That entirely illustrates my point. He shouldn't need to put a ton of work in. Everything should just be a simple it costs this, it takes this much space. You just have drop-down choices and it adds them up, providing warnings where you have added too much.
My ship spreadsheet doesn't have any macros and I don't even have drop-down selections. It isn't as function rich as Arkathan's but I don't need to accommodate a component until I need it in a ship. I haven't run any of the provided ships through it as I treat those as off-the shelf designs and one offs. If you buy those you get exactly those. If you want to modify them you need to do it in game (and then most people can't be bothered).
My comment is my requirement for the book not a criticism of the existing one, but it is based on my experience of the Robot Handbook and my own spreadsheet, I got frustrated with not being able to work out how pricing came out and we have had discussions here about what they should be. Words like "heavily discounted" in the book without any metrics are just annoying. The discrepancies came about from trying to list every robot already published in the new book, when none of those robots were designed using a unified set of rules. It was bound to be a kludge. It is also coloured by other ready-made design books by other publishers (Car Wars VG III, I am looking at you) that were contemporary with the CT editions where some of this inconsistency originated.
My hope is that you build a consistent and well structured spreadsheet* first. You use that to refine your rules. One you have that you can use it to generate new ships (possibly in the spirit of the old ones, but make it clear that these are updated designs to fulfil the same roles, not direct copies) and give them new names. Then draw deck plans for those new ships that are consistent with your deck plan rules. Every component described in the book should be exercised at least once. Have a couple of worked examples, focussing on the more fiddly aspects.
After release when inevitable typos are identified (no-one is perfect) produce an errata file on the downloads page and keep it up to date.
Put a version number in the book so that if a later edition is released that fixes some of the typos we know which are corrected.
*This needs testing by someone who is an expert in spreadsheets to ensure no errors have crept in or your spreadsheet will just compound errors. The spreadsheet should be as simple as possible. If it has look up tables then you should only use them once and any remaining calculations be based on that. Minimise macros and complex multi cell formulae. It is better to just add a column or row to calculate intermediate values so you can verify them as you go. You can always hide rows and columns later to tidy things up.
