Schlock fans who play Starfire?

[Loxley]

Starfire is a ridiculously complex tabletop star empire and starship combat game. The discussion about what an AI could do and what other races could do to prevent it made me think of it.

Does anybody here play starfire? I own it... but... it's too big and complex for me to figure out alone. It's not often that a game is able to out do me.

A PBEM starfire game might be interesting.

Loxley

(Hrm.... stats for an Obenn Thunderhead....)

[suicide junkie]

I haven't played Starfire itself, but the Space Empires series was inspired by it, and I'm a big fan. Plenty of Schlock fans over there too.

Game info & demo download ( http://www.malfador.com/se4.html )
Forum ( http://69.56.133.54:81/threads/postlist ... oard=UBB23 )


PS: Mr Tayler...
would you mind if I tried to make a shipset from the comic?
Not sure if there will be enough UNS ship designs for all the hulls, but it would still be cool.
Plenty of ground troop / fighter options... not sure about satellites, don't think we've seen any mines... large ships and bases are going to a bit sparse, but the terapedoes would fit in the role of "drones". Admiral Breya in her full uniform would be good for the politics portrait.

[n0z3k1ll3r]

would you mind if I tried to make a shipset from the comic?
Not sure if there will be enough UNS ship designs for all the hulls, but it would still be cool.

You beat me to it, which is probably a good thing considering my atrocious graphical skills. But if you get the go ahead, I wouldn't mind a copy.

[Howard Tayler]

Permission granted, under the following terms:

1) You can't charge money for it.
2) My artwork, ship names, and other strip elements need to be appropriately credited as mine, complete with the copyright information (2000-2004 The Tayler Corporation) and the URL of the strip. You can say "used with permission" in conjunction with all of that.
3) I reserve the right to revoke such permission if you go and do something that I personally find embarrassing, offensive, or otherwise damaging to the intellectual properties I've created.

--Howard

[suicide junkie]

Ship/unit pictures are all that it really uses. With a general spiel about race history/society/physical appearance tacked on.

The ship and class names are made up by players as they design and build 'em, and the size names are set by the mod. Usually uninspired sizes, like escort, frigate, ... battleship, ... small/medium/large fighter, etc

Examples of other shipsets:
http://diesel2035.free.fr/hosted/bob/index.htm
http://www.dogscoff.co.uk/viking.htm

[n0z3k1ll3r]

On the topic of those ship sizes, I've been trying to categorise a lot of the Schlock ships myself. It may (note the may) help:

Serial Peacemaker: Escort (I don't think its actually said anywhere, but I assume its smaller than Sarasota)
Sarasota: Frigate
Athens: Destroyer
Kitesfear: Cruiser
PDCL: Dreadnought (as big as things get without being actually as big as things get)
Tunguska: Baseship (actually as big as things get)

Thats all the main ships I think.

On the topic of permission, I've been messing around in Milkshape trying to learn what to do. More specifically, I've been doing this by trying to make an increasingly more detailed PDCL. So far this has only been for the hell of it, but would it be alright if I added this into something like Freelancer?

[Howard Tayler]

Re: Sizes, straight from my Backstory notes (since this project seems worthy of being done correctly)


SHIP CLASSIFICATIONS
Corvette 25-50m (no examples in the strip canon)
Tausennigan Light Troopship: 30-60m (the Toughs had one in Magic Dreamland)
Frigate 40-100m (the Sarasota, which is 60m long)
Tausennigan Heavy Troopship: 100m (The Serial Peacemaker, which is now a bit longer than that after the refit)
Dragon-Class Cruiser 60-200m (the Kitesfear was 75m long)
Battlecruiser 100-300m (no examples from strip canon)
UNS Destroyer 250-400m (Athens was once 400m long)
UNS Battleship 300-500m (Some examples in the Buuthandi assault -- too lazy to go find them)
UNS Carrier 400-600m (There was one next to the Serial Peacemaker when it was docked on the Hellavator prior to the Tunguska showing up -- strips from late 02 and early 03)
Thunderhead Superfortress 1500mx1000mx1800m (we've seen these recently)
UNS Battleplate: Triangular, 3000-8000m on a side, 300-1000m deep, three to 15 big annie plants (the Tunguska)
Tausennigan "Cloak" class weapon platforms: 1000 kilometers long, 50km wide, 20 primary 25km annie plants, flexible chain construction

[suicide junkie]

I'm up to september 2001 bookmarking strips with ships and units in them...

The hardest part will probably be the units.
We've got tanks, minitanks, and infantry to cover most of the ground troops, and the tanks + dogfighter should cover the space fighters.

I don't recall Satellites, though, and mines are typically meant to not be seen except possibly on the shelves at planet mercenary.
Surface to Space weapon platforms are also going to be hard to find.
Oh, and colony ships, there won't be any of them to find

Three different sized carriers would be best, as well as three transports (generally 50% fighter bays/cargo bays minimum in game respectively)

I can't recall if we ever saw a UNS flag... probably in the Xinchub scenes, if anywhere.
Shield animations and explosions can be fairly generic, maybe something photoshopped together out from the many lost ships in the strip.
(a sequence of eight 36x36 pictures to be overlaid on the combat, with pure black being transparent)

The top of the hellevator would work as a small base, but I'm not sure about the medium and large bases.

[Whitehawke]

Oh, and colony ships, there won't be any of them to find

Stupid robot "meat infestation!" light sail.

[n0z3k1ll3r]

Dragon-Class Cruiser 60-200m (the Kitesfear was 75m long)
Battlecruiser 100-300m (no examples from strip canon)
UNS Destroyer 250-400m (Athens was once 400m long)

Interesting. I thought cruisers were usually larger than destroyers (they certainly are in Space Empires). Or is it just that the UNS build really big ships?

[WS_Rashana]

It depends really on how you define 'Cruiser'.

In previous discussion I think it was decided that in the case of the Kitesfear, 'Cruiser' was defined as a generic term for a moderately self-reliant starship/warship.

Things get kinda odd with the UNS, which seems to follow something analogous to current USN doctrine.

During WWI-WWII warship naming conventions and their roles were fairly well defined.

Battleships: These were the main Capital ship for a time and where what you mainly used to beat-down the other guy's navy with:

Dreadnaught: Basicly an improved Battleship.

Monitor: A ship designed for shore-bombardment. Not very fast or sea-worthy, but good enough for it's job. Enough armor to withstand most coastal artilliary and at least one turret-full of Battleship guns. These never did catch-on realy in the post-Dreadnaught era since by then Battleships could do basicly the same job yet Monitors were more or less useless on the high-seas.

Cruiser: A large, but not too large, naval warship that was the main multi-purpose platform for defensive and offensive opperations not warrenting a full-on Capital ship.

Battlecruiser: Basicly a bigger Cruiser with Battleship guns. Intended as a fast, well-armed scout and raider that could out-gun anything it couldn't out-run. It's big-guns made it too tempting for some admirals to put it in the line of battle, much to the BC's detriment.

Destroyer: A light class of ship used mostly defensively as a picket, or to hunt-down dis-proportionatly dangerous small warships like torpedo-boats or submarines.

Frigate: A more general-class escort vessel, usually used for civilian convoy escort or scouting.

Corvette: Basicly much like a Frigate only intended for use in costal waters, usually slower but with bigger guns.

------------------

Things went kinda wonky in the post-war years. The Carrier became the ascendant capital-ship and Nuclear War became the military's mantra. Battleships and Battlecruisers were consigned perhaps too-quickly to the ash-heap of history, under the assumption that a future navy would have no need of armor or guns in the Nuclear age. But history played-out a bit differently.

IIRC an act of congress declared all future Cruisers be Nuclear powered (Dunno if that's still enforced) Which proved politicaly un-tenable. The USN still needed Cruisers, so they started building Destroyers bigger to take-over the Cruiser role, and built Frigates to fill-in for the now larger and more expensive Destroyers. The result being now most Cruisers in the USN inventory are actually smaller and less powerfull than the latest Destroyers.

Or so I've been given to understand.

[n0z3k1ll3r]

Ah, beureaucracy in action.

[n0z3k1ll3r]

I've more or less finished the PDCL I was working on in Milkshape, and I'm currently trying to stick it in freelancer (its in there but the camera is screwed up so it doesn't really mean much). Just making sure, do I have your permission to continue doing this, Howard?

[Howard Tayler]

Knock yourself out. It's fan-art, right?

[n0z3k1ll3r]

Knock yourself out. It's fan-art, right?

Its finally in with a working camera. I'll send you a screenie in a moment.

[spacedragon]

To the thread starter - drop me a PM or email if you need help figuring out Starfire. I'd be glad to help out (oh yea - and we need players for PBEM...)