Persei-Aries War Resumes

Development continues for crossover warships and rules between Darkstar and Star Trek.  I’ve now designed system rules and “available components” for cloaking devices, because it’s time to bring in the third great faction in Star Trek, the Romulans.

This is the classic Romulan Bird of Prey from the original series.  Not the hijacked lore-screw-up “Klingon” Bird of Prey (technically there was no such thing before bungled script re-writes in Star Trek III).

I was surprised by how small the ship is in the FASA records.  Only a class VI, barely a “large destroyer” in Star Trek (counts as a frigate in Darkstar).  Then again, it has a cloaking device, and the powerful Romulan plasma torpedo we see in the episode: Balance of Terror (Season 3, TOS).

Rules for the Romulan plasma torpedo were easy.  FASA had perfectly designed tables for these weapons, cost-balanced and meticulously play-tested, and of course Darkstar players are no strangers to plasmsa weapons.

The cloaking devices were a little tougher.  We know they’re very small (Kirk practically carries one in his arms in the TOS episode: The Enterprise Incident.  Crew is not an issue, so POWER has to be the real “cost” of the system.

I originally took a short cut, simply “demanding” that a ship equipped with cloaking carry shields one class bracket higher (i.e., a Class V-VI destroyer with level 6 shielding would have to carry Class VII-VIII “Frigate” shielding).

But this was cheap, manual, and would prove problematic when I wanted to build the very largest Romulan ships, like the D’deridex class warbirds seen in TNG (i.e., they are already the “highest” class bracket, there IS no higher class bracket for them to pay for their cloaking).

So I finally bit the bullet and built two more weapons categories for the two weapons tables (TOS, TNG).  Now a ship that wants to carry cloak simply buys this as another “weapon.”

Power is the killer.  Cloaking devises in the lore are described as drawing tremendous energy from the quantum singularity power plants that drive most Romulan warships.

So like I said, this is the classic V-8 Bird of Prey, commanded by “Mark Leonard” in Balance of Terror.  It’s smaller than the Enterprise, but can cloak and is overgunned for its size.  It’s not faster (which balances against how we see it in the episode, it could never simply run away from the Enterprise, and jives with the general concept that this ship was analogous to a large submarine (the episode drawn from the classic movie: The Enemy Below).

The usual cloaking rules apply.  The ship is NOT placed on the table.  The owning player must track his hex number and facing per turn.  While the cloak is up, no weapons fire is allowed (the experiment in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country seems to have never been repeated – it’s also lore-breaking and game-breaking).

So in game terms is breaks down to a simple modification to the usual power allocation rules.  You can spend thrust and operate shielding while cloaked.  Weapons will not fire while cloaked.  A player must decloak during power allocation phase before he can use weapons.  And of course, all weapons fire in Darkstar is simultaneous.

This still makes cloaked vessels (and Romulans in general) very dangerous.  They can literally sneak up behind you and blast away at full broadside, slowing to a crawl so they can double-allocate to weapons when their cloaks drop (no thrust points).  So the turn sequence would allow for:

• Turn 1:
• Vector toward an enemy
• Slow down.
• Turn 2:
• No power to Thrust or Cloak
• Decloak
• Fire all weapons twice
• Take fire in return (you shields are still up)
• Turn 3
• Power away next turn.

We’ll see how it works probably next week.  This weekend is getting v ery busy with “conventional” Darkstar and Sitrep / HK Ops.