Oh, I’m surprised they don’t have scaling effects for people/ships/capital ships. That’s one of my favourite bits of tech from d6 Star Wars (which I’ve never played, but had described to me with great enthusiasm many times).

I can’t agree more with the pressure of constantly improvising mixed results, particularly in combat. It seems right for the genre: nothing ever goes right without four or five things going wrong. But it is so much pressure.

I wonder if it would be totally wrong to use Advantage to make narrative tweaks. Like in your radio-droid example, maybe you could spend that Advantage, not to let the droid radio out, but to say “Oh-ho, you just noticed that one of those droids is carrying a backpack communicator. You recognize it as the sort of thing that can do ship-to-ship comms,” and then only later spend further dice to activate it.