Space combat for me has always been a bit tricky. I have trouble visualizing where everyone is in space and keeping track of relative ranges after you have more than about 4 ships in the sky. I also noticed a few times when players would ask their current speed I'd say one number and realize later when I listened again that I'd got it wrong. (I know, they should be tracking that, but so should I)
What I really wanted was a way to easily visualize a number of ships and their relationships to each other, as well as where everyone is on the ship without having to resort to a flat star map. One of my favorite gameplay features of EotE is that you don't have to use maps if you don't want to, and with space combat in Star Wars being fairly three dimensional, I didn't want to be looking at a chess board.
Enter, my cockpit :
This is the .png that I printed out from Photoshop. I wanted the layout to be fairly modular, and it should work well for most freighter sized vessels. Currently the ship my party is flying is a reflagged Krayt Fang from the beginner game, so I have an orange metal background and the changed name up top. If they ever change, I will change the texturing/name without much trouble. I also have the ability to shift around which speeds are available (not grayed out), as well as change the numbers in the Pokéball as well as the ship outline and the layout (say should they have side shields).
And here it is in Roll20:
I have the cockpit itself as well as the stars cape on the map layer. By making the 'view screen' transparent, I can easily swap in the image of whatever system they are in, as well was any flavor images I want (space dock, docking bay, imperial fleet...). The player tokens reflect their current status for strain and health and update directly to the character sheet. (The greyed out token is a player who isn't on the ship at the moment; he's on the GM layer so I can place him back in without much trouble at any time)
The Speed and System Strain/Hull Strength read outs are controlled simply by drawing boxes on Roll 20. Once they're drawn I can delete them at will, in the case of the Damage readout; or move it up and down the display for the speed. I went with this system mainly because it will allow the guys to have a much heavier ship without having to redo the cockpit too much; This layout will get me to 50 hull strength and 25 System Strain without having to redo that section.
The radar display on the right has an enemy ship on it at the moment, but it's on the GM layer (why it looks grayed out). I can add it onto the token layer with a simple right click when I want the encounter to begin. I flirted with the idea of making a 360 targeting display, but in the end decided that's getting to close to 'space chess', and I wanted this just to work as a cheat sheet for my players/me.
I'd love feedback/suggestions on ways to make this better. If you're interested in using this for your own games, feel free; You can get a full sized PNG of this cockpit here , and if you have Photoshop and want to personalize it, you can download it here (warning: PSD is 55mbs)
