UPF Minelayer Model and Miniature

This is not the post I had planned for this week, but since I’ve been up to my ears getting the next issue of the Frontier Explorer ready to go, I didn’t have time to do the post I had planned. You’ll probably get that one next week.

With the Assault Carriers (UPF & Sathar) completed, it was time to tackle the last of the UPF ships needed for the Second Sathar War game: the UPF Minelayer.

Now, this is a bit of an interesting ship to do the mini for. If we look at the counter from the game (shown at right), those familiar with the miniatures produced by TSR will realize that a miniature already exists with that silhouette.

This is the miniature labeled on the blister pack as the Sathar Cutter. This particular one is missing one of it’s cannons but it’s a really close match for the shape on the counter.

This isn’t the first time that TSR messed up the labeling of ship images as the counters and the “Ship Identification Guide” in the Tactical Operations Manual don’t match up. We can probably assume that they had this miniatures and its silhouette and since the cutter doesn’t have game stats (until fans created them – see Frontier Explorer issue 2 – Friend or Foe), they used the image for the UPF Minelayer but didn’t change the name on the blister pack. In the blister pack, it is sold with the Sathar Frigate so my guess is that it was supposed to be a sathar ship but the silhouette was used for the UPF Minelayer by accident.

In any case, it poses a bit of dilemma. We need to make a ship that at least sort of looks like the counter to continue with the theme of the miniatures I’ve been creating but it also can’t look exactly like the sathar ship. This is also why I saved this miniature for last as you could always use the Sathar Cutter mini as the UPF minelayer in your game as it matches the game counter. So with that background out of the way, let’s look at the ship.

UPF Minelayer Miniature

Since I’m not planning on matching the shape of the silhouette on the counter exactly, I want to look at the broad features of the silhouette for inspiration. In my mind there are four main features to be considered:

The body should be somewhat roundish and elongated
There should be two side lobes off the main body
There should be two guns mounted forward on the main body
The engines should be long and skinny.

Now that last one doesn’t match with any of the engines on any of the other UPF ships. However, I’ve always felt that the minelayer, unlike the mainline ships, used ion engines instead of atomic engines. It’s really more of a system ship that does its work before the battle starts so it doesn’t need the performance of the main warships.

And the game stats bear this idea out. Ion engines are limited to an ADF of 1 and that is what the minelayer has, unlike all the other ships which have an ADF of at least 2. So these long skinny engines can be the UPF ion engines instead of atomic ones.

The two guns really aren’t an issue either as the minelayer sports a pair of laser batteries in addition to the mine and seeker missile dispensers. And the other features are just things to keep in mind while designing the ship. The minelayer is listed as hull size 7, so in the end, the ship should be a bit bigger than the UPF Destroyer when it is all done. With those design constraints, let’s get to work.

The image to the right shows the finished model. Instead of the smooth rounded body of the Sathar Cutter, I chose to go with a more angular squashed cylinder and then add cylindrical lobes to the side somewhat like the UPF Assault Carrier.

The two laser batteries are mounted on the front of the ship and the engines are long, tapered to the back, and, although you can’t easily see it in this image, angled slightly inward at the back as are the engines on the silhouette.

Beyond that I added some surface features reminiscent of the other UPF vessels and then a bunch of small cylindrical indentations on the back of the fuselage to represent the mine dispersal system. In the model, they are all at different angles so that mines are spread out as they are ejected.

Printing the Miniature

With the model made, it was time to print. Since this is a relatively small miniature, the print only took about 5 hours. Here is the UPF Minelayer next to the sathar cutter and UPF frigate, as well as a ruler for scale.

The engines didn’t come out as straight as I’d like. I’ll need to add some more supports to them on future prints to get them to hold the right positions.

As you can see, the ship is a bit bigger than the cutter and the body is bigger than the main part of the frigate as well. It’s also bigger than the destroyer although I don’t have a picture of that one. While it’s not as long, it is about as thick and much wider so I feel that it came in at right about the correct size to be just a bit bigger than the frigate and the destroyer.

This model just about used up all of my grey resin so I’ll probably be printing in the black or white resins until I get some more grey ordered. The grey (and white) take longer to print as they are opaque resins and need more curing time but I definitely like the look of the grey miniatures. At least they photograph better than any of the others.

Up Next

I finished this model a couple of weeks ago so my Patreon supporters already have the model file. I’ll be posting it on DriveThruRPG shortly with all the other models on my 3D Models page. I’ve also added it to the Miniatures Price List here on the site.

That completes all the UPF and Sathar ships. I’m probably going to revisit the fighters soon as I need to make those models more friendly to FDM printers. The models I created work on an SLA printer but the wings are too thin (by about a factor of 5-10) to print on a regular FDM printer. I want to make the models easier to print on FDM printers (or at least versions that are) before I post those models on DriveThruRPG.

But before I do that, I’m going to tackle the last military vessel that I haven’t reproduced from the original miniature sets, the pirate frigate. That’s a ship that came in the Sathar ships box of miniatures along with the pirate assault scout which I have already reproduced. I’ve already started on the model, so once I get issue 27 of the Frontier Explorer out the door, I’ll get back to it.

Once the pirate frigate model is complete, I’ll be in a position to start offering “module packs” of printed miniatures that contain all the ships needed for the Knight Hawks scenarios from the various modules as well as the UPF Task Forces. I may need to make a few more models for some of those (the Gullwind and Elanor Moraes come immediately to mind) but that will give me some direction for future builds.

After the pirate frigate, there are just 7 ships from the original sets left to recreate: the freighter from the Federation Ships box and the six ships from the Privateers box. Those will be my next projects, interspersed with the models needed for the module packs, after reworking the fighters.

What are your thoughts on the minelayer model? Let me know in the comment section below.

Sathar Assault Carrier Model and Miniature

With the UPF Assault Carrier completed, it was time to tackle the Sathar Assault Carrier. This would complete all of the capital ships for both sides.

Now, way back when I started this blog, I posted the outline for a sathar assault carrier project. This is not the model that project was intended to create. When I made that project outline, I never imagined I’d be this heavy into creating miniatures. Although if I ever get around to actually doing that project, the end result might be fairly similar. One major difference, however, would be that all the surface features would be actual scale rather than selected for aesthetics as they are on this model. But that’s for some undetermined future date. Let’s look at the model I have created.

Building the Model

Like the others, for this model I’m working off the silhouette from the game counter, pictured to the right. As you can see, this ship is a bit more bulky and angular than the other sathar vessels which tend to be more bulbous and curvy.

That said, there are definitely some features that fit the typical sathar ship style. We have the long skinny engines with the spherical tip, long, extended nacelles for the engines struts, and a round head separated from the body by a skinny neck. The other features that stand out are the guns on the head of the ship and the rectangular shape of the lobes on the side of the ship. I’m going to assume that the latter are the location of the bays for the fighters.

image showing a small assault carrier being approached by an assault scout and exploration vessel

Now, there is another reference for the sathar assault carrier in the rules. The image to the left comes from the module SFKH3: Face of the Enemy. This ship (bottom) is described as an older, obsolete, and smaller assault carrier no longer in main-line service by the sathar fleet. In the module, it has been converted by the sathar to serve as a mobile base for larger scout craft instead of fighter craft. So while I will probably model this ship at some time in the future, I won’t be using this image as a reference for the assault carrier model.

Like the UPF assault carrier, the sathar assault carrier should be significantly larger than the light cruiser but not quite as big as the heavy cruiser. That gave me a bit of a scale to shoot for when building the model. Once that scale was decided on, I used the counter to get the rough shape of the head and body of the ship.

Here’s the final model (pictured to the right). The size of the body, neck, and head are taken directly from the dimensions on the counter.

Given the positioning of the guns on the counter, I assumed there were three evenly spaced around the head. Since the stats for the Assault Carrier include a laser battery, a rocket battery, and a proton battery, I figured that wasn’t too much of a stretch.

The size and shape of the rectangular lobes around the center of the ship are based on the counter as well. The height of the lobes from the center of the ship match the profile height from the counter and the size of the rectangle that forms the outer face, along with the width where it intersects the hull match as well. What is different is the detail on the face. The counter shows one large rectangular shaped detail that I decided to break into three smaller ones on each lobe. each of these represent a fighter bay giving the assault carrier the capacity (per the rules) to hold up to a dozen fighters.

The other major difference is the engines. Instead of the single, long engine depicted on the counter, I went with pairs of smaller engines, similar to the ones used on the heavy cruiser. Unlike the heavy cruiser, which mounted the two engines in each cluster in-line with the engine strut, for the assault carrier, I chose to mount them perpendicular to the engine strut. Additionally, these engines are slightly shorter, a bit thicker, and have a bit more spacing between them than the ones on the heavy cruiser. Otherwise, they are similar to the heavy cruiser engines and modeled on those engines.

It’s not obvious from the image of the model, which is the intention, but I started using a slightly different technique when modeling this ship. For all the ships in the past, I’ve set a global level of detail for round objects that was fine enough for the larger bits of the ships to look smooth. This resulted in way more detail on small objects (like the spheres around the upper body) than was needed and caused the rendering time of the model to be really long. Starting with this model, I’ve been specifying the detail at the individual part level, allowing me finer control and reducing the rendering time significantly since I don’t have to put as much detail into the smaller pieces.

Printing

With the model done, it was time to print the miniature. As it turns out, this model is fairly massive. In fact, physically, it has more volume than any of the models I’ve created to date, even the UPF assault carrier. Here’s a picture of the sathar assault carrier along with the sathar heavy cruiser and light cruiser (and a quarter for scale).

The light cruiser looks kind of glowy because it was printed in a translucent resin and this particular print was hollow so the translucency really shows.

It sits right in there between the light and heavy cruiser but it is much fatter. It ended up weighing a couple of ounces, compared the ~1 ounce for the heavy cruiser and ~1/2 ounce for the light cruiser. It actually has some heft to it. I may consider printing these slightly hollow to save weight and bring the cost down. Here’s another picture with it next to the UPF assault carrier.

The two assault carriers side by side. One of the features chipped off of the aft fuselage of the sathar ship when I was trimming off the printing supports attached to it. I don’t think those supports are actually necessary and will remove them next time I print one.

As you can see, it ended up being a bit bigger even though they are supposed to be roughly the same sized ships. I probably made the sathar one a bit too big, but I like the way it turned out so I’m going to leave it be. It’s not too out of proportion to the other sathar vessels. Any downsizing I need to do will come with the next round of ships, which I’ll be designing to all be to scale with one another. However, with it being this massive, it makes sense that one of the sathar conditions for retreat in the Second Sathar War game is the loss of too many of these ships.

Up Next

That’s it for the Sathar Assault Carrier. I’ll be adding it and the UPF Assault Carrier to the Miniatures Price Table here on the site as well as uploading the model files to my 3D models page on DriveThruRPG. My Patreon supporters received the model files for both of these ships a while ago.

The next ship I’ll be tackling will be a new model for the UPF Minelayer. That may be ready by the end of the month.

Let me know what you think about the Sathar Assault Carrier in the comments below.

Detailed Frontier Timeline – FY60.329 to FY60.359

A new month and new set of events in the Frontier. This month’s timeline includes events from the Warriors of White Light module (SFKH0), the beginnings of events from the Bugs in the System module (SFAD5), and more exploration beyond the edges of the known Frontier Sector.

Date (FY)	Events
60.329	Patrol Group Flint arrives make the jump to the Kazak system and begin decelerating toward Stenmar station
60.330	The TransTravel corvette is completed at the Terldrom (Fromeltar) starship construction center.
60.331	– The TSS Dark Shadow is detected smuggling weapons provided by Streel to the Liberation Party on Clarion (White Light). A firefight breaks out between the new boarding party of the CMS Osprey and the Dark Shadow’s crew. The smugglers are taken into custody and the ship impounded. (SFKH0) – Deceleration complete, Discovery Squadron, realizing they are no match for the numerous sathar and other unknown vessels in the system begin accelerating for a jump out of the system back to OFS031 system. Luckily, they seem to not have been detected.
60.332	The HSS History’s Hope successfully makes the jump to OFS222, a bright blue main sequence star, even more massive than Belnafaer. They begin decelerating to prepare for the return jump to OFS221.
60.333	Patrol Group Flint arrives at Stenmar station (Kazak) they spend two days refueling and preparing for the jump to OFS019.
60.334	– Strike Force Nova departs Laco (Dixon’s Star) for the Truane’s Star system. – The TSSS Searcher departs Pale station with a shipment of titanium to attempt charting the return jump from the Truane’s Star system to the Cassidine system.
60.335	– Patrol Group Flint departs Stenmar station (Kazak) for their jump to OFS019. – Discovery squadron successfully jumps back to the OFS031 system completely charted the route between OFS031 and OFS070. They begin plotting a return jump to the OFS030 system
60.336	– Sathar SCC#4 completes a frigate – Shakedown cruise complete, the fourth Saurian Ark Ship begins loading supplies and passengers
60.337	Having killed their velocity, the HSSS History’s Hope begins acceleration for the return jump to OFS221.
60.338	The TSSS Searcher successfully jumps into the Cassidine system completing the jump route between the Cassidine and Truane’s Star systems. They decided to not report the jump to the UPF immediately and exploit the shorter jump times to move cargo between the two systems for higher profits.
60.339	– During a magnetic storm, the Matrix infection on Jetsom mutates and takes over the ship’s computer system, killing or incapacitating all members of the Alpha team on the ship (Belnafaer) (SFAD5) – Patrol Group Flint arrives in OFS019 on high alert. They immediately detect sathar radio signals and begin cataloging the sources. Deceleration starts along a vector away from the inner system. They begin the calculations for the return jump.
60.340	Four crew members from the Moneyspider are killed in an attempt to reach the crew on the stricken Jetsom when their shuttle is damaged in the descent and destroyed. Only six crew remain on the Moneyspider. (SFAD5)
60.341	– After two days of data collection, Patrol Group Flint has identified nearly 20 different ships in the OFS019 system including two each of frigates, destroyers, light and heavy cruisers, and assault carriers. There are numerous fighters and two of an unidentified new class of ship. – The HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps back to the OFS221 system completely charting the jump between OFS221 and OFS222. Details are relayed back to the UPF to collect the bounty. They begin decelerating in preparation for returning to the OFS222 system and continuing their exploration.
60.342	– Sathar SCC#5 (OFS019) completes a cutter – The 4 sathar destroyers from Liberty system arrive in OFS019.
60.343	– Deceleration complete, Patrol Group Flint begin accelerating back toward jump speed to return to Kazak as the jump calculations are finalized. – Strike Force Nova arrives at Pale (Truane’s Star). They will have a five day layover to cross train with the Pale militia before heading out to Zebulon.
60.344	– The PGCSS Marionette, which vanished from Terledrom (Fromeltar) without its crew 28 years ago, suddenly appears in the White Light system headed directly for Clarion Station (SFKH0) – The decelerating sathar destroyers pass very close to the accelerating Patrol Group Flint. Relative velocities are too large to allow for an engagement but there is now doubt that the sathar are now aware of the presence of the UPF ships. – Discovery Squadron successfully jump back to the OFS030 system completely charting the route between the OFS030 and OFS031 systems. Work begins on engine overhauls and plotting the jump to the OFS026 system.
60.345	– Attempting to approach the PGCSS Marionette, it repeatedly veers away and the the CMS Osprey is forced to disable its engines and maneuvering jets in order to board the ship. – The crew of the CMS Osprey find that the ship is being controlled by a deranged cybot calling itself the Puppetmaster. After a zero-g battle with robots controlled by the Puppetmaster, the cyborg is destroyed and the crew takes control of the ship. (SFKH0)
60.346	Repairs to the PGCSS Marionette’s engines allow it to be diverted from its collision course with Clarion station. The ship is impounded for inspection.
60.347	Loading complete, the fourth Saurian Ark Ship departs the Sauria system for destinations unknown
60.348	– Training with the Pale militia complete, Strike Force Nova departs for the Zebulon system. – Patrol Group Flint successfully jumps back to Kazak. Flight forces in the system go on high alert.
60.349	TransTravel corvette arrives at Terldrom (Fromeltar)
60.350	After an amazingly long string of bad luck in several of its ventures, the Groth Energy Corporation, the major power supplier on Groth (Fromeltar) declares bankruptcy. While they maintain power generation, all other corporate activities are frozen.
60.351	After nearly half a year of investigation and the death of seven more of the young eorna, the cause of the mysterious deaths is finally uncovered. One of the “Great Plan” eorna had been sabotaging the endeavor and subtly poisoning the children. He is taken into custody.
60.352	Patrol Group Flint arrives at Stemnar station where they will remain on alert with units of The Flight until Strike Force Nova arrives.
60.353	Three days after declaring bankruptcy, the Groth Energy Corporation (Groth, Fromeltar) is purchased by an undisclosed off-world organization for a fraction of its actual value. The new owners immediately begin restoring complete operations.
60.354	Discovery Squadron successfully jumps back into the OFS026 system although they end up much further out in the system than intended. The decision is made to try to get to OFS017 directly and not take the detour caused by their misjump to OFS025.
60.355	Sathar SCC#3 (OFS138) completes a frigate.
60.356	The HSS History’s Hope arrives back in the OFS222 system and begins plotting their next jump. This jump will take them beyond the Outer Frontier Sector. Their target star is a white dwarf, 6 light years away. They designate this region of space as the Yazira Sector and their destination as YS001.
60.357	Strike Force Nova arrives at Volturnus (Zebulon) and joins up with Patrol Group Virgo. The crews are given three days shore leave on Volturnus before they leave the Frontier.
60.358	After several days of investigation and analysis, the eorna responsible for the poisoning of the children is diagnosed with a subtle mental illness that caused him to be unable to accept the new direction the species was going with the discovery of the egg ship.
60.359	In light of the subtle nature of the discovered mental illness, all eorna associated with the eorna egg project undergo a deep psychological analysis.

And here’s the updated full timeline file:

DetailedFrontierTimeline Download

UPF Assault Carrier Model and Miniature

Unsurprisingly, December has been kind of hectic and I didn’t get as much time to work on this miniature as I had hoped earlier in the month but I managed to finish it in time for Christmas.

This is a model for which there is no original miniature so this one comes completely out of my imagination. Well, almost completely. Like the others I’ve created from scratch, we at least had the silhouette from the counter. Now this shop deviates significantly from the cylindrical shape of the the other capital ships in the UPF roster and actually looks a bit more like the UPF assault scout. It’s also radically different from the silhouette given in the UPF Campaign book that I’ll use for a different version. In any case, this was the basis I used for the model.

Building the Model

The first thing I needed to do was figure out a scale. According to the rules, the Assault Carrier is supposed to be hull size 16-18. This makes it a bit bigger than the light cruiser but smaller than or on par with the heavy cruiser. We’ll see how well I did with that later but based on the size of those models, I picked a scale and got started.

The first order of business was to get the basic body shape down. I knew that I didn’t what to make it as thick as it was wide since that would make it very, very massive. So while I matched the silhouette, I made the fuselage flattened rather than as thick as it was wide. I didn’t have any good idea what that circle on the silhouette was supposed to be so I just left it off. I suppose it could be a really big dome but it was right where I wanted to put the fighter hangars so I ignored it.

I again reused the standard UPF class C engine that I’ve used on all the other capital ships That makes it differ somewhat what from the silhouette as they are longer than depicted but that’s not really a big deal. The gun batteries at the nose are also a bit bigger than depicted on the counter.

With the basic shape done, it was time to add surface detail. The first thing I did was add in hangar bays for the fighters. Since an assault carrier can hold 8-12 fighters, I decided that this one would have 12 bays. There are three on each “face” of the fuselage. They are the three rectangular structures sticking out toward the back (thicker) part of the ship. Each one represents a bay for a single fighter.

After that it was just a matter of adding details to give it some character like the other ships. I turned out that there was a lot of surface to cover on this model, more than on the others. I reused some of the surface detail structures from the other models and created a few new ones for this model. I’m starting to build up quite a collection of objects.

The angled surfaces of this model provided some interesting opportunities to play with the relative rotation of the details having some parallel to the surface and other (like the hangars) not rotated to be at the same angle. For each face of the model, I composed all the surface features on a flat, vertical plane an then rotated it to be flush with the surface of the ship. This make positioning everything much easier.

When adding in all the detail, I struggled between how much regularity to include (e.g. identical, regularly spaced features) versus applying a bit of randomness. You can be the judge of whether I hit a good balance or not.

All told this model took about 8 hours of works spread out over a month of time, often in 15-20 minute increments here and there when I could find the time.

Printing

This post would have been up a bit sooner but there were some issues in getting the model printed. Well, printing was straightforward, but getting the final model rendered ran into some problems.

There is a lot of detail on the model and in the end, my laptop that I do the modeling on was unable to do the final render to the printable file at the high detail level I wanted. It kept crashing due to running out of memory. In the end I had to render it on my big computer (which I’ll probably do as a matter of course from now on as it has more memory and a faster CPU). And even then there was a weird problem in the rendering that I had to figure out. Since it took 2.75 hours to render, even on the big computer, that was not a fast process.

From this I’ve learned that I need to start being more selective and assign rendering detail at the individual element level instead of globally. The issue is really on the round pieces as you get lots of vertices in those parts that really are needed on the small parts but if you don’t have it on the larger pieces, you notice the individual faces. I’ve been setting the detail level high so the big pieces (the lobes and weapons balls in this model) look good but that’s been serious overkill on all the small parts. In the end, the raw model file for this ship was 381 MB. The next largest ones were the space station at 239MB and the battleship at 215MB. So that’s something I’ll be looking into on future models.

I finished the model Sunday afternoon and thought I’d have a print by Monday morning but all the rendering problems resulted in me not getting the print started until late Monday afternoon. It takes twelve hours to print so it just finished this morning. But it printed and it looks great. Here’s a picture of the side not shown in the model image above. It still has the printing supports on it as it’s not done curing yet. They will all get removed once that is done.

It’s still curing so I haven’t removed the printing supports yet.

I was very happy to see out it turned out. The details in the model image looked a bit over powering, maybe because of the color scheme the software uses. But printed, they looked just right.

Earlier I mentioned that we’d check in on how I did on picking the scale. Here’s a picture comparing the assault carrier with the battleship (left) and heavy cruiser (right). I probably should have included the light cruiser as well but didn’t. This image shows the side of the assault carrier that was in the model image.

The assault carrier should have roughly the same volume as the heavy cruiser. It’s shorter but much fatter. And going by the volume of resin needed, more than double the size. So on an empirical basis, I probably made it a bit too big but I actually think it looks just about right aesthetically. So I’m happy with it as it is. However, it’s way too wide to use as a chess piece if I do make a chess set with the ships so I’ll have to think about that.

Coming Up

I’ll get the model posted up on DriveThruRPG in the coming week (and updated this post with a link) as well as getting it added to my Miniature Price List page.

This finishes all the UPF models except for a new minelayer. I’m holding off on that one as you can use the sathar cutter miniature in a pinch since that one matches the silhouette of the counter in the game. I’ll revisit that model soon but next up is the Sathar Assault Carrier.

A year and a half ago when I started this blog, the Sathar Assault Carrier was one of my original projects that I’ve managed to not spend any time on. This will not be that version of the assault carrier as I wanted to create a full set of deck plans and a model that matches them like I did for the sathar destroyer. That’s a very large project. This version of the miniature will be created just as I’ve done with the UPF Heavy Cruiser and Assault Carrier – using the counter silhouette to give its shape and adding surface details based on the existing miniatures. The sathar ships are less cluttered so this should go faster.

What do you think of the UPF Assault Carrier? Let me know in the comments below.

Obar Enterprises

I don’t have the UPF Assault Carrier done yet so this week you’ll be getting a new organization you can use in your game.

Those of you who follow along with the Detailed Frontier Timeline, either on the monthly posts here on the site or via the @StarFrontiers Twitter feed, may have noticed the introduction of a new organization into the timeline: Obar Enterprises. Anyone that has played in my online games in the last few years has also probably run into, or worked for, Obar Enterprises. And anyone that participates on any of the old online Star Frontiers forums might recognize the name since my handle on those forums is Terl Obar, the name of one of my early Star Frontiers characters and one of the founders of the company.

Obar Enterprises in My Games Today

The following description is the basis I use when players encounter Obar Enterprises in game, whether just in passing or as employees. This is not how the characters were originally created, as that involves the module adventures and the PCs might run through those. The section at the end of this post, entitled “The Real Story”, tells how they were created and advanced in real life.

Background

The company is owned by two couples: Terl and Yala Obar and Leelab and Reesta Lar. Terl and Yala are yazirians while the Lars are dralasites. It’s an unlikely pairing given their races, but they form a tight group.

Terl and Leelab, or Lee as he typically goes by, originally met years ago when they were hired as troubleshooters for the Cassidine Development Corporation (CDC). Terl was a medic with psycho-social skills and Lee was a weapons expert. Lee would often joke that he “took ‘em apart and Terl put ‘em back together.” Despite the general prejudices of their races, the two hit it off and were often assigned on the same team. Over time, Reesta became part of their core team bringing environmental skills and Yala joined as a technician and computer expert. Others came and went from the team to fill in needed skills but the four of them formed the core.

Over time romance blossomed and the two couples were married. While this could have potentially been an issue, CDC was willing to bend the rules due to the effectiveness of the team. Had their performance dropped, they might have been split up, but since their performance stayed high, and even possibly improved, they had no problem staying together as a unit.

CDC, especially after very successful missions, allows its employees to purchase stock in the company. The four took advantage of that to greater or lesser extents over their time with the company. CDC has done well over the years and this allowed the Obars and Lars to build up a very sizable nest egg. After many years with CDC, the four decided that they were ready for something else. They had made many contacts over the years and decided it was time to work for themselves.

While at CDC they had picked up starship skills: Yala was a capable Pilot, Lee an Energy Weapons gunner, Terl had picked up the Rocket gunnery skill, and Reesta had picked up a lot of computers over the years and had become a passable Astrogator. They lacked an engineer but figured they could hire one.

Cashing out a small portion of their CDC stock, combined with a sizable chunk of their savings, they were able to purchase an old, used hull size 7 tramp freighter, the TSS Searcher, and get it up and running. Hiring a pair of engineers, they started hauling freight primarily between Dramune, Cassidine, and Prenglar with the occasional run out to Truane’s Star as well. They organized their new endeavor under the name Obar Enterprises, Leelab and Reesta not wanting to put their name on it.

After about a year, they decided to take a gamble and chart a route through the Xagyg nebula from Cassidine to Truane’s Star cutting the travel time between those two systems down from three weeks to just one. This would allow them to move desired commodities between those two systems quickly and turn a tidier profit. With that in mind, they loaded up the Searcher with a cargo at Triad, made sure the main and backup life support were topped off, and picked up several extra jumps’ worth of fuel, just in case things went wrong. Ready to go they set off on this new adventure.

Luckily, nothing went wrong and they safely arrived in the Truane’s Star system. Similarly, the return jump to Cassidine went off without a hitch. With the new jump fully charted, they decided to keep the route as a “company secret” figuring they could make more money having the private jump route than they could from reporting the route to the UPF. This turned out to be the case and they made a sizable profit over the years before someone else charted the route and reported it, making it a standard route on the UPF maps.

Not long after the new route was charted, Reesta decided that the merchant life was not for her. They had had several close calls with pirates over the years and especially since they had struck out on their own and she wanted to do something about that. She also missed the more structured life working for CDC but, not wanting to go back there, decided to use her starship skills to secure a commission as part of Spacefleet and help fight the pirate problem directly. She retained her partial ownership in Obar Enterprises but left the day to day operations to enroll in Gollwin Academy. Given her existing experience, she was fast-tracked through the program graduating in only a year.

In the intervening years, Terl, Yala, and Lee have continued to grow Obar Enterprises as Reesta has begun working her way up through the ranks of Starfleet. While still primarily a freight company, having expanded their ship roster to include several freighters and escort ships, they have also diversified some of their endeavors to include mining operations and, drawing on their experiences at CDC, some for-hire troubleshooting teams. It’s also rumored that they have an exploration branch that is cataloging the unexplored systems in the Frontier but there is no public mention of this portion of their business. Reesta currently commands an assault scout as part of Task Force Cassidine.

Current Activities

Terl, Yala, and Lee still typically make the run between Cassidine and Truane’s Star, although now in their company’s flagship, mobile headquarters, and their home, the TSSS Morning Glory, hull size 20 freighter. In addition to their freight hauling activities, they have a couple of mining operations on Pale and New Pale in the Truane’s Star system, as well as one on Rupert’s Hole in the Cassidine system.

From their time at CDC, they still have many contacts in that corporation as well as contacts in Spacefleet (through Reesta) and in the Pale government on Truane’s Star. They will often contract with those organizations to do specific jobs that those organizations don’t want to be associated with directly or don’t have the manpower to pursue. As part of this portion of their business, Obar Enterprises maintains a small band of troubleshooters that they can assign out to various missions and assignments much like a small mercenary company.

The rumored exploration activity is also a reality although it is not something they talk about. OE has purchased a Moraes class exploration vessel and have a crew exploring all the systems between Truane’s Star and Scree Fron. As part of this they have discovered a habitable, although uninhabited world, that they are working on a plan to develop and colonize. The TSS Searcher often disappears from the Frontier for weeks at a time to deliver supplies to this system. All of this is a secret company project.

Current Resources

Ships

Obar Enterprises has a number of ships operating around the Frontier. In addition to the Morning Glory, they still have the TSS Searcher in operation, along with a hull size 6 Pacific class freighter, the TSSS Dark Rose. They operate two Stiletto-class assault scouts, the OESS Courage and OESS Excalibur, that typically serve as escorts for the Morning Glory.

For their troubleshooting teams, they developed a small, hull sized 2 spacecraft. The prototype, the TSSS Dart (StarFrontiersman issue 11) has now been in operation for about 3 years. They currently have three of these ships commissioned, the Dart, Bolt, and Quarrel, with a fourth, the Flechette, scheduled to be built in the future.

Their exploration ship is registered as a yacht, the OESS Enterprise.

In addition to the ships above, they have another hull size 20 freighter currently under construction in the Triad starship construction center. The OESS Dusk’s Radiance will be Lee’s primary ship when it is completed in the next year.

Installations

To support their shipping operations, Obar Enterprises maintains offices on the major stations in Truane’s Star, Dixon’s Star, Cassidine, Prenglar, Dramune, and Fromeltar. Being a registered corporation on Pale, they also have an office in Point True but it is minimally staffed as their true headquarters is onboard the Morning Glory.

As mentioned above, they have mining operations on Pale, New Pale, and Rupert’s hole. Additionally, they have a mine on an asteroid somewhere in the Truane’s Star system and it’s rumored they have a compound on Laco in the Dixon’s Star system. There are also rumors of another complex built into an asteroid in the Cassidine system but nothing is know about that complex if it exists (GM Note: it does, but it’s in the Truane’s Star System, not Cassidine, and it’s different than the mine).

Finally, they have a small science installation on the surface of a planet in the FS42 system and are in the process of constructing a small station in orbit around that planet.

Responses

Obar Enterprises is a fairly typical small business but has very deep pockets when it comes to resource acquisition. The nest egg from their time at CDC is very large although they don’t really need to tap into it for regular operations due to successful business over the years and careful resource management.

The Obars and Lars don’t need to work. They have so much money that they could retire and live extravagantly at any time. They work because they want to and endeavor to make sure that their employees are well taken care off. Because of this, their employees are quite loyal.

Individually and as a company they are much more willing than would be expected to take on risky or adventurous endeavors just for the excitement of it. Since money isn’t an issue, a material loss is not a major setback. On the flip side, they don’t hold back when defending their own and will bring all available resources to bear on any threat to their assets and especially to their people.

Overall, Obar Enterprises is a friendly, upright organization but are willing to take on risk and expend resources to achieve their goals. They will not start a fight but if one breaks out, they will end it as quickly and overwhelmingly in their favor as possible. I’ll probably go into more detail about Terl, Yala, Lee, and Reesta themselves in a future post.

Plot Hooks

PCs might interact with Obar Enterprises in a number of ways if you include the company in your game. These include, but are definitely not limited to:

Employment – As former adventurer’s themselves, they look for those type of beings to fill the ranks of their workforce, especially their troubleshooter/mercenary division. The PCs could be hired as a troubleshooter team for the company and assigned missions for the company or contracted out to other organizations. Or they could be recruited in the exploration division. They will have fairly wide latitude in how they proceed. They will be given objectives, not processes.
Competition – Maybe the PCs will be going after the same cargo, target, or other objective as a team from OE. They’ll have to use ingenuity and resourcefulness to win out as the OE team will be well funded and equipped.
Collaboration – Maybe the PCs work for an organization that has contracted OE for help and some number of NPCs from OE will be working with them.

These interactions could occur in any of the areas where Obar Enterprises have interests or activities.

The Real Story

So that’s Obar Enterprises as I currently use them in my games. If we were playing D&D, the company would probably be considered Neutral Good. They want the Frontier to be a better place and follow the rules when possible but are not afraid to color outside the lines when that gets better results.

While the history given works in a generic campaign, that isn’t how the characters got to where they are. Terl, Yala, Lee, and Reesta were some of my earliest characters when I first started running and playing Star Frontiers, along with four others, a human couple and a vrusk couple, that I used sort of as test cases for all the modules. As a group of eight, I ran them through all the published modules, very much in the order that I talked about in my Module-based Campaign posts. They left CDC sooner than described (and joined it later), joined the Clarion Royal Marines, and participated in the Beyond the Frontier series. I’ve removed those references from their current form so that those adventures can be used for PCs in the game. If you don’t plan on using those adventures for the PCs, feel free to add those details back into the background of the OE crew and give them contacts and connections in those systems. They might even be local celebrities in certain parts of the Frontier.

The CDC investment came from the Mission to Alcazzar module. That module has a table you can roll on to see how their investment does. It’s way too generous with only a 20% chance that something bad will happen (90% loss or 50% loss – 10% chance each), a 20% chance there will be no change, and the other 60% of the time the investments will multiply by 2 (20% chance), 5 (20% chance), 10 (10% chance), or even 50 (10% chance). So if you invest the 5,000 Cr. the module allows and let it ride for a few years, you’re probably going to have a lot of money. I’m sure I fudged some rolls in my early teens toward positive results. The listed value of that “nest egg” on their character sheets is in the hundreds of billions of credits. Each. But given the generosity of the table, that can be achieved in just 10-15 years of random rolling which is why I spread it out over more time in the write up. They really can buy anything that they want if it is for sale.

In the character and ship sheets, the TSSS Dark Rose is really the Gullwind, acquired as part of the Dramune Run module. That was the ship they started with and used to plot the jump from Truane’s Star to Cassidine. The Searcher came later as their second ship. Also, they have never cashed out their CDC stock. Acquiring the Gullwind for free, plus the money saved from the other KH adventures where they were well paid, provided enough capital to get started and they’ve done well and grown their resources. I used to play out running cargos around the Frontier. Each ship sheet has a strip of cellophane tape across to top with its operating budget written in wet erase marker (dry erase wasn’t a thing). I’d worn out the paper writing and erasing all the time that I hit on that as a solution.

I have a folder full of papers detailing the characters, their ships, and their installations. A lot of those probably need revising from the wild imaginations of my teenage self and updated with a dose of realism. There’s also a notebook containing the full plan for the FS42 system. I had originally placed their system where Belnaefar is located on the Zeb’s Guide map but that was before I owned a copy of Zeb’s guide. I had placed Benaefar in the system down to the left (FS22) originally. With the move of Belnaefar, I’ve simply moved the location of the OE system (named Sadar in my notes).

Otherwise, the outline provided is pretty true to how I originally envisioned and ran the characters. The only other major difference is that Reesta never really participated in the OE endeavor other than to be a part owner, she, plus the other four from the group, went right from the Beyond the Frontier series of adventures into Spacefleet. They get together as often as they can when the Morning Glory is in Cassidine and she’s not on patrol.

That’s Obar Enterprises as it currently exists in my game and how it came to be. I’m sure there are details or other information that I left out. Let me know what you like about the write-up and where it could be improved in the comments below.

Detailed Frontier Timeline – FY60.299 to FY60.328

Here’s the next installment of the timeline. As always, you can get these daily as I post them on the Star Frontiers Twitter feed. This month sees the Discovery Squadron arriving at their destination, Strike Force Nova setting out to deal with the sathar presence in OFS019, and the HSS History’s Hope continuing its journey well beyond the Frontier. We also see the beginning events of one of the modules and the emergence of a new small corporation that will play a role later on.

Date (FY)	Event
60.299	Star Law agents at foil an attempt to explode a bomb at the Council of Worlds headquarters on Gran Quivera (Prenglar). The suspects claim to me members of the Anti-Satharian League but the League leaders deny their involvement.
60.300	Further investigation and interrogation of suspects captured at the Council of Worlds bombing reveal that they are actually members of the Free Frontiersman Foundation, a radicalized political faction bent on overthrowing the UPF.
60.301	Sathar SCC#2 (Liberty) completes an assault carrier
60.302	Strike Force Nova arrives back at Morgaine’s World (Prenglar). Crews are given a week of shore leave while Spacefleet decided how to best utilize the Strike Force given the recent discoveries.
60.303	Discovery Squadron successfully jumps into the OFS030 system but arrive much further out than anticipated. However, the jump is considered a success. They begin immediately monitoring for sathar signals and plotting a jump to the OFS031 system, just five light years away.
60.304	HSS History’s Hope arrives in OFS221. Calculations begin for jump back to OFS224. The crew hopes that the second attempt will be more successful than the last.
60.305	After a long investigation, the security leak at Nesmith Enterprises of Triad is attributed to a shadowy faction know as the Investors. Little is known about this organization beyond that it appears to be supported by very rich financial backers.
60.306	Calculations complete, the Discovery Squadron begins accelerating toward their jump to the OFS031 system.
60.307	Calculations complete, the HSS History’s hope begins accelerating for the jump back to OFS224.
60.308	The two destroyers from Patrol Group Virgo, still stationed in the Zebulon system, are tasked by Spacefleet with a reconnaissance mission to OFS019 and charting the return jump from OFS019 to Kazak. The two ships depart immediately for Capella.
60.309	Crew of the Jetsom start experiencing minor issues with the ship’s electronics (Belnafaer) (SFAD5)
60.310	– Repairs of the Streel starship construction center (Pale, Truane’s Star) completed restoring the SCC to full capacity. – An assault scout for the TransTravel corporation is completed at the Minotaur (Theseus) starship construction center. It begins its maiden voyage headed to Terldrom (Fromeltar). – Successfully arriving in the OFS031 system, the Discovery Squadron begins decelerating toward the inner system searching for sathar signals.
60.311	– Construction of CDC mining base on Alcazzar (Rhianna) complete, full scale operations begin. (SF4) – The two TransTravel assault scouts arrive at Terldrom (Fromeltar).
60.312	The HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps back to OFS224 and begins decelerating in preparation for a jump back to OFS221. Details of the full jump route are transmitted to Spacefleet.
60.313	Strike Force Nova is ordered to the Zebulon system while the UPF negotiates with the Rim Coalition to allow the large fleet to traverse Rim space. The Strike Force leaves orbit around Morgaine’s World and begins accelerating toward a jump to Dixon’s Star.
60.314	After four days in system with no detection of sathar presence, the Discovery Squadron decides to spend an extra week in the system before making their final jump to the OFS070 system. This will allow them to catch up on repairs and maintenance for their ships before the final push and allow the astrogators extra time to work on their calculations.
60.315	Having fully recovered from their trek, the Spire Dragons team holds a final press conference on Gran Quivera to recount and discuss the expedition and answers questions about the trip. Thousands attend to hear the details.
60.316	Sathar SCC#2 completes a destroyer
60.317	Deceleration complete and engine overhauls finished, the HSS History’s Hope begins accelerating for jump back to OFS221 to start the next leg of their journey.
60.318	The two UPF destroyers tasked with charting the route from OFS019 to Kazak, now dubbed Patrol Group Flint, arrive in Capella. The crew takes two days of shore leave on Faire before continuing onward.
60.319	Construction of TransTravel corvette complete at Prenglar and the new vessel begins its maiden voyage to Fromeltar.
60.320	Obar Enterprises, a small independent freight company successfully charts the first half of a new jump route from Cassidine to Truane’s Star with their small tramp freighter, the TSSS Searcher.
60.321	After only a week of deliberations, the Rim Coalition authorizes the entry of Strike Force Nova into Rim space. This will be the largest Spacefleet presence to ever enter a Rim system.
60.322	– Repairs, maintenance, and calculations complete, the Discovery Squadron begins their final jump to the OFS070 system which was the destination of the transmission from the Glass Pyramid on Laco (Dixon’s Star) nearly a year earlier. – Strike Force Nova arrives at Laco (Dixon’s Star). They will have a twelve-day layover before continuing on. There is some concern in the Council of Worlds about sending such a sizable portion of Spacefleet out of the Frontier.
60.323	Fourth Saurian Ark Ship is completed and begins its shakedown cruise.
60.324	Patrol Group Flint jumps into the Osak system, they remain near jump speed while traversing the system and plotting the jump to Kazak.
60.325	The TSSS Searcher arrives at Pale station over two weeks ahead of the time it would typically take to make a run from Cassidine to Truane’s Star and begin unloading their cargo. They immediately begin looking for a cargo and working on calculations for the direct return jump.
60.326	– Discovery Squadron successfully jumps in to the OFS070 system. Signals from sathar vessels are immediately detected upon arrival. A deceleration vector is chosen to attempt to minimize the signal reaching the inner system and work begins immediately to calculate a jump out of the system. – Messages are dispatched via subspace radio to both the UPF and Rim Coalitions with all the jump data and news of the sathar presence.
60.327	HSS History’s Hope arrives in OFS221 without incident. Work begins on plotting the next leg of their jump to OFS222, only 4 lightyears away. They decide to make small jumps to improve their chances of a successful jump.
60.328	Alpha team descends to Jetsom while Beta team returns to the Moneyspider. Their shuttle brings the Matrix to the ship infecting the systems in the Moneyspider and Snobol (Belnafaer) (SFAD5)

Here’s the full Timeline document:

DetailedFrontierTimeline Download

The full timeline document is starting to get pretty big. It’s up to 27 pages at the moment. We’re approaching the end of Frontier Year (FY) 60 in the timeline. Would you like to see a new document for the new year or should I just keep growing this one? Let me know in the comments.

UPF Heavy Cruiser Model and Miniature

The final model. Click for full sized image

Okay, with the UPF Battleship completed, I’ve now recreated all the original military miniatures. I still need to make the Pirate Frigate model and also the freighter and privateers but those are going to wait a bit. Before I tackle them, I want to finish all the ships in the UPF and sathar order of battle. These remaining ships are ones for which no miniature was made by TSR. There weren’t models for the fighters or destroyers either, but I’ve already made those. That leaves us with these missing ships: the UPF Minelayer (if you don’t use the sathar Cutter model), Assault Carriers for both sides, and the UPF Heavy Cruiser. The latter is the topic of today’s post. The image to the right shows the completed model. This post will talk about how we got there.

Sources

There aren’t a lot of sources for the Heavy Cruiser. For “definitive” images, we only have the silhouettes on page 6 of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book (KHCB) and the game counter. You might be able to argue that some of the other ships depicted in the books are heavy cruisers, but nothing else is labeled as such. Since I’m saving the profiles from page 6 & 7 of the KHCB for a second set of miniatures I’ll produce later, we’re going to go with the image on the counter for our basic profile.

This is the image we have to work with. It has a relatively small head, wide fuselage segments and a fairly narrow “waist” region. We also notice that like the destroyer, this has a prominent cannon hanging under the bow of the ship.

Based on the data in the KHCB, the heavy cruiser should be between HS 16-18 and have 6 engines. Since the Battleship was HS 20, and the Light Cruiser is HS 12-14, this ship should fall somewhere right between those two ships in size. That’s what we have to work with, so let’s get started.

The Basic Hull

Building the basic hull was straightforward as I just had to measure the relative sizes of the various parts of the ship and scale them appropriately. There were two main deviations. The first was the engine region. The images on the counters show small engine structures. Since the light cruiser and the battleship both use the same engine design, I intend to reuse that engine here on the heavy cruiser as well. That necessitated making the engine region just a tad bigger than what is shown on the counter, and the engines will stick out further from the body of the ship.

The second variation was in the bow or “head” of the ship. The rules say that heavy cruisers are all old ships. That, combined with the fact that the bow of the ship looks kind of small compared to the body of the ship, led me to make the decision to use the same bow portion on this model as I used for the light cruiser, similar to how I used the same head on the destroyer that I did on the frigate. This gives us the following basic profile.

Adding Details

Next I decided to reuse some of the major elements from both the light cruiser and the battleship. On the aft portion of the fuselage, I used the domed structure from the back of the battleship but only placed three of them compared to the battleship’s four.

Then on the forward fuselage, I used the cannons from the light cruiser placing four of those compared to the light cruiser’s three emplacements. I also add the external cannon onto the bow of the ship. Along the way I also added in the crenelated trim at the edges of the cylinder sections. That gave me this profile.

That was the relatively easy part as I was reusing major structures that I had created for the other models. After that it was time to work my way up the fuselage adding in random bits of machinery, piping, and other structures to give it a bit of surface character to match the other ships in the series.

For some of these bits, I reused some of the structures from the light cruiser and battleship models while for others, I just added things in that fit my fancy. In the end, the final model looked like this:

In the end, the model was 112.5 mm (4.4″) tall which put it right in the middle of the 94 mm and 120.75 mm heights of the light cruiser and battleship, respectively.

Printing

The next step was actually printing it. It’s all well and good to have a cool looking model, but if it doesn’t print, that doesn’t do us any good.

For this printing, I switched back to the grey resin that I had used for the light cruiser. It’s an opaque resin and takes about 50% longer to print but it photographs much better. The total print time with this resin was about 14 hours so I started the print before I went to bed and let it run overnight. When I got up in the morning the print was almost done. After it finished and I gave it some time to cure, I snapped a picture of the heavy cruiser model along with the light cruiser and battleship.

This shows the relative sizes along with a ruler for absolute scale. I think it turned out just fine and looks like a ship made from the same design templates.

Getting the Model and Miniature

I’ve added the Heavy Cruiser to the Miniature Price Table if you want to order a physical miniature. The cost for this miniature will be $5.50, the same as the sathar heavy cruiser. Anyone who joins my Patreon this month (Nov 2019) at the Crafter level will get a printed battleship and heavy cruiser miniature in December.

If you would like a copy of the model STL file, I’ve made the model available on DriveThruRPG along with all the other models. The cost of the UPF Heavy Cruiser model is $1.99. My Patreon backers received the model last week when I finished it.

Final Thoughts

What do you think about this model and miniature? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

Next up is the UPF Assault Carrier. I’ve’ already started working on it so you can expect to see a post in December with that model and a printed version of the miniature.

I’m also considering making a chess set using the ships from both sides as the pieces. Is that something you would be interested in? Let me know.

UPF Battleship Model and Miniature

I thought I’d be done with this model and ready to post this last week, but the model ended up taking me about 50% longer than I had originally planned. And since I had guessed 10-12 hours, that was a significant time overrun. In the end, the model took about 17 hours to complete.

Let’s not bury the lede, here is the finished model, pictured to the right. With the engines, it stands 120.75mm (4.8″) tall (or long depending on how you look at it) and is a little less than an inch (23.7mm to be exact) in diameter at the widest point on the engines.

The extra time was spent in trying to get all the details just right. There are a lot of them on the battleship and it just took longer than I was expecting. However, I’m really happy with how it turned out. Let’s look a bit at the process.

Getting Started

This is a miniature that was part of the Federation Ships boxed produced by TSR. On the box, it said that there was “some assembly required” for the battleship miniature. This model comes in 10 different pieces. The eight engines are each separate and the main fuselage comes in two parts. Now, I picked up my miniature box(es, I have four now, only 2 of which didn’t have lead rot when I bought them) used on E-bay in the last few years. As such the previous owners had already glued the fuselage together in three of the boxes but hadn’t attached the engines. So this is what I had to start with.

One of the two originals I used to reference. The other had a paint primer coat applied. Click for full sized image.

Now, as I discovered while working on the Light Cruiser, those are the exact same engines on both miniatures, so I had already done the work to create them. I just had to make 8 copies for the battleship.

There were also a number of repeated elements on this ship, namely the three main levels of gun turrets, the structure around the waist of the ship, and the “grill” around the neck.

That’s what I tackled first. For the gun turrets, I created a model of each of the structures and then just placed four of each of them, ninety degrees apart, around the fuselage. For the structure around the waist, it was repeated six times, and the grill around the neck has thirteen bumps. That piece ended up being just a stretched and squished sphere rotated around the neck. Getting those pieces in place was the “easy” part and only took about five hours to do giving me a model that looked like this.

The gun turrets are the same as used in the Light Cruiser, but they are sitting on different base platforms. So while I could reuse the turret, I had to build the bases new for this miniature.

Adding the Trim

At that point I just started at the back of the ship and worked my way forward adding in all the little detail bits. When I got to the area between the gun emplacements, I would work one section at a time filling in the space between the turrets, rotating 90 degrees and repeating.

While there are some repeated elements across the ship and mostly on the bow or head of the vessel, almost all of the the little decorations on the surface are unique. So each one had to be measured with my calipers and reconstructed. In the end, that just wasn’t as fast (and there were a lot of details) as I had expected. When I hit the 12 hour mark, my original upper estimate, I was only up to the area between the upper guns and the model looked something like this. (I didn’t save an exact picture at the time.)

The details on the upper fuselage (right side in image) are only on the little bit you can see. Everything around the back side is still blank and the details between the gun turrets in the middle and bottom on this image are missing as well.

The one nice thing about filling in the details on the bow of the ship was that, unlike the light cruiser, which had irregular hexagons for the shape of the head, the battleship has a regular hexagon shape. That meant that the angles you had to tilt all the pieces were exactly the same on all the faces. That made lining things up much easier. Plus there are a number of repeated elements on the bow.

With that done, I added the cannon on the top and the model was finished. Here it is again in the same orientation as the previous two images.

Printing

As I learned from the light cruiser, these ships really need to be printed standing up. So that’s what I did. My biggest worry were the middle gun turrets. With the barrels facing down, each barrel was going to need it’s own support that would then need to be trimmed off. It turns out that those supports had to be added by hand as my printing software didn’t add them automatically.

I had black resin in the printer at the time so that’s what I used to print this model. Unfortunately, the back resin doesn’t photograph as well as the green or grey. The image at the right shows the finished battleship model next to the Sathar Heavy Cruiser. Both still have their printing supports on. This was taken just after the battleship finished printing but I hadn’t cured it yet. The total print time was nearly 12 hours.

I also discovered after the fact that the vertical structures on back of the upper turrets that stick straight out need supports as well, which I didn’t add. They printed at an angle on the actual print. It looks fine, but isn’t what I had planned on.

I’m still amazed at the detail this printer can achieve. All of the details on the model show up in the print. Here the final printed miniature with all the supports removed.

And here it is next to the original metal miniature (minus the engines).

You can probably spot a few differences and there are a few more visible if you’re holding them, but I’m really pleased with the way this turned out.

Getting the Model Files

I’ve already added the UPF Battleship to my Miniatures Price Table page here on the site if you’d like me to print you one or more of them.

Additionally, as I’ve been posting these models, people have asked me about getting the model files. To that end, over the last few week I’ve been publishing all the STL files for printing the models on DriveThruRPG. You can find them in the 3D Models section of my New Frontier Games storefront.

All of the models that are recreations of the original TSR miniatures are free, pay-what-you-want products. Any of the the models that are my original creations are listed with a small cost. I’ve posted all of the models I’ve created to date on the site with the exception of the UPF and sathar fighter models, and two models I’ve made based on deck plans created by Bill Logan. Those will be going up shortly, I just haven’t had a chance to get them posted. All future models will be posted there as well.

If you are one of my Patreon supporters at the Surveyor ($2/month) level or higher, I send you all the model files as I create them. Or you can support the creation of new models by becoming a patron or making a donation through the pay-what-you-want option on the models listed on DriveThru. And if you are a Patreon supporter at the Crafter Level ($30/month), I will send you a printed version of the miniature. Anyone who joins at that level this month will get the battleship mini.

What’s Next?

Now that the UPF Battleship is done, I’ve finished recreating all the UPF and sathar ships from the original boxed sets. I still need to do the pirate frigate, the freighter from the Federation Ships box, and the privateers to get all the original minis recreated.

I’ll tackle those, but first I want to fill in the order of battle for the two main sides in the Second Sathar War game so that people could potentially play out that game with a full compliment of miniatures. As such I still need to do the UPF Heavy Cruiser, the UPF Minelayer (if you don’t use the cutter miniature), the assault carriers for both sides. Of those the easiest will be the UPF Heavy Cruiser as it will draw heavily from the design of the light cruiser and battleship. I’ve already started working on that model. It might even be finished before the end of the month. It’s much easier to make my own designs than trying to recreate existing ones. Plus I have a lot of little details structures already designed from the other ships that I can reuse.

After the heavy cruiser, I’ll tackle the assault carriers and then the minelayer before going back to finish the recreations.

And that’s it for now. Let me know if you have any suggestions, questions, or comments in the comment section below. I hope you enjoy the miniatures as much as I enjoy making them.

A Module Based Campaign – final

I can’t believe it’s been three months since I last looked at this. I’ve really been distracted by the 3D modeling and miniature creation project. I’m not quite done with the battleship miniature so that will have to wait another week (or more, it’s taking longer than I expected). With this post we are going to cover all the remaining modules and wrap up the module based campaign.

When we last left our intrepid adventurers, they had either just returned from Alcazzar or finished up some other mission for CDC and had arrived in the White Light system, probably on Clarion station. They have shiny new level 1 spaceship skills and are hopefully itching to start using them. It’s time to recruit them into the Clarion Royal Marines!

Warriors of White Light

The cover of this module was a map for the Second Sathar War game from the Campaign Book.

SFKH0: Warriors of White Light is the first of the Knight Hawks modules that incorporates both the Alpha Dawn and Knight Hawks skills and includes bits of the spaceship combat game as part of the play.

The module is designed to give the characters experience with various aspects of the Knight Hawks rules including ship combat, zero-g and space suit operations, and a chance to battle the sathar once again.

The module includes five mini adventures that are designed to be interspersed between descriptions of routine patrol and inspection duty. The first is just a routine inspections where they discover weapons to being smuggled to anti-crown forces on the surface of Clarion. The second presents a ship controlled by a mad cybot that hit hurling toward Clarion station. The third is a raid on a pirate base in the system. The fourth encounter has the PCs pitted against a sathar boarding force that is trying to capture their ship. The final encounter is a boardgame scenario where the milita battle a sathar raid.

I’d play this module as presented. As the Referee you have to add in a few more routine encounters that don’t really go anyway to help make the scenarios presented stand out but you don’t want to spend too much time on it, just enough to that the players appreciate the excitement.

By the end of the module, the PCs will have earned between 15-30 XP. I’ll be giving the sample characters 25. Unless the preform poorly, this is enough for all of them to have level 2 skills by the time they play the scenario with the sathar boarding force. By the end of the module, they should have all achieved level 2 in their spaceship skills and the gunners may even be at level 3.

The Question of What is Next

Until this morning, I would have said Dramune Run (SFKH1). It is the next module in the series and we’ve been playing them mostly in order so that makes logical sense. But as I was thinking about writing this post, I realized that that might not be the best order. So we’ll start by looking at what to do if you do want to run Dramune Run next and they I’ll discuss the alternate option that I’ll be using.

If you want to run Dramune Run as the next module, you’ll need to add in a few more adventures between the end of the Warriors of White Light (WoWL) module and Dramune Run. In that module, the PCs will be flying a hull size 6 ship, which requires at least a level 3 Pilot skill and our pilot PC is only level 2. They probably need about 15-30 more XP to get there (My sample PC, Dolnab, needs 20 more after WoWL).

There are plenty of options here. You could run more adventures like those presented in the WoWL module. The main thing here would be to come up with some new scenarios and not just reuse the same ideas. White Light and Clarion have been favorite topics of the authors in the Frontier Explorer fanzine and we’ve even been running a “Warriors of White Light 2.0” series in the magazine (starting in issue 22). You could mine these for ideas of adventures on Clarion station (issue 23), in the White Light system (issue 23), and even one that involves the freighter from the first encounter that takes them across the Frontier to Cassidine and back (issue 24). We took a bit of hiatus from the series in issues 25 & 26 but there are still some articles in the queue so you can expect more to come. These adventures and ideas should get the PCs up to a level 3 pilot skill and then they are ready to tackle the Dramune Run.

However, as I was thinking about this, I felt that there was a better way to run the modules. In addition to requiring a few more adventures to get the PCs ready for the Dramune Run module, the module ends with them owning a ship. At that point, it’s pretty hard to get the PCs to not just want to go off adventuring in their ship and the remaining modules are not really conductive to that. Instead, let’s save the Dramune Run for the climax of the campaign and start by going a different direction.

Beyond the Frontier

The last three Star Frontiers modules published by TSR comprise the Beyond the Frontier series. The modules are:

SFKH2: Mutiny on the Eleanor Moraes
SFKH3: Face of the Enemy
SFKH4: The War Machine

Much like the Volturnus series of Alpha Dawn adventures, these modules take the characters to new worlds to meet new races and confront the sathar, just on a larger scale.

The advantage of going with these modules before Dramune Run is that they make a nice progression from a power level perspective and the PCs can actually be assigned to the mission as part of their commission in the Clarion Royal Marines. It can just be their next assignment.

From a power perspective, the PCs only need a level 2 piloting skill to be the backup pilot on the UPFS Eleanor Moraes, a HS 3 exploration vessel. If anything, the PCs are going to be better skilled than the pre-gens provided with the module. They can start right away without any intermediate adventures needed. And participation in these adventures will give them more than enough experience to be at the correct level for the Dramune Run.

The PCs will be part of the Frontier Expeditionary Force (I should make a patch for that organization) which is composed of civilians and Spacefleet members. It’s completely reasonable that the government of Clarion, which has a high standing in the Council of Worlds, would volunteer some of its decorated Royal Marines to be part of the endeavor. Pushing the boundaries of the Frontier helps to ensure the security of their world. The PCs are a natural choice given their recent experiences in the WoWL module’s scenarios.

Again, these modules can be run as presented. I’m going just discuss them briefly to summarize what happens and the XP gained.

SFKH2: Mutiny on the Eleanor Moraes

This module starts of the series with the PCs out exploring the world of Mahg Mar in the Waller Nexus system when the First Officer, Bill Terry, mutinies, takes control of the ship, and destroys their exploration airship. It is up to the PCs to traverse the wilderness between them and recapture the Eleanor Moraes before Terry destroys it and kills the remaining crew.

This adventure requires a wide mix of skills and will give the PCs a chance to use some of the environmentalist skills developed back on Volturnus (and hopefully improved upon on some of the intervening adventures). It also requires use of their technological skill and weapons skills and, due to the rough trip back to the ship, gives the medic a chance to shine as well.

Hopefully the PCs recapture the ship intact but regardless, when the call goes out about the events on the planet, they learn that their old ship, the CMS Osprey, is being dispatched to assist and will arrive in a few weeks with supplies and repair materials. They just have to hold out until then.

This modules gives out 6-18 XP depending on how the PCs perform in their trek back to the ship and in the capture of the ship itself. I’ll be awarding our sample characters 15 XP.

SFKH3: The Face of the Enemy

This module also takes place on Mahg Mar, after the Osprey arrives but before the repairs to the Eleanor Moraes are complete. In this adventure the PCs once again make contact with a native intelligent race on the planet, something they have had a lot of practice with throughout the campaign (Volturnus, Starmist, and Alcazzar). Along the way they discover evidence of sathar presence on the planet and capture a small, hull size 2 sathar scout ship. The climax of the adventure is a Void jump to a new system (FS30) and a raid on a modified sathar assault carrier and the chance to capture sathar prisoners and the assault carrier itself.

The module awards 5-17 XP depending on how the PCs do. I’ll be awarding our team 14 points for this adventure. They’ve now earned enough XP to increase their Knight Hawks skills even more as well as possibly increase some of their other skills. With the sathar ship captured, they are ready to take on the final part of the series.

SFKH4: The War Machine

In the War Machine, the PCs are going to make contact with the technological race native to the FS30 system and hopefully drive the sathar from the system, capturing or destroying the sathar starship construction center based in the system.

This module involves both character and ship action as well as diplomacy and problem solving. After fighting off a small squadron of sathar fighters, the PCs are contacted by the native race in the system to arrange a meeting. While the team has had several first contact scenarios, this one is unique in that the species being contacted has active interplanetary spaceflight capabilities. After making contact they proceed to the planet’s surface and attack a sathar processing plant. After that they mount an attack on the sathar ships and shipyard. If successful, the Mhemne (the native race) are liberated and the sathar facilities are destroyed along with several sathar ships, reducing their combat capacity in the upcoming (or possibly on-going) Second Sathar War. The system is renamed the Liberty system (the module doesn’t say what the Mhemne’s name for it was) and the PCs are hailed as liberators and heros.

This module awards from 9 to 26 XP based on performance but if the PC’s are performing down near the 9 XP level, they may not succeed as they are making a lot of mistakes and losing valuable resources. We’ll give then 22 XP for this module.

Back to the Frontier

That end the Beyond the Frontier series of adventures. By the time it’s all over, the PCs have been gone for several months. Upon their return to Clarion, they can collect their back pay which should be a considerable amount of cash. It’s now time for the final adventure in the module campaign,

The Dramune Run

At this point the PCs have level 3 spaceship skills and reputations as heroes and outstanding members of the Clarion Royal Marines in addition to their other exploits across the Frontier. Just the type of people Garlus Tylappar needs to help him.

The initial encounter of this adventure can occur at any point after the PCs are back on Clarion station. They’ll probably be given a few days to a few weeks of leave after returning from the Liberty system. Garlus should approach them during this down time to make his pitch. He should lean on their reputations and show a knowledge of their exploits in making his case (but nothing that would not be known through public media).

This module also just plays out as written. The PCs will help get the Gullwind repaired and into space. They will fight off pirates on the way to Dramune and then be captured and escape from Darkworld station rescuing the Chukkahs and exposing the Malthar’s plans.

The XP awards for this module range from 20 to 43 with a possible 5 XP for the astrogator and up to 120 XP divided by the number of PCs for rescuing Chukkahs. I’ll be awarding our team a total of 48 XP each.

The End

And that wraps up the module campaign. The PCs now have a ship, and after the Beyond the Frontier series, a reasonably large chunk of cash to get them started. If they want to continuing adventuring or take up the life of merchants you can extend the campaign for as long as you want.

The Final Characters

These are the final skill levels of the characters at the end of Dramune Run.

Name: Yanni

Race: Yazirian, F

STR/STA: 40/40

DEX/RS: 55/55

INT/LOG: 55/55

PER/LDR: 45/45

Racial Abilities: Battle Rage 5%

XP: 288/299

PSA – Technological

Skills: Technician 6, Robotics 5, Computer 3, Beam 3, Melee 3, Engineer 3

Notes:

Born on Hentz, Araks. Yanni likes to tinker with gadgets and vehicles. She’d love to be able to tinker on starships as well.

Name: Mekar

Race: Yazirian, M

STR/STA: 45/45

DEX/RS: 70/70

INT/LOG: 55/55

PER/LDR: 55/55

Racial Abilities: Battle Rage 5%

XP: 282/299

PSA – Bio-social

Skills: Medic 5, Environmental 4, Projectile 5, Psycho-social 3, Melee 2, Gyrojet 2, Beam 2, Rocket Weapons 3

Notes:

Born on Pale, Truane’s Star. As Mekar will tell anyone who asks, his job is to understand the local critters and keep everyone else in one piece.

Name: Dolnab

Race: Dralasite

STR/STA: 55/55

DEX/RS: 65/65

INT/LOG: 70/70

PER/LDR: 50/50

Racial Abilities: Lie Detection 5%

XP: 264/299

PSA – Techological

Skills: Technician 6, Computer 3, Robotics 3, Projectile 3, Melee 3, Demolitions 1, Beam 1, Pilot 3

Notes:

Born on Inner Reach, Dramune. Dolnab loves to tinker with computers and also play flight simulator games.

Name: Michaella

Race: Human, F

STR/STA: 55/55

DEX/RS: 64/61

INT/LOG: 50/50

PER/LDR: 40/40

XP: 294/299

PSA – Military

Skills: Beam 6, Melee 6, Environmental 2, Thrown 4, Martial Arts 4, Medic 2, Projectile 3, Energy Weapons 3

Notes:

Born on Minotaur, Theseus. Michaella grew up as the youngest of seven with six older brothers. She learned to shoot and hold her own with her brothers’ rough-housing at a young age.

Name: K’sta’n

Race: Vrusk, F

STR/STA: 50/50

DEX/RS: 75/75

INT/LOG: 50/50

PER/LDR: 35/35

Racial Abilities: Comprehension 15%

XP: 284/299

PSA – Military

Skills: Gyrojet 6, Martial Arts 4, Projectile 4, Technician 2, Melee 6, Thrown 3, Beam 2, Rocket Weapons 3

Notes:

Born on Terldrom, Fromeltar. K’sta’n has always had an interest in weapons, but also in the forms of the various martial arts.

Name: T’vor

Race: Vrusk, M

STR/STA: 40/40

DEX/RS: 55/55

INT/LOG: 65/65

PER/LDR: 40/40

Racial Abilities: Comprehension 15%

XP: 280/299

PSA – Technological

Skills: Computer 6, Robotics 5, Beam 3, Melee 2, Technician 2, Astrogation 3

Notes:

Born on Gran Quivera, Prenglar. T’vor used to hang aout at the University of Prenglar as a kid and chat up the tech professors. He loves to hack computers and robots and can usually get anything working, eventually. He also has a deep interest in astronomy.

Final Thoughts

I don’t really have much to add. What are your thoughts and ideas on the way the campaign was laid out? Feel free to comment below.

Detailed Frontier Timeline – FY60.268 to FY60.298

Here’s the next installment of the timeline. This month sees the Sathar consolidating some of their forces, the Discovery Squadron bypassing the sathar starship construction center to press on to their target system, and the Saurians continue their exodus from their home system. We also see the incidents that will kick off the events of a couple of the game modules (SFAD5 – Bugs in the System and SFKH0 – Warriors of White Light).

Date (FY)	Event
60.268	An order is placed for a second assault scout for the K’aken Kar system at the Fromeltar starship construction center.
60.269	Crown Princess Leotia Valentine of Clarion (White Light) celebrates her 33rd birthday.
60.270	Discovery Squadron arrives at Stenmar Station where most of the crew takes a week of shore leave.
60.271	The sathar starship construction center in the Liberty system completes a destroyer and 6 fighters.
60.272	Errors in the astrogation calculations cause the HSS History’s Hope to misjump and not return to the OFS224 system. Luckily, they end up in the Araks system. While not disastrous, the misjump emphasizes for the crew the risk involved in their endeavor.
60.273	Deciding not to risk trouble with the Family of One authorities on Hentz (Araks). the HSS History’s Hope decides to not stop at the station and head straight back to Histran (Scree Fron)
60.274	Businesses on both Inner and Outer Reach (Dramune) lodge formal complaints against the new inspection of cargo arriving at Inner Reach from Outer Reach claiming it is hurting trade and damaging business. The government refuses to make any changes to the process.
60.275	Strike Force Nova arrives at Hentz (Araks). It will spend just 4 days here before heading on to the Athor system.
60.276	A new assault carrier is completed in the sathar starship construction center near Fromeltar.
60.277	After 20 days backtracking though their original path, the Spire Dragons reach their coastal camp. All told it took just over half a year (202 days) to make the full trek and cost the lives of fifteen of the team’s members.
60.278	– Newest saurian Ark ship completes its checkout and passengers begin shuttling to the ship. – In order to avoid OFS019 and the sathar forces there, the Discovery Squadron decides to try skirting the edge of the nebula near Kazak and jump to the double star system OFS017.
60.279	Strike Force Nova departs Hentz (Araks) for the Athor system
60.280	After four weeks of the increased inspections of ships arriving at Inner Reach (Dramune) from Outer Reach (Dramune), authorities have seized millions of credits worth of the drug Ixiol and reported cases of the drugs use on the planet has dropped significantly.
60.281	As news of Inner Reach’s (Dramune) success on limited the import of Ixiol spreads around the Frontier, other systems consider similar sanctions. However, many of the systems lack the militia enforcement necessary to make it successful.
60.282	– A heavy cruiser is completed in the sathar starship construction center near Zebulon (OFS19). – The frigate, light cruiser, assault carrier, and fighters arrive in OFS19 from OFS111. The forces in the system are now on par with, if not exceeding, the strength of any of the UPF Task Forces. – Mistakes in the astrogation calculations, possibly due to the presence of the nebula, send the Discovery Squadron off course and they end up in a single star system instead of the binary system they were shooting for.
60.283	The HSS History’s Hope arrives safely at Histran Station (Scree Fron) where it will resupply before reattempting to complete charting the jump route between OFS224 and OFS221.
60.284	Construction on the second K’aken-Kar militia assault scout begins.
60.285	– After three days of observations, the astrogators of Discovery Squadron determine that they are in OFS025 instead of OFS017, having jumped further than intended. No sathar signals have been detected. – After much discussion, the decision is made for Discovery Squadron to press on. They prepare to jump to OFS026 which would have been the next system after OFS017.
60.286	The HSS History’s Hope departs Histran Station (Scree Fron) headed to OFS224 to resume its attempt to chart a course to the suspected Yazirian home system.
60.287	PGC shipyards around Gran Quivera attacked by militants claiming to be Streel supporters, using access derived from the Nesmith Enterprises breach earlier in the year. Production capacity reduced by 38%. Several hulls destroyed but the Spacefleet battleship escaped unscathed.
60.288	Strike Force Nova arrives in the Athor system. Originally scheduled to spend seven days in the system, the news from the Discovery Squadron cut that short to only 2 days.
60.289	Strike Force Nova detects extremely faint signals from OFS200 in the Athor system. The detection confirms that the signals have been being broadcast for years undetected.
60.290	Strike Force Nova departs the Athor system to return to Prenglar.
60.291	Construction of two TransTravel assault scouts completed at the CDC starship construction center orbiting Triad (Cassidine) and begin traveling to Terldrom (Fromeltar).
60.292	PGC and Star Law release a joint statement that autopsies of several of the saboteurs killed at the PGC shipyard contained the same sathar parasite as the sathar agents that attacked the armed station orbiting Triad (Cassidine).
60.293	Loading complete, the third saurian Ark ships departs the Sauria system for destinations unknown.
60.294	– The Discovery Squadron successfully arrives in the binary star system OFS026. No sathar signals have been detected while decelerating into the system. – The Discovery Squadron begins plotting a jump to the OFS30 system, another binary star system 9 light years away. This will be the longest uncharted jump of their journey.
60.295	– Sathar SCC#3 completes a heavy cruiser – HSS History’s Hope arrives in OFS224 and immediately begins trip to OFS221
60.296	Unbeknownst to the crew, the Matrix virus infects the Jetsom’s electronic systems in the Belenafaer system. (SFAD5[1])
60.297	Boarding party of the CMS Osprey killed by smugglers during a routine cargo inspection. The freighter is destroyed as it tries to flee toward a Void jump. The Clarion Royal Marines post a job opening for new staff. (SFKH0)
60.298	Calculations complete and verified, the Discovery Squadron begins accelerating toward OFS030.

[1] SFAD5 – Bugs in the System module

Here’s the full timeline document:

DetailedFrontierTimeline Download