My quick review:
It's a 12 page 3.1MB PDF, of which 8 pages are actual content, two pages are front and back cover, and 2 pages are "legal mumbo jumbo".
Graphics: The deckplans and various views of the ship look really nice. What were those made with? I'm a little perplexed about one thing though - the upper deck shows the cylindrical engineering modules on the rear sides of the ship, but the lower deck plans seem to imply that the engineering modules are only present on the upper deck level. But when you look at the 3D plan views of the ship, you can see the engineering modules are centred in the middle of the vertical axis of the ship, and span both upper and lower deck levels. Or am I misinterpreting something here?
Another thing that had me scratching my head a bit was the fuel purifier, or more precisely the cargo hold. Wouldn't it have been a more sensible design to put the fuel right next to the engineering modules (and the fuel purifier) and the cargo holds at the front of the ship? Instead you need to run pipes from the fuel tanks through the cargo hold area to the fuel purifier, which sounds like a recipe for disaster...
I liked the idea of the 'open' garden and pool at the front of the ship though - very cute
. Sounds like quite a comfy ride really!
Text: Layout is very good. The first two pages are a detailed overview of the ship, including quirks and idiosyncracies. It's generally readable but I think it does need an edit - I found the writing style to be a little too 'chatty', and there are quite a few extra/misplaced/missing commas and apostrophes and plurals. The lower deck plan mentions a "dinning area" too. The editing errors are noticeable, but don't render it unreadable.
It sounds a bit weird to me to have two lasers and a sandcaster on the same triple turret. I guess it works since sandcasters launch barrels of sand, but I'd imagine that you don't want to be firing all three weapons at once since it'd be a bit pointless to fire the lasers in the same direction as the cloud of sand that popped out from the barrel that the sandcaster just fired.
The deck plan explanations are good. The manoeuvre drive explanation goes a little overboard on the technobabble for my tastes though (it's very "super" apparently!). It actually sounds like a fusion torch drive (not unlike TNE's HEPlaR), which turns into something more like an H2/O2 chemical rocket near the ground (which to be honest isn't really something you actually want firing off near the ground either).
Although it's described as a reaction drive, in game terms it's described as a normal reactionless M-drive-2 - there's no mention of it using up extra hydrogen fuel in the stat block (and from the descriptoin, one would think that it should use up extra fuel).
Stat block: I haven't checked this because I'm not that familiar with MGT's design system, so I'll have to take the authors' word for it that the stats all make sense. Stats are only presented in MGT format. I thought the size comparison with the space shuttle was cute
.
Adventure seeds: Three adventure seeds are given - they're pretty decent, though I'm not really sure how well the ship would serve as a mercenary transport in the second seed given it's only got six staterooms and a lot of space taken up by 'luxuries'.
One more oddity is that the legal stuff at the front mentions that "the new components and there (sic) descriptions found on p12" are Open content... but there isn't a page 12 (page 12 is the back cover) and there aren't any new components described anywhere else.
Overall: It probably sounds like I'm being over-critical, but that's what comes out of being able to spend a lot of time analysing a short product. But I actually quite like this - I think it's well worth the $4 (oddly enough the back cover says that it should be priced a $5, but DTRPG is selling it for $4). Yes, the editing isn't 100% but then what is nowadays... it's still perfectly readable. I can't say whether or not the design oddities I pointed out are problems (I'll let the authors answer that), but they had me wondering anyway. But despite those it's still a very well put together product that can be slotted into pretty much any game, and hopefully these guys will make more.
I'd give it two thumbs up (actually it's not perfect, but I don't want to cut off any knuckles!), or more accurately I'd give it a 4/5. Good first effort, methinks!
