 December 15, 2013 - 12:35pm | Thanks to Jaxon uploading so much to the magazine stand I was curious to see if his uploads were from the old Dragon archive which lacked the original art but they are scans of the original material with art. By chance i clicked on the Day of the Juggernaut and started asking questions about the interesting ship pictured in the header of the article. http://www.starfrontiers.us/node/7932 Its a scorpion class sathar fighter but it packs a LB? Which seems a bit much to me for a fighter. But the typical KHs fighter has 8 hp where as this one has 10 so perhaps its a HS2 hvy fighter- still its a LB mounted on an HS2 hull 1. I would make it the pod laser system 2. the design suggests the heliopes of clikk fame (Sundown on Starmist)- scorpion tail and all and the artwork suggests the forward firing pod laser system as well. 3. i think I'd do a revisit of this with it actually being a click vessel that was reactivated and sent against the UPF by a sathar clan- this would not be a sanctioned action by whatever passes for a sathar high command but is the action of one desperate clan of sathar trying to regain its place in the clan hierarchy because it suffered heavily in the previous space battle mentioned in the article. OR its a sathar clan employing clikk designs in its military equipment. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 December 16, 2013 - 3:39am | I'd say that the artwork doesn't match the text. This may be because it was acquired for some other article, wasn't used for that, and thus was slapped onto this article. This can sometimes happen with illustrations. It'd probably better just to have some new artwork rather than try and shoehorn everything to fit a picture that doesn't line up with the written description. That way you also don't have to bring the Clikks into it, as IMHO that seems to be stretching things a bit too far. |
 December 16, 2013 - 8:22am | Um...the artwork on the cover has two forward laser cannons or batteries on the brdige area and one battery mounted on each wing with each engine. This would be the HS: 9 Cruiser, Type D. Suggested Weapons: LB (x3 ~ 2 wing mounted, 1 bridge mounted), EB (bridge mounted), T (x2, main body - two portals are seen). If the two rear vents were suggested as engines, it could be a HS: 15 Cruiser, Type A (or HS: 13, Type B). Suggested Weapons: LB (x2 ~ wing mounted), EB & PB (bridge mounted), T (x4, main body - one portal), S (x2, main body - one portal), Laser Cannon (x2, wing mounted - forward) I do not see a place for the rocket batteries or disruptor cannons. |
December 16, 2013 - 7:57pm | I think the artwork is an obvious match for the scorpion fighter not the actual juggernaut. i suppose that the publicaiton date of the magazine it was in puts it significantly before the introduction of the pod laser. RE: the clikk connection- I've previously put forward the thought that since the eorna Day of Doom (the day the sathar showed up and devestated their planet) was 900 years ago and the the day that the clikks dumped the heliopes on Starmist was a similar large number of time (I forget the actually number right now but as I remember it was close to 900 years ago). Couple that with the clikks feeling the need to put such a god awful big tank on an exploration vessel this puts both the clikks and the sathar active approximately at the same time a millenium ago in approximately the same region of space that makes them obvious competitors unless you want yet a 3rd party that was scary enough for the clikks to build bolo/ogre sized tanks and for the sathar to crap their pants and wipe out a civilization like the eorna. So for me the clikk sathar prior history is completely understandable. In fact it makes sense to explain some things. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
December 17, 2013 - 2:35am | The drawing seems to suggest some other design with vaious weapons, so I still am inclined to think that it was simply tacked on to the article - or they just asked someone to draw a 'space fighter' without giving them the text to read. It'd be easy enough today to just do a new drawing that better matches the text. |
December 17, 2013 - 4:59am | In KRingway's favor would be the Ares article on Von Neuman machines- automated sathar factories left on planets to mine resources and build killer robots- automated killing machines are not an unexplored thread with the sathar. Since we know that sathar clans have a tech specialty that they become known for, it is perhaps the smaller clans that go in for more automation- perhaps they have "home planets" with environments that enforce a high mortality rate on the sathar population, or its just another case of using a tubed brain to run a facility. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
December 17, 2013 - 7:21am | The whole article seems a bit strange to me, to be honest. A ship that just needs to have a drive, a hull, a brain, and some way of carrying drone fighters and space to surface missles would not have to be very big at all. Nor expensive. It could be just a very basic thing, churned out in numbers, as a sort of one-shot disposable assault system that you don't expect (or intend) to get back once it's job is done. You just have to make it fast (so it can get to where it's going quick enough to be a surprise), give it some defences (just to give it a fighting chance of completing its mission) and everything else would be extraneous. Even the fighters could be just boiled down to basics. My overall point is that once you take out the need to defend the (perhaps less expendable) crew and keep them alive en route and on the way back home, everything else can be very bare bones. Robot yards could perhaps churn these out and just fire them off in numbers. Even if one got through, it'd be enough to real spoil the target planets day and the UPF would have to divert a lot of resources just to defend the Frontier... |
 December 17, 2013 - 5:34pm | If there were masses of drone ships constantly harrassing the Frontier we would see a vast increase in armed space stations and fighters and small attack craft like Assault Scouts to defend each planet and their shipping routes. These ships would make great commerce raiders. During the American Civil War eight Confederate ships did so much damage to the Union merchant fleet that it took about 30 years for the American economy to recover. The Frontier could become a very isolated place withour regular merchant ships plying the star lanes. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
December 18, 2013 - 2:31am | It would depend on how complex the robotics side of things could be, and how expensive/cost effective it would be to have that in a 'disposable' system. |
