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This is a nice little supplement for the Stars without Number. It requires the Stars Without Number (SWN) core rule book and the Skyward Steel (SS )book to use fully.
It is broken up into 3 main sections.
The first covers starship operation costs and clarifies the operation costs and other things in those books and has some stuff to help in determining operation cost for ships. This was pretty well written and helpful.
I was surprised that it didn’t mention that Kevin Crawford , the designer of SWN, advised changing the Life Support cost for maximum crew from two weeks to one month in the past when asked about the duration on and this errata/rule change is now found in know SWN core book errata lists on several sites.
Next, comes some new fitting for starships some of these I’m surprised were not in the basic book. This only takes up one page.
Finally you get a bunch of pre-built ships. The ship designs are useful ones and I can see using several of them in my SWN games.
Unfortunately, the PDF has a couple of errors are in this book, that caused me to drop my rating of it from 4 stars to 3 and make me almost give it a 2 star one. These errors make it unable to fully use everything in the book currently. I do hope the publisher updates the PDF to fix them. If so my rating would go up.
Now if your wondering what the errors are these are the ones I spotted.
In a few cases some of the material is different from an older version that was in a fanzine a few years back, so it isn’t clear if these are changes or errors that occurred when the material was put into this PDF.
1.) Several of the new starships have a New Fitting called Fuel Bunkers but no rules are given for them in the book. Fuel bunkers are also mentioned in the Refueling section on page 6 (7 in the PDF) too.
The author of Richard Hazelwood did give rules for this New Fitting in the Infinite Stars #1 fanzine, in an article he wrote which contained some of the material in this PDF, but they got omitted from the New Ship Fittings in the PDF for some reason.
2.) Most of the ships have different stats (especially cost) compared to the earlier version given for them in Infinite Stars #1 article.
Aside from the cost being different in most of the article versions they got changing on what fittings they have.
Which version is the “correct” one for a ship isn’t clear and no reason is given for why that ship had its stats changed is ever given.
3.) The Tech Level for the Booster Pack and Laboratory in the New Starship Fittings section on page 9 (10 in the PDF) are given as 3, but they are given as 4 in the old Infinite Stars #1 article but they are listed as TL 3 in this PDF.
This leads to the question of which version is correct. (I’m inclined to think the TL 4 one is since all ships in the core SWN are at the least TL4 and this is the lowest TL for any fitting for a standard SWN starship. (The Engines of Babylon does cover lower than 4 TL, but none of these ships are of that type.)
I recommend you get this PDF only if you have the old Infinite Stars fanzine issue #1 till the PDFs gets fixed as you’ll need it for the details on the missing Fuel Bunkers rules and to see the for the ships that appear in that fanzine and this PDF so you can figure out which one is correct..
Overall, it would ve a great product if it it didn't have the problems I mentioned so notw it is just a ok product.
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