Star Fleet Battles Designer's Edition, Expansion #1

After we converted the original pocket game into a boxed game in the fall of 1979, the wholesalers asked us about doing expansions in order to fully develop the market. This pocket-game-format expansion included about 40 pages of new rules, new ships, new scenarios, new empires, and updates to the previous rules. These included some old-style SSDs, the first X-ships, two new empires (Hydrans and Andromedans), fighters and carriers, and a lot more. Looking back, it's amazing how much new stuff we crammed into this tiny package. Rules updates allowed plasma torpedoes to fire on any impulse, added proximity fuzes for photons, allowed Tholians to move asteroids around for use as web anchors, allowed ships to shoot at asteroids, created collateral damage for wild weasels, added saucer separations, and defined a lot of things that should have been obvious but apparently were not. New weapons included displacement devices, TR beams, power absorbers, type-F plasma torpedoes, Gatling phasers, m