open book to you.

As a full round action you may make a sense motive check against a creature you can see, opposed by the target’s bluff. If you succeed you gain uncanny insight into the person and their place in the world. Ask one of the following questions about the target, plus an additional question for every five you surpass the bluff check by, and the GM will answer truthfully from the targets's perspective.

>What do you wish I’d do?
>How are you vulnerable?
>How dangerous are you?
>How bad is your situation?
>What do you intend to do?
>How are you connected to current events?
>What do you most value?

Once a creature has been affected by Light shining through, regardless of success or failure, they are immune to further uses of it for 24 hours.

That and I'm working on non-combat stuff because until the bestiary comes out, trying to do combat stuff beyond throwing down basic ideas would be pointless as I don't have the numbers to properly run it against.