Jorus Merrill
is mek bote
Everyone loves a nice little freighter, all battered and modified and lived-in to within an inch of its life. But the starship guide is really vague on light freighters, and as someone who helped write the original version, that's 110% deliberate. Light and medium freighters are where creativity and individuality can really show through.
Q: But what if I'm not all that comfortable with the Factory? What if I've got no idea where to start?
A: OK, there are three ways to do this. The first is to make a new class of ship from scratch, and that's by far the most complicated. The second most complicated is to modify a canon ship. The easiest is to modify a Factory-approved 'modern' ship.
Q: What about development threads?
A: If you want to make something Millennium-Falcon-Amazing as your personal home and base of operations, I guarantee you'll have a ton of fun writing about how you put it together or obtained some special module or whatever. IE, a dev thread. If you can cite some thread you wrote, under the 'Development Thread' line, you can get away with an awful lot.
Q: So what was that about modifying existing Factory ships? Where can I find a list?
A: Well, searching the approved starship forum for 'freighter' would probably find you a good many. There's one short list here, and others can be found here and here. Oh, and here's an old favorite of mine. There are over two thousand approved ships in the Factory. And you don't have to stick with light freighters and shuttles, either. Maybe you really like the look of some faction's dropship or shuttle or gunship (all factions have an armory manifest) and decided to modify one. (Get permission for that.) There are many, many good options buried in the approved starship forum and company product manifests, more than even I know about.
Q: But I like canon ships.
A: That's not a question. HOWEVAR, you can totally use ships from eight hundred years before our board timeline. Maybe it's an antique, patched up over and over again. Maybe it's been drifting in deep space until completely refitted. Maybe at some point some starship manufacturer made a replica line. These are all details you can include in your Description to give your ship some reasoning and some life. The reason I suggest going with a Factory-approved ship, though, is that in 90% of cases, canon ships have very little usable detail, and you'll often end up guessing for things like length/width/height, cargo capacity, etc. Here are some lists of canon ships, with an emphasis on more fleshed-out pages:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Freighters
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Corellian_Engineering_Corporation_products
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Transport
Q: But I wanna make my OWN ship because I found this picture on DeviantArt and-
A: Trust me, I understand. And as long as you're not trying to cram class-0.3 hyperdrives and impervium hull coatings and octuple turbolasers onto your ship, the starship judges will help you out if you've shown your work and covered your bases in good faith. Since ship creation from scratch can take a lotta detail, try the official ship guide in the starship factory forum, plus this. But let's start simpler. Let's go with a canon ship, the very pretty YT-2000:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/YT-2000_light_freighter
Q: I don't even know where to start in filling out this template. What do?
A: OK, let's run through it line by line.
First, post your image. Use the image button rather than pasting it in, or your thread won't post. Then link to the source of the image.
Intent: "A personal freighter for _______________." That is all you need to put. Feel free to wax eloquent if necessary.
Development Thread: Have you secured some special bit of equipment or modified your ship or acquired it in a thread? Link to that. (The thread should be at least ten posts long.)
Manufacturer: Well, in this case, it's CEC, the Corellian Engineering Corporation.
Model: YT-2000 Light Freighter.
Affiliation: Independent
Modularity: Just put 'no' unless you want to have the ability to swap out different parts of your ship; in that case, write about it in the description.
Production: Unique
Material: Durasteel hull, transparisteel viewports - that's the standard choices.
Description: Here's where you sit down and talk about your ship. What you love about it, what it's good at, what it's bad at, where you got it, how you modded it, where it came from.
Classification: Light freighter
Role: Personal transport
Height: 9.6 metres is canon
Width: 21.6 metres is canon
Length: 29.4 metres is canon
Power Core Generator/Reactor: Your standard vanilla choice is 'solar ionization reactor.'
Hyperdrive Rating: 2-3 is civilian standard. 1 is military standard. Remember that a dark age knocked all our technology back to movie era or a little after, so class 0.75 or 0.5 is still very, very rare. It'd be wise to do a thread for it if you want a drive that fast. The absolute fastest ship in canon is the elite Bes'uliik starfighter, with a class 0.4 hyperdrive. On Chaos, that speed's only matched in production by the Silk Holdings Rassilon-class...which is basically a James Bond Lamborghini.
Minimum Crew: 1 is canon (feel free to alter this a little)
Optimal Crew: 4 is canon (feel free to alter this a little)
Armaments: We'll get to this.
Hangar: We'll get to this.
Non-Combative Attachments: Straight from the guide, these are the basics:
Your ship is unique and you might be able to get away with turning one or two of those 'standards' into 'advanced.' Some of these may not make sense for your ship (the Slave I had detention cells, the Falcon didn't), and you may be after other options. There's a brief list of upgrades here, and other companies like CEC and Ri'ess Regal Drives have started making modular improvements too. Also, canon has tons of interesting things buried in Wookieepedia under different headings. Careful of game tech -- go with well-substantiated things that were meant for ships around this size. Oh, and this is where you, in particular, toss in your false telesponders (false identities) and smuggling compartments and other...toys.
Passenger Capacity: 7 is canon (feel free to alter this a little)
Cargo Capacity: 115 metric tons is canon (feel free to alter this a little - and chop it if you're carrying big heavy stuff or a lot of aftermarket add-ons)
Consumables: 3 month is canon (feel free to alter this a little)
Sublight Speed and Maneuverability: 4 (the standard number for a light freighter) - If it's VERY VERY fast and not that big, go 3. 5 could also work, especially on the larger end of things.
Q: So you mentioned armaments and hangar?
A: Hangar, for light-to-medium freighter, could definitely be 'N/A', meaning 'not applicable' ('nothing'). But if you want a couple of speeder bikes or a landspeeder, or heck, even a small starfighter, this is where to put that. (If you try to cram in a little fighter or something, write a little about it in the Description.) There are even little pod-ships that are meant to fit inside freighters. For example:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/YT-XC
http://starwarsrp.net/topic/4955-kkt-74-cricket-construction-vehicle/
(Or you could even make your own.)
Q: Thought you said you were going to talk about armaments.
A: OK, broadly speaking, there are no standards for what a light or medium freighter has. A stock YT-2000 has two dual laser turrets, which is just fine for most civilian purposes. Take a good solid look at what's already been approved, and remember -- at two quad lasers, an autoblaster, and a concussion missile launcher, the Millennium Falcon was rocking out with military-grade hardware. (Some smugglers also had special weapons, like Connor nets and other tricks.) Broadly speaking, on the Guide 2.0 side of things, if you aim for somewhere around heavy dropship/gunship, you're in the right ballpark. It is also 110% acceptable to take inspiration from Captain Malcolm Reynolds of the good ship Firefly, and have your ship be completely unarmed.
If you want or need to know anything else, just ask.
Q: But what if I'm not all that comfortable with the Factory? What if I've got no idea where to start?
A: OK, there are three ways to do this. The first is to make a new class of ship from scratch, and that's by far the most complicated. The second most complicated is to modify a canon ship. The easiest is to modify a Factory-approved 'modern' ship.
Q: What about development threads?
A: If you want to make something Millennium-Falcon-Amazing as your personal home and base of operations, I guarantee you'll have a ton of fun writing about how you put it together or obtained some special module or whatever. IE, a dev thread. If you can cite some thread you wrote, under the 'Development Thread' line, you can get away with an awful lot.
Q: So what was that about modifying existing Factory ships? Where can I find a list?
A: Well, searching the approved starship forum for 'freighter' would probably find you a good many. There's one short list here, and others can be found here and here. Oh, and here's an old favorite of mine. There are over two thousand approved ships in the Factory. And you don't have to stick with light freighters and shuttles, either. Maybe you really like the look of some faction's dropship or shuttle or gunship (all factions have an armory manifest) and decided to modify one. (Get permission for that.) There are many, many good options buried in the approved starship forum and company product manifests, more than even I know about.
Q: But I like canon ships.
A: That's not a question. HOWEVAR, you can totally use ships from eight hundred years before our board timeline. Maybe it's an antique, patched up over and over again. Maybe it's been drifting in deep space until completely refitted. Maybe at some point some starship manufacturer made a replica line. These are all details you can include in your Description to give your ship some reasoning and some life. The reason I suggest going with a Factory-approved ship, though, is that in 90% of cases, canon ships have very little usable detail, and you'll often end up guessing for things like length/width/height, cargo capacity, etc. Here are some lists of canon ships, with an emphasis on more fleshed-out pages:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Freighters
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Corellian_Engineering_Corporation_products
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Transport
Q: But I wanna make my OWN ship because I found this picture on DeviantArt and-
A: Trust me, I understand. And as long as you're not trying to cram class-0.3 hyperdrives and impervium hull coatings and octuple turbolasers onto your ship, the starship judges will help you out if you've shown your work and covered your bases in good faith. Since ship creation from scratch can take a lotta detail, try the official ship guide in the starship factory forum, plus this. But let's start simpler. Let's go with a canon ship, the very pretty YT-2000:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/YT-2000_light_freighter
Q: I don't even know where to start in filling out this template. What do?
A: OK, let's run through it line by line.
First, post your image. Use the image button rather than pasting it in, or your thread won't post. Then link to the source of the image.
Intent: "A personal freighter for _______________." That is all you need to put. Feel free to wax eloquent if necessary.
Development Thread: Have you secured some special bit of equipment or modified your ship or acquired it in a thread? Link to that. (The thread should be at least ten posts long.)
Manufacturer: Well, in this case, it's CEC, the Corellian Engineering Corporation.
Model: YT-2000 Light Freighter.
Affiliation: Independent
Modularity: Just put 'no' unless you want to have the ability to swap out different parts of your ship; in that case, write about it in the description.
Production: Unique
Material: Durasteel hull, transparisteel viewports - that's the standard choices.
Description: Here's where you sit down and talk about your ship. What you love about it, what it's good at, what it's bad at, where you got it, how you modded it, where it came from.
Classification: Light freighter
Role: Personal transport
Height: 9.6 metres is canon
Width: 21.6 metres is canon
Length: 29.4 metres is canon
Power Core Generator/Reactor: Your standard vanilla choice is 'solar ionization reactor.'
Hyperdrive Rating: 2-3 is civilian standard. 1 is military standard. Remember that a dark age knocked all our technology back to movie era or a little after, so class 0.75 or 0.5 is still very, very rare. It'd be wise to do a thread for it if you want a drive that fast. The absolute fastest ship in canon is the elite Bes'uliik starfighter, with a class 0.4 hyperdrive. On Chaos, that speed's only matched in production by the Silk Holdings Rassilon-class...which is basically a James Bond Lamborghini.
Minimum Crew: 1 is canon (feel free to alter this a little)
Optimal Crew: 4 is canon (feel free to alter this a little)
Armaments: We'll get to this.
Hangar: We'll get to this.
Non-Combative Attachments: Straight from the guide, these are the basics:
- Communications Array
- Encryption Network
- Escape Pods
- Holonet Transceiver
- Standard Deflector Shield Generator
- Standard Detention Cells
- Standard Life Support Systems
- Standard Navigational Systems
- Standard Sensor Array
- Standard Targeting Systems
- Tractor Beams
Your ship is unique and you might be able to get away with turning one or two of those 'standards' into 'advanced.' Some of these may not make sense for your ship (the Slave I had detention cells, the Falcon didn't), and you may be after other options. There's a brief list of upgrades here, and other companies like CEC and Ri'ess Regal Drives have started making modular improvements too. Also, canon has tons of interesting things buried in Wookieepedia under different headings. Careful of game tech -- go with well-substantiated things that were meant for ships around this size. Oh, and this is where you, in particular, toss in your false telesponders (false identities) and smuggling compartments and other...toys.
Passenger Capacity: 7 is canon (feel free to alter this a little)
Cargo Capacity: 115 metric tons is canon (feel free to alter this a little - and chop it if you're carrying big heavy stuff or a lot of aftermarket add-ons)
Consumables: 3 month is canon (feel free to alter this a little)
Sublight Speed and Maneuverability: 4 (the standard number for a light freighter) - If it's VERY VERY fast and not that big, go 3. 5 could also work, especially on the larger end of things.
Q: So you mentioned armaments and hangar?
A: Hangar, for light-to-medium freighter, could definitely be 'N/A', meaning 'not applicable' ('nothing'). But if you want a couple of speeder bikes or a landspeeder, or heck, even a small starfighter, this is where to put that. (If you try to cram in a little fighter or something, write a little about it in the Description.) There are even little pod-ships that are meant to fit inside freighters. For example:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/YT-XC
http://starwarsrp.net/topic/4955-kkt-74-cricket-construction-vehicle/
(Or you could even make your own.)
Q: Thought you said you were going to talk about armaments.
A: OK, broadly speaking, there are no standards for what a light or medium freighter has. A stock YT-2000 has two dual laser turrets, which is just fine for most civilian purposes. Take a good solid look at what's already been approved, and remember -- at two quad lasers, an autoblaster, and a concussion missile launcher, the Millennium Falcon was rocking out with military-grade hardware. (Some smugglers also had special weapons, like Connor nets and other tricks.) Broadly speaking, on the Guide 2.0 side of things, if you aim for somewhere around heavy dropship/gunship, you're in the right ballpark. It is also 110% acceptable to take inspiration from Captain Malcolm Reynolds of the good ship Firefly, and have your ship be completely unarmed.
If you want or need to know anything else, just ask.
