VBAM Games Forums

There was a comment in the playtest campaign thread about general units for certain jobs, e.g. the Klingons had a rough time finding a lost officer due to a lack of labs on their ships.

There already exist quite a few general/civilian units in FC that could be made to do various jobs:

Exploration/science/local police: Use Prime Trader (has 6 lab boxes iirc; in the SFU background, fast for a civilian unit and often used by local govt's as an auxiliary for such jobs) It has a wide mix of capabilities.

Local defense/local police/convoy escort: Armed Cutter

Local defense: Monitor, Base Station, Defense Satellites

Orbital "port" facilities: Commercial Platform, maybe civilianised Base Station

Fast courier: Armed Priority Transport (just a small amount of cargo, big engines, used in that role in SFU)

While I am waiting for Charlie to show up (as he's our conversion guru) I do want to point that most of them are already in.

You just don't have access to them in the beginning. You would need to spend a tech advancement on the general starship section to get better civilian ships.

terryoc wrote:There was a comment in the playtest campaign thread about general units for certain jobs, e.g. the Klingons had a rough time finding a lost officer due to a lack of labs on their ships.

Since we are only on turn 4 in the game his forces are relatively limited. One thing we are trying to figure out in our playtesting games is what minimum force should a player start with in a standard scenario like this playtest.

terryoc wrote: There already exist quite a few general/civilian units in FC that could be made to do various jobs:

Exploration/science/local police: Use Prime Trader (has 6 lab boxes iirc; in the SFU background, fast for a civilian unit and often used by local govt's as an auxiliary for such jobs) It has a wide mix of capabilities.

This was one of the units I wanted to give out by default because it could be labeled a "fast" ship, and has some extra capability. I would almost certainly not make it part of the generic convoy unit (a campaign abstract for moving things around).

When I started asking about the extra ships I was looking at a lot of the F&E and SFB material, where I could see that in some cases there were some very neat ships like this which may have been used by the KDSF with some different campaign and tactical functionality (maybe was better armed, extra transporters, and so on). In a campaign sometimes the variety is helpful.

terryoc wrote: Local defense/local police/convoy escort: Armed Cutter

So far that is the big civie escort I could find.

terryoc wrote: Local defense: Monitor, Base Station, Defense Satellites

I wonder if they had planned any more such stations. These are important to use since they often translate to different supply ranges, or trade benefits to the local system. Defensive satellites were just added in Orion Attack, right?

terryoc wrote: Orbital "port" facilities: Commercial Platform, maybe civilianised Base Station

I think this one (also just added as I recall) is very important because with a civilian base you can create a different variety of missions, and most importantly, use it to boost trade, and so on.

Then I started to think that the ever economically expanding Federation might have a trade station variant, or the Lyrans might have one with an embedded construction facility, or the the Klingons may have a more heavily armed version. But I am probably starting to think about too many new ships for not much net tactical result .

terryoc wrote: Fast courier: Armed Priority Transport (just a small amount of cargo, big engines, used in that role in SFU)

In a campaign these make a huge difference in these missions too. For example if Rainer had to move a priority shipment, say emergency part replacements or foodstuffs, this would be a great ship for that.

I am curious how the construction slipways turn out. One thing I am discussing is which ships would constitute the resupply vessels. Those are AOEs to the traditional VBAM player.

Thank you!
-Jay

defense satellites were in a Communique, so have been pulled in already. All the other civilian ships mentioned we had access to, so have been included, too. Haven't seen the civilian station yet. Where was that?

The commercial platform is in Orion Attack. A civilian base station is (IIRC) the same as a base station but with phaser-1s instead of phaser-4s. I'm not sure if that's correct, need to check with ADB on that one. Maybe I'm thinking of the Orion bases (Orions never had phaser-4s).

Ah...we haven't been given access to that material yet.