Full Thrust Rules for Spelljammer

Since the beginning I was very discontent with the ship combat rules of Spelljammer: My players just bolted five light catapults and 5 medium ballistas onto their whaleship and were able to annihilate entire fleets of standard ships using this modification. The scary deathspiders were not as scary anymore due to their limited range of 2 hexes thanks to their heavy ballistas.

Since I am too lazy to think up how to remedy the weird ship combat, I instead decided to work on a conversion for Spelljammer into Full Thrust. Utilizing this system I have already got a well working ship combat system and do not need to worry about any imbalances.

This is what I have come up with - we just had one ship combat so far, so I really cannot comment whether it is working well yet:

As a rule of thumb, the players should not be allowed to design entire ships, as this will only allow them to exploit any loopholes in the system. If a situation should arise, where the players are needed to construct a ship anyway, be sure to increase the price by 50 to 100 percent, since it is most likely a unique ship and there are no existing blue prints or the necessary facilities to build it without an additional cost.

• Fighters and fighterbays can only be bought by the IEN. There is no maximum limit, except for weight, to the number of fighterbays.
• Since fighers are rarer, pdaf and adaf cannot be bought regularly. Every ship will have one free pdaf system, which does not weigh or cost anything, for each full 15 tons. Every spellcaster of level 5 to level 9 counts as pdaf. Spellcasters of level 10 or higher count as adaf.
• C batteries are light catapults and ballistas. B batteries are medium catapults and ballistas. A batteries are heavy catapults.
• Screening systems consists of additional armor plating, nets, magical barriers and the like.
• Pulsetorpedos are heavy ballistas.
• Subminition pods are one shot greek fire projectors.
• Minelayers are jettisons of all kinds. Jettisons may also be used as adaf systems.
• The nova cannon is an Antilan prototype weapon, which is not for sale to PCs or anyone else than sunmages.
• AA mega batteries represent groups of up to 5 bombards.
• Waveguns are great bombards.
• The needle beam is a special magical device, which needs to be operated by a level 10 or higher spellcaster.
• The thrust rating is identical to the SR of the helmsman.
• The amount of firecontrol systems can alternatively be based on the number of officers with tactical training among the crew.

Ships do not need to pay for drives or FTL drives, because they need to buy a Spelljamming helm instead, which will determine the thrust rating. After the design process, the ships point value is multiplied by 500 to determine its value in goldpieces. Any remaining weaponspace is divided by 2 for escorts, by 3 for cruisers and by 5 for capital ships and rounded up. This number indicates how much space can be used to retrofit any weapons. However, you should not allow the PCs to buy weapons out of the book, instead let someone at a spaceport give them an offer - for example building another subminition pod / greek fire projector onto the ship for 1500 goldpieces or exchanging an existing weapon and bolting another weapon onto the deck in its place. Weapon replacement works by selling the current weapon for half the price and installing the new weapon for the full price.

Repairing a system costs half its price (1000 goldpieces per hullpoint for example) or a quarter of its price if a repaircrew is on the ship. Repaircrews cannot be repaired though, as a failed threshold roll indicates their death.

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