Shadow of the Spider Moon
In general, Erik's already addressed most of the issues I see here, but I'll add a few more comments.
[First of all, thanks to ruleslawyer for the plug for my website (
www.andycollins.net). Actually, I visit my message boards almost every day, and frequently respond to questions or comments there. I try not to monopolize conversations too much, and I'll admit I don't respond to every post, but I try to provide an answer for every question I see that's directed to me. (I've already responded to the SJ questions posted there.) And if you really really need me to see something, you can always send it directly to me at
andy@andycollins.net. My response time is pretty good for direct queries.]
It's true that Shadow of the Spider Moon doesn't address every possible topic that might come up in a Spelljammer game. Erik and I agreed up front that we'd present a usable ruleset that referred to the core D&D rulebooks as much as possible, while also presenting the basis of a setting for DMs to use in their games.
Could I have written more? Of course. Would it have fit into the space provided? Almost certainly not. I'm not going to say that every decision we made was perfect for everyone, but I'm pretty happy with the balance we struck between mechanics and flavor, between rules and setting.
We had to paint in pretty broad strokes in order to cover such a wide topic in the 30,000 words or so we had to spend. (Think of it this way: if Shadow of the Spider Moon had been a separate book, it would be a mere 48 pages.) by necessity, that forces us to use the tools we've already got (such as the core books) and, occasionally, ignore (or skim through) some topics that might otherwise get complicated and use up our precious, precious word count.
Why formians and not thri-kreen? Because presenting thri-kreen (and believe me, I think thri-kreen are very cool) would have taken up space, while everyone has formians in the Monster Manual. Ditto for giff, neogi, and all the other interesting critters floating around in the SJ universe.
(And yes, I know that the spider-shaped ships of the original SJ game were neogi vessels, but with no neogi, I didn't want to lose the fantastic visual image of enormous spiders soaring through space. Thankfully, the presence of the drow meant we could revisit that image without having to use space to include a new monster.)
We *almost* included the arcane/mercane. In fact, they were part of my original outline (I pictured them as mysterious visitors, flying enormous pyramid-shaped vessels that resembled the ruins on Ashen) but I just couldn't justify the additional space they'd take up.
No, we don't specifically call out the existence of an "Elven Imperial Navy," but it wouldn't be hard to imagine something like that emerging from the forests of Perianth, if that's something you wanted. That's assuming the various houses could cooperate enough to put a whole fleet into action, but that's up to the DM...
You say gnomes aren't the same without giant hamsters? I don't mean to be too flip, but "Great!" I hope that each of the PC races looks a little different from what people are used to, both from older SJ and from 3E itself.
Yeah, three-dimensional combat is a bear. I wish I had the space (and, frankly, the expertise) to present a simple system to handle it in your game. Ultimately, our feeling was that if you liked 3-D space combat, you probably already have a favorite rules system for it (in which case any attempt we made would almost certainly fail in providing anything useful for you), and if you didn't like 3-D space combat, you wouldn't care about any rules we bothered to put in. Maybe we were wrong--if there's anything in there that I'm not really happy with, it's the fact that we couldn't give space combat a full treatment. If that happens to be what really peeves you, then I'm truly sorry.
As far as navigation goes, I suppose it works just like navigation in any other form would work--there are probably charts and landmarks (or "spacemarks"?) and such to use, familiar shipping lanes, and the like. To find something "off the beaten path" should be as difficult as finding an uncharted island in the middle of a huge ocean, but multiplied across a third dimension of searching. I suppose we could have included more on that topic, but we would have had to cut something else. I guess we thought that other subjects would be more interesting, and that most players wouldn't want to spend too much time on the mundanities of navigation. If you're really concerned about other travel times, you can certainly use those listed as a starting point to estimate others.
Erik and I appreciate all the interest that Shadow of the Spider Moon is getting. Like he said, this is just our take on a familiar setting, and we fully expected that it wouldn't please everyone. If we get the opportunity to revisit the setting, you can be sure that we'll re-examine topics like these to see if we can provide additional useful information for DMs and players in Shadow Moon games.
Thanks, everybody!
. I really would have liked to see a starmap, tho. 
