>dying in starfighter combat is for cannon fodder
I dunno. I mean, yes thats true, but I look at it like this - it depends on exactly what your trying to emulate.
Lets say you actually are running an AoR campaign about a Rebel X-Wing squadron, or even an Imperial TIE Fighter Squadron. There are a lot of ways to do that kind of a campaign. Personally, I like to write out every NPC in detail, and make the losses and victories meaningful. But that only works if you have PC's who care about NPC's.
While I'm not trying to say that star wars campaigns should be super gritty with character death happening all the time - using just the X-Wing novels as a guide, you can say that starfighters have ejection seats, and once you have a starfighter shot out from under you, the danger becomes "do i get captured by the enemy, or rescued by my side? preferably before I run out of air, or freeze to death" That may be a bit more gritty then you sound like you prefer - but its a way to have consequences without character death, and could open into new opportunities
>PC gets shot up, ejects, captured by the enemy
>player party wants to rescue him, goes off reservation to do so
My original point is, that while FFG's starfighter rules aren't perfect, and even minor tweaks are necessary (like I suggested above), but the lethality isn't one of them necessarily, and can actually be a benefit in a way.
But its all academic for me - I haven't run a starfighter based campaign yet, and all starfighter\ship combat I've done in FFG (as a GM), has been with bigger ships, freighters and the like. One time a PC actually was in a starfighter (a B-Wing), it was doing CAS for the player group, and took a missile from the ground, which dropped it to 0 Hull, and the player had to limp it home with hard rolls. He still racked up an impressive list of dead minions, so he didn't complain.
