Cheap space battle mat

My first project in this vacation was to make a simple hex-gridded board to play the starship battle games that I have bought during the last year. By the way, the board was inspired by a post I saw in another blog but now I just can't find the link to give proper credit. In that case, the author used a series of circles to draw the hexagons. Here, I used two sets of diagonal lines drawn with a ruler and a 60-degree square on a sheet of black cardstock. The dots were painted with a correction fluid pen.

It took me an afternoon (around five hours) to get the mat done, with 29x18 hexagons (about 1" between flats.) The mat is far from perfect but it cost very little to make, and the hexagons look regular enough to play. Besides, printing a poster-sized battle mat like this would cost around US$40 from the print shops I know (yes, print-on-demand services are really expensive around here.)

I'll start my playtests with Starmada: Admiralty Edition as I found out that a new edition is about to be released and it feels bad to think that I haven't even tried the current one. Right now I've read the basic rules and I'm thinking of a way to play solo while keeping the movement orders mechanics.