Full Thrust: A Nest of Vipers!

Introduction

Pirate ships docked at Starbase-13

In a remote part of the frontier, Orion pirates have taken over an old battle-station (Starbase 13) and are using it to refuel and repair their privateers.  They have been a considerable thorn in the flesh of the Federation; twice the sector admiral has attempted to retake the station, with disastrous results on both occasions (here and here).  However, the Federation are not the only government who have been stung by the Orion raids...

[I seem to be getting very forgetful these days.  Last week at the Helensburgh club night, I forgot to take my camera.  This week I had the camera, but had forgotten my Full Thrust event cards and all my explosion & missile markers.  Oh, well - those are optional anyway, so the game can go on without them.  Annoying, though.]

The Scenario

"Commander, there's an unidentified ship approaching the station at high speed.  Looks like an ore carrier or something like that."
"A single freighter?  Must be one of our prize crews; they may have forgotten to re-tune their ID signal.  Now stop worrying and don't disturb me again."
"Sir!  Multiple warp signatures, inbound!  Emergency - we're under attack!"

Setup

Place an Orion starbase 18" from one end of the table.  It is surrounded by a thick ring of mines, 24" away from the station.

All the ships in the Orion fleet are docked at the base.  Until they undock, they cannot use any of their own weapons or launch any fighters.

The Klingon fleet arrives from the far end of the table at any desired speed up to 10.  The attackers don't have any minesweepers, but the resourceful admiral has commandeered a large freighter.  He/she may use this to force passage through the minefield or it may be filled with marines and used in an attempt to capture the base (good luck with that!).

We played with roughly the following size of forces:

• Klingons: 2000NPV
• Starbase: 1750NPV
• Orion ships: 500NPV
• Mines: lots!

Special Rules

The Orions are partying hard, as many of their raiders have returned from successful forays at the same time.  Consequently, they aren't as alert as they might be and are relying on their passive defences (minefield) more than they should be.
Every Orion ship and each sector of the starbase must track readiness for each of the following items that are fitted to that ship/sector.  At the start of every turn, throw a dice for each item on each ship; on a '6' the preparedness advances to the next level:

• Weapons - level-0: cannot use, level-1: class-1 beams and point defence may be used as normal, level-2: fully operational
• Engines - level-0: cannot use, level-1: may use 1 thrust, level-2: fully operational
• Screens - level-0: cannot use, level-1: count as class-1 screens, level-2: fully operational.
• Hangars - level-0: cannot use, level-1: fully operational.

The starbase rotates 90 degrees clockwise at the end of every turn.

Victory Conditions

This game is heavily weighted in the attacker's favour, due to the large element of surprise.  So, the Klingons must capture or destroy every Orion ship and the starbase.  None shall escape!  Any other result is an Orion Victory.

For a variant, the Orions could improve their readiness on a 5 or 6 (rather than just a 6) and then victory would be determined by a straight comparison of points value destroyed or captured by the end of the game.

How it played for us

The Klingon fleet approached rapidly, in tight formation.  They had sent the Minotaur (bulk freighter) on ahead with controls locked; the intent was that she would enter the minefield obliquely and thereby cut a wide hole in it through which the fleet would pass.

Consternation and confusion reigned on the Orion side as crews raced for their ships and tried to find their missing officers.  The corvette Pirate was more alert than most; she undocked from Starbase-13 and started to power up her weapons.  Slightly later, the cruiser Etna pulled away from the station on impulse power, but all her other systems were down.

Quadrant-3 of the starbase reacted much more swiftly than the remaining Orion forces; its big weapons were activated just as the station's rotation turned the quadrant away from the attacking fleet.  They did manage to launch a squadron of fighters, though.

The commandeered freighter Minotaur hit the minefield and the Klingons were delighted when she only took 3 points of damage from the first and second clusters of bombs.  This would be easy!  Their joy turned quickly to horror as the third part of the barrage scored a whopping 17 hits.  When the sensors had settled down again and the debris had cleared, it became obvious that the Minotaur had been destroyed before hitting the fourth and final set of mines.

Captains cursed and helmsmen sweated as the port half of the Klingon fleet turned even closer to the other ships.  The battlecruiser Relentless and the frigate Victory couldn't quite make it past the mines, though; these detonated with a spectacular "fut!", scoring minor damage to the frigate and none at all to the larger vessel.  Even as the first squadron of Orion fighters approached, the fleet was through the gap and racing towards the shocked defenders!

White squadron attempted to slow down the Klingons by making an attack run on the Admiral Kang.  However, the flagship's gunners were ready for action and jubilantly shot down 5 of the 6 fighters.

One of the Orion players commented, wistfully "It would be nice if the last pilot was Luke Skywalker".  He wasn't; the lone fighter achieved nothing against the enemy battleship...

Another set of Orion fighters (Red squadron) was launched.  It also made a firing pass on one of the Klingon capital ships, but again without much success.

By now, the Klingon fleet was charging forward.  The battleship Admiral Kang and the battlecruiser Relentless kept close together and concentrated their fire on the starbase.  Phasers did a moderate amount of damage, but almost all of the ships' disruptors missed.  Meanwhile, the cruisers and frigates split off to hunt down the few Orion ships which had managed to undock.

As the Orion battlestation rotated, the fully active quadrant-3 was able to open fire.  It could only bring weapons to bear on 2 over-eager Klingon frigates this turn, so these bore the brunt of the Orion's frustrations and were vapourised.  One of these ships took twice as many hits as were needed to kill it; the crew never even realised they were dead until they arrived in Sto'Vo'Kor to begin their afterlife.

In retaliation, the Klingon warships fired on and destroyed the plucky Orion corvette Pirate and the struggling cruiser Etna; neither ship had much chance against the weight of fire-power directed against them.

Due to some navigational errors, the Klingon frigate Warrior ended up well out of the fight, heading back towards the minefield.  On the Admiral Kang, the flag captain's staff noted this apparent dereliction of duty but were too busy to take action immediately.  Once the battle was over, the captain of the Warrior would probably be reassigned to some awful cargo run, I suspect...

In the final turn of the game, before we ran out of time, the Klingon fleet reached point blank range to the starbase.  Even as Quadrant-2 started powering up its heavy weapons, the Admiral Kang and the Relentless pounded it mercilessly with phasers (all disruptors missed, again!), inflicting heavy damage and knocking out both torpedo launchers.  In return, the fully active Quadrant-3 was rotated towards the attackers and it lashed out at the Klingon battleship.  The Admiral Kang was forced to take a threshold check, but luckily (for her!) only lost her warp drive and a single disruptor.

Conclusion

At this point, we had to pack the game away.  What might have happened next, if we had more time to play on?

The Klingon warships would have overshot the starbase quite dramatically, given the speed at which they were travelling.  This is especially true for the 2 capital ships, which weren't quite as nimble as the cruisers.

Had they been able to trade blows with Quadrant-3 for one turn from their current position, they would then have been faced by the useless and totally inactive Quadrant-4 (I guess that's where the party was being held!)  If this had happened then the massed Klingon fire-power should have reduced the base to rubble quite rapidly, though probably not without taking a few hits themselves.

As it was, it would be a race between the fleet slowing down and turning round, versus the remainder of the starbase (especially Quadrant-1 and Quadrant-4) remembering where they had left their weapon-arming codes and/or finding someone sober enough to man their tactical consoles!  When/if the battlestation woke up properly, the attackers would have taken some real damage.

The few, remaining Orion ships were toast, really.  Their chances of disengaging from the station and then escaping before being picked off were slim, I think.

Finally, I suspect that the Klingon admiral will dispatch a task force to hunt down that Ferengi trader who sold him all those "advanced" disruptor targeting controls, in order to negotiate a refund!

Return of the Assault on Starbase 13!

Introduction

A couple of months ago, I ran a Full Thrust game at the Helensburgh Games Club entitled "The Assault on Starbase 13".  In that game, the attacking Federation fleet did stupendously badly - so much so that it has become near legendary.  Since then, I've been wondering if my scenario was too unbalanced, one side was supernaturally lucky or whether the fleet players merely blew it.  In order to answer these doubts, I decided to rerun exactly the same game again.  Call it a parallel universe, if you like!  So, here's how it went...

Briefing

Federation Intelligence are aware that a flotilla of Orion pirates are operating out of an old battlestation near the Tholian border.  This starbase is heavily fortified and so the pirates have been immune to attack by local forces.  The recent arrival of capital units from Starfleet has changed the picture though: Admiral Polanski has decided to use his squadron to capture or destroy the Orion base and thus prevent the pirates from raiding this sector!

Forces

The Federation attacking fleet consists of:

• USS Intrepid (Battleship)
• USS Invincible (Battle-cruiser)
• USS Gemini (Carrier)
• USS Danube (Heavy Cruiser)
• USS Callisto and USS Phoebe (Light cruisers, adapted for mine-sweeping)

The Orion defences were:

• Starbase 13 (Battlestation, built of 4 quadrants.  Each quadrant is approximately battleship strength. 2 segments can fire in any one direction.  The station automatically rotates 90 degrees clockwise each turn)
• Minefield (a thick minefield, about 24" from the starbase)
• Terror (missile-armed heavy cruiser, initially docked at the battlestation)

The Approach

The Federation fleet approached the minefield with glacial slowness this time round (2" per turn!).  Although the Orion base commander was initially panicked by the appearance of the hostile fleet as they came out of warp, he had time to finish his 3-course meal.  Indeed, he was well into the after-dinner mints and coffee before the intruders came into range of the starbase's heaviest class-4 phasers.

For several turns, the minesweepers at the front of the Federation fleet took hits from the base's long range weapons.  At this range, the firing was not particularly effective, but it was completely one-sided.  4 squadrons of Orion fighters were launched from the starbase; they were pleasantly surprised to find that the Federation carrier didn't respond by scrambling its own fighters.

Just as the Federation sweepers breached the minefield, they were swarmed by enemy fighters and also by missile salvos (fired by the now-undocked Orion heavy cruiser Terror).  The Federation carrier hadn't launched any of its own craft to intercept, so the sweepers just had to sit and take it!  USS Phoebe was destroyed outright, while USS Callisto was crippled with failing life support and a smashed command deck.  Still, at least they had forced a passage...

The Assault

The Orion fighters now turned their attention to the USS Gemini, which still didn't scramble its own fighters in response.  2 of the Federation ships (USS Danube and USS Invincible) accelerated through the hole in the minefield, but the battleship USS Intrepid hung back in order to line up better with the gap.  This separation of forces was ultimately to cost the Federation badly!

Now things started to get ridiculous.  The Federation carrier USS Gemini tried to escape the hostile fighters by accelerating and avoid the minefield by turning, both at the same time.  Neither was successful, as the ship crashed through 2 rows of mines and the nimble attack craft easily caught up with her.  Fortunately for the USS Gemini, the Orion craft finally ran out of ordnance (!) and so after their attack they returned to the space station to refuel and re-arm.  Unfortunately for the carrier, she was now badly damaged - though she had only lost 1 of her 4 hangar bays.

Finally, the surviving Federation squadrons were launched from the USS Gemini.  They immediately raced to attack the Terror - but the Orion cruiser was still under the umbrella of the base's defensive systems and the majority of the Federation craft were destroyed before they were able to shoot.  The last few fighters did manage to inflict a troubling warp core breech critical hit on the pirate ship, though.

At this point, the Federation cruiser USS Danube and battlecruiser USS Invincible scored some telling hits on one quadrant of the base.  The battleship USS Intrepid was a long way behind and didn't really contribute much to the fight.
In return, the starbase played an event card to overload a pair of its heavy phasers.  To the Federation's great relief, both weapons burned out instead of unleashing a hurricane of firepower on their poor vessels.  Even so, the base's other weapons caused a lot of hurt to the USS Danube and a moderate amount of damage to the USS Invincible.  These 2 ships were just not powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with a battlestation all on their own!

Conclusion

At this point, we ran out of time and packed everything away.  Had we been able to continue, the starbase's rotation would have turned its somewhat damaged quadrant 2 away from the attackers and brought the undamaged quadrants 3 and 4 into play.  When that happened, the USS Danube's life expectancy would have been very short indeed.  The USS Invincible might have inflicted some more damage before it was destroyed in turn.  The battleship USS Intrepid was still too far away to be more than a minor nuisance at this stage; it would either have to flee or to tackle the battlestation on its own (and that would only have ended in one way).

I'm still wondering if this scenario can be won by the Federation, or whether they need considerably larger forces to do so.  Reason tells me that it should be possible, though I think it needs much better co-ordination and manoeuvering skills than my Federation players possess.  Here's how I would do it:

• Move at a reasonable speed (6" or 8", perhaps) so as to lessen the amount of closing fire.
• Send the minesweepers a turn ahead, to clear a path through the minefield.
• Use the Federation fighters solely to defend the fleet against missiles and hostile fighters; the starbase has a stupendous amount of flak and so attacking it with these is tantamount to suicide.
• The Federation capital ships must arrive at optimal range of the base at pretty much the same time.  It should be possible to get 3 heavy ships (plus 1 or 2 light cruiser/minesweepers, if they survive) to attack and overwhelm a single quadrant on the base.  Of course, as the station rotates it will constantly present fresh quadrants, but as long as the majority of Federation ships survive then these can be depleted in turn.

The Assault on Starbase 13

Introduction

Federation Intelligence are aware that a flotilla of Orion pirates are operating out of an old battlestation near the Tholian border.  This starbase is heavily fortified and so the pirates have been immune to attack by local forces.  The recent arrival of capital units from Starfleet has changed the picture though: Admiral Mottram has decided to use his squadron to capture or destroy the Orion base and thusprevent the pirates from raiding this sector!

Forces

The Federation attacking fleet consists of:

• USS Intrepid (Battleship)
• USS Invincible (Battlecruiser)
• USS Gemini (Carrier)
• USS Danube (Heavy Cruiser)
• USS Callisto and USS Phoebe (Light cruisers, adapted for minesweeping)

The Orion defences were:

• Starbase 13 (Battlestation, built of 4 quadrants.  Each quadrant is approximately battleship strength. 2 segments can fire in any one direction.  The station automatically rotates 90 degrees clockwise each turn)
• Minefield (a thick minefield, about 24" from the starbase)
• Terror (Heavy Cruiser, intially docked at the battlestation)

The Approach

Admiral Mottram brought his task force in closely grouped and at high speed.  The plan was to close with the battlestation as quickly as possible, so as to reduce the impact of its long range weapons.  The sweepers would lead the way and blast right through the minefield.

Immediately, the battlestation launched fighters and sent them off to the left.  The Federation fleet jinked to the right and completely wrong-footed them.  However, it wouldn't take long for the fast Orion fighters to catch up...

The Minefield

USS Gemini launched her Federation fighters just as the fleet entered the minefield.  Callisto managed to sweep one set of mines successfully, but Phoebe failed to clear a second set.  These wouldn't have exploded for the minesweeping ship, except that the Invincible was close on Phoebe's heels and she caused them to detonate.  To add insult to injury, Phoebe then failed catastrophically to sweep the second row of mines and another cluster went off.  The multitude of explosions left Phoebe reeling and out of control; both Invincible and Callisto took moderate damage as well.

Federation fighters (white, front and right) overwhelm 2 Orion squadrons (silver crescents)

The Orion fighters were determined to attack the Federation battleship, but this didn't work out very well for them.  Firstly the Federation intercepted half their strike force with superior numbers of fighters and savaged it.  The other Orion craft then made an attack run on the Intrepid, only to discover that the Federation minesweepers had been converted from escort cruisers - and that the conversions had still left them with a considerable defensive capability.  The combined flak from half the Federation fleet completely annihilated these Orion fighters.

Closing the Range

Admiral Mottram might have been forgiven for thinking that the worst was over.  After all, his fleet was now through the minefield and was approaching the range where his weapons would start to become effective.  He'd disposed of almost all the Orion fighters (just 1 remained!) for minimal loss.  What could go wrong now?

The Orion heavy cruiser Terror had undocked from the starbase and was slowly building up to battle speed.  She was now in range (just) and chose to fire both of her missile salvos at once, figuring that she probably wouldn't get another chance.  One salvo locked on to Callisto and the other on to Gemini.  In both cases, an unusually large number of missiles were on target and the ships messed up their defensive fire badly.  4 warheads hit each target, causing severe damage and turning Callisto and Gemini into barely controllable hulks.  Callisto suffered the further indignity of a non-critical hit: she lost the gravity control in the canteen and the cooks were left floating in a mist of hot soup and meatballs!

Revenge of a kind was taken when the Federation fighters sprinted ahead of the fleet and pummeled Terror.  But this didn't matter too much to the Orions; the ship had already fired all of her expendable ordnance and wasn't expected to survive beyond that anyway.  The lone remaining Orion fighter pursued the Federation craft doggedly, but failed to achieve anything.  Indeed, the Federation pilots just ignored him contemptuously for the remainder of the game!

The End

The carrier Gemini was out of action, but the commander of the Federation fighter wing decided to turn his attention to the battlestation.  This turned out to be an unlucky choice, as the starbase had vast numbers of defensive turbolasers and microrockets.  The Federation attack force was almost completely destroyed and failed to inflict any significant damage in return.

At the same time, the battlestation fired on the approaching capital ships.  Beam fire was intense, but only had limited effect on the Federation force.  Then the station fired 4 torpedoes at Invincible.  3 of them hit and a '6', '6' and '5' were rolled for damage.  Truly the dice gods were on the side of the Orion pirates during this game!  The Invincible staggered out of formation with her weapons destroyed, engines off line, bridge wrecked, life support failing and warp core going critical.

By now, there were dark mutterings against Admiral Mottram from all the other Federation players.  At this point the Intrepid chose to play her trump card.  The admiral held the Federation's stock of event cards (see here for a brief mention of how these events work) and announced that Intrepid would "Match their shield harmonics!"  It was not to be, though: the Orion commander responded with an "That's not fair!" card of his own and cancelled the Federation event.  Intrepid's fire then did only minor damage to the battlestation.

In desperation (and probably facing a court-martial should he return), Admiral Mottram ordered the Intrepid's crew to abandon ship.  Without waiting to determine whether these orders were completed, he took the helm and accelerated the battleship straight towards the starbase.  As Danube passed on one side, Intrepid ploughed into one face of the starbase and exploded!  The Federation were unlucky and only rolled a '1' for their damage multiplier and thus failed to destroy the station.  Even so, the facing quadrant of the space station was badly damaged.

Aftermath

Amazingly, the only ship destroyed was the Intrepid, which wasn't a surprise considering she rammed a battlestation of 4 or 5 times her own mass.  All the other Federation ships were crippled and out of control, apart from Danube, which had somehow come through everything pretty much unscathed.  Even the Orion cruiser Terror had been able to creep away after her one-and-only devastating salvo, aided somewhat by the playing of a "Legendary Engineer" event card to assist with damage repair.

The captain of the cruiser Danube reported that Admiral Mottram managed to make it to an escape pod after locking the battleship's controls on a collision course with the starbase.  However, the Orions have denied holding him as a captive, so he is officially listed as "missing in action".  But who knows whether the Orions are telling the truth?

The Federation plan could have worked, but 2 things went wrong:

1. The minesweepers were too close to the other units when they entered the minefield.  If they had been even a few inches further ahead then any mines they detonated accidentally would only have hit the (expendable) sweepers.  Instead, 3 ships were damaged during the forcing of a passage through the field.
2. The Orion player had the most outrageous luck I can remember seeing for a long while.  3 of the 6 Federation ships (Callisto, Gemini and Invincible) were gutted by missile or torpedo salvos that performed well above average.  This left the Federation player insufficient firepower to hurt the battlestation.  Even the event cards that had been dealt to each side worked in the Orion's favour, allowing him to cancel the Intrepid's last, desperate attempt to regain parity.  And finally, the sacrifice of the Intrepid had a real chance of maiming or destroying the battlestation, but the dice went heavily in the Orion's favour - again.  Truly, I should have asked the player to pick some lottery ticket numbers for me!

Spaceballs!

Mine, all Mine!

Recently I mentioned briefly that I was stuck on several gaming/model-making projects (here).  Several of my loyal followers were kind enough to make some useful suggestions about these, especially for my Space Mines for Full Thrust.  This helped me to come to a decision on how to proceed, so here it is: my recipe for making cheap, simple space mines!

The USS Toronto about to enter a minefield

1. Make Bases

I used thick cardboard (mounting board), cut into rectangles of around 2" by 3/4" (5cm x 2cm).  This certainly fits the "cheap" requirement of the project; I have a large bag of offcuts of mounting board, bought from my local art shop for a very low price.
I don't think the exact size of each base matters, unless the rules you wish to use mandate this.  My favourite space rules, Full Thrust, treat each mine individually.  I think I prefer the idea of mines being an area feature instead, so some house rules are probably in order.

2. [optional] Shape Bases

It only took a moment to give each base a slightly smoother shape by trimming the corners off when they were all stacked together.  I could have continued further and rounded them with more cuts, but decided not to do this.

3. Drill Holes

 Again, it was fairly easy to make holes in the bases for the wire stands.  I just stacked the cardboard up until the height was about the same as the length of my drill and then bored 3 holes through each stack.

4. Add Stands

Next, I glued lengths of wire into each hole.  I used 20 gauge florist's wire (the plain or galvanised sort, not the plastic coated ones), cut into random lengths from about 3/4" to 1 1/2" (2cm to 4cm).  Again, this is really cheap and can be bought in bulk.  Annoyingly, I ran out after preparing a dozen or so bases.  I've been using the same packet of florist's wire for various pinning and basing jobs for at least 10 years, so it came as something of a shock to actually use up the last piece!

5. Fit the Mines

For my space mines, I am using some 6mm round beads.  These particular beads have indentations around the perimeter, inset with some sparkly stuff and they were somewhat harder to find than the very common plain round or faceted beads.  They're still cheap, though: a packet of several hundred only cost a pound or two.  The beads are easily glued to the stands - after all, they already have a hole drilled right through them!

6. Undercoat

I used a cheap, black aerosol primer to undercoat these models.

7. Paint

 Now here's the bit with which I really had difficulty: what colour is a space mine?  In the end I chose to paint the indentations (including the hole in the top) with a bright red.  Once that was dry I then covered the body of the mine with dark steel/gunmetal.  Job done.

And that's it.  Simple and cheap, for sure.  Effective?  You be the judge of that!  Once I obtain some more wire though, I intend to make many, many more of these.