Greetings, first time poster, brand new to Starmada!

First a little background.  Back in the day we played a heavily modified version of FASA's Star Trek Combat simulator.  Eventually we progressed to Babylon 5 wars, and while we found it enjoyable, it had a bit too much granularity.  We then stumbled across FULL THRUST, and fell in love with it's simplicity.  We immediated modified it to simulate Babylon 5, Star Trek, Master of Orion, etc.  We ended up with a lot of quirky little rules, even though we were not fully happy with the system, it was fast and easy.  We played it for a few years, and then put it down.  Recently we have decided to get back into starship tactical gaming scene, and I cracked open the old FULL THRUST system we had been using, and was just not that happy with it.  Screens were a glaring problem and for each weapon (we had about 30 of them) there were all of these finicky little rules to remember.  So I decided it was time to overhaul the system to make it more uniform, less finicky, and more of a toolkit (sound familiar?).  After getting to work, the task became daunting.  On a whim, I went out to RPGnet to look for a possible replacment system, convinced that I would not find anything as smooth as FT... Convinced that I wouldn't find a simple, flexible toolkit system that could design the fleets that I wanted.  And then I stumbled across STARMADA.  I researched it heavily, and then decided to bite the bullet.  I bought the Admiralty Edition and the Rules Annex, and was ASTOUNDED.  The glove fit perfectly.  It has the perfect amount of flexibility, granularity, ease of play, common sense, toolkit to emulate any SF design philosophy, etc.  Wow.  Everytime I would think, "it obviously doesn't handle X", two pages later I would find simple streamlined toolkit rules to handle X. 

This system hits it out of the park.  It is exactly what we want.  I have to say WELL DONE.

That said, I have a couple of questions after going through the books a couple of times:

1.  Despite being a programmer, I am not a math whiz.  And this system relies heavily on math - for the most part, it is all background thank goodness!  But it does rear its head during Starship Construction, so please help a non-mathlete interpret something.  Certain formulas confuse me.  Like the Total Space Units = Hull (1.3) x 100. Is that Hull to the 1.3 power?  I had no idea that was possible!  I tried multiplying it by 1.3 and the math doesn't work out.  If so, how does one enter that on say the windows calculator in scientific mode?  I know it is not really necessary at that point because of that handy chart, but it become necessary in determining the COMBAT RATING  (ORAT x DRAT)0.5.  So is that to the 0.5 power?  Help a math challenged person out! 

2. Piercing, Piercing[x] etc.  Does that increase the IMPACT or DAMAGE?  The book says Impact.  So why would one ever choose this if it is impact, when one could just build the ship with one additional impact?  What would be the difference between a weapon with an IMPACT 3 and a weapon with an Impact 2 Piercing [1]?  If I read the rules right, for unshielded ships are not affected by "impact", right?  Impact is only to break through shields.  Or is Piercing to add to damage?  But then I guess the same issue appears?  Why not just increase the damage?  Or am I just not getting something?

3.  Wrapping my head around "Strikers" and "Seekers".  These are kind of like "Missiles" right?

4.  Are the SFB sourcebooks ever coming to PDF?

Anyways thanks much for the help!  I am very excited to be on the STARMADA bandwagon.  It is so sweet, I don't see myself leaving!

ET