You mean, like, sending them the PDF and deleting the copy on your machine and asking them to delete the shared copy of the PDF when they “hand it back to you” (as seated at the table only one at a time could have access to the physical copy), right?
Possible, but a bit too impractical for my tastes. 
The issue then borders on sharing materials…since Modiphius has treated me so well, I’m very reluctant to do anything that might be considered piracy etc. If they said it would be ok, then I’d be fine with doing it,.
but I doubt they would. Instead, I allow them to activate the sources I own on the character creator (with a similar logic, they’d be allowed those options if we were physically together, so they can online). Giving them the PDF makes it uncontrolled at that point.
I buy cheap tablets from Walmart and put my RPG pdfs on them so they are available for my players.
If you’re keeping the tablets and they’re just using them when at your game, then that’s fine IMO. No different to sharing books. I play online with people that I’ve never met though, so a different dynamic.
Which VTT do you use? Foundry VTT has a pdf uploader that you can’t download from for this very situation.
Well, while I maintain that every person in an RPG group shouldn’t need to buy a book to play the game, I’m moving on. The pdf was released to preorders today; what do the people who got it think?
(I had a preorder with Modiphius, but discovered my local shop could preorder and went to support them, so I’m waiting on that to come in for a receipt to get the pdf.)
Is the pdf of the gm kit out too, or just the core book?
Interesting. We use Forge, which apparently is a part of Foundry, so I’ll look into that. Thanks.
We agree they shouldn’t have to. It’s the logistics 
Happy to move on though.
I haven’t had chance to scour it yet (several young children makes that difficult!), but it looks good from my skim.
Species abilities generally seem more powerful than their 1e counterparts. By more powerful, largely they seem more useful. In 1e, they were quite niche a lot of the time. Not always, but often enough that they didn’t feel important. Most of the ones that I’ve looked at instead feel like they could potentially come into play most sessions.
On the flip side, they’re kind of bland, sometimes. Like, the Trill get Bonus Momentum when they succeed at a task after buying dice with Momentum. Andorians are exactly the same, but you have to buy with Threat instead. Neither has that flavour that screams “this is my species!” that I was hoping for. Cardassians can tell that you’re lying, for another example - perhaps I’m wrong here, but it feels more like Cardassians are able to lie than detect lies. That said, some are flavourful - Vulcans can resist being emotionally compromised (but suffer a drawback that once they’re worn down, emotion tasks become even harder for them), which does scream Vulcan.
I guess I was hoping they’d take the opportunity to slam home the flavour…but while some they did, others weren’t so flavourful (although species talents can allow for that). They did good, just not A*.
I haven’t had chance to look at the other stuff yet. I looked at that because I promised my group a judgement on whether I’d let them have the specifies ability or not.
Considering the quickstart, there were not many surprises in the PDFs. Character conversion from 1st edition to 2nd should be pretty easy overall. Atttributes, departments, values and talents are all the same numbers, so you just have to get updated talents, add species abilities and pastimes and that’s it.
Spaceframes are a little different, but not too much. They have less overall points in systems, mission profiles incorporate not just departments, but one point in systems as well. Galaxy would have the same points overall, Akira one less, to mention two examples.
The spaceframes and species are solid. Overall I like the species ability which is in addition to the species trait and two optional talents per species. As has been mentioned, the species ability is not in all cases species defining, but it is something players can use with solid mechanics.
Spaceframes often come with special rules like pulsephaser cannons on the Defiant class or a better shuttlebay for the Akira class that allows small crafts extra minor actions after launch and the ability to take cover close to the Akira.
Overall I like what I read so far. I didn’t get to talents and starship combat tough.
On the downside, there is no Orion spaceframe despite playable Orions and Orion starship sheets. And a lot of species from the 1st edition books are still missing. The toolkit is 40 pages + 16 sides reference sheets (8 doubles) and the GM screen and comes at the price of a full book. I don’t regret buying in, since I bought some of the 1st edition books mostly for more options as well and the toolkit delivers with additional rules and spaceframes but I feel that maybe 10 or 15 pages more for 1-3 spaceframes and some additional core species like Benzite, Bolian, Caitian and Reman would be more reasonable for a 40 Euro “book”.
I am not very much into art, so I didn’t analyse it too much. I’d say it looks good or at least fine in most cases. Some pictures like the Andorian species image are recycled from 1st edition but most are new. The images are a mix of styles from various shows and movies. I would have prefered if they sticked with TNG/DS9 aesthetics, but since the CRB is for every era it makes sense and did not bother me too much. The only art I did not like were the species images for Cardassians (I get diversity, but a black Cardassian?) and Klingons (a Discovery season one Klingon).
That’s my first impressions from flipping through the book and toolkit so far. Overall I like both quite a lot.
Why not?
How many Cardassians did we see on screen? Like, fifty? At the end of the Dominion War, the dominion killed 800 million on Cardassia Prime, alone. So there’ll be billions of Cardassians. Why couldn’t there be black Cardassians? Or completely blue ones? They’re fictuous, they can have every colour we can imagine. 
Yes, but why should they? They are a reptilian species that avoids bright light. Every Cardassian we have seen so far has grey skin. It’s not even a human shade of “white” and there have been black actors playing Cardassians, having the same shade of grey as all of them. As you said, it is fictitious, so why would there be a need to humanize all the alien species?
And for the record, this is not about some kind of racism cause it’s a black Cardassian. I just think the decision was made for diversity and not because some artist thought there should be more skin tones for Cardassians. I would also be opposed to a blue one, or one with three arms, since they can look however we can imagine them. Same goes for deep red Orions for example.
I don’t really have any issue with there being non-grey Cardassians. Given the various incarnations of Klingons, Romulans (and even Cardassians!), I don’t think there’s a problem with back Cardassians. That said, the location seems…odd? Like in the species selection section, you’d expect the most stereotypical and recognisable examples to exemplify the species. I’d have expected those to be the kind of pictures that anyone can look at and instantly identify. The Bajorans were another species with an odd choice in that regard.
I have to admit, I did groan when I saw that they’d picked the most controversial form of Klingon to represent them.
As far as I can tell with the Space Frames their math is exactly the same as the Utopia book so if you have that you’re golden. You just gotta make a logical choice what system point to add to the mission profiles from that book that didn’t get reprinted in CRB 2E.
As far as the species that weren’t reprinted seems easy to just pick one of the species talents and make that the species ability until they get an updated version.
It really does seem like conversion of old material is as easy as they said it would be. Which is rare for an RPG company lol.
Yeah, they picked a Cardassian that you would see nowhere in canon, a Klingon that you would see in Discovery season one only and the Bajoran has a weird forehead. Some odd choices and that’s why I mentioned the images. It’s in no way something that sours the books for me but in my opinion it is a bad choice.
My favourite earth-reptils include those of the Iguania suborder. Talk Iguanas (e.g. Dr. Zimmerman’s “Leonard”) or (“bearded”) “dragons”. While not necessarily sun-avoiding, both the Mwanza flat-headed rock agama and Sinai Agama are true beauties! 
As I said: With about fifty Cardassians on-screen, our sample is way too small to conclude anything reasonable about the “normal range of colours” of Cardassian skin (or scales, for that matter). On a side-note: the guys of the Blue Man Group aren’t naturally blue-skinned and neither are (I suppose) the creepy killers in Firefly.
Yes, it was stated that the formulas in UP would be reused in 2e.
Glad to hear that conversion indeed will be easy! Sadly, I had no time to skim through the books myself, yet all I read here gets me more excited!
Glad to see that the D’Deridex’s Scale is still inconsistent 
Overall I’m very excited for 2e and I’ll convert my campaign and all PCs this weekend.
True to the heart of Star Trek where the Klingons have four of the exact same ship in different sizes because the producers pay no attention to that.
I’m wondering when my book will turn up. They said it was on time for the UK (woot!), but I’m not sure when in August that actually means. I find it much easier to parse the bigger picture with a physical book. Digital is great for looking up single rules or aspects of them (eg How much damage does a type-2 phaser do again?), but I need physical to really grasp how it all fits together. I’m weird, I know.
I’ve searched the whole pdf and can’t find how Reserve Power is determined.
PC ships essentially all have 1 point of Reserve Power that refills every Scene. They can use it once and it’s gone. You can perform certain Actions to regain it though.