Star Fleet Warlord Rules (Updated) - Play By E-Mail

Optional items are purchased using the appropriate miscellaneous orders, described in Chapter Seven. Once
bought, items are placed into a stockpile, which is located at your Home Office. The stockpile can contain any number of
optional items of each type (there is no upper limit, other than what you can afford to buy), which are presumed to be
packed away in crates awaiting deployment. Items in your stockpile cannot be used for attack or defense; they are of no
use until assigned or delivered as appropriate for their type. An unallocated optional item does nothing for you!
Must optional items are used by starships and are picked up using any of three methods:
• If you have items in stock when you buy a ship, that ship will pick up what items it can at that moment-
automatically, without any effort on your part! This will happen before the ship is delivered to a Warp Gate, if
you specified one as the delivery point. Thus, if you want to be sure a given ship has a full load of a particular
item (e.g., fighters on a carrier), buy the items first, then buy the ship. It will get first crack at those items.
• If any of your ships visits one of your bases, no matter where that base is or how far it is away from your Home
Office, that ship will automatically pick up any items you have in stock (so long as the ship is capable of
carrying those items, of course). If several ships enter the hex of a base on the same pulse of movement, the
oldest ships have priority.
• Finally, facilities ships can distribute optional items using a special order called GIVE (see Chapter Six). When
it uses this order, a facilities ship makes all your unallocated optional items available to all ships in the same
hex (again, older ships have a higher priority and will take what they can before other ships get a chance - ship
captains are notoriously greedy).
Facilities ships are extremely rare and hard to come by. Usually you will allocate optional items to ships by sending
them to bases and letting them pick up items automatically.
The cost of an optional item can often vary unpredictably, depending on the moods of the Galactic Council at the
time you try to buy the item(s). An item's price can fluctuate as much as 25% above or below the costs listed below, and
you will usually not be able to see these changes coming. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be), price shifts
do not last long, and usually go back to normal immediately following your purchase order.
Don't be too concerned about keeping your ships filled with optional items at the start of the game. In the early stages,
you need ships more than anything else. Drones and the like can wait, at least until you've had a few good prospects.
Fighters
These are small, one-being attack craft. A vessel which uses these is termed a carrier. For simplicity, the Galactic
Council provides one generic type of fighter which all carriers use. These fighters have combat factors of 4, both in attack
and defense, and usually cost around 5 EPs. Strike carriers and Legendary Aces each add 1 to the AF and DF of every
fighter aboard (these bonuses are cumulative).
Typical squadrons of fighters come in groups of 8 or 12. You will note that a carrier with 12 fighters has a
significant boost to its combat factors. However, note also that fighters do not provide hit points to a ship, so carriers by
themselves can often get in "over their head" and attack forces with much greater staying power. This usually results in a
lost carrier! For this reason most carriers are escorted by several other ships to provide support during battle. (See
Chapter Eight for a detailed example of this concept.)
Fighters are destroyed in combat only when the carrier begins to take damage. At light damage one fighter will be
lost, medium and heavy damage can kill several, and crippling damage destroys them all.
Fighters don't work in novas, supernovas, nebulas, ion storms, negative energy fields, or antimatter zones.
Fast Patrol Ships (PFs)
Fast Patrol Ships are usually referred to as PFs. These units are larger than fighters and in fact are much like
small ships, but are incapable of independent strategic operations. To this end they are carried around by other ships,
which are often referred to as tenders. PF tenders usually hold six PFs and are often scouts as well, although a few
"casual" tenders exist that only carry two. Most Lyran ships fall into this latter category.
A PF has an AF and DF of 15, and usually costs about 20 EPs. Legendary Aces add 3 to the AF and DF of each
PF on your ship. There are no "strike tenders," and even if you have PFs aboard a strike carrier, they receive no benefit
from this fact.
If a PF is aboard a ship which takes enough damage to cause the ship to reach the "heavy damage" level or
greater, one PF will be destroyed and 6 points of damage will be subtracted from that volley. (This process is then
repeated until all PFs are destroyed or the volley is no longer sufficient to heavily damage the ship.) This damage
absorption ability is the main advantage of PFs over fighters!
Fast patrol ships do not apply their combat strength in negative energy fields, but they do provide their damage
absorption. They do not work at all in novas or supernovas.
PFs do not become available until Y180. Note that unlike Star Fleet Battles, all PFs are "generic" and become
available at the same time.
Lyrans (historically the first to develop PFs) do not gain PFs any sooner than other races, although many of their
tenders are available before Y180. Many players who specialize in Lyran ships spend their entire income during Y180 in
order to fill all their ships with PFs!
Revised 30 June 2010 Page 20