I am going to put this topic here (without a "reply to" capability) so that people who are interested can find it and know where this product stands.

This is one of over 100 ideas on the list of "products we might do someday". We cannot work on every idea simultaneously, and we cannot select all 100 ideas to be the next thing
published. For every one of those 100 ideas, there are players who fondly wish it would be the next one, and who believe that many or most others agree with them. Every year,
we add more ideas to the list than we could hope to publish in a single year.

For now, nobody is working on SCM, we aren't seeking outside input, and it's just an idea. There is no specific schedule for its publication. Sure, we've been talking about it
for 10 years, but then, we've talked about other products for that long without having worked on them or pubished them, and we have of course published ideas that were thought
up much more recently.

There is a specific reason why this product has gone nowhere, that being the following theory: The product must be "perfect" and free of "loopholes" or it will damage the player base. If someone can find a loophole, then his regular gaming group is going to be upset when he builds and unbeatable ship, and he's going to be upset when we start issuing page after page of errata to make it illegal. Since the product cannot be perfect, it is too dangerous to print. Of all of the product ideas kicking around in SFB, this is the only one to have a significant number of people who do not want it ever to be published. Not just people who won't buy it, but people who don't want anybody else to be able to buy it. Frankly, there are probably more people who want to block publication than buy the product.

Many years ago (when TFG-4 was still alive) they noted the number of people who wanted this and "suggested" we print it. We noted the "high negatives" and they agreed it could not be published. Later, Bruce Graw came to them with the "custom design system" which works in a very different way, one that would not be as popular but which wouldn't have any negatives. TFG announced that "ship construction manual" would be published and planned (with ADB agreement) to use the Bruce Graw system. The problem was that once players found out that SCM would in fact be the CDS not R7, they rioted, refused to buy CDS. Many demanded R7 and resented being scammed by CDS in R7 clothing, but many others demanded that neither CDS nor R7 be published. Every now and then, somebody who doesn't know that half of the story stumbles upon an old reference to the impending publication of CDS and asks why it never appeared since it was announced 15 years ago. That's why.

It wouldn't be THAT hard to design a system that could produce ships from whole cloth. The Barbarians in C4 are about 90% of that system. Give players a wide variety of basic hull frames and let them pick whether to make the extra boxes labs or APRs, phasers or drone racks, or whatever. The problem is that what most players who want SCM really want is the ability to refit, revise, or tweek existing ships. Take any given ship, dump the probe and all but two labs, add batteries and APRs and phaser-1s, widen the weapon arcs, etc. And such a system would be grossly more complicated to design.