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After our Graveyard Shift, Patch and I went on to SFB, where we tried out “Flight of the Audacity” from Captain’s Log #3.

It’s certainly an interesting idea. A Klingon frigate (IKV Audacity, me) works through a large and dense asteroid field to get at a Federation force negotiating with a Neutral Zone planet, kidnaps the native’s diplomat, and then makes off through the same asteroid field. The Klingon is chased by a Fed CA (our friend, USS Kongo, seen in “Rescue the Hostages” and “Coming of the Meteor” and played by Patch), so there’s a vast difference in weight class, helped by the F5C having a better time maneuvering around the asteroids. However, it is an early scenario, never republished, so I had deep concerns about balance (I think much of the trouble it it was written before ‘speed is life’ really became a mantra). To keep you from going too fast, empty space is still considered to have dust, which will cause damage at the end of each turn (up to 7 at speed 31).

It took me a while to realize, but this is the ‘demo’ scenario for the new Klingon F5L introduced in the issue. Before Captain’s Edition, the F5L was a stand-alone command variant of the F5. Captain’s Edition took the separate -C and -L suffixes and made them a unified idea, with the -Ls being the equivalent to the -K refit. The original F5L SSD is pretty much the current F5C (the modern F5L gets improved phasers and drone racks).

Sadly, play of the scenario showed it did not live up to its promise. One of the troubles is that the F5C is an extremely energetic ship. It has a total of 22 power (compared to 34 on a Fed CA, which is twice as big), which turned into a steady speed 27, putting up 5 reinforcement (to counter 5 dust damage at that speed), and charge one phaser per turn. The CA can either go speed 26 and take a point per of dust damage/turn, or go 25 and have one point of power left for a phaser. It also starts at WS-0, and so has to spend the first turn warming up the phasers. (Otherwise, Kongo‘s best move may be to do a turn 1, impulse 1 fire of 6xPh-1s at range 20.) No chance for photon torpedoes as long as the action stays this fast.

So, the ‘special sauce’ of the scenario is that it is a scrolling asteroid field. Audacity must move at least ten hexes towards the upper left corner. Specifically, ‘direction F’. I mentally shorthanded that to just ‘left’, so I possibly violated that (depending on exactly how you want to measure it), though while trying to obey the spirit. Also, I don’t think this makes things any better. Any time a ship enters the topmost or bottommost row of hexes, you scroll everything six hexes away and place seven new asteroid counters, and then roll for a one-hex drift. If a ship enters the leftmost column of the board, you also shift everything six hexes, but place four new counters, and roll two dice each: the first is how many hexes down the column you move the counter, and then the second is a one-hex drift. Neither system really gives the density needed to really cause maneuvering, but the left-hand side version does get a lot more unpredictable (it also tends to clear out the upper left corner, making a purer direction F flight safer).

The large variation in where allows for some interesting dynamics in bunched clusters on the left edge, which did happen. Now, Patch did manage to catch up some during our play (thanks to my attempts to maneuver), but he expended his batteries (without being able to recharge), and was slowly losing the front shield, while I hadn’t taken any actual damage.

This scenario might also work better with a regular F5. It has two fewer APR, getting the power curve down to something less extreme, and has a 9-point #4 shield that it will need to be cautious with (the F5C has the equivalent of the B-refit built-in for a 16-point shield).

We called the scenario after just about four turns because it wasn’t working out. The scrolling asteroid map is still an interesting idea, and I’d like to tweak it some for re-use. Say roll d3 to move the counter from initial position, and then a drift roll. For this scenario, there also needs to be more of them; some way of gradually increasing the number of placements over the first few turns as you get deeper into the field would be nicely thematic, but a lot rougher mechanically.