>>96502373
PC are typically people not spaceships. Ship fighting ship is the province of war games not RPG.

Ship combat leads to either A) a minimum of 1 ship per PC which implies fleet vs fleet or B) somewhere you gave you have at least 1 ship with multiple PC on it.

They both lead to either i) PC being commander or ii) player assuming the NPC role of commander or iii) GM controlling the ship.

In iii the players might as well fuck off since the GM is reduced to playing both the friendly and opposing forces.

In ii the PC are all reduced to even worse dogsbodies than they usually are. The point of most RPG is that you have a PC, usually just the one, not that you play as a character who is not your PC.

In i you have a certain type of campaign where everyone has a spaceship and a fleet of spaceships might be a big hassle because the PC are all spread out across ships and the defies the notion of a party. You could also end up with players each having to control a group made of more support NPC than your typical old school party has henchmen because the commander needs his away team or you break verisimilitude even worse than Star Trek with a captains only part murderhoboing the galaxy.

B also comes with the potential problem that if everyone wants to be commander, someone has to suck it up and not be.

I've assumed larger ships, even capital ships, but you could play with everyone as a fighter pilot or whatever. Maybe your fighters have FTL so no carrier needed and every PC can fighter pilot as well as they can their other role.

The FASA Star Trep RPG integrated a starship combat board game well enough but even then starship combat took up the session, and that combat wasn't role playing it was board gaming. Trying to abstract ship combat away from board game defies all sense as current ideas of starship combat are all about manoeuvre, unless you opt for "over the horizon" combat where the ship is a missile/drone launcher and the PC might as well not be there.