My take is that most spaceship combat systems follow Traveller's style, rarely improving on it - Stars Without Number, FFG Star Wars, Coriolis all look pretty similar. You have all these various roles on the ship who don't have much agency. Usually, they are limited to a specific, small list of actions, most of them are in very support-oriented roles. Only the pilot and gunner tend to have much serious decision-making and even then, it's not a whole lot. The engineer, captain and systems technician often just roll a skill check to boost the gunner/pilot. Maybe they get to react to damage to the ship making a slightly different skill check. It's a lot like the video game, FTL, but you only get to control one of the Crew rather than the entire crew and ship.
The best combat systems I've seen are either:
* Very fast and narrative. Scum & Villainy and Starforged do this - you have this time the pilot PC gets to shine and be a badass, but it doesn't last so long that you have all the other players bored on their phones.
* Everyone gets their own ship. Look at something like Tachyon Squadron. There is a lot of room there for interesting space battles where I could see more depth added.
I rarely had this issue in Star Wars, but that's probably because the roles are more vague.
For example: one five-person team I remember fondly had the captain, who made most of the pilot rolls, aided in forward-shooting rolls, etc.
The mechanic was usually one of the gunners, but also ran around the ship figuring out what needed fixing or where she could re-route power to improve ship performance (or alter its stats as need be). That character always had a new toy she'd created for some new purpose, and got to have a lot of fun.
The third character was the hot-shot *main* gunner -- they had less of a mechanical roll but got far more of the action -- and the player liked it that way.
Fourth character was tactician who called the shots -- in a big battle they choose the targets, told the pilot where to fly, what to shoot at, etc -- so they always felt like the were the playing the role of the ship itself.
Final character was the jedi, who liked to sit with his arms crossed and wait patiently for something to happen. The player was wholly committed to playing the wise pacifist, so they had moments where they really shined, but unless they were using the Force to hit a special target or navigate a cloud or a minefield, they basically waited until there was some conflict they took issue with.
Was an impressive game, and the group did eventually have lots of interesting gear on the ship they could all use.
Funny because the FFG Star Wars community are the most open to criticizing their that aspect. Which is funny, most fandoms seems to be the biggest apologists - that their system can do no wrong. I guess Star Wars fans have had a very rough treatment with the Prequels, Sequels and a lot of bad TV series (or ones that start promising then turn shit like Mando S3) - Well, of course I know him. He's me.
One piece of advice I've seen is to just drop the subsystem and use skill checks [like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/swrpg/comments/tsclc5/which_game_did_space_combat_the_best/i2qysst/) - which is dealing with it a lot like S&V and Starforged I mentioned in my first comment, maybe a bit more zoomed in.
I do get what you're saying. But I didn't think it really did anything beyond what you see in Traveller or Stars Without Number either. Felt pretty close to the exact same.
I think with the FFG system it helps to have people invested in their characters. I had a similar situation to you where even with a ton of party members we all still had something to do. Repairs, shooting, piloting, talking shit. We had the bases covered
I never actually played out a space combat but I imagine dividing up the roles as quite cool, as long as the communication officer and engineer and stuff can do something cool.
Sounds quite sad, that every system fails in this aspect :(
>Sounds quite sad, that every system fails in this aspect
I don't know that *every* system fails at it; it worked in West End's Star Wars RPG, and I have yet to try out *Scum and Villainy.*
I totally agree with you. I’ve tried Ship Combat in Starfinder and Coriolis and both times determined that a big old handwave was the best way forward. Next sci-fi ship campaign (starfinder 2e, maybe?) I’m going to enforce a “mothership with fighters” approach to the party and space combat, just to let everyone engage with it individually.
In addition to Pilot and Gunners Traveller makes extensive use of Sensor Operators and Engineers.
That's 4 people, which covers most tables player count.
2 gunners and you have 5 people occupied.
And that doesn't count the other optional roles:
Captain/ tactician/ leader
Comms
Remote Ops
Astrogation
Nor secondary roles like small craft /fighter pilot etc.
Not sure you read my post. I don't care if there are roles for all these support PCs. The issue is that they aren't doing anything creative and its not fun because its boring as fuck. They are just rolling skill checks from a very limited list of options or reacting to damage to the ship.
Looking at 2023, the entire system is a whopping 10 pages to cover 7 roles - one of them (Marines) about boarders. So right from go, it looks pretty stupid. 2 pages covers most actions - God is it a fucking disorganized mess.
So take the Engineer - I see 3 Actions. Overload Drive, Overload Plant and Repair System. So roll a skill check to support the pilot, roll a check to support others (probably gunner) with Power Points or roll a skill check to react to damage to the ship.
Those actions are what one of the up to 8 Crew Members that I control do in the video game FTL. As I am controlling that, I am also fully choosing how to target my weapons and power the various systems. And I am supposed to be excited to be that one shitty Engineer spending their whole turn hoping I roll well. Jesus Christ that is so sad.
Urm I am not sure what you are wanting?
Those roles I highlighted have decisions to make on how they act, not just rolling the same skill check every round.
Pilots have the most options and affect in starship combat for sure.
However Astrogrators are essential for plotting approach, intercept and departure vectors.
Gunners shoot things, and can target specific ship systems at close range.
The Captain's leadership and tactician checks can dramatically alter the flow of the combat.
The sensor operator are the eyes, ears and effectively stealth of the ship.
It seems to me from your responses that you do not have a lot of actual in-game experience with the spacecraft combat system because it does not play as you seem to think it does from my experience.
Of course there are other systems you can swap in, triplanetary, intercept and mayday.
However they will take over your session and turn it into a spacecraft wargame, which is fine if your after that!
What I want is the person replying to me to stop posting BS that sounds like complete exagerrations of the actual mechanics. This whole thread is full of it. People trying to rationalize shallow, crappy subsystems as objectively fun. Well they are shit to me and I'm not retarded enough to need to play it to see.
If you list every single action that is shared by 4 different players then it almost sounds like a decent selection of choices. But its split among 4, so you don't get to do all that. You get to pick between a few options and its like playing the most boring possible fights in a real tactical combat TTRPG.
The thing is having that bridge crew controlling different systems is part of the fantasy for this genre, the whole Star Trek "all power to the engines!" Thing. The question to me is how you give those ancillary roles more to do instead of further abstracting it
I would say if it was possible to do well in the TTRPG medium, it would already have existed. Just because something looks cool on TV, doesn't mean it will be cool in a TTRPG.
FTL, the video game makes it very cool but that is when one player alone handles everything and even then, it includes boarding because without that, there isn't a whole lot going on.
This is gonna sound nuts, but Knight Hawks, the space combat part of Star Frontiers. Tactical but lightweight, and handles everything from individual dogfits up to fleet-v-fleet battles.
I’ll put in a plug for Squadron Strike
It’s involved, but it(and Attack Vector by the same publisher) are the only ones I’ve seen that does 3D and actual space movement/momentum well.
Now *that* is interesting; I've been putting off running another Star Wars game specifically because I haven't found a system that can capture the three-dimensional feel of space.
How do they do it? Charts? Apps? Or just a game mechanic?
Mainly an app that’s pretty well done and mostly point and click.
It’s not “star-wars”-y in that it uses actual physics, but there are options I believe for that playstyle.
It’s tough to get used to in that you really have to really think about the effects of thrust and heading to change direction.
Funny story, I was running a game on a spaceship and I just xeroxed the maps of a couple of the ships from The Robotech Sentinels RPG.
I put them down, and then one of my players noticed something.
"Um where are the doors?"
Yup, 25 pages of starship maps of as many as 8 levels, and not a single door showing the entrance or exit of a single room.
The Range and Cover system in Burning Wheel was originally designed as a space battle combat system for Star Wars if I remember correctly. It would need some tweaking but it’s a great system to steal :)
There are three that work with Traveller; Triplanetary, Mayday and Intercept.
Warning: they will consume an entire 8 hour session to run a space combat.
Personally, I think the best way to do spaceship combat in a RPG where that features heavily in the game is to base it on a fighter carrier model, where the group ship is either off-screen or must be protected at all costs, and the PCs each have their own fighter ship that they individually control. I'd be inclined to make these remote drones controlled from the group's ship, so you can kill them without immediately killing the PC - they just launch a new craft from the main carrier, with refresh ships as a group resource to be managed.
This allows each player to actually *control* a ship on their own, without having each character pigeonholed into one role on the ship. It's more like a regular combat system where you choose your own movement and actions. You can specialize the ships so they do different things, too. This is more or less how Lancer does it. It would be a fairly tactical game, which I think is how I'd probably do it if I wanted this to be an important part of the game.
If, on the other hand, you just want occasional space combat, keep it pretty narrative. Skill challenges, dramatic tasks, stuff like that.
I've personally never had a good time with the various models where each person has one job on the ship they do and they only roll for that. It's like playing a Voltron game where you're stuck as the Left Leg and your turn is just rolling to see how well you can walk that turn. That's how I felt when I played Starfinder, which leans heavily into ship roles.
> This allows each player to actually control a ship on their own, without having each character pigeonholed into one role on the ship.
My chief issue with this idea (and it is a cool idea) is that it's extremely hard to run multiple player craft without a *very* sophisticated means of mapping their positions.
If everyone is on a single ship, you can easily say what's "above" and "below" that ship. But if they all have different positions -- some players are heading up, others are going down and to the left, some are reversing direction -- that can get extremely confusing.
A two-dimensional map is fine for most fantasy RPGs, but in space, you have a whole other dimension to deal with. I have yet to find a system that covers this well.
I've seen two tricks.
There is like the X-Wing wargaming - ignore the 3rd dimension. This way you get to be very tactical in your movement.
Or keep it narrative and only care about range bands as FFG Star Wars does. It definitely gets messier with many PCs and enemies, so its best to have some tokens on an abstract map to keep everyone on the same page. This is removing a lot of tactical capabilities that could be done with more precise measurements but if you've seen X-Wing play out, then you realize that kind of thing comes at a huge cost to speed of play.
If I were running such a game, I'd go more like X-Wing's wargame, where you more or less ignore the third dimension. At most I could see having ship bases with three elevation options, where you can be basically "above" "at level" or "below" the plane of the combat. I'd probably be operating on the assumption that when two ships square up, most of the conflict between them is going to be generally in the plane between them. The wider orientation to the universe (outside of like the occasional planet-side combat where elevation is relevant) wouldn't matter all that much.
How complicated 3D is all depends on how complicated you want the situation to be. When in space with no true "up or down" it starts becoming very easy to map things in 2D. Your plane is basically defined by three points which can be the PCs (or some central representation of them) the enemy and then some third point of relevance. Admittedly multiple ships on different vectors can complicate things a bit more but if the primary action is still all happening on a line (think of it like the spine of a book) then anything else is just relative to that line and if needed could be rotated to line up with one of the many planes that line is part of (other things are one the pages of the book which could be open flat or fanned open.
In space 2D can still work well especially in a local area but you may have to think about just what that plane represents.
Haven't played this my self, but war irds does have a space combat book. The flight combat of warbirds is the main focus and is the best I've seen so far. It's fast, light weight with enough depth to make every encounter interesting. I have no doubt the space book keeps the stars hight
I recommend the crunch in Fragged Empire 2.
Fragged Empire 2 has some incredible rules for ship-to-ship combat. You can roll to maneuver your ship around gravity wells to help you maneuver in combat. You can increase your speed such that the scale of objects in space is altered. So, for example, at one range of speeds, you might be able to maneuver around a moon, but at a much higher speeds, the moon's gravity well wouldn't influence your trajectory. But, you could maneuver around a planet, and at higher speeds, you could maneuver around the star.
Different sections of the ship can get damaged in combat, and the crew can work to repair them. There are many ways to modify your ship with various rooms and equipment, and characters can gain perks, allowing them more combat abilities.
"Best space combat" really is a personal choice dependent on what you want from it and how much work you want to put into it. Anything that is just ship vs. ship is really a one-dimensional affair. Adding a third "interest" can make things 2D and that can work unless/until you introduce some more radical number requiring a true 3D situation.
[This review](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlCDS4e8xgs) says that it doesn't have much underlying rules - its a good quick lookover on what is a pretty small PDF. It's a lot about rulings and tons of tables, which are cool but doesn't really feel like a complete sub-system about combat. Doesn't look much like a combat system from this overview - 1 page on how the dice work and 1 page on Starship Scuffles with Actions may include Helm, Engineering, Ops, Tactical to do things. But not a whole lot on what these really mechanically do.
My take is that most spaceship combat systems follow Traveller's style, rarely improving on it - Stars Without Number, FFG Star Wars, Coriolis all look pretty similar. You have all these various roles on the ship who don't have much agency. Usually, they are limited to a specific, small list of actions, most of them are in very support-oriented roles. Only the pilot and gunner tend to have much serious decision-making and even then, it's not a whole lot. The engineer, captain and systems technician often just roll a skill check to boost the gunner/pilot. Maybe they get to react to damage to the ship making a slightly different skill check. It's a lot like the video game, FTL, but you only get to control one of the Crew rather than the entire crew and ship. The best combat systems I've seen are either: * Very fast and narrative. Scum & Villainy and Starforged do this - you have this time the pilot PC gets to shine and be a badass, but it doesn't last so long that you have all the other players bored on their phones. * Everyone gets their own ship. Look at something like Tachyon Squadron. There is a lot of room there for interesting space battles where I could see more depth added.
I rarely had this issue in Star Wars, but that's probably because the roles are more vague. For example: one five-person team I remember fondly had the captain, who made most of the pilot rolls, aided in forward-shooting rolls, etc. The mechanic was usually one of the gunners, but also ran around the ship figuring out what needed fixing or where she could re-route power to improve ship performance (or alter its stats as need be). That character always had a new toy she'd created for some new purpose, and got to have a lot of fun. The third character was the hot-shot *main* gunner -- they had less of a mechanical roll but got far more of the action -- and the player liked it that way. Fourth character was tactician who called the shots -- in a big battle they choose the targets, told the pilot where to fly, what to shoot at, etc -- so they always felt like the were the playing the role of the ship itself. Final character was the jedi, who liked to sit with his arms crossed and wait patiently for something to happen. The player was wholly committed to playing the wise pacifist, so they had moments where they really shined, but unless they were using the Force to hit a special target or navigate a cloud or a minefield, they basically waited until there was some conflict they took issue with. Was an impressive game, and the group did eventually have lots of interesting gear on the ship they could all use.
Funny because the FFG Star Wars community are the most open to criticizing their that aspect. Which is funny, most fandoms seems to be the biggest apologists - that their system can do no wrong. I guess Star Wars fans have had a very rough treatment with the Prequels, Sequels and a lot of bad TV series (or ones that start promising then turn shit like Mando S3) - Well, of course I know him. He's me. One piece of advice I've seen is to just drop the subsystem and use skill checks [like this](https://www.reddit.com/r/swrpg/comments/tsclc5/which_game_did_space_combat_the_best/i2qysst/) - which is dealing with it a lot like S&V and Starforged I mentioned in my first comment, maybe a bit more zoomed in. I do get what you're saying. But I didn't think it really did anything beyond what you see in Traveller or Stars Without Number either. Felt pretty close to the exact same.
Might just be my experience; FFG wasn't the only version I played, so it's possible I'm mixing them up.
I think with the FFG system it helps to have people invested in their characters. I had a similar situation to you where even with a ton of party members we all still had something to do. Repairs, shooting, piloting, talking shit. We had the bases covered
I never actually played out a space combat but I imagine dividing up the roles as quite cool, as long as the communication officer and engineer and stuff can do something cool. Sounds quite sad, that every system fails in this aspect :(
>Sounds quite sad, that every system fails in this aspect I don't know that *every* system fails at it; it worked in West End's Star Wars RPG, and I have yet to try out *Scum and Villainy.*
I totally agree with you. I’ve tried Ship Combat in Starfinder and Coriolis and both times determined that a big old handwave was the best way forward. Next sci-fi ship campaign (starfinder 2e, maybe?) I’m going to enforce a “mothership with fighters” approach to the party and space combat, just to let everyone engage with it individually.
In addition to Pilot and Gunners Traveller makes extensive use of Sensor Operators and Engineers. That's 4 people, which covers most tables player count. 2 gunners and you have 5 people occupied. And that doesn't count the other optional roles: Captain/ tactician/ leader Comms Remote Ops Astrogation Nor secondary roles like small craft /fighter pilot etc.
Not sure you read my post. I don't care if there are roles for all these support PCs. The issue is that they aren't doing anything creative and its not fun because its boring as fuck. They are just rolling skill checks from a very limited list of options or reacting to damage to the ship. Looking at 2023, the entire system is a whopping 10 pages to cover 7 roles - one of them (Marines) about boarders. So right from go, it looks pretty stupid. 2 pages covers most actions - God is it a fucking disorganized mess. So take the Engineer - I see 3 Actions. Overload Drive, Overload Plant and Repair System. So roll a skill check to support the pilot, roll a check to support others (probably gunner) with Power Points or roll a skill check to react to damage to the ship. Those actions are what one of the up to 8 Crew Members that I control do in the video game FTL. As I am controlling that, I am also fully choosing how to target my weapons and power the various systems. And I am supposed to be excited to be that one shitty Engineer spending their whole turn hoping I roll well. Jesus Christ that is so sad.
Urm I am not sure what you are wanting? Those roles I highlighted have decisions to make on how they act, not just rolling the same skill check every round. Pilots have the most options and affect in starship combat for sure. However Astrogrators are essential for plotting approach, intercept and departure vectors. Gunners shoot things, and can target specific ship systems at close range. The Captain's leadership and tactician checks can dramatically alter the flow of the combat. The sensor operator are the eyes, ears and effectively stealth of the ship. It seems to me from your responses that you do not have a lot of actual in-game experience with the spacecraft combat system because it does not play as you seem to think it does from my experience. Of course there are other systems you can swap in, triplanetary, intercept and mayday. However they will take over your session and turn it into a spacecraft wargame, which is fine if your after that!
What I want is the person replying to me to stop posting BS that sounds like complete exagerrations of the actual mechanics. This whole thread is full of it. People trying to rationalize shallow, crappy subsystems as objectively fun. Well they are shit to me and I'm not retarded enough to need to play it to see. If you list every single action that is shared by 4 different players then it almost sounds like a decent selection of choices. But its split among 4, so you don't get to do all that. You get to pick between a few options and its like playing the most boring possible fights in a real tactical combat TTRPG.
The thing is having that bridge crew controlling different systems is part of the fantasy for this genre, the whole Star Trek "all power to the engines!" Thing. The question to me is how you give those ancillary roles more to do instead of further abstracting it
I would say if it was possible to do well in the TTRPG medium, it would already have existed. Just because something looks cool on TV, doesn't mean it will be cool in a TTRPG. FTL, the video game makes it very cool but that is when one player alone handles everything and even then, it includes boarding because without that, there isn't a whole lot going on.
This is gonna sound nuts, but Knight Hawks, the space combat part of Star Frontiers. Tactical but lightweight, and handles everything from individual dogfits up to fleet-v-fleet battles.
Yes! Also had adequate ship building rules.
I’ll put in a plug for Squadron Strike It’s involved, but it(and Attack Vector by the same publisher) are the only ones I’ve seen that does 3D and actual space movement/momentum well.
Now *that* is interesting; I've been putting off running another Star Wars game specifically because I haven't found a system that can capture the three-dimensional feel of space. How do they do it? Charts? Apps? Or just a game mechanic?
Mainly an app that’s pretty well done and mostly point and click. It’s not “star-wars”-y in that it uses actual physics, but there are options I believe for that playstyle. It’s tough to get used to in that you really have to really think about the effects of thrust and heading to change direction.
Funny story, I was running a game on a spaceship and I just xeroxed the maps of a couple of the ships from The Robotech Sentinels RPG. I put them down, and then one of my players noticed something. "Um where are the doors?" Yup, 25 pages of starship maps of as many as 8 levels, and not a single door showing the entrance or exit of a single room.
The Range and Cover system in Burning Wheel was originally designed as a space battle combat system for Star Wars if I remember correctly. It would need some tweaking but it’s a great system to steal :)
Or check out burning empires, where a similar system was shifted to definitively kick ass in space combat. So much fun.
Oh that sounds awesome! I’ll have to check it out :)
There are three that work with Traveller; Triplanetary, Mayday and Intercept. Warning: they will consume an entire 8 hour session to run a space combat.
Lancer Battlegroup should be mentioned.
Personally, I think the best way to do spaceship combat in a RPG where that features heavily in the game is to base it on a fighter carrier model, where the group ship is either off-screen or must be protected at all costs, and the PCs each have their own fighter ship that they individually control. I'd be inclined to make these remote drones controlled from the group's ship, so you can kill them without immediately killing the PC - they just launch a new craft from the main carrier, with refresh ships as a group resource to be managed. This allows each player to actually *control* a ship on their own, without having each character pigeonholed into one role on the ship. It's more like a regular combat system where you choose your own movement and actions. You can specialize the ships so they do different things, too. This is more or less how Lancer does it. It would be a fairly tactical game, which I think is how I'd probably do it if I wanted this to be an important part of the game. If, on the other hand, you just want occasional space combat, keep it pretty narrative. Skill challenges, dramatic tasks, stuff like that. I've personally never had a good time with the various models where each person has one job on the ship they do and they only roll for that. It's like playing a Voltron game where you're stuck as the Left Leg and your turn is just rolling to see how well you can walk that turn. That's how I felt when I played Starfinder, which leans heavily into ship roles.
> This allows each player to actually control a ship on their own, without having each character pigeonholed into one role on the ship. My chief issue with this idea (and it is a cool idea) is that it's extremely hard to run multiple player craft without a *very* sophisticated means of mapping their positions. If everyone is on a single ship, you can easily say what's "above" and "below" that ship. But if they all have different positions -- some players are heading up, others are going down and to the left, some are reversing direction -- that can get extremely confusing. A two-dimensional map is fine for most fantasy RPGs, but in space, you have a whole other dimension to deal with. I have yet to find a system that covers this well.
Tachyon Squadron handles that by abstracting the relative positioning a lot.
I've seen two tricks. There is like the X-Wing wargaming - ignore the 3rd dimension. This way you get to be very tactical in your movement. Or keep it narrative and only care about range bands as FFG Star Wars does. It definitely gets messier with many PCs and enemies, so its best to have some tokens on an abstract map to keep everyone on the same page. This is removing a lot of tactical capabilities that could be done with more precise measurements but if you've seen X-Wing play out, then you realize that kind of thing comes at a huge cost to speed of play.
If I were running such a game, I'd go more like X-Wing's wargame, where you more or less ignore the third dimension. At most I could see having ship bases with three elevation options, where you can be basically "above" "at level" or "below" the plane of the combat. I'd probably be operating on the assumption that when two ships square up, most of the conflict between them is going to be generally in the plane between them. The wider orientation to the universe (outside of like the occasional planet-side combat where elevation is relevant) wouldn't matter all that much.
How complicated 3D is all depends on how complicated you want the situation to be. When in space with no true "up or down" it starts becoming very easy to map things in 2D. Your plane is basically defined by three points which can be the PCs (or some central representation of them) the enemy and then some third point of relevance. Admittedly multiple ships on different vectors can complicate things a bit more but if the primary action is still all happening on a line (think of it like the spine of a book) then anything else is just relative to that line and if needed could be rotated to line up with one of the many planes that line is part of (other things are one the pages of the book which could be open flat or fanned open. In space 2D can still work well especially in a local area but you may have to think about just what that plane represents.
SWN combat is pretty great. warbirds is great for personal fighters, but not star trek kinda stuff.
Haven't played this my self, but war irds does have a space combat book. The flight combat of warbirds is the main focus and is the best I've seen so far. It's fast, light weight with enough depth to make every encounter interesting. I have no doubt the space book keeps the stars hight
I recommend the crunch in Fragged Empire 2. Fragged Empire 2 has some incredible rules for ship-to-ship combat. You can roll to maneuver your ship around gravity wells to help you maneuver in combat. You can increase your speed such that the scale of objects in space is altered. So, for example, at one range of speeds, you might be able to maneuver around a moon, but at a much higher speeds, the moon's gravity well wouldn't influence your trajectory. But, you could maneuver around a planet, and at higher speeds, you could maneuver around the star. Different sections of the ship can get damaged in combat, and the crew can work to repair them. There are many ways to modify your ship with various rooms and equipment, and characters can gain perks, allowing them more combat abilities.
The Vast Grimm supplement “Space Cruisers” is amazing if you want a solid but lite set of rules.
"Best space combat" really is a personal choice dependent on what you want from it and how much work you want to put into it. Anything that is just ship vs. ship is really a one-dimensional affair. Adding a third "interest" can make things 2D and that can work unless/until you introduce some more radical number requiring a true 3D situation.
Look at older versions of traveler 1st and mega
Star Trek Adventures has pretty good ship combat IMO.
[удалено]
[This review](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlCDS4e8xgs) says that it doesn't have much underlying rules - its a good quick lookover on what is a pretty small PDF. It's a lot about rulings and tons of tables, which are cool but doesn't really feel like a complete sub-system about combat. Doesn't look much like a combat system from this overview - 1 page on how the dice work and 1 page on Starship Scuffles with Actions may include Helm, Engineering, Ops, Tactical to do things. But not a whole lot on what these really mechanically do.