To hate the USP is to hate the variety that HG offers in terms of systems. You can't have it both ways. Variety breeds complexity.
You can use the sample form that is within the HG rule booklet, that has the USP on the side, but it's really a lot of wasted space.
Or you can simply enumerate the systems. The data is the data, complaining about how the data is represented, considering that it's really just numbers on a page, is silly.
It's not like Starfire where the ship representation is part and parcel to the game. Or SFB, which is much more tactical and the positions of the boxes on the have important game mechanics.
Or Brilliant Lances, with it's ledgers of systems and rows of boxes.
Battle Rider counters are cluttered because there's a lot of information on the counter. Ships aren't just movement, defense, and attack factor. That works great in GEV, not so much in starship combat. Ships tend to be big, complicated and packed with systems. HG lets you represent 300 laser as Laser-9 Btty: 10. That's pretty concise.
There is nothing stopping you from representing the HG stats however you want, you don't have to use the USP.
As for boiling a design down to the USP, seems to me that's far simpler than any other aspect of HG ships design (notably the combination and conflict of percentage and fixed tonnage systems). Weapons should be placed by USP code in the first place (so, yea, there's no point in having batteries of 25 lasers -- don't do that). Everything else is picked when you select the system.
You can use the sample form that is within the HG rule booklet, that has the USP on the side, but it's really a lot of wasted space.
Or you can simply enumerate the systems. The data is the data, complaining about how the data is represented, considering that it's really just numbers on a page, is silly.
It's not like Starfire where the ship representation is part and parcel to the game. Or SFB, which is much more tactical and the positions of the boxes on the have important game mechanics.
Or Brilliant Lances, with it's ledgers of systems and rows of boxes.
Battle Rider counters are cluttered because there's a lot of information on the counter. Ships aren't just movement, defense, and attack factor. That works great in GEV, not so much in starship combat. Ships tend to be big, complicated and packed with systems. HG lets you represent 300 laser as Laser-9 Btty: 10. That's pretty concise.
There is nothing stopping you from representing the HG stats however you want, you don't have to use the USP.
As for boiling a design down to the USP, seems to me that's far simpler than any other aspect of HG ships design (notably the combination and conflict of percentage and fixed tonnage systems). Weapons should be placed by USP code in the first place (so, yea, there's no point in having batteries of 25 lasers -- don't do that). Everything else is picked when you select the system.
