Starfinder Society Scenario #3-22: The Vast Experiment: Dancing at the Edge

The story content of the scenario is quite appealing and it has quite an epic scale compared to many scenarios, even other high tier ones. It is also important for metaplot in my opinion.
There are two bigger issues that cause it to lose many stars in my book.
See Spoilers:

I played this scenario online during PaizoCon 2021 and had an absolute blast. The adventure gave my group a little bit of everything-investigation, combat, skill challenges, and starship combat. My envoy really excelled during the starship combat being able to broadside really helped balance the encounter in my opinion. The NPCs both old and new were interesting and I can't wait to see what happens to a particularly important person's whose fate is left up in the air. In short, this is one of my favorite scenarios of season 3 and I would heartily recommend it to anybody interested in high level play.

I liked both how starship combat was at same time incredibly difficult but possibly with tactics even if players have bad luck with dice. And even if they can't beat it they can still get enough successes in scenario otherwise.

Scenario has really haunting feeling to it with somber ending and I like how its basically "well things got real and they are about to get worse". The investigation section is excellent and I like all hints about what might be going on in year 4.

Anything I didn't like... Well I don't enjoy MIA situations personally because of how ambiguous they leave, you always expect someone to come back from MIA ;P

I know I know, voting something down just because it has starship combat? Nope. I can usually ignore starship combat and look at the whole scenario.

Usually.

The investigation was well done. It got accross the empty creepiness of what transpired, but had more than a few more checks than it needed. The fights were good but without any amazing mechanics, the NPCs were interesting and as 3 dimensional as its possible for them to be with their screentime. It's not starship combat it's THAT starship combat...

This is a LOT of starship combat for the DM to run. In the past when we've had multi ship fighting the shields and critical thresholds were simplified to cut down on the bandwidth. No such concession was made here. It's just a regular ship but there's three of them. You have to keep track of three ships, 3 hit points totals, 12 shield values spinning in space, x number of penalties from hitting critical thresholds, which ships have which systems at what levels of borked and a few other fight specific things...all while making 12 skill checks and 9? attacks per round. Running a ship is a job for an entire team of starfinders. The DM has to run 3 of them. It's the worst parts of starship combat for the DM cubed. It's enough to suck two stars out of the adventure.