To Go Where No Game Has Gone Before

Well, on my game table, anyway.

As regular readers might know, I am still fan of Star Fleet Battles, a game inspired by the original Star Trek and animated series.  If you look around the internet, you'll most likely find comments relating to the game being complex or having a huge rulebook.

I learned the game over 40 years ago from the 21 page of rules in the original boxed edition of the game, not the 288 pages in the Commanders edition rules or however many hundred pages in the current rulebooks.  And, I really enjoy the game.

The rules are big, but the game isn't really that complex; I can have have you running a starship in 15-20 minutes.  There is just a lot of detail; info about races, ships, and scenarios make up most of it.  More about the current version of the rules can be found here.  The original boxed version is usually available on Ebay.

I've always preferred the idea of gaming in Captain Kirk's universe of the 1960s or even in earlier Trek periods.  Most gamers seem to prefer the time of Next Generation or later, but I find the capital ships too big and overpowering, generally less interesting.

The series, Star Trek Enterprise, had the perfect setting for me; I even preferred the cast and characters to most other Trek series, too bad the writers weren't up to the task.  In any event, the idea of the smaller, technologically unbalanced ships with archaic weapons was just more captivating to me.

Some years back I discovered Prelude to Axanar, and more recently I watched Strange New Worlds (in many ways the Star Trek series that I waited my whole life for).  In the last couple of weeks, I bumped into The Romulan War on Youtube, which sems to have finally pushed me over the edge on this early Star Trek trek.

My hobby options have been somewhat limited over the last week, as I await the arrival of my band saw blade (see last post).  So over the last few days, on a whim, I decided to look into what was available to create a Star Fleet Battles version of the ships for The Romulan War (TRW) and for the Four Years War (FYW) dealing with Axanar and the Klingons.

Given the information that I've found, I will need to overlap both canon and non-canon info and fill in some blanks to create the ship diagrams and weapon tables for a my own version of Star Fleet battles in these earlier periods.

I've been chasing info about ship classes mentioned in material addressing the two conflicts about the ships, propulsion, and weapons (among other things) to produce the ship diagrams, called SSDs in SFB, that allow a player to run ships in the game system.

The Four Years War (FYW) with the Klingons isn't a problem to bring into SFB, the basic game starts just shortly after that period.  The Romulan War is roughly a hundred years earlier, and the ships are a lot more primitive.  I don't know if there is enough granularity to the weapons tables in SFB to accomodate the weapons and defensive systems without re-scaling the game system.

Where I currently stand is that bringing the Federation to life for the FYW isn't much of a problem at all.  The Klingons are a little tougher, finding more ambiguity in ship classes and descriptions, and there is generally less diversity with respect to ship size and class.

With respect to Axanar/FASA, I will have to do some picking and choosing. I quite like the Axanar fan film perspective, and was never a big fan of FASA's ship designs (particularly the Klingons). So I will mostly be going with the Axanar fan film's direction regarding ships, which can be readily adapted to the SFB game system.

With respect to The Romulan War, again the Federations ships seem more easy to produce, though qualifying and quantifying the relative value of armor and polarized plating of the ship hulls instead of the later shields is a bit abstract, and trying to do it, such that there is a direct linear progression from the time of the TRW, through FYW, and the TOS may be tricky.

Aditionally, defining the weapons of that earlier period, spatial and photonic torpedoes, and the various pulse and beam weapons looks to be less than strait forward, and they all look to cause very minimal damage by comparison to even the worst weapons of Captain Kirk's era.

I haven't really gotten into the meat of the Romulan ships yet, having seen what's presented in the fan films, and just scattered bits otherwise.  Leaning on TOS info and my own notions, somewhat derived from SFB, this may prove the toughest part of the adventure.

Another avenue that I've gone down over these last few days, is availability of models for these two conflicts in or close to the 1/3788 scale of the old Gamescience and SFB game miniatures.  

A lot of the Federation ships are available for FYW, as are some Klingon, though at the moment, scale may be an issue for some of the Klingon ships.  For the earlier period of the Romulan War, I have a lot less to work with thus far, and suspect that I might have to start scratch-building and casting fleets for those.  Though there are quite a number of model ships available in the Romulan Warbird configuration that might work as proxies.

I could play both periods with counters, but would really prefer and better enjoy the games if they included miniatures.  Ultimately, I don't really know if this will go anywhere, and beyond the research stage, it may just sit on a shelf for quite some time before manifesting on the table top.   Last year, I shared a plan to focus on 10 gaming periods, and was doing pretty well with this since November.  Star fleet Battles - The Early Years wasn't on that list.

Anyway, this is the more interesting part of what I've been doing while waiting for my band saw blade to arive for my foam cutting project.  I'll plan to continue to research the ships and build a timeline of events for the two conflicts, and make up at least a few SSDs for some of the ships to get a feel for what they look like in the game.  Hopefully I'll have something to share in a future post from all of this.

That's all I have for now, be safe out there.