Space Station Cirrus

[EnsignJDonavan]

Actually Ive always wondered if Mongoose will be doing Space Stations, such as they did in Noble Armada: Expanded Ed with Space Station Cirrus. It was such a beast in Expanded Ed. Hope you will include it into the book that includes the Guild. Well just a question.

 

[starbreaker]

Agreed, that would be a nice addition to the game. They need something for the third book - League, Symbiot, and a few new things for existing fleets won't fill it completely. Doing stations and orbital defense platforms and such would take up some space constructively.

 

[EnsignJDonavan]

So I was comparing the stats from Noble Armada: Expanded Edition and Noble Armada: A Call to Arms. Now this is a very rough idea of what the Space Station Cirrus might look like. But it gives you an idea how much power it would have.

Cirrus - League controlled Space Station
Pts: 400
Speed: 2
Turns: 1/45
Hull: 4
Shields: 5
Damage: 75/20 (hard to say on this, its physically larger than a dreadnaught but it has TONS of crew quarters and shops)
Ramming: 3
Troops: 33 (24 Marines and 9 Marauders)
Craft: ?? (Cirrus is one of the few stations that can over haul ion drives. One would think they would have some BUT in the Expanded Ed only the Kurgan had Fighters)
Trait: Command +2, Lumbering, Think Machine
Weapons
Heavy Lasers R 36 Fore (or if we are gonna start using SF Arcs, FH) AD 8 Accurate, Precise, Burnout Multihit 2
Heavy Lasers R 36 Starboard (or if we are gonna start using SF Arcs, SH) AD 8 Accurate, Precise, Burnout Multihit 2
Heavy Lasers R 36 Port (or if we are gonna start using SF Arcs, PH) AD 8 Accurate, Precise, Burnout Multihit 2
Gatling Lasers x2 Fore (or FH)
Gatling Lasers x2 Starboard (or SH)
Gatling Lasers x2 Port (or PH)
Grappling Gun x2 Fore (of FH)
Grappling Gun x2 Starboard (or SH)
Grappling Gun x2 Port (or PH)

Like I said this is a possibility of what it might look like. Eat your heart out anyone who messes with the Guild.

 

[locarno24]

Just adapt and abuse the existing B5 rules for stations.

The modular station rules were added in Powers & Principalities and work well enough in concept with a few tweaks:

1) Balancing specific weapons may take some doing. Obviously short-range weapons become far more of an issue on a static platform; so a light slug gun battery should pack a shedload of weapons.

2) Stuff like Spacedock module (allows some free repair in campaigns) and War Room module (improves initiative in campaigns) can be moved directly across. Some sort of shield modules should be generally available (to anyone who's not Vuldrok).

3) Point defence module will be gatling lasers, obviously.

4) The critical chart could do with work. B5 ACTA had stations suffer a critical hit but automatically repair it at the end of the turn, but the whole escalating critical levels is one of the nice things in Noble Armada. Might be easiest to give them a new critical track with more levels to it? You'd have to redo the engines track anyway (initially nothing, then starts to spin, then starts to fall towards the planet - or nearest table edge).

5) As noted, lots of troops. It should be possible to capture a big station but it should be an operation on a par with planetary assaults

 

[starbreaker]

You'd do much better to divide the station into several discrete sections, each with their seperate record sheet and critical track. Each section could be targeted individually, with perhaps a rule for destroying one section to cause an effect on all the others (perhaps each takes a ram-style d6 bump to one crit location, or just 1 bump to each critical location) - or for really, really big stations, define each section as adjacent to one or more other ones, and have destruction of one only affect the neighboring sections.

You need to be able to usefully assign more than 75 overall damage to a station, and there's just no point in all that having one critical track. Dreads (and even cruisers) are often limping wrecks from crits by the time they're crippled, much less destroyed. A much bigger, tougher station with 200 total would suffer even worse from that effect - unless you subdivide it into (say) five 40-point sections. each with independent crit tracks.

As usual, GZG's Full Thrust rules (or perhaps the More Thrust supplement, I forget) has some useful ideas along this line - and they're free downloads these days, so scoping them out is just spending time.