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Thursday, September 25, 2014

Continuing Operations

This is Steven Petrick posting.

There have been surprisingly (at least to me) few reports on the Hydran Master Starship Book, so it seems to be heading towards a smooth launch date. The page count has held steady, even so while I originally envisioned keeping the Stinger-X where it appeared in the "rulebook sequence," i.e., as the last ship description in the Module X1 rulebook before the first entry for the Module X1R rulebook, I have now decided to move it to more or less to "rule sequence," that is to say to say it now appears as the last entry in the Hydran advanced technology ships.

I have also been doing my bit on the A Call to Arms: Star Fleet rulebook revision, having been allowed to read the draft (just the rules) looking for problems. I think over all the book is much improved over the earlier version. It is still a very simple and slimmed down set of rules allowing for large battles to be quickly fought and resolved.

I have been frequently interrupted to check orders and products being packed for shipment, which always breaks my chain of thought.

One of the advantages of "The Early Years" is that there are not a lot of small attrition units. While shuttles exist, they are mostly unarmed and there are no fighters or fast patrol ships. Planetary defenses do not include defense satellites in this period. This can make a relatively large scenario relatively easy to play. I have completed a scenario about the Hydran attack on Borax, the homeworld of the Borak Star League found in Module E3. While there are a lot of ships, there are no fighters so it is very much a slugging match. Because this is a home planet, however much in the Early Years and an empire itself not long in space, the planetary defenses are not all that strong, and the only "attrition" units are a force of early security skiffs to support the ground bases and the defending Borak Star League ships. The Hydran attack is, however, further hampered by the historical fact that at the time of this attack all of their early dreadnoughts and early command cruisers had been destroyed by the Klingons and Lyrans, and with the home shipyard destroyed, they had no means to replace them.

Still, the unique circumstances that existed between the Hydrans and Borak allow for some additional elements of surprise.

I would note that it should be obvious that historically there would have been a lot of merchant ships in the system, but as these are almost entirely unarmed merchant ships, the scenario is simplified by noting that both sides would have ignored them as targets.

Well, that is it for today, I need to get back to examining the A Call to Arms: Star Fleet rulebook.