After an initial full read through of the rules all I can say is I can't wait to play it! I really like the scale and the manner in which the new "fleet level" traits have been incorporated. I particularly like the role played by initiative, and how it is modified by Command. I can't wait to tinker around with conversions from Starmada, as well as some universes where the fleet level abilities will have a chance to shine. Kudos once again Cricket.
Cheers,
Erik

Your understanding is correct. It is an imperfect solution if you are looking to have a 1:1 replication of the SFB capabilities, but remember that Starmada has an element of "abstraction" built into it anyway. Your fighter is going to fire off its payload in one turn, but that is a minor difference compared to the fact that ships don't have to manage their energy like they do in SFB. I like o think of it as scaling the original game down to Starmada. Things that used to take a long time over multiple pulses/actions/ turns in the original game happen very rapidly in Starmada. In the end it becomes Trek-flavored Starmada rather than a SFB clone.
Cheers,
Erik

I'd second that. The learning curve for playing in Vassal is pretty gentle and I've found that the engine/module is very stable...even though the die roller hates me 
Cheers,
Erik

I agree that this should work fine with the Trekmada stuff, but I can see very easily how someone could abuse this procedure if building their own ships with weapons that are ridiculously good at killing fighters without taking up much space. However, I personally think that this would work just fine for Anti-Fighter Batteries as is.
Cheers,
Erik

I'd vote against a d10 version of Starmada personally as I think it plays just fine the way it is. I think that adding more numbers to the mix would just extend the ship design portion of things and not really improve the game-play in any useful fashion. The "Starmada-scale" just feels right at the d6 level...anything else would just be a different game. That's just my two cents.
I too have to admit that I would like to see some more non-SFU Starmada in the (near) future, but hey, if people are buying it (and especially if Cricket is expanding his pocket Empire to more peeps) I can't blame anybody for sticking with it for a while longer! 
Cheers,
Erik

You're welcome...I remembered the "conversation" as it was my question that started it. You may blast away with reckless abandon! 
Erik

Personally, I can't see any reason why you couldn't make some really interesting, playable modern warship designs with Starmada. I think aircraft present a couple of problems (the top speed difference being MUCH greater than Dreadnoughts era ships & planes)unless you "scale" the movement of the ships way down and use the top end of the scale for fighters. Then the real problem becomes fighter-launched ordnance... That I can't see a real resolution for in the current rules (house rule needed?)
Erik

This got me thinking, has anyone tried to port over the Stars Divided experience/officers system to S:AE? Seems like it would be fairly simple, and if nobody else has I might give it a crack.
Cheers,
Erik

     For a while I missed the arc diagrams that were used in B5Wars, but after playing enough with designs and actually playing the game I soon discovered that when I saw [ACE] I  knew what that was visually and I didn't need the diagram anymore. I do remember downloading a font a few years back that had every conceivable arc combination in it, and I did play around with adding them to standard Starmada displays where the regular arc letters go. It just didn't improve things for me at least, and more importantly was a more time consuming process. On one of the other forums I frequent somebody did arcs for a different game system by using "donut" graphs in excel, and I played around with porting that to Starmada. Personally I liked that a whole lot better as it worked with the design spreadsheet better, but in the end I dropped that too as it wasn't really "better" than the alphabetical designations (and required modification of the shipyard spreadsheet).

     Personally if there is going to be a picture of the ship on the SSD, I would prefer it to be out of the way of the data. I think that some of the official B5Warss SCSs were so jumbled up with information they were an eyesore, to the point where I started using Illustrator to remove the silhouettes so "clean up" the displays. I  know Starmada displays would be a lot less busy than those, but I've seen plenty of designs that would be covered by arc diagrams, and leave very little room for anything else, which kind of ruins the point of having a nice graphic.

edit: and one other thing to consider is that I can put all the designs from a given Empire into Drake notation and be able to have the designs on just a few pieces of paper when printed. I vastly prefer that to printing one ship (or at best 2) per sheet of paper and having to manage pages and pages of ships when playing with a squadron of 5-10 ships. In most of the tabletop games of Starmada I have played I have needed just one piece of paper for ships and another for fighter flight tracking.

Cheers,
Erik

Nah, I'm the impatient type    Besides, what I'm  looking to do is something that is a capability of  hyperdrives in a  number settings, not adding in another piece of special equipment.
Cheers,
Erik

Personally, I think that the distance of the jump across the game board is so short relative to the distance of an interstellar jump that the chances of hitting your mark should be such that a 33% chance isn't unreasonable. This also means that there is a 33% chance of throwing just 1 die for the whole process and and a 66% chance of throwing 2, and each die roll beyond the first is dependent on the previous, so there is little confusion (at least to me). I don't feel that a micro-jump should have a greater chance of deviation based on the length of the jump for the same reason as above, the distances are relatively minor for a vessel capable of interstellar travel. The fact that it is done "on the fly" and without very much prep is what I think accounts for the any scattering, rather than the distance involved.
Cheers,
Erik