I've been doing a lot of writing for Starfinder, and that means a lot of designing starships. I've become pretty comfortable with the rules for this, which are different from (but overlap in some interesting ways with) the design of monsters. This is particularly noteworthy because I've been designing quite a few monsters that are so big they fly around in space and function just like enemy starships.

Starship-sized monsters are super interesting, but they pose a design challenge: they've got to have all the statistics you'd find in a normal starship but still seem like actual living creatures that drift through space. You have to think about what they eat and how they eat it, how they fight, and how their natural attacks are somewhat like (or entirely unlike) conventional starship weapons in a fight.

Because of a few different projects piling up, I found myself designing four different starship-size creatures in a row. Then, just last night, I had to design a normal starship enemy. The experience was a little weird--wait, now I need to think about what a science officer or engineer would do aboard this ship? And how it has an actual power core and not a beating heart or psychoconductive nerve system, or whatever? I have to think about crew quarters for actual people on this thing?

I just thought it was neat to get back to the "normal" starship rules and find them so different from the living starship design I'd been doing!