Starship Engineering question (Minor Esseles Spoilers)

[ForceShaman]

So I'm going to be running a Star Wars table top game for some friends in the near future and wanted to use the events of the Esseles FP as a simple contained one shot adventure that can lead into a more expansive game if the players want to continue.

 

I'm having issues with the security lockdown portion of the scenario from a lore / verisimilitude perspective.

 

Minor Spoilers Ahead .....

 

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I'm not an engineer, but it seems to me that requiring the engineering compartment to be vented into space during a reactor reset is poor design. I like the moral question the scenario presents, but I'd like to have a plausible explanation on hand if a player has the same thought that I did.

 

Is this just an inherent flaw in the starship design? Is this a flaw in the design of the Esseles (and others of the same model) specifically? Is there an actual good reason for this particular system design? Or can someone help me tweak the events here to keep a similar moral discussion but that makes more plausible sense?

[SteveTheCynic]

As a design decision, it's complete nonsense. I suppose one could imagine this scenario, though (note: it's a bit of a stretch, and still represents poor design):

 

All large ships of any sort (including Earthly ocean-going vessels) have occasional need to replace large internal components like engines, boilers, reactors, etc.

 

Replacing such components on an Earthly ship (even a space vehicle like NASA's Shuttle) is, when necessary, done *either* by breaking the component into small parts and packing them out through ordinary-sized holes, then doing essentially the same in reverse to insert the new component into the ship *or* by making a large hole in the ship (drydock is a wonderful thing) and passing the components (a large diesel engine's cylinder block isn't amenable to being broken into small pieces and reassembled) through that large hole.

 

The Star Wars equivalent ends up with a large hole in the side of the ship blocked by one of those energy screens that's transparent to solid objects and opaque to gasses, as seen in e.g. Death Star docking bays.

 

OK, now for the Esseles part:

 

1. The large hole is, naturally enough, in the engineering bay.

 

2. A reactor reset glitches *all* the power in the ship, including the power that maintains the energy screen. See e.g. the Sith Warrior class story scenario on Alderaan.

 

3. Under normal circumstances, if they have to take down the external energy screen while the ship is in space, there's a physical door at the entrance where the player stands while talking to the engineers, instead of the energy screen that we see in the Esseles scenario, and the controls on the player's side of the panel are safe to operate because there's nobody in the engineering bay and there's a physical door to keep the air in.

Edited February 29, 2020 by SteveTheCynic

[ForceShaman]

OK - That makes more sense than anything I had come up with previously. Also explains why the controls to do the reset/venting would be on the players side (aside from the meta of forcing the player to actually make the decision.)

 

Thanks