New Rules

Ship Characteristics

Most of the ship characteristics such as speed and shields are the same as WD #225, but there are some differences such as standard leadership values, ram values, boarding parties and fighter squadrons.

Leadership Values

The LEadership value represents the ability of the crew on a particular ship. This varies with experience but also depends on the race, with Inquisition crews being better trained and more of a team than Ork crews. To represent this there is one standard leadership value for each race to save on book-keeping and dice-rolling for each ship. The Leadership value is affected by a number of modifiers to represent damage and also the effect of Flagships and Squadron leaders getting the pick of the crews.

^*This leadership value only applies to ships with Space Marine chapters on board, the rest of the fleet counting as Imperial.

The maximum leadership value is 10, and the minimum is 2. Values cannot exceed or drop below these limits.

Ram Values

Ships do ocasionally ram each other, and the result is usually catastrophic for one or both ships. As such, each ship has a ram value; the bigger the ship, the bigger the value. Fighters do not have ram values as they are too manoverable to be rammed and will not ram other ships as the effect would probably only scratch the paint-work. A quick rule of thumb is that the ram value of a ship is half of its remaining damage points, rounded up.

Boarding Parties

Each ship has a number of boarding parties, not only to board other ships, but also to prevent the ship being boarded and captured itself. The actual number of people that a boarding party represents varies as the effect of a terminator company is a lot greater than a hundred gretchin, but one boarding party has the same combat value as another.

Fighters

Each ship carries a number of fighter squadrons. Fighter squadrons are in turn broken down into four types: fighters such as the Thunderbolt, fighter-bombers such as the Marauder, bombers like the Firelord, and finally the transports such as the Thunderhawk. Each ship can launch or land up to half of its fighter complement each turn at no effect to the ship's orders, but it can't launch half of its complement and then land the other half in the same turn. For example, a ship with four fighter squadrons could launch two or land two, or launch one and land one in a turn, but not launch two and land two in the same turn.