I'm told the rules don't include starship creation, so rules on how to create your own starship and modifications would be essential. A sample starship creation work through for newbies would probably be nice.
Gonna disagree with you here. I'm to the point of arguing that Starship design (and perhaps even combat) are a complete distraction for an RPG.
Heresy, but consider this.
From an RPG perspective, why all this time and energy on something like a ship building system? CT LBB had one, but it didn't have a system to build cars and trucks and boats or anything else. More specifically, there's no rules to design buildings or factories or laboratories. Are buildings encountered more often than a starship? Are they even more fundamental to operations, and the global economy, and to adventurers than a starship? Yet we can design a starship down to the size of the bolts, but nobody can tell me how much a sheet of drywall costs, and nobody has "Plasterer - 1" as a skill. How much does a tuna canning machine cost, and what is it's throughput?
Refs just make that up, with no regards to, well, anything. How may tons of AC does it have? How big is the air plant? How much power does it use? Hey, are those LED or fluorescent lights.
Save for the edge case of the trader that needs to pay for the ship and rely upon the published trade system to ideally make that profession a possibility, like the pricing of the ship along with the basic operations and trading system are in balance enough that it'll mostly work out in the end, starships are just "houses in space".
"What about ship combat?"
What about it? Here's what we know about ships combat. It's really deadly, and really expensive. Which means that you will rarely have anything close to a "fair fight". If your merchant gets in to a shooting war with a pirate, odds are very high, you will lose. Sure, you may blow the pirate out of the sky, but if you thought your mortgage was bad, wait until you try to repair your ship. Yay -- megacredits of debt and damage to save a 50KCr payload. Well played.
We saw in Firefly how much can be done with a weaponless ship. We saw the little Firefly freighter up against the towering sky scrapers city in the sky Alliance whatever-that-ship-was.
Do you think it really mattered how much that Alliance ship cost? How much crew it has? What it's weapons were, etc. etc.? Do you think the production team pondered the build time and volume discount for that ship?
No, hardly.
If your freighter encounters an armed opponent, you're going a) talk your way out of it b) get raided and your stuff stolen, or c) get blown to bits. And you know what determines if that happens? The referee. You can do what you want as a player, but it's the ref that advances the story. And if he wants your stuff stolen, or your trip delayed, or your crew absconded and ship destroyed -- guess what happens? And not a die roll is necessary for this to happen.
So, outside of the gearhead grognard simulationista's, for which it's clear that most of the design systems are simply inadequate, and lacking enough information to satisfy them, why does an RPG need a ship design system?
Does Star Wars have one? Did the Star Trek systems have one? I don't know. Dare we discuss the tonnage and power plant requirements of the Hyperdrive on a X-wing fighter?
But for an RPG, I think the over detail of a starship is unnecessary. Just like the BTUs of the water heater or the number of stalls in the womens bathroom on the 6th floor.
Just a nice list of ships to pick from, just like the air raft vs the ATV vs the AFV -- something taken whole as is and then filled with narrative to get the characters through it.
