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Friday 1 June 2012

Old Terran Ships

On the Spartan Games Community recently, I posted a few designs for older Terran ships - The Thorn Class Battleship, The Guardsman Cruiser and the Missionary II Frigate. One poster remarked that it wasn't paper designs they wanted to see, but actual physical ships.


As Spartan are frankly unlikely to create such retro-engineered designs, I thought I'd give it a go myself. I picked up a Terran fleet cheaply on ebay (which had the Razorthorn in three sections - front, middle and engines, plus the multi-part resin cruisers and frigates), and set about creating the predecessors to the standard Terran ships that I'd already crafted using my Excel version of Spartan's custom ship generator protocols.


First up was the Thorn Class Battleship, here are the stats I came up with for the ship;


DR: 6 CR: 8 Mv: 6" HP: 7 CP: 4 AP: 4 PD: 6 SH: 1 Mn: 0 FW: 0

Fore Fixed: 5/6/4/3
Fore: 6/8/3/0
Port: 6/8/3/0
Starboard 6/8/3/0

Torpedoes (any arc): 2/3/4/5

So reduced long-range firepower in Port & Starboard arcs, lowered FF and no turrets, but a fore arc (same as port/starboard) instead, torpedo effectiveness considerable reduced and only a single shield. I wanted a substantial and dangerous ship, but showing older technology - so still lots of guns, but not as effective over range.
So, some of these mods are easy to show on the model - no turrets being the obvious one. I also removed the extreme fore of the front of the Razorthorn and added a thorn-like "nose" of green stuff, which also double as a shroud over the twin linear accelerators I would add later. In order to get sufficient area for the fore arc (in addition to the Fixed Fore LAs), I planned to add some raised platforms on the first and last broadside positions of the Razorthorn. These were built up from green stuff and then cut back with a scalpel to provide a nice clean edge. Here she is at that stage;

Next I would need guns...so I made simple push moulds from FIMO and baked these for 30 minutes until hard and allowed to cool. after that, wetting the moulds and pushing them on to soft greenstuff produced sufficient guns for the new weapons fit.




Now I just have to decide what weapons fit to go with...