Boarding
Although most starship combat involves lasers and torpedoes fired across vast distances, some starship crews—from Besmaran pirates to hardened vesk marines—relish boarding enemy vessels to finish the fight hand‑to‑hand. Of course, starships rarely draw close enough to each other to facilitate boarding, so moving troops from one ship to another typically occurs in one of four ways: a starship latching onto an enemy ship with an anchoring weapon, one starship ramming another, striking a starship with a breaching pod, or a giant space creature injecting pathogens into its prey.
When a starship launches a boarding party, the party’s maximum size equals 20% of the attacking starship’s complement or 4 combatants, whichever is higher. Some options, such as breaching pods, are exceptions that provide a different maximum size.
Source
Starship Operations Manual pg. 40
If a starship uses a weapon with the anchoring special property and begins the gunnery phase adjacent to the ensnared target, the gunner can use the shoot crew action to secure the target. If successful, the attack deals no damage, but the gunner’s ship can send one boarding party aboard the enemy starship. Source Starship Operations Manual pg. 40 |
Breaching pods fly teams of combatants toward a target, much like a tracking weapon. Upon impact, a breaching pod’s prow pierces a hole in the target, allowing the combatants to pour into the starship. Due to their size and composition, breaching pods can’t pierce any quadrant with Shield Points. Source Starship Operations Manual pg. 40 |
Some creatures can inject dangerous biological agents into a starship. When calculating its boarding statistics, the pathogen’s tier equals the creature’s tier, and the pathogen’s complement modifier is +0. In addition to fending the pathogen off as though it were a boarding party, a defending officer can use environmental controls to weaken the pathogen as an open crew action with a Life Science check (DC = 10 + 1-1/2 × the creature’s tier). If successful, all pathogen boarding parties take a –4 penalty to their next boarding attack before the end of the next round. Source Starship Operations Manual pg. 40 |
When a starship successfully rams and deals damage to another starship’s Hull Points, an officer can direct a boarding party to invade the targeted starship as an open crew action during the gunnery phase that round. Source Starship Operations Manual pg. 40 |
Once a boarding party has invaded an enemy vessel, the defenders can react in one of two ways: repel the invaders through starship actions or confront them in tactical combat. Starship actions best represent the PCs relying on their starship’s crew and other defenses to repel attackers, whereas tactical combat is best if two or more PCs want to pursue the attackers directly. Source Starship Operations Manual pg. 40 |
