Full Thrust
Fleet action Space combat
Work in the world of Hollywood movie making has been picking up lately despite the best efforts of our politicians in Sacramento to send it like every other viable business out of California in search of lower taxes and a friendly business environment! So this equates to more money and less time to play miniatures…. Good and bad..lol!
I have lately wanted to get out my 25 year old Star Fleet battles ships and play with them or sell them. I do not remember what it was that re-kindled the spark but I suddenly felt the urge to paint a Star field and some planets! Coupled with the finding and printing of the Full Thrust 2nd edition rules set (available free online now!) I was hot to try it again. I remembered the old Star Fleet Battles game as being slow and cumbersome, one of the reasons my ships sat on the shelf so long! In fact I had sold my copies of SFB on ebay a couple of years back thinking I was done with “Space” battles. I found “FT 2nd” and after a quick read of the core rules thought it looked quite good. I also found a wealth of online support and info.
I dusted
off my ships and got to work building my Space matt. I have in my business
access to tons of “Black” cloth used in films to make “things: disappear or just
hide stuff. It comes in 4’ x 100yrd rolls so I ripped 8’ off for “Space”. I
used paint dripped out of Hypodermic needles to create stars and my airbrush to
create the “nebula” some quick pastel chalk highlights, about 2 hours and I was
done. I also created a Styrofoam ball planet (1.5 hours), 5 “driveway rock”
asteroids! (10 minutes), and a completely new “tanker” ship from scratch from
styrene and craft store beads (3 hours) so after starting in spare time on
Wednesday I was ready by Sunday morning!
My normal Bismarck Room play testers Steve Gausche and Doug Kendrick came over Sunday morning for a hearty Breakfast at the local home cooking spot and by 10:30 we were playing. We did the first introductory game with three Frigate class Klingon D5s on Doug’s side and two Orion Pirate Light Cruisers on Steve’s side. It was a meeting engagement both side coming on at Impulse speed 8. Doug tried an enveloping maneuver trying to take advantage of the inability of ships to fire most weapons to the rear quarter. Had he rolled better it would have worked but Steve’s ships could take multiple hits better and before the small Klingon Frigates could get into position there was only 1 left! The game played very fast (especially with small light ships!) with the first game coming in at just over ½ hour! O’hh I almost forgot yours truly ran the Asteroids! 5 of them that moved at speed 5 and did nothing!
The
Second game was a bit more involved with each of us taking fleets of about 750
points. Doug used his own ships, 3 Destroyers, and 2 Heavy Cruisers, Steve my
Orion Pirates again, 2 Destroyers, and 3 Escort Cruisers, finally I took my
Klingon’s. I went with fewer ships but took 2 Destroyers, 1 Light Cruiser, and a
heavy “Battle Cruiser” the “Kno’Kers”. I was hoping to use the little destroyers
to flank and keep them busy while my Battle Cruiser pummeled them at range with
its powerful 3 “A” battery Disruptors while the Light Cruiser “Span’Kme” ran
interference. This Battle was also fairly fast, a bit over an hour as I recall
with Steve again picking up the win! Steve came at me balls out with Doug doing
another flanking run with two of his ships around Steve while engaging me and
Steve with the 3 remaining ships. I held back using the "Knok'Ker's" long range
weapons combined with it's ability to take quite a bit of damage and shields,
and was doing well but the combined weight of Steve and Doug singling out my
heavy ship was too much!
The core Rules are very simple and even with 3 new players and 15 ships it was fast! The expanded rules will ad much more "flavor" and slightly slow the games down but not much! I recommend a chess type timer to limit the orders and firing planning phase so to simulate the little time a commander really had in a space battle. We all had a lot of fun and will certainly take them to the Bengal club for future battles.
