Thought I'd pen a couple of Practical thoughts on this for those that are considering writing an adventure and submitting it to Frontier Explorer
1. is the magazine size- we've settled on a 60ish page count for a number of reason: 1) it keeps the work load down so that we hit the publishing deadline and maintain a dependable schedule 2. the upper page limit is largely because of the print on demand service that we use for the POD version of the magazine which gives us full color printing, quality paper, and upto the page's edge printing but limits us in page count. This forces us to serialize large submissions of fiction or RPF adventures. So we will look for logical places to chop your submission into parts1, 2, and 3
2. Another consideration is that our fan license from Wizards restricts us from publishing modules without written permission issued on an individual basis. These means that for the Star Frontiers IP the adventure/module must be serialized over several issues to comply with the license.
3. After some consideration and a game report from a reader it seems to me that a natural break in an adventure should be about one evening game session- the game report I recieved was from the "Mooks Without Number Part 1" adventure in issue #1 and that reader and his kids played 80% of the adventure in one sitting- not quite getting to the space encounter at the end. This sort of follows the 3 Act Play structure which is fairly tried and true so it might help to think of your adventure in terms of standard RPG game sessions and what is doable with the rules you are writing for. So Adventures of 1, 2, 3, and possibly 4 sessions worth of play are idea though most submissions should be of 3 or less in size.
4. We have the ability to do a center staple pull out on the Print on Demand version of the magazine. This means that you have the opportunity to have a nice double page two sided map at the center of the magazine and can have this with each serialized part of your adventure which will only enhance the potential popularity of your adventure. We also would like to promote the POD version of the magazine and one way to do this is by the added value of the center staple pull out features so including this as a feature in your adventure is a big plus.
5. We dont require that the adventure be in any particular rule system just that it be science fiction, though we are looking for stuff of the same flavor of Alien, Aliens, Outland, Firefly/Serenity, and Star Frontiers where the technology is a little bit beyond todays technology and leans more toward science then fantasy.