 October 12, 2014 - 5:34am | Discussion about exploration ships at the SF-UN yahoo group got me thinking about this again. What makes a good exploration ship? I would contend that you want something bigger HS5-6 with a lander. Mother ship is ion powered, lander is atomic powered, total crew is not very big, around 20. ship has labs, med bay, storage (packed with supplies), hydroponics, workshops, vehicles and so on. It almost sounds like the merchant cruiser from the Traveller module "Leviathon" though perhaps not as large as that but certainly something big enough to handle a 1 or 2 year or perhaps longer mission. But then when i start thinking of a ship going away for years I start thinking about what they come back to and with a setting that includes something like the sathar that suggests a setting where the worms have had their way but now the sathar clans are fighting each other to see who will be top dog. Of course for a situation like that you might want the PCs ship to be a warship. and then it would make a lot of sense for the ship to be an assault carrier. then you're just playing BSG in the Star Frontiers setting. Another tack might be a sathar controlled Frontier post FY111 where the sathar have enslaved the core four species and employ control measures like the "caps" form the Tripods trilogy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tripods However I like the BSG storyline better than the Tripods one. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 October 12, 2014 - 6:40am | For the Sathar to go from victory to squabbling over which tribe is in control to me speaks of a several year time span at least. Perhaps the ship has to be lost somewhere for a while before returning. I would think you would have to have a ship large enough to have a sizable hydroponics bay and also be able to process ore for ion fuel. I would think HS 10-11 or so. I agree that a smaller, specialized team with lots of robots would be the way to go for crew. |
 October 12, 2014 - 3:20pm | There are alot of possible explanations for the delay in Sathar attacks. The first one could have just been a recon in force to test the Frontier and never expected to succeed. They are suicide troops after all. Maybe they were bringing alot of forces up and establishing bases to attack as the timeline and since they attacked from a different direction could be. Maybe they were squabbling among themselves. Battletech had some of that with the Clan invasion. Maybe they had another war to fight first. Maybe they wanted alot more intelligence and set up the whole spy network. Maybe they struck a deal with Streel and attacked only to booster their sales when the time was right. Maybe a combination of things. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
 October 12, 2014 - 5:02pm | I think I've only had the need to spec one exploration vessel, a scout sporting both ion and chemical drives (one for jumps the other for atmospheric use)...and that's a pre-UPF era vessel. Any interstellar exploration ship would definitely be an ion powered vessel. Those drives can store amazing amounts of fuel and don't require overhauls like atomics. That, and if the crew runs out of fuel they burn anything (at an ADF of 1/2 that is). Life support would have to be ramped up for lengthy endeavors. Canon states that up to three back up systems can be utilized (in addition to the main), and it also states that a single LS system can sustain the crew for six months (I often contemplate if there is some disention between KH and AD time...KH seems to state things in Earth time increments versus GST). It goes without saying if you double the capacity of the equipment you double the expiration of the air/food/water/waste capacity...so a single LS system can go a full 12 months (earth or GST time?) and three back-ups to that would quadruple the full service interval. I'm on the fence for atomic versus chemical drives for a lander. Atomic drives would never need service as long as they don't jump (a flaw in the canon rules...apparently you can accelerate/decelrate indefinitely as long as you never reach jump velocity, only a jump consumes a pellet). While breakdowns are rare (re: the breakdown table on p.10), more so with newer vessels, there are two applicable problems for the atomic drive: meltdown or hyperignition. One of those is not repairable, and depending on how many drives are installed could render the lander useless. OTOH the chemical boosters are inexpensive and simple, but would require a storage of fuel on the host ship. |
October 12, 2014 - 5:37pm | Lets suppose a sathar clan rose ascendent and forged a mega block of of multiple clans for a major push on the Frontier believing that with enough hulls present they could smash the thin Space Fleet. Space Fleet fought vallently and managed to take out the hvy carrier of the core leadership of this ascendent clan but ultimately the number of sathar vessels brought to the gun fight eventually overwhelmed space fleet and the militias were swepted away like so much rubbish. When the power of the ascendent clan was broken the 5-6 other clans present began jockying for who would be the new top dog and this lead to them falling out. Each clan has grabbed 4-5 systems but is not cooporating with any other clan. they have not completely pacified their new territory lacking sufficient troops in their floatillas thus they have resorted to crude methods of nuking knots of resistance on hvy population worlds, lighter population worlds escape the initial attempts at pacification. Indigenous populations are still active. Some are collaborating with the sathar others are resisting, there is wide spread panic to escape. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 October 21, 2014 - 3:45am | I've done huge deep space exploration ships a few times, but this Sathar idea has me thinking now. Hmmm... |
October 21, 2014 - 4:25am | To be sure this is a campaign where you smash everything and more or less rewrite the setting. the campaign could center on existing in and working toward a better future in the Frontier like the Tripods books or it could be a BSG rip off which has some appeal. For me I think the "story" with the most interest is in the BSG area but not the endless adventure or looking for the new home but rather returning to the Frontier and trying to put together a refugee fleet and escape. For example some ships will require atomic fuel and therefor you will need a stockpile of it. atomic fuel was processed on Clarion and its known that locations X,Y, and Z on clarion would have been good places to find stockpiles of fuel before its occupation. A team will need to be dispatched to infiltrate clarion and locate such stockpiles and then either steal them or plan an operation to steal them. Of course the PCs can encounter sathar and zuraqor occupation troops, rag tag Royal Marine and Royal Guard units, a government in hiding, collaborators, resistance fighters, refugees, death and destruction everywhere, areas that have been nuked, uranium processing facilities (what they are looking for) that are leaking radiation from damage done during the initial occupation. and so on Just going to clarion for fuel becomes a major campaign component. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 October 21, 2014 - 10:20am | Well... i know many of you hand wave the fact that atomic spews radiation out the back... I would make the lander chemical. ----------------------------------------------- |
October 21, 2014 - 12:47pm | Well... i know many of you hand wave the fact that atomic spews radiation out the back... I would make the lander chemical. Sure the lander can be chemical driven, I'd even role with someone's house rule that the engines on the assault scout are a special design with enough rocket fuel or a take off and landing. Still the point is that anyone putting together a rag tag fleet for a BSG campaign would need stockpiles of fuel both chemical and atomic and these will need to be obtained. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 August 22, 2016 - 7:11am | The SF rules render a RTF situation almost unplayable. Fuel stores will be exhausted within months at best case. |
August 23, 2016 - 8:19am | The SF rules render a RTF situation almost unplayable. Fuel stores will be exhausted within months at best case. And that is almost the point, they have to find a safe place to rebuild. Fuel stores will run out for the military ships but in theory the civilian ion drive ships could have unlimited fuel with some digger shutters and a mining ship working comets in the outer system of stars they visit. so add a jump tug to boost all of the fleet's assault scouts. And there will have to be on mission to Clarion to raid the stockpile of atomic fuel (I vaguely remember something about Clarion producing uranium so I assume its a player in the creation of atomic fuel pellets). I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
August 23, 2016 - 10:14am | Good points. Nu Galactica played around with materials shortages in the early seasons, but dropped most of that in the later ones. |
 August 23, 2016 - 11:38am | Good points. Nu Galactica played around with materials shortages in the early seasons, but dropped most of that in the later ones. They probably got tired of writing stories dealing with material shortages, though one would imagine that would be a day-to-day fact of life for someone in that situation. One might also get "inspiration" for how to deal with shortages by looking at the nuclear holocaust survivor movies that were popular in the 1980s. I remember there was one produced by the BBC that was pretty dire. Joe Cabadas |
August 23, 2016 - 12:26pm | They went from whole stories dealing with (for example) a fuel crisis to the occasional dropped line about this shortage or that. One gag had Chief Tyrol stapling a rip in the seam of his coveralls because there was a thread shortage. |
