(TFT) (SFB)

["Craig W. Barber" <craigwbar@comcast.net>]

Weird, fun game.   You had a diagram of a starship (the first of course was
the TV show version of the Federation Heavy Cruiser (think Captain Kirk and
Scotty), the second the Klingon cruiser.  In the end they invented thousands
of them, and you can still play the game online.)  Original source material
was the Fed tech diagrams released for trekkies circa 1970 or so.  The boxes
on the ship sheet ("SSD") were labeled things like "Warp Engine", "Impulse
Engine", etc, lots of boxes, including things like "Shuttle", "Lab" and so on.
Players also had an "energy allocation" sheet: total up how many warp,
impulse, battery, reactor and other energy boxes you had, then put energy into
shields, weaps, moving, and so on.  Pre-plotted turns on the map.

Crazy popular, so they started adding rules to use those shuttles, labs and so
on, adding races, new weapons and so on, filling out complete lines of ships
from shuttles and PT boat equivalents up to super-hyper-mondo-things
(dreadnoughts beware).  Monsters, freighters, mines, commander stats, a
tactics manual, and so on.

Complete re-write of the confused rules in the late 80's.  A ton of fun.
Fairly slow motion ROP (rate of play).

Craig

PS "Murphy's Rules" pointed out that one turn was 1/30th of a second, scale,
and yet during that time a starship could fire all weapons, move a great
distance, carry out damage control, launch shuttles, board, be boarded, etc
etc...


----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Tapley
To: tft@brainiac.com
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 2:01 PM
Subject: (TFT) Re: TFT Digest V3 #905


At 15:07 -0400 8/3/07, Dan wrote:
>I seem to recall reading many years ago that Phil Kaufman
>( creator of the TFT economic system and the unbeatable
>"Kaufman Retrograde" tactic of Star Fleet Battles ) died - I
>think he was killed in a car accident.   Does anyone else know
>for sure?

I double-checked, and my text copy of the Errata acknowledges "Draper
Kauffman"  of St. Louis at the time of ITL production, for the
economics system. Is this the same person?

At 15:07 -0400 8/3/07, Craig wrote:
>Ah, the Kaufman retrograde...  I *STILL* fantasize about catching in a fleet
>action someone who's never heard of it.

That would be me. But then, I haven't played Star Fleet Battles
either. I'm vaguely curious, though - how did it work?
--
- Mark, 210-379-4635
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