Starship Boarding - The Alpha Tactic?

In Space Dogs RPG, starship combat is designed to be streamlined. Once you and your table get used to it, any given space combat should rarely take more than about 10 minutes. But that doesn't mean that the battle will be done. Instead, the alpha tactic for the players 80-90% of the time will be to board the enemy starship, while the rest of the time the enemy will be trying to board them. This helps push gameplay back to the infantry/mecha ASAP, which is the focus of Space Dogs and where it really thrives.

The main in-setting reason that boarding is viable is due to the in-system propulsion technology; gravity engines. They engines pull/push at gravity wells in a star-system such as stars and planets. But they also make it nearly impossible for multiple ships with gravity engines to actually collide, and when closing on another ship you can 'catch the wind' of their gravity engines to close on them faster.

With this all being the case, nearly every starship in Space Dogs has a full grid layout to have running battles across. And since the space faring species of the starlanes aren't generally stupid, the starships which the players board are likely to have defenses to deal with boarders, such as chokepoints, auto-turrets, and blast doors. Larger ships are likely to have a detachment of their marine equivalent, with smaller ships having an armory to equip their sailors in battle.

Of course, just because the defenses are there doesn't mean that the PCs will need to deal with them. They can try to hack the turrets and blast doors, or they can bypass them entirely by using demolition charges to blow through walls and floors. A ship boarding action can often be a wild ride.

Shown below are all 3 decks of a wolf class frigate, which is one of the most common starships by Space Dogs.