Thread:Wazat/@comment-2600:6C40:1900:2F0:AD40:9F2B:E453:B3B1-20180111005406/@comment-454133-20180111012528

For small ships, I and many other players use Tackle Boxes -- those multi-compartment plastic boxes that hold people's fishing hooks, lures, bait, etc. You can find them at your local Walmart or related store, or on Amazon etc. Each ship goes in a separate compartment, usually on top of its baseplate (e.g. my A-Wing sits on top of the Tycho cardboard baseplate). Ideally you'll have their dials nearby too, but I was lazy and stored all my dials together, much to my chagrin when I have to go hunting for them. ;)

The best tackle boxes I've seen were ones that could link together in a stack and clip into place, so you could carry them all as a unit. If you find yourself needing more space, you buy another box and snap it into place. You don't need to get fancy though -- basic tackle boxes work great.

They also hold your componets -- I have one tackle box that holds my move templates and range rulers, focus/shield/etc tokens (each in their own compartment), etc. I always pull it out, and then pull out the boxes for the faction I'm playing today.

There are companies out there that sell custom holders for all the ships, and those can be interesting for players who want to spend a lot. It's not for me though, and I also don't recommend it for a new player who's just getting into the game.

Large ships are tougher, since their size and shape doesn't fit much of... anything. I use large tupperware with newspaper or soft junk foam to cushion them, and often store multiple large ships together in the same container with padding between them. Huge ships are substantially harder and I've not yet found an elegant solution, other than keeping them in their original box (since I rarely have to transport them anyway).

For cards, some people use a card binder, with sleeves of the right size for pilot cards and others for upgrade cards. I personally hate this method -- it's expensive, very bulky, and requires a lot of re-organization when you have to put a card somewhere in the middle. Instead I found a double-tall tacklebox   (tall enough for upgrade cards to stand up inside, and for pilot cards to stand on their sides). It  had long rows that were wide enough to hold the upgrade cards, and I built simple cardboard dividers labeled with each letter of the alphabet. Then each upgrade card of letter A gets ordered alphabetically and put behind the A divider. Next is B, and so on. Took me some time to organize, but I like the end result: very compact, and it's easy to find stuff and make additions. I do all my squad building with the Squad Builder Apps or Websites like Yet Another, and then when I want to track down all the cards and put them on the table, they're all alphabetized and easy to find. I keep them loose enough that I can flip through them with ease, and it's a reasonably fast process considering it's only two tackle boxes in size for the obscene number of cards I've accumulated over the years.

For pilot cards, I order them by ship type and then roughly by Pilot Skill and then Pilot Name. So A-Wings come before B-Wings, and within A-Wings, Arvel before Tycho. Then I folded some printer or lined paper in half, curved that around the cards, and dropped them into a slot in the rectangular sections of the tackle box. To pull out my rebel pilots, I grab both sides of the U-shaped paper and pull them out, and it's easy to work with them. Same deal for Empire and Scum. I have so many pilots that I actually have two such sleeves per faction (e.g. A-Wing through HWK for one sleeve), and I've written on the paper to label them for easy searching.

It is such a cheap engineering solution. I love it. :D