Originally posted by BlackStar
Ah! I had this problem a little while back and it drove me nuts! I finally opened the derelict.exe file with WINZIP and copied the ships.tbl and stars.tbl into my data\tables directory directly.
Now I just have to remember to rename it to something else so my 8 yr old can keep playing the main campaign...
What he said.

I didn't realise you had NO tables whatsoever, or I'd have said this too!

I actually used the Derelict stuff as my base data, instead of the standard FS2 stuff - avoided this problem, and meant I didn't have to keep chopping and changing my /data/ directories around all the time. All the mods and stuff I get go straight into it, rather than having separate directories for each one.