Long term massive undertaking help needed

[SON OF ROMULOUS]

OK so the gaming group i am part of plus a few who come and go as they please are working on a massive undertaking. The plan is to incorporate 40k Gothic and role playing together (possibly epic but so far that's only me and another who are interested) into one massive story arch. The plan is to use rogue trader to represent an expeditionary force being sent out to both reclaim and explore a lost/forgotten sector. I was wondering if any other gaming groups had done anything similar and if so what worked for you? what didn't work? the core of the group is defiantly into the thematic story driven set up as we have discussed it.
i know one of the main issues is always logistics but did you find that you had difficulties in other area's if so what were your solutions to said problems?

[DWest]

Disclaimer: I have not specifically tried a Battlefleet Gothic / Rogue Trader mashup, so take with a grain of salt. With that said-

Combining a standard RPG and a wargame is a very tricky business, because a) part of the "fun" of a wargame is seeing units get chewed up, and b) the systems never mesh right, even when written by the same team. In regards to a) the few times I played BFG, it was depressingly easy to get even a tough ship ground into chunky peanut butter just for getting in close to shoot. Do you have some kind of handle on what a hit's worth of damage in BFG scale means to the actual ship, and how to repair it, and a plan for what to do in the campaign if their ship gets crippled/obliterated?
b) does Rogue Trader have rules within to convert to BFG, and if not do you have some house rules hammered out? And beyond that, if you end up "splitting the party" because of how an action goes down (I'm assuming not everybody can be The Captain), do you have something in place to keep everybody engaged with the game?

For reference, the closest similar thing I've been involved with is a long-running Battletech/Mechwarrior hybrid campaign. Despite being from the same company and set on the same scale (individual characters operating engines of destruction), the two systems did not mesh in the slightest, and as the Gamemaster, I had to keep my thumb on the party's side of the scales pretty hard to keep things moving. An equally-weighted battle between the PC mechs and their opponents? forget it. There was a very real chance that at least 1 PC was going to die in a fight like that, and the damage done to their machines meant in-game days or weeks of downtime, spoiling any sort of pacing. During the session itself, the player who got shot out of his mech first was always a problem, as they'd either start playing other games and distracting the rest of the players, or the one time I recruited the sorry sap to help run my side of the table and get things done faster, he went all bloodthirsty and started gunning for the other PC mechs.

[SON OF ROMULOUS]

Ya i know what you mean. but i think that knowing that ahead of time it would be easier to try and avoid such a situation. or to have in game mechanics set up to mess with that potentiality. in our only war group we already lost a ship to the filthy tau... so i would say what would have to happen would be something along those same lines... it was a mad dash to the life boats followed by some very very lucky roles and ended up with us safely planet side. could always have the caveat that this is 40k and whats the mantra there is only war and you will not be missed lol.

but ya that's why we are headed towards a crusade style fleet approach. it allows casualties to be taken across the board with out completely crippling the force if we were all on a single vessel.. though the whole single vessel idea is very tempting to see how such an approach would play out.

[SON OF ROMULOUS]

@dwest ya i've seen that it's hard to keep people attention when they are not actively participating. one way around that would be to have multiple characters i would have to venture. i know in the deathwatch crusade they split the sector up into 3 primary warzones each warzone has its own threats and issues. like right now in our ownly war campaign each week one of the guardsmen plays a game of 40k against the Gm's tau so far i lost my buddies vostroyans lost so yup... 0-2 in campaign games vs tau is never a good place to be lol. our only hope is kreig... if not then i'm up again and it will be a 2nd attempt this time guard backed up by a tank company :)