So after a couple of years of tinkering and reworking the designs when I could find the time I finally have my Nova Edition 2300AD ships done. I no longer have the time in my life to put them all together "pretty" with lots of fluff and flair, but I wanted to get them posted up at least.

A couple of things about these designs...

For those familiar with the 2300AD setting you will see many ships that appeared both in canon materials and as man-made designs. I have tried to keep all of the designs true to the spirit of the setting, but these are not straight up "conversions" of any of the ships. In fact, I found that the inconsistent nature of the original design process and the differing philosophies of many fan -made ships made it impossible to establish a coherent conversion process. As a result I went back and used a modified version of Starcruiser 2300AD's Naval Architects manual to redesign every single ship. In this way I was able to produce designs that were entirely consistent, and generate the statistics that I used to build the SNE versions.

After building and testing a number of these new conversions I found that play test games were very "vanilla". So, I started to rework some if the core elements of 2300AD to add more diversity to the SNE versions. There are several examples of these changes that those familiar with 2300AD will notice.

First off, I had originally designed every fighter as a standard ship and then placed them into groups of 4 to essentially make a flotilla. Play test games showed that these were ok, but decidedly un-fighterlike. After redoing them as SNE fighter flights the designs lost some power, but added a little more fun. One thing this caused was to have to "fudge" things a little to be able to include fighters not based on ships. For planetary interceptors/fighters I just include a 3-hull ship with no other features just so I can put the fighters on the board, but we never actually include the "ship" in the setup.

The next change that I made was to submunition weapons. As built in 2300AD these are expendable direct fire weapons, that (because of their nuclear detonation nature) affect line of sight. I decided that to add flavor to the games I would change submunition weapons into Flares and Mines. I looked at the design intent of the submunition launcher, and if it was a defensive type system primarily for protecting a vessel against attacks I converted it into Flares. Conversely, if the submunition dispenser was a primarily offensive system, I converted it to Mines. Playing around with these I found that they added a lot of complexity to the play test battles without "breaking" the overall feel.

In 2300AD recon drones can play a big role allowing a vessel access to targeting and search information without exposing itself by running its own active sensor systems. I played around with a couple of things but eventually settled on converting the drones to Probes with the rule alterations that I have posted elsewhere.

In 2300AD electronic warfare plays a very important, if sometimes vague, role. To try and get this flavor I have used Active/Passive sensor optional rules and I have also included the Scout special ability on several ships, though nothing exactly as it appears in 2300AD. I have intentionally not used the Escort ability so these special scout vessels are used in the less direct role of fleet electronic warfare support (though if I ever have the time to try it I have a plan for using their ability in a campaign setting).

I decided to limit the numbers of missiles that I ship could fire in a single attack to just one salvo, with its BAS determined by the number of remote communicators that the ship had. With this I also put in a house rule that one ship can only fire 1 missile salvo per turn. This simple change kept missiles from being overly powerful compared to how they work in 2300AD. Because of this I also redid fighting missiles as weak, but potentially numerous and therefore useful fighters WITHOUT limiting how many a ship can have on the board at once. Even though this makes them quite different than the 2300AD versions, it does play ok, and helps justify the "pointing" of ships using them. In play test these tweaks made for some interesting choices for players beyond range, aim and fire.

I included Marines, but limited their number to the lift capabilities of a ship's small craft, with additional troops being lumped together as Transport. Likewise, I only included armed landers as SNE Shuttles, though a vessel may have numerous small craft in 2300AD.

The last thing I will mention is that some slight "tweaks" were necessary in a few designs to make them SNE Space Unit compliant. However, there are some units that are over the SUs by hull size. In every instance that I did this, it is to accommodate auxiliary services and has no bearing on the combat capabilities of a ship. The majority of the "oversized" ships are civvies and I would rather have a smaller Hull with "oversized" cargo. I didn't want civvies to become damage sponges... Also, players have a tendency to look at huge Hull civilian ships and say, "hey, let's fill all that cargo space with weapons." In the real world auxiliary warships are never INTENDED to fight purpose built combat vessels (though they sometimes had to). In the game ships like that quickly get outlandish. By keeping Hull down and making all civilian construction Fragile Systems I tried to keep this tendency under control.

So one thing that I have been thinking about is using probes as recon platforms, and not lousy weapons. A lot of settings have such things and some plain rely on them. I know you can hand-wave recon drones/probes etc as being part of a ships ECM, but I wanted something that would add a little granularity to a game, especially in a setting with things like FLARES and ESCORT, but no ships that work like the SCOUT ability is written in the rules. So here is my first go at Probes as "Tactical Intelligence/Recce" systems rather than weapons.

Probes may be used to improve an attacking ship's ability to target a foe. Probes are launched at the same time that a ship makes its other attacks. A ship may not launch probes when cloaked.

First, declare how many probes are being launched, and remove that number of probes from the ship. For each probe launched, select a target hex within 12 hexes of the launching ship. Place a “PROBE” marker face down in the target hex. Up to five probe markers may occupy a single hex.

During the end phase, remove all face up probe markers, and flip all face down probe markers to face up.
Probes have two effects. First, if the launching ship has line of sight to a face up probe marker and the probe has line of sight to a target ship the launching ship may attack the target so long as all other criteria (range, etc…) for an attack are met. The second, if the face up probe is 4 hexes or less from a targeted ship, the launching ship gets +1 to all of its attacks against that target so long as all other criteria (range, etc…) for an attack are met.

When a ship is selected to make its attacks, it may target any probe markers.
Attacks against probe markers incur a -1 penalty.
If the weapon is also accurate or repeating, a further -2 penalty is applied.
If the weapon is catastrophic or triple damage, a further -3 penalty is applied.
Each hit against a probe marker destroys the probe.
Weapons with catastrophic, diffuse, double damage, scatter, and triple damage traits loose these abilites when attacking probe markers.

Thoughts?
Erik