"Freeform Strike Craft" Topic

We've decided to try something unusual with Silent Fury's strike craft – even though it's a hex-based game, we're abstracting the location of strike craft to make it very freeform and flowing. The intent is to incorporate a significant number of miniatures on the board while keeping it simple and fast, since we've got ships to fight with as well. Have a look.

Strike Craft Reborn

Also, quick survey for the space gamers – about how many fighter / strike craft miniatures do you currently have, and how are they based? Since we're out in the community now, we'd like to get an idea of what people generally have already available. If we see a trend in terms of numbers, we'll keep those in mind as we develop the system and scenarios.

In my gaming universe there are no fighters/ carriers.

I admit to arming a few boarding shuttles, and to arming a lander (200 ton internal space) but they are weapons of no resort! (a space folorn hope perhaps…)

In space, smallcraft only make sense as a corollary to helicopters or landing craft. I don't use many of them, even in a 'smallcraft game' like Jovian Chronicles.

I use tons. Fighters/gunships can have a very high thrust to mass ratio since they don't have to worry about lengthy endurance. I mount my fleetscale fighters 2 to a base.

In space, smallcraft only make sense as a corollary to helicopters or landing craft.

I agree, but Silent Fury is more pulp space combat than realistic space combat, so we wanted to include them.

Look at all those raiders in the pic above. It looks great. :)

I have roughly 100 stands done like that. BSG, B5, Star Wars, Drew's Freespace fighters (my favorites).

I like both small, fast strike craft, as well as fighters.

For the larger vessels, giving them a decent punch and minimal protection (excepting perhaps against fighters, or other fast strike craft) is probably a good way to go.

Missile boats, torpedo boats, gunboats, etc.

I mirror these on the modern Fast Attack Craft of today.

They work especially well as Planetary Defense Force units, which are useful for trying to keep invasion or bombardment fleets at bay, or to at least make their attacks on the home world/star system a bit more costly.

We use about 6 fighter stands per carrier. Each stand has a few of the GZG fighters on it.

At most we use 2 carriers per side but usually only 1.

In our home grown rules fighters serve as the long range weapon for capital ships (Fusion Cannons are mid range and Nova Torpedoes at short range…smaller ships are armed with various missiles for long range combat). They come in three variants: interceptor, multi-role, and strike.

Against capital ships you need a lot of Strike squadrons/stands to be effective and hope the enemy doesn't have tons of interceptors. But if the capital ship lacks fighter cover or enough Point Defense Systems strike fighters can kill a capital ship.

Against smaller ships strike squadrons can be very dangerous.

So they're effective under specific circumstances but also vulnerable or even ineffective in others (Interceptors are useless against capital ships and can barely scratch escorts but are death to strike fighters…) Like all of our weapons it's sort of rock-paper-scissors.