I love my Scyk interceptors and my A4 Y-wings. They're the greatest. I'm also excited to see the new ships the Scum will come out with. I'm also excited to get my scum repainted in a proper space pirate squadron. That'll take some time, but I'll get it done.

So, basically make the A-wings an even less desirable choice then?

Wow, I never thought of the Y-wing as Mossie. That's a great comparison. I just saw a real Mossie yesterday at the EAA Air Venture Museum, along with its Merlins dismantled for viewing. Great plane.

I love the Warthogs. They're in my Scum list, though I didn't leave points for the Agromech upgrade. Even without it, I ended up with target lock pretty much every turn, which made them very unlikely to miss. The Ion cannons were fantastic, because I didn't care so much about their damage output (it was good anyway), but I had Scyks with manglers backing them up, so what I really wanted was to screw my opponent out of using his actions and his dials. They accomplished that mission perfectly, and piled on more damage than I was expecting. Since I only needed one hit to make the ions do their work, generally, my rounds looked like "Fire main gun at range 1, roll 3 dice, spend target lock, reroll some dice, end up with 1-2 uncanceled hits on average. Then roll 3 dice for ion turret, and the enemy now has no focus or evade tokens, and I only need 1 hit, so I generally get at least 1 to ionize him." So I was averaging probably 2-3 damage per warthog per round, with an ion token thrown into the mix. I think the Warthog is a good name for the Scum Y-wing. It's a very apt comparison. A heavy-hitting ship, with two engines, which looks like a pig, and is dirty and simple and old-school, but gets the job done. Somebody mentioned the Warthog is a heavy fighter, but it's not. It's kind of helpless against fighters IRL. It is a ground attack beast, though it can take out helicopters quite nicely. A heavy fighter would be something like an F-15E strike Eagle.

We can't do heavy hutt without medium hutt, so Dunelizards for everyone!

Very pretty! That's the first Star Viper I've actually wanted.

I was trained by a USAF lieutenant colonel via flight sims, so it's a term we used a lot.

The term knife fight comes from the old fighter pilot slang "Knife fight in a phone booth" implying an extremely close-quarters battle. It gained currency in the modern era, in the age when it was thought missiles would be dominant. Since sidewinders could engage opponents at 2-3 nautical miles initially (and farther than that these days) and now modern AIM-120 active radar guided missiles have a 100% PK (probability of kill) at 75 nautical miles, gun kills are considered to be the "knife fight in the phone booth." The action which characterizes this kind of fight, is a close quarters dogfight at relatively low speeds (300-400 knots), utilizing the types of maneuvers common to earlier kinds of aerial combat like that seen in WW1 and WW2. In terms of Star Wars, I don't have enough experience to figure out which ships are the best knife fighters, but in the computer games, the best dogfighters are always the lightest and most agile, so you'd call the A-wing and the TIE interceptor the best at the "knife fight in the phone booth" the way the F-16 and F-18 are considered superior to the F-15 in this aspect today. However, the tabletop game of X-wing plays out differently than a simulator does, and it seems to me that the ships that perform best sticking it out at close range are the very ships that would do poorly at it in a simulator environment - B-wings especially, but Y-wings as well (though they lack the great arc-dodging performance). So, knife-fighting in X-wing miniatures is, I think, a reversal of knife-fighting in real aerial combat, and in the X-wing games, favoring heavy-hitting ships with good shields and hull who can stick it out against enemies at close range.

This is fantastic! That cherry blossom Z-95 is one of the coolest things ever!

You'd really want to play it? The other issue is I don't have any game creation expertise or any artistic talent, so I'd need to find partners willing to do it.

This is making sense to me now. I appreciate you posting this build, it's something I haven't seen yet (though I'm sure not uncommon) and it's interesting to think about how Scum will deal with it best.

I'd have to play it out to see if I agree with you or not. All I'm saying is that it makes no sense to be able to shoot the star wars cannons (which are supposed to be lasers, I think, but which act more like guns) at the same range as a missile. The combat in star wars was initially based on WW2, and missiles play little or no role in the films (yes, I know about the Death Star, but the way they behave is more like bombs from a dive bomber in that scene). The X-wing video games, which heavily-inspired both the Rogue Squadron series of books, and this miniatures game, move technology up to something approaching the Vietnam-era in terms of weapons capability. If we're going with that as our baseline, missiles should have an engagement zone beyond that of guns, that's all I'm saying. The fact that they don't hinders their utility to the extent that they go largely unused, just as they would in a real life scenario in which an expensive, one-shot weapon had the same range and damage capabilities as an infinite-shot weapon with no base cost.

While I can suspend my disbelief to enjoy dragons, hey they're magical, I must say Birds of Prey would be awesome. Makes me remember the video of the Golden Eagle grabbing goats off of a cliff, flying away and dropping them to their deaths hundreds of fett below. Yeah, raptors are bada**. I used to work at a raptor rehabilitation center, so I have hands-on experience with most of the North American raptor species. I have been trying to get the funding/resources to do a miniatures game of birds of prey, with falcons and accipiters serving as the fighters, eagles as the heavy fighters/gunships, and vultures as the bombers (lammergeier anyone?) but I think I'm pretty much alone in this desire so it hasn't gone anywhere. For me, the other issue with dragons is that nobody bothers to utilize proper aerial combat tactics with them. If you actually watch raptors, they utilize the same maneuvers as jet fighters. The first time I saw a peregrine falcon make a good turn circle entry into the lag window on a duck, pull lead, and go in for talons, I was hooked (and so was the duck).

I'd be surprised if you didn't see them. That was my initial plan for my Scyks - all ion cannons. Even with the build I'm planning to run is A4 Y-wings with ion turrets and Scyks with Manglers, so it's heavy on control. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but can't pilots arc-dodge their way out of Biggs' ability? So rather than moving to get him in their arc, they move to get him out of their arc while retaining the others? I know that it would be tough if you're a good formation flier, but it's possible, right?

Actually, Manglers would play into his hands. The problem with Draw Their Fire has always been it does nothing unless your opponent actually rolls a critical. With a Mangler it will work every time and allow DP to consistently split the incoming damage around. Ah, I see what you're saying. That makes sense. So against this build it'd be better to roll with ion cannons to control his movement and give damage he can't send elsewhere?

Not any faster than 3 die attacks, and I can Draw the Fire of any [KABLAM] results that are nominally the threat of the beast. I do not fear the 5x Mangler build any more than I would a 5x Interceptor build. Why not? The mangler allows you to change normal damage results to crit results. You pass those on, but in a given mangler swarm, you're pretty much guaranteed to be passing 5 crits on to your damage sinks, which would not be the case for the interceptors, which would produce fewer crits.

I don't know that you're blind to it, but Mangler Cannons may start eating through shields fairly rapidly?

I'm gonna post a few reasons why I don't think this is a good idea. Colonel Jendon passing Target Locks gained at anywhere thanks to the title to Scimitars armed with Assault Missiles. Lieutenant Blount with Deadeye locks down anyone with an Ion Pulse Missile then an A-Wing next round uses Decoy and Deadeye locks down the same ship again. Nera Dantels could Torpedo ANYWHERE with Deadeye. My general rule of thumb for any attack is that if it goes beyond three it should only be for Epic. Also I'm going to go the same with the Battlefield cards. I think you just backed up my point. All of a sudden missiles become incredibly viable. If they're limited weapons, there is a limit to how many turns you can deploy them, and they still require you to roll attack dice, so they're not guaranteed hits. This suddenly gives them a reason to be in the game, which they seem to be lacking at the moment. It also dramatically alters the playing field with stand-off tactics versus formations. Edited to add: Just as an example, the scimitars with assault missiles are paying 5 points per missile with no rerolls, with the missile discarded at the time of the attack. That's a pretty hefty price to pay to take a shot, which is why we don't see many ordinance cards in play at the moment.

Realism is a deal breaker, and you have no problems with X-Wing? I get that Star Wars has atrocious space physics, and that the ship designs are implausible for the mission at hand. For some reason that doesn't bug me nearly as much as dragons. I guess there are two reasons for this. In the first place, we don't know what the most effective starfighter designs will look like in the future (and many smart people into science fiction think they won't exist at all). Secondly, we do know what works in our atmosphere, with our gravity, and dragons do not. That's not to say Star Wars isn't way off the mark - it is, but it's not as far off the mark as Dragons. I guess the last point is probably that I grew up with Star Wars so heavily influencing my views of space that it seemed to me to be reality as a kid, and it's hard to shake that notion as an adult. Not the same with dragons. Is it logically consistent? Maybe not, but there it is.

I cannot stand D&D: AW. Dragons are aerodynamically implausible. Makes me freaking crazy. The only way they could possibly work is if they were giant hydrogen gas bags, and even that rubs me the wrong way. Dragons...grumblegrumble. If they want to have non-airplanes or non-starfighters, use birds of prey. They're beautiful and intelligent and incredible fliers. Let's face it, Peregrine Falcon vs Northern Goshawk is a way cooler match-up than some lame sky lizards.

I would love to see your desert storm squad!

Gorgeous repaints! I love your scum especially.

Nothing wrong with it looking like a viper, the viper's a hot ship. Plus, logically, your design makes more sense. With the E-wing's engines slung under the winglets, it would roll like a pig. Moving the engines closer to the center of mass of the ship will increase the roll rate substantially. So, it looks better and the performance improves. Oh, and nice job moving the blaster to a place that allows the freaking canopy to open.

I love it!

Does this spreadsheet also track how much money you spent on the sets? That would be terrifying...