The base difficulty is decided by the maneuver and the amount of actions being handled at once. If you beat the number for every two points you are over the next person on the maneuver gets a +1 bonus to their roll.
Say the maneuver for your part is a 7, between your skill and your roll added together, you get a 10. Then the Jonas would get a +1 bonus to his next part of the maneuver. If you would fail and get like a 5 total roll, then Jonas would get a -1 for his next part of the maneuver.
A simple manuever for helm would look like Match Speed. The total difficulty would be a 4 for you to beat on your roll including your flight operations skill roll of 5, so there is no real way you could fail that test unless you rolled a 1 on your luck die. For each maneuver there will be certain bonus it contains and certain negatives.
A defensive pattern would have the captain issue you an order for Gamma-4. This consists of three actions a Hard About, A Z-axis movement, and an Open movement. Because there is three actions all being done at the same time it would raise each difficulties target number by 3.
The first action Come About is basically a 180 turn that is a target number of 4 for the helmsman basically, but now it becomes an 7. So if the helmsman rolls really well, he grants himself a bonus for the second roll for the Z-axis maneuver.
The Z-axis manuever is basically an up or down movement that is normally around an 7 difficulty, but is now an 10 difficulty while the helmsman performs all three actions at once.
Open is another easy manuever with about a 4 target number, but is then modified to an 7.
So all together, the helms has turned the ship around 180 degrees, dropped it down on the Z axis and is trying his best to get open ground between him and the attacker.
There are also ranges in this game, so most ships do not want to be in point blank range in a slugging match. This way the maneuvers come in, to try to make this seem like the fight has movement going on.
So basically there are three main categories of the actions: Helm, Tatical, and Command. Each one is broken down to having a certain prerequisite skill level for use. Easy manuevers would require a level one skill shipboard systems (flight ops or tactical specialization) or Starship Tactics and a target number around 4. Medium Manuevers would require a level three skill level and have a target number around 7. The most difficult manuevers would require a level 5 skill level and a target number around 10.
Other officers can also provide bonuses too. Say the science officer wants to use the sensors to provide tactical with the weakest point in the shields or a good heading to provide the helm to go behind an asteroid, depending on that persons roll, he could also provide the other player with a bonus on his next skill roll.
The engineering officer can be doing emergency repairs after a section has been hit and knocked offline, or he can finely tune the phaser array and provide Jonas with a small bonus to damage.
Due to your previous experience and rank, most fo the players currently have anywhere between the level 3 or level 5 for those skills.
Does this seem fair to all of you?
On posting this manuevers, which would be easier to refer to by alphabetical or broken down into levels under command, helm, and tactical?
