[Varyon]

Originally Posted by scc

1. Minor one with ships, I'm sure there's a line somewhere about using items from Ulta-Tech to outfit Spaceships, so does that mean I can use the Barrier Screens from page 171 to protect my ships?

Given they're superscience, you can pretty much give them whatever weight and stats you want. So, sure, that's an option. The important thing is to weigh it against the weapons and decide how you want fights to go.

Originally Posted by scc

2. Speed, this is a bit of a multi-headed one, but starfighters engage in WW2 dogfighting is SW. This means not only do they have a top speed, but at full acceleration they can reach that top speed fairly, probably a single turn. How high is this likely to be given that these a human controlled ships?

I'd actually suggest against using the Spaceships combat system here; dogfighting is probably better done with the systems from Campaigns (although there's apparently a Pyramid article that modifies the chase rules from Action! for dogfighting). My Harpyias setting takes heavy inspiration from Star Wars, and I opted to give capital ships Move 1/10 per drive, while fighters have Move 10/50 per drive. These are meant to give top speeds roughly comparable to WWII-era naval ships and fighters, respectively, but the accelerations are markedly higher - the USS Enterprise (CV-6) had a top speed around 18 yards per second, for ~2 drives, although I suspect this took markedly longer than 10 seconds to reach; meanwhile, the P-51D Mustang had a top speed of around 218 yards per second, achievable with ~4 drives, but HT 238 only gives it an acceleration of 3 yards/second/second, not the ~4 G's the above drives would give. Something like Move 1/50 per drive might give more WWII-style maneuverability for fighters, and looking up some more about WWII naval vessels it's likely a top speed of 5 yards per second per drive may be more appropriate (the fastest had a top speed around 25 yards per second), although I have no clue what acceleration would be appropriate.

That's for combat, and near a planet. For travel through space, this might need to ramp up if you want to allow for something like the X-Wings launching from Yavin IV and reaching the Death Star relatively quickly (although once there, they were largely going at WWII velocities). I opted for extremely fast boost drives, which may or may not work for you.

Honestly, I may opt to revise the stats in Harpyias; I think my prior numbers were due to some bad research...

Originally Posted by scc

b) Bigger ships tend to be slower, so how much should speed to be reduced per increase in SM?

I'd be tempted to go with the breakdown used for the old d20 Star Wars Roleplaying Game, with fighters, space transports, and capital ships. Capital ships should have performance comparable to naval vessels, while fighters would have performance comparable to fighter craft. For space transports/gunships (like the Millennium Falcon), those end up somewhere in-between. I'd probably go with SM +4 through +6 as fighters, +7 through +9 as transports/gunships, and +10 and higher as capital.