Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Blake's 7 Ships for FT

Someone in the Full Thrust FB group asked about SSDs for some of the ships from the BBC TV show Blake's 7. A few years ago I picked up a handful of ships from Shapeways. Sorry, I don't recall the supplier.
The principal one is of course the Liberator, otherwise known as Deep Space Vehicle 2. The aliens who built her also had a lighter scout ship. The main enemy are the Federation Pursuit Ships.
They are very much based on the TV show and not really built for more general FT games. The liberator is very fast and manoeuvrable but armed with only a forward facing long range torpedo. The scout has the needle beam so it can attempt to disable the DSV in a surprise attack. While the pursuit ships are designed to attack en mass with their single torpedo each.
Given that the ships are armed with torpedoes, the shields are probably redundant, but I included them for use against other classes of ships. I felt that the torpedo better represented the 'plasma bolts' used in the show. The alien ships also only have 3 hull rows rather than 3 to represent their higher technology level and armour to improve their survivability.
I usually play with the vector movement rules. I have not used these ships in cinematic mode, which may be tricky give the limited firing arcs.
Please enjoy and let me know how the games go. I'd be very interested in other people's attempts to model the ships.