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.
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.
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.
This time it’s a couple of the most notable Klingon ships from the Battle of the Binary Stars, specifically the Sarcophagus and Cleave ships.
The normal line ships I’ll get to later…
First up the Sarcophagus.
SHIP-Sarcophagus
Image 1 of 8
I’ve given this one a bit more punch than other Klingon ships of it’s era (notably the 3 dice D7 class) to represent this ships size and status. It’s supposed to be an older ship, but given what it took to bring it down I’m assuming its pretty heavily upgraded.
Its ability text is intended to represent its many tractor beams. T’Kuvma is represented as an Admiral, and I think a reasonably good one (they did win the battle after all). Voq I think is reasonably narratively accurate given what actually happened in the story.
Then onto the cleave ship. The cleave ship is ridiculous. It’s the stupidest design. I love the cleave ship. The cleave ship is the most Klingon thing ever. I see no contradiction in these statements. Seriously, I don’t like a lot of the season 1 Klingon ship designs but I love the concept of the cleave ship.
“We’ve got this massive old freighter, its built like a ruddy tank but its a hundred years out of date, takes a fortnight to turn around and it can barely do warp 4…shall we scrap it?…Sir…what do you mean melee ship”.
SHIP-IKS-NaQjej
Image 1 of 6
Given its apparent size I genuinely think the thing that makes most sense for the cleave is a repurposed freighter, and that in mind I’ve given it a crappy move dial, and no agility. However the named and generic both get to attack on collision. I’ve also given it a decent attack value because whose going to tell the guy with the kilometer long space knife “no you cant have all my surplus disruptor turrets”.
As for the invisibility field, I’ve basically made it a way to delay your deployment and almost guarantee a collision…The cloak and echo options are basically supplementary and irrelevant on anything more advanced that the D7.
So…yeah. It’s been a while. I kind of forgot about Attack Wing for a while, my local scene was petering out, releases were tailing off and the pseudo second edition stuff had yet to hit.
Then I had some other projects I was working on, which I’ll probably put on here at some point. Then before I knew it it was the other day and I ran into one of the faction packs in a shop and it set me off on a spending spree buying some of the…I’m gonna call it second edition for clarity purposes.
Of course it wouldnt be Attack Wing if you could buy it easily if you missed it on day one so I didnt manage to get my hands on the Romulan Faction pack or the new starter, but I did manage to get the Borg, Dominion, Ferengi, Independant, Kelvin and Animated ones, plus the fighter squad card pack (well dang, I can actually run all my old resouce fighters as named ships now)…the other card packs didnt interest me that much.
It being me though it’s got me thinking of homebrew again and where better to start than Discovery…
Today the list starts up again with the battle of the binary stars, specifically the Federation half.
SHIP-USS-Shenzhou
Image 1 of 8
The Shenzhou is a pretty ship but it doesn’t seem to pack much punch and was, if memory serves, presented as quite an old and not particularly powerful ship so I’ve gone for a low stat-line, and a move set on the crappier end of the scale. The ability is quite a nice one for a small cheap ship…protects your more valuable ships one way or another, either with freebie evades or by drawing fire and getting itself blown up. Captain Georgiou replicates the raid on the sarcophagus, Detmer helps keep the Shenzhou alive while it protects its allies and Gant is intended to lend a little extra kick to ships with low attack values.
Then we have the rest of the fleet…I’ve opted for a mix of the designs I like and just the ones there are a decent image of from the show.
SHIP-USS-Europa
Image 1 of 17
I’ve picked the fleet flagship, the Europa, with a command skill boosting ability. The T’Plana-Hath, mostly on grounds theres a decent image of it, this one another support ship, removing time tokens from friendly ships. Lastly theres the Yeager (STOP NAMING SHIPS YEAGER, WE HAVE ENOUGH) of the Cardenas class which I just like the design of…this one gets a bit of extra punch in close quarters with friendly ships.
Last up is Admiral Anderson, his ability letting a ship take a few parting shots back at its attackers (or simply diverting fire away onto another ship to avoid the damage).
Next time…probably the Klingon side of the binaries, so that would be the Sarcophagus, the cleave ship…the “D7” and “birds of prey” (and heres where I start to get opinionated on Discovery…good thing weve moved on and theyve made some improvements).
As for the Discovery itself, Burnham, Saru etc…later.
Now for some other notes. Firstly you may notice I’ve kept the old points formula…basically given I have the luxury of none of my stuff ever having to be tournament balanced I can keep things easy. I am however adopting a few bits of the new card formats like the firing arc symbols and the divider line in some cases.
I very much wish theyd come up with the whole “main and sub factions” thing from the beginning so we could have had the cardassians, breen, andorians etc all be their own factions and still play happily together.
I’m also planning doing some new general upgrade cards for each faction including some cheap standardised versions of the most common weapons (with both disable and time token versions) and some tech upgrades to give some factions some more feel.
And the last in this batch of Beyond themed updates.
Kralls swarm fighters. The gimmick here is it allows you to run an entirely fighter based fleet. Yes, I realise that would be a living nightmare if they introduced it to the real game, but that’s the fun part of homebrew…it doesn’t all have to be printable.
Swarm Prime:
Swarm Second:
Swarm Command Squadron:
Swarm Squadron:
Krall and co take the form of squadron upgrades rather than regular captains and crew, although Krall and Manas still boost a squadrons captain skill and can be targeted as captains (for effects that disable captains etc).
Krall and Manas both give out free fleet actions (representing controlling advanced functions of the swarm) and the Tear Apart upgrade lets you trade squadron tokens for negative effects on the opponents ship.
Lastly Kalara screws with your opponents deployment. The text box gives limited space but if I was FAQing this for an OP I would say that it DOES allow the enemy ship to deploy outside the deployment area if it has to in order to stay in the required range.
First the Kelvin. It’s roughly Miranda class equivalent (to go with the constitution refit alternate timeline Enterprise). It’s ability boosts its defence to keep it alive a little longer. Captain Robau, as a blue shirt, has a science/scan related ability…and George Kirk has a modified dominion suicide run ability. This one works better the less evasive the target ship is.
The Franklin is even smaller, with only 1 attack dice. It can, however, make additional attacks should it hit…almost seems like that would be handy against…I dunno…fighter squads maybe?
Former MACO Captain Edison gets a free shot with a MACO squad, allowing you to use the Franklin as an agile little troop transport, with the remaining crew helping to keep the ship alive while it weaves through enemy lines.
Here’s a few new toys from the most recent movie. The unnamed constitution parts are from our last visit to the alternate universe. Having seen very little of the new Enterprise-A I’ve gone for a pretty basic ability that represents the ship’s bleeding edge technology (basically the one I gave to lucky-Kirk in the previous JJVerse post).
No ship would be complete without it’s captain and crew and while most of our previous crew still work fine there are a couple of notable abscences.
Firstly an actual captain card for Kirk (the last one was a crew upgrade which could take over if you lost your captain) and secondly a crew card for Jaylah. Last for today a couple of talents for notable moments from the movie.
You may say “but those go with the Franklin” and you would be right. And I did start on the Franklin and the swarm ships but DAMN is there a shortage of decent looking pictures of those. So next time…along with the Kelvin and George Kirk which I missed last time.
I was thinking about the card [mtg_card]Smallpox[/mtg_card] recently. When I got back into the game at M12 I dismissed it as garbage (it’s an easy new player mistake to look at a card with symmetrical effects like that and just see it as something that hurts you).
Older (depressingly so) and wiser (insufficiently so) I thought I’d have a crack at making up some decks that make use of it. So I’ve started working on some deck lists that use it.
Specifically deck lists in the modern format (I know legacy even less than modern, one of these days I’ll finish the last couple of cards for my all foil “just for fun” legacy deck and show it off here) which use four copies of [mtg_card]Smallpox[/mtg_card] and two copies of [mtg_card]Liliana of the Veil[/mtg_card] (because I own two Lilianas and I figure the two cards pair rather well).
[d title="Modern Smallpox 1 - WB Control"]
Creatures
2 Fulminator Mage
4 Vampire Nighthawk
Spells
4 Smallpox
4 Thoughtseize
2 Wrath of God
2 Disfigure
2 Geth's Verdict
2 Go for the Throat
2 Hero's Downfall
2 Victim of Night
Planeswalkers
2 Elspeth, Sun's Champion
2 Liliana of the Veil
2 Ob Nixilis Reignited
2 Sorin, Lord of Innistrad
Enchantments
2 Bitterblossom
Lands
2 Ghost Quarter
4 Godless Shrine
2 Plains
4 Shambling Vent
12 Swamp
Sideboard
2 Barter in Blood
2 Despise
2 Dismember
3 Duress
2 Fulminator Mage
4 Lifebane Zombie
[/d]
The basic plan here is to land a planeswalker or bitterblossom and then grind your opponent out with control spells until you can hit a big finisher like Elspeth. The Fulminator Mages are some additional anti-tron support. The Nighthawks are interchangeable with plenty of other things, they’re mostly there to gain some life and block, plus they might come in handy against some aggro decks that take an early lead.
You must be logged in to post a comment.