STARFIRE BASIC

Starfire began in 1979 as a simple, fast-playing game of starship combat. Its original micro-pouch edition,
published by Task Force Games, cost about US$5 and featured about 10 pages of rules and 20 pages of
scenarios. Ship display sheets were painfully simple, with each starship capable of being represented by a single
line of text, like so:

Endeavor DD (2) SSSAAHWILWIWIIII(6)

Endeavor was the ship's name. DD is the modern-naval abbreviation for a Destroyer. The (2) represented its
Turn Mode, i.e. how many hexagons the ship had to move forward before it could make a 60 degree turn. Each
S was a shield, each A was a unit of armor, the H was a cargo hold, each W was a gun/missile "weapon"
launcher, each I was an ion engine, and the L was a laser. The (6) was just a quick summary of how many ion
engines the starship had, and thus how fast it was -- a ship could move as many hexagons per turn as it had
engines.

Each ship was assumed to be able to run all of its systems at full power every turn. Missiles and gun shells were
in unlimited supply. If a ship was hit by enemy weapons and took damage, letters on its line of text would get
crossed off from left to right, one letter for each damage point, so that after taking 7 damage points the
Endeavor would look like this:

Endeavor DD (2) xxxxxxxILWIWIIII(6)

As you could imagine, designing your own ships was trivially easy. You put your shields and armor and cargo
holds on the left, so that they'd get destroyed before your critical systems did, and then you packed whatever
useful systems you could afford to buy into the remaining "hull" space. Each system had a cost in
"megacredits," for purposes of game balance, and a size in hull spaces. (Engines cost more megacredits and
took up more hull spaces the bigger the ship they were installed in.) If you wanted to get really fancy, you could
even use "Tech Levels" to indicate whether a particular system was available for building into your ship or not
-- e.g., missile launchers were available at Tech Level 1, but force beams did not become available until Tech
Level 4. Starships from different races could meet each other and have big space battles thanks to the existence
of naturally-occurring "warp points" that linked star systems together.

It was an exceedingly simple, elegant system.

So, we will use the same system, calling it “Starfire Basic” (Starfire II). Below is a list of systems being used in
this campaign:

A = Armor

S = Shields

H = Cargo Hold

L = Laser

Q = Crew Quarters

Lh = Life Support
X = Sensors

BbS or BbL = Boat bay small or large

Br = Bridge

W = Missile launcher

F = Forcebeam

I = Ion Engines

G = Gun

L = Laser

Z = Datalink (3 ships can be datalinked together)

*All weapons have unlimited ammo.

*All systems are run at full power every turn.

2nd Edition Starfire To-Hit and Damage Tables

To-Hit Table
Range 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21- 25-
24 30
Gun 11 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 - - - - - - - - - - - -
Missile - 4 7 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 8 8 7 7 6 - -
CM - 4 7 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 8 8 7 7 6 6 5
Beam 12 12 11 11 10 10 9 9 9 8 8 8 7 7 7 6 6 5 4 4 3 2 2

Damage Table
Range 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21- 25-30
24
Gun 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 - - - - - - - - - - - -
Missile 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 - -
CM 0 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
Force 5 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 - - - - - - -
Energy 5 4 3 2 1 1 1 1 1 - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Primary 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 - - - - - - - - - -
Laser 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Needle 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 - - - - - - - - - -