I can’t believe August is over already. Time has just been flying by.
Looking Back
This month turned out to be pretty good for me as far as posting here on the blog goes. We started with our usual Detailed Frontier Timeline post.
Next up was a post with a sample star system. I had talked about starting a new project and this was the first pass at that. I got very little feedback on that post. I was hoping for a bit more but that’s okay. I actually haven’t had time to finalize the details of how I’m going to present those system but it’s something to work on this coming month.
We actually had two different battles in the Detailed Frontier Timeline this month, one in Fromeltar that resulted in a major setback for the UPF and then another in Gruna Garu that will also cause some problem. The sathar didn’t come out unscathed so the UPF isn’t as bad off as they think but they don’t know that.
Next up I wrote about a campaign idea I have, searching for the Yazirian homeworld. That campaign concept is playing out in the Detailed Frontier Timeline as the journey of the HSS HIstory’s Hope. That was another post I was surprised to not get a lot of commentary on. It looks like it would probably be better as a novel then a game, I guess. But maybe if I actually started soliciting players, people would respond.
Then I had a post looking at the Yachts and Privateers from the “Fast and Deadly” Dragon article. This was actually in preparation for the battle in the Gruna Garu system in the timeline since there were privateers in that battle. As someone pointed out, there was a follow-on dragon article “Yachts & Privateers Return” that basically did the same thing as me and revised the stats for the ships. I’ll need to look at that and see how they revised them differently than me. Considering that was written by Doug Niles, who wrote the Knight Hawks rules combat rules, it definitely deserves a look.
Behind the scenes, not much else happened. I didn’t work on my websites at all, other than to create a temporary fix for an issue on the Frontier Explorer site that was cause a process to runaway and use all the CPU on the server. I did get my 3D printer set up and running here in AZ as someone wanted me to print them some ship minis but I didn’t do any modeling.
Looking Forward
Coming up we’ll have the usual Detailed Frontier Timeline post. There might be another battle this month but I haven’t progressed the timeline far enough to see how things play out. I got a bit behind with the Battle of Hargut (Gruna Garu) and the prep for that so I’m only a couple of days ahead instead of a couple of weeks like I’d like to be. That typically happens when there’s a battle.
I plan on posting at least one new star system, and maybe more. We’ll see how that goes. I’m also starting to get itchy to do some 3D modeling so maybe there will be a new model. No promises though as I’m also traveling a lot this month. I plan to keep up the archiving work on the Arcane Game Lore posts as well. But beyond that, I really don’t know what the month will bring.
Final Thoughts
I’ve been debating back and forth on the value of these “State of the Frontier” posts. I’m thinking of maybe only doing them every two or three months instead of monthly. Especially if there isn’t a lot of “behind-the-scenes” work going on. Do you find them useful? Should I keep doing them monthly? Let me know what you think.
The surprise appearance of sathar forces in the Gruna Garu system were met by the combined forces of the Hargut militia, the Frontier Fighter Corps, and the Yazira Squadron. Sustaining heavy casualities, including the complete loss of the Frontier Fighter Corps squadron, the defenders were able to destroy nearly all the invading vessels.
The final sathar ship, heavily wounded, and in an act incomprehensible to sane minds, rammed the defense station destroying itself and the station in the process. We honor those who gave their lives defending ours.
Rinna Harglot, Hargut Global News
Background
Hoping to draw some of the UPF forces from the spinward side of the Frontier where most of the fighting has occurred so far, the sathar have explored a route into the Gruna Garu system and launch a small fleet to attack that system hoping to overpower the defenders there. They are opposed by the Hargut militia, Frontier Fighter Corps Squadron Theta, and the rag-tag volunteers of the Yaziria Squadron.
Order of Battle
UPF
Militia
2 assault scouts
1 armed station
Frontier Fighter Corps (Squadron Theta)
8 fighters
For this battle, I’m using the game stats in my A Look at Yachts and Privateers post from a few days ago for the Yaziria Squadron ships. I basically picked the ships in that group at random from the ships in the article.
Yaziria Squadron
1 Belvedere Class ship
1 Astro Blaster III Class ship
1 Imp Class ship
1 Nova-AR Class ship
1 Rollo’s Revenge Class ship
1 Condor II Class ship
2 Thruster II Class ships
Sathar
1 destroyer
2 light cruisers
1 heavy cruiser
The Battle
Setup
The sathar are here to do as much damage as possible to attempt to draw forces from the other part of the Frontier. They come in relatively slow (speed 15) in attempt to get the defending forces to spread out so that they can deal with them in waves instead of all at once.
The UPF forces spread across a wide front moving at speed 20 to be prepared to engage the sathar regardless of what path they take through the system. The FFC squadron splits into two flights on the wings and the Yazira Squadron splits up as well with the militia assault scouts above them.
Initial starting positions for the battle. Click for full size image.
Turn 1
The sathar maintain their speed but pull into a closer defensive position. Out of range of any UPF weapons, they take some long distanced shots at the armed station with their proton and electron batteries. The second light cruiser connects with both weapons knocking out the stations laser battery and crippling its damage control system.
The UPF ships race forward applying maximum acceleration but can’t quite get in range of the sathar vessels which get another round of free shots on the station which has now come in range of their cannons as well. They are not as lucky this time and only the destroyer’s laser cannon connects with the station knocking out 9% of its hull integrity.
Closing the distance. Click for full image.
Turn 2
Accelerating to speed 17 and remaining as a group, the sathar turn to go after the lone flight of FFC fighters below the planet. The fire a salvo of torpedoes at the station as they pass and fire their energy weapons at the fighters with each ship targeting a single fighter and the heavy cruiser firing one of its laser batteries at the fighter targeted by the destroyer. The station fires all of its ICMs in an attempt to disrupt the torpedo attack. The heavy cruiser also drops a seeker missile along its path.
All of the torpedoes miss the station but the fighters are not so lucky. The smaller capital ships all hit with their cannons and electron batteries and the heavy cruiser hits with one of its laser batteries on its primary target. The two lead fighters are vaporized by the energy cannons hitting them. The third fighter has 25% of its hull integrity knocked out by the electron battery while the disruptor cannon damages its combat control system. The final fighter has its navigation control system jammed by the hit from the heavy cruiser’s laser battery.
The UPF move to eliminate the sathar vessels. The other flight of FFC fighters continues its maximum acceleration and loops in behind the sathar ships to unleash a volley of assault rockets. The militia assault scouts do the same. The damaged fighters remain at speed 25. The fighter with the navigation control hit spins away from the sathar vessels and never gets a shot but the other fighter maneuvers for an assault rocket shot and then flies up near the station to position itself for its next attack.
The Belvedere and Imp join up 50,000 km away from the sathar ships to remain out of range of their torpedoes and fire their laser weapons at the frigate. The Rolo’s Revenge and Condor II do the same to come up behind the sathar vessels but close to 40,000km so that they are within torpedo range. The Nova-AR and Thruster II vessels make an assault rocket pass and follow the militia assault scouts’ and fighters’ general flight plans. The Astro Blaster II, with its limited maneuverability strafes the sathar ships with its electron battery.
Defensively, the sathar ships fire their rocket batteries at the Astro Blaster II and focus their remaining weapons on the UPF fighters and Thruster II vessels. Their cannons are fired at the two wounded fighters while they fire two energy batteries each at the other 6 vessels.
The partially damaged fighter is obliterated by laser and disruptor cannon blasts from the destroyer and a light cruiser. The other light cruiser connects with its disruptor cannon starting a fire on the fighter with the navigation damage. The Astro Blaster III is hit by two of the rocket batteries knocking out 77% of its hull integrity and taking it out of the fight. In the other flight of fighters two are destroyed by electron battery fire while the other two suffer 88% and 50% hull integrity reduction from laser batteries. The second Thruster II ship is hit by an electron battery knocking out its engines.
The surviving UPF ships open fire. The seven assault rockets are all fired at the heavy cruiser while the ships focus their energy weapons on one of the light cruisers. The Rollo’s Revenge and Condor II fire torpedoes at the destroyer. The destroyer and heavy cruiser fire ICMs at the incoming torpedoes. Six of the seven assault rockets hit the heavy cruiser. On takes out the cruiser’s torpedo launcher while the other knocks out its ICM launcher. The other four hammer its hull reducing it’s hull integrity by 88%. The ICMs do their job and intercept both torpedoes headed for the destroyer. The light cruiser is raked by energy fire with the Astro Blaster III’s electron battery knocking out its ICM launcher, the Nova-AR’s laser battery short circuiting the power system, and a proton battery from the Rollo’s Revenge and a laser and proton battery from the Condor II rake the hull and reduce its hull integrity by 29%.
The battle after the first round of engagement. It got chaotic real fast with all the different ship capabilities. Click for full-sized image.
Turn 3
The sathar heavy cruiser, heavily damaged, just drifts away from the battle. The other sathar ships pull to port and go after the Belvedere, Imp and Astro Blaster II vessels. They also activate the seeker missile dropped last round that activates near the Rollo’s Revenge and Condor II. With the Condor II being the larger ship, it is targeted by the missile. Between the two ships they fire three ICMs at the incoming seeker missile. Unfortunately, the seeker missile evades the ICMs and slams into the Condor II but only knocks out its masking screen launcher.
Defensively, Condor II and Rolo’s Revenge fire at the Heavy Cruiser while all the other ships in range fire at the damaged light cruiser. He heavy cruiser is hit by an electron battery from the Condor II that knocks out its disruptor cannon and the Condor II and Rollo’s Revenge hit with a proton and electron battery respectively knocking it down to just 1% hull integrity (1 HP left). The Light cruiser is hit by the Belvedere’s and Imp’s laser cannons knocking out its disruptor cannon and reducing its hull integrity by 11%.
The sathar fire two torpedoes at the Rollo’s Revenge and two at the Belvedere. The heavy cruiser fires all of its energy weapons at the Rollo’s Revenge as well. The other ships fire their cannons at the Astro Blaster III as they fly by. They fire two rocket batteries at the Belvedere and on at the Imp and divide their energy battery weapons evenly between the two ships. The heavy cruiser deploys its final seeker missile along its path.
The Rollo’s Revenge and Condor II fire ICMs at the incoming torpedoes and both miss. With no ICMs, the Belvedere isn’t as lucky and one of the torpedoes hit reducing it’s hull integrity by 62%. The Rollo’s Revenge is hit by an electron battery from the heavy cruiser that knocks out its power system disabling its defenses. Both rocket batteries hit the Belvedere obliterating it. The rocket battery fired at the Imp misses. The destroyer’s laser cannon connects with the Astro Blaster III destroying it. The Imp is hit by a laser, proton, and electron battery, all of which damage its hull, but amazingly only reduce the hull integrity by 50% (only 10 HP on 3d10).
The fire on the UPF fighter damages its hull knocking out 50% of its hull integrity. That fighter pulls to the left with it’s out of control maneuvering and slows to speed 20 but its path takes it dangerously close to the planet.
The UPF fighters and militia assault scouts loop around the planet and make an assault rocket run on the undamaged sathar light cruiser while joining up and remaining at speed 30. The Imp and Rollo’s Revenge join up to go after heavy cruiser to finish it off. Due to the Rollo’s Revenge’s speed, the come within rocket battery range of the cruiser. The Condor II and Thruster II ships come up behind the sathar vessels and fire at the damaged light cruiser. The Nova-AR starts chasing down the sathar ships as well but is too far away to catch up with its limited acceleration.
Defensively, the heavy cruiser focuses its energy weapons on the Imp and fires a rocket battery at the Rollo’s Revenge. The rocket battery hits knocking out the ship’s maneuvering. A lucky hit by the cruiser’s laser battery destroys the Imp (10 HP on 1d10). The other sathar ships fire on the incoming fighters and Thruster vessels dividing their weapons among those four ships. The two fighters and damaged Thruster II ship are hit by a laser, electron, and proton battery (respectively) and each are destroyed. The other Thruster II vessel is hit by an electron battery which reduces its hull integrity by 60%.
The surviving ships open fire at their respective targets. The Rollo’s Revenge’s electron battery takes out the heavy cruiser’s proton screen just before the torpedo slams into the hull obliterating the ship. The Condor II and surviving Thruster II ship hit with every weapon except one of the Condor II’s laser battery. The Thruster II’s pod laser knocks out half of the cruiser’s maneuvering capabilities while the Condor II’s laser battery induces a navigation control failure. That is moot, however as the torpedo, assault rocket, disruptor cannon, and proton and electron batteries rip into the cruiser’s hull and destroy the ship (98 HP, too bad they didn’t shoot at the undamaged cruiser. The militia ships fire at the other light cruiser. The laser batteries miss but both assault rockets hit reducing the hull to just over 50% integrity (both AR rolled double damage but only did a total of 34 HP).
The battle after the first half hour. I shifted the map to keep all the ships on the board. Click for full-sized image.
Repair Turn 1
The damaged sathar light cruiser repairs 11% of its hull integrity.
The station repairs its laser battery. The fighter tries to repair the fighter but can’t quite get it out (rolled a 34 on a 30 DCR). The Rollo’s Revenge tries to repair its maneuvering but can’t quite get it fixed. The surviving Thruster II tries to repair its hull but the damage will require a shipyard. Finally, the Condor II repairs its masking screen launcher.
Turn 4
The sathar activate the last seeker missiles which chases down the Rollo’s Revenge. With no ICM’s left, the ship’s crew watches helplessly as the missile closes in and slams into the hull reducing the hull integrity by 62%. The two surviving ships turn to port and head back toward the planet, slowing to speed 14.
Defensively, all the ships fire at the damaged light cruiser. The Condor II hits with a laser battery reducing the hull integrity by 13% and an electron battery which starts a fire. The Thruster II’s pod laser scores a critical hit reducing the cruiser’s hull integrity by another 23%
The sathar vessels fire all their weapons at the Condor II. One electron battery hits damaging the Condor II’s combat control system while both torpedoes hit reducing the ship’s hull integrity by 78%.
The fire on the UPF fighter proves too much and compromises the hull, destroying the ship. The Rollo’s Revenge and the Condor II, both heavily damaged, just drift away from the battle as they work on repairs to their hull to prevent the ships from breaking up while maneuvering. The remaining ships loop around and go after the sathar vessels intending to take out the destroyer on this pass.
The militia assault scouts loop around and fire on the destroyer, slowing to speed 25. Like the assault scouts, the Nova-AR loops around, just counter clockwise and fires on the destroyer as well. The Thruster II follows a similar flight plan to the Nova-AR but it’s high speed takes it further away from the sathar ships after if fires its weapons.
Defensively, the destroyer fires at the Thruster II while the light cruiser fires at the lead militia assault scout. An electron battery connects with the Thruster II damaging its engines while the assault scout is hit by a laser battery knocking out the assault scout’s laser battery and an electron battery that reduces its maneuvering by 25%.
The Thruster II’s pod laser damages the destroyer’s engines but then three of the four assault rockets hit the destroyer obliterating it.
Wounded ships are starting to drift away. Had to shift the map a bit again. Click for full-sized image.
Turn 5
Cognizant of the fact that it probably won’t survive the battle with the remaining UPF vessels, the damaged sathar light cruiser turns toward the planet and station. Using the gravity of the planet to assist it’s motion the cruiser barrels straight at the station to ram it. The crew of the station watches in horror as the large sathar vessel barrels down on them. They fire their laser and rocket battery in defense but know it won’t be enough. Both of the station’s weapons miss. The cruiser fires all of its weapons at the station while it approaches. However, only the disruptor cannon actually hits knocking out the station’s empty ICM launcher. The massive ship impacts the station and the two vessels rip each other apart.
Final positions. The Rollo’s Revenge is off the bottom of the map and not shown. I shifted it again because original I was going to have the sathar ship flee and had shifted the map before I realized they would ram the station. Click for full image.
Final Repairs
The militia assault scout quickly repairs its damaged LB and then its damaged maneuvering shortly thereafter.
After about two hours, the Rollo’s Revenge has repaired all of its damage except its hull. It will have to carefully fly to Prenglar to get that repaired not what the Hentz shipyard has been destroyed.
It takes two and half hours for the Condor II to complete its repairs and like the Rollo’s Revenge, it too must carefully limp to a shipyard to completely repair its hull.
After an hour and a half, the surviving Thruster II has repaired as much as it can of the battle damage but is also unable to repair its hull and must head to a shipyard.
Aftermath
The sathar didn’t quite do as much damage as they had hoped. While they destroyed the fighter squadron and the station, they didn’t take out the militia assault scouts. However, they did succeed in showing the UPF that Gruna Garu is now vulnerable. So while they didn’t do as much damage as desired, it will have the desired effect of stretching the UPF thinner in the defense of the Frontier.
If you count the damage done to the surviving ships of the Yazira Squadron, the sathar actually did more damage than they took inflicting a total of 320 HP while losing 270. They definitely took out more ships. Although if you only count the ships destroyed, the sathar only destroyed 249 HP of ships. So it was pretty even.
Lessons Learned
The sathar were doing pretty well until turn 4. Then their defensive fire failed and the UPF ships had a stellar round. The turn before was also a bit surprising when the Condor II hit with everything and obliterated the sathar light cruiser. I was actually expecting the light cruiser to possibly survive that round but it didn’t.
Overall, the privateers and yachts did pretty well. The Condor II and Rollo’s Revenge are formidible ships. I picked the ships for the Yazira squadron fairly randomly. If those two ships hadn’t been part of the mix, it might have gone much worse for the UPF as their torpedos were quite helpful. The Yazira Squadron were “bonus” ships relative to the order of battle for the Second Sathar War game but so were the ships I gave the sathar when I added in the ships at sathar SCC#10 a while back so it evens out.
Playing out this battle was a little slower than some of the others because I was using new ships that I’d not played before in the Yazira Squadron. I have the standard ships etched into my brain from so many battles but I was continually looking up the stats for the yachts and privateers. It also made for a bit more chaotic battle as every ship had unique characteristics.
I mentioned in my State of the Frontier post that I was going to start working on transferring all my posts from the now dead Arcane Game Lore blog to this one and I’d post a summary occasionally listing the posts I’d moved over. This is the first of those summary posts.
For the most part, I just started at the beginning of the posts I made on that blog and started working forward. However, I question came up and I responded with a post I made here and realized that the post in question had links to my Arcane Game Lore blog posts. So I temporarily stopped working on the chronological progression and went through all my posts here on the Expanding Frontier to look for links to Arcane Game Lore posts and I ported them over first. That is why there are a few posts from 2015 even though the title says through December 2014.
For a couple of posts I wasn’t able to get the images, or didn’t add in the comments from the other blog. I’ve made a note of those and will go back and fix them up at some point. In once case, the image is something I need to rescan and the pictures are in Utah while I’m in Arizona. In any case, I’ll keep working on this over the coming months.
Here are links to all the archived posts I’ve uploaded to the site so far. Feel free to read some of my early writing if you’re interested. Not all of it is directly Star Frontiers related and some of it isn’t even directly sci-fi but it is all game related at some level.
I was starting to work on the Battle of Hargut (Gruna Garu) that is coming up in the Detailed Frontier Timeline in a few days and had to put together the Yazira Squadron. From the timeline I had created the following details:
Date (FY)
Events
61.299
A small group of 8 civilian privateer vessels, hailing from the yazirian worlds of the Frontier and calling themselves the Yazira Squadron, arrive in orbit around Morgaine’s World (Prenglar) and request permission to assist Starfleet in the fight against the sathar.
61.301
Worried that since the sathar have a route into Prenglar they may also have one to Gruna Garu, Spacefleet sends the Yazira Squadron back to Gruna Garu to bolster the defenses there.
61.310
Yazira Squadron arrives back in the Gruna Garu system where they join up with the local militia to coordinate the defense of that system.
So there are eight civilian privateer vessels and they were sent to Gruna Garu to bolster the defenses there. I did this even before I conceived of the sathar actually trying to chart a route to Gruna Garu. It was just a concern on Spacefleet’s job. But it turned out to be a good idea because if they weren’t there. The incoming sathar ships (1 destroyer, 2 light cruisers, and a heavy cruiser) would probably completely overwhelm the 2 militia assault scouts and Frontier Fighter Corps squadron in the system.
The question is what should the ships be. I figured I’d just pull up the old Dragon article “Fast and Deadly” (p. 78, Dragon June, 1984) that provided stats for some yachts and privateers and use those.
Then I actually looked at the ship stats in the article.
Given the starship construction rules, even allowing for a little “fudging” in the rules for upgraded military technology in some of the ships, they just didn’t make sense to me. The yachts weren’t too bad but most of the privateer vessels were just so far out there that they seemed way overpowered. So I thought I’d work through each of these ships and see if they made sense or not and if my intuition about the ships was correct.
So here we go.
Yachts
We’ll look at the yachts first as there seem to be fewer problems with these ones. I find it interesting that of all the stats for the ships that could be included, the article included the number of lifeboats on these ships.
This one actually checks out just fine with the ship design rules. The minimum hull size (MHS) for all the weapons and defenses are equal to the hull size of the ship which means that it has to loose 1 ADF or MR and it sacrifices the ADF.
It says it has an ICM launcher but not how many salvos, we’ll assume 4 (Note: after looking at the later ships, I think it meant that it had a single ICM salvo. I’d still leave it at four though). The MHS for all of the Astro-Blaster III’s weapons and defenses comes to 12 (EB=6, RH=1, ICM=5). This means that it should be losing a total of 3 ADF or MR. Since a HS 6 ships starts with ADF/MR of 3, again this one checks out. They sacrificed 2 ADF and 1 MR.
Here we run into the first problem. The MHS for the weapons and defenses add up to 5 (LB = 3, AR = 1, RH =1) and so this hull size 5 ship should lose one ADF or MR. Unless you assess a MHS penalty for each assault rocket in which case it would be 2 lost. However, the rules give the MHS requirement on the launcher not the rockets so I don’t think that should be the case. The designers here assigned a loss of both an MR and an ADF point so the ship has ADF & MR of two instead of the default 3. Personally, I think they assessed too much of a penalty.
But that’s not really the problem. The problem is that this ship cannot fire assault rockets. On Page 18 of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book (KHCB), right under the table where the minimum hull size values are listed, it says “Assault rockets cannot be used by any ship that has an MR less than 4.” The idea being that you need to be maneuverable to line these weapons up as they are not self steering. By default, a HS 5 ship, which has a base MR of 3, cannot fire assault rockets. That doesn’t mean we can’t make it work but there needs to be some changes. Let’s look at two variants on this:
For this -AR variant we kept the assault rockets. And I only assessed the single point of ADF loss bringing the ship down to ADF:2/MR:3. We gain the extra MR point by sacrificing hull points. One of the variations on ship design, found in the “Modifying Spaceships” section under “Movement” on page 22 of the KHCB says “Any ship can gain one ADF or MR point by removing 20% of its hull points.” Applying that gives us the stats above. We sacrifice 5 HP for 1 MR.
This variant is basically a slightly larger and half as fast assault scout. It has a few more HP, only 3 AR instead of 4 (although you could bump that up without penalty in my opinion) but only has 2 ADF instead of 5.
The the -L variant, we drop the assault rockets. Now the MHS total is only 4 and we definitely only need to lose one ADF or MR point which I chose to take off the ADF. I would have put two LB on the ship and taken the two points of ADF/MR penalty like the original variant, but the rules say that you have to be double the MHS for a weapon to have two of them. Since the MHS for a laser battery is 3, the ship would need to be hull size 6 to have two. I considered replacing the assault rockets with a rocket battery but the MHS for that is 5 and we would have had to take 3 points of ADF/MR penalty instead of 2. So this variant is a moderate HP laser platform, basically a bigger version of the Imp class with a few more HP.
Again we’ve run into the problem on assault rockets on a ship with an MR less than four. Additionally, while they assessed a 1-point penalty to the ADF/MR for all the weapons and defenses, that is too low. The total MHS score for the weapons and defenses is 5. Half the hull size is 1.5 and 5/1.5 = 3.333. The rules explicitly say to round that fraction up before subtracting 1 so there should be a 3 point penalty, not a one point penalty. Now if you round the fraction for the hull size up to 2 before doing the division you only get a 2 point penalty. The rules aren’t explicit on that step so you could go either way, although given the wording of the rules, I’d lean in the rounding the division of the HS up before doing the second division. I’m going to be generous and say it should only be a 2 point deduction. But we still have the problem of the MR being less than four so we need to reallocate the deduction.
This variant reallocates the full deduction to the ADF so that the MR remains at 4 and it is valid to have the assault rockets. I also bumped up the assault rocket count to two instead of one. If you think each individual assault rocket should have the MHS applied, this keeps us at a penalty of 2. If you subscribe the MHS applies only to the launcher, I wouldn’t have an issue bumping that up to 3. This ship is effectively a slow assault scout.
If you don’t like moving player only (MPO) limited weapons on your ship, the Rim-Song-L class drops the assault rockets and keeps the laser battery. Now the MHS total is 4 and we only have the 1 point deduction on ADF/MR (assuming we round up the fraction dividing the HS by 2) which I assessed to MR like the original stats. So now we have a fast maneuverable laser platform.
The original stats just listed rocket batteries, not the number of shots so I assumed four like the frigate and destroyer have. I assume that if your ship is big enough to hold the launcher, you can have 4 salvos. The original also said “masking screen” so I assumed that meant one charge although per the rules this ship could hold two.
For this ship, the default ADF and MR are 3 so they’ve assessed a 2-point penalty. Let’s see if that makes sense. The MHS total for the weapons and defenses is 14 (LB = 3, AR = 1, RB = 5, RH = 1, MS = 4). Whether we round the HS divided by two up or not, that’s a three point deduction, not two. Plus we again have the problem that you can’t put assault rockets on a ship that has an MR less than 4. And in this case, with all these weapons, there is no way to get the MR up to four. With a three point deduction and sacrificing 20% of the hull points for a +1 MR, we’d have an ADF of 0. Which doesn’t work. The assault rockets have to to.
This version keeps all the weapons except the assault rockets and bumps the masking screens to two charges. That drops the MHS total to 13 and we still have the 3 point penalty to ADF/MR. We apply the deduction knocking the ADF to 1. It’s an armed pleasure yacht so it would never normally be accelerating that much anyway.
Again, if you want a purely laser weapon system, this ship is large enough to have two laser batteries so we drop the rocket battery in favor of a second laser battery. Now the MHS total is only 11 and our ADF/MR penalty drops to two instead of three so our ADF goes back to 2 like in the original.
Privateers
Some of the yachts were fine and the others were close but still needed some adjustments to fit within the rules. I’m pretty sure the Privateers are going to need some serious adjustments. The description of the privateers say that some of them are refitted military vessels. So for these ships, I’m going to allow a few more weapons on them than on the civilian hulls that the yachts were created from. This will be represented by not dividing the hull size in half before dividing the MHS total for the ship but rather multiplying it by two instead, effectively making them capable of carrying four times as much armament. That still isn’t as strong as the military vessels in the game. We’ll see how this goes.
If you want to look at a good system that actually allows you to recreate almost all the existing military ships in the game, you should check out the Military Ship Design articles in Star Frontiersman issue 11, page 5. The variation I’m using doesn’t quite let the ships match the capability of the system in that article but is significantly better than the standard design system for arming ships. I actually think it is still a bit much but I don’t want to tweak the ships too much from the original article describing the privateer ships.
The ships here in the Privateer section are the names of the ships given for each of the miniatures in the Privateers box of ship minis produced by TSR back in the day. I’ve included pictures of each of the minis with these ships.
Okay, the MHS total for this ship is 40. If this was a civilian ship it would have a 9 point ADF/MR penalty and would not be possible. Going with the paramilitary option I described above, it only has a 1 point penalty which was applied to the MR. So we can leave this one as is.
The one is loaded with weapons and defenses. The MHS total for this ship adds up to 71, the largest we’ve seen yet. It’s also the largest ship at hull size 13. Dividing the MHS total by twice the hull size and dropping one gives us a movement penalty of 2 points. There were no penalties assigned to the original ship as it retained its full ADF and MR of 3. We’re going to have to change something.
The goal here was to get the MHS total down to 52 so we only take one point of performance penalty. That was actually pretty easy. I just dropped the electron and proton screens (a total of 22 MHS points) and that dropped us down to 49. So I tossed in another torpedo, another masking screen charge, and two more ICMs. The truth is, in all my playing of KH battles, I can’t remember a time I’ve ever activated any screen other than a masking screen so I (personally at least) don’t feel like this is any loss. I applied the one-point penalty to the MR.
Okay, this is a fun one. If you look at the image of the miniature for this ship, it is the same hull design that they use for the hull size 6 Gullwind from the Dramune Run module although this ship is listed as hull size 9.
That aside, let’s look at the design. First off, this is a missile boat. I probably wouldn’t put seeker missiles (SM) on a privateer but I didn’t design it. The MHS for the weapons and defenses on this ship add up to 33 for this ship. Dividing that by double the hull size gives us a one-point penalty which was applied to the MR for the ship. I’d probably bump the masking screen up to 2 charges and the ICMs to four salvos but we can leave this one alone.
This one is just painful. First up, the MHS total for the listed weapons and defenses is 12. Which doesn’t seem to bad but the ship is only hull size 2, smaller than an assault scout. Using our formula, it should have a 2 point penalty but none was applied. In addition, both the laser cannon and rocket battery have MHS of 5, which means that they can’t be installed on a ship this small. The canon rules bent that a bit putting a laser canon on the Streel Corvette Class, a HS 4 ship but putting it on a HS 2 ship is just too much.
We’ll fix this one by making it a heavy fighter. We will drop the rocket battery but give it another assault rocket and replace the laser cannon with a Laser Pod, a weapon introduced in the article “The Laser Pod” in Polyhedron #19. The game stats for the pod laser are:
Pod Laser: MHS: 1, Type: FF, RD, Range: 5, Damage: 1d10, Attack: 50% against RH, 10% against MS
It’s basically a mini laser cannon that can fit on a fighter.
Now the MHS for the redesigned ship is 3 and there is no penalty to ADF or MR.
This is just a civilian assault scout again but a little bigger. The MHS total for this ship’s weapons and defenses is 9 which is one over the 8 limit we have with the system we’re using for the privateers so we have a one-point performance penalty that needs to be applied. We’ll penalize the MR.
The MHS total for this ship is 15, which gives us a one point penalty which was applied to the ADF so that’s good. The problem is that we have three laser batteries on a ship that should only have one because it would need to be HS 9 to hold three but is only HS 4. If we’re willing to let that slide, this ship is fine. If not we need to do something. But dropping it down to a single laser battery just makes it a Lightspeed Lady class ship so I’m going to let it slide even though even the standard ships don’t violate this rule.
Final Thoughts
Most of these ships are a bit overpowered. And I think the privateers are really overpowered for what I feel should be available to civilian ships but they are not as overpowered as the actual military ships so I’m willing to put them into a “paramilitary” class and let them slide with only a few changes.
The one thing that the original “Fast and Deadly” article didn’t include is prices for these ships. I think it was mainly introducing them for the miniatures game so wasn’t too concerned about that. Plus I don’t think they actually looked at the ship design rules provided with the game to work out the total cost of the systems for each ship. That could be an interesting exercise for a future article or series of articles. But at the very least, I would expect the privateers to be significantly more expensive due to their upgraded weapon capability even though the extra weapons don’t add much to the cost of the ships per the costs in the rules (I feel the weapons costs are way low in the ship design rules.)
All of these ships are buildable with the alternate ship construction rules I’m working on and have posted parts of. The hull sizes might be different and the role-playing details of the ships might vary a bit but it would be easy to design each of these ships and work out their costs, crew sizes, engines, etc. And they probably wouldn’t match the miniatures very well but their Knight Hawks stats would be dead on.
Now that I’ve looked closer at these ships, it’s time to pick some of them to be the ships of the Yazira squadron and get to the Battle of Hagurt coming up in a few days.
Do you agree with the changes I made? Would you do it differently? How would you handle the privateers? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
I can’t decide if this would make a good campaign (I think it would) or if it would be better as a novel but I’ve had this idea kicking around and percolating in my brain for several years now and I thought I’d put it out there and see what everyone thinks. I kind of hinted at it in a Facebook post a month or so ago if you’re in the Star Frontiers: Alive and Well Facebook group.
Some Background
If you’ve been following the Detailed Frontier Timeline that I’ve been posting (either here or on Twitter), the HSS History’s Hope is on this campaign arc in the timeline. The timeline has a few entries:
Date (FY)
Events
59.362
Astronomers on Histran (Scree Fron system), release news of the discovery of a previously unknown brown dwarf approximately 100ly from the Frontier. Its motion indicates that it had a close encounter with a K4 star some 175 years ago. Initial news of the discovery is quickly suppressed by the Family of One.
59.373
Despite efforts of the Family of One (FoO), data on the newly discovered brown dwarf is now available. The FoO reaction to the news fuels speculation that the K4 star is Yazira, the “lost” yazirian home system.
60.082
After months of fundraising, a new organization, The Yazira Heritage Foundation, purchases and begins refitting a small vessel to use as an exploration ship. Their goal is to reach the star that rumors claim is Yazira.
60.119
Saboteurs strike against the exploration ship being refitted by the Yaziria Heritage Foundation damaging it but not destroying it, setting back their efforts. The Foundation suspects the Family of One to be behind the attack.
60.163
The Yaziria Heritage Foundation’s exploration ship, the HSS History’s Hope, completes its refit in the Hentz (Araks) starship construction center and begins its maiden voyage to Histran (Scree Fron).
This is where the campaign begins. The PCs have been hired as part of the crew of the HSS History’s Hope. They would be hired sometime shortly before the ship is completed. The ship holds a crew of 24 including the ship crew and scientists and the PCs would be part of that crew.
Campaign Outline
This is a high-level Knight Hawks campaign. The PCs will be fairly advanced. In fact, there should be at least two level 6 astrogators on the ship, one of which at least should be a PC. I envision the PCs are the command crew for the ship (pilot, engineer, astrogator, gunner, etc.) and possibly have the scientists and other crew members as secondary characters. Depending on the number of players, I could have them roll up characters for the entire crew with each player having several characters that they switch between depending on the particular events happening. The campaign is more about the exploration than level advancement although there would be some of that along the way.
The campaign would be broken into three phases:
Acquiring the ship – The PCs must travel from Histran (Scree Fron) to the Hentz (Araks) shipyard to pick up the HSS History’s Hope and transport it to Histran for supplies and picking up the rest of the crew.
Exploring the Vast Expanse – The PCs have a starmap and a destination but there are no known jump routes. They must chart a completely new course there and back. This part of the campaign will involve exploring new systems (if desired) once they jump there, possible findings of relics from the yazirian exodus, and who knows what else. This will probably take a couple of years game time to make all the jumps there and back. The PCs will have to decide how often to go back to the Frontier for maintenance and resupply, the best way to chart the routes, whether or not to report them, etc. as they go along.
The Yazira system – Once they arrive at the target system it will require a careful exploration. Is this the yazirian home system? What exactly happened if it is? Are there survivors? What became of them? Or is this a false alarm?
There are forces in the Frontier that don’t want this endeavor to succeed so the PCs can expect opposition along the way. There will be lots of character action and probably some Knight Hawks battles along the way as well.
Other Background Material
I’ve posted several articles that could be considered background for the campaign. I’d probably synthesize these into a document for the players that only contains information they would know but the relevant posts are:
I have a good idea of adventures/encounters for part one and three, but am struggling a bit to make the middle part exciting. The main issue is that the charting of new routes, ship maintenance, and void jumping are really all just die rolls that could take a few minutes of game time while covering days of game time. There may or may not be interesting things in the systems they jump into. I still trying to come up with ideas to engage the players on that aspect of the game. If they find something interesting (and there will , that’s not an issue. It the finding part that is bothering me. And maybe just rolling the dice is okay to move through a system until something happens.
I think this type of game would appeal to certain types of players and not others. Is this a campaign you’d like to play in? Or do you think it’s better suited as a novel? Or both? Let me know in the comments below.
In an unexpected and horrifying turn of events, the sathar fleet attacked the civilian orbital shipyard around Terledrom in their attack today before retreating from the system. The shipyard was completely destroyed along with all the ships under construction. Many of the crew and engineers were lost as well.
Task Force Cassidine, together with with the new Frontier Fighter Corps squadron and the militia drove off the attackers destroying five major vessels of the sathar fleet. UPF forces lost fourteen of the twenty fighters in the system and the militia lost one of its assault scouts. Luckily nearly all the crew were recovered. The militia frigate was significantly damaged as well and will be heading to Outer Reach in the Dramune system for repairs with the loss of the local shipyard.
Kat’kst’kll, Terledrom News Service
Background
Deciding on a change of tactics, the sathar launch a massive fleet at Fromeltar, larger than any of the fleets seen so far in the Frontier. Despite the increased size of the Fromeltar militia and the presence of Frontier Fighter Corps Squadron Gamma, these ships plus the depleted Task Force Cassidine are outgunned by the incoming sathar fleet. The UPF has more ships, 32 vs 21, but twenty of the UPF ships are fighters with another 7 being assault scouts. The UPF fleet only has 5 capital ships, a battleship, an assault carrier, and three frigates, compared to the 10 capital ships of the sathar fleet including four heavy cruisers.
However, unlike previous sorties into the Frontier, the primary target of this attack is not the ships of Spacefleet but rather the starship construction center in that system. This is only going to be a hit and run on the sathar’s part and they aren’t planning on a major engagement with the fleet. Three hours before the sathar ships reach the planet, the assault carrier deploys its fighters and turns to head home. It looks like the fighters are to be sacrificed.
Order of Battle
UPF
Task Force Cassidine
9 fighters
3 assault scouts
2 frigates
1 assault carrier
1 battleship
FFC Squadron Gamma
8 fighters
Terledrom Militia
3 fighters (manned for UPF)
4 assault scouts
1 frigate
armed station
Terledrom SCC
Sathar
9 fighters
2 cutters
3 frigates
1 destroyer
2 light cruisers
4 heavy cruisers
1 assault carrier (not participating in battle)
The Battle
Setup
Unlike previous engagements, instead of continuing to slow as they approach the planet, two hours out, the sathar forces start accelerating instead of continuing to slow down. Additionally instead of dispersing out to engage the UPF forces, the fleet amasses into a single tight formation bearing directly on the planet. They enter the map at speed 44.
Caught by surprise by the sathar’s speedup, the UPF forces scramble to gain speed and because of this are somewhat out of position as the attack commences. The fighters and assault scouts have matched the sathar’s speed but the frigates have only achieved a speed of 35 while the battleship and assault carrier are at speed 20. The fighters form up into flights of 3 or 4 ships and the assault scout fly in pairs or trios.
Positions at the start of the battle. The sathar are all massed into a single hex with the composition shown in the upper right box. The gray background space station is the starship construction center and the blue background one is the armed station in the system. Click for full size image.
Turn 1
The sathar stay as a group and accelerate with an ADF of 2 to a speed of 46. The armed station, expecting to be obliterated, fires its laser battery and rocket battery at a pair of fighters, hoping to reduce the assault rockets coming at it but both miss.
Surprisingly the sathar do not attack the armed station or continue on toward the UPF ships. Rather they swing around the planet, using the gravity of the planet to get an extra turn for the heavy cruisers and as they pass by, unload all of their firepower into the starship construction center orbiting behind the armed station. Defenseless, the SCC is pummeled by the sathar attacks.
Eight of the nine assault rockets connect with various parts of the shipyard, five of which do double damage reducing the hull integrity of the station by 35%. Six of the ten fired rocket batteries hit reducing the hull integrity by another 15%. Only four of the ten torpedoes connect and amazingly are not very effective, reducing the hull integrity by only another 11%. Four of the six disruptor cannons connect knocking out the station’s DCR, and reducing its hull integrity by another 7%. All four laser cannons hit dropping the hull integrity another 10%. Seven of the ten electron and proton batteries connect, inducing an electrical fire and reducing the hull integrity by another 4%. Finally, fifteen of the eighteen laser batteries connect reducing the hull integrity by another 17% leaving the station with just 1% of its hull integrity remaining. Finally, the heavy cruisers deploy some seeker missiles along their path to activate against pursing ships.
Enraged by the nearly complete destruction of the shipyard, its crews, and the ships inside, the UPF forces swarm after the fleeing sathar vessels. The only exception is the assault carrier which flies to get as far away from the sathar as possible. The battleship is moving too slow to get into range, and the two UPF frigates can’t get to optimal range but are at least able to bring some of their weapons to bear. The fire on the SCC knocks out half of its remaining hull integrity (3 of 600 HP left).
Recognizing the danger of all the fighters, the sathar concentrate their defensive fire on that threat. The defensive fire destroys four fighters and nearly destroys two more. It damages the engines on two fighters, and completely knocks out the engines on another. It knocks out the maneuvering system on one fighter and the assault rocket launcher on yet another. Finally, one of the fighters is hit damaging its combat control system.
The UPF ships return fire with a vengeance. The fighters concentrate on two of the heavy cruisers while the assault scouts focus one of the light cruisers. The frigates focus on one of their counterparts. The more distant frigates miss but the one close in with the fighters connects with its laser cannon and a torpedo. The don’t do as much damages as they could but still manage to take out 67% of the sathar frigate’s hull integrity (the LC only did 3 HP and the T, while rolling double damage, only did 24 HP).
The assault scouts miss with their laser batteries but connect with six of the seven assault rockets on the light cruiser knocking out its ICM launcher and damaging its maneuvering jets before the others slam into it and destroy it completely. The first heavy cruiser is hit by six of the eight assault rockets launched at it. The rockets take out just over half of its hull integrity, knock out its maneuvering, damage its engines, knock out its disruptor cannon, and cause a power short circuit knocking out all of its screens and ICMs. The second doesn’t fare as well. It is also hit by six assault rockets. The first three knock out about 56% of its hull integrity, the next two damage its engines and knock out its maneuvering. But the final assault rocket slams into the cruiser’s torpedo magazine causing a massive explosion that destroys the ship.
Courses and positions after the first round. The UPF ships show in the yellow boxes are positioned at the corresponding letter on the map. Their facing is as given in the boxes. Click for larger image.
Turn 2
The sathar continue to effect their retreat from the system. The wounded heavy cruiser with no MR, accompanied by the wounded frigate accelerate by 1 (the HC’s max) and continue straight and the frigate doesn’t break up from the slight acceleration. The other capital ships make a turn to port, accelerate by two and begin to leave the inner system. The fighters loop back to make a pass at the battleship.
At the same time the sathar activate three of the seeker missiles that they had deployed last turn. The first one starts to accelerate toward the armed station. The second activates among all the fighters and assault scouts and targets the militia frigate in that group. The third goes after the UPF frigate just behind the larger group of ships chasing the sathar fleet. Both frigates fire off all of their ICMs in an attempt to intercept the incoming missile. The missile going after the UPF frigate manages to evade the seeker missile but the militia frigate isn’t so lucky. The missile slams home but mercifully doesn’t destroy the ship. It’s hull integrity is only reduced by 40% (only 16 points on 5d10).
Defensively, the armed station, UPF frigate A, and the battleship fire at the fighters while the other ships focus on the damaged heavy cruiser. The frigate connects with the lead fighter knocking out its AR launcher. The station misses but the battleship hit with 2 laser batteries destroying one fighter and knocking out the AR launcher on a second, and its disruptor cannon vaporizes a second fighter. The other frigates and assault scouts, firing on the damaged heavy cruiser, only manage to land two laser battery hits (from the militia frigate and assault scout) knocking out the cruisers PB and only scratching its hull (1 HP).
Offensively, the sathar fighters fire their assault rockets at the battleship, but the destruction of and damage to their wingworms distract them and only one of the five rockets connect damaging the battleship’s engines.
The fleeing sathar ships focus the energy battery weapons on the fighters behind them, while they focus their cannons and rocket batteries on the fighters in the lower group (C) along their flight path. They fire torpedoes at the frigate and assault scouts behind them as well. The assault scouts immediately start dodging in an attempt to evade the incoming torpedoes but the frigate, having expended its ICMs unsuccessfully on the seeker missile can only watch as the torpedo homes in.
While the torpedoes are only moderately successful, damaging the LC on the militia frigate and destroying one of the militia assault scouts, the energy weapons and rocket batteries are much more effective, completely destroying the fighters along the sathar flight path and destroying four fighters in the trailing groups. In addition, two more fighters are damaged (12% and 88% hull integrity left).
With the battleship too slow to catch the fleeing ships, and some of the assault scouts thrown off track trying to avoid the incoming torpedoes, the UPF cannot safely pursue the larger group of sathar vessels and go after the damaged ships to finish them off. Three of the assault scouts are able to pursue even with their evasive maneuvers and are joined by the four functional fighters. One fighter has its maneuvering damaged and just starts to decelerate. The sixth fighter cannot accelerate and tries to stay with the main group but falls behind and doesn’t come into weapon range. The frigates also pursue the damaged sathar ships but they are still at a speed disadvantage and fall a bit further behind. The battleship starts slowing down and staying near the station while the three militia assault scouts slow down as they are headed off in the wrong direction for pursuit but should be able to start to catch up soon. The assault carrier, now safe, begins slowing down and returning to the planet.
The starship construction center succumbs the fire and is completely destroyed. Defensively, the sathar heavy cruiser and frigate fire on the incoming fighters but all the shots go wide.
The UPF ships fire five assault rockets at the heavy cruiser and two at the frigate. They focus all their energy weapons at the frigate (3 LB from the Assault scouts and 2 LC & LB from the frigates). Four of the five assault rockets hit the heavy cruiser. All of them rip into the hull completely destroying the ship. Of the energy weapons fired at the frigate, only one of the assault scouts score a hit reducing the frigate’s hull integrity by 10%. One of the assault rockets knocks out the frigate’s LC while the other detonates in the core of the ship with a titanic explosion that consumes the entire ship (42 HP).
Upper half of the map. The yellow numbers indicate how many hexes off the map the ship is along the direction they were traveling. Click for larger image.Lower map. The top row of this map is the same as the bottom row of the upper map. Click for the full-size image.
Turn 3
The remaining sathar ships continue to flee the system but activate their remaining seeker missile that they left by the planet. Both the newly activated one and the one activated the previous turn fly at the armed station. Firing ICMs to try to avoid an impact, one of the missiles is intercepted but the other one hits the station reducing its hull integrity by 30% but not destroying it. With the sathar ships now quite far away and retreating, the UPF calls off the pursuit and begins looking for survivors from the starship construction center.
Repairs
The only damage on the surviving sathar ships are damaged assault rocket launchers on two of the fighters which are quickly repaired once they rejoin the assault carrier.
Damage to the UPF ships is only a little more extensive. The battleship quickly repairs its damaged engines and the militia frigate is able to get its laser cannon back online immediately as well. Over the next hour an a half it is able to get its hull back up to 75% integrity but then hits a snag that can only be repaired in a shipyard.
The fighter with the lightly damaged engines also gets that under control immediately can begin decelerating with the rest of the fighter group. It takes nearly an hour for the fighter with the completely knocked out engines to get some engine power back and many hours for it to slow down enough to dock with the carrier where it is completely repaired. After an hour and half of work, the fighter with the damaged maneuvering jets restores some control and begins to head back to the carrier where it arrives a few hours later and is completely repaired. The fighters with damages hull carefully make their way back to the carrier where they are fully repaired.
Unfortunately, the damage to the station from the seeker missile are such that it would take tools and equipment from the shipyard to repair. Those repairs will take some time to effect now that the shipyard has been destroyed.
Aftermath
The sathar lost more ships than they had planned on, losing 34.5% of their hull points that they came into the battle with, 2 fighters, a frigate, a light cruiser and 2 heavy cruisers (286 HP of ships). That said, they accomplished their primary goal of destroying the starship construction center.
The UPF “only” lost 14 fighters (72% of the ships) and a militia assault scout (for a total of 135 HP) but the loss of the shipyard is going to be significant. Additionally, it lost the ships that were in the shipyard including an assault scout that would have been completed the next day, two fighters, and a frigate and destroyer under construction. There were also three civilian ships in the shipyard, a HS 11 ship undergoing maintenance, and HS 10 and HS 11 ships that were under construction and scheduled to be completed in 38 and 76 days respectively.
The remaining six fighters are all assigned to Frontier Fighter Corps Squadron Delta. The assault carrier is detached from TF Cassidine and with the militia frigate heads toward Dramune. The frigate will enter the shipyard there while the carrier will head to Prenglar to pick up more fighters to round out FCC Squadron Delta and replenish its compliment with TF Cassidine. Also, one of the minelayers at Prenglar will be heading to Fromeltar.
The shipyard situation is more serious. Work will begin to build a new shipyard but it will be years before it is back at capacity. Additionally, with the loss of the shipyard here at Terledrom and the one at Hentz (Araks), the UPF is going to start arming the shipyards, adding defenses, and increasing security.
Given that the UPF know the route to one of the active sathar shipyards in OFS019, the remnant of this battle group is headed there for defense while the sathar continue to rebuild their forces.
Lessons Learned
When I first conceived this scenario, I thought the sathar would come in hot, swing by the planet, take out the shipyard and then fly out of the system. And that went just about perfectly as far as destruction of the shipyard went. They did 594 HP of out the 600 HP the shipyard had and left it with a fire that took out the last 6 HP. And that was despite rolling poorly for the damage from the torpedoes.
However, as I was setting things up, I realized that with the limited ADF of the sathar since they were staying together as a group, the small fast UPF ships would be able to boost to the same speed and intercept the sathar. So I set it up that way and the sathar took more damage than they expected. The downside was that the UPF was just barely able to intercept the sathar on the first round which meant that they had to stay close and be subject to offensive fire from the sathar instead of making a run and turning out to be farther away. They could have done that a little bit (2-4 hexes) but I didn’t have them do so as they are new pilots and I chalked it up to inexperience.
I was surprised at how close to exact the damage done to the shipyard was. Since the shipyard as designed didn’t have weapons or defenses, the only non-hull hits possible were the fire and DCR. Equipping the shipyards with weapons and defenses will help to increase their survivability since the damage will be spread around. But not by much.
The sathar could have possibly wiped out the remaining UPF forces completely if they had stayed in the system but that would have been a long drawn out battle as it would have taken them a long time to slow back down. The shipyard was their target so they took it out and left.
I mentioned in my July State of the Frontier post that I was working on putting together a way to generate star systems. This is a sample of the data you can expect to see for each system. This particular system isn’t tied to any specific system on the map but is more for demonstration purposes. This is also not the final formatting or colors, but rather the default colors from the programs. Once I figure out exactly what I want, I’ll update the code to make the output match. So let’s look at what we have.
System Data
First up is the system data. This is generated using a program called StarGen. It’s a bit old and doesn’t work exactly for the smallest or largest stars but it is good start for most of the more interesting systems that might have habitable planets. I also don’t think it takes into account much of the new exoplanet data but we’re making system for a science fiction game so that’s okay. I’ll probably tweak things as I go along.
This generates a lot of data for each planet including thinks like average, min, and max temperatures, orbital characteristics, rotational characteristics, atmospheric composition (if present) and more.
-243.6° C Earth temperature -438.5° F Earth temperature
Normal temperature range
Night
Day
-234.6° C -390.3° F
–
-224.5° C -372.1° F
Min
Max
-249.8° C -417.7° F
–
-209.6° C -345.2° F
Equatorial radius
5165.8 Km
0.81 Earth radii
Density
2.25 grams/cc
0.41 Earth densities
Eccentricity of orbit
0.030
Escape Velocity
5.8 Km/sec
Molecular weight retained
0.0 and above
H, H2, He, N, O, CH4, NH3, H2O…
Axial tilt
39°
Planetary albedo
0.15
Exospheric Temperature
0.95° K
-1272.05° C Earth temperature
Length of year
104035.23 Earth days
93990.83 Local days 284.83 Earth years
Length of day
26.56 hours
Boiling point of water
-53.4° Celcius -64.1° Fahrenheit
Hydrosphere percentage
0.0
Cloud cover percentage
0.0
Ice cover percentage
0.1
There is an alternate output for the system view at the top. Instead of the images, it can make a simple system diagram that looks like this:
This shows the relative positions of the planets on a log scale as well as the range of their orbits (the gray bars) based on the generated eccentricities. The blue bar is the habitable zone for the system and the numbers above the gray bars are the masses of the planets in Earth masses. I’m leaning toward using this one. What do you think?
Planetary Maps
For each system, I want to do planetary maps for at least the habitable planets and possibly some of the ones classified as Venusian, Martian, Water, or Ice by StarGen. I haven’t found a program that will make good maps of the airless worlds (putting craters everywhere).
I also haven’t found a program that I’m completely happy with as far as generating the maps go. I have two that each do a bit of what I like.
Worldbuilder
The first is a program called Worldbuilder. It creates the world using plate tectonics it figure out mountain ranges, subduction zones, and the like and then has an atmospheric circuation model to figure out rainfall and temperatures and such. I like all that. It also can do a lot of different map projections, including on a globe and allow you to zoom in on any part of the map. Strangely, it only does a hex grid across the map and not lattitude and longitude lines.
It has a lot of knobs you can turn to adjust things like the water percentage, heat level, number of techtonic plates, and so on. And it does ice caps quite nicely.
One of the major downsides is that it is not supported anymore and the last development on it was in 2015. And while I have the code, it is in Lua, a languate I know nothing about so its a bit hard to read and edit. Another issue is that there is no key that I have been able to find to explain the colorings on the various maps (temperature, elevation, biomes). I’m sure its in the code but I’m still trying to figure it out.
Here are some maps for a sample world from that system. You might recognize the map style from other maps I’ve posted on the blog for locations and adventures on Pale. I used this program to generate the planetary map I used for that.
Globe view with the biomes selected
Biomes map
Elevation map
Tempurature map
And just for fun the tectonic plates.
I really like the way this program generates the worlds, I just wish there was a little more documentation on what the program knobs do, and a key to the maps. In looking at the code, the biomes seem to be fairly generic: ice, water, rock, sand, etc.
Planet Map Generator
The other program is just called Planet, although the web page calls it Planet Map Generator. This one doesn’t have as many things you can adjust in the planet generation and just make maps based on an algorithm that generates the elevations on the map. The maps can look very fractally or smoother depending on the coloring scheme you use. It is a fractal generation method so you can zoom in as much as you want and it has some projections that I like that Worldbuilder including an icosohedral projection that is great for gaming.
You can tweak the water level and colors used but not much else. Addtionally, the developer also just added biome generation based on a simple air flow and rain model for given terrains. And the biome list has 11 different biomes, so that is nice.
Here are a few maps from that program. These are all elevation maps.
The default color scheme. I don’t like how jagged the elevation contours look with this scheme.
This is an alternate color scheme that I like a lot better as it makes things look smoother.
Same map as above but with biomes substituted for the elevation data. The oceans are a little intense on this one so it might be better to try a different color scheme for this.
Here’s the globe.
This is the Mollweide projection that I like as it shows the entire world but doesn’t distort the regions near the poles. Worldbuilder doesn’t have this projection (or any others like it).
Finally the icosahedral projection. This one is great becuase it is effectively equal area everywhere with minor distorations and works great for gaming by overlaying a hex grid on it.
I really like the look of these maps. The one thing it doesn’t do is show ice caps or really do any weather patterns.
Which to choose?
I want to be consistent so I probably need to choose one of the map programs over the other. While i love the look of the maps coming from the Planet Map Generator, it isn’t quite as versatile for creating different types of worlds with different characteristics and I’m leaning more toward the Worldbuilder program for that reason.
There is an interesting option. The Planetary Map builder does have the option to import a low resolution (24×12) map of symbols as a seed for it’s map generation. So if I take that sample elevation map from Worldbuilder and convert it into the format Planetary Map Builder needs for input, I get a map that looks like this (with the original map below it).
Some of the details are lost and the terrain is a bit different, the Planetary Map Builder tends to put the moutains in the middle of the contients while the Worldbuilder does it on tectonic boundaries.
I could also create the biome map in Planetary Map Builder.
So while I can make the nicer looking maps from the Worldbuilder seed maps, I don’t think I like the way that changes the terrain. So I’m leaning toward the Worldbuilder maps as I like the terrain features better. I just need to figure out how to color them like the Planetary Map Builder maps and get better biome information.
What I probably need to do is learn Lua and translate the Worldbuilder code into C/C++ and then merge it with the relevant code from Planetary Map Builder. But that’s a bit of work. We’ll see if I can find time. Until then, I think I’ll use the Worldbuilder maps as is. The nice thing is that it is reproduceable and if I do make code upgrades later, I can rerun the programs to produce the same worlds with upgraded maps.
Final Thoughts
I still haven’t decided how to format these or where to host them but that’s a small matter. I can always start as blog posts like this one and then move them somewhere later.
What do you think about the different maps and style? Which do you prefer? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
And if you like the things I’m working on and want to encource me to spend more time on it, consider supporting me on Patreon.
This was a busy month in the Frontier. The sathar probe into the Theseus system is intercepted and destroyed by the militia. The lost K’aken-Kar assault scout finally finds its way home and Spacefleet starts to get serious about locating the sathar routes into the Frontier and their starship construction centers. The UPF suffers a major blow to its production capabilities as saboteurs nearly completely destroy the Hentz (Araks) starship construction center. Finally, the HSS History’s Hope misjumps into an unplanned system and makes what might be a major yazirian cultural discovery.
Date (FY)
Events
62.038
Five fighters are completed at the CDC shipyards (Triad, Cassidine) and work begins on five more. Three of the fighters are immediately assigned to fill out FFC Squadron Eta while the other two are placed in storage.
62.039
The Second Battle of Theseus. The Theseus militia intercepts SFB-J2 and destroys, only suffering minimal damage.
62.040
– Jump calculations complete, the HSS History’s Hope begins the final accelerations and alignment for their next jump.
– Deceleration complete, SBF-A2 begins accelerating for the return jump to OFS203.
62.041
– Deceleration complete and with still no sign of sathar presence in the OFS020 system, PG Probe Alpha begins acceleration for a return jump to the Fromeltar system.
– The militia ships arrive back at Minotaur (Theseus) after the battle with the sathar and the damaged assault scout is immediately moved into the shipyard for repairs, bumping out a HS 5 ship undergoing maintenance.
– SG Alpha jumps into the Prenglar system. A ship carrying the new fighter pilot graduates boosts to meet up with carrier as work begins on calculations for the jump to Athor.
– A heavy cruiser is completed at SCC#5 (OFS19) and joins SBF-E2. The battle group, consisting of 2 C, 1 FF, 1 DD, 1 LC, & 2 HC depart for SCC#4 (OFS111).
– Three assault scouts are completed at the PGC shipyards (Gran Quivera, Prenglar) and join TF Prenglar. The shipyard space is released by Spacefleet back for pubic ship maintenance work.
62.042
The HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps into the new system which they are designation YS13. They begin deceleration an jump calculations for the return trip to YS12.
62.043
SBF-A2 is detected in the outer reaches of the Gruna Garu system but is too far away to be identified and just recorded as an unidentified vessel. Due to the on-going conflict, it is reported immediately to Spacefleet.
62.044
Two fighters completed at the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyards and join those manned by the militia under the direction of FFC Squadron Epsilon.
62.045
– After 13 days, the astrogator on the K’aken-Kar assault scout establishes that they are in FS33, the original destination for their first misjump. They begin work on calculations to jump back to their home system.
– SBF-A2 slips into the void but misjumps, overshooting its target and ending up in OFS198.
– Given the reports from the Gruna Garu system of unidentified vessels in the outer system, Spacefleet orders SG Alpha to deliver the fighters waiting at Hentz (Araks) to the Gruna Garu system.
62.046
– PG Probe Alpha slips into the Void but misjumps and doesn’t end up in the Fromeltar system. However, their comm systems light up almost immediately and they realize they have overshot their target and ended up in the Dramune system. They immediately begin decelerating and plotting a return jump to Fromeltar.
– SBF-A2 determines its location and begins plotting a jump back to OFS203.A light cruiser is completed at sathar SCC#4 (OFS111)
62.047
Starfleet puts out a Frontier-wide announcement looking for high level astrogators to participate in a high-paying, adventurous, but possibly dangerous classified project.
62.048
With CNE Group’s infrastructure rollout on Groth (Fromeltar) plagued by constant sabotage, the consortium brings in a large MercCo contingent as additional security and several investigative teams.
62.049
Despite the vagueness of the advertisement, Starfleet’s call for high level astrogators garners dozens of applicants in just two days. Screening of applicants begins immediately.
62.050
Three more pilots complete the accelerated training at Gollwin Academy. They are temporarily assigned to fighters at the Academy and start training with TF Prenglar while awaiting permanent assignment.
62.051
– The HSS History’s Hope misjumps and instead of ending up in YS12 are in an unknown system which they designate YS14. They begin immediately working on finding their position.
– The K’aken-Kar militia assault scout begins accelerating for the jump back to its home system.
– Four fighters are completed at the Hentz (Araks) shipyard and FFC Squadron Beta takes control of them and the other four fighters currently manned by the militia in preparation for the arrive of SG Alpha in a few days.
– Two fighters are completed at the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyards and join the partial squadron manned by the militia under the command of FFC Squadron Epsilon.
– SG Alpha jumps into the Araks system and begins deceleration towards Hentz to pick up the fighter stored there.
62.052
Sathar agents succeed in sabotaging the Hentz (Araks) starship construction center almost completely destroying it. Pieces of the SCC rain down on the planet. All ships in the center, including 4 civilian vessels, 2 assault scouts, & 4 fighters are destroyed. It will be years before the facility is back to full capacity.
62.053
In wake of the near total loss of the Hentz (Araks) SCC, Star Law launches an investigation into the Family of One’s management of the facility and their security measures. Security is tightened at all other SCCs.
62.054
– Sathar fleet TG1 jumps into the OFS138 system containing sathar SCC#3. It is joined by the frigate and heavy cruiser there and continues on toward OFS020.
– A destroyer is completed at sathar SCC#10 (OFS174).
– A HS:5 ship completes maintenance at the Minotaur (Theseus) SCC and the militia uses the space to begin construction of another frigate.
62.055
– After a full assessment of the damage to the Hentz (Araks) SCC, it is determined that existing center is effectively a total loss (98% damaged) and the decision is made to build a completely new structure. The limited capacity of the surviving center is dedicated to that work.
– SG Alpha arrives at the Hentz station and the eight pilots take control of their fighters and begin loading them onto the assault carrier for transport to Gruna Garu.
62.056
– The K’aken-Kar militia assault scout successfully jumps back into the K’aken-Kar system and begins decelerating toward home. All data from its travel are immediately transmitted to Spacefleet.
– With the fighters loaded, SG Alpha departs for Gruna Garu.
– The crew of the HSS History’s Hope detects a faint, intermittent radio signal emanating from somewhere in the YS14 system. While the astrogators continue to work on locating their position, other crew work on finding the source of the signal and understanding it.
62.057
– SBF-E2 arrives at SCC#4 (OFS111). The AC, LC, and 8 fighters are attached to the battle fleet and preparations are made for them to join TG1 in OFS020.
– An assault scout is completed at the PGC shipyards (Gran Quivera, Prenglar) and joins TF Prenglar.
62.058
– A heavy cruiser is completed at sathar SCC#10 (OFS174). Together with the destroyer completed four days earlier, they are designated TG2, and immediately departs for SCC#1 (OFS203).
– Three assault scouts are completed at the CDC shipyards (Triad, Cassidine). Designated Shuttle Group Beta, they depart immediately for Prenglar.
– Five fighters are completed at the PGC shipyards (Gran Quivera, Prenglar) and are transferred to Gollwin Academy.
62.059
PG Probe Alpha arrives back at Terledrom (Fromeltar). Two high level astrogators from TF Cassidine are transferred to the ships of PG Probe Alpha and it sets out once again to OFS020 to try to chart the jump back.
62.060
– SBF-A2 successfully arrives back at sathar SCC#1 (OFS203).
– The astrogators on the HSS History’s Hope identify their location as a system 9 light years from YS12 and begin plotting a jump back to the YS12 system.
– A Spacefleet destroyer is completed at the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyards. It departs to joint PG Vigilant in the K’sta-Kar system.
62.061
– With the screening of the initial astrogator candidates complete, Spacefleet organizes three new patrol groups, Probe Beta, Gamma, & Delta, each consisting of two assault scouts (drawn from TF Prenglar) with a level six astrogator on board.
– After a final briefing, the newly formed patrol groups are dispatched to try to discover the jump routes the sathar are using to enter the Frontier.
62.062
With more resources available now that their position has been determined, the crew of the HSS History’s Hope localizes the source of the mysterious signal to a planet in the inter system. It appears to be a FM radio signal and work begins on decoding it.
62.063
Security for CNE Group on Groth capture saboteurs attempting to disrupt their infrastructure rollout. As suspected the saboteurs were hired by the Groth Energy Corporation.
62.064
PG Probe Alpha jumps into the OFS020 system and immediately begins deceleration and jump calculations for the return to Fromeltar.
62.065
– Jump calculations complete, the HSS History’s Hope begins acceleration for the jump back to YS12.
– SBF-E2 departs sathar SCC#4 (OFS111) for a jump into the OFS020 system to join up with TG1.
– SG Alpha arrives at Hargut (Gruna Garu) delivering the fighters from Hentz which are formed into FFC Squadron Theta. The assault carrier departs to return to Prenglar.
62.066
– The crew of the HSS History’s Hope finally have a breakthrough on the signals from the inner system of YS14. To their surprise, it is a garbled mayday message in a very old Yazirian dialect.
– The old yazirian mayday identifies the ship as the Yazirian Ark Ship (YAS) Royal Cloud. The HSS History’s Hope immediately aborts the jump back to YS12 and starts heading to the inner system.
62.067
– Now 500 days since hatching, the Eorna young are still growing and thriving. The problems seem to have been all with the rogue Eorna and a new batch of eggs are prepared for hatching and plans begin to accelerate the population growth program.
– An assault scout is complete at the Outer Reach (Dramune) shipyard and departs for Morgaine’s World (Prenglar) to join TF Prenglar.
– All attempts at communication with the YAS Royal Cloud by the crew of the HSS History’s Hope receive no response.
62.068
– SG Beta arrives at Gollwin Academy and joins up with TF Prenglar, replacing several of the assault scouts that departed as part of the new patrol groups.
– The replacement destroyer for the Inner Reach (Dramune) militia is completed at the Outer Reach shipyards and departs across the system to Inner Reach. Outer Reach begins construction of a destroyer for themselves.
– Five more fighters and an assault scout are completed at the CDC (Cassidine, Triad) shipyards. The fighters are temporarily attached to FCC Squadron Eta while the assault scouts depart to join PG Vigilant.
This post is only a few days late. But there is a good reason. I’ve spent the last three weeks packing, moving, and settling in in Tucson, AZ. I’m down here for the rest of the year as my wife is on sabbatical at the University of Arizona as I mentioned in my previous State of the Frontier post. With that out of the way, on to the regular content.
That was it for posts on the site. After finishing the deck plans, my daughter came to visit from grad school and we shifted in the packing and moving mode. That said, there was some work that went on behind the scenes.
First, I continued to work and get ahead of the Detailed Frontier Timeline. I’m about two weeks ahead at this point and trying to keep posts scheduled so they come out on time. I’ll talk more about that in the Looking Forward section below.
Next, I started looking into a revamp of the Frontier Explorer website to make it more mobile friendly and simpler not that we are not actively publishing any more.
Finally, I started assembling the resources for a new project that I hope people will like that I’ll talk more about in the Looking Forward section as the first post in that project should be coming out in August. So let’s move on.
Looking Forward
First up as always will be the Detailed Frontier Timeline post. It should have been up yesterday but I wasn’t quite settled and able to work on it. Related to the timeline, I have events figured out through August 14th but there is going to be a major battle on the 15th that I need to play out before I can move beyond that. This will represent a change in tactics on the part of the sathar and it will be interesting to see how things play out. If you look closely at the timeline published so far (or are following on Twitter), you might be able guess where the battle will be.
I mentioned before that I have a new project I’m starting up. In comments about the Extended Frontier Map, people have commented that they’d like to see astrographic data about the star systems. So I’ve been assembling a suite of software tools to generate star systems and world maps. I’m going to start generating star system data for each of the star systems on that map and generating a catalog. I haven’t decided on the format or where it will be housed (here or the Star Frontiers Network wiki) so there might be some fits and starts as I get it going and work out the details but a first trial system should be posted this month. If I can streamline the production process, you might start seeing a new system every week but that will probably take some months.
Another thing that happened last month is that my old Arcane Game Lore blog went off-line. The blog has been fairly dead for a while and apparently my co-blogger, who was hosting the site, allowed the domain name to expire and it is now owned by someone else and seem to be some advertising site. Unluckily, I never did a backup of the posts and I can’t get a hold of the site owner to see if he has them or access to the data still. Luckily, they are preserved on the Internet Archive so I’m going to start rebuilding the posts here. There are posts from 2013-2018 from me there to pull over and at one point I was posting weekly. I basically stopped posting there when I started this blog. The posts will be back-dated to their original post date so they may not show up in the RSS feed for this site, but as I get them posted I’ll make a summary post for those interested in going back to read what I wrote back then.
That’s probably enough to keep me busy, but if I find some more time, I might start working on 3D modeling again and finish up the Privateer miniatures. I’ll also be working on website updates.
Final Thoughts
I don’t really have anything else to add. Other than to thank my Patreon supporters and encourage anyone that likes what they find here to support me on Patreon as well.
