Firestorm Armada originally came out from Spartan Games around the end of 2009, had a fairly steady stream of new releases including a 2nd edition, lasting until about 2017 before the company shut down for good. These days Warcradle owns the rights to most of the old Spartan games, but while they have an open playtest document for a 3rd edition there's really nothing been done with it since 2020 and none of the older minis are available through them at this point. We recently had word that the new edition is back in development here in 2026, so we'll see what comes of that. Certainly not holding my breath on new releases, and sadly I doubt the older figures (there have been at least two generations of these ships with quite different design aesthetics) will ever come back - except perhaps as STLs for home 3D printing.
Anyway, I'll do my part to preserve some record of the early Firestorm Armada line, in this case with a gallery of some very old (well over ten years now) painted samples of some of the Relthoza ships.
This is my only surviving image of most of an original Relthoza fleet box (one battleship, three cruisers, and four frigates over on the left - the box came with six initially) plus a blister pack of escorts (on the right) and a heavy cruiser (the bigger horizontally-oriented ship). All resin except for the three metal escorts. They're quite large, with the battleship over 6" long. All are resin except for the escorts.
Escorts again, this time with a pair of destroyers and a dreadnought.
Took a lot of photos of that dread.
It is a nice model, very detailed but easily painted and a breeze to assemble, only four parts if memory serves.
Not the speediest of ships, as you might guess by the relatively dinky engines.
The two "side hull" pieces would almost work as cruiser-sized ships on their own.
Despite its size and vertical layout, being made of fairly light resin made it pretty stable, although I did cut down the flight post to further lower the center of gravity.
Destroyers again, another very vertical design.
Firestorm was weird in that destroyers were nearly as big as cruisers.
Escorts, in the older more yellow color scheme I first used.
Size comparison shot with a customized Phalon ship from Ground Zero Games' Full Thrust range. Probably not a great deal of help, but the custom ship was built off a combine superdreadnought and battlecruiser hull. Its also made of metal (with metal flight post as well) and weighs considerably more than the larger Relthoza resin figure.
Another size comparison image, with a Full Thrust Japanese superdreadnought added.
And one last image, this time next to the two largest ESU ship classes in the Full Thrust range, with the superdreadnought on the left and the heavy carrier on the right.
I note that as of time of writing, you can turn up a few more images on Pinterest from back when these were on sale, or from old deleted blog posts of mine. Not going to try dredging them out of the Wayback Machine though, so these will have to do.
