Warbirds: Space Age by Tasoth

Summary

posted by Tasoth Original SA post

What is that supplement? Climb into your space suits, grab your asses firmly with both hands and prepare for lift of because….

Warbirds: Space Age is blasting off.

It’s short, 31 pages, so this won’t be long or crazy in-depth. It picks up from the original setting. The Guild is supreme, they fly around in their tricked out prop planes and dominate against lesser aircraft. That is until a new island shows up, huge and unclaimed, that kicks off the biggest war Azure has ever seen. Big wars mean scores of combatants and The Guild starts getting its shit kicked. Hard.

Losing pilots left, right and center, the squadron commanders shout a collective ‘FUCK THIS SHIT’ and raid The Guild equipment vaults. Pilots start launching in jet fighters toting gatling style cannons and self-guiding missiles against prop planes. But that doesn’t end the war. No way.

Nuclear fusion rockets do. Rapidly the Guild takes the lead in space exploration by funding the Azure Space Agency. Missions go to the moon and moonlets surrounding the, recently revealed, gas giant that is Azure. Satellites are launched, planets are explored and Azure seems to be the only place capable of supporting life in system. Space is mostly written off until someone takes a closer look at the LaGrange points. It’s there The Guild and ASA find the next great discovery.

Mother fuckin’ Mass Relays.

Okay, not really Mass Relays, but jump gates. One leads to the Galactic Neighborhood, where mankind comes charging and, more or less, assumes the role of the Orks in their primitive but highly effective fighters; the other leads to a red dwarf surrounded by an asteroid field. And that asteroid field is rife with floatstone.

And that Ork comment is no joke. Humans are the only ones with the resource base to expend floatstone in their nuclear rockets. And Azure has a higher gravity than most worlds, so humans are stronger, faster and capable of withstanding higher acceleration than the other species in space. Mankind even built lasers and plasma weapons over transistors, so most human technologies outside of ‘Go fast’ and ‘blow shit up’ are woefully underdeveloped.

There’s a bunch of different alien races from low-grav world scholars, reptilian soldiers that seem to act with one mind to, the funniest, a race of cyborgs whose technology and implants completely fizzle out in the presence of humanity’s nuclear rockets. They even have simple rules to make your own alien races.

Actual rules haven’t changed. You need the core book to play. But the rockets humans use knock out most electronic systems and force alien craft to engage the human fighters in dogfights, which most alien craft are not built for. Downside, the rockets give away human positions and are easy for heat seeking missiles to track. Most of the vehicle stats aren’t different and there are some sample space craft of all sizes in the back of the book. Of note is that human capships are worse than their alien counterparts in all areas but speed, and they can escape at a moment’s notice because of their engines. Most combat won’t be happening in deep space, but around planetary bodies, gates or artificial constructs.

And that’s really it. 31 pages to take your Warbirding from the skies to the cosmos.