Don't think I'll make it. I have to work Friday and I'm not sure I can make a trip to Florida from Michigan that quickly. ;-)
Hope to hear reports from the gaming though!

I have been curious, what do you guys use for counters or models for your ships?

My ships are based on WW2 & WW1 ships.  I use 1/2400 minis that I purchased from Panzershiffe.  I have mounted them on hex bases.  They look similiar to the IJN Yamato being converted to the Argo in StarBlazers.  My biggest ships are myfour-turred design that repersents the USA's Pennsylvanias, NewMexicos, Tennessees as well as the British Queen Elizabeths & R Class DNs.  The evolution of this ship can be found in the B-Basin.
These DNS & their escort DDs work well.
Cheers

We are playing Starmada again on Monday Jan 21 @ noon At Gaming Glenn's gaming store near Fort Lauderdale. 8-)
All are welcome.

Hello again everyone!
I am visiting S.Fla again soon and we are playing Starmada S:NE Sunday April 14th at 1pm at Gaming Glenns store on Stirling Road in Davie, near Fort Lauderdale. All are welcome!  Bring your ships or use designs that I have made of the Minbari, Federation, Klingons, etc. 8-)
Cheers

Hello again everyone!
We are playing Starmada S:NE again on Friday July 5th at 1pm at Gaming Glenns gaming-store on Stirling Road in Davie, SE of Fort Lauderdale.  8-)
All are welcome!
Bring your own ships or you may use Minbari, Federation, & Klingon designs that I have made and miniatures that I have.
Cheers
Steven

I give up and will join the rest on ship designs.  Seeing my shielded ships getting blown up and barely getting one threshold, maybe a second threshold on one ship because I concentrated the entire fleet's fire on it, on the enemy while on my way to a very one-sided battle loss has shown me the light.

Fragile hulls with lots of hull and armor is the way to go.  Shields are too expensive for their effect.

I saw that, and was pleased.  Perhaps it's more to do with the the massive hulls and armor that Beowulf puts on his ships, using the Fragile system option to put on more of them.  I've built many ships of varrious sizes with various shield strengths, and none have held up compared to his designs.

Mostly though, it stems from his ships hardly getting thesholds for the automatic 2 box hits for systems.  Ablative armor, which we do not play with here (I think it's too cheap an option after trying it a few times) makes it more so.

But, perhaps I found a chink in his designs.  Our last battle, where I designed massive hull and armor ships with Fragile systems (on the same point value scale, i.e., 400-600 pt ships to his 500ish pt ships), but included Fire Control with the caveat that at short and medium ranges my ships will always use 1 thrust for evasive maneuvers which the FC counteracts.  Once his ships got thresholded then he had very little fire power, -2 (weapon damage) + -1 (evasive) for -3 shift, compared to mine.  This was one of the most balanced games we've played in a long while, but then I stopped fighting the urge to use shields and went Fragile+hull+armor.

IMO, Fragile systems might be a touch too cheap.  Perhaps making the Equipment chance for damage go from 1,2,3 to 1,2,3,4 might balance it more. Seems like the regular system checks is more severe than it is for Equipment damage checks when going from Normal to Fragile systems.

Just a thought from the peanut gallery...I feel like if there is a "problem" it is with the frontloaded/ablative armor combined with the fragile systems not with shields. To me it really does an excellent job of creating the kind of shields you see in sci-fi all the time ("that hit brought our shields down to 67.3% captain), where once you knock out the shields damage happens pretty rapidly. The problem is this: in most of those types of setting those types of shields are either universal, or used by some dominant force. That seems like what has happened here. Either you have the shields (armor) and you are on a more-or-less equal footing, or you don't and you are at a bit of a disadvantage. I don't see any game design reason to fix this either, these things have their place. It all comes back to whether you want your games to be about design philosophy, recreating something from movies/tv/books, or some other basis for "controlling" what is available to factions.
Just my 2 cents.
Erik

Hello again everyone!
I am visiting S.Fla again and we are playing Starmada S:NE Monday March 17th at 1pm at Gaming Glenns gaming-  store on Stirling Road in Davie, SE of Fort Lauderdale.
All are welcome!  8-)
Bring your own ships or you may use Minbari, Federation, & Klingon designs that I have made and miniatures that I have.
Cheers
Steven

Hello again everyone!
I am visiting South Florida again.  We are playing Starmada S:NE on Monday November 24th at 1pm at Gaming Glenns gaming-store Dragon's Lair on Stirling Road in Davie, SE of Fort Lauderdale.
All are welcome!
Bring your own ships or you may use Minbari, Federation, & Klingon designs that I have made and miniatures that I have. 8-)
Cheers
Steven

Hello everyone!
We are playing Starmada S:NE  on Monday March 16th at 1pm.
  We will be playing at Gaming Glenns store on Stirling Road in Davie, near Fort Lauderdale.
   All are welcome!
    Cheers
      8-)

Hello everyone!
We are playing Starmada-Unity on Monday 6/18 at 1pm at Gaming Glenns store on Stirling Road in Davie.  8-)
We have extra ship-sheets and figures.
All are welcome!
Cheers,
Steven