Full Thrust: Rescue the Tanker!

Introduction

The Tholian Border Patrol (1 heavy cruiser and 2 corvettes) englobing the Minotaur with web

Amongst the Orion pirates, the MacTavish cartel (it's a long story) is known for taking risks.  This time they may have gone too far, though.  One of their squadrons, desperate for supplies, has arranged a rendezvous with the Minotaur, a large freighter carrying fuel and spare parts.  However, in order to avoid attention from Starfleet, the agreed meeting point is in a sector claimed by the Tholians.

Unfortunately for the MacTavishes, these xenophobic aliens have encountered the freighter already and have immobilised it with one of their strange energy webs while they await instructions from their leaders.

The Scenario

The MacTavish squadron: 2 light cruisers and 2 heavy destroyers

The Orion squadron must rescue their supply ship and escape before Tholian reinforcements arrive.  For their part, the Tholians are well aware of the wealth of materials that the freighter is carrying, as well as the possibility of useful data on the pirates' operations, so capturing the merchantman would be good!

Forces

Orion

• The MacTavish Squadron (500 NPV) arrives from one table edge on turn 1.  They have an initial speed of 10.

Tholian

• The Border Patrol (330 NPV) starts in the middle of the table.  They have already surrounded the bulk freighter Minotaur with web.
• The Rapid Response Force (400 NPV) arrives later in the game, from the opposite table edge to the Orions.  From the start of turn 5, the Tholian player may dice for the arrival of these reinforcements.  To arrive on turn 5 requires a roll of 5+, to arrive on turn 6 needs a 4+ and so on.

Victory

• If the freighter escapes off the Orion table edge whilst still under Orion control then the Orion player wins a major victory.
• If the freighter is in Tholian hands when the game ends (by agreement or when all forces on the Orion side are destroyed or have fled) then the Tholians win a major victory.
• If neither side holds the freighter (i.e. it has been destroyed!) then the side that was responsible for its destruction loses.  The other player scores a minor victory.

The Game

Seeing that the Tholian cruiser was outside the web and on its own, the Orion squadron accelerated hard. They planned to obliterate the larger enemy vessel before braking and turning sharply.  The smaller Tholian patrol craft could be mopped up at leisure.

When the Orion squadron reached effective range, things didn't go quite according to plan, though.  The Orion light cruiser Pegasus prepared to fire on the agreed target, but suffered a software fault in her targeting arrays.  Her entire volley was directed at the small Tholian corvette Topaz instead.  Even though the Topaz was partly shielded by the energy web, the tiny vessel took 3 damage points out of her allotment of 4 (a triple threshold check) and virtually every system on the ship went offline.  With the bridge wrecked and life support failing, the remaining crew abandoned ship.

This mistake didn't save the Lithos though, as the other 3 Orion ships all pummelled the Tholian cruiser.  In particular, the heavy destroyer Cyclone scored a runaway series of '6's, causing massive penetrating damage that (amongst other things) knocked out both of the Lithos' fire control systems.  Without these, she couldn't fire back!

Bizarrely, the Cyclone was then struck by a severe energy vortex which spun the destroyer almost back in the direction from which she had come.  Perhaps it was an effect of the over-charged phaser volley she had just fired, or maybe a spatial anomaly caused by the strange Tholian weapon?  Whatever the cause, the Cyclone didn't try to rejoin the rest of the Orion fleet.  A combination of asteroid fields and high speed would have made such a manoeuvre quite risky!  Instead, over the next couple of turns she sailed off the table.

The Orion ships were braking hard now, but they were still going to overshoot the freighter.  Almost contemptuously, the cruiser Manticore swatted the second Tholian corvette (Zircon), thus leaving the web without any power.  At the same time, the other Orion ships continued to hurt the crippled Tholian cruiser.  This time, the damage caused her warp core to go critical and her internal life-support atmosphere boiled away into space through the gaping holes in her hull.

As the web collapsed, the freighter Minotaur was finally able to move.  She started to accelerate in order to escape, but painfully slowly.  Meanwhile the Orion ships turned hard and the Tholian cruiser drifted away slowly, abandoned by her crew.  This was (I think) turn 7, and still the Tholian reinforcements hadn't arrived!

Finally, the Tholian battleship Tholos thundered on.  She was a long way from the action, but travelling at high speed.  Could she catch the Minotaur before the merchantman escaped?

In a bizarre mistaken order, the light cruiser Pegasus actually turned towards the huge battleship, though the other 2 Orion warships both fled.

Even though the range was moderately long, the Pegasus didn't stand a chance against the Tholian behemoth.  The Tholos' broadside scored multiple hits, resulting in a runaway warp reactor which exploded immediately.

Judging that the Minotaur had too great a lead, the Tholian Inspector General fired some long range warning shots at it.  He was hoping to scare the freighter into surrendering, or perhaps damage its engines.  Instead, a single phaser hit caused a series of explosions (the Minotaur was carrying fuel and engine parts, I suppose) which ripped through the containment field controls for the reactor.

At this point, fate intervened.  The Minotaur's chief engineer had been killed in the fire, but one of the deckhands stepped forward.  "I know what to do!" he exclaimed.  "I've got a feeling about this".  Before anyone could dissuade him, he activated the controls to flood the engine compartment with triclozine.  [With 2 damage control parties, I needed to roll a 2 or under to shut down the critical warp core.  By playing the "Use The Force" card I could halve the result of the dice, thus improving my chances considerably.]

Sadly, the crewman had chosen the wrong option [I rolled a '5'!  Even though the card allowed me to halve this, it still rounded up to a '3' and so the warp core was still critical.  We then rolled to see if it went supercritical and promptly came up with the necessary 5 or 6].  The Minotaur blew up in a spectacular fireball, thus ending the game rather promptly.  Actually, the 2 Orion warships that were still on the table were departing too fast to be caught by the battleship anyway, so there was little point in playing on for 1 turn until they made their "official" departure.

Conclusion

OK, that really didn't go as I had expected at all!  I think that the Tholian player made a bad mistake when he deployed the heavy cruiser outside the web.  Apparently he was hoping to draw off the Orion forces by manoeuvring, but this just wasn't realistic.  Once the Lithos was crippled, the Tholian corvettes were easy meat for the Orion ships.  If I had been running the Tholians, I think I would have tried to board the Minotaur and capture her instead.

The Tholian reinforcements took a long time in coming.  Because of the earlier losses, this meant that the Orion squadron was already on its way home.  Indeed, if the Minotaur had had Thrust-2 instead of Thrust-1, they would probably have been quite out of reach by the time the Tholos arrived.  As it was, an unlucky long-range shot wiped out the prize!

Technically, this was a minor Tholian loss, since they destroyed the prize freighter.  In any case, 3 of the 4 Orion warships escaped with only superficial damage.  The Pegasus would probably have made it also, if her captain hadn't blundered his orders.  The Tholians lost a heavy cruiser and a corvette destroyed and another corvette reduced to an abandoned hulk, so the Tholians would have lost on material as well.

I don't think there was anything much wrong with the scenario, but I do think that playing the Tholians will take a bit of thought!

"Not Star Trek" Tholian Fleet

Introduction

Tholians are a strange race in Star Trek.  For one think, they aren't represented as humans with a few extra ridges or bumps, but are instead have an extremely alien, crystalline appearance!  As a very minor race, they were limited to just a single episode of the original series of Star Trek.  I believe that a little more official source material is available in the other Star Trek series Deep Space 9 and Enterprise.

Militarily, the Tholians are known for 2 things:

1. They are extremely territorial and xenophobic; Tholians will show great hostility towards anyone who intrudes into any area to which they lay claim.
2. Tholian vessels can spin an "energy web" which is completely impassable to other spaceships.  However it takes them a long time to do this, suggesting that it is primarily a defensive weapon [it's difficult to persuade an enemy ship to stay still for long enough to be encased in web!].

My "not-Tholian" fleet: 1 battleship, 2 large cruisers and 4 small patrol craft

The Tholian Web in Full Thrust

For the most part, Tholian ships aren't very difficult to design.  I've drawn a lot of my inspiration from Star Fleet Battles (SFB), where they have good shielding, high-quality phasers and not a lot of anti-fighter or missile defences.  Most of their ships are rather small patrol craft, though they do have a few bigger craft.  Oh, they also have web generators...

For most of my other "not Star Trek" conversions, the appropriate weapons or other ship systems already existed in the original Full Thrust rules.  Sometimes someone else had already proposed suitable rules for a non-standard weapon, such as the Disruptor.  However, I've never come across a Full Thrust conversion for the Tholian Web.  So, here goes, then...

1. Web Generator System: Mass: 1, Cost: 3.  This is fairly cheap, but since it has such a specialised use I don't think that's too unfair.
2. Construction of webs: You can't!
   I'm not going to propose any rules on how the web may be built during a game.  Judging by the relevant sections of the enormous Star Fleet Battles rulebook, this is far more complex than all other aspects of the Tholian web put together.  Unless in exceptional circumstances, I don't think many scenarios will see a web being built, so I'm just going to duck the issue completely.  In all of my games, any webs will already be in place.
3. Shape of Web: For scenario purposes, I imagine that web will either be laid in a circle of no more than about 8" in diameter, or else in straight segments of 12" or less between anchor points.  An anchor point may be a Tholian ship or an asteroid or small moon, but not a planet (any atmosphere, however tenuous, interferes with the energy web).
4. Maintenance of webs: The web vanishes at the start of any turn when there isn't a Tholian ship with an active web generator system within 1" of it.
   In SFB, much of the complexity of the Tholian web revolves around the strength of the web, as judged by the number of energy points assigned to it from adjacent ships versus the "natural" rate of loss.  I don't want such book-keeping in my games of Full Thrust, so I'm only going to have 2 states for my Tholian Web: either it's at full strength or it has lost so much power that it has no effect any more (i.e. it dissipates).
5. Movement through web: A non-Tholian ship, fighter or other craft which enters a web will halt in place immediately.  From then on (as long as the web persists), the ship is caught and may not use thrust to change speed, though it may use it to change heading.  Tholian ships are exempt from this; they may move through web as if it wasn't there.
   I did consider either assigning damage to a ship with a lot of speed when it hit the web (the "brick wall" effect) and/or allowing a sufficiently-powerful ship to break through a web.  In both cases, I found it difficult to frame any rules that modelled a decent effect.  It's simpler just to assume that the web "sucks the momentum" from any moving object.
6. Combat: All beam weapons that fire through a web are penalised by counting the target as having 1 extra level of screens for every 2" (or part thereof) of web through which the line of fire passes.  Beyond Level-2 screens (the highest in the Full Thrust rulebook), extra "levels" reduce the chance of damage by 50% each, so Level-3 would need a '6' for 1 point of damage, Level-4 would require a '6' followed by '4', '5' or '6' and so on.
   Non-beam weapons, including missiles and bolts of all types, may not be fired through web.  The effect of area effect weapons doesn't pass through web.
   Note that the Tholian weapons are no more effective at shooting through the web than anyone else's.  However, their ships are designed with a high proportion of beam weapons, so little of their fire power will be blocked.

The Ships

My "not Tholian" ships are from Magister Militum, from the old, small Chariot Miniatures range of spaceships.  More specifically, they're vessels from the Trios faction.  When I bought my miniatures, the web store showed 3 different classes of spaceship as available, but I can only see 2 through the link given in the previous sentence.  The "patrol craft" doesn't appear to have the "Trios" label, but can be found by searching the site for "TA1".

Note that if anyone is interested, I have placed a copy of my source file for the following SSDs ==>here<==.  It's in OpenOffice Draw (.odg) format.

Keep watching this blog for a battle report involving these ships.  In a few days, I'll be posting the results of a tussle between Orion pirates and Tholian border guards over ownership of a lost freighter!

Magister Militum Designation	Picture	Full Thrust SSD
TA1 Patrol Craft
TA2 Battleship
TA3 Dreadnought

The Workbench, January 2014

Introduction

It's that time of year again when I hope to do a lot of painting during the holiday season.  However, as usual, a combination of family duties and sickness has prevented much progress.  For comparison, this is the state of things one year ago: http://colgar6.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-workbench-december-2012.html.  One of these years I will get stuff done over the Christmas and New Year holidays!

So instead of showing you all my output for 2 weeks of effort, here's a record of my untidy workbench...

The Bench

Let's start the tour at the left hand side.  Here we have one of my Christmas presents: a box of figures destined for SAGA.  Most of them are monks, some of whom are armed.  These will form an angry mob, probably for my Scots warband (since they're angry at the Vikings, they cannot be part of that force).  There are also another bard and a mounted Scots warlord in the box.

Further back, but still on the left, is my Barbarian army for Hordes of the Things.  This was last year's Christmas present and I have actually completed 3 bases of it.  Only another 9 or so to go...

Next to that, there is a pile of boxes.  The top box contains a mixture of figures that are waiting to be sealed.  I managed to run out of varnish a day or two into the holiday season, just as all the small hobby retailers shut up shop for 2 weeks!  Still, as soon as the ordered materials arrive, it will only take a few moments to finish off these models.

The next box down in the stack contains another Christmas present.  This is a small squadron of starships that I will use as Tholians in my "not Trek" games.  Tholians were a very minor race in the Star Trek universe, most notable for their unique energy web technology.  I'll need to come up with some appropriate Full Thrust rules for the Tholian Web...

To the front of my painting station is a plank bridge.  My apologies for the quality of the photograph; this didn't come out well and I haven't the energy to re-take it.  The bridge is my first attempt at using coffee stirrers as building materials; I think it'll be quite effective when finished.

The rest of the painting station is the normal jumble of figures in various stages of construction:

• There are a few Dark Age warriors (part of my nascent Anglo Dane SAGA warband) to the front left.
• Several buff-coated cavalrymen and their horses are visible; these will add to my force of Witch Hunters.
• A couple of Dreadball teams are in the clear trays in the centre.
• Most of the other figures are assorted Old West gunslingers & civilians and modern zombies & survivors.

Finally, my West Wind bikers can be seen at the rear right, where they have languished since last year's workbench posting.  Oh, well - maybe I'll finish them this year!