Starfield: How to build the Rocinante / Tachi from The Expanse

This is a 100% glitch free, vanilla build with no mods. Below is a screenshot of the in-game ship menu showing the stats of the build:

Necessary Perks/level/credits:
The parts used in this build require the player to be able to pilot Class C ships (so 4 points in Piloting) and 4 point in Starship Design in order to use the best engines and grav drives. In addition, this build uses the Poseidon DT210 series engines, so you will need to be at least level 38 in order to purchase them at shipyards (my character was level 57 when I made this guide). As such, this is a late game build that uses some of the most expensive ship parts in the game. Therefore, be prepared to spend 500,000 credits or more when making this build from scratch and purchasing all the best end-game parts (though you may be able to build it cheaper if you purchase lower cost versions of the same/similar parts).

Hab Choice:
The build uses Stroud Eklund parts for the habs, mainly because the cockpit is the Stroud Eklund, and I wanted the rest of the ship’s interiors to match Stroud Eklund’s internal aesthetic. Also, in The Expanse, the Rocinante/Tachi is a Martian gunship and therefore the interiors should look as sleek and advanced as possible; personally, I believe Stroud Eklund best matches this aesthetic. But you can use whichever manufacturer’s habs you want, just be aware that changing the hab manufacturer may result in the ship’s interior ladder moving to a different location (and therefore not aligning with the docking module and landing bay as I intended).

What follows is a shot by shot recreation of my Rocinante/Tachi build which you can follow along with to recreate yourself. Let’s get to it.

We start the build at the Stroud Eklund shipyards. Note that we will be placing some placeholder parts on our ship in order to get it flyable, but we will phase these temporary parts out as we complete the build.

I will use the Frontier as the basis for the build as every player automatically gets the Frontier and can therefore use it as the starting point for the build.

Delete everything except the landing bay.

Now add the following parts.

And now for a few placeholder landing gears just so we can resolve the final build error.

That’s all the Stroud Eklund pieces we need. Next, we’re off to the Deimos Shipyards to get some cowling to make our Rocinante look like a proper gunship.

Once you’re at the Deimos Shipyards, begin by deleting the placeholder landing gear and replacing it with Deimos landing gear and cowling as shown:

Next, delete the Nova Galactic landing bay and replace it with the Deimos landing bay. Be sure to reverse the landing bay so you can attach the cargo container as shown below.

Now let’s place some cowling around the habs to give our ship that armored, gunship look.

Add the same three pieces of cowling to the starboard side of the ship as shown below.

Now we’ll add cowling along the spine of the ship as follows:

Next, delete the Stroud Mid Bracers we used to attach the engines to the ship and replace them with Deimos cowling:

Repeat the two Deimos cowling wings on the opposite side of the ship as shown:

Add two more pieces of cowling here:

We now have all of the Deimos pieces we need. However, there is an error message saying that our ship currently has too few landing gears.

To solve this, place a temporary Deimos landing gear underneath the ship as shown below (We will be replacing it at our next shipyard):

Now we can head over to Titan, Saturn’s moon, for the last few pieces.

Head to Titan, Saturn’s moon, and land at the settlement of New Homestead. Talk to the ship services technician at the landing pad. This is where you can buy all of the Nova Galactic ship parts, including the unique parts unavailable anywhere else; which is why we’re here.

Start by adding the weapon mount as shown below:

Next, replace the placeholder Deimos landing gear with the Nova Galactic landing gear:

Now add a couple of extra cowling pieces just cause they look good:

Lastly, add four cargo containers to give the ship that nice, bulky, gunship look:

That’s everything we needed on Titan. Now it’s off to Akila City for some weaponry.

Once you arrive at the ship services technician on Akila City, it’s finally time to put some turrets on our gunship. Start by adding an Equipment Plate to the connection point above the grav drive as shown:

Now we can add a turret to this point. I prefer using particle beam turrets, but you can use whatever type you prefer. Attach the turret as shown:

Note the turrets MUST face the direction you want them to fire. You can use the rotate key to rotate the turret into the correction orientation. I have the rear turrets facing aft, but you can choose any direction you wish for the turrets by using the rotate key.

Now attach another turret on the bottom side of the ship as shown:

Next, add the same turrets to the port and starboard sides of the ship:

And what gunship would be complete without torpedoes? Let’s throw some missile pods on there as well:

Lastly, I equip my Rocinante with a suppressor on the fore mounted weapon rack as shown below:

I also throw on the Com Spike from the Crimson Fleet/SysDef questline in order to make the weapon rack look like the Rocinante’s sensor port/antennae:

And that’s it. You’re nearly there. All that’s left is a little painting.

Here is the color settings for the black color I used:

And here is the setting for the orange color I used:

I used only those two colors for my paint job. I took a nice photo of the Rocinante/Tachi I found on google and just did my best recreating the paint job. Below are some reference photos you can use if you would like to mimic my paint scheme:

Have fun painting and I hope this guide helped. And remember to watch those doors and corners when boarding enemy ships.