Well there's a couple of problems.
First, single ship combat is uninteresting. One on one it's mostly just a game of dice to see who survives, with the number of weapons etc. acting as thumbs on the scale.
The singular problem is that once in combat, you can't get out until someone is dead. If you could get out, you wouldn't have engaged in the first place.
Now, if you're the attacker, looking for combat, that's fine -- as you, in theory, go in with the advantage and means to win. If you're the defender, you're kind of stuck with no options than to run, burn, and hope they keep missing you.
I appreciate that this is some kind of random encounter. And that, perhaps, you may want dangerous areas that the pilots know are dangerous, so they're going in to these areas knowing attacks will happen and are ideally prepared to prosecute them properly.
So, what next.
Next, Book 2 is lethal on small ships. Those little A drives are one hit wonders. So, you can either balance by making ships harder to hit, or you can bulk them up letting them take more damage. The point being in the end, it may take 5 shots to hurt the ship. 5 shots that hit and ablate the armor enough to do damage, or 5 shots with the odds that 1 will hit and end it right there.
Mechanically it's the same, to a point. On the average, statistically it take 5 turns (shots, whatever) to end the fight. But with the latter method, someone can get lucky and end it on the first shot.
But this goes back to the first point. If there's nothing you can do in those 5 turns or shots to change the outcome, what difference does it make? Or is it simply a game of who gets lucky first?
Because if the ship has the power and speed to evade and outrun the attacker (i.e. we armor up the ship to provide us time to escape concept), they wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. It's not like they jumped out from behind a rock.
Granted, there's the jump drive. On those edge cases where the combat is right near the 100D limit to where, "if we can hold them off for a few more minutes, we're home free".
But from a play style, I mean, "we just have to take it, turn on evasive maneuvers, and pump out sand, and hope for jump" doesn't seem very...fun. "Just keep hitting that NEXT button until we get out of this!" Compared to dancing ships and crosshairs and Big Guns going FOOM FOOM FOOM, watching the other ship burn, with sparks flying off of it until it finally explodes in a grand display.
Clearly, combat is Hard. Its especially hard in a trading game because it's (ideally) extremely expensive, if not outright lethal and game ending.
It's hard to make it interesting.
Simply, I would just implement Book 2, literally, as a starting point, and then run some encounters and see how they feel. From there, I'd start tweaking things until it feels better as you get to posit different scenarios of ship encounters. Just put two ships together and start rolling dice, skip the whole maneuver thing for the time being and see what it's like.
For example, in Mayday, if you play it to scale (it has huge hexes), any combat within 100D is only 3-4 hexes on the game board. May has well just but the ships 2 hexes away and start blasting. See what happens after 2, 3, 4 rounds.
Now, in contrast to Book 2. Terrestrial 100D is 12,000km diameter. x 1000 for meters. x 100 D = 1,200,000,000 meters. On Book 2 scale of 1:100,000,000, that ends up with a play space of 12 METERS. 1G is 100mm, or 1/10th of a meter. Which means that the 100D limit is, essentially, 120 "hexes" away. That's a LONG time to make that run from the planet to the 100D marker. With 1000 second turns, it's 11 turns at 1G to get across that gap. Anything under 25 "hexes" is +0 Range DM, so that's "short range". 50 hexes is medium range (-2 DM), and beyond that is -5 DM.
So, start there, see how the damage unfolds, and just tweak until it works. You know ("know") as a designer what you're trying to achieve, you want danger, but not suicide. You want the combat to be friction on the trade, to basically up the "cost" of trade to where the Captain has to decide if it's "worth it", but at the same time, you don't want the first random encounter to end up with a dead ship, dead crew, and bankruptcy. You can start at different ranges. What happens when the attacker is medium range. How well does a trader do taking 10 turns of sustained, -2 DM laser fire? A +2 Gunner eliminates that range DM. Sand is a -3 DM. Then there's the whole computer thing.
Keep it simple. Pirate near, but not close, chasing you to the jump limit. 10 turns, -2 DM, roll 10+ to hit, 2 triple laser turrets (6 total lasers), so 60 shots. 16% chance hit, so that's 9. 9 hits. Over the length of the encounter, you have about a 50% chance of a Jump drive hit, which means you're a dead duck.
So, that's just a simple example of what it can be like. Obviously defensive DMs (Evade, etc.) can help tremendously. But in the end it's, essentially, 10 rounds of dice rolling that you just hope to get out of alive.
There's a computer game, free, "Endless Sky". It's kind of fun. You grab cargos, run warplines from system to system. It has combat. It's supposed be kind of twitchy ("Aim the ship" "shoot the lasers", "realtime", etc.). Few times it happened to me, it handed me my hat. But it wasn't lethal, it was inconvenient, cost a little money, and a "friendly trader" would show up and heal the ship and send me on my way.
It was enough to keep me away from dangerous areas, but I never played the game long enough to build a ship big/armed enough to go in there and bring the fight to them. Just stayed away and racked up more monies.
