The fleet here is just the start of my Earth Alliance: Early Years and was put together just to get the ball rolling so to speak. Starting the Fleet The range of ships available to the budding Earth Force Admirals is restricted to those with 'In Service' dates between 2230 - 2247, which pretty much restricts it to a lot of the somewhat 'veteran' vessels in service such as the Artemis Frigate or Olympus Corvette, both as it happens shown in the photo above. They are certainly not bad ships by any stretch, but put up against the more advanced ships of the Centauri or worse, Mimbari, they will almost certainly be a little outclassed. That's not to say the list is not worth fielding, far from it. The EA Early years list does contain some real gems, such as the iconic Hyperion Cruiser, Nova Class Dreadnought and a carrier all at 'Raid' level (Note: For those that don't play, ships are categorised by level with each 'roughly' twice the ability of the level preceding. They are from the lowest Patrol, Skirmish, Raid, Battle, War and Armageddon). All of the above I will feature later, but for now, I thought I would assemble a small core force with which to build around. The Orestes Class Systems Monitor
Equipped with a main bore sighted battery of Heavy and Medium Laser Cannons, forward railguns and all round pulse cannons, the Orestes-Class can more than hold its own in the centre. Fighter support is also available in the form of two Starfury wings Painting wise the Orestes is very straight forward consisting of dry-brushing NATO black and wolf grey for the rear section and working up from a black primer and adeptus battle grey (GW Foundation range), through stonewall grey (Vallejo), wolf grey (Vallejo) and finally ghost grey (Vallejo) for the main hull of the ship. The final highlights were a mix of ghost grey and white. For the banding I started with a dark stripe of night blue (Vallejo) which I then added Prussian Blue (Vallejo) to for the highlights. The Starfury fighters were somewhat trickier in that Mongoose supply all of the fighters with special black plastic hexagonal box-bases. They look very smart when mounted on them, however, the problem is I really don't like the look. So, I ditched the supplied bases in preference of a standard small flying base into which I mount each of the fighters individually using a length of steel pin (aka a paperclip!). This gives me the advantage of matching all of the bases within the fleet as well as varying the height and positions of the fighters on each base for a more natural look. The downside however is it means clipping the stems off, filing, pinning and mounting a huge number of fighters individually. there are times I will admit that I wish I hadn't chosen this method. Especially with one of the earth carriers coming with a whopping sixteen flights! |
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At
the heart of the fleet I selected an Orestes. This is a 'Battle'
level ship which is designed to be the core of any Earth
Alliance task force.