Disclaimer: I am a fan of Knight Hawks and this post that follows is not intended as a knock on SFKH.<br /><br />In 2000/2001 a former Star Fleet Battles author named Ken Burnside started work on a game called Delta-V.<br />Delta-V was intended to be an updated vector-movement style space combat game that fixed as a glaring set of math holes found in previous vector movement games regarding ship position displacement during thrusts. His paper vms-vs-dv.pdf is out there and rather pointedly illustrates the problem.<br /><br />Delta-V morphed into Attack Vector: Tactical (AV:T) which is a play-aid driven 3D space combat game of military-grade fusion torchships in combat across 10 colony world systems after all contact with Earth is lost.<br /><br />Attack Vector is a fantastic game and the extremely cleverly designed play aids allow you to have 3D shooty spaceship goodness without tons of nasty slow math.<br /><br />However, the rules and designs of Attack Vector are very closely tied to the underlying science assumptions which means ship construction requires a massive spreadsheet and tons of calculus... which is not optimal for a general public consumption game.<br /><br />Bowing to public pressure, Ken reworked the ship design and rules engines into a game called Squadron Strike (SS) which gets *most* of what was going on with Attack Vector able to be used with ships of your own imagination.<br /><br />I've been re-gathering Attack Vector: Tactical in brain as part of spinning up a local AV:T game group in Houston... but as I go I cannot help the recurring thought that Star Frontiers could/should be a setting for Squadron Strike, allowing for UPF, Sathar, Pirates, Corporate, and independent ship fleets to all do battle in 3D.<br /><br />The core Squadron Strike set is a bit pricey, but with good reason - it comes with a large number of play aids like hexmaps, plastic tilt blocks and altitude tiles, laminated cards used to track the ship attitude (using dry erase markers) in lieu of doing 3D math etc.<br /><br />There are also starter kits and PDFs for the rules, setting, and default ship books, as well as some extras like print-and-fold tilt blocks box minis. The main thing you miss out on going the PDF only route is the Ship Design spreadsheet.<br /><br /> So my recommendation is that at least one person in each gaming group have the deluxe set with registration code to get access to that sheet... or become one of Ken's patreon supporters to get access to the spreadsheet when it is updated quarterly through that channel.<br /><br />Back to the point, however:<br />If there are other Squadron Strike fans here on the
boards, I would be happy to help out in a group project to adapt Star
Frontiers Knight Hawks ships to the Squadron Strike rules engine.<br />I am not able to do all of the conversion work on my own due to time and other distractions like reality, family and working with on-call shifts.<br /><br />But, I could help with a group conversion effort since I have a registered copy of the boardgame, which nets me the ship design spreadsheets, and I
am also a Patreon supporter of the author which nets me some extras
like how to do spacefighter combat which would help round out a complete
conversion.<br /><br />Some of the conversion tasks include:<br />Artwork needed to render onto the box miniatures as six views (top, bottom, nose, aft, port, starboard) - someone with the various original miniatures sets could probably do this with photos?<br /><br />Adapting the movement rules between Knight Hawks values and Squadron Strike units - existing SFKH vector movement adaptations might help here.<br /><br />Creating each ship weapon and defense within the Squadron Strike capabiltiies list - and the endless debate to get them "right" with respect to each other when something has to be made up to fill in a gap.<br /><br />Creating each ship systems display (SSD) sheet representing the relative fuel, armor, and systems of a Star Frontiers vessel - the Squadron Strike ship design sheet helps with this as it includes a cool output to PDF setup that makes homebrew sheets look as nice as the originally published ones. But there would be more debate here regarding fuel units and expenditures, and damage allocation and tracking boxes I think.<br /><br />Converting the Second Sathar War strategic game over to something like the Attack Vector: High Command map.<br /><br />Scenario writeup - probably starting with converting the tactical book engagements into Squadron Strike engagements.<br /><br />Scenario generator - why not take it up a notch? AV:T and Squadron Strike 1 both had Patrol and scenario generators which may lend themselves to adaptation to SF.<br /><br />Playtesting - this is one of the roughest and most time consuming parts - but also where a lot of fun could be... testing the ship maneuver, weapon, armor, and damage in the various scenarios to see how they really work and adjusting them accordingly. This means good recordkeeping and after-action reports...<br /><br />It also means everything developed as a document needs version control because they get revised a lot and everyone needs to keep them current from a shared repository.<br /><br />This site, or a share from my dropbox could work ...<br /><br />As a project, I think converting two commonly fought ships or one scenario would be the place to start - publish that on the site and in the fanzines - then regularly work out couple of other ships and scenario to highlight them and publish those separately. Over time, build up the library of how to do it, as well as expand the ships able to be played with the conversion.<br /><br />So... after that terrible pitch... are there any interested folks out there with the game interested in trying to adapt SF to it?<br /><br /> With enough interest and hands witht he game to spread the work out, it could be doable and the result would be a great companion/alternative to 2D SFKH.<br /><br />It's something to think about and now at least I've got it out of my brain and into the Void to see where it lands.
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