Workbench: Mauridian Missile Cruisers

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Mark

Long-time followers of this blog might remember that I bought some Val’Neveg missile cruisers from Ravenstar Studios back in October of 2013. Here’s the picture I took for that post:

Vel'Naveg missile cruiser, from Ravenstar Studios.

Vel’Naveg missile cruiser, from Ravenstar Studios.

Well, I finally got around to painting them. If that seems like a long time to wait, consider that they displaced some Orc ships from Battlefleet Gothic. I was going to paint them, but changed my mind when I decided that I needed to write an Ascension battle report instead. I was missing three matched missile cruisers, and these were sitting in my “unpainted” box.

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I write like
Arthur Clarke

I Write Like. Analyze your writing!

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Mark | Leave a comment

One Page Rules: Faster Than Light

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Mark

Star Noir operates under the fiction that an FTL drive works. To be specific, Sonny White’s implementation of the Alcubierre Drive works. In Starships, it makes very little impact, except to limit the places from which a ship may escape. I assume that stellar objects are not all known, so there’s a strong risk that a ship jumping into warp might run into one of those objects. Combat is therefore fought at “normal” speeds where Newtonian physics applies.

But what happens if all the objects are charted?

The rules for FTL are so different that this is not really a Starships scenario, but what I refer to as “one page rules” — a game stripped down to just the key mechanics. As a result, this scenario can be played without referring to the Starships rules at all.

(I expect that any One Page Rules will be a simple novelty. The usual “beta” warning also applies, of course.)

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I’ve added a bunch of new sections to Star Noir: Xìngyùn, along with adding some (presumably bad) Chinese place names.

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Mark | Leave a comment

The Battle of Luna, or the Protractor Scenario

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Mark

Back in Scenario One (the Battle of Ascension) I talked about how ship rotation was short enough to be ignored by Starships. In this scenario, I make the opposite assumption: ship rotation takes a whole turn.

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Star Noir: Xìngyùn

Posted on January 4, 2015 by Mark

Overview

Xìngyùn (Fortune) was a Chinese mining colony, built to take advantage of an enormous precious metals deposit. It earned its independence from Earth-side China during the Market Revolution, which otherwise saw the Communist rulers suppress the Capitalist reformers.

Xìngyùn still relies on the export of precious metals, and is the primary source of specie used in interstellar trade.

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Star Noir: The Significant

Posted on December 2, 2014 by Mark

So far as humanity can tell, the universe is full of habitable worlds. They’ve found them in every system they’ve been to, and settled them all. Five are what you’d call, “significant”. In alphabetic order, they are:

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Normally, PFM is supposed to be about games that I’m working on, but the following article about a possible propellantless drive may lead to a different method in Star Noir.

Strange thrust: the unproven science that could propel our children into space

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Mark | Leave a comment

State of the Purple Fuzzy Monster

Posted on November 20, 2014 by Mark

Those of you who’ve followed this site for a while have probably noticed that the number of “workbench” articles have declined somewhat.

Okay, stopped completely.

The reason for that is that I’ve been bitten by the game-writing bug. I’ve currently got six projects in the pipeline:

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Space Pirate

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Mark

The latest entry in my series of beta scenarios is the “ship’s systems” scenario. In designing Starships, I made the decision to simplify the ships’ systems to focus on the movement mechanics. In this scenario, I add more complicated damage rules. As I expect this to slow the game down a touch, my recommendation is to reduce the size of the forces involved. In the example scenario, they’ve been limited to a single ship. (Insert usual warning about beta scenarios here.)

Background

In the lull after the Battle of Earth, Ismo Nyman and a crew of malcontents stole an unchristened destroyer from the Jamestown Highport orbiting Moultrie. They were successful for the simple reason that no one had tried it before.

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