Using FC Fleet Ship Cards in SFB

[ericphillips]

This is mainly for Mike West who wrote that article on using FC cards in SFB in CL 42, but if anyone else has an opinion, give it. Here is my question:

If I want to use the fleet card side in SFB, what so you suggest doing with the scanner and sensor tracks. I realize that the repair track would have to be halved for the smaller ship, but I am not sure about those other tracks.

I don't want to have a generic number that never changes. Part of SFB is getting your systems hit and the degradation of capability. Maybe taking two boxes off?

Thanks.

[Steve Cole]

I'd just use the original sensor/scanner tracks. It's not going to be that "wrong".

[mjwest]

Well, in the article I just simply said to skip sensors and scanners. To do anything else would require making your own rules to use them. You could just import them from SFB like Steve suggests (and use the same tracks regardless of scale). Or, you could import them and destroy two boxes for each hit in fleet scale.

The article was written from the assumption that the player was new to SFB and didn't have all of the SFB SSDs. In that case, you won't know what the sensor and scanner tracks are "supposed" to be. So, the article just said to skip them and move on.

To simulate them anyway, the easiest way is to assign a beginning rating of 6 to size class 4 ships, a rating of 7 to size class 3 ships, and a rating of 8 to size class 2 or larger ships. This is for both sensor and scanner. Each hit will drop the rating by one (in squadron scale; two in fleet scale). Obviously, a rating above 6 counts as 6 for function, but is used to give it extra durability.

(The above is just a suggestion. It is all "do it how it makes sense to you", so I just offer the above as a suggestion to get things going.)

[ericphillips]

I have all these ship cards, and now I am moving to SFB. I just got a great deal on used SFB stuff, and have TONS of SSDs, and books. A whole SFB library up to R6. I am going to buy the e23 SSD books, however, because I like the books for the rules, but PDFs are way more manageable than loose SSDs.

Anyway, we might use fleet scale for some of the larger battles in SFB if we do a local campaign, which probably means converting some SFB SSDs to fleet scale, which seems easy enough.

And might use F&E's battle system to play out those battles we cannot do in full, either because they are mismatched or there is no time.

Thanks for the hints. I'll figure something out.