This was a fun one to use to jump back on the horse.

Per a request (Osprey), I’ve made the Aurore-class freighter, known for its appearance in the Zygerrian arc in Clone Wars (among a couple of appearances in that show). I always enjoy adding the newer vessels, because there’s less reference material, and it makes me work a bit harder to come up with something decent. You can see the stab I’ve taken at this particular vessel on the “Medium Craft” Deckplans page.

Inspired by a post in the SWRPG subreddit, I took a hard look at the really “cheap” vessels I had available. I didn’t have many – there really aren’t many. This particular ship was a great one to turn into a real junker (and consequently a cheap purchase) – it’s a Clone-Wars-era ship (which means that it’s older), it’s not designed to support a whole lot of people or amenities (it’s basically a box with engines), and it’s used by criminal lowlifes. A lot of the ships in the book(s) are very off-the-assembly-line new and useful, so it’s nice to design around something that isn’t, inherently, all that great.

I always keep my eye open for neat ship designs to work with, and one of the ones I’ve got in my backlog should be another great one to adapt as a pretty inexpensive ship (canonically, it’s really cheap too, which is a bonus). Hopefully I’ll get that one done some time here soon, too.

I’ve also updated a few Silhouettes to some of the vessels.

To back up, one of the things that really bothers me design-wise about the game has been the incredibly imprecise application of numbers. I’m a big fan of accuracy. While there are several stats that are “in the ballpark” levels of accuracy, few have been as inconsistent as the Silhouette stat. That’s been a source of more frustration than it probably should be, and as a result, I’ve probably stuck my fingers in my ears a little.

The biggest area of flux in the Silhouette stat has been right at around the 4/5 line. For the most part, this separates the freighters from the small capital ships, and it’s particularly contentious, because it’s the point at which the handling (not Handling) of the ship starts to look like a capital vessel (i.e. inability to perform some maneuvers). Problematically, the books have had Silhouette 5 craft as small as 41m in length and Silhouette 4 craft as long as 50m in length (yes, Silhouette is volume and not one dimension, but these are similarly-proportioned ships). Consequently, I’ve done pretty much whatever I felt like around that area, because it would drive me crazy to try and figure out the non-logic driving those stats.

However, in discussing it recently, I was concerned that I was simply being obstinate, and I gave the books a quick review. While I’m still frustrated with the imprecision, there looks like there’s at least a plurality of ships that use the 40+m mark as Silhouette 5. Not wanting to be a complete child, I’ve updated some of the vessels in the deckplans section accordingly.