tidewater Darkstar

Our campaign is really a thing, honest! And as shown above, our battles have a place or two.  You could ignore Alpha Mensae, and a few outliers; if you check out the coordinates listed in Parsecs, you would eventually realize how far above or below some of these are from others.  So close, yet so far.

With the help of some correspondence from Oriskany, I can tell you some of the stars feature amongst the constellations Hydra and Cetus.

The 8 star systems we plan to use have no names… yet.  Their rays are numbered: Gliese 413.1, 431, 432, 433, 438, 442, 453, & 479.  I actually built a 3D model out of Lego (& then updated it) to better visualize their relation to each other.  In fact, I realized the best way to build it with limited resources was not to plot X and Y on the plate, but instead X and Z, with the stacked up towers being Y.   One iteration of the model can seen below:

We have our stage, although we’re really only using a few places in the middle, with the Canadian main base at [Gliese] 479, and a Japanese anchorage at [Gliese] 413.1.  But now comes a part where we really strayed from the beginner’s program.  It is suggested to new players (which we still are) that each take a Battlegroup of a destroyer and 2 frigates, or atleast 2 such Battlegroups, and proceed thus.  Carriers not recommended, but definitely assuming only one nation’s ships will be used for each player’s fleet.

But I wanted to try out Light Cruisers, so I said “let’s allow it” and picked the British, except I thought Canadian.  And my light cruiser was a weird hybrid carrier.  (I actually thought of a bizarre faction that would somehow tie together Scandinavian with North American Natives and all the Europeans inbetween, but dropped the unwieldly idea)

Then I looked up bit of 20th century Canadian Naval history, and thought American ships can also work!  And then I thought, the story of the Oakville  was too good to ignore, but none of the available British or American ships fit the concept, so an Arab League corvette was selected, almost at random!

In future, I hope to keep each player’s fleet to one “national source” -especially myself.  At any rate, here is where we started, the Canadian Expeditionary Force vs. the Japanese Advance Force: