The success of Expansion #2 had produced a demand for more Star Fleet Battles products. As Steve Cole and his new company (Amarillo Design Bureau) needed income, they were only too happy to do another product, later in 1982. This expansion focused on new ships (with 86 new designs including war cruisers and PF tenders), but included two new empires (Andromedans and WYNs).
As with the two previous expansions, this began with a few (10?!?) pages of updates to previous rules, including an updated Sequence of Play, Fractional Accounting (you no longer had to spend energy in complete points), the plasma shotgun (which should have been a new rule, not buried in the errata), balcony and track landing systems, a true cloaking device cost chart, segmented turn plotting (the last attempt to make plotted movement work), shuttle chain reactions, new rules for firing weapons through an atmosphere, advantage options, and quick reverses.
New rules included enveloping plasma torpedoes, aegis fire control, the WYN Radiation Zone, ECM drones, changing speed in mid-turn, PF tenders, war cruisers, complete mine rules, new Federation fighters (F18 and F16), minesweepers, carrier pods, Lyran trimarans, Romulan modular ships, Free Traders, armed priority transports, Federation Express couriers, and more.
New scenarios included Space Dragons, Minesweeping, PF Pickup, Incident on the WYN Border, Probing the WYN Cluster, Fi-Con Fiasco, Trojan Shuttle II, and The WYN and the Lion.
Admiral Kosnett's War, a new campaign, was included.
Background for the WYNs and Andromedans was provided.
The game, for the first time, included a Master Ship Chart, which was so complex that the typesetter refused to format it and Task Force had to use the version from Steve Cole's typewriter!
Written by Stephen Cole
