First Full Thrust SSD built

I have been reading through the Full Thrust rules for the last few days. It is a system originally designed around the spacecraft models from GZG (but not limited to them). I particularly like the Outrim Coalition vessels. There are a lot of ships available for the game but not any of the Dropfleet models. I decided to help learn the game by building some stats for the UCM and PHR models I had pulled out.

The game is free and you can download the rules from their website. They are scans of old print versions of the game but they are quite readable. The rules are ‘fun’ over ‘realism’ and are quite simple. Hugh Fisher created a version of the rules called Full Thrust Dimensions that consolidated the various books and some other ideas into a nice set of rules. Those are the ones I am currently reading. There is also a version, from a group called Emerald City Skunkworks, called the Project Continum (sic) Rules that expands on Hugh’s work to add some additional capabilities to the game in terms of weapons, new ship systems etc. I will be looking into those at a later date.

The game uses an SSD much like SFB or Federation Commander but they are a bit more freeform in that the systems in the SSD represent effects and not discrete weapon mounts. So a bank of beam weapons might be represented with a single Class 2 beam icon but be many physical weapons.

Building the SSDs is a bit of problem if you are as fussy as I am. The German site, MechWorld, has a Full Thrust shipyard web app that will let you build ships and also create SSDs for you. It also does all the data verification for you so you don’t have to.

The issue for me is that the SSD builder, which is an incredible app, creates graphics in which the alignment is off enough to trigger whatever the hell is wrong with my brain. So all the weapon and ship systems are slightly off from one another and nothing lines up correctly. YMMV but I can’t stand that sort of thing.

Happily Hugh Fisher also created a set of symbols and templates in multiple formats that let you create your own SSDs. So I grabbed those and then used Affinity Designer to create my own (corrected) version of the frigate that I built using the MechWorld app.

So there are a few issues with my SSD that I still need to fix but at least the alignment won’t be triggering me.

I did steal the outlines from the MechWorld site to use in my SSDs as they look really damn good. If I progress any further in this then I may look at creating my own in Affinity Designer or editing theirs to make them a bit more visually distinct.