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Greetings!
After finally getting my login fixed after several years away, I figured I'd start my comeback with a discussion I've been wanting to post for years but couldn't while my login was busted.
Let me start by saying I love Starfinder, maybe even more than Pathfinder, and I've gotten a lot of mileage out of 1st edition. However, during that time, I've really only had a single concern regarding the system and its many supplements. That concern is around design consistency, and with a new edition dawning, I feel now is a good time to bring this up - a new edition brings new opportunities for improvement!
Now what I mean by design consistency has nothing to do (mostly) with the starship rules at large. I love the shipbuilding rules and my group and I enjoy the combat system, especially with many of the additions that were added with the Starship Operating Manual. The starship stuff is so fun, in fact, that I've spent a fair amount of time really getting into the nitty gritty of it - I've built A LOT of ships. It was all of this fiddling around that would lead me to my concern as I noticed early on that many of the published ships didn't match up in build point properly for their Tier. . . so I started a spreadsheet.
Every time I used a published ship in one of my campaigns, I'd check the designer's math. Unfortunately, more often than not, my skepticism of the published content was rewarded. For every ship that was off in BP, over or under (usually over), I would alter the build, keeping it within theme for the ship, and add the change notes to my spreadsheet. As time went on, I just caved and did (almost) every single ship published.
(For anyone interested in my ship corrections and notes, I can start a different thread with actual spreadsheet details if there's enough interest).
The results of this spreadsheet includes nearly 150 ships currently. Of that number, only 23% of published ships have the correct amount of BP. Now, this wouldn't be a particularly major issue if ships were mostly flavor, but BP is directly attached to Tier and Tier functions a lot like CR. This would be the equivalent of Starfinder using a build-point system for monster design for CR and then having only 23% of the published bestiary be the correct CR, which would be a crazy-low number for quality control. Now, in some cases, the BP are only off by 1 to 3 which is no biggie (except at really low Tiers), but most ships are off by more than 5% of the listed BP for their Tier.
In the name of balanced encounters, I would like to request (nay, implore) the lead designers of 2nd edition to please double and triple check the math on submitted starships in the future. Luckily, I'm a big old nerd who doesn't mind spending some of his spare time doing this for his own games, but there are lot of other people who will use ships as is and while many times it'll be fine, there are definitely cases where if certain ships are chosen (for the PCs or the enemies) it's going to lead to feels-bad or feels-boring encounters.
And if this has already been noted/covered by the design team, then my apologies. I know the game is in good hands.
Now, the above was the gist of my request to the designers, but for anyone with the patience and interest to keep reading, here's some more context from my spreadsheet data:
2) Speaking of bestiaries, the Starship Operations Manual basically serves as one. I think this was worked on and published after the BP changes to the core as well. The number of correct ships in the ship bestiary is 34%. That's still not great, especially since most of the ships are out by over 5% of their BP or have other issues entirely unrelated to BP, such as illegal build choices or non-functional ones.
3) Speaking of illegal build choices, these often go hand-in-hand with incorrect BP allocation, but sometimes the ship has the correct BP but there's another issue. One example of this occurs with ships of Tier 1 or lower, where they don't have enough power to run their Drift Engine. Now most ships of Tier 1 or lower don't have Drift Engines, but of the small number that do, over half of them don't have a Power Core strong enough. Or if they do have a Power Core strong enough, it's only because they ran over in BP.
4) Now I noted earlier that if a GM uses specific ships in encounters it could lead to balancing issues. Even in most cases where the BP difference is over 5%, it should still be alright most of the time. However, there are a few cases where the BP difference puts ships in entirely different Tiers. This mostly occurs at the low end of play (which is also the most played) and is really only an issue for a select few corebook ships and ships from the early APs, again, due to the BP adjustments. I doubt this has ever blown up anyone's game but I think it's worth noting as it makes the case that the corebook ships should've been errata'd as well. My point is that if the 2nd edition corebook has BP errata'd in the future, they should definitely do the ships too.
5) The BP issue gets slightly rougher in the mid-Tier range where the correct BP ratio drops to 16%. Very few ships in the mid-range have exact BP. Tier 8, for example, has one.
6) Again, a lot of these ships are only off by a few points, so maybe these are purposeful choices. Especially in the mid-range, where 1 or 2 points doesn't make or break the CR/Tier scale. Let's call it designer's fiat. If I include all ships that are only off by a few points in the "correct" category. That raises the number of correct ships to almost 45%, but that's still below half.
7) My data doesn't include all the default ships for the Starfinder Society or anything that might have been introduced in a society module. I have to assume, for the good of the organized play community, that those ships are all correct.