Saturday, December 28, 2013

The Last Victory Super Galactic Dreadnought?

Say It Ain't So, Joe! 

As far as I can tell the last of the retail store metallic Victory Super Galactic Dreadnought (SGD) was sold.

No longer manufactures metal SGDs.  Only the lightweight resin SGDs are available, as shown below.



Carries a few of the closed line of 1989 Belle Haven Perth Pewter Starfleet Wars Collection.  Below is a list of their remaining inventory which also includes the sculptured Biological Units.  You better hurry, before they are all gone.



Has not carried metal SGDs since March of  2013 and will only restock with the resin versions.  They still have many of the Starfleet Wars/Galactic Knights miniatures available for purchase at a lower price than Monday Knight Productions.

Does not carry the metal SGDs.  Currently has very few selection of the Galactic Knights miniature line.




SOLD!
The Last Victory Super Galactic Dreadnought?
 




Friday, December 27, 2013

Aquarian Alliance Blueprints

Space Station - Wave Class

Super Galactic Dreadnought - Typhoon Class

Galactic Dreadnought - Leviathan Class

Galactic Battlecruiser - Shark Class

Galactic Attack Carrier - Stingray Class

Galactic Attack Carrier - Behemoth Class

Stellar Cruiser - Barracuda Class


Galactic Transport - Sea Horse Class

Stellar Destroyer Leader - Tigershark Class


Stellar Destroyer - Piranha Class

Star Armored Pursuit Ship - Dolphin Class

Starbomber - Wahoo Class

Click here for a (hi-res) download of the Aquarian Alliance Blueprints


Wednesday, December 25, 2013

THE FIVE WORLDS: A HISTORY


THE FIVE WORLDS: A HISTORY

Part I:  Terran Contacts With The Entomalians And Avarians

Date:  October 17, 2308 EST

Subject:  Intergalactic Origins of the Fourth Interstellar Conflict

Source:  Excerpts from the writings of First Admiral Marc Harder


Our repeated contacts by way of trading and warfare with other powers in the past 250 years have taught us a great deal; not only about their military prowess, but how other races have evolved and survived. These sociological and economic factors have had as much to do with an empire's success as their military capabilities. A brief review of the Five Powers evolvement is in order before we take an in-depth study of the current situation.

Much of Old Earth's technology was interrupted and destroyed by the last World War in 1987. While this period remains shrouded in mystery due to the loss of many records, enough data has survived to be able to trace mankinds development through the post-atomic era.  The war started among several minor countries in what is now the Mediterranean Cultural and Recreational Center, spread to Africa and Asia and eventually drew the empires of North America, Eurasia, and the European continent into conventional warfare. It remains unclear as to who fired the first thermonuclear missile; but what is clear, is that few people survived its effects.

The survivors from distant parts of the globe were able to contact each other via radio transmissions and acquired surviving transportation to reach some of Earth's few untouched regions. By 1994 the first major resettlement was established in Australia. All mankind cooperated for the first time in our history resulting in a remarkable recovery.  By 2041 we had achieved a technical level superior to that enjoyed in 1987 that was in no small part achieved by great strides in energy research and rocket propulsion.

Our technical achievements during the next fifteen years were many but two overshadowed the rest. One was the high speed underground shuttle system that connected every major city on the globe. The second was the orbiting space platforms that converted sunlight to electricity and beamed it down to an energy dependent culture. From these space platforms, shuttles were launched to explore Luna and Mars and establish our first continually manned outposts. Two manned interstellar probes were launched into deep space as our first strides into the heavens. Audio and visual contact with the probes were lost in 2060 when new transmissions overwhelmed their signals.

These transmissions proved to be an Entomalian (Bug) warfleet hunting down Avarian survivors when the Bugs attacked the outer Avarian provinces. One Avarian pilot managed to land his crippled craft on Luna Base where he and his ship attracted a great deal of curiosity and suspicion. The surviving pilot enlightened us about current intergalactic politics including the capture of one of our probes by the Bugs before the Avarians could rescue them. As it became clear that our people could be in deadly peril, we feverishly built defenses around massive laser and missile installations on Luna Base and a dozen asteroids placed in orbit around Earth.

Luna Base

The Entomalians interpolated the course of our captured probe that entered their battle area but had no available ship to go to the edge of the galaxy to investigate its origin. But the Bugs' memories were long, and on the fateful day July 18, 2063, a lone battlecraft appeared on Luna's long range scanners. It obviously scanned us because it didn't venture within firing range but headed back the way it had come. A week later our sensors picked up the ion trails of over forty starships closing our solar system. The Entomalians swept in, ignoring their losses, and pulverized Luna Base, the outpost asteroids and finally Earth itself.  By the time they had finished their destruction our recovery had been set back 70 years.

Our short rebuilding period was due largely to help from the Avarian culture. Most of Earth was now uninhabitable due to radiation levels left over from the 20th Century as well as the residue of the Entomalian massacre. For twenty years we labored to build a new Earth but our most important population centers and manufacturing sites had to be located on Luna and Mars. At the same time our first primitive intergalactic battlefleet was constructed on the nearly weightless environs of Luna. All of mankind's illusions about a peaceful exploration of space and finding benevolent, advanced races had been shattered.


The Avarians

From our explorations during the next century we found that our scientific expectation that planets would evolve creatures able to survive the peculiar atmosphere and climactic conditions of that planet were false. In some cases life existed in spite of those conditions. A case in point was our Avarian benefactors.  Their small, dusty planets have a gravity of 0.89 compared to Earth's 1.0.  This varies of course, but the home planets closely follow this formula.

Vegetation is plentiful with many farms to develop the tremendous amounts of protein the Avarian's diet and metabolism require. Much of the planet's surface is cultivated with fast growing grains that must be continuously irrigated because of the lack of surface water.  This lack of water on the planet's surface or in shallow underground reservoirs ruins our long held evolutionary theory that life must evolve in a water environment. Even the Avarians are unable to explain with any scientific certainty how their ancestors survived the rigors of their planets.


Cities are usually built high and are spaced far apart to allow the maximum land area to be devoted to agriculture and protein farms. The architecture is simple in detail but complicated in design and form. Thin spires rising hundreds of meters into the atmosphere support their graceful cities as the legs support the weaving body of a spider. The flow and sweep of their building lines have few flat panels to mar the sculptured effect of these trade centers. 


The Avarians are somewhat shorter than we are with a light, hollow bone structure. Internal organs are similar to ours with the exceptions of a duplicate liver, minor heart system and an organ of unknown function placed anteriorly to the pancreas. Their fast metabolism gives them only a marginally reduced lifespan compared to ours because their advanced medical technology has been able to compensate for the rapid degeneration typical of a species with a high metabolic rate.


The Entomalians

Entomalian lifestyles are the most structured in the galaxy. Three classes of individuals exist on their jungle planets. The Office of Galactic Intelligence (OGI) has classified 76% of the population as workers, 3% as the ruling or managerial class (code named drones) and the remaining 21% are performing military duties. Their society is strongly influenced by the military; a continuous state of war with someone is their way of life. Living quarters and 40% of the manufacturing sites are buried deep underground.  The principal energy processing centers are located on the surface, along with extensive agricultural sites. All large animals (principally mammalian!) have been ruthlessly exterminated which caused such an ecological imbalance that many of the Entomalian agricultural areas suffered from an unchecked small pest population (actually a related species of the Entomalians). This caused a timely decrease in the Entomalian population that helped save the Avarians and ourselves shortly after our first contact with them in 2063. They have fully recovered now, but are in a state of technical obsolescence particularly with our introduction of the Star Base REVENGE (the newest Terran weapon, REVENGE is a mobile killer satellite capable of destroying whole planets).

The Entomalian chitinous exoskeleton serves as body armor but is not as protective as our armored infantries form-fitted plate. Their internal organs are bathed in a green mucoprotein solution that oxygenates the body's cells.  Oxygen transfer takes place through pores in the thorax making them susceptible to suffocation when operating in a smokey, gaseous or liquid atmosphere.  With four arms to bear weapons, plus their large numbers of soldiers, a fusilade of concentrated firepower can be directed against any target. They tend to be a little slower afoot than we, but utilization of underground trams in their tunnel complexes has caught our troops by surprise on more than one occasion. 


Usually stymied by well protected sites, they try to encircle the site to isolate it and capture it later. This nullifies fortress type defenses but isn't effective against a MAATAC Corps. The workers and drones have not proven to be a challenge to our Interstellar Assault Corps (ISAC) but the soldiers will fight to the last. They have no regard for casualties because their losses can easily be recovered in their breeding chambers.  The blood feud between the Entomalians and Avarians has existed for about four centuries. The hard working Avarians found that their meager existence carved out of their barren planets was imperiled by the Entomalian desire to secure new agricultural centers. The distance between the major planets of these two races, and the technical superiority of the Avarians, have kept the tremendous masses of Bugs at bay until recently. The Avarian nation is reduced compared to what it once was but we have resolved to relieve some of the Entomalian pressure from their beleaguered fleet. This comes at a time when we are not bound by treaty but by our gratitude.


Our treaty with the Avarians ended when we became involved in the Carnivore-Aquarian dispute. The Avarians have been friendly with both nations and were politically embarrassed when we chose sides. We have found it difficult to support Carnivore claims on border systems because they have attempted seizure of some of our colonial planets and pirated defenseless merchant ships. The Entomalian sham of negotiations was broken when we revealed the existence of the REVENGE. The Bug's delegation has returned home leaving our military to ponder the possibility of another extended campaign.



Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Aquarian Alliance Forces

The True Neutral Aquarians
The Aquarians are the galaxy’s true neutral race. This causes members of all of the opposing races to be split about how to deal with them. Every race has a faction that argues that the Aquarians should be viewed as friends and that they are just keeping any one race from dominating the galaxy. At the same time, every race has opponents that say the Aquarians are vile intruders that need to be wiped out of the galaxy. This is a problem for all of the races since the Aquarians live on planets composed entirely of water and therefore almost impossible to destroy. As a result, most races do their best to avoid conflict and confrontation with the Aquarians, although none are totally successful.

At any one time an Aquarian fleet may be assisting an outnumbered Terran outpost while on the other side of the same sector an Entomolian scout ship is being rescued from a Terran superior force and allowed to move on without any concern.

The most unique feature of the Aquarian forces is that they prefer to cripple ships and leave as much of the crew alive as possible. It is not unusual for the scene of an Aquarian battle to resemble a huge ship graveyard full of wrecked ships emitting emergency beacon signals.

The Other Races
None of the other galactic races considers the Aquarians allies or even friends. That being said, each race has their own formal doctrine on how to deal with the Aquarians. The most benevolent of these races are the Avarians who see the Aquarians as annoying, but since the Aquarians are not of fond planets with wide-open spaces and the Avarians love such planets, the two races rarely find themselves at odds with each other. The Terrans and Entomolians are pretty much ambivalent to the Aquarians, taking their assistance when given and avoiding situations that would increase the probability of bringing the Aquarians in on the opposing side. The Carnivorans, on the other hand, hate the Aquarians and since the Carnivorans pride themselves on setting up situations where they have the upper hand they often find themselves opposed by Aquarians forces.

Aquarian Biology
Aquarians are very small in stature and although they are one of the oldest spacefaring races, they are still dependent upon an aquatic environment. An average Aquarian stands only four feet tall and resembles a bipedal fish with thin arms and legs. They are grey in color with a fine coat of scales that covers their entire body. Both genders of the Aquarian race look identical to all but the Aquarians themselves.

Aquarian Alliance
The entire Aquarian race views itself as one single large ‘school’. Each planet and system within the alliance has a representative that sits on the council and debates which systems (or events) the alliance should intercede in and which they should not. This does not mean that the entire alliance has to agree on any individual event; instead, several individual systems might agree on a situation to intercede upon and send their individual fleets to perform the required action. Many races view this as a weakness; most often, the Carnivorans have made this mistake. On several occasions a pride of Carnivoran ships have used this belief to give them courage to attack an Aquarian system. Once or twice, the Carnivorans have even made the mistake of capturing an Aquarian system. When these events occurred, it has given the other races a respite because all Aquarian ships in the alliance return to the captured system and destroy the offending forces. Their “school of piranha” mentality has served the Aquarians well and to anyone’s knowledge, no race has ever captured and held an Aquarian planet for more than a few weeks.

Aquarian Technology and Ship Designs
Aquarian ship construction has advanced beyond that of the other races in many ways. The other races have speculated this is due to the role that the Aquarians have given themselves in the universe. Since the Aquarians view themselves as the universes’ balancing force, most of their ship designs are maximized for defense and crippling other ships. That does not mean that Aquarian ships cannot destroy other ships or go on the offensive, it is just that they prefer not to.

This philosophy affects three different aspects of their designs. First, the Aquarian armor designers have found a way of implementing swarms of nannites to reinforce damaged armor by moving undamaged armor from other areas of the ship to help cover damaged sections of armor. The second innovation developed by the Aquarians is their field dampening missiles. These missiles are used to limit the effectiveness of enemy weapons fire. The final different system on Aquarian vessels is their sonic pulse cannons. These cannons cause serious damage to the exterior of enemy vessels while still leaving life-support and internal structures intact. Through these technologies, the Aquarians have become a major influence in all systems and many believe that if they ever showed interest in conquering non-aquatic worlds, they could become a serious threat to any race they focused upon.


Zebra Station Alpha

“Sir, I have three incoming targets from sector zebra-19. No transponder signal and the computer does not  recognize the designation. Two of them are approximately the size of our scout vessels, but the other appears to be approximately the size of a Samurai destroyer leader.”


“Ensign Murray, double check those signals, that is directly from Entomolian Space. I do not want to be surprised here. If these are Entomolian ships I need to know now.”

 “Captain, I have double checked, these ships are strange, they do not reflect a normal signature. If these are Entomolian vessels they are a new type of ship all together.”

“Understood, Murray. Lieutenant Neismith, are we picking up any communications traffic?”

“I am not sure, sir. I am picking up some isolated signals, but they are jumbled. I am running it through the computer, give me a second.”

“Until then, Ensign, let’s go to alert level two, man all weapon stations, but let’s not launch fighters yet. I want to make sure of their intent before showing our hand.”

Captain Hamilton looked around the bridge at his small crew. The Zebra station was a small outpost, designed to watch the Entomolian border and patrol the sector. He had one small flight of light fighters and a dock for two armored pursuit ships, it was not much but the sector was quiet and it was considered the perfect place for new command staff to get their command legs under them.



“Sir, I have the basics back on these new ships, they do not appear to have any atmosphere on board. The internal structure of the ships appears to have the consistency of seawater. I am still running scans but I am having trouble picking up a consistent reading on the ships hulls.”

“Murray, I want all of this recorded and if this starts to go south, I want you to immediately send all of your records to headquarters.”

“Captain, you are going to want to hear this and you’re not going to believe it.” Lieutenant Neismith threw a switch to broadcast through the bridge:

“Terran Station Commander, this message will repeat until we are forced to leave this sector. I am Commander Hurlaxx of the Aquarian Alliance and I bring you important information. During one of my normal scouting missions, I discovered a large Entomolian force heading in your direction. I estimate that you have 3 hours at best to recall your scout ships and prepare to defend yourself. We will help as long as we can, but we are also outclassed by the sheer size of the forces advancing on your outpost. I strongly suggest that you alert Zebra Headquarters and have them prepare to defend against a large Entomolian force with at least one Super Galactic Dreadnaught. Again, I repeat. Terran…”

“That has repeated at least twice so far, there is other traffic being transmitted on a narrow beam into uncharted space. The beam is tight and scrambled, I cannot intercept much, but I am working on its destination”


“Murray, contact our deep sector probe, let’s see what we have out there. Neismith, contact our scout ships, have them return here at top speed. This is either a serious trick and they are going to return to our wreckage or we are going to need every gun we can get to defend this station.”

“Sir, Zebra-19 long range probe is gone. Not unresponsive, Sir, but gone.”

“Murray, Neismith, combine all of the data you have collected, encode it and transmit it on a narrow beam to headquarters and be quick about it, then man your battle stations. We will hold this station for as long as possible.”

Thus ended the final bridge records from Zebra station Alpha and began the Entomolian-Terran Zebra Conflict.


Source: Aquarian Alliance Fleet Book

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

How to fight like a Bug


Now for some advice for the rookie Entomolian commander. The Entomolians have many strengths and weaknesses. It is easy for a new player to see all the new grav weapons and suicide fighters and forget the Entomolians' disadvantages. The more cynical player will see the lack of shields and ECM and wonder how they can survive. Exploiting the new weapons while keeping your ships intact can be a real trick. Here are some tactics you can try as you see fit. Remember, none of these work in all situations, and some can be risky as well.


1. If your opponent is playing the Avarians, keep your ships about eight to ten hexes away from them. They will not be close enough to use railguns (with a 6 hex range) and you will be close enough to use your ships' grav guns.

2. If you have more HPBs and PLBs than the opposing force, stay back at long range. If your opponent closes, he or she will probably have to face you at medium range where you can blast them with grav guns.

3. If your opponent is Terran, and has equal or greater number of long range weaponry, close to medium range as soon as possible. You will suffer damage quicker, but you will cause far more. Especially if at least a few of your ships have heavy grav guns.

4. Use the Roll Ship Markers often. Your ships will tend to suffer far more damage on one armor facing than the other. Remember to roll your ship, or turn your facing, to protect the vulnerable side.

5. Entomolians ships suffer very little effective damage (such as lost systems) in the first turn, sometimes even the second one. Use this to your advantage. Send as much damage as you can with a ship while your armor is getting chewed up, then withdraw it before suffering hull box losses.


6. If you are using Standard Rules, attack with your Stinger Missiles as soon as possible. This will provide a much easier target. If you win initiative, you will be able to use your missiles before they are destroyed, no matter how many weapons or fighters the target ship has.

7. When using Command Rules, send the light fighters in as one massive attack. Even a few hits can be devastating, even to an enemy super galactic dreadnought.