You oponent doesn't have to have any stock ships!!
If you have all additional ??? ships on all sides in a serial or multiplayer game, then the computer will play ALL sides and you can follow the actions of a particular ship by pressing the T key and scrolling through the participants. It's a useful bug in the game that I use to test out various ships in combat.
If you want to have the multiplayer option (you and 5 comptuer players) you'll need to fit a network card into your PC, which are either free from some old P4, etc. chucked in a skip or a £1 at a computer fair, car boot sale, etc.
This will allow you to fight large battles with both computer allies and opponents. It'll also allow you to hook up to another PC for LAN games against human oposition.
The consitions for this are that all LAN computers have the same SFBSPC13.TXT ship list, the same models and same version of SFC 1 otherwise a crash will occur.
I run SFC 1here and also run LAN games. I also create, kitbash and correct models for this version.
I also know how to convert SFC 2 and SFC 3 models to SFC 1 models.
We have a large collection of models, which are used in LAN campaign games. We generally play SFC as we would SFB, as a wargame and not a computer game. In wargames sides are never "balanced" as in real warfare. You have to do the best with what you have given.
If you want any of our models for your own use just E-mail me and I'll attach some. You should see our Federation and Klingon fleets!!
The latest Klingon additions I've created are a J3 "Guardian" Internal Security Fleet border patrol skiff, J4 "Prowler" Internal Security Fleet heavy patrol frigate, J6 "Deceiver" Internal Security Fleet cruiser, Large Troop Barge and I'm working on a Klingon fast troop ship for Distant Action fleet actions in campaigns (the conventional K-FTL from SFB is just too slow as are F5G, D5G, D6G, etc. in our campaign games).
Chances are if you've seen it in a book somewhere, we have it in the collection or know where to download it.
I could just send our SFCSPC13.TXT ship list and you could just read down it and state what you would like.