Hi, I just played the demo through, and I must say I’m impressed. I would buy the game right now but I don’t have that much money, so I think I will need a bit encouragament. Here is a few questions:
1: Is there a free-play mode? (A mode where you can decide how much funds and pilots ans stuff you have?)
2: Is the modding community active? (I had a quick glance over it and it seems to be pretty good.)
3: Is the game easily moddable? Not that I would mod it (I’m completley hopeless in such things) but the basic game will get boring after a while, and I’m itching to play e.g a Babylon 5 mod.
4: Is it easy to change between mods?
Can’t help with the mod question since I lack the time to dig into that aspect of GSB. But I’ve also asked your question 1 (free play/mission editor) and the answer is no, it doesn’t exist, but you can edit missions by modding the game’s data. Which would imply an active modding community.
That being said don’t let the lack of a mission editor prevent you from purchasing. There are only a few mission parameters and the canned missions provide plenty of variety as is. Just playing with ship design, fleet deployment, and ship orders has provided loads of fun for our family. In fact, compared to Xbox 360 games and table-top miniatures games the US $22 we spent on GSB is a HUGE value…it provides loads of playing time per unit cost.
We’ve been playing a “hot seat” campaign using a work-around with the challenge system and a number of my friends in our local game club are now interested.
1: Yes and no… People post up challenges with fun fleets they’ve made (there’s hundreds of these up already,) but they are almost all deployments based on the conditions of the existing single player scenarios. The base scenarios are varied enough that the variety in the challenges people post up is pretty big. It is possible to make your own scenarios, if you’re comfortable with editing text files etc (what I mean is, it’s not built in, but it’s almost trivial to ‘mod’ a new scenario in if you really want.)
2 & 3: It appears so, there’s a Star Wars themed mod already, and a WWII naval mod, for example. I’ve been playing about a month now though, and haven’t actually tried any mods yet (there’s that much variety in the basic game already, plus new features have kept getting added, like the carrier module.)
4: At the moment, it looks like it’s not trivial. Copy+paste the game folder sort of thing 
However the developer seems keen on making his game accessible for modders, so hopefully he’ll add some sort of in-game mod selection.
As for encouragement… Seriously, buy the game. It’s awesome. It’s less than 25 bucks. I’ve got more value out of this game than many of the AAA titles I’ve bought in the past. It’s one of the most entertaining Indie games I’ve played.
Thaks for the info, I think i will buy the game. Also had a better look at the modding board, seems to be pretty promising.
Welcome aboard, von bork. We do indeed have a lot going on with regards to modding. Check out the wild new dreadnought-class hulls I’ve just introduced at the Mod Forum to complement the one I originally made for the Federation. Nasty. 
I have some mods as well. Some change ship sizes and module amounts and other things to make the game more fun. I’ve also made a few of my own ships.
You can get them all at the forum.
What is the full game download size?
54.7 MB