56 Spaceships Built

Well, it has been a long time since I last posted to this blog . . . but I've now finished building and painting some 56 spaceships for Full Thrust.

I've built one fleet for each of the four "official" combatants (ignoring the aliens) from Fleet Book One. Each fleet currently consists of:

• 2 Heavy Cruisers
• 3 Escort Cruisers
• 3 Light Cruisers
• 3 Destroyers
• 3 Frigates

I will eventually add some capitol ships . . . but this should be a good start. I've scratch built the various ships as "generic" . . . that is all four fleets share the same look (except for color). All Destroyers are the same pattern, all Escort Cruisers are the same pattern, etc.

The four colors of the fleets are: Red, Blue, Yellow and Green. Eventually I'll dig out my camera and take a photo or two . . . but until then at least this project is not dead.


-- Jeff

So, What Is "Full Thrust"?

"Full Thrust" is the name of a set of ship-vs-ship Space Combat rules.

They may currently be downloaded (in PDF format) for free from GROUND ZERO GAMES, the owners of the copyrights for the game.

For me, the major attraction of these rules is that they are dead simple but allow a surprising amount of tactical sophistication.

Shown here are the covers to "Full Thrust (2nd Edition)" and "More Thrust" (which adds onto the first volume.

There are also a pair of "fleet books" that substantially complicate things as they make them "more realistic".

Well, I'm not a huge fan of realism in tabletop gaming. I like the clean simple system of the first two books more than what I've been reading in the fleet books.

For me, one of the attractions of "Full Thrust 2" is that it IS so simple. Murdock, one of my gaming buddies, would like to play with his son (age 7 or 8, I think). Well the movement system of these first two books is easy . . . the changed "vector movement" system of the Fleet Books is (I feel) a harder concept to grasp than the former.

Also, I like the simpler ship designs of the original rules than the overpowered designs of "2.5" (as the fleet books are called).

So, I'm going to design my "Comox Cluster" senarios using "Full Thrust 2" and more or less ignore the fleet books.


-- Jeff