yay, you'll be very happy with it!

The use of the sheets is very concisely described in the rulebook.  Suggest you start there and, of course, ask any questions of the forum.

There is a FAQ available at http://www.tablegamer.com/cgi-bin/faqw.py

you are most welcome

I find if I fiddle around with cut-and-paste functions a bit, I can fit a squadron of a dozen average mid-sized (hull 10-14) ships on one page, although that may vary if they have a lot of special equipment or weapon batteries (anything with lots of check boxes to track).  You can save a lot of space by putting all the ships of the same type together as well...no need to duplicate the hit chart over and over that way.  Overall, it doesn't seem any more difficult to do layouts for than Full Thrust...if nothing else you don't need a special font for making your own designs. 

As for conversions, I'd done some very rough attempts to model the Phalons into Starmada way back when, but abandoned it when I realized I'd rather just build new designs for them with no direct attempt to refer to FT.  The best approach for choosing hull sizes is probably to pick the largest model you're likely to convert (probably some SDN or CVA) and assign that Hull 20 (or 18-19 if you want some wiggle room for later), and the smallest ship (recon scout, no doubt) Hull 1, and then sort of fill in the range from there.  Starmada can handle size 21+ ships, but they start getting very, very slow and unfeasibly expensive as they grow past size 15 or so.

One thing you will notice, In Starmada you can usually afford a lot more small ships for the price of a big one than you can in FT, since the Hull Size system isn't strictly linear.

Rich

Fiddling around with the ship construction tool, I think I've found another possible answer to my question about different sizes for different ships.

Do most Starmada designs use up all (or most) of the available Space Units?  I was wondering about corvettes and frigates both having 1 Hull Point.  I suppose it would be possible that the corvettes use less of the 100 SUs than the frigates do?  I tried putting a ship into the tool, and got 20 SUs left over.

I was looking at it a bit differently, with scout ships being hull 1, corvettes 2, frigates 3, etc.  But those are looking a bit too strong so far--the corvette is getting more or bigger weapons than I had in mind.  So if I devalued but differentiated by how many SUs were actually used, I might get closer to what I'm after.  I haven't looked to see if that handicaps ships that pay for a hull size but don't use all the SUs.

Of course, I've not actually played yet, and am still fiddling around.  I'll get a feel for what makes sense after having tried it.

andy