The Black Campbell

Happy holidays, readers, from the family Rhymer!

Most of these aren’t canon, but were cobbled together for our Battlestar Galactica campaign. Added them to the Twelve Colonies document in the RPG section of the site, as well.

Pancolonial Political Holidays:

Armistice Day Junius 21 — Colonial government holiday

Colonial Day Sextilus 8 — Colonial government holiday

Colonial Fleet Birthday Sextilus 12 — Military “holiday”

Pancolonial Religious Festivals:

Bacchanalia Martius (last weekend) — big drinking holiday, arts, celebrations to Dionysus.

Thesmophoria Aprilius 17 — Mostly a “women’s” holiday in cities. Big in farming communities. Honors Demeter.

Diasia Junius 6 — General Colonial government religious holiday.

Olympic Games Junius, second week every four years. Sporting competitions honor Zeus.

Panathenea Games Julius, first week every four years [midway between Olympic Games. Military-oriented sports competitions; honoring Athena.

Thargella Sextilis 19 — Celebrates Apollo.

Exodus Novilis 1 — Celebrates the tribes’ leaving Kobol. Probably not the real date.

Mars Day Novilis 11 — Celebrates Colonial veterans.

Saturnalia Decilus, last weekend. Festivals, parties, noted for costumes and masks.

Traditionally, the rich and poor, aristocrats and servants traded places for a day.

Posidea Decilus 26 — Honors Poseidon. Horse racing on Leonis, Picon, and Virgon.

Apaturia Febrarius 14 — Known as Eros Day on Caprica, honors Aphrodite.

Colony-Specific Holidays:

Arelon: Thesmophoria, Aprilus 17 — Honors Demeter. Farming fesitvals, known for drinking.

Independence Day, Septimus 12 — Celebrates the independence from Virgon.

Aquaria: Hermaia, Decilus 11 — Honors Hermes. Practical jokes, hospitality to travelers. People put out herme, small phallic stones, to bless those traveling.

Canceron: Eleusina, Sextilus 15-18 — Celebrates the mysteries of death and rebirth.

Democratia, Septimus 21 — Celebrates the creation of the Canceron global government.

Independence Day, Septimus 12 — Celebrates independence from Virgon.

Caprica: Hyacinthia, Ianarius 17-19 — Three day holiday celebrating aspects of Apollo.

Eros Day, Februarius 14 — Apaturia on most other Colonies.

Gemenon: Heraea, Martius 10 — Honors Hera.

Diasia, Junius 6 — General thanksgiving day to the gods.

Leonis: Daphnephoria or “The Hunt”, Aprilus 22-24 — Hunter’s weekend.

Libran: Athenaia, Julius 28 — Known for sporting and craft competitions.

Picon: Pohoidaia, Decilus 28-30 — Horse and boat races dedicated to Poseidon. Picon’s version of the Posidea.

Sagittaron: Lycaea , Novilis 12-14 — Honors Zeus.

Freedom Day, Octilus 29 — Celebrates independence from Leonis.

Scorpia: Dionysia, Maius 3 — Celebrates Dionysus. Best known for wishes hung on trees.

Saturnalia, last weekend of Decilus. — People change roles, wear costumes, etc. Popular vacation draw to Scorpia.

Tauron: Enyalia, Junius 14 — Celebrates Ares. Known for impromptu bouts of fisticuffs.

Our Day, Martius 2 —  Celebrates the independence from Virgon.

Virgon: Hestaia, Octilus 10 — Worship of Hestia, involves parties at home.

These holidays use our campaign specific date system:

The months of the year are as follows (assuming Sextilis is the sixth month, the year starts with March): Martius/01, Aprilus/02, Maius/03, Junius/04, Julius/05, Sextilis/06, Septimus/07, Octilis/08, Novilis/09, Decilus/10, Ianuarius/11, Februarius/12.

I’m leaning yes on seeing this one…

I’ve been really bloody ill much of this week, so that means movies when I’m up in the middle of the night coughing up buckets of phlegm.

First off: Did this movie need to be remade? No. I remember seeing the original Total Recall in the theaters and enjoying it immensely, save for the idiotic SFX when people were exposed to low pressure. It was the perfect vehicle for Schwarzenegger, and for the director Verhoven, who had given us the witty and ultraviolent Robocop.

That said, I wasn’t such an aficionado of the original I didn’t think it could be done better. So did Len Wiseman pull that off? There’s a lot of critics and fan reviews that say no. My response is no, if you were looking to get your ass to Mars; yes, if you were looking for something riffing on the movie and its very short story source material.

The good: It looks great and is very atmospheric. I was going to say if was very Blade Runner in look, but I’d suggest it owes more to Ghost in the Shell and other good anime universes than that august film. The performances: Farrell is good in most of his roles (truly great in Tigerland, Phone Booth, and Ondine) and he is much more believable as the everyman who finds out he’s a superspy. Kate Beckinsale is fantastic as the femme fatale and seems to be really enjoying herself through the movie. Jessica Biel is Jessica Biel. Bryan Cranston is solid as the bad guy. Some of the tech has the same “I want that!” impact that Minority Report had.

The adequate: the set up for the film — that most of the world has been ravaged by a chemical war that’s left just bits of Europe (the United Federation of Britain) and Australia (the Colony) habitable. The colony provides labor for the people topside and with living space at a premium, Chancellor Cohagen (Cranston) is looking to engineer a fight with the Colony, in which he will use robotic police/soldiers against the unarmed population. There’s a resistance, of course, that is of middling use.

The bad: The main conceit is that the workers get from the Colony to the topside using “the Fall” — a massive, skyscraper sized elevator through the planet. It’s a staple of golden age science fiction, and if you are willing to just roll with it, you’ll probably like the movie. If you can’t get past it…well, have a look at Looper. For my part, the rest of the movie was pretty enough and fun enough to look past it. The other bad: the Resistance. They’re awful, ineffective, and when we do find them toward the end of the movie, they have basically been holding out for an ephemeral “kill switch” for the robotic forces that the hero supposedly has recovered. Bill Knighty doesn’t even get enough screen time to have an impact on the movie…and that’s a shame.

Is it as bad as it was made out to be by the old fans of the original movie? No. Is it a terrible movie? No. A lot of the critics seemed to like doing the “it’s a Bourne movie in the future” complaint — a quick quip from the bard, “There is nothing new under the sun…” But I think he was paraphrasing. The amnesiac running from shadowy forces while trying to save the girl/nation/world is a pretty old theme.

Style: 4 out of 5 — a lot of the look is derivative of Blade Runner and various anime. I rather liked it. Substance 3 out of 5: It’s the usual amnesiac running from shadowy forces while trying the save the girl/nation/world movie. Just because you’ve seen it before doesn’t mean you might not like it.

A definite rent.

The other movie was Looper and I hadn’t expected too much from the usual “time travel” schtick film. Time travel and psychic powers are two of my least favorite tropes of science fiction — even when done right, they usually are a cheat, plot-wise. (Need to get rid of nasty ancient aliens? Telepaths! Need to question that rock monster eating miners? Telepath!) Looper has both time travel and telekinetics. And it works pretty well, because the characters are engaging and the acting is generally pretty good.

The good: Willis does action. Willis is the bad guy. Jeff Daniels is a fantastic gang lord. No, really. The set-up: time travel gets invented and is outlawed, so only outlaws have time machines…which they use for various nefarious purposes, one being to send folks back in time to be eliminated without issue — law enforcement techniques are so good and surveillance is so ubiquitous, it’s nearly impossible to disappear someone in the future. Joe, the main character is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt (young Joe) and Willis (old Joe), the latter of whom gets sent back to “close his loop.” Gordon-Levitt is a decent enough actor and proves it by acting through a bunch of either prosthetics or CGI to make him look more like Bruce Willis.

All of the characters are flawed and ignoble, but they all have excellent motivations that are well realized by the writing and acting.

The setting is 2044 Midwestern America and there’s a lot of stuff going on in the background that they don’t explain that makes the movie more than the sum of it’s parts. There’s a lot of homelessness and vagrancy. Joe is an abandoned child, Sid — a kid who becomes a major piece of the plot was abandoned by his mother (Emily Blunt) who later has to clean up her life to take care of him. Daniels’ character seems to make it his mission to rescue waifs and turn them into gunmen. It’s interesting commentary that we see no men who aren’t vagrants or killers; women — they farm, whore, work at diners, etc…but there’s almost no men who aren’t indigent or criminal. Even the cops work for the bad guys.

The average: They don’t go into the time travel thing other than to stay focused on the conceit of the film (loopers). You would think organized crime would be using the technology for much bigger return.

The bad: the prosthetics for Gordon-Levitt don’t quite cut it.

Style: 4 out of 5 — It doesn’t need the flashy CGI settings of Total Recall to look futuristic and interesting. Substance: 5 out of 5 — there’s a lot packed into the movie, including a couple of elements that would have been fine as a main hinge for a movie (telekinetics, for instance.)

Buy it…it’s surprisingly good.

The big disappointment was The Dark Knight Rises. Is it a good movie..? No, not really. It’s made worse how damned good the Dark Knight was. Here we start with the bad to show why this movie was a gigantic cluster#$%^.

The Bad: The movie is a rehash of the same themes as The Dark Knight…but completely undoes the points made by that movie: A psycho holds the city hostage through terror. The people do not cave…they don’t destroy each other on the ferries; hell, the one prisoner even makes a show of his decency! The Joker was wrong. But along comes Bane, who does the same schtick, except he’s working with Gotham’s equivalent of molemen to do massive scale badness, including holding the city hostage with a neutron bomb. No one fights back. They cave. Hell, even the nation decides not to call the baddies’ bluff and, say, hit the neutron bomb’s truck with a missile from a drone (which, judging from the tech level of the Batman movie world should also have the ability to look for a radiation signature. After all…we can do that now.)

The whole Wayne must let go of his blahdablahda and jump to the ledge to escape Talia al-Ghul’s prison in India. Awful. And one of the reasons the movie is also about 40 minutes too long.

The average: Tom Hardy is adequate as Bane, which is disappointing, since he usually steals the show in most stuff he’s in.

The good: I like that Wayne isn’t holding up to the Batman lifestyle too well. His body is beat to shit and he can’t hang without prosthetics and painkillers. You simply can’t play that hard, that long. Ask any pro athlete. Michael Caine is superb, as usual, and Anne Hathaway manages to be sexy and believably so as Catwoman.

Style: 4 out 5 — It looks good, has the same dark brooding mood of the other films. Substance: 2 out of 5 — it’s not awful, but it is a pale shade of The Dark Knight. It’s a rental, in my opinion. Or rewatch The Dark Knight and marvel at Ledger’s performance.

There’s a new Google+ gaming question running about concerning the seven games you play the most. Considering I haven’t gotten to play in a game until a few one-shots at the local game store recently (the zombies on a cruise ship was such a good set-up I even ignored my zombie fatigue to play in it…), I figured I’d go with the seven game I’ve run most often (starting with the most recent.)

1. Battlestar Galactica (Margaret Weis Productions) — 2007 to present

I first started running this about halfway through the series. Anyone familiar with this blog has an idea of the things I’ve done with the setting and plotlines to make it work for the groups, but here’s a quick recap:

The first campaign was a “second fleet” style game, with the characters having two characters each — a set of ground survivors, and members of a battlestar, Pleiades, which had been doing some deep space exploration and returned to find everything gone to hell. Galactica and Pegasus were out there, but they never were able to link up. I ran it close to the new series, canon-wise. It rand for about two or so years, then imploded with my marriage and loss of half the game group.

It was one of the games that the new group was interested in, so it came back, but adapted to fit some of the game style preferences of the players — more Cold War intrigue and paranoia prior to the Fall (coming soon!) More chances to try and stop the attacks, or possibly win them.

The game runs on the MWP Cortex rules — not the “Cortex Plus” they foisted on us with Leverage and Smallville (gag!) Character creation is fast and easy, play is not hampered, but enhanced by the rules, and it the first rules sets to come along since James Bond that I would gladly use for just about anything.

2. Hollow Earth Expedition (Exile Games) — 2007- Present

Ubiquity is one of those rules systems that hovers on the edge between rules lite, with fantastic mechanics like “take the average”, but bogs down a bit in too many modifiers and special rules in combat (most of which I now just ignore.) For pulp action, it’s almost perfect, and one of the licensed products using the system, League of Adventure, looks to have adapted it well to the Victorian speculative fiction subgenre.

We’ve had several campaigns using HEX. There was a game that was based in South America oin which they found an entrance to the Hollow Earth. That campaign fizzled a bit toward the end, then died for the same reasons as the BSG game. I’ve used it for the Gorilla Ace campaign, as well as an early ’40s Cold War game (Artemis Campbell — our take on Modesty Blaise.) The most recent game was set in China and has suffered the loss of most of the players, but the new group iteration looks to be interested in playing more of this.

The weak part for me is character creation, with is a bit math heavy and overly complicated (in my opinion, but at least you don’t need a Cray supercomputer like you did for early GURPS or Champions.)

Now if they’d only get the Revelations of Mars sourcebook out!

3. James Bond: 007 (Victory Games) — 1984 to present

This was my go-to rules set for anything modern. I tweaked it, back in the ’90s to run Cyberpunk effectively. It was used to run a Stargate campaign. There’s been numerous iterations of the campaign — MI6 agents, CIA, private investigations/espionage (before this became cool with the Terror War), Miami Vice style cops…

The system is a percentile dice roll under your attribute or skill x the difficulty rating. Guns and cars all have different modifiers and are much more diverse mechanically than in many game systems. This can be a hassle unless you are looking for the brand-name cache that Bond (or Miami Vice, for that matter) bring to the screen — can your Aston-Martin DB5 outmaneuver and outrun a Ferrari F355 like in Goldeneye? (Hell to the no!) But the game did do a good job of making some vehicles and weaponry more attractive than others.

Character creation is a bit more involved, and if you aren’t using the tables on the excellent GM screen (eBay!), you can occasionally find it math heavy.

It’s still my favorite system, more from nostalgia than anything else.

4. Castle Falkenstein (R Talsorian) — 1995 to 2008

I had already been running Victorian sci-fi since Space: 1889 came out but found the GDW rules problematic, to be kind. Falkenstein‘s card-based system (“Gentlemen don’t play dice…”) was novel, the character creation was very easy and quick — and since this game, I’ll admit that any character creation that takes more than an hour for the first go-’round annoys the pants off of me.

The weak part — the background. This was the first attempt to “Shadowrun” a Victorian game. Elves and other mythic beasts are there to get the D&D crowd to buy in; I ditch the fantasy aspects and stick to the more 19th Century speculative fiction side of things. The other was combat. The design was an attempt to emulate fencing, but not the cinematic fencing a game liek this should be putting forth. It was awful and overly complex. One of the players and I kit-bashed a combat rules set using the standard card deck of CF with the combat design of Lace & Steel to create a fast combat system that made it fun to forget guns and go with fisticuffs and swords.

The first campaign was simply Space: 1889 with CF rules to play by. It worked beautifully. The other campaigns, over time, lost the Space: 1889 elements and became more Earth-bound historical with science fictiony bits games…what can I say? I’m a historian!

5. Star Trek (Decipher) — 2000-2006

I bought the Last Unicorm Games Star Trek sets because they were beautiful and had elegant rules systems, if they did have the dreaded race/class elements of D&D. I never got to run LUGTrek before it folded, was bought up by Wizards (IIRC), then was spun out to Decipher, which treated the franchise like a hated wife with herpes that you just can’t seem to give up.

The mechanics were solid, character creation wasn’t too much of a chore (still — races and “classes”) and for a while there it looked like this might be the one to carry the Star Trek role playing experience for a while. And like every other line, it died.

Star Trek was always the white elephant of gaming to me. Seemed like a great idea — a setting everyone is at least slightly familiar with, rich universe to plump…but it never quite worked. It felt, much like most of the series since “the Old Show”, soulless.

I originally planned it as a minicampaign for a Trekker in the group. It would up running six years. One of the things I did was throw canon right out the window. Whole movies and series were ditched. Technology was not easily and quickly convertible. No more turning the deflector dish into a can opener. The Federation was a wondrous place where everyone did adult education and bad art; the only place for the motivated and talented was politics and Starlfeet. By the end we had androids and sentient ships – it was an attempt to fuse “Singularity” style sci-fi (before it was cool) with Trek. It worked beautifully. Sadly, I think it’s one of those lightning in a bottle scenarios — I don’t expect to pull it off again.

Sticking with the idea of the stuff I ran the most successfully rather than most recently, I’m going to not put some of the games that got run for a short time. There was a decent Serenity game that I wrote myself into a corner and couldn’t plot my way out. It was also my first attempt to sandbox a game, and got to watch the characters/players wander where most people have gone before…boredom; it’s why I disagree with a lot of GM advice out there. Try not to railroad the players, but construct the adventures in a way where encounters will happen and seem natural, even though they were pre-ordained. Another would be Marvel Heroic Role Playing — which uses “Cortex Plus” and is the first of the post-Jamie Chambers stuff to really do a great job.

6. The Babylon Project (Chameleon Eclectic) — 1997-2000

This one is a bit of an odd-man out. The character creation is a bit clunky, the base mechanics easy (two dice — one a plus, one a minus, add/subtract to your skill vs. a target number), but the combat was clunky. For some reason, however, I “got it” — the damage allowed for the kind of stuff that I heard/saw in the military: serious injuries that didn’t phase a person, minor injuries that dropped a body from shock, and everything in between. Ship combat was cribbed from Full Thrust and was great.

It didn’t hurt that this was the big show for us, at the time. I’d gotten into it with the G’Kar and Londo in the elevator episode and we stuck with it through the crappy movies of the 2000s. I ran a rogue colony of “Amazons” — humans that had been protected by one of the lesser Old Ones which had pretended to be Olympians in the classical period. They were another front of the Shadow War and were allowed to do their thing without bumping up against canon too badly, until the end fight at Coriana 6.

Great characters and adventures kept it moving despite a clunky system and I’ve given thought to buying the old books online after a glancing blow with the disastrous Mongoose Babylon 5 d20 stuff. (To be fair, they too 3ed as far as they could to make it work.) It was, like the Star Trek game that followed it, a bit of lightning in a bottle. When I attempted to run a d20 version, it just sort of fizzled out.

7. Space: 1889 (GDW) — 1989-1995

As with The Babylon Project, this game is a testament to how a great setting can overcome shitty mechanics. Character creation is plenty fast, the die mechanics are easy but mathematically unsound, but who cared! I was a redcoat on Mars flying a cloudship!

I bought it right off from The Complete Strategist there in downtown Philadelphia, worked through an early campaign with almost no knowledge of the period, and within two years was a bachelor degree holder in history , specializing in the Victorian period. (It’s a common thread that my professional and gaming life mirror each other…)

Even when we found better mechanics, we clung to 1889 setting queues long into the 1990s. I keep thinking of bringing it back, but the Victorian “pulp” and ’30s “pulp” have a lot of the same tropes and the guns and cars and planes of the 1930s seem to be more accessible for players. (It’s a similar problem between Space: 1889 and Serenity — both are Old West/Victorian period pieces, just one has Verne-style spaceships, the other more realistic looking ones.)

Prior to Space: 1889 most of the GMing or playing I did was either in James Bond: 007 or DC Heroes games during the Philadelphia years, so I could have made a good case for the latter as my number 7.

(Turns out Martin Ralya did something similar over on Gnome Stew…)

One of the readers is looking to maybe play in a Skype-based James Bond:007 game, if there’s anyone out there GMing one. Jonathan’s in the eastern time zone, and if you hit the comments on the JB:007 page of the site, you should be able to get his contact info. Or just sing out in comments on this post.

Passin’ it forward!

I posted the production notes for Blood & Chrome that were up on Facebook a few days ago, and have finally had time to compare them to notes on how a battlestar group might look I drew up a few years ago. So here’s my take on a miniseries-period battlestar group (BSG.)

Going with the idea that there are 12 “main battlestars” or “heavy battlestars” (I’m using the former term), one to do CAP on each colony and the surrounding shipping space, this would be the usual wartime battlestar group. Figure they’re rarely more than half strength, with half their number on temporary or detached duty.

COMPOSITION, BATTLESTAR GROUP

A combat-ready battlestar group consists of a main battlestar (Mercury, Minerva, or Columbia-class) and its attendant air group, 2 light battlestars (Erynis [Valkyrie] or Berzerk-class) and their air groups, 2 support escorts of Vanguard-class — one hospital, one an aerospatial assault unit, 4 assaultstars (Cygnus or the older Orion-class), 2 replenishment tyliers (pronounced til-i-ers; replenshiment oilers in the wet navy carry fuel, but also other supplies. They would be the refinery ships from the series), a combat support vessel (a repair ship like the Flatop from the series), and two victualing ships (basing on Blood & Chrome, these are the Celestra-style freighters.)

Assuming the support vessels are mostly civilian/merchant marine, that’s roughly 10 ships a BSG or 120 capital ships…which seems about right with Starbuck’s comment about the initial losses in the miniseries.

Considering how expensive and time-consuming peace time construction of these ships would be, I think 120-150 ships is about right.

Next off — nomenclature. I figure a battlestar is always a “group” (BSG), as per the patches in that they have an air group aboard. Any ships attached to, say, Galactica might have their own ship patch — say an escort named Diomedes is attached for longer than temporary duty to Galactica — the patch would read “Battlestar Diomedes” (or whatever you want to call your escorts; I call ’em gunstars if they’re cannon heavy, assaultstars if they’re missile heavy) and the bottom of the patch would be BSG-75, even if Diomedes herself was BSG-12, say. On her own, she’s BSG-12. (Hey, you have to keep the guys that make uniform patches in business…)

Any “battlestar” with an air group of any size is a BSG, otherwise, it’s just BS (that would be the assaultstars and gunstars.) Support ships would have registrations like DD (for the escorts like Vanguard [I’m going off of the numbering on the model for that particular ship; do whatever you feel like), RT for the tyliers, CSV for the combat support ships, and SV for the victualers.

Figure the battlestar groups during peacetime are broken up and doing missions throughout colonial space — light battlestars doing interdiction work, hospital ships aiding in disaster and humanitarian support. Escorts would also be doing policing, but would also cover the hospital ships and civilian contractor vessels doing deep space exploration, etc.

Just a thanks to all the new readers, the folks that are regulars, and double that to you who have pitched in content or regularly post. We’re up about 30% on readership this month, alone. We’re still not pulling, say, Gnome Stew numbers, but for a highly specialized game blog that deals with (mostly) dead systems, we’re doing well.

Next year, there’s a bunch of things I’m hoping will finally break loose and get moving. I’ve been heavily hamstrung with minding my little girl, but there’s preschool coming up next week, babysitters helping out, and I’ve bailed from my PhD program. As a result, I’ve turned out a film prospectus, got the starts of a novel, a short novel/novela, the beginnings of research for two more novels, and I’m hoping to turn my attention back to a James Bond RPG-related project.

But once again: thanks! And a good holiday season to all!

I’ll have comment on this, once I have a moment to really look at it. (20 month old girls never stop!) The following was cribbed from the Blood & Chrome page on Facebook (no infringement intended, copyright trolls!):

The Battlestar Task Group – Early Production Notes by Doug Dexler, the CG  supervisor

(Subject to change)

The Colonial Defense Force forms carrier battle groups on an as-needed basis and assigns ships to the group based on the mission. Therefore, no two Battlestar Task Groups are the same. However, a typical Battlestar Task Groups consists of the following ships:

Guided-missile cruisers (2)
These are offensive ships loaded with cruise missiles to strike planet based targets

Modern Colonial DFF guided missile cruisers perform primarily in a Battle Force role. These ships are multi-mission [Air Warfare (AW), Surface Warfare (SW), Fleet Surface Fire Support (FSFS) and Surface Warfare (SUW)] and capable of supporting Battlestar Task Groups (BTG), amphibious forces, or of operating independently and as flagships of surface action groups. Cruisers are equipped with cruise missiles giving them additional long range Strike Warfare (STRW) capability

Support Destroyers (2)
Defensive ships. They can defend against attacks by Base Stars and Raiders Destroyers.Equipped with the ability to launch missiles and lay down flak umbrellas.

CDG 51 and CDG 1000 destroyers are warships that provide multi-mission offensive and defensive capabilities. Destroyers can operate independently or as part of Battlestar strike groups, surface action groups, amphibious ready groups, and underway replenishment groups.

One stealth frigate (1) (The Reliant is a stealth Frigate)
Offensive\defensive ship. The frigate is a guided missile cruiser with a limited flight deck facility.

Can take Vipers and other attack planes into areas where a Battlestar would stick out like a sore thumb. They are shiny black

Stealth destroyers (2)
Offensive\defensive ships – The equivalent of a light cruiser.

Carries the latest in dradis bending technologies. They are shiny black

Dradis Picket Ships (6)
The fleets first line of defense. Our long range eyes in space

On the outer perimeters and often heavily attacked by Cylon Raiders. It’s the most dangerous job in the Battlestar Task Group.

Amphibious Attack Ship (2)
For putting boots on the ground. Modern Colonial Amphibious Assault Ships project power and maintain presence by serving as the cornerstone of the Amphibious Readiness Group (ARG) / Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG). Carries a combination of aircraft and landing craft.

Amphibious warships are designed to support Colonial Marine Corps tenets of Operational Maneuver From the Space (OMFTS) and Ship to Objective Maneuver (STOM). They must be able to sail in harm’s way and provide a rapid buildup of combat power ashore in the face of opposition. Because of their inherent capabilities, these ships have been and will continue to be called upon to also support humanitarian and other contingency missions on short notice.

Colonial Sealift Command (CSC)
Six Types Of Ships

Fast Combat Support Ships (FCS) – An ever shifting armada that keeps the Battlestar Task Group supplied.

Fleet Replenishment Tyliers (4)
The largest subset of Colonial Fleet Auxiliary Force ships, provide fuel to deployed Fleet ships underway, as well as to their assigned aircraft. Tyliers and the ships they refuel sail side by side as fuel hoses are extended across guide wires. Underway replenishment of fuel dramatically extends the time a Navy battle group can remain at sea.

Fast Combat Support Ships (2)
CSC’s four fast combat support ships provide one-stop shopping to the fleet for fuel, ammunition, food and other cargo. These ships are especially valuable because of their speed and ability to carry all the essentials to replenish Colonial DFF ships underway.

Dry Cargo/Ammunition Ships (4)
Four ammunition ships supply ordnance to Colonial combatants at sea, providing service through a combination of alongside transfers and replenishment lifts via Freight Trains. These ships are able to deliver ammunition, provisions, stores, spare parts, potable water and petroleum products to Battlestar Task Groups. Designed to operate for extended periods at sea.

Fleet Space Tugs (6)
These ships provide the Battlestar Task Groups (BTG), with towing service and can tow vessels as large as Light Cruisers. When augmented by divers, fleet tugs assist in the recovery of downed ships and aircraft.

Rescue and Salvage Ships (2)
CSC’s four rescue and salvage ships recover objects and stranded vessels and provide firefighting assistance. Like fleet space tugs, they are able to move objects like downed ships and aircraft. The key advantage of these ships is their ability to rapidly deploy divers to conduct rescue and salvage operations.

Hospital Ships (1)
Contains 24 operating rooms and up to 1,000 beds, including a medical staff of up to 1,200 military medical personnel.