Full Thrust Phalon Gallery

 After finishing up last week's index of starship posts I came to the much-belated realization that I didn't actually have a gallery of Ground Zero Games' Full Thrust Phalon ships anywhere.  Probably did one many years ago and deleted it when I purged many old posts from before 2016, then just never got around to replacing it.  This sad state of affairs can't be allowed to continue, of course.

See, I used to own a lot of Phalon minis.  A whole lot.  Possibly more than the entire continent of Australia at one point, although that might have been a joke by the guys at Eureka.

Capital ships, from the humble battleship up to a customized dreadnought and superdreadnought. 

A hefty carrier arm with the attendant swarm of fighter craft.

Dizens of cruisers from light recon ships up to battlecruiser fleet defense ships.

Whole flotillas of destroyers and frigates of various types.

Clouds of light escorts and strike boats and tiny scouts.

They're all long since sold off to new owners, but I did manage to find some old images from back in 2014 when I made a concerted effort to record the fleet en masse for posterity.

How did I wind up with som many?

Well, Phalons are an older fleet, dating back to the 90s and the days when Geo-Hex had a license to manufacture and sell many GZG figs here in the US.

And I was working in a game store back in those days, with a healthy employee discount.

Between that and keeping and eye out for other stores choosing to remainder Full Thrust stock now and then, I was buying ships pretty cheap for  a few years there.

For whatever reason, the Phalons seemed to show up in disproportionate numbers in those kinds of closeout sales, and I've always had a hard time saying no to a bargain.

To be fair, apparently all three of the Fleet Book 2 alien races had a similar, ah, dearth of popularity, and showed up at discount more often than the human fleets.

I think I'd attribute that to biotech ships (whether Sa'Vasku or Phalon) just being less in demand than more conventional designs, and the first-generation Kra'Vak at least looking like the larger ships would be rather fragile on the table. 

At any rate, the local FT players that I gamed with most often agreed to split the xeno fleets between us, and I wound up becoming the area's Phalon Guy.

Not that I'm complaining, or I wouldn't have accumulated so many of them over time.

I was even happy to buy some of the new sculpts that came out in 2008 and 2009 even though I already had far more minis than I really needed. 

Never did get any of their transport pod ships though, and there's just the one lone Gruuss attack cruiser to be seen in a few of these images. 

Sadly, the Gruuss I got had a rare miscast around the weapon barrels, so it's not quite a stock model. 

I did pick a half-dozen of each of the new destroyer types, which I'm still quite fond of.

All of the new sculpts have suggested stats over on Dean "Star Ranger" Gundberg's Full Thrust Resource page here.

He's also got better close-ups of some of my own paint jobs on them than I do, including the "Gruuss-B" with the miscast and a good image of how it's supposed to look from the original news release for Salute 2008.

I had so many ships that I "expended" a few on conversions, like the "head swap" on the battledreadnought here where a heavy cruiser aft hull replaces the original prow.

The dorsal weapon pod got some mods as well.

I did something similar with a superdreadnought and a battlecruiser aft hull later on, but my close-up photos of the ship are still eluding me.  You can catch a glimpse of it way up in the first photo.  It's the lone ship in the purple paint scheme, and was meant to be the personal flagship/transport of the Oobah of Poom, the head of a major social/religious/economic faction within the Phalon Conglomerate.  I ran a few scenarios over the years where various navies were bent on killing or protecting the Oobah on his way to negotiations with humanity at Sol.