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Tsagualsa wrote:
Adeptus Titanicus has shown that they're not totally averse to have cardboard stuff like Command & Control panels and so on, if they can sell it they'll print a gunnery chart under a marketable name like Cogitator or sth. like that in a heartbeat. Or even C&C panels for individual capital ships, that would be an easy way to do special characters or ships of renown on the cheap.

Having a command "bridge" card for each vessel (or small squadron) would be a sensible play aid for BFG.

 schoon wrote:

Tsagualsa wrote:
Adeptus Titanicus has shown that they're not totally averse to have cardboard stuff like Command & Control panels and so on, if they can sell it they'll print a gunnery chart under a marketable name like Cogitator or sth. like that in a heartbeat. Or even C&C panels for individual capital ships, that would be an easy way to do special characters or ships of renown on the cheap.

Having a command "bridge" card for each vessel (or small squadron) would be a sensible play aid for BFG.

You could probably turn the firepower chart into a cool-looking slide or circular rule, to go with the nautical theme:





Tack a sackfull of skulls and cherubs on it to imperialize it, and off you go.

Never seen them before, but those two items are beautiful! Like something out of Myst.

A BFG gunnery-table slide rule would be amazing if it was functional.

SamusDrake wrote:
Never seen them before, but those two items are beautiful! Like something out of Myst.

Stuff like that, in slightly more modern presentation, was state of the art in engineering up to the late 70s and early 80s, when scientific pocket calculators that could do logarithms, roots and so on reliably and fast became widely available and affordable. These mechanical devices use a couple of tricks to give good approximations of e.g. natural logarithms and stuff like that just by moving a couple of parts, it's really quite neat. There are other, similar devices that are in use to quickly calculate e.g. wind drag in airplanes that are still part of modern-day pilot training, mostly as a fallback measure if your computers go into total failure, but also for very small planes that do not have full onboard navigation.

SamusDrake wrote:
Never seen them before, but those two items are beautiful! Like something out of Myst.

How could you. Now I am downloading Myst again.



I think if GW where to go back to BFG, I would like to see them do bigger oval bases. I think it could work out well with them, and cool modelling options.
And small ships on 32 bases, since my memory is fuzzy of the game. So I only half remember the basing.

But using the oval bases they could do the vectors from centre of ship to notch one base. Have a post in the base in the centre point.

And I think ships could be slightly bigger if they don’t make the board be too small, as long as they do focus on fleets and don’t push a you can build two big super ship and win. Coool right. Attitude.

 Haighus wrote:
A BFG gunnery-table slide rule would be amazing if it was functional.

There's some nifty slide rule generator software on the net, i might just have to do it

Apple fox wrote:

And I think ships could be slightly bigger if they don’t make the board be too small, as long as they do focus on fleets and don’t push a you can build two big super ship and win. Coool right. Attitude.

What I disliked most about the game was having to have a series of spare bases with direction arrows on to sub for warships when everything got too close together and the ships would hit each other.

It's partly just the nature of the game that ships will get close together. As long as you have rams, boarding actions, and short range weapons, anyway. The only real fix would be to make the bases as big as, or larger, than the ships themselves.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

Apple fox wrote:

And I think ships could be slightly bigger if they don’t make the board be too small, as long as they do focus on fleets and don’t push a you can build two big super ship and win. Coool right. Attitude.

What I disliked most about the game was having to have a series of spare bases with direction arrows on to sub for warships when everything got too close together and the ships would hit each other.

Solved elegantly by Spartan Games in their day by making the second range band optimal rather than the first.

Apple fox wrote:


How could you. Now I am downloading Myst again.

Bzzzzrrrzzzz...bluuuue pages...rrrrrhhhhzzzzzz....must bring more....rrrhhzhzhzhz...blue pages!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Tsagualsa wrote:


Stuff like that, in slightly more modern presentation, was state of the art in engineering up to the late 70s and early 80s, when scientific pocket calculators that could do logarithms, roots and so on reliably and fast became widely available and affordable. These mechanical devices use a couple of tricks to give good approximations of e.g. natural logarithms and stuff like that just by moving a couple of parts, it's really quite neat. There are other, similar devices that are in use to quickly calculate e.g. wind drag in airplanes that are still part of modern-day pilot training, mostly as a fallback measure if your computers go into total failure, but also for very small planes that do not have full onboard navigation.

Now they also sound interesting. Cheers!

Now I want a sextant range finder/line of sight indicator for tabletop games.

If it comes back, there will be a slight scale change to invalidate everything they have produced before and 3D party folks have made since.

This is the way of GW.

 Easy E wrote:
If it comes back, there will be a slight scale change to invalidate everything they have produced before and 3D party folks have made since.

This is the way of GW.

Not happening with Warhammer The Old World.

There are reasons something like that could happen that don't involve simply wanting to "invalidate everything" anyway.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

Apple fox wrote:

And I think ships could be slightly bigger if they don’t make the board be too small, as long as they do focus on fleets and don’t push a you can build two big super ship and win. Coool right. Attitude.

What I disliked most about the game was having to have a series of spare bases with direction arrows on to sub for warships when everything got too close together and the ships would hit each other.

Solved elegantly by Spartan Games in their day by making the second range band optimal rather than the first.

In Star Trek attack Wing you just put the ships on longer and shorter pegs when they are too close to each other (you can even switch while playing). Works most of the time.

My hopes are not up for any potential BFG rerelease. If it happens, it will probably have greatly simplified rules "to make it more accessible", the new models will be stylewise greatly different to the old ones with much bigger scale, the game will introduce huge 'Space Titans', every race gets a class of new Death Star level battleships which completely unbalance the game and make old big ships obsolete and so on...

 Jadenim wrote:
Now I want a sextant range finder/line of sight indicator for tabletop games.

They did it in one edition for WFB - I still have them somewhere.

Be cool to see BFG return - although as I have more than a hundred ships I don't need more....be also nice to have a space ship game that survives....

 Easy E wrote:
If it comes back, there will be a slight scale change to invalidate everything they have produced before and 3D party folks have made since.

This is the way of GW.

The thing about BFG is to get around the issue of ranges (either ships have to be the size grains of sand, or you have to play on a football field) they had a convention that the 'ship' was a dot in the center of the base, the base was a radius of a few 100 KM around the ship, and the model was just to represent it.

So if the new game has bigger or smaller models it should not affect fluff or gameplay at all.

Probably what we will see is a radical new look, either by setting it during the Heresy or by focusing on some Xenos or Chaos faction that is not fully colonized by 3rd parties.

Leagues of Voltron vs Raq Ghouls anyone?

We shall see.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:


Probably what we will see is a radical new look, either by setting it during the Heresy or by focusing on some Xenos or Chaos faction that is not fully colonized by 3rd parties.

Leagues of Voltron vs Raq Ghouls anyone?

We shall see.

Many 'current' BFG hulls are either straight up Heresy designs or retrofits based on Heresy-era hulls. The 'arrow' design chaos hulls are mostly Heresy-era, while the armoured-prow imperial designs are more recent. So a return to Heresy era would mostly mean that more stuff would look like Chaos does now. 40k ships are extremely old, the designs moreso than the individual ships, but finding hulls that predate the Great Crusade and are still in service is a thing that happened more often than you'd think.

I’d love to see the Gloriana class, and how those owned by different Legions have been adapted to their taste.

Plus rules for Ursus Claws. Everyone loves Ursus Claws.

Sample art found on Reddit. I think this is official, but apologies if it’s just really well done fan art. Not that there’s anything wrong with fan art, except as a specific reference of ship styles.



Note the Battle Barge hasn’t changed since the Heresy, and that the Tribune appears to demonstrate the intermediary design of the Grand Cruisers.

The art is from one of FW's Horus Heresy books.

The grand cruiser is as always hideously ugly because GW and FW never seem to have figured out how to blend the two styles rather than just make things a mishmash of the two.

The Gloriana seems to have diverged into unique ships of their own depending on the Legion, so I am not sure how much of it can still be called a consistent class. The Iron Warriors one for example seems to be covered more in armor plating to the point where visually it seems under armed for its size.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I
Note the Battle Barge hasn’t changed since the Heresy, and that the Tribune appears to demonstrate the intermediary design of the Grand Cruisers.

The Vengeance class and their sister classes nicely show the step between 'Arrow'-style Heresy hulls and 'Hammer Prow' current-era imperial designs. Note the intermediate prow design and the Arrow-style stern:

We also have HH book mentions of the "newer" ship designs too, like Lunar class ships. It is possible the armoured prows were always around but the combat paradigm was less popular. It is also possible they were not so heavily armoured in the past but retained the same profile, like the Emperor class. The Armageddon class battleship at least dates back to the Scouring, so that gives the armoured prow a long history.

IIRC, each Segmentum has its own pattern of ships produced in the Segmentum Fortress, plus some other patterns from major forgeworlds, so it is easy to introduce new patterns. The classic Imperial armoured prow is either Jovian or Martian IIRC, the "Chaos" design is from Cypra Mundi, and there are designs for (I think) Bakka and Voss pattern ships and prows in the old model range. I may be mixing up Bakka and Kar Duniash for the Rogue Trader cruiser model.

 Haighus wrote:
We also have HH book mentions of the "newer" ship designs too, like Lunar class ships. It is possible the armoured prows were always around but the combat paradigm was less popular. It is also possible they were not so heavily armoured in the past but retained the same profile, like the Emperor class. The Armageddon class battleship at least dates back to the Scouring, so that gives the armoured prow a long history.

IIRC, each Segmentum has its own pattern of ships produced in the Segmentum Fortress, plus some other patterns from major forgeworlds, so it is easy to introduce new patterns. The classic Imperial armoured prow is either Jovian or Martian IIRC, the "Chaos" design is from Cypra Mundi, and there are designs for (I think) Bakka and Voss pattern ships and prows in the old model range. I may be mixing up Bakka and Kar Duniash for the Rogue Trader cruiser model.

The "newer" Imperial designs now favored by the 40K Imperium are a concession to loss of technology. The arrowhead designs seen now in the Chaos fleets had more powerful engines and more high powered energy weapons (lances), which over time it seems the Imperium found more and more difficult to produce and maintain. The Martian or Jovian school of design ("armored prow") seems to have become dominant as the simple expedient of slapping on slabs of armor over the front and using torpedo tubes was more doable than maintaining long range lances.

I think you were referring to the Apocalypse class battleship not the Armageddon class battlecruiser. The Apocalypse is a sign of the Imperium regressing. It has the armored prow, but its long range lances are dialled back to half their potential range due to trouble with the power relays. Actually firing the lances at full range as designed would blow relays and sap energy from the engines, a flaw that the older battleships like the Desolator did not have.

Iracundus wrote:

 Haighus wrote:
We also have HH book mentions of the "newer" ship designs too, like Lunar class ships. It is possible the armoured prows were always around but the combat paradigm was less popular. It is also possible they were not so heavily armoured in the past but retained the same profile, like the Emperor class. The Armageddon class battleship at least dates back to the Scouring, so that gives the armoured prow a long history.

IIRC, each Segmentum has its own pattern of ships produced in the Segmentum Fortress, plus some other patterns from major forgeworlds, so it is easy to introduce new patterns. The classic Imperial armoured prow is either Jovian or Martian IIRC, the "Chaos" design is from Cypra Mundi, and there are designs for (I think) Bakka and Voss pattern ships and prows in the old model range. I may be mixing up Bakka and Kar Duniash for the Rogue Trader cruiser model.

The "newer" Imperial designs now favored by the 40K Imperium are a concession to loss of technology. The arrowhead designs seen now in the Chaos fleets had more powerful engines and more high powered energy weapons (lances), which over time it seems the Imperium found more and more difficult to produce and maintain. The Martian or Jovian school of design ("armored prow") seems to have become dominant as the simple expedient of slapping on slabs of armor over the front and using torpedo tubes was more doable than maintaining long range lances.

I think you were referring to the Apocalypse class battleship not the Armageddon class battlecruiser. The Apocalypse is a sign of the Imperium regressing. It has the armored prow, but its long range lances are dialled back to half their potential range due to trouble with the power relays. Actually firing the lances at full range as designed would blow relays and sap energy from the engines, a flaw that the older battleships like the Desolator did not have.

I did mean the Apocalypse. I still think it is highly likely early Apocalypse class vessels did not suffer the relay issues, or they wouldn't have been very effective in their role as Desolator-hunters.

I agree the Imperium in 40k has lost much, but the point I was making is that the Imperium in 30k still used the "newer", simpler designs to some extent and in a form similar to their 40k counterparts. Clearly there was a variety of tactics and fleet types in use. For example, the grand cruisers are generally ancient vessels, yet most of them are slow brawlers rather than quick snipers like the Chaos vessels, which fits much more with the Mars/Jovian school. In addition, Mars and Jupiter are some of the earliest shipyards available to the Great Crusade, so it stands to reason many vessels were produced in that style.

I’ve often wondered if part of the Imperial shift in types of ship use was to counter Chaos’ comparative lack of ability to create new ship types.

That’s not so say Chaos can’t and don’t create new ships. Certainly one Escort Class was a stolen design which never saw Imperial Service - but lacking anything like Imperial Infrastructure, it’s not on the same scale.

If memory serves from BFG, Imperial ships make far wider use of torpedoes. Not only useful for drawing out and, theoretically, exhausting enemy fighter cover, but breaking up enemy formations as much as doing reliable damage, because a broken formation is easier prey, especially if you can maintain yours. They also offset Chaos’ typically longer range, as well drilled and equipped crews can launch a good wave or two or Torpedoes long before the enemy is in properly effective range.

So with that in mind, but also I’m yet to read later Heresy/Siege of Terra? Perhaps it was an attempt to be able to do unexpected tactics in the lead up?

Backfire wrote:
My hopes are not up for any potential BFG rerelease. If it happens, it will probably have greatly simplified rules "to make it more accessible",

Which happened with exactly one out of all the specialist games they've re-released and the rest of what you said mostly didn't either.

If we do get BFG back, I hope we see GW vinyl mats, rather than card stock playing areas. The rules themselves are fine and dandy. They do (did?) a fine job of recreating 2d naval tactics without being overly finnickity.

I know Armada has come along since, and from what I understand it’s well thought of. But I don’t think GW need necessarily chase that design, because there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the basics of BFG.

Though if my understanding is correct, in Armada the larger the ship, the more in advance you need to commit to its manoeuvres. That’s a concept I do quite like - but given BFG fleets tend to have pretty much the same ship sizes between them, it may be less necessary?

Not sure I’ve explained that well. Star Wars. Imperials have larger, more individually powerful ships, made ponderous by greater planning needed. Rebellion has smaller ships which need to be used in concert, but are more reactive. Both sides have advantages and disadvantages. BFG lacks that fairly stark difference in ship types, if not classes across the fleets, so may not need it in the same way?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’ve often wondered if part of the Imperial shift in types of ship use was to counter Chaos’ comparative lack of ability to create new ship types.

That’s not so say Chaos can’t and don’t create new ships. Certainly one Escort Class was a stolen design which never saw Imperial Service - but lacking anything like Imperial Infrastructure, it’s not on the same scale.

If memory serves from BFG, Imperial ships make far wider use of torpedoes. Not only useful for drawing out and, theoretically, exhausting enemy fighter cover, but breaking up enemy formations as much as doing reliable damage, because a broken formation is easier prey, especially if you can maintain yours. They also offset Chaos’ typically longer range, as well drilled and equipped crews can launch a good wave or two or Torpedoes long before the enemy is in properly effective range.

So with that in mind, but also I’m yet to read later Heresy/Siege of Terra? Perhaps it was an attempt to be able to do unexpected tactics in the lead up?

Torpedoes ignore void shields so they are an effective means of plinking away at big ships that don't have enough fighter cover. The Planet Killer was taken out after the Gothic War by a squadron of Imperial cruisers firing volley after volley of torpedoes at stand off range.

Torpedoes require an extensive logistics service however. BFG the game does not require absolute accounting/tracking of ammunition, but each cruiser doesn't carry that many torpedoes. So replenishment at naval bases or with a fleet tender would be needed after awhile. By contrast, the lance based ships are effectively independent of this kind of ammunition supply line, which works out for many Chaos captains as most of the time they are essentially lone pirate ships or wolf pack pirate bands. They might not dock at a friendly port for a long time as there aren't that many for them outside the Eye of Terror.

That does make sense - and again I feel reflects that The Imperium, as much as it’s a bureaucratic mess, has pretty impressive logistics, including a great many places where a fleet can restock, making mass torpedoes a viable strategy for them. It also goes some way to explaining why Chaos forces didn’t refit.