vastrix said:

Another fun way to instill paranoia is to ask to see their sheets & don't say why. My daughter nearly always objects with ", What, no, why?!!?!" I simply say ", Okay, you fail." She then grimaces & passes the sheet. Never gets old!

@ Siranui,

Agreed on many of your points, but the design philosophy seems to be trying to appeal to the tabletop community by coming up with stats for these sorts of things--just look at the Starship combat rules in RT or all the vehicles in RoB.  So I think they've decided to go the mechanics route rather than the abstraction route. (Of course, one doesn't have to buy those supps if one prefers abstraction.) But from a business perspective, can you blame them? There are a huge number of 40K players playing these RPGs now who love the idea of having rules for vehicles, Titans, etc. I am one of them--yes a table-top RPG heretic!

Oh, I'm not saying it's a bad business idea. It's just something that I probably couldn't be less interested in!

Ultimately, unless a GM is willing to roll the dice and potentially say at some point 'ok, that shot hits your reactor, you all die and loose everything. Including you three who don't have any spaceship combat skills, and have been sat there looking bored for the last two hours of spaceship combat', then formalised spaceship combat rules are a bit of a waste of ink.