rule clarifications

1. At different spots in the rules it says a normal move is two hexes and three hexes. It's two. I wrote three because I spazzed out on ordinal versus cardinal numbers. The intent is that in normal travel you can skip over a single intervening empty hex if you start and end the move in a system.

2. Seeing off an isolated scout from a system is not enough of a victory to give you plus 1 in attacking planetary defences.

3. Because it's too much trouble to calculate for the added "realism", combat damage to a fleet does not count against its notional points total for attacking system defences. Actual ship losses do; you can only count the points values of ships you choose to commit to the fight (remember,it's open to you not to commit ships which might be completely destroyed by hull damage in the event of a defeat). Handwaving rationalisations: a) the dice roll models a lot of things, including morale, which counts the ships, not whether they're broken b) that much loose energy probably damaged lots of things apart from the original targets.

4. Freighters, if any of you have them, cost 10% for maintenance just like everything else does. For those of you who say, but they should be cheaper than warships to run, they are; you haven't put any weapons in them, they presumably have less powerful drives, and I'm not billing you for crew factors in the first place. 10% of a cheaper ship is less money. Cowboy up.

5. If any of you want to use heavy missiles, the ones in MT are fine, other designs can be raised with me in the normal way and either blessed or damned on my whim and or the force of your argument.

6. Although it may not feel like it in practice, one underlying assumption in the campaign is that news travels no faster than starships. This has all kinds if implications, all of which were intended, so before you ask a question about, for example, coordination and communication, ask yourself how it's affected by the fact that there is no communication system faster than a courier boat.