Starship Designer
Starships of the Galaxy, page 20.
You are trained to design (and redesign) starships.
Prerequisites: Tech Specialist, Mechanics (Trained)
Benefit: You can design a starship from scratch. Doing so takes a minimum of 30 days and a DC 25 Mechanics check, adding 1 to the DC and 1 day to the time for every additional 100,000 credits of the design’s final cost beyond the first 100,000 credits (even a genius starship designer can spend years working out the blueprints for a star destroye). Other characters trained in the Mechanics skill may use the aid another action to assist your Mechanics check; if any assisting character also has the Starship Designer feat, divide the starship’s cost by the number of characters who have this feat (including the primary designer) when determining the time required.
When making modifications to starships, you never treat the work as if though it were a nonstandard modification, evn if it normally would be (see Nonstandard Modifications).
Additionally, you can make custom modifications to starships. Each of these modifications has a base cost of 5,000 credits (multiplied by the starship size-cost modifier) and requires a DC 25 Mechanics. On a failed check, the modification fails; you must spend half again as much time and money to make a second attempt, and you gain a +2 bonus on your Mechanics check for each attempt after the first. Instalation of a custom modification normally takes one day per 5,000 credits of final cost.
The same system can be customized multiple times, but doing so becomes increasingly difficult and expensive. For every previous custom modification on a given system, increase the DC by 5 and the base cost by 10,000 credits. No system can be customized more than three times. Multiple benefits from successive customizations stack.
Typical customizations are described below. the Gamemaster may allow other modifications.
Add Emplacement: You add 1 unused emplacement point to a starship.
Improve Hull: You add a number of hit points to a starship equal to ½ its Strength score (rounded down to the nearest multiple of 10).
Improve Hyperdrive: You can reengineer a hyperdrive to improve its class by 1 step (×2 to ×1, ×1 to ×.75, and so on). The hyperdrive obeys all the restrictions of its neww class. (This is the primary way that class .75 and class .5 hyperdrives come into existence.)
Improve
Shields: The SR of the shields is increased by 5.
Improve Weapons: You can grant one weapon a +1 equipment bonus on attack rolls.
See Starship Modifications for more information on designing and modifying starships.