Warship Build Special — UNSC Small Ships
This is a series that I haven’t touched in a while and given that I intend to present some Halo-themed ship listings for Intercept Orbit for Easter, I guess it wasn’t a bad time to offer the additional vessels that I needed to make for that to work. The Homeworld series is still happening, of course, and I still have to post the second half of the Kushan fleet before moving on to the Taiidan — I have grand plans for that series.
With that said, let’s move on to today’s builds.
The reason why I want to do all of this is mostly because I want to teach my kid and his friends to play the game, so I have been converting my real-life fleet fully in order to do so. I also want to add the Constructed faction, but that is something for later for now. I think you’ll enjoy what I have in store for you.
However, in order to make this idea work I needed some extra ships, given the IO releset. Today we’ll start with the new UNSC vessels.
First of all, I needed the High Value Asset. In Intercept Orbit the players fight for the non-combat assets of each fleet — transports, space stations, space whales, and so on. The UNSC HVA I came up with is the humble freighter — the Mulzac-class to be more specific. These were simple but reliable ships the UNSC used to carry all types of cargo around. As in the lore, this build is relatively simple and somewhat small. Using 10 parts it should be easy enough to put together. Two or three of these should be enough to play a game.
Another important aspect of IO’s rules is the concept of Aces. These are elite squadrons that give additional abilities to your fleet. These are usually represented by models of tiny robots (known as Frames in the game) to differentiate them from normal squadrons. However, an interesting discussion that I had in the past was about the possbility of using small warships for this role. This discussion actually derived from the idea of making fleets based on The Expanse setting.
However, Halo also has tiny warships barelly bigger than fighters. Corvettes are light, short-range warships that although individually quite weak, can add valuable capacities to a fleet due to their agility and relative stealth. The most common in regular use in human space is the Gladius-class. These vessels have limited weaponry that doesn’t place them much above a flight of Longsword fighters. However, their sensor suite is quite good and they found a place as scout assets in UNSC and Insurrectionist fleets.
This is a very small model that uses just 7 parts plus the base. It would be the UNSC yellow ace.
However, sometimes you just need that extra punch in your fleet at a reasonable price tag. The Lancer-class frigate was developed for this exact purpose, but turned out to have too many weapons and too little endurance for anti-Insurrectionist actions. It found a new purpose during the Covenent War when its firepower was direly needed.
This is evidently the red ace and it is another simple build that uses just 10 parts plus the base.
Again, these ships are not meant to be deployed alone but in small squadrons. In order to reinforce this idea I would place two per 4x4 base — the general size of an IO Frame squadron. You only need ONE ace per fleet, so two ships of the type you decide to use. You can have more than one fleet, though. An UNSC-Insurrectionist battle could make for a fun game.
The next post should be the second part of the Kushan fleet, than, but then we should have a new set of Covenant ships to complete this set so I can share the listings. Let’s hope it’ll be ready in timely fashion.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this post. If you like stuff like this please leave me a tip in my Ko-fi account so this madness may continue. You can also check original gaming stuff and adventure modules from me, as well as fiction that I wish to expand on in the future.
For now, go out there play games and enjoy your lives!
