In our first two games of ABS we came across two problems:

• it is sometimes difficult to determine which class a ship is
• you can lost track of which battlegroups have activated in a round.

We tried the following fix for these problems and it worked well.

I made a series of 15 mm square counters from card. These had the ship class printed on both sides (e.g. K for corvette, GS for gunship) but had different background colours on each side (I used cyan and magenta).

In the first and third rounds the counters all start with one colour showing (e.g. cyan) and are flipped after the battlegroup has activated (to magenta).
In the second round the colours are flipped from magenta to cyan.

In the image the bomber wing (B) is yet to activate, unlike the corvette and gunship.

I used the following codes:

The file I created for printing counters is here: Ship Class counters simple multicolour.pdf

Open it using Acrobat Reader to view and change the layer visibilities to alter the colours.