My first one will be the Big 4 then: EA, Minbari, Centauri, and Narn; Ships of the Fleet ships for now. (Starting small and all that). Won't be relying on any fancy formulas, going to be looking at the ship sheets and making good guesses. Always open to suggestions.
This is a good way to approach any conversion. My only extra piece of advise would be to also convert the key ship from each of the League navies to use as reference points so that you can make sure that your conversion approach still works for those empires, too. Those would be: Abbai (Lakara), Brakiri (Avioki), Drazi (Sunhawk), Pak'ma'ra (Sim'sall'e maybe?), Vree (Xorr or Xill).
Okay, here's my basic list. All ships are from the B5Wars Ships of the Fleet source materials.
I thought about this the last week, too, and I think the approach you took here is interesting, and you could almost "accordion" the upper unit class sizes out another level if you wanted to so that all of the "cruisers" in your conversion were CB and then adjust upwards from there. For example, the Hyperion could be a cB, the Omega a BB, and then the Nova or Warlock a DN. That might give you more CP to work with, too. Alternatively, you could leave the Hyperion as a CA and then have the Omega, G'Quan, and Primus all be CB.
Where I'm stuck right now is what I'd call a simplified ISD (In Service Date) that works with the 2nd Ed rules. If I could get a handle on that, I could start statting out ships. Figured I'd put my work so far out there and get some input on it.
The easiest approach I can think of is to convert the ships that you want to use, then sort them by B5 ISD and then just apply a VBAM ISD that goes 3000+ from there. Then you don't have to worry about those large, awkward gaps between ships in some B5 fleets. In cases where multiple ships are available in the same year in the B5 list you just have to decide which should be Year X, the next X+1, and so on.
Or, in other words, what Will said
I did that for my FASA Trek conversion I did a few weeks ago. I converted the stardates to Star Trek in-universe years, and then apportioned them as needed to build the timeline.
I've so far avoided using formulas - the last spreadsheet I saw and modified used them heavily, and the formulas I added just made it more complex. Just wish I could remember who it was that made that sheet though.
I've found that the 2e construction system's shift AWAY from formulas was a very important one, and it seems to have made actually using it much simpler. I find that I can typically eye ball about what kinds of stats two units should have relative to each other, and then I calculate the CP used and manually adjust from there to make it fit.
For my own stab at a B5 conversion, I also found myself not using the Tech Bonus rules, per se, but instead slowly adjusting stats upwards as one cruiser replaced another or as a new tech came online that needed to be worked in. Like the Avioki might have AF 2 when it is first introduced with those Gravitic Bolts, but the Gravitic Pulsar bumps it up to AF 3. Those slow upgrades eventually fall in line with the Tech Bonus rules, at least in spirit.
Onto real thoughts though. Bases in B5 Wars tend to be large, and are probably not nearly as common as minefields and DefSats. At the same time, everyone in the B5 universe had pretty established navies at the time too and those bases had probably been around for a good while. Base construction rules have changed as well (built at the same rate as everything else now). Think I'm going to make a separate table for determining actual base 'classes'.
That's probably for the best. I'd almost be tempted to make a table of the starbases and their ramming factors and then adjusting them down by a uniform multiplier to find approximations on your other table. Or you could eye ball it and say that this base should be as strong as this ship and run with it. Bases are such strange things because they CAN be powerful, but most people don't seem to use them.
On the subject of variants, for the type of force lists it sounds like you're trying to build I'm almost thinking you could ignore most of the major variants and just include the "iconic" version of each ship, especially if you're not applying any kind of Tech Bonus over time. That way you'd have a single Hyperion instead of a half dozen versions of it. Exception can then be made in cases where a variant is actually important (like the Hyperion Assault variant, but you could always use the Tantalus instead -- did that ship ever make it into B5W? I might be remembering a fan conversion).
I do have to say that a welcome byproduct of the 2e construction rules is that the unit availability rules from 1e are almost superfluous because variants tend to have more special abilities, and that inherently increases the costs of the ships to the point that you're not going to be building a lot of them.
Can't decide what I want to do for the Minbari - Stealth or Jammer. Think Stealth works better for the setting. Think I'm going to use a "Matter" trait (thanks Jay), basically an anti-Armor trait, same cost as Armor, for matter weapon heavy ships. Going to give EA ships Armor, better reflects Interceptors I feel. Missile ships are obvious, thinking of adding Missile (E) trait for races (like the Narn) that use energy torpedoes.
I would go with Jammer for the Minbari over Stealth, if only because the Minbari weren't cloaked the enemy just had a hard time locking on and their sensors tended to overload the EA's systems. Jammer also means that the Minbari will be able to lock down enemy Scouts to the point that they don't have any scout functions available during combat, which seems a decent approximation of that in VBAM.
Giving EA ships Armor seems like a good solution for the Interceptors!
For the Narn energy mines, another option would be to use Disruptor, as most of the tactical use of the energy mines in the game seemed to be as an area denial weapon that would force an enemy to evade them. Giving the Narns a weapon that reduces enemy formations seems to cover that, but doing it as a Missile would also work.