Firestorm Armada - Gundam Fleet Wings

In my most recent blog I posted about my Gundam themed force. To carry onward with those ideas, I figured I would push with my various ideas for Wings and flights.

For the first thing, the way Wings are handled in Firestorm Armada is no longer the same as it was when I last played. The V2 rulebook has changed how wings work, so I will need far less minis than I had originally thought I would. This works out great for me, and keeps the battlefield from getting jumbled up with tons of small ‘gundams’ and losing focus on the ship combat.

The idea is pretty specific for the most part.

First off, the odd man out. Not a Gundam, but a common sight within all the series is the mobile armor. For my force, I wanted to go ahead and use these as Assault wings. The Lancer miniature in particular fits the image that came to mind. In a lot of Sci-fi you see assault troops with some form of delivery system, and these mobile armors large thrusters will make excellent delivery systems for the foot troopers. I envision the fighter taking the cargo ever closer to the target, bobbing and weaving through combat. Once they are within range, the cargo system unlatches from underneath and almost immediately the main thrusters fire. The assault troops are sent at a high speed straight at the hull of a ship, breaching it and allowing them to unload.

For my Fighter wings I picked the Pathfinder miniature, as it is a main line troopers for the Jovian forces in Jovian Chronicles. Only fitting it would fill the same role in my force. Not much else to say. It is a fast vehicle, capable of launching the pilot into combat at great speeds, and has a general combat stat-line to handle more or less any situation. Not the greatest mobile suit, but certainly capable of getting the job done. I am tempted to add a shield to this mini to give him a more gundam-ish style, but for the most part it is decent out of the box.

 

For the Interceptor wings, only one of the Jovian Chronicle minis really screamed ‘MUST GO FASTER!’, and that is the Hector exo armor with nothing but massive thrusters instead of legs. For a machine that whole purpose exists to stop other ships and attacks, it seemed more than fitting. Yeah, it looks like it won’t do a ton of damage on it’s own, but it isn’t meant to, rather it is out to play the support role and make sure that no enemy mobile suits and mobile armors can endanger their squad mates. To me, this model seems like the one that most needs an active beam saber added to it, while every machine, expect the mobile armor, is expected to have a beam saber as standard armament, this one is the one that would most likely get right into melee if needed, while the others would tend to try and gun length.

The final ‘gundam’, but one I simply love the mini of and think it makes perfect sense, is the Stormrider exo armor that will play the role of the Bomber wing. The massive energy cannons look like they could put a decent sized hole in the side of a ship, and the massive thrusters make up for the large armor and weapon system weight loads the vehicle has to transport on the battlefield. While it’s main weapons are the twin mounted plasma cannons, there is also two turreted 30mm Vulcans mounted on the shoulders for use during defensive engagements while the machine is trying to get into a better position to use his guns.

So that is my general idea for the various mobile armor and mobile suits my Firestorm Armada fleet would launch. In terms of color, I have never had a problem with the classic white, blue, and red most main gundams use. That will also allow them to match the fleet itself with ease since I plan to carry over the Argama’s color scheme as true as possible.

I have not decided how I want to go about with naming. It only seems right that I name the mobile suits being launched, as those would be more personal than just another fighter jet. Biggest problem is that in no series does the various heavy, medium, and light armors really stay together on the Argama. In Z Gundam, you had the Rick Dias, Gundam Mk2, Zeta Gundam, and Hyaku Shiki. I guess you could say that the Zeta Gundam could count as the Bomber since it had the mega particle cannon, Gundam Mk2 was a pretty balanced mobile suit, but the Rick Dias was certainly no interceptor. It will take some work, but I am sure I’ll get something planned out. These are just the current rough ideas. I may scrap the idea of using the names from Z Gundam, and just stick with the theme.

So that is it for my wings. Not much, but something is certainly better than nothing at all.