Aétos Drydock

Aétos Drydock was built to serve as the target site for a starship heist, and it was a high point of a 2-year campaign using the Stars Without Number sci-fi tabletop roleplaying game. See below for more info & static images.

This campaign took place in a version of our galaxy several centuries in the future, where Earth has been long lost and new interstellar nations have already risen and fallen and risen again. The main characters were pirates and smugglers, but they had a significant problem—their ship was a simple merchant vessel and not well-suited to piracy. Enter Aétos Drydock, a facility on an independent world that was due to conduct routine maintenance on a military corvette. All the characters had to do was infiltrate the yard, board the vessel and eliminate any crew before seizing the vessel for themselves. What could go wrong? 

A lot, as it turned out. 

This map was 70 x 70 grid squares (representing 140 by 140 meters), and had several different layers and versions for different stats of the drydock. I run games in a very sandbox style, where there are no predetermined outcomes or right answers, so I wasn't certain when my players would enter the drydock, or how many times. I made a version with a freighter in the designated bay in case they scouted the place well in advance, and an empty version if they entered just shortly before the corvette arrived. Lastly, of course, were the versions with the corvette itself in place, with its two decks, magnetic crane above, and possible boarding tubes extended. 

Aétos Drydock was created at the tail end of my time making battlemaps in Photoshop, and I feel there's only a handful of things that would have been improved by using Dungeondraft for a map like this—some things, like shadows, would actually have been worse.