It's a given that anyone who's read the books/and or watched the show, when presented with a game set in The Expanse universe, will at some point want to get their own Martian gunship. I asked my eldest (who's done some RPGing in the past and read the series) and her response was typically pithy as teenagers will do, amounting to "duh".

It's not just the clean lines and advanced tech of the most up to date warships in the setting. The concealed weaponry that is MCRN design standard (PDCs that retract into the frame, torpedo tubes which are sealed inside the ship) makes it much easier to add things to the hull and mask its profile. Not like the clunky UNN warships with their fixed weapons.

Fortunately, there are two canonical junctures in which it's possible to get a Martian gunship. Plot seeds which are in the books themselves.


Option 1: Aftermath of Operation Silent Wall

The reason the Donnager was dispatched to pick up the survivors of the Canterbury is because it was already in the Belt, carrying out anti-piracy activities under Operation Silent Wall.

What's interesting is that most of it's escort ships weren't on the Donnager at the time of it's destruction, they were scattered all round the Belt engaged on missions of their own. Most of them are never accounted for or even mentioned again.

Sure, you could argue they're just recalled by the MCRN brass and make their way back to Mars under their own power, but one of the comics made use of the two specialised escorts, which were still out there. Not hard to come up with one or more of them that got into distress somehow and ended up stranded out there, maybe parked up on some forgotten asteroid.

I can imagine an entire introductory scenario around finding out one of those ships has been discovered and a race to get it before some other faction does. It would be just as legitimate a salvage as the Roci was.


Option 2: Martian corruption post-opening of the ring gates

A few years later than the first option, but the precedent here was set with the breakaway Laconians trading a whole load of escort ships to Marco Inaros' OPA faction in return for a sample of the protomolecule. With the opening of the gates and the existence of hundreds or even thousands of ready-to-inhabit planets out there to colonise, the collective societal endeavour of terraforming the planet no longer made any sense to many Martians.

Thus as the planet basically emptied of the most adventurous and enterprising people and the MCRN went through a huge cutback and decommissioning, there's all kinds of wargear that could be disappeared. In the books, that's what the Laconian faction did, they emptied the bellies of a few of Donnager battleships of their escort vessels. There were a dozen corvettes like the Roci in the hands of the Free Navy (the TV show gave them a much broader range of ships, probably to avoid the visual confusion of them all looking alike).

Getting the PCs involved in some kind of dodgy deal to get their own, or taking a ship off someone who'd done the same would be totally viable.


Obviously in either case having a Martian gunship brings it's own problems and complications, both in terms of keeping it running and supplied with Martian munitions (one of the reasons the crew of the Roci had a railgun installed, so they weren't entirely dependent on finding sources of Martian ammo) and the perennial ownership disputes. But those are nice problems to have when you have a shiny, state of the art warship at your disposal.

Doing some thinking about the setup to an Option 1 scenario. These boats would be away from the Donnager, their carrier/mothership for weeks, even months on end. So that would mean a full crew complement, to maximise redundancy.

In the case of this class, that's only 8 people. The crews are drawn from the 2,000 or so personnel on board the battleship, which is a deep bench to draw about 60 people (four Morrigans with 8 each, two Corvettes with 12 each). By which I mean they could probably afford to go slightly officer-heavy, perhaps a Lieutenant-Commander as skipper and a Lieutenant as their XO.

There'd need to be a mixture of Navy and Marines, because they're going to be boarding/EVA stuff. For the smaller boats, perhaps 5 Navy and 3 Marines. There's four duty stations; pilot, operations, weapons and engineering. The Marines would cover weapons, the Navy everything else. Each of the Corvettes has a Force Recon team for anything really nasty they might enounter, but just regular Marines for the smaller ones.

Reason why all this matters is to come up with a plausible scenario for how the boat ends up in distress and ultimately stranded. I have in mind they're all acting relatively independently and tooling around looking for trouble. They'll swarm together whenever a bigger threat emerges, but otherwise be doing their own thing.

There was some ruse or other that's worked in the past, which gets turned on them by some pirate who wised up to it. The captain and Marine complement left the ship to go play "away team", setting off an ambush. The ship comes under fire at the same time as the away team, resulting in the captain telling them to flee without them, rather than have the ship be captured along with the away team.

They escape, but not without most of the remaining crew being killed or wounded, and the reactor suffering damage. The chief engineer dies in the process of making the reactor safe and saving the ship, the sole surviving (and wounded) crew member manages to pilot the ship to a lonely rock to hide it. Tries to contact the battleship, can't work out why it isn't responding and ultimately shuts everything down, locking out the systems and dies.

That last recording is intercepted somewhere and gets passed around certain channels, which is the seed for that opening adventure, where numerous factions try to locate the ship and "salvage" it.

The trick is in what a party does after getting their hands on it.  If a small group of people wound up somehow possessing a small naval patrol boat, even assuming the navy did not promptly hunt them down to get it back, fueling, berthing, and maintaining the boat would be well beyond most peoples' means, to say nothing of ammunition and repairs if they actually went around shooting things in it.  The Expanse crew received a government's support, and something of that sort of level would be necessary to keep a ship like that operational beyond a few days.

Why settle for a Martian gunship when those Laconian destroyers are so much more sexy?

Quote from: Valatar on March 29, 2025, 01:12:55 AMThe trick is in what a party does after getting their hands on it.  If a small group of people wound up somehow possessing a small naval patrol boat, even assuming the navy did not promptly hunt them down to get it back, fueling, berthing, and maintaining the boat would be well beyond most peoples' means, to say nothing of ammunition and repairs if they actually went around shooting things in it.  The Expanse crew received a government's support, and something of that sort of level would be necessary to keep a ship like that operational beyond a few days.

True, this is alluded to a lot. The Roci crew had what was effectively the most government-like faction of the OPA supporting them and keeping them protected and armed for a few years at the start. And more importantly having a friendly port they can visit without immediately being jumped on by lawyers/bounty hunters/whatever to get the ship back.

Repairs I think they could probably get away with a lot of after market stuff, outside of really specialised bits, but ammo (especially torpedoes) is more challenging.

If they do the standard PC type thing and stay well away from Mars and the inner planets, they might have an easier time. But that brings other complications.

Quote from: HappyDaze on March 29, 2025, 01:14:20 AMWhy settle for a Martian gunship when those Laconian destroyers are so much more sexy?

They're ridiculously overpowered and much, much later than I'd want to be running a game. 40-odd years after the start of the first book is a different setting, to all intents and purposes.