Earth Defence Force fleet taking shape...

First off, as you've probably seen by now (unless you use an RSS reader) things look a little bit different around here. Yes, I thought it was time to try to spruce things up a little bit and this is the first step. My html-fu is weak but I'll continue to tinker with the blog a bit adding some pages and generally trying to make it look nicer. I hope you'll like it! Oh, and if there's some kind of feature you'd like to see on Fire Broadside let me know in the comments and I'll see what I can do... :)

In other news my search in Akihabara for Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato/宇宙戦艦ヤマト models was succesful! In 1979 Bandai released a bunch of "space panorama" sets with model kits of the different ships from Star Blazers and they happen to be just about the right size for Firestorm: Armada (which is what we're focusing on at the moment). These sets we're re-released last year and I found and bought one of them a couple of weeks ago:

 Decisive Battle of Saturn (with Andromeda and two destroyers against three Comet Empire ships)

However, they're not very common in stores over here anymore, and although they're available at Hobbylink Japan I wanted to see if i could find them cheaper by myself. So I turned Akihabara upside down looking for these things, but the only ones I could find was either the one I already had or the set that doesn't include any Earth Defence Force ships. I was just about to give up when I entered a small store near the station and found the two sets I was looking for to be able to make a well rounded fleet, namely:

 

Earth Defence Force Army (with the Yamato, Andromeda and a regular battleship as well as a Cosmo Tiger against a Comet Empire carrier).

Fierce Fight of Comet Empire City (with a battleship, two destroyers and a patrol cruiser against a Comet Empire dreadnought and a carrier)

I also managed to find an individual pack with two extra destroyers (seen at left) and one with some kind of transport that I thought could be useful as a, well... transport. Apart from these model kits I bought a few the Mechanical Collection trading kits which included two carriers and nine small unmanned cruisers that I think will be the perfect size to use as frigates.

So, all in all I have:

• One Yamato battleship
• Two Andromeda battleships
• Two standard battleships (I think I'll use the Andromeda models as battleships and these as battlecruisers)
• Two carriers
• Six destroyers (which I'll use as cruisers)
• Nine unmanned cruisers (smaller scale so will work as frigates)

The plan is to also get some fighter wings from the actual Star Blazers miniature game. I think that should be enough to get me by for a while. In my experience we rarely play very large games anyway.  It's no use putting the ships together yet as I'm leaving Japan in a few days but expect updates on this project and some pictures next week or so. 

Buying these sets has left me with a bunch of White Comet Empire ships as well, and although I didn't give them a second glance at first I've actually started to like them. So I might end up with two Star Blazers fleets!