Having never really used starfighters in our game (except as adversaries), it had never really dawned on me just how fragile they could be. Now that one of our players wants to use a Jedi Starfighter, I'm looking at those numbers and thinking how terrible they are! Sure, with the right talents you can commit force dice and you can add a little defensive flying but otherwise they are very squishy and setback dice on attacks aren't all that amazing.

One idea that I'm considering, and that certainly makes flavourful sense is adding your ship's maneuverability to your defence score for any zone- e.g. a +3 Jedi Starfighter, A-Wing or Tie Fighter is getting some bonus defence because they are nimble- most trade that off on the fact that they are low in hull and standard shields (if any!). It would also mean that talents like Skilled Jockey would actually mean that heavier ships would be slightly harder to hit with a skilled pilot (increasing their effective handling as close to 0 as possible) and big clunky ships would add Boost dice to enemies- wouldn't make too much difference as often the damage and armour makes successes (and even crits) pretty negligible.

Thoughts?

I'm personally planning on using the Genesys rules for vehicles from now on, as there are several changes that make vehicle encounters much easier and more smooth. For instance, there's a maneuver that allows the pilot to suffer system strain up to their ranks in piloting to reduce damage from a successful hit for that same amount. It also reduces critical hits, potentially ignoring damage or crits altogether!

I took a look at the talents in Star Wars and it seems the only one that is affected by using the Genesys rules instead is the Full Stop talent, which lets you do the same thing that the decelerate maneuver does in Genesys. That talent only shows up once in Star Wars and can be avoided, so it's not a huge deal that it is made obsolete.

I want to point out is that a setback dice and upgrading from a difficulty to a challenge dice is roughly equal for the chance of success (not despair is naturally not a thing on setback). Meanwhile increasing the difficulty and adding two setback dice is roughly equal as well. People really seem to underappreciated setback dice. 4 setbacks are a solid start for your defense, spending your advantages on increasing defense on your checks ON TOP can do wonders, especially when combined with evasive maneuvers and intuitive evasion.

To be honest, the genesys speed mechanic seems super odd to me and having the target difficulty based on distance instead of speed hits fighters super hard and seems very unlike star wars.
Still, the new GtA, dangerous driving and brace for impact seem to be great additions to the system. If you add those starship combat becomes a lot slower.