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Space Naval Games / Babylon 5 Wars Conversion to Firestorm Armada
« on: March 07, 2015, 11:44:11 am »
So, over the years I've made it my personal quest to keep B5 alive, converting B5 Wars into Battlefleet Gothic, then making more balanced fleet lists for ACtA, etc. A while back I started on a project to convert B5 into FSA under V1 but had to shelve it due to time constraints. This past week however, I found myself with about 5 hours of spare time and restarted the process. I went all the way back to the B5 Wars source material since, though impossible to really play on the table-top, it was considered the most canon of all sources and endorsed by JMS himself.
Ruckdog provided a place for me to upload some files a while back and I'm hoping he'll let me use that same space to post some playtest materials. I don't have time to test all the ship stats myself, so I'm hoping that as a community we can work the kinks out and have something we'd all be willing to share with the broader community.
Here's some background to help explain how I arrived at the starting stats and rules.
First, I took the B5 Wars stats and built a spreadsheet to convert them into the basic ship stats such as DR/CR, HP, SH, PD, etc. I have a Word doc that goes into the particulars in gory detail which I'll post to the upload area (once Ruckdog reminds me of where it is). I want to keep as close as possible to the original stats so as to preserve the intent of the B5 Wars designs, but I know we'll have to make some tweaks as we go through playtest.
I think the big thing now is weapons load-out. The weapons are VERY hard to convert, and despite my best efforts to codify everything into a spreadsheet, there's still a fair amount of art to it. I think I'm close, but those used to ACtA may seem some glaring differences since Mongoose didn't stick to the original B5 Wars material in some cases, probably due to the same difficulties I'm running into. For now, I'm building the ships to reflect the B5 Wars weapons load-outs as closely as possible. I've built out an Omega Alpha, a Hyperion Theta, an Artemis Zeta, and an Artemis Heavy, and so far the weapon loads look kind of odd compared to FSA. I'd ask that we not pre-judge and give them a few tries on the table-top to see how the ships and fleets interact before making any changes however.
We'll also need to abandon fleet composition rules for the most part since B5 Wars really didn't use them. As anyone familiar with B5 will know, Earth Alliance was perfectly happy to send out fleets composed of all Omegas and the Narn did the same thing with G'Quans, so there's canon to support that. Basically, bring what you've got (with a few very large or rare ships noted as restricted).
If you're interested in helping out, let me know. I've got tons of models and I'm pretty sure Mark and Dale have some as well, and obviously it's fine to proxy.
UPDATE: To help organize things a bit, I will keep this post updated with the latest links to playtest materials.
http://www.sendspace.com/filegroup/wtTEgZmDuPNWfThNUWfp48mEF8Lrsz6xJvkwLdUCbFR8diMV4xulsfkc0DmvdDPa
