Unified spaceship weapons for Star Wars d6

As much as I like the D6 system and its approach to space combat, the weapons that they put on the ships for Star Wars are total chaos. Terms are used completely inconsistently even though the stats are generally pretty consistent. About 90% of the time. And then occasionally you run into a gun that has the same range in “space units” as regular other guns of that type but 20 times as much range in “atmosphere units” for no reason at all. Since I am a huge fan of consistency, I made the following list of standard guns found on the vast majority of ships.

Starfighter Weapons

Laser Cannon

Fire Arc: Front/Turret
Skill: Starship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 1-3/12/25
Atmosphere Range: 100-300/1.2/2.5 km
Damage: 4D (12)

2 Laser Cannons (fire linked)

Fire Arc: Front/Turret
Skill: Starship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 1-3/12/25
Atmosphere Range: 100-300/1.2/2.5 km
Damage: 5D (15)

4 Laser Cannons (fire-linked)

Fire Arc: Front/Turret
Skill: Starship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 1-3/12/25
Atmosphere Range: 100-300/1.2/2.5 km
Damage: 6D (18)

2 Light Ion Cannons (fire-linked)

Fire Arc: Front/Turret
Skill: Starship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 1-3/7/15
Atmosphere Range: 100-300/700/3.6 km
Damage: 4D (12)

Proton Torpedo Launcher (3 torpedoes)

Fire Arc: Front
Skill: Starship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 1/3/7
Atmosphere Range: 50-100/300/700
Damage: 9D (27)

Concussion Missile Launcher (4 missiles)

Fire Arc: Front
Skill: missile weapons
Fire Control: 2D
Space Range: 1/3/7
Atmosphere Range: 50-100/300/700
Damage: 7D (21)

Capital Ship Weapons

Turbolaser Battery

Fire Arc: (varies)
Crew: 3
Skill: Capital ship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 3-15/35/75
Atmosphere Range: 6-30/70/150 km
Damage: 7D (21)

Double Turbolaser

Fire Arc: (varies)
Crew: 3
Skill: Capital ship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 3-15/35/75
Atmosphere Range: 6-30/70/150 km
Damage: 5D (15)

Turbolaser

Fire Arc: (varies)
Crew: 2
Skill: Capital ship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 3-15/35/75
Atmosphere Range: 6-30/70/150 km
Damage: 4D (12)

Ion Cannon Battery

Fire Arc: (varies)
Crew: 3
Skill: Capital ship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 1-10/25/50
Atmosphere Range: 2-20/50/100 km
Damage: 4D (12)

Quad Laser Cannons

Fire Arc: (varies)
Crew: 1
Scale: Starfighter
Skill: Starship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 1-3/12/25
Atmosphere Range: 100-300/1.2/2.5 km
Damage: 6D (18)

Double Laser Cannons

Fire Arc: (varies)
Crew: 1
Scale: Starfighter
Skill: Starship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 1-3/12/25
Atmosphere Range: 100-300/1.2/2.5 km
Damage: 5D (15)

Laser Cannon

Fire Arc: (varies)
Crew: 1
Scale: Starfighter
Skill: Starship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 1-3/12/25
Atmosphere Range: 100-300/1.2/2.5 km
Damage: 4D (12)

Concussion Missile Launcher

Fire Arc: (varies)
Crew: 2
Skill: Capital ship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 2-12/30/60
Atmosphere Range: 4-24/60/120 km
Damage: 9D (27)

Tractor Beam Projector

Fire Arc: (varies)
Crew: 4
Skill: Capital ship gunnery
Fire Control: 2D (varies)
Space Range: 1-5/15/30
Atmosphere Range: 2-10/30/60 km
Damage: 4D (12)

Combined Fire

Capital ships often have ridiculous numbers of guns on them. Star Destroyers have 180 batteries and Super Star Destroyers even 1000! Nobody wants to make that many attack rolls. Every round. Here is where the Combined Action mechanic comes into play. A character with the Command skill can coordinate others to work together as a group, concentrating their efforts on a common goal and assisting and helping each other. On a warship it can be taken for granted that there officers for just that purpose who are trained in the Command skill well enough to make their check every time. So what you do when two capital ships open fire on each other is to group their guns together, which is a bit different than the fire-linking mechanic that allows a single character to aim multiple guns at the same target.

When several guns or gun batteries are firing as a group you make a single attack roll and damage roll instead of making one for each weapon seperately. However, for every gun in the group you get a +1 bonus (or +1D for every three guns, as by the regular rules for adding bonuses) which you can split as desired between attack and damage.

For example, a Star Destroyer has 60 turbolaser batteries, 20 of which are pointing forward. Each one has a gunner with a capital ship gunnery skill of 4D+2, a fire control rating of 4D, and deals 7D damage. (For some reason, the original stats for Imperial I Class Star Destroyers from the Rulebook say 5D damage, but all other Star Destroyers from the Imperial Sourcebook say 7D for turbolasers.) Instead of making 20 attack rolls against a fleeing corellian corvette, you can group the 20 forward guns together into 4 groups of 5, resulting in a total of 1D+2. So you might make the attack roll at 9D+1 and roll 8D for damage. If you know you’re going to hit anyway, you could also put it all into damage to get 8D+2 to attack and 8D+2 for damage.

If you end up in a major space battle with several capital ships, it might even be more useful to group all forward guns into a group of 20, resulting in a total bonus of 6D+2. Do the same for the right guns and the left guns and you can have the Star Destroyer shoting at three different targets with just 3 rolls for attack and damage each. It’s relatively unlikely to have capital ship battles happen completely unexpected. Since the GM generally knows in advance which ships will be involved in a battle between capital ships, it’s very easy to make some notes on how you’re grouping the guns together for that battle in advance.

2 thoughts on “Unified spaceship weapons for Star Wars d6”

  1. Can you do an article on upgrading ship Sensors? There are multiple sources defining the types of sensors that a ship can have, and even how much those sensors cost, but I can find absolutely no text defining how the different sensors actually adjust Sensor rolls. Different starships have different Sensors dice in their stat blocks, but I see no rhyme or reason as to how buying specific sensor packages affects those dice/pips.

  2. I don’t think I ever looked into sensors like that, and it’s been ages since I did any work on the Star Wars d6 system.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *