Ship Design Pointing System - It becomes increasingly obvious after a good deal of play, that some designs are just better than others. This is due to the ability of some ships to mass their fire, while others - remaining true to their orgins, are forced to spread their fire arcs out. A simple change is all that's needed to bring these designs back into balance (and has the side effect of removing the old "max 50% primary power in one arc" rule).

The Basic Cost is now the mass of the ship + power requirements

Power Requirements - this depends on how a ship's weapons are concentrated and represents how much energy is required to power all the weapons in the ship's most powerful arc. It costs an additional 2 pts for each mass used for primary power or specials in the most powerful weapon arc (the other arcs are not calculated). To this add 1 pt for each mass used for secondaries or fighters.

Example - the Basic Cost of a 6 mass cruiser with 2 mass in primaries and 1 laser lance in the forward arc, 1 mass of primaries in each of the left & right arcs, and 1 mass in secondaries would change from 6 pts to 6 + (4+2) + 1 = 13 points under this new system.

Ship Design : Engines - It has always bothered me that we chose to represent the greater usefullness of faster engines by using an increase in cost for the ship. This is not, of course, how it works in real life. A military ship does not use expensive cutting edge engine technology just to gain a little speed - they use bigger engines.

So, with this in mind, ship design for ships with engines other than 1 (which don't change at all) is replaced by : it costs 1/4 of a ship's mass for each additional 1 engine rating. Ships with 0 engines GAIN 1/4 "extra mass" for weapons.

Example - the available mass for weapons of a 6 mass cruiser with an engine rating of 2 is 75% of 6 or 4.5 mass. This would drop the basic cost of the ship to just 6 points (plus additions).

Engine Critical Hit - When this was first suggested to me, I immediately thought it was an excellent additional penalty for ships with engine criticals. It makes sense that such a ship would be easier to hit due to its directional predictability.

Ships suffering with the engine critical hit receive the +1 "slow ship" combat modifier.

More Speed - We've been trying out variations to the +1 "slow ship" modifier. Along with the current modifier we've added two new ones - a +2 "stationary target" modifier, and a -1 "high velocity" (ships moving greater than 12" per turn) modifier. They give a little more variety without unbalancing the game. The -1 gives the fast ships a small advantage to match their greater cost.

Ships suffering with the engine critical hit receive the +2 "stationary" combat modifier.