As far as I can remember, I did the following for the space stations:

Build as a normal ship, but do NOT receive bonus SUs for reducing BTV. Instead, all space stations receive +25% to their SU total.

Then, do not include the mines in the SU total, as they are already deployed. However, they do add to the Combat Rating. The minefield around Celestial Queen is 12" in diameter, covering about 5.75 times the area that a large minefield would occupy -- since the large minefield takes 3 mine factors to generate, the Queen's minefield is equivalent to about 17 mine factors. However, this minefield also has the benefit of (1) being already deployed, and (2) being navigable to friendly ships. Thus, I counted it as being twice the "size" for point costing purposes.

Doing all this using the ISSB, I get a "ship" with -7 SUs remaining and a point value of 275... close enough, although I don't know why there is the 3 point discrepancy to the official point value.

Diamond Rock, on the other hand, comes out all wrong... it should be over 300 points.

One wonders if we may have discovered to first bit of errata...

I suppose I could help, but I'm not exactly sure how I created the stations...

oops...

That's a tough one to quantify, since the effect would be to square the effectiveness of the shield rating--i.e.:

Shields   Normal   Must Re-Roll
0         x1.0     x1.0
1         x1.2     x1.4
2         x1.5     x2.3
3         x2.0     x4.0
4         x3.0     x9.0
5         x6.0     x36.0

You could get away with a x3 modifier, perhaps...

I've also sold several hard copies of the Iron Stars Library recently...

The ships are not to any particular scale. The pictures on the counters are sized to fit the counter, which is of a varying size depending upon the hull size.

And today, I've been told to expect "algebraic retribution".

Now THAT should be a game title...

This is correct.

But anything under 4" is considered a "light gun" in Iron Stars (and Grand Fleets, for that matter) -- they certainly don't constitute a "secondary battery" by any definition. Historically, they would have been all but useless against armoured targets.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship … y_armament for a brief discussion of the topic.

We've had this discussion several times related to Starmada, and those who have been around a while know that I'm not a big fan of setting up such designations.

If I want to call something a "cruiser" that Jim would label a "battleship", so what? These terms have been flexible throughout history -- and there are plenty of examples of nations mislabelling ships in order to fool the enemy...

Indeed. The whole concept of the "dreadnought" was an all-big-gun battleship... it was supposed to make logistics and fire control easier, since you only had one size of shell to worry about, and all your guns fired at the same range and same ROF.

I suppose that can be done rather easily...

You can put as many guns on a ship as your available SUs will allow. I believe the most SUs you can get is on a size 35 ship with -1 armour and -2 thrust, for a total of 490, giving you as many as 245 light guns!

A more realistic possibility is to stuff 13 d12/x3 primaries on that ship -- quite a punch!