Chapter Six: Vehicles

Most of the time, characters will need to go to a destination that is too far away or too dangerous to travel on foot. Some other mode of transportation will be necessary to travel to these places. Enter vehicles.
Vehicles had a prominent role in the Wing Commander games. The focus of every game was on Fightercraft, which were used by the player to fight against the Kilrathi or Nephilim (and in some of the games, against the Confederation). Flying a fighter was what the player did in the original games; indeed, it was the very point of them. Given the importance of fighters, it stands to reason that vehicles in general (of which Fightercraft are but one type among many) should be a central part of most adventures set in the Wing Commander Universe.
There are a plethora of different types of vehicles in WCRPG, with the differences between them dependent on the terrain in which they are designed to be used and their intended function. There are four main categories of vehicles: land, sea, air and space. Each category has several different types of chassis, each of which affects the performance of the vehicle in different conditions. Each individual chassis has a number of weights ranging from super-light to super-heavy, which affects the vehicle’s overall performance and defensibility. Finally, there are four main categories of vehicle users: civilian, commercial, industrial and military. There are in fact 504 different combinations of chassis, chassis weight, and users in WCRPG, without accounting for all the different races in the game! Vehicles are so varied, in fact, that it is very difficult to design a system that covers every type of vehicles conceivable; while WCRPG's system is reasonably thorough, some types of vehicles are simply not possible in the game's context. The system has been designed to allow for some flexibility and to allow easy game play, which unfortunately requires that some aspects of it be kept a little unrealistic.
Most of the contents of this Chapter are devoted to the process of constructing vehicles. Section One covers basic rules regarding vehicles including how they operate and what players need to know in order to use them properly. Section Two begins the discussion of vehicular construction. It also includes a number of subsections that describe the different chassis, the four types of users and the different types of equipment and systems that can be added to a vehicle. Finally, Sections Three and Four contain a catalog of vehicles (both canonical and non-canonical) that are present in the Wing Commander universe, including a list of every fighter to make an appearance in any of the games. These catalogs are presented both for use in adventures and as an example of the end product of vehicular construction.
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Category:WCRPG