Nice work you guys, I can't wait to play this!
As far as Ion Cannon colors: In Empire Strikes Back the Ion Cannon blasts had a bright yellow head and a magenta tail. It kind of looked like a comment.
The notion that Ion Cannon blasts are blue was invented by the lazy writers and "researchers" at West End Games (sometimes called WEG) and the games opted to use that rather than relying on the canon material.
Most of the official tech guides (The Essential Guide Series, the The SW Technical Journal, and various RPG material) just makes stuff up without bothering to look at the films or consult the notes of the model makers, who almost always wrote notes down about size.
A couple of well-educated fans have taken it upon themselves to thoroughly research this stuff and produce accurate results. Many of these sites also have extensive lists of weapons and ships. Here are a few sites I use:
The Star Wars Technical Commentaries by Dr. Curtis Saxton. This guy went on to write the Star Wars: Episode II: Incredible Cross-sections. He is also a working theoretical astrophysicst. Some of the stuff yall might enjoy most are:
-An extensive listing of Imperial captial ships from all the various official material. This will help you flesh out the Imperial fleet with more than just ISD's and VSD's.
-A complete listing of all Mon Calamri vessels. Good for the same reasons.
-Size analysis of the Super Star Destroyers and the Death Star. Using notes from the model makers and designers, as well as analyzing images of the films and comparing them to other ships, he concludes that the SSD is actually closer to 16km in length, not 8 and that the first death star is around 100 miles in diamater (160km) and that the DS2 is somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 miles (800km) in diamater.
Star Destroyer.Net: By Mike Wong. Contains a turbolaser analysis which gives you some ideas of how powerful SW weapons are, as well as their charactersics (turbolaser blasts explode after a set distance, they have KE, etc.) as well as his Trek vs. Wars page, which has lots of info on the hyperspace and sublight speed capabilites of SW vessels, as well as other technology such as jamming, inderdiction fields, and so on.
Bob Brown's Star Wars Discussions: An extensive essay on lightsabres as well as discussions on starship design, and various other Star Wars related discussions. By Dr. Bob Brown.
