Oceanic Union ships at Star Ranger

 A short note today, friends.

Strike Force Wollondilly

The excellent Dean Gundberg, who manages the spaceship wargaming hub Star Ranger, contacted me a few weeks ago to use the photos of my Oceanic Union spaceships for his ship stats page. How could I not? Star Ranger is the first place to go for rules on Full Thrust ships that aren't part of the core books or from other fictional settings, as well as a generally neat place for starship combat games.

If you want to see my ships on the Oceanic Union Defence Force page, go here to see them.

Other Full Thrust resources are available on Star Ranger here.

Thanks again, Dean. A real pleasure to help out.

Project: Strike Force Wollondilly

Remember one of my first posts, when I talked about Full Thrust? I mentioned that I had two fleets. The alien Sa'Vasku with their bioships, and the Oceanic Union - Space Australia (and friends).

Oceanic Union Strike Force Wollondilly

Here they are! I finally got around to getting some photos taken.

The Oceanic Union are a federation consisting of Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and a host of Pacific nations - Tuvalu, Vanuatu, &c. Given the balkanisation of the former United States in the setting, I like to think that Hawai'i was a late joiner. This also handily explains why the New Anglian Confederation and the Oceanic Union aren't as close as the modern UK-USA-AU alliance. As we'll see, I've also included Timor-Leste as a member, although the former Portuguese Timor had yet to succesfully leave Indonesia when Jon wrote his timeline.

Jon never really detailed the minor factions, but the Full Thrust community has agglutinated a kind of quasi-canon. One such detail is that Oceanic Union Defence Force ships (OUDFS; 'oddfuss') are usually painted in designs indigenous to the regions of the Federation. When combined with the flat, panelled surfaces of OUDFS ships, this gives a great deal of freedom for striking freehand designs.

This project was actually finished in May 2018; you can see the project unfold in real-time on the old Tumblr.

Below the cut for more individual photos!

Project: Codename: Sothoth

When I was fourteen - o, lo! many years ago - and was first getting into wargaming, one of the local chaps showed me this cool spaceship game. This was before Battlefleet Gothic, and there was nothing like it in the local scene. It featured three different species of aliens, each more horrible and weird than the last. Humans hadn't unified, like in Star Trek, instead clumped into a handful of superpowers... which included the United States back under the rule of the British Crown.

The game was called Full Thrust and is completely awesome.

More Thrust, the first supplement book

A few years ago, I decided I wanted to get back into wargaming (or at least painting miniatures, as I didn't have any opponents and it turns out that being in your thirties doesn't prevent you from being awkward about introducing yourself to gaming groups). Ground Zero Games has always had very reasonable prices and shipping, so I decided to plump for some of those cool spaceships I'd wanted as a teenager.

I purchased two intro sets: the Oceanic Union, a federation of Australasian-Pacific states and the Sa'Vasku, an advanced alien species who use living bioships which consume their own bio-matter to power their systems and generate drones. 

Elder strike ship and strike ship See below.

I wanted the Sa'Vasku to have an organic sense, but still retain their essential alien-ness, so I looked to Terran arthropods for colour scheme inspiration. I'm hardly unique among the folks with Sa'Vasku ships for doing this, but I also wanted to avoid the drab browns and ochres that 'organic' often means in this context. Luckily, arthropods are super weird:

Blue swimmer crab. Photo from WA Fisheries.

Electric blues for the spikey bits, and white patterns for the core bodies. I went with a solid stellar black for the torso themselves. They're artificially engineered bioships, sure, but this lets me pretend that they have a natural kind of space camouflage. (Yes, I know that doesn't make sense). The underbellies are purple, as some swimmer crabs get a purple tinge. The overall effect generates a striking, science fiction colour pattern, while still showing a sort of organic realness.

Plus, I'd never worked with a bright blue, and I try to pretend to push my limited painting skills.

Drone fighters - finished 02 Aug 2019!

I've really enjoyed this project, and the folks on the Full Thrust Facebook group have been very kind each time I posted an update. During the unfortunate recent business, I managed to finish everything I had planned for this project, so I can reveal the results below. As you will see, in the past two years, the tablet I was using to background the photos perished mysteriously, so not everything looks as cool as it could.