I’m beginning a Rogue Trader game shortly, and not having run (or even played) in this game is a bit daunting to me. I have made characters, read through the rulebook a couple of times and had CommissarCarrie educate me in the finer points.
Building ships is a bit of a challenging task as well. I can imagine anything that has to be designed to resist the vacuum of space and the terror of the immaterium would need to be nothing short of “tough as nails”. At first, it seems like a pretty straightforward thing to do. Each ship has a Space rating (and an SP, but we’ll get to that later). Your profit factor tells you how big your ship can be in SP. So you go and pick your hull. The first thing you drop in is an engine. The engine produces Power and takes up space. So far so good! Now you can choose more components like a bridge, void shields and the like. Each has a Space and Power rating. Sounds pretty easy. You gotta balance those out. Everything looks great! Now we just need some guns!
Turn the page – Guns also have a Space and Power rating, we’ve got this! They also have a SP rating. Wait, what? We just armed our ship and it went up 5 SP. Now our Rogue Trader pockets have come up dry! So back to the harbor master we trudge, to turn in our ship for a slightly smaller class of ship so that we can fit things in it. Other, fancier things take up SP because it makes the ship fancier too. It also affects crew Morale, and other attributes as well (like speed. must have a fast ship!)
I wound up trading hulls twice before I could cram everything in that I wanted. But it’s a very tightly packed transport full of surprises and paying customers! We’ll see if our intrepid crew is interested in the Silver Chance.
I found a Ship Generation XLS sheet that seems to be pretty nifty, and has lots of bells and whistles!