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Cue your fav battle music and strap yourselves in Gamer Nation
Let me begin the discussion by regaling you with an epic starship battle then let's discuss the do's and dont's, the pro's and con's!

Yesterday, Friday, my gaming group reached an epic moment in our long time, far reaching alternate universe campaign

My namesake character, his fleet having suffered reverses at the hand of the extra galactic Yuzhan Vong invaders has finished consolidating his remaining forces: his fleet at Bakura, allied with the Chiss, has repulsed the Ssi Ruuvi and his fleet at Elrood has secured the sector, accepting refugees from other ravaged holdings, including the hidden, mobile shadowport. (this was done mostly in downtime)

Yesterday, as the other player in the group was unavailable for our regular game, our GM decided it was time to for me to take the fight back to the Vong by thwarting their attempt to invade the Corporate Sector and the Bonadan System.

He allowed me to stat out my modified Executor class Super Star Destroyer Daala's Legacy (formerly the guardian) and take it into battle against an advance fleet trying to land forces on the capital planet of the CSA

I arrived in system in a trajectory close to the planet, raising shields as proximity alarm begin blaring! Vong transports have already landed troops on the planet! Planetary shields are down! The next wave of invaders is approaching! 2 ISD II equivalent, 6 ISD I equivalent and 10 medium transport equivalent (troop transports)

The crew feared it would be overwhelmed but the Grand Admiral and admiral in charge of the fleet new better. A fierce battle ensued...
I pause here for effect as you picture the sound of turbolasers firing.....
What happened next was spectacular only in it's sheer savagery. In one round of combat, half the Yuzhan Vong fleet was decimated, only 3 transports survived the initial onslaught. One of the ISD II Eq. was -10 on the track, most of the others were at -1 or -2, 2 or 3 ships only escaped that first firestorm unscathed...
The Vong fire back, spitting molten balls of lava across the star spackled skies of Bonadan: some hit, most miss!
Round two begins, the defenders win initiative again the ensuing thunder of heavy turbolaser batteries puts paid to this initial attempt at conquest, crushing the Vong fleet.
It only took us two rounds or....3 HOURS of game time!!

now here's the debate!
initiative? how important is it?
weapons?? I raise two points.
Ion weapons: In Saga edition, capital ships thresholds are so high, they seem almost worthless, against Vong "living" ships, they shouldn't even work to disable them.... but they DO still inflict 1/2 damage! Is this real damage?? As they helped me finish off the transports, I'd like to hear your opinion...
Gun size: in SOTG, many guns on stock ships are statted out as being more damaging than the base upgrades available (I know, I know, game designer fiat!) but does this mean they have upgrades like quad or advanced cannon already installed, or can these be added further increasing the damage? My example? 25 heavy turbolaser batteries at 11D10x5: not quad's, advanced cannot be added to turbolasers...I added quads, making them 13D10x5 guns...on a high roll to hit, with 5 gunners 18D10x5 damage! I only rolled 2 Crits on over a 100 rolls but i still managed to crush their threshold more than 50% of the time!

Crew quality: I raised the crew quality from skilled to expert: how do you calculate the CR increase from such a change?? It was significant in this combat, leading to increased hits, more dice of damage, condition track damage...

Increases to ships stats: Str, Int, Dex! raise one? which one? raise two? raise them all?? why?

Let the discussion begin! Use your words like turbolaser batteries and demolish your opponents with your cunning arguments!! Cackle with glee as your precision quoting reduces their position to a molten quivering pile of refuse!!

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Giving the Suul family a bad name since '98!!

I don't have much time to reply right now, but I've been thinking about the effects of applying the "unit" rules for starships, creating flights and wings of fighters, for example, so that there are fewer actual ships flying around the map, combining chances to hit, and the like.

Of course, I've also toyed with having a mass space battle just being represented with a skill challenge as well.

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"The things that we love tell us what we are."--Saint Thomas Aquinas

The ion damage question is a little tricky. The description of ion damage in the SECR (p. 159) does say that any target hit by an ion weapon loses HP equal to half of the rolled damage. However, the descriptions of the individual ion weapons in the Equipment chapter also say that biological targets take "half damage." I've seen these rules interpreted in two ways:

1. If you interpret the "half damage" specified in the Equipment chapter as redundant, then your handling of ion weapons hitting Vong ships was spot on.
2. If you think that both indications of "half damage" are intentional, then a biological target would only end up taking one quarter of the rolled damage from an ion weapon.

I wouldn't agonize over the question too much, as long as your group picks one interpretation and sticks with it.

As for the damage rating for the turbolasers on your SSD, there could be a simple explanation. A lot of the stock ships are built with weapon system enhancements -- such as quad cannons or fire-linked weapons -- but in most cases these are not listed in the stat block. For an example of this, take a look at the X-Wing T-65XJ3 stat block on page 163 of Starships of the Galaxy. Its weapons are described only as "heavy laser cannons" and they deal 7d10x2 damage, which is 2 more dice than a heavy laser cannon should have. However, we can see from the picture that the X-Wing has 4 cannons, so they are very likely fire-linked. Applying the "fire-linked 4" weapon enhancement adds 2 damage dice to the standard heavy laser cannon, which gets you the 7d10x2 listed in the stat block. Even though the stat block doesn't list the cannons as fire-linked, this is quite possibly what the designers had in mind when they wrote it.

So if you find a ship with impossibly strong cannons, like your SSD with 11d10x5 turbolasers, try to see if it could logically have one or more of these enhancements built in. For a ship like the Executor, one can easily imagine that its main guns are actually quad-turbolasers arranged in sets of four, in which case you could apply both the quad cannon and fire-link 4 enhancements for an extra +4 damage dice. Add those to the base damage for heavy turbolasers, and you have your 11d10x5 damage. Unfortunately, this would mean that you could not "quad" the already quad-turbolaser guns, so your damage would be pretty much maxed out at 11 dice.

Hope this all helps.

For a major space campaign I ran recently, I threw out initiative to help make things run smoothly. My players directly commanded two capitol ships and dozens of fighters and had a small fleet of support ships and other fighters. I had them all go on the same initiative count, completed all of that action, and then spent 10-15min doing all of the NPC actions and just giving them a summary and allowing them a chance to use reaction skills as appropriate. This gave the players some time to strategize while I was doing the NPC's and worked out really well.

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The Rogue Blogger
Twitter: @WayneBasta

The only issue I have with this, is that it goes against other Dev rulings of the same kind like the Evasion/Deflect debate...
1/4 damage seems to go against KISS, somehow...

As for the rest, it just seems to me that if something is on the ship, it should be included in the stat block or in the description at least....
One thing that grinds my gear is that ships like ISD's and SSD's don't have any medical bays!
Illogical! But there aren't any listed... Nor do they have hyper transceivers or Holonet receivers...yet we see them used in the Saga and EU all the time...

Which means for me, if it's not listed, it's not there and I have to/can add it...
*shrugs*

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Giving the Suul family a bad name since '98!!

But ion weaponry doing 1/4 damage to organics/biological beings is how it works & has always worked in Saga AFAIK.

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Arkansas Regional Captain & proud member of Spice Runners Squadron
Kessel Base, The Rebel Legion

"The bad guys hardly ever quote Star Wars."
Harry Dresden, Cold Days

Oh come on. Really? Stat blocks were not and are not designed to tell you every functioning system and amenity aboard a starship or vehicle. A stat block is merely a capsule of a starship's capabilities in combat that can be quickly referenced during play.

SSDs and ISDs have medical bays in Saga. They have many, I'm sure.

Don't be such a stick in the mud about things like this. Not only is it no fun for anybody at the table, but it's also illogical--a lose-lose situation.