State of play

For brevity's sake:
It's the end of strategic turn 1 of economic turn 2.
Con's Savasku remain quiescent, and there's some restlessness about that.
Eddie and John have clashed in Colin's system at F6. Colin took one horrified look at the forces arrayed against him and decamped. Eddie and John then had a battle of sorts; after an initial exchange of fire, Eddie's forces went cloaked for six turns, while John tried to manoeuvre for position. When Eddie lifted his concealment, he was more or less where he'd begun, though his carrier had fallen back behind the main force so far that it was about two feet off table. John was a little more than two feet in front of him and had spent the intervening period chunking out thirteen groups of fighters. For game purposes what happened next was that John sent all the fighters in against one dreadnaught on the end of Eddie's formation, lost a few to Eddie's limited number of interceptors, and then pressed home the attack through largely ineffective PDS fire, doing a total of 25 points of damage. Which was not quite enough to make Eddie check for systems failure. There was then another exchange of gunfire, with John's four vessels handing out a lot of damage and Eddie's main weapons doing a lot less. Eddie fired the Nova cannon just to see what would happen, and then recloaked to cover his withdrawal.

John dithered for a moment and then decided to attack the system defences, which at 5000 points are probably the strongest in the game. He lost.

Nett result.

Colin has bugged out to unspecified parts. Eddie has bugged out to unspecified parts, nursing heavy hull damage to one of his units. John has bugged out to unspecified parts nursing 500 points of damage and feeling pretty darned sorry for himself. Colin is still in possession of F6.

Other things of note; well, the second phase of the Eddie/John fight featured an aborted dogfight between 13 groups of John's fighters and 12 groups of Eddie's. Eddie got so pulverised that I decided to rewind the turn, partly because of the fact that it was a dogfight meant that no-one could fire PDS into the furball to thin out the Savasku fighters a bit. Eddie was fielding 4 squadrons of heavy interceptors and eight of heavy torpedo fighters, and I think he had felt that his losses would have been more manageable than they were.

It doesn't really work that way. In a dogfight, statistically, normal fighters will lose 4 fighters per squadron; assume that the dice scores are evenly distributed, then the 4 and the 5 will nail one each and the 6 will get another two. Heavy fighters ignore the 4, and so take three casualties. Interceptors do wicked execution; the five and six kill two each, and the three and the four do one each, so statistically an interceptor group will completely wipe out a normal squadron, and nearly wipe out a heavy. On the other hand torpedo fighters will knock out one fighter per squadron engaged; it just doesn't work to use them against other fighters.

Nova cannons; we spent a lot of time trying to figure out when they fire. We have concluded that they fire in the ship fire phase (not in the missile phase) and keep moving in the fire phase (not the movement phase) of the two succeeding turns. When you combine this with the other restrictions, they're not a hugely useful weapon against a target capable of any kind of manoeuvre (though Eddie admitted that he had one because a nova cannon masses less than a B6).