billclo said:
Ben2 said:
On the subject of starter sets I've been looking with a certain amount of envy at the Dropzone Commander set.
Plastics for the most common ships (essentially doing a plastic squadron sprue with heavy cruiser, light cruiser, 2-3 small ships) would leave metals and resins for the bigger ticket items (BCs, DNs, BBs).
If I had more than two pennies to rub together I'd put money in a starter set with plastics. Terrain could be handled with a couple of card sheets and people could sort out their own black cloth.
Throw in a revised 2nd ed rulebook containing all the errata (and possibly a good amount or all of the stuff from the next book) and your golden.
The problem, from what Steve Cole has said in the past, is that plastic miniature molds are horribly expensive, much higher than molds for pewter.
They are. While the price has come down a lot in recent years, but prices I've seen quoted are $5-10k. Mongoose have an advantage in that they've got digital sculpts done for their range which would reduce up front costs, but they'd want to go the China + CAD route as it is significantly cheaper than 3 ups followed by the process to scale them down. Getting a decent size sprue done in the UK would be 30-50k (and that's in pounds).
However a SFU starter set kickstarter with an initial target of $50k to do everything (1 sprue for Fed, Klingon, Romulan, Gorn, card terrain and rulebook) might be doable.
There would need to be a lot of prep for such a kickstarter though, because you'd need constant updates to get additional pledgers, keep pledgers and get people to up pledges. I'd love to see a plastic civilian sprue, and plastic sprues for all the Alpha Octant and Fed/Kling/Rom sprues for the war hulls, but any SFU kickstarter would have to be meticulously planned with stretch goals mapped out, digital sculpts done, prototypes done and other promo material all lined up ready before the kickstarter started.
The Dredd kickstarter was very successful, the Rogue Trooper kickstarter was sort of successful and the Meerkat kickstarter didn't succeed, so Mongoose kickstarters have been mixed. I think the SFU has the potential to be bigger than the Dredd kickstarter but would need a lot of work setting it up.
Gates of Antares had some big names attached to it, but hadn't got an awful lot to show and so stalled. Kickstarter can be a brilliant tool, as Mantic have found (getting more than $1,000,000 for Deadzone) but Mantic put an incredible amount of effort in, and even though they are selling a new intellectual property, they marketed it very well. SFU is a much more recognisable property, and with clever marketing it could do incredibly well, but the work would need to be put in.
