My Nolo´Tars (and some thoughts)

I liked the "aged metal" look of the Liandra in LotR quite a lot, although it was a bit too bright for my tastes - so I wanted a darker version of it for my Nolo´Tars. Here´s what I´ve come up with:

Nolotar1.jpg


nolotar2.jpg


Nolotar3.jpg


Now, while painting the ships, I´ve been thinking about the miniature itself, and the ISA in general.

I like the Nolo´Tar miniature quite a lot, but it is definitely too big! Also, it has those funny little gun turrets which haven´t been there in the movie - but I´ll come back to that in a second.

First some thoughts about the ISA: As it stands, the fleet has two different ways of playing. There are the White Stars (WS 1+2; Gunship, Carrier, WS Fighter, Blue Star) which are extremely fast an agile. And then there are those ships that aren´t - the Victory, the Nolo´Tar and an upcoming Sharlin variant. So, an ISA player can basically choose whether he wants to use many "fast and fragile" ships, or the slower heavy hitters (or mix those two styles, of course). Again, I will come back to that.

Back to the Nolo´Tar again: It is HUGE. Too big. Out of scale. Freakingly so.

But:

It is a nice miniature, and it could be used an altogether other ship. Some upgraded version of the Nolo´Tar - with the gun turrets, some differences in the plates when compared to the Liandra, and the obvious size difference, it is just different enough to get away as another class of vessel within the same design concepts as the original Nolo´Tar (a bit like the different WS-classes). So, it could still be sold, while a new miniature could be comissioned for the Nolo´Tar itself (even more similar to the Liandra, with about the same size as a Halik - that should be about right).

Now, that could come in handy with the different playing styles of the ISA fleet:

The fast and fragile faction has a good selection of ships - Patrol,2 upcoming Raid choices, battle, War. It can be played on it´s own, without having to take the slower ships.

Now, there are only 3 choices for the slow faction (including the upcoming Sharlin), two of those towards the upper levels. So, at lower levels, the current Nolo´Tar stands pretty much alone (personally, I think there´s little actual tactical use in combining it with White Stars).

Finishing my thoughts above, the current Nolo´Tar figure could be upgraded to a raid-level ship, a new and more to scale miniature could still be used in the skirmish level (maybe with a small dodge of 5+ or so), and ISA players would have enough choices for a different playing style (at the moment, every ISA fleet somehow feels/looks/plays more or less the same). All for the price of one little additional miniature and a half-page of rules for another ship.

Any opinions?
 
Like the paint job, also like the mini, but I agree, it's too big!

don't forget when assesing the ISA, they can have an FAP of allies that can bolster either fast or slow forces
 
Sounds sensible idea - especially since some people don't consider the present S+P stats "Official" (no offical stamp) - more models / ships (balanced and usable ones mind you) the better for ALL races................ :D :D
 
Personally i think the problem with the ISA minis are that mongoose is trying to make the new ones as close to scale as they can with the oversized WS. Personally i like the big WS because they are the center of my fleet (even with the other classes as options i still prefer the "how many white stars will i take today" approach to fleet selection), and a properly scaled mini would be too small, but the carrier, gunship et all just seem too big in comparasin to other minis like the Victory (a really huge mini, but i don't mind because it should have that sort of "presence" on the field) and ships from other fleets.

This is really just my opinion but i feal the WS class ships in general should be about the same size, so the gunship just looks like a reconfigured WS, and the carrier looks like it might be pregnant. (when i get around to painting mu kit bashes i'll post some pics).

anyway, regarding the ISA's feal:
What if for second edition the ISA wasn't actually a fleet but rater a construct like the League of non Aligned worlds. so the fleet breakdow would be something like this:

Whitestar Fleet (new fleet, ISA member):
-White star 1 and 2
-White Star gunship
-White star carrier
-White star fighter
-Blue Star

Minbari (ISA Mamber):
-Nolo'Tar
-That Sharlin varient Thing

EA (ISA Member):
-Victory calss
-Victory and Excalliber (unique ships)

Then basically the ISA workes the same way as the league where you can mix and match any ISA member's ships in a combined ISA fleet, but doing so forces your initiative modifier down (say you take the lowest mod from amoung the members present and subtract 1 for every other member present)

The main problem i see with this is that the ISA members list would include almost all of the League members (obviously raiders would be excluded, and maybe one or two others) so it would cheepen the cool factor of combined league fleets even more than the have been up untill now
 
About that "splitting the ISA fleet" thing: It was my impression that the ISA fleet was an independent force, sponsored and built by it´s members, but not controlled by them (the Victory, for examole, was being built bya human company, using additional tech from the Minbari and Vorlons, and using EA control elements, but it is still NOT a human/earth ship). The Nolo´Tar is a ranger ship, built for exclusive rangers use, and within other parameters than the regular Minbari military (although a "spy" version with stealth would be an idea). The White Star fleet seems to be just the current (and most powerful) version of a rangers fleet. So, having it as an independent fleet list should make more sense (although the idea with combining it from different factions like the league is a cool one).

Oh, which reminds me - what about the Enfili? It was scrapped by Delta-Vs at the beginning ot LotR, so that might be an interesting patrol or skirmish choice (anything more powerful might be inappropiate for the performance we´ve seen on screen)?
 
as for the fleet split, i do see your point regarding the seperation of the ISA from it's members, but in the case of the Victory i have to say that i think it's prety clear that the Builders intended for them to be crewed by EA personell (the controles were made to standard EA specks to lower the learning curve, and the head of the construction sight makes a point of the fact that the bridge layout is different from standard EA ships). Also the only ones ever shown on screne were used by the EA to defend earth, and the only one to survive that was then loaned to the EA for an indeterminate period of time. I think it's perfictly alright to include the Victory as an EA Crusade era ship.

but ultimately the important part of my sugestion was the league like set up for combined ISA fleets.
 
Very nice work on those minis MustEatBrains. I didn't like the Nolo´Tar prior to seeing what you've done with it.

In fact, would anyone object if I used one of those for a pak Hurr Gunship, instead of the Hurr Gunship? Looks better IMO.
 
And ultimately, the important part has been a cool one! :D I think it could be fun, piecing together an ISA fleet from different detachments - then again, it might take away some of the uniqueness of the League system; although I wouldn´t expect that to be too much of a problem.

Did I understand right that you wanted to use special ISA ships from different gouverments, not the ships from those other fleet lists?

Someone refers to Sheridan as stealing his own ship, and Sheridan is ISA, not Earth Force. Maybe the Victory and Excalibur were meant to be crewed by EA personell, but under the direct command of the ISA?
 
prelude_to_war said:
Very nice work on those minis MustEatBrains. I didn't like the Nolo´Tar prior to seeing what you've done with it.

In fact, would anyone object if I used one of those for a pak Hurr Gunship, instead of the Hurr Gunship? Looks better IMO.

Thanks! :) Well, the Nolo´tar is certainly big enough to be a gunship, so I don´t see any problems - as long as your opponent doesn´t use Nolo´Tars himself (and even then, the paint job should be enough to keep them apart anyway)
 
MustEatBrains said:
And ultimately, the important part has been a cool one! :D I think it could be fun, piecing together an ISA fleet from different detachments - then again, it might take away some of the uniqueness of the League system; although I wouldn´t expect that to be too much of a problem.

Did I understand right that you wanted to use special ISA ships from different gouverments, not the ships from those other fleet lists?

Someone refers to Sheridan as stealing his own ship, and Sheridan is ISA, not Earth Force. Maybe the Victory and Excalibur were meant to be crewed by EA personell, but under the direct command of the ISA?

actually i had ment that the ISA could use any ship (with a compatable in service date) from it's member races, but having a set of select ISA compatable ships is just as good. it's not as true to the fluff IMO, but it could solve some obvious balance issues with regards to making the ISA as i envisioned them to attractive a fleet. it also could be justafied in fluff terms as the member races could simply choose not to include certain classes of ship in joint ventures for their own reasons. I'd be happy either way, so long as the ISA get's a more multi-racial feal than the 1 FAP of allies allows.
 
Why not have some non human devloped ships that are built for the ISA like the Victory class? Like the Brakiri building a ship for the ISA with added bits of ISA tech. Earth doesn't seem to have unlimited acess to all of the tech that went into the Victory class. The other goverments would be up in arms if the EA got free acess to Vorlon tech and they didn't.

Getting off point. The point is, why not some non human and Minbari based ISA only ships?
 
Spike1382 said:
Getting off point. The point is, why not some non human and Minbari based ISA only ships?

Nice idea. That could look something like this (please replace the word "detachment" with something cool):

An ISA fleet can consist of one or more of the following detachements : White Star Fleet, Minbari, EA, League, Narn.

Each detachment has it´s own list of ISA ships. You can choose from as many of those lists as you want, but you will get a -1 Initiative penalty for each additional detachment after the first (keeping all those different races under control is a difficult task after all). In addition, when spending a fleet point on allies, you can only choose allied ships from fleet lists you have chosen as a detachment (so, in order to ally a fleet point of Minbari ships, you first must choose Minbari as a detachment and use at least one Minbari-based ISA ship).

Since there are no WS fleet allied ships, the White Star fleet doesn´t count against the number of detachments when calculating the initiative malus.

These are the ships you can choose from:

White Star fleet:

Patrol: Blue Stars
Raid: White Stars 1&2
Battle: WS gunship
War: WS Carrier
+ fighters

Minbari:

Patrol: Enfili class Borderpatrol vessel
skirmish: Nolo´Tar class ranger frigate (with a new, smaller model)
Raid: Ithil´Mar class ranger attack ship (just made that one up; using the current Nolo´Tar model).
War: *Sharlincommandvariantofwhichidontknowthename"
+ Flyers, nials,
EA:

patrol: Myrmidon LCV (to make some sense out of it)
Battle: Sigma Class advanced destroyer (made that one up - maybe something like a non-shadowtech Marathon?)
Armageddon: Victory Class advanced destroyer
+ Starfuries, thunderbolts, Firebolts

Narn/League: not quite sure, but you get my meaning - a G´Quan variant would be cool! (the G´Kar class alliance cruiser? or the na´Toth class strike carrier? Or anything like this?) Some league variants, maybe an exclusive ship or two (the "Boombox-class massive superdreadnought" could be interesting...)

Well, that would make things a bit more complicated than with most other fleet lists, but it might be an interesting challenge...
 
yeah i didn't mean to say only EA and Minbari could have ISA ships, but rather they seemed the logical choice for the owners of the ones curently designed.

i like the sugestion about ISA ships and then allies from the main list. It let's an ISA fleet contain any ship from it's msmber races but it's have to be composed mostly of the vessels built for them.
 
Those are beautifully painted ships dude. How did you achieve that aged look, its great. It looks like you got the ships from an antique shop, its that convincing. :)
 
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