ICON questions

So, after years of not touching the ICON system, I'm refamiliarizing myself with it and liking what I'm seeing. I had forgotten a lot about the good stuff in the books.

Two questions from my reading this weekend. I'm hoping a veteran user of the system can help shed some light.

Ship to ship combat: Is it fast? My glance at the power distribution rules makes me wonder if combat is a slow painful process. I'd like a quick, cinematic ruleset.

Do the rules allow for most of the PCs to have something to contribute to ship to ship combat? I had run some fights with the Coda system and remember a couple of the players had nothing to do.

Trills: Anyone have any experience with problems running a Trill PC out of the book? The DS9 core book has a nice Trill template, but I was curious if the actual play caused problems or significant imbalance.

Starship Combat.

I wish I could help you with the rules. But like you I wanted a cinematic system, and in doing so, threw all the rules (yes, even Spacedock) out of the window... Some of the details I kept;

Spacedock skill modifiers
Critical Damage tables and technobabble
Starship shields and hull levels
weapon damage details

But I applied it according to plot. Sometimes things would go very well and the players would do well, othertimes they started to get an Ensign alert (the number of ensigns flying through the air due to explosions denotes how much danger they were in...)

It all worked quite well and ensured that things happened the way I wanted them too and that the players starship does not get destroyed by a lucky critical hit... Shuttles however are fair game.

The Trill.

As far as I can remember the Trill rules play fairly well straight out of the book, although a few old-timers might recall that Jonas Bashir, Greg Davis and I had done a bit of work with some Trill stuff, but never really went very far (back when I did the Maquis sourcebook and most of the Psionics sourcebook)... I ought to post some of the stuff I have in the collected notes here someday as there were symbiont merits and flaws among a few other rules (we never did bother with Styro's suggestion that all Symbiont 'worms' be allergic to Salt as a compulsary flaw)...

Basic rule of thumb the more background and history given to the past hosts the more stuff the player should get out of it, with one advanced option under consideration was to apply exactly the same system as the ICON Further Tours of Duty (at 5 point per tour/host life...)