You know what weird thing Star Frontiers, a science fiction game about space exploration, was lacking for three years of its existence? Rules for space ships. Knight Hawks fixed that in 1983.

Well, not 100% true. As you saw yesterday, the mini-module that accompanied the screen touches on an aspect of space combat, as does the module Sundown on Starmist. But that isn’t exactly the robust set of rules you’d expect for a space-based science fiction RPG in the year of our Return of the Jedi.  

Knight Hawks delivers a suite of info on both star fighters and larger capital ships and is pretty satisfying for the time. As it says on the box, the ship combat is resolved using a tactical hex-based board game (it is designed as a stand-alone, so you can just play the ship battles if you like). It is fine, but a bit too wargame-y for my particular tastes. It is a lot simpler than Traveller, though!

Thing I have a hard time wrapping my brain around: despite all the capital ships being depicted horizontally, the inside decks are arranged perpendicular to the ship’s axis because they launch and fly like rockets. So, you know how the Millennium Falcon is basically one deck and you can walk from the cockpit to the engines in the back? Not so for Star Frontiers. You need a lot of ladders and elevators to get from the bridge (the top) to the engines (the bottom) in that cruiser on the cover. Which makes some sense, because acceleration would provide gravity. I think. It honestly hurts my head to think about it.

Anyway, I think the cover painting is fun, because it isn’t the sort of thing you usually see Elmore doing, and I think he does it pretty well.