The Embrace of Charybdis

We had a brief game of Star Fleet involving three Battlecruisers on either side, a table full of terrain, with a Black Hole sucking everything to the centre of the table.In the first turn the Federation won the Initiative,but both sides had nothing in range or arc, so we just swooped toward one another. The Black Hole sucked everything to the middle of the table The second turn saw my brother realise he had misdeployed, as I was able to bring all three of my ships to bear against USS Kirov, shielding two of them from the rest of his force thanks to the asteroid field. The Klingon C7 Red suffered Level 1 Critical hits to Weapons and her Dilithium Chamber, while Kirov suffered a Level 1 Critical to her Impulse Drive. In the End Phase everything on the table got sucked further toward the Black Hole, and the Red managed to repair the Critical Hit to her Weapons system. The third turn was the last. In an attempt to redeploy, Niall tried for a very minor High Energy Turn for the Kirov, which failed, leaving her exposed to the concentrated firepower of all three Klingon ships. She did not survive. Something of a space oddity occurred, as the dust cloud which had been hiding one of my warships touched the Black Hole and vanished, while my ship lay further away, and so didn't. Come the end of the turn, a planet, dust clouds and an asteroid field had all been sucked into the Black Hole, but more importantly, the Klingons were still in good fighting shape, while a third of the Federation fleet was gone. So we shook hands and called it a day.

These equal points affairs are getting a bit samey, so I think next time we might do an imbalanced fight. Another thing I have noticed is that I am drawing up bad fleet lists. They are bad in the sense that when a fleet concentrates fire on a single ship, it generally renders the rest of the battle badly imbalanced. Next time, if we don't have an imbalanced fight, we might have a go at using a large number of small ships: four Burke Frigates and two Callahan Cutters would be equal in points to two Klingon E4s and four F5s, so it would be unlikely that the loss of a single ship would drastically alter the nature of the battle. I am still not quite sure what the technique should be when fighting against Klingons with the Federation. On the one hand, going at them head on allows the use of Photons, which are potentially devastating, but on the other hand, Fed ships are generally less capable of turning, so I should expect to find Klingons glued to my ships' tails. Presumably the way to resolve that is by having ships turn repeatedly, so some ship always has an arc on the enemy. Anyway, for now here are the photos of this latest battle.