Full Thrust Pages
Star Ship Combat
Vector Back to my Periods of Interest
In late 2005 I dropped in at an Auckland Wargames Club meeting. A couple of guys were playing a Space Ship combat game with really neat looking ships. The rules were Full Thrust by Jon Tuffley and the ships were Sa'Vasku and NSL fleets from Jon Tuffley's company Ground Zero Games. I was hooked.
I have been a Traveller player since I was sixteen, and I have always wanted a set of quick-play rules for playing out space battles. Traveller actually has two star ship combat systems - that in Book 2 uses vector movement, and is nicely detailed, but isn't entirely integrated with the very detailed star ship construction system in Book 5: High Guard. Book 5: High Guard has a great star ship design system, but a very abstract star ship combat system. Which suits a role-playing game, but left me rather dissatisfied.
So, finding both a set of rules, and a range of figures, was a real bonus.
I have looked at Battlefleet Gothic by Games Workshop and while they seem a servicable set of rules, I'm not very fond of the whole Games Workshop Warhammer 40K backgound. To me, the Full Thrust Universe (or Tuffleyverse to the fans) is much more plausible and closer to my original point of interest, Traveller.
In the Tuffleyverse, there are four main factions vying for domination beyond the Core Sytems. These factions are the New Anglian Confederation or NAC; the Eurasian Solar Union, or ESU; the Neu Swabian League, or NSL; and the Federal Stats Europa, or FSE.
The ESU is a Sino-Russian Communist successor state, and as my main Renaissance army is also Russian, there seemed to be some sort of tenuous synchronisity in me building an ESU fleet. I have since built up a small FSE squadron, a larger UNSC force, and an alien Kra'Vak fleet as well.
A photo of a few of my Kra'Vak ships, suitably manipulated, won me 2nd Prize in a painting competition hosted by GZG in 2006. The prize was an Islamic Federation, or IF, basic fleet pack, which I am finally beginning to paint up.