Alien Space/SFBM (was: Stardestroyer stats)

On Sat, 09 Mar 2002 10:46:58 -0500 Jon Davis <davisje@nycap.rr.com>
wrote:

> Roger Burton West wrote:

> Evidently the fire control scanners had failed horribly, as fire

> Sounds like... was it "Alien Space"? It had one weapon for which

> Alien Space... What fond memories.

> The "Gapper Zapper" :-P Range was 36"

Range of _all_ the "Special Weapons" was 36", from memory, as opposed
to 60" for beams; the player with the double-strength beam battery and
no special weapons had an interesting time trying to keep out of SW range so
that he could zap everyone else.

> Stalker Pods

Oh, yeah... The Nytron Cube/Lance, the infamous Magma Beam (not unlike
an FT nova cannon), Proton torps (long before Star Wars gave them to
fighters), Blazers... ah, nostalgia. I was a GZ ace in bygone days, and had
quite a few kills with Javelin torps, too. Lotsa fun.

Made more so with the group I played with by our house rules (uprated weapons,
hyperjumps, base stations) and the notorious typos in the copies of these
rules that were distributed to players. I never saw an Electron Stalker Pod in
use, but $Torcker Pods were a source of great hilarity, as was the Tenticlee
Beam.

As for the fire control "problem", I've always thought that people who
complain about that were missing the point! You got to crawl about on the
floor (or I did; we ran our games in university common rooms and the like),
carefully sighting your shots (especially with the GZ, where both beams had to
hit or nothing happened), and the satisfaction was
great when the shot hit, particularly when you managed to get _right_
on target so that the weapons damaged life support and sensors, which
were located in a narrow mid-section region; ahead of that, weapons and
defences were hit, behind it engines, etc. Of course, with a GZ, any hit was
enough... <g>

Oh, and AS used degrees, not grads, and IIRC, the GZ beams were one degree
either side of the nominal shot bearing. The SFBM introduced grads ("metric"
angles, I presume).

Most people here know of the story of AS and the StarFleet Battle Manual, so I
won't repeat it, except to curse yet again the
non-appearance of the semi-promised AS minis. I really wanted a couple
of sets of those ships...

Phil
----
"I think... I think I am! Therefore I am... I think?"
                                       -- The Moody Blues

On Tue, 12 Mar 2002 11:16:23 +0000 (GMT), Phillip Atcliffe
> <Phillip.Atcliffe@uwe.ac.uk> wrote:

> Most people here know of the story of AS and the StarFleet Battle

Well, I haven't heard it! If you feel like repeating it via e-mail, I'd
love to hear it.

The miniatures store in Toronto that I haunted had both of these games, at one
time. They may STILL have them...

And there was a third game using the same big counter idea. It was a WW2
dogfight game. I had it (don't know what happened to it). It was fun, using
the same counter style (aircraft in the middle, degrees around the edge). Of
course, if you got really close with the aircraft you started to get weird
effects with the counter being bigger than the aircraft it represented. It was
fun, though, and you got to crawl around on the floor!