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Here's my hot take on starship combat - and starship encounters in general - I think the real trick is about designing starship _encounters_ rather than starship _procedures_. There's a bunch of standard problems with vehicle encounters: the pilot and gunner do all the work, so you invent roles for each character, but then you end up with everyone stuck doing the same action each round because it's the only sensible thing to do (often with one player quarterbacking everything), so you maybe go another level and let players move between stations dynamically, but you still end up with very few viable options, while taking more effort than a simple "take turns shooting at each other" game.

I think the core thing here is that trying to use mechanics to add depth to a simple encounter really just makes it slower and more complex, without adding real choice. Instead, the key is to make the actual encounter complex, and then depth will come naturally. And if the encounter is not complex (e.g. a duel between two ships in open space, particularly where one outpowers the other), then don't drag it out - just quickly do the damage rolls as you normally would.

So, things I would do if I wanted an interesting space combat is have multiple zones with "terrain" (asteroids, opaque gas, moons to hide behind, maybe weird warp field corruption if that fits the setting), have more moving pieces (maybe even, as in the Elite Dangerous RPG, give each player their own ship!), multiple partially conflicting goals (save the civilian ships, grab the ancient artefacts, don't let the pirates escape!), and multiple moving parts (boarding parties, cyberwarfare, multiple enemies etc). And if the scene isn't big enough to justify that sort of thing, then just roll through it quickly. That's the type of advice I would write - maybe even using something like the Cairn 2e quick map generation thing with throwing dice on a piece of paper, to generate quick and fun battlemaps for space combat.