Sablemage
Demi-God
No game last Saturday due to scheduling conflicts, so let's review something instead of sharing a writeup.
In a nutshell: Cepheus Engine stats and deckplans for the Gagarin class scoutship and half a dozen variants; 51 page PDF from Moon Toad Publishing with accoutrements, available here, £4.50 at time of writing.
Intentionality check: Not an impulse purchase, so check passed. I've known Moon Toad was working on this for a while, and it appeared to be inspired by one of my favourite scoutship deckplans, the Type S as shown in Traveller20. So it went on my wishlist immediately.
What You Get
The product covers seven versions of the basic design, each with full design details and deck plans:
- Baseline configuration. The usual scoutship features, but only one stateroom, no air/raft or turret, and 22 tons cargo. This is the basic spaceframe, built at TL 12; other variants are made by adding bits to it, reducing the cargo space, and they all start by adding a turret and air/raft.
- VIP transport. This adds a luxury stateroom and four crew bunks, and has 7 tons of cargo.
- Basic mail packet. This one has three staterooms, one standard and two cramped, and 11 tons of cargo.
- Extended operations packet. Three standard staterooms, 9 tons of cargo.
- Small cargo. One standard and one cramped stateroom, 14 tons of cargo.
- Basic passenger. With four standard staterooms and 5 tons of cargo, this one is actually the closest to the stock Classic Traveller Type S.
- Maximum cargo. One standard stateroom, 17 tons of cargo.
In all cases, the ship has jump-2 drives, but enough fuel tankage for an extra jump-1 (or additional mission duration). It also has two half-ton mission pods, each of which can further customise the ship with (say) an extra sensor or a one-shot missile. The product lists 21 different mission pods, which are more fluff than crunch but still intriguing, a random location chart, a page of details on the air/raft, and statblocks and portraits for eight characters, set up to be easily printed and cut out as cards.
This is a fairly big download for the page count, and consists of three files:
- GagarinScout.pdf (15 MB). The main PDF; introduction, full designs for each variant, several deckplans for each variant with different amounts of 'clutter' such as cargo containers. These are interspersed with illustrations of the ship type in various paint schemes and attitudes.
- GagarinAssets.zip (112 MB). A collection of 153 PNG files; 21 clutter items (things like cargo crates), 16 environmental backdrops (roads, snow, jungle etc), 4 external views of the ship, 18 planetary backdrops, 9 illustrations from the PDF, 2 air/raft images, 12 deep space backdrops, 72 tokens of various characters. Basically, all the VTT or print-and-play assets you might need to use this product except deck plans, but I usually snapshot those from the PDF anyway.
- gagarin_POD.pdf (74 MB). I'm guessing this is the file you use for making your own hard copy via something like Lulu, but I'm not sure; I don't swim in those waters. It's about 5x the size of the basic PDF, so I assume higher resolution.
What I Think
Moon Toad deck plans have been my go-to designs since about 2020, and I think this one might take over from their previous Strela class as my favourite scoutship. One thing I especially like about it is that if I print it on A4 paper, it's exactly the right size for 15mm figures or meeples.
Moon Toad have clearly thought about how I might want to use the ship in a game, and provided me with everything I might want for 15mm print-and-play; the only things missing for VTT are the deck plans, but that's nothing a quick screenshot or two and a bit of image editing won't fix.
Given the number of ship variants and VTT assets included, I am very pleased with my purchase.
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