Month: February 2021

Pining for the Fjords

Nearly there, taking details from various fan versions of the norway Ive added some raised and recessed sections and visible phaser arrays, torpedo launchers and a traditional deflector dish, as well as some Attack Wing style window squares. The first print run will tell whether I’ve got them prominent enough for the intended scale.

Now all that’s left is the nightmare of panel lines. Now they wouldnt BE a nightmare if I knew what I was doing (I saw a method of doing it through modifiers which would work very nicely if my geometry wasnt a bit of a “novice grade mess”.

A wild Diversion Appears

For many years I’ve dipped in and out of 3D modelling, learning very specific tasks such as texture mapping or skeleton binding or arcane format conversions for…projects. Never however have I produced a 3D model of my own from scratch, until now.

Because owning a 3D printer and having no ability to effectively use blender was a tad too daft even for me…

So here we go.

The first 3D model I ever built. I have no particular fondness for the Saladin class, and if I did it would be the refit version, however it was a really nice simple set of shapes and I thought it would give me a nice concept of how much detail would show up at Attack Wing scale. When I’ve primed the physical one and found somewhere to mount the peg I’ll definitely post a picture here.

And while that was printing I set about making myself something a tad more relevant to the things I actually want to play in Attack Wing…notably the Norway Class. This one clearly isn’t finished yet, but I thought for once I’d post a WIP.

The more canon eyed among you may spot various oddities in both these designs. In both cases the designs are a hybrid of various different images of the ships, taking details from a few sources and changing some to account for what works at 5-7 centimetres long.

For example the TOS-Style Saladin is commonly pictures with a Constitution style deflector dish hanging on an arm below the centre of the saucer which would be a complete structural failure in resin, so I substitued an equally era appropriate sensor dome. Also the pipes on the back of the nacelles are closer to solid fins here to maintain integrity without losing the general shape.

The Norway is an even trickier one because just about every image of the Norway Class has some variations. For those not as much of a nerd as myself the reason for this, and why the class never appeared after First Contact, was that the original 3D file was lost and not rebuilt until eaglemoss wanted to produce a physical model, so just about every intervening version takes some liberties with the details of the original…And I do exactly the same here. Hopefully I’ll be able to show off the finished version of this in physical form pretty soon.

Oh and should I deem these good enough I shall post the files here for download, as I will with any other ships I make.

Star Trek: Attack Wing – Homebrew (Discovery Part 4)

This is a brief one. Captains and crew of the Discovery.

A few are coming later with the Section 31 scout ship.

CAPTAIN-Saru

Image 1 of 10

So, captains…Saru is the science ship captain and Burnham is the more flexible captain (I did consider a more sarcastic ability which literally allowed some form of limited cheating but I do actually like Discovery).

Stamet’s specifically makes the Spore Drive more efficient (used with any other crew you don’t get an action the turn you return). Culber is a standard doctor ability…however if you use the Lorca/Stamets/Spore Drive combo Culber gets you a third use of the Spore Drive.

I’ve given Reno an ability representing a kind of “bodge it together” tech improvisation. Owo, Rhys and Nhan have pretty standard “assorted bridge crew” abilities. Tilly’s is intended to be a tad less reliable, representing a kind of “flash of inspiration” support character. All the abilities are useful to some degree, and you’ll know which you get at the start of turn so you can plan accordingly.

Star Trek: Attack Wing – Homebrew (Discovery Part 3)

So…yeah. It’s been a while since the last post. Three seasons of Star Trek, one global pandemic, a D&D murder mystery, and a series of events I have come to describe as the Saga of the Kidney Stones. The saga has yet to come to an end. Its now been 13 months. While I attempt to keep profanity on this site to far far below my usual casual levels…FUCKING OW.

This kind of fell by the wayside a little because I was busy with other things and then all the…everything…happened. However Lower Decks, plus the upcoming Star Trek Alliance release (which if memory serves was still upcoming when I last posted…really wizkids you make good games, stop killing them with distribution) really brought back my interest in the game. So much so my ebay purchases to pick up stuff I missed back when I was last paying got my card blocked. Seriously bank…you thought erratically spending large sums of money on collectible game pieceswas suspicious…you don’t know me at all.

On the plus side I finally have a big cube coming.

And without further ado where were we…Discovery season 1. Blimey. So I’m shuffling up the order a little bit from what I planned because TIME.

To start, the Discovery’s USS and ISS, and the ISS Shenzhou.

SHIP-USS-Discovery

Image 1 of 15

So, all the normal and mirror Crossfields can take the spore drive for free. It’s kind of the point of them. USS Discovery plays up it’s science ship nature, whereas ISS Discovery and Shenzhou are both combat machines throwing around extra attacks.

Then we get to Admirals. In this post we’ll be looking at Lorca, Georgiou and Cornwell.

ADMIRAL-Gabriel-Lorca-Admiral

Image 1 of 6

The intention behind Lorca’s card is that you can take him as a captain on Federation OR Mirror ships but you can only take him as an admiral on Mirror ships. He’s also intended to represent the moment Lorca overloads Stamets to take out the sarcophagus (and shift universes).

I am not, however, entirely happy with the wording. The INTENT (and my ruling should you ever want to use the card for real) is that you can use this card to get a second use out of “disable this upgrade/put X time tokens on this upgrade” OR “disable one of your crew upgrades/put X time tokens on one of your crew upgrades” by discarding the crew upgrade in question. It is NOT intended to enable use of a passive ability on a disabled card (such as the TOS USS Enterprise expansion Mr. Spock card).

In the tradition of the mirror universe Empress Philippa works by singling out and brutally destroying enemy ships. Admiral Cornwell is intended more as an action efficiency support role.

TECH-Blast-Doors

Image 1 of 3

So blast doors could have also been a sacrifice based elite talent but this works quite nicely with one of Geordis rolls under the engineering blast door too. The DOT-7 (I LOVE THE LITTLE FLOATY ROBOT BOYS) provides another repair tool…There will probably be more in the Disco crew section…something has to explain how they survived the battle against control. As for the spore drive…this is the upgrade Lorca’s passive ability is intended to work with (ie you put time tokens on Stamets, then use it again and discard him).

Next time…a metric butt-ton of Disco S1 and S2 captain and crew upgrades. Then Picard and Lower Decks. A random note I’m putting off deciding what to do with S3 future characters. They finally made the Discovery look good…but the stats could never play nice with the rest of the game, and theres not enough detail visible of the other ships. Also I’m saving Pike’s enterprise and associated characters for Strange New Worlds.