The party ship is always a light freighter
Think about the ships that actually matter in Star Wars. Not the Star Destroyers — the Falcon. The Ghost. The Razor Crest. The Ebon Hawk. Every one of them is a light freighter with a handful of people living aboard, and that is not a coincidence. A ship small enough that the crew is the party, big enough to sleep in, and janky enough to break at dramatically useful moments.
So that's the shelf worth filling. Five new light transports are live in the starship catalog and the Starship Builder, and the point of each one is that it's bad at something specific.
The one with no hyperdrive
The Crescent-class Transport Mark II is a luxury courier that cannot leave the system.
Hyrotii built the base Crescent with a Class 1 hyperdrive and high-speed ion drives, trading tonnage for speed. The Mark II keeps the drives, deletes the hyperdrive entirely, and spends the reclaimed volume on cargo and a larger passenger lounge. What's left is fast, comfortable, and stuck — it has to be carried, or refitted at the cost of the space it was redesigned to gain.
That reads like a defect until you notice who bought them second-hand. A ship this conspicuously expensive gets waved through checkpoints that would strip a freighter to the frame. Its real cargo capacity is its reputation, and somebody else arranges the long legs.
The one with no guns
The H-type Nubian yacht is Padmé Amidala's chrome yacht, and it carries no weapons at all — not as a cost saving, as a design brief. Naboo does not build warships.
What they spent the mass on instead is surviving without violence: a Class 0.9 hyperdrive, the fastest in the whole catalog; a layered shield system co-designed with the Gungans; electronic countermeasures, a slim profile and sheltered engines to keep the sensor signature small enough that the question of shooting may never come up.
It's the only playable chassis that genuinely cannot start a fight, and the least cargo-dense hull in the fleet, because the volume that would be hold on a freighter is staterooms here. It moves a small number of important people a very long way, very fast, in conditions that announce exactly how important they are.
The one that gets boarded
The HT-2200 was Corellian Engineering's attempt to cash in on the YT-1300, and it failed commercially for reasons that make it interesting to fly.
The good part is real: four fully independent cargo bays, each with its own gravity, temperature and atmosphere. Livestock in one, volatile chemicals in the second, a refrigerated consignment in the third, crates in the fourth — same run, nothing ruins anything else. 800 metric tons, by a distance the largest hold in the catalog.
Everything else undercut it. Inadequate maneuvering thrusters, a poor lift-to-mass ratio, an overtaxed power generator, and two single-barrel laser turrets covering 54.8 metres of hull. It has the worst handling of any chassis we've statted. Spacers called it pirate bait, and the name stuck hard enough to kill the product line.
The one that shoots back differently
The Simiyiar-class is Mon Calamari-built and carries an ion cannon alongside its dual laser turret — the only playable chassis that does.
That's a categorically different option. A laser trades damage; an ion cannon takes a pursuer's systems offline and lets you leave. It also carries a backup shield generator, so losing the primary array doesn't strip it bare — warship redundancy on a 26-metre hull, built for operators who expected to be shot at and couldn't reach a repair yard.
The politics come along with it. Once Dac joined the Alliance, Mon Calamari Shipyards was the only major shipwright openly backing the Rebellion. A Mon Cal hull in an Imperial docking bay is a statement whether the captain intends one or not.
The one with the second hold
The XS-800 is defined by its doors. Crews board through a ventral airlock behind the cockpit. Cargo goes in somewhere else entirely, through two separate loading elevators serving independent bays on either flank — and the two bays don't connect.
For a working hauler that's just efficient. For anyone whose manifest doesn't match the contents, it's considerably more interesting. An inspection party that opens one elevator and finds exactly what the paperwork promised has no particular reason to walk the spine and open the other side.
A note on where the numbers come from
Some of these ships are thoroughly documented and some are barely documented at all. Where a figure is recorded, we used it. Where it isn't, we worked it out by benchmarking against comparable hulls — and each ship's page says which is which.
The XS-800 is the extreme case: the sources describe its layout and essentially nothing else, so its stat line is a reasoned reconstruction and its page says so outright. We'd rather tell you that than quietly invent a number and let it look like canon.
Go fly one
All five are in the Starship Builder now — pick a chassis, install upgrades, apply traits, export a sheet. That's 39 playable chassis, and if your crew wants the one that can't jump, can't shoot, or can't turn, those are now options.