Product Reveiw - GF9 Blood Crystals

I've bought a fair amount of GaleForce nine Battlefield in a Box terrain.  There were the two hills earlier in the year and now a box of Blood Crystals.  In all three cases I've been very happy with the product.  The hills are works of art.  I had to move them out of my office because I'd just sit there and stare at them.  My wife even liked them.

The blood crystals box.

Sci/Fi Monday - Federation Marine Corps

The Federation Marine Corps is one of the elite forces of the Federation of Neu Normandie.  Formed out of elements of the Imperial Marine Corps, immediately following the declaration of the Federation, there are two main missions for the FMC.

The first mission is that of ships guards.  There are Marine detachments on all vessels of cruiser size and above.  These ships guards serve in two roles.  They guard against mutiny by the sailors; rare now but not uncommon in the days immediately following the withdrawal of the imperial forces.  In this role the Marines are billeted between the crew and officers with two Marines in power armor always manning the one hatch that separates officer's country from the crew.

The second role of the ship's guards is to serve in boarding actions.  The Marine detachment will both defend against enemy boarding attempts and, much more to their tastes, board enemy ships, capturing them for the Federation.

The second major mission area for the FMC is to secure a planet head on an enemy planet.  The transition from space to terra firma is, by far, the most difficult of all military missions.  The FMC specializes in dropping to a planet and securing a planet hold which can support the landing of larger Army forces.

The nature of the mission demands that the FMC be equipped with grav vehicles.  While grav technology is mindbogglingly expensive, it is the only way to reliably accomplish the mission of seizing a planet head.  The FMC uses dropships for follow on forces, primarily logistics and mechs, but the main force will be dropped from low orbit in grav vehicles.

The FMC is task organized into mixed air/space/ground task forces of battalion strength.  There are Marine Divisions but they are administrative rather than operational organizations.  The divisions are force providers for the fleet and the strike elements.

The basic building block of the combat force is the Marine Planetary Assault Unit (MPAU).  The MPAU, (pronounced M-POW), is built around a rifle battalion.  To this is attached a command element, an aerospace element and a logistics element.  The MPAU is capable of capturing a heavily defended spaceport and holding it long enough for the Army's forces to arrive by drop ship.

The MPAUs serve aboard ship, located close to the action.  As such they are often the first force available when a crisis erupts.  This fact has resulted in an additional, unofficial, mission being added to the mission set of the FMC's MPAUs.  They are often called upon to land on a planet under attack and add some firepower and elite skill to the local defense forces.  While this is not an official mission the pragmatic nature of the Corps means that all MPAUs are trained to conduct training of indigenous forces.

The FMC is the go-to force in the most trying of circumstances.  When the Federation needs forces on a planet immediately they turn to the FMC and it's aggressive infantry to accomplish the mission, whatever it is.

Painted Federation Marine Corps Vipers

I've completed two more Vipers for my Federation Marine Corps.  These are the fire support variant.  They use the same color scheme as the first two.  This gives me a full platoon of four mechs.  Two are the infantry support version and two are the fire support version.

FMC fire support Viper (Rebel Minis)

Dropzone Commander

I've been looking at this game for awhile now.  I mentioned it in this post, in fact, as one of the games I'm hoping to check out in the next four months.  As launch gets closer I'm getting more and more excited about both the models and the rules.

The cover looks like it really captures the flavor of the game.

Dux Britanniarum Pre-orders up

The latest game from TooFatLardies is finally up for pre-order.  Dux Brit is a game covering the period following Rome's retreat from Britain and the invasion of the Saxons.  It fits nicely in the period between Hail Caesar and Saga, for me.  It also comes with a really slick sounding campaign system, which I'm hoping can be modified for other game systems.

Sci-Fi Monday - Star Drives

The Kang-Smith Jump Drive.

Extra solar system human space travel became feasible when the Kang-Smith jump drive was developed at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA in 2237.  The KS drive allowed ships to disappear in one location and reappear up to three light years distant, instantaneously.  Later improvements to the KS drive allowed jumps of up to seven light years.

The jump drive, as it is called, is powered by a battery system, the Twitch Battery, which discharges all of its energy in one giant release.  The battery is then recharged via the ship's fusion engines.  Initial battery/engine combinations took up to three days to recharge, limiting the speed of a ship to approximately six light years a week.  Later developments allowed two battery sets to be carried, and recharged in only two days, enabling  a jump per day, or two in rapid succession.  When combined with the longer jump distances, of seven light years, this improved the speed of a jump ship from six light years per week to 49 light years per week.

Update

I haven't been posting much lately because I haven't finished a thing.  My normal posts seem to be either painted minis or battle reports.  That doesn't mean that I haven't been doing anything, just that none of it has fit into either of those categories.  So here's what has been going on.

A 15mm dropship, in the making.

Sci-Fi Monday - The Fury Reach

This is the first of Sci/Fi Monday articles.

This post is going to be a long one.  No pictures, just a wall of text.  If you don't want to read it, no worries.  It's the history of the Fury Reach, the background for my sci/fi campaign area.  Once I have this out of the way I can start working on the fun stuff.  Fun for you that is, I like this sort of thing.

The Fury Reach was colonized during the Fifth Wave of human expansion.

More after the jump.

Sci/FI Monday

Now that I'm back at work I've been having a much harder time finding both time and desire for hobby.  Working two jobs just kicks my butt.  By the time I've gotten the boys to bed it's all I can do to read everyone else's blogs.

In an effort to kick things up a notch I'm going to devote Mondays to science fiction.  Every Monday I'll have a post about Sci/Fi.  I was going to start this last week but I had food poisoning and just wasn't up to it.  I was so sick that I was throwing up things I haven't even eaten yet.

The first few posts will lay out the background for my Sci/Fi setting.  I don't know about the rest of you but I need to have a context to put my games in.  Even if I'm not playing an actual campaign I can still place the battles into a campaign like context.

I've written the first post, and it's a doozy.  I won't blame you if you can't wade through the whole thing.  I'll be posting it up on Monday morning, if I can remember before I head off to work.  That will get it up in prime time for my UK followers and it will be waiting for the lunch crowd here in the States.

Battle Report - Harad/Dwarfs vs Easterlings/Gray Company

This game doesn't lend itself to my usual narrative battle report style; so it's a good thing I've already decided to just do it as a pictorial report.

This game was a four person, team game.  Nick and I had just finished our game of Force on Force and were going to start a game of LotR when Jonathan and his brother arrived.  This was perfect as it let us play four on four.  We played the same scenario as the last two reports.

Since the brothers wanted to be on the same team we ended up with odd match ups, good/evil on each side.

I'm on the left with the Easterlings, and some rangers, opposite me.  I parked in the ruins for most of the game.

Battle Report - Harad vs Gondor

I played a couple of games of LotR last week.  It's too much effort to write them both up, so I'll tell the story through pictures.

The first battle was against the Traveller.  We were brewing up a batch of beer, and smoking some meat, so we were running in and out all day.  He chose Gondor and I had my Haradrim.  We played the same scenario as in the shop the week before.  There were three objectives (yellow dice, I really need to make some).  Warband deployment but within six inches of the table edge.  Extra points for wounding and killing the enemy general.

Rangers in one set of ruins.  Most of my army is bottom right.  One warband top right, opposite Faramir.

Battle Report - Force on Force

I finally got in my first game of Force on Force.  Verdict?  I loved it.  The game was fast and furious, very tactical and had plenty of room for cinematics.  It seemed to capture a realistic, but fun, simulation of combat, not getting bogged down in details.  It has a quick mechanism for including variables that makes attachments and weapons count, but doesn't slow the game down.  I ordered Tomorrow's War last night based on how this game played.

The setup.  Two infantry patrols meet in a destroyed village.