Federation Commander

Dear Friends,

Those of you who are familiar with Battlestations, I have this question - what would you have to say about the compatibility of Battlestations with PD - in its various system incarnations. Can Battlestations be readily used as the boarding / in-ship combat scenario solution for PD campaigns ?

Thanks !

Gary

Not having even heard of Battlestations until ADB announced a SFU version, I wouldn't know how it plays. That being said, the game looks to be a very good dual purpouse pack for PD games with some possible tweaks here and there.

If a square on the Battlestations board is roughly equal to 5 feet/2 meters, it'll fit it very nicely with either version of PD20 and the upcoming Savage Worlds version. With GURPS, which uses hexes that equal 3'/1Meter, a minor amount of tweaking needs to be done. Mainly, if a weapon's range is given in GURPS hexes, (they usually aren't, btw), you just halve the number of hexes (droping fractions) to get the equivalant number of squares. Now if a Battlesation Square equals roughly 3'/1M, then conversioin from GURPS becomes the easier one and D20 just need some minor tweaking.

Also, Movement in GURPS is based on hexes, the average being 5 hexes a turn, so the average PC can move 15 feet in a turn, which is 1 second as opposed to 6 minutes in D20. The last part is only system specific, so it doesn't bear much on the topic, but is worth noting.

So, depending on what the size of a square is in Battle Stations will define how easy it's be to port over. Basicly, it's range from easy with a bit of math involved to Drag and Drop your game right on to the board.

My 50 cents.

Battlestations is really kind of three games in one. A space combat game, a run around inside the ship and shoot game, and an RPG. You could replace their RPG and run-around system with GURPS or d20 or SW and it would work out nicely.

I have the first edition of Battlestations. The "gameboard" is a series of tiles called "modules." Each module is section of starship: bridge, engineering, teleporter, etc. You arrange the modules to form spaceships in accordance with rules.

I played the game once, about 4 years ago at Kublacon. The setting for Battlestations is a take off on Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica. At the last few cons I attended there was at least one BSG variant offered.

@gurps_gm: does the rulebook say how big a square is on the board?

Thanks guys ! Once SFU Battlestations comes out, I'd like to explore "moduling" whole major vessels, such as a Fed CA/CC, Klink D-7, etc. In fact, my dream PD / SFU Battlestations scenario is a boarding battle between a CA and D-7, something like the climatic battle between the HMS Surprise and the French Vessel Acheron in the movie "Master and Commander." Maybe something to pursue for a future convention ?

You cannot really build a Fed CA with battlestations modules. Battlestations only really works on a single deck ship (a CA has, I forget, 20 or 30 decks?) and each module is basically one 'room' so while a gunboat is about 3x6 modules, the enterprise would be 200x1000 modules (with two dozen such layouts side by side, for the various decks).

True, but it'd make for interesting H&R raid games.

If not the whole CA, at least the bridge and the immediate decks !

I think building a CA in Battlestations would turn BS into the equiv of F&E!

dreamingbadger wrote:I think building a CA in Battlestations would turn BS into the equiv of F&E!

Um, that's a good thing, right ?

I could see us selling sets of 450 crewman minis.

domingojs23 wrote:Um, that's a good thing, right ?

sure if your definition of "tactical" fun extends to spending several days playing out a few seconds of activity ... think of it like this... resolve every F&E combat with SFB or FC...

As a project for a big club with unlimited resources I can see it working, assuming you can get over the 2d vs 3d problem, which SFB, FC and F&E get over by having the scale big enough to ignore the Z-axis for practical purposes.

it just feels that BS is meant for a different "scale" and trying to move it to 'this' scale will cause things to break or at least take a very long time.

Sweeper wrote:@gurps_gm: does the rulebook say how big a square is on the board?

@Sweeper:There is an example in the book. However, I measured a module which was around 3 and 1/2 inches on a side. Each module has a maximum of 25 squares; some covered in equipment -- which means impassable. I think each square is roughly a 1/4 inch across.

Normal 25-28mm figs are too big. Gorilla games, has a line of figs I believe.

@gurps_GM: What I meant was, what is the scale of the map board? does 1 square on the Map Tile equal 5'? or something else.

@Steve Cole: A guy a Twilight Creations Inc. (Makers of the fine Zombies!!! game line) was once joking that their best selling products were the "Bag o' '
packs where $10 get's you; 100 zombies, 100 female zombies, zombie dogs, skeletons, or glow in the dark(super) versions of any of them. A lot of folks, myself included, buy them for extra minis for other games.