SciFi Saturday – Fighter Rosters

For my Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks games, I do like to make use of the "Boardgame Ship Rosters" that are printed in the Campaign Book. You really need something to keep track of the paperwork regarding each ship's velocity, ammunition, damaged systems, etc. (when I was a teenager I'd use regular notebook paper, but it would end up looking completely garbled; so much easier now to run off some copies for clear communication). As noted earlier, for a given scenario I usually fill these sheets out in ink, make gameplay marks in pencil, and then erase and re-use at a later date.

Here's one minor problem with that process: It's pretty wasteful when a whole squadron of fighters are involved (based on a space station or assault carrier). They have very few hull points, only a single weapon system, they're never given any names in the boardgame rules or scenarios, etc., so most of the record space is wasted on them. And since each official sheet only has room for 4 ships, you'd have run off and maintain a whole bunch of sheets just for the fighters in each game.

So here's my solution: I made a dedicated roster, in the same style, just for Fighter-types. Cutting out the unnecessary information allows us to fit 8 of them on a single page. Knowing the statistics in advance allows us to pre-print them on the sheet and save time. And the statistics are the same for both the Basic and Advanced games (ignore DCR for Basic play; and I assume you know that they have Reflective Hulls like all military vessels). Just fill in the letter of each counter in use and you're good to go.

Another idea: Several places in the rules go back-and-forth about the limit on how many fighters a Carrier can carry (twelve on CB p. 5; ten on TM p. 8; eight on CB p. 55). For simplicity, we might establish this latter number (8) as the actual limit, so that one of these rosters conveniently represents all the fighters available on a single Carrier.

Download the PDF here.