SL119 The First Carrier

by on May 19, 2025 at 12:15 pm
Posted In: SFB

After finishing up the latest adventure in Hatten, Patch and I turned to Star Fleet Battles. For our look into Y163, we went with “The First Carrier”, which is the demo scenario for the Kzinti DDV. They started fielding tactical warp fighters in the second half of the Four Powers War, and now that it’s over, they’ve built a special destroyer just to carry the improved AAS fighter.

The main action is reminiscent of SG33 “Treasure Ship“; an unmanned freighter has come out of WYN nebula, and both the Kzintis and Lyrans are trying to grab its cargo for themselves. This time, it’s a large freighter, and is completely dead (no fuel/power). The Lyrans have a CL and FF, while the Kzintis have the DDV and a FF. Interestingly, the scenario rules restrict the frigate’s drones to speed-8 and the DDV’s speed-12.

My initial plan as the Kzintis was to get to the middle of the board at speed 8 (so the fighters could keep up) and try to control the area around the freighter with the fighter squadron while I started towing it. I was thinking purely in terms of carrier operations and controlling a portion of the board. This was a mistake. Patch came in at speed 21, and was nearly to the freighter at the end of turn 1. We were both surprised to realize that a large freighter is still only MC 1/2, so that going speed 30 on turn 2 only slowed him down to speed 17. Drones and fighters couldn’t catch up to him, and even if I had boosted speeds to overtake that, the DDV and FF couldn’t do that much without the backup.

So… we reset to start the game again for the next session.

And the second time, I did not start with any fighters deployed (I had the four allowed by WS-III out the first time), and both ships went speed 18. The first turn was of course spent on approach to the freighter, and on impulse 21 the DDV launched a scatterpack. On 23, I started launching the fighters. On 25, the CL opened fire, hitting my FF with a disruptor, which I absorbed with batteries. The next impulse, I hit back with the FF hitting the CL with its disruptor. His FF returned the favor on 28, but missed with both. Finally, the scatterpack got to launch range, and bloomed on 32.

With both sides 3-5 hexes from the freighter at the start of turn 2, speeds dropped, with the Lyrans going 15, while the DDV went 10 and my FF went 12. With Patch closer, I thought he might grab the freighter and try to at least shift it towards his side before I could get in. Since I was already pointed in that direction, I figured I’d still intercept, and possibly force him to drop the tractor to get speed back up. However, Patch instead danced around it, leaving me the chance to grab it with the DDV, and start towing at speed 5. I was also spending more on EW, including loaning to the fighters so they were at 4/4 as long as the DDV was nearby.

My real surprise was the Lyran FF turned away from coming in right behind the CL on impulse 5, which announced an ESG during impulse 6. When it came up on 10, it was at radius 2, and a couple hexes away from my FF. On 11, the FF moved adjacent and launched drones. It also fired the disruptor and the forward ph-1 for 10 damage, 8 of which registered on the CL’s #2 shield. The drones moved on 12 to hit the ESG and reduce it, while the FF launched a shuttle. On 13, the CL slipped in, with the ESG killing the shuttle and doing damage to the FF in the midst of more direct fire (this was a partial mis-read of the ESG damage rule; the shuttle should have had one damage point left, and the FF take one more point), which did 9 more to the CL, but one overloaded disruptor, and a pair of ph-1s did 16 damage to the FF on terrible rolls, ending up with five internals; which was hull plus one warp hit.


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World In My Claws

by on May 15, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Part two of Mating Flight picks up slightly after the first book ended. Trest was conquered at the end of the previous book, and there’s plenty of problems as they don’t realize it yet.

Related problems are actually something of the central pillar of book two, even though its peripheral to the central conflicts of it. It’s a neat trick, and done well here.

This book handles the bulk of the twelve-year period of the flight, and the time scale stretches out as there is less immediate excitement and more long-term projects take over. This also happens as the various dragons settle down with a better idea of who they are and how they want to relate to other people.

And this very unconventional mating flight comes up with unconventional answers. It is something of a celebration of found families, among other things.

The mating flight itself provides a nice mechanism for coming full circle, as it comes to an end, and the members of the flight arrange their official positions as adults in draconic society. This helps round out the novel in a very satisfying way, and hold things together for the conclusion. Overall, this is a great duology to get.

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France 12-12

by on May 11, 2025 at 1:57 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

After our refresher course in C&C: Medieval, Mark and I went back to the Simonitch ZOC-bond games, and tried out France ’40. It’s two scenarios and a conjoined one, and we did the Sickle Cut scenario, which starts on May 13, as the Germans cross the Meuse.

Mark had the Germans, and presumably played more cautiously than he should have, though it certainly worked out towards the end.

Getting across the Meuse is probably best done with help from the scenario rule that lets the Germans use multiple air units on one combat for the first turn. However, we missed that, and Rommel didn’t even need to re-roll as the 7th Panzer got a 5 on a 1:1 for a DR2 to advance over the major river. Similarly, the 6th Panzer had a 2:1 (boosted to 3:1 with air and no opposing artillery) for a A1/DR2 that forced a fortress brigade back. Similarly, the pair of green divisions near Sedan were defeated and forced out, one with a D1.

This was also the major rules goof of the game, as we didn’t notice until a turn or so later that crossing a major river stops all advances, even with a road bridge (which we generally didn’t have here either). So there were also some advancing combats to make things even better for the Germans (which was at least good practice on that mechanic, which we haven’t gotten use nearly enough in other games).

All this meant that the French line pretty much dissolved between Sedan and the central Ardennes. I had to leave the south-central plains open, and merely start anchoring a new line on the Aisne.

For the second turn, an assault on the center of the Dyle Line produced an EX, but an attack just north of the Ardennes got a D1, prying open that area, especially when a breakthrough to the south produced a DR2. An EX took out one of the defenders of the Aisne, but the 2nd Panzer declined to advance, and the Germans lost more tanks to a DRX near the Maginot Line. The main German problem in the south became a lack of supply since there was no clear road west.


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Radetzky’s Marches

by on May 5, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Despite the title, this isn’t focused on Radetzky. (But it is a great take off of Johann Strauss’ celebration of the campaign.)

At the start of 1848, revolution swept through Paris—again. And this time, much of the rest of Europe caught revolutionary fever as well. In particular, much of northern Italy went into a ferment that became the First War for Independence, and this book is focused on the military aspects of this.

It really helps if you have some grounding in the period and the Austrian army. There is a small glossary in the back that explains, for instance, that “FML” is “Feldmarshall-Lieutenant”, or Lieutenant General, but in the text it’s never explained, while the abbreviation shows up many times there, and again, the glossary is buried in the back (and there’s a lot for it to be buried beneath). Thankfully, I’ve read enough Napoleonic materials to know this already.

The main part of the book looks as if it should be a detailed, but readable, history of the campaigns of 1848 and 1849, but that’s not really the purpose. There are a decent number of maps, but not enough for some detailed movements over terrain thoroughly unfamiliar to most English-speaking readers. But, this is really a detailed analysis of the campaigns. Not only do we get detailed descriptions of many of the battles and skirmishes (quoting eyewitness accounts where possible), but constant referrals to losses as recorded in unit histories and returns.

So, this is actually a very detailed resource, and if someone wanted to, say, design a wargame on the subject, this would be an excellent one-stop starting point for a design. Added to this detail-oriented history is the fact that there are twenty-one appendixes, mostly giving orders of battle and numbers of troops of various armies at various points.

As a readable history of the First Italian War of Independence, it is lackluster. The writing is not up to helping you juggle all the details that get thrown at you. As an advanced study of a subject already somewhat familiar, I imagine it would do much better. But a more casual reader needs to at least be cautious.

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The Long Pursuit

by on May 1, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Stephen Douglas was a very able speaker and politician on what turned out to be the losing side of history, is mostly remembered for being Abraham Lincoln’s foil (or more properly, the other way around). Enough so, that basic history textbooks will go into the Lincoln-Douglas debates, even though they don’t have time to mention much else about him.

This book goes all in on this, tracing both careers from their initial arrival in Illinois, to Douglas’ death in 1861.

It’s a good idea, and you certainly learn a lot, but their careers are not quite as tightly coupled as needed to make it the best format.

So, it’s a pair of parallel biographies at the general history level. There’s not a bunch of detailed analysis of their lives and speeches, but all the basics are there. Morris seems fairly evenhanded in his treatment, though he shows Lincoln coming off far worse in the main Lincoln-Douglas debates than you generally hear in less detailed books. Certainly, Lincoln is shown with many of his problems here, though I think some more attention to the change in tone of Lincoln’s politics going into the 1850s would have been very useful.

Of course, part of the lack of digging into detail is that everything leading up to the Kansas-Nebraska Act is about a third of the book, while the remaining two thirds concentrates on the fallout over the next six years. This keeps it from being the extensive background book you might expect, and undermines the “thirty year struggle” idea given in the subtitle.

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