Insight: Grade

Players familiar with Dog Fight: Starship Edition have had little reason to care about one ship statistic: Grade. A vessel's grade is basically its level of technology. The six original ships are all grade 4 (what ever that means). But there are other vessels in development which feature a range of different grades.

Future History

If we imagine current early 21st century space tech (and everything before it) as level 1, what would level 2 tech be like? In all likelihood inner system travel would become more commercialized, thus more streamlined and presumably more common. Perhaps not as common as an everyday launch from the Earth, but certainly common enough to have established or be in the process of establishing installations on the moon. This is, of course, all speculative but reasonable enough to help establish a baseline of technological development for the Dog Fight universe.

So level 3 space tech would have to be even more sophisticated than the vaguely referenced level 2, and extending the speculation further to level 4 would, ideally, be standard game-level tech. If we consider grade 1 tech to be point A and grade 4 to be point B (the goal), what is that goal? For the context of Dog Fight: Starship Edition, that goal is combat ships. Thus grade 4 ships represent Earth's first aerospace vessels primarily committed to combat action. In the Dog Fight universe, the U.S.S. Tavor was launched from Mars in 2095, the newest of the six basic combat ships currently available in the game.

Support Craft

Most support craft are not as sophisticated as capital ships so the former are typically of a lower grade. Given that these vessels are not intended to be self sufficient for extended periods of time they can be designed with anywhere from grade 1 to grade 4 technology.

Retrofitted Ships

Another collection of capital ships is in development. As far as the storyline goes, these are grade 3 ships which have been retrofitted to compete with grade 4 ships already released. There are some cool card ideas surrounding this concept.

SEE THE SHIPS