A lot of this is up to the GM/player and made a little more difficult by weird organization
Yeah, I'm beginning to put things together now, it's a lot of information in a lot of different places though. I'm working on a flow chart and some task lists simplified into a four week month, and it's starting to look sensible.
Travel time management is the hardest factor to calculate for me
I agree. My solution to this was just use mekhq for travel times. It just does other things a little too automatically for me.
Pheonix - cheers for the references. I hadnt really looked much into the merc books, as I assumed they would have been superseded completely by CO, but it seems like they will be pretty handy for my purposes. I like your idea of a space battle on arrival - this may be the motivation I need to start learning aerospace rules :-)
I jumped on hot spots on the web store too, just a shame it doesn't have the second book of player info, only the GM stuff. The web store says it does, but it ain't there. Sigh.
Anyway, if I work up any useful spreadsheets, cheat sheets or infographics, I'll pretty them up for public consumption and post them, hopefully help out some other struggler noob GMs.