depends.

If I'm running a convention game, I pick one big ship two small ships per person, generally.  then I'll stay away from ships with lots of special abilities. Just easier to teach that way.

Noel ran an awesome campaign a couple years ago where the ships were designed by someone else and I had to figure out the best way to fight... turns out it was the fighters that won that campaign (big surprise there)

My personal tastes run to the eclectic so I'll build theme fleets but most times I fill up the ship and see what happens to the CR.

If you think about it tho, it's not too odd that you'll have the same amount of hull and one will be much higher CR than the other.  those 1/2/3 weapons don't have much oomph, at least not versus the 3/6/9 weapons, you've got a ton more firepower at 9 hexes than 3...but I'm sure you've considered that...so yes, it is strange

fixed link

I have played games where there were a hundred or so asteroids. all moving somewhat randomly, and I think they were fun.

You can randomly place rocks from the garden onto the board, then, at the end of each turn, each asteroid rolls two dice, one for direction, and one for distance. if they collide, they stop, if they hit a ship or fighters, they roll to hit.

simple mechanism, and it does take a little cooperation by all to make sure you move the asteroids, but it really doesn't take all that long to move everything each turn.

One scenario I play with that is "Attack the mining facilities" where the defender gets 6 randomly placed minig markers and the attacker has to "land" a flight of fighters on the asteroid simply touch the asteroid during the fighter movement and it's been checked).

That one goes over well at the conventions I play it at.  I usually grab ships from the book, 3-4 per player.

my point is, the more asteroids the better, if you're needing to block LOS.  I do like the GF way too though.

I think the quotes around pointalist mean he knows that.

What would you say the definition on implicit is? perhaps: capable of being understood from something else though unexpressed : implied <an implicit assumption>

There are many things I would challenge Mr. Kast on. Words are not one of them.

Well, this is late, but ...

Happy birthday US of A, sorry I missed the party

fighters fighters fighters fighters

unless you don't do fighters, I can't remember your house rules.

actually, it's per stone-weight of the gamer running the ship. The heavier you are, the better your weapons fire.

Might as well capitalize on gamers' most common trait

There's a decibal to shield correlation there someplace too.

this was initially kind of a strange thing for me. adding a die roll seemed a lot more fiddly, but in the end I think it manages to simulate "power" (you can take away a shield point on the opposite side of the ship, and call it power-reallocation)

what I want to know is How did I miss this post?

you can get great magnets out of the Magnetics sets you might be able to pick up at garage sales, etc

Well, I personally don't think the amount of work that it would take is worth it.

A model that might work though is more of an online article-based periodical, one that is user-submitted but "edited" by the powers that be.

Nothing as fancy as a quarterly PDF but the articles could be made available in that format as well.  If users submitted material, and the editor posted that material online (after editing of course, that's what editors do). it wouldn't need to be a quarterly thing, it would be truly periodical as it could wait until there was enough submissions to fill out 2-3 "issues".

Not quite a forum, not exactly a magazine, it's a MAGNUM.