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Archives of Nethys

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Chapter 2: Starship Combat / Additional Starship Options

Starship Combat Scale

Source Starship Operations Manual pg. 51
Starships range from tiny single-pilot fighters to colossal vessels employing hundreds of crew. A Small ship can easily fit within the hangar bay of a Gargantuan or larger vessel. How, then, do you adjust for different ship sizes within a starship combat?
One of the best ways to set the scale of your combat is to determine what sort of terrain you want on the map. In fights with no appreciable terrain, the scaling hardly matters. There’s enough space in a starship hex for each ship (even ultranoughts). However, when there is an object of known size desired as terrain, you may wish to scale accordingly. For example, in a dogfight between fighters over an ultranought, the Supercolossal ship becomes terrain instead of a separate vessel.
Close Combat—1,000 Feet per Hex: This scale is most appropriate for Medium and smaller ships. When using this scale, the action is focused on these ships’ maneuvers around larger obstacles. This scaling allows the GM to position asteroids, space stations, and derelict bits of space debris as terrain to add interest and challenge to a ship combat. At this scale, a Large ship would just barely fit in a single hex, while bigger vessels might fill a significant portion of the map and become abstract terrain or an environmental hazard of their own.
Standard Scale—10 Miles per Hex: This is a default scaling used in most combats. It allows even Gargantuan ships to fit within a single hex. Absalom Station or the Idari would fill a single hex, but there could be larger stations that encompass multiple hexes. At this scale, most planets would completely fill the map and could be depicted only if placed at an edge.
Fleet Actions—100 Miles per Hex: This scaling allows for massive multi-ship battles on a truly epic scale, with enough space for a small planet like Aballon or Apostae to fit on the map. A planet the size of Castrovel would fill most of the map but still leave room for some starship action from an invading force around the edges.
Feel free to adapt your own scaling to fit the requirements of your game, but note that weapon ranges, starship speeds, and other hex-based statistics shouldn’t change with the scale, in order to maintain the balance of the starship combat system.