# Starship! *Created:* 2025-01-06, *Modified:* 2026-10-08 ![[Starship! (cover).jpg|600]] **Starship!** (Flagship Games) is a tabletop miniatures wargame of capital-ship fleet combat in the cold depths of space, built to capture "the feel of starship combat found in animé and popular science-fiction films" — which, being Flagship, means the laws of physics get a cursory nod and are then left behind for fun and playability. It's the starship sibling of the same studio's [[Mecha!]], sharing the Battlepole 3D trick (here it's your ships that climb and dive through six flight bands instead of your mecha), and it commits one heresy wargamers still argue about decades later: **you're allowed to pre-measure.** All distances in the future are trivia to a race that can design a "great whomping space ship," so Starship! lets you measure to your heart's content and even read your enemy's spec sheets. It's a game that assumes nobody's keeping secrets. ## Setting The universe is whatever you want it to be — Starship! is a customizable toolkit, not a locked canon, with ship design and race creation built in. Its fiction frames a war between fleets that exist partly in normal space and partly in **hyperspace**, the "indescribable place" where hyperdrives fling giant ships from Point A to Point B and where gravitational storms, rogue planets, and ion fields churn the landscape; the hyperspatial polarity conveniently keeps everyone "right side up" relative to each other so the ships can actually dogfight. The rulebook carries three ready-made races front and center: - The **DARC** — the classic animé good guys, colonists of a terraformed Earth-like world (New Deutscheland, New America, New Russia, New Canada) who broke free of the old empires and just want to go home and restore Truth and Beauty. Everyone's young and good-looking with great hair, everyone yearns for something, and their fast, graceful ships fight with agility and superior shields — no torpedoes, lots of long-range passes, then Disruptor blasts to cripple a target for boarding. - The **S'Tang** — burrowing, armadillo-like omnivores whose homeworld's sun swelled into a red giant, driving them through brutal tunnel wars into a culture that believes victory comes from maximum linear force. Their language has over two hundred words for heat and fire and every obscenity references one or the other; their ships charge straight at the enemy and obliterate it as efficiently as possible, and their racial edge is **Liquid Armor**. - The **EMC** (European Militaristic Cybersynthesis) — the human antagonist empire that conquered Earth and menaces the colonies; its ships are the white hulls on this cover. ## Mechanics Starship! runs on a clean, fast turn sequence, with the fleet's ability to act governed by the size of its biggest ship: - **Turn order:** each turn opens with the **initiative** roll — each side rolls 1d10 and adds its **Command Points**. Movement goes by ship size, largest (SS5) first down to escorts, with the side that lost initiative moving first within each size so the winner can react; shooting then goes largest-first too but with the initiative side firing first, and damage lands immediately. Then fighters/mecha move and fight, boarding resolves, repairs happen, and fires burn. - **3D movement:** ships carry **velocity** and spend **Thrust** to accelerate or decelerate, and use **Vector Changes** (22.5° turns) to steer — and, crucially, to change **Flight Bands** (2 VC per band), climbing and diving through six levels of vertical space on the Battlepole. Push past your ship's safe thrust or safe VCs and you're in **unsafe** territory: roll 1d10 against your **Stress Number** or eat a persistent hull crit. Movement isn't a free-for-all; ramming is deliberate, declared, and comes with a grim Ram Chart. - **Combat:** each gun rolls 1d10 against the target's **Target Number**; roll equal or higher to hit, and beat the **Lethal Hit Number** for a double-strength hit (guns only — missiles and torps never crit that way). Damage is sized (1, 3, 5, or 7 columns wide), hits the ten **armor columns** on a facing, is reduced by **shields**, and rolls 1d10 for where it lands. Anything that punches through armor causes **crits** — internal damage divided by the target's ship size, each rolling on the ship's crit chart. Armor is ablative; a dead hull is a floating hulk. - **Weapons:** a genuinely generous arsenal — **missiles** (fire batteries, run the ECM and defensive-fire gauntlet), **torpedoes** and **E-torps** (energy torpedoes, impervious to defensive fire but decaying over range), **guns** in fifteen technologies (including bow-only **Spinal** guns of catastrophic output), **Point Defense Systems** (PDS, useless against ships, precious against missiles and fighters), **fighters** and **mecha** in squadrons, and **combat shuttles** and **assault pods** that deliver marines for **boarding actions**. - **Design & fleets:** you design ships from **Build Points** in ship sizes SS1–SS5 (starbases up to SS6), choosing guns, weapons, ECM, crew, marines, and armor; every race gets a **special ability** (the S'Tang's Liquid Armor, the DARC's Agile Ships + Superior Shields). A full **campaign** system layers on top: each player becomes a galactic empire with a **Holdings Chart** — a circular grid of up to 25 territories linked by Warp Lines — earning Resource Points, building from up to ten ship designs, and resolving weekly orders. There's even a "Temporal Flux" escape hatch so a busy player can lock their empire in time for a turn rather than miss out. It's not hard science and never claims to be; it's fast, 3D, and built to be tinkered with — the kind of game that wants you to build the ships you already love. ## Editions **Starship!** is a short line with a convoluted but short lineage — same studio family as Mecha! (Seventh Street Games' staff reorganized as **Flagship Games**, whose rights were later absorbed by **Scale Creep Miniatures** in late 2009): - **Starship! 3D Miniature Space Combat** (Flagship Games, **2000**, re-released **2004**) — the original print rulebook, launched at Conquest 2000 after a famously long "rules in development for over five years" gestation, then re-released in October 2004 alongside the supporting resin miniature lines (S'Tang, EMC, DARC). - **Starship! 3D Miniature Space Combat** (Scale Creep Miniatures, **2015**) — the electronic edition, *copyright 2015 Scale Creep Miniatures*, watermarked PDF still sold today. *In the library.* Same game, one electronic re-release; no true second edition to chase. ## References - [Starship! 3D Miniature Space Combat - Scale Creep Miniatures, on DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/296736/starship-3d-miniature-space-combat) - [Starship!: 3D Miniature Space Combat (2001) - BoardGameGeek](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/30578/starship-3d-miniature-space-combat) - [SCN - Starship (Flagship Games release history)](https://www.star-ranger.com/Starship.htm)