Star Wars

The following is a skirmish scenario with USEME006 (Starship Battles) made by Alternative Armies (http://www.15mm.co.uk/ )
I don't know the miniature's producer, I bought them on ebay long time ago (if you know the producer please email me),

It was since I was a kid and saw the first Star wars Movie that I wanted to play a fighter battle with X-wing and, especially, my all time favourite, the Tie fighters. As I said I found on ebay some ships semi-painted and I bought the lot, which included 13 Tie fighters (two advanced), one shuttle, 2 X-Wing, 3 Y-Wing and the
Millenium falcon:

This was the initial setup :  the imperial forces are escorting a personel shuttle from one station to another (see them on the upper right corner).  Unkwown to the empire,  an engineer on board  is in reality a spy of the rebel forces, with secret plans with him. The mission of the rebels is simple, board the shuttle and rescue the spy (and the plans...).
In order to do so, the rebel prepared an ambush in an area with asteroids and planetoids which could mask few ships. Only 5 fighters could be hidden in the asteroids field. The Millenium Falcon will arrive from hyperdrive suddenly (left top) and the battle will start

Rebel forces hiding

ambush close up

The Millenium Falcon appears....

The imperial forces divide themselves in two squadrons

Imperial forces

Imperial forces close up

The asteroid field

Field of battle

Field of battle

The rebels move toward the shuttle

X-wing and Y-wing will keep a squad busy while the Millenium attack the other

close up

X-wing

The tie fighters are eliminated and the Millenium prepare to board the shuttle

boarding....

Once the spy is on board the shuttle is eliminated (the less witness the better)

In order to play Star Wars with USEME006, we had to create a roster and to identify every ship in the army list.. It was quite easy, as there are a lot of info on star wars ships on the net (http://www.starwars.com/explore/encyclopedia/technology/, http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page) later I will publish the roster, at this moment it still needs some adaptations.

Also, as we created a scenario tailored on the ships we had, it had to be possible for the rebels to win the game, althought in inferior forces, so :

- The rebels were given all ELAN 6, while the imperial tie forces had ELAN2 (which is quite logical, being an escort to a normal transfer no ace was sent, on the other side the rebels sent their best pilots and ships)

- The two advanced tie fighters had ELAN 5, which allowed (as an option) to create two squads of 3 ships with ELAN 3 with some tie fighters out of team. Nevertheless, the imperial commander decided not do to so, and divided the forces in two squads (which had ELAN 2).

- The millenium falcon was rated as destroyer and legendary. The shuttle was rated as destroyer, but without any weapon (which he had according to sources, but made game too difficult). Also when boarding it was treated as with marines onboard.

- To add some chanches, the spy on the shuttle made a try every turn to stop the ship. we rolled a d6, with 1 the spy was captured, and the Millenium would lose the marines capability (that is the spy was put in a cell, and more difficult to rescue. With 6 the spy succesfully damaged the shuttle which was then considered as struck

- Fire was only possible in the front half 

- We did not use the vector movement but the ships had to curve using the explosion templates of the game. Tie fighters, X wing could curve with the smaller, the others with the medium

 I had the rebel forces and I won mainly because I was quite lucky as my X and Y wing could resist the attack of the bigger squad. When the imperial commander saw one squad eliminated, he decided for a kamikaze action trying to ram the millenium with all the remaing ships. That did not work and the Millenium (which was rated as destroyer and legendary) finished the work.

What went good  : the rules are easy to learn and we had fun, the fact that they are so simple, still considering various factors, make it easy to adapt them
What went wrong : the game was too static. It was not the fast and furious fight of the movie. For the next game we will introduce some more house rules : first if a ship is not moving it will be hit with a 2,3,4,5,and 6
If moved less than half movement 3,4,5,6. That should make less inviting to stand still.
Also we will use little chains marked on 8 and 10 inches (the two measures we used) to define movement.
Finally, we have to adapt better the Y-Wing and X-Wing, as they were very similar and in reality the X-Wing should have superior manouvrability

The Sequel

Some little changes in space... we added two bigger planetoids (which I made the day before, so they are not so nice as the smaller ones), and we spread the asteroids field all around, so that they could not be avoided so easily

Once again, the imperial commander divided his forces in two squads, the rebel (me, again) sent the y-wing squad to disturb on the right

On the left, the two x-wing  made a screen to the falcon

The imperial forces sent a squad to deal with the y-wing, and the other to eliminate the falcon

This is the little chain we used to measure distances and curves

we used the explosion template to turn, here is an example.

the tie fighter got the smallest radius

the tie fighter eliminated quite easily the y wing squad, while the x-wing proved 

an example of turn

turn completed


Update Nov 2018
Reading again this post after a  while, and especially after Xwing (which i did play) come out, I will steal the idea of cardboard counters for making turns, as it is more practical.