Just throwing it out there, but I think there should be a new category of unit: air support. First, you would have fighter support: x-wing, tie fighter, droid starfighter, Arc Starfighter. They would have 4-6 health, 1-3 shield tokens, armor, Speeder 2, speed 3 with a compulsory move, immune to range 1, surge to block, cover 1 and white defense dice. They would also have a new keyword, "escort". Escort would state that while the fighter is within range 1 of a dropship that is in the air, the fighter would gain guardian -. That is, the fighter could attempt to intercept any and all damage to the transport. They would have two weapons, but no arsenal. The first weapon would be blasters: Range 3, front arc only, 4-6 white attack dice with blast, suppressive and scatter to be used against trooper units. The second weapon would be missiles: Range 3, front arc only, 2-4 red dice and 2-4 black dice with impact equal to the number of dice rolled. Missiles would be usable only against vehicles. The idea is that they are great for taking out vehicles, and they can provide support against infantry by strafing. Strafing would be highly inaccurate fire, but would pull the units out of cover and heavily suppress them. They would have a commo, and a pilot upgrade available. A new pilot could grant arsenal 2. The second class of ships would be troop transports: U-wing, Imperial Dropship Transport (IDT), HMP droid gunship, and LAAT for the clones. They would have 4-6 health, white defense dice, armor, speeder 2, speed 3, with a compulsory move (there would be a landing craft key word that would allow them to ignore their compulsory move on the condition that during the current activation they use an action to perform the "land" action). While in flight they would be immune to range 1 and have cover 1 and surge to block. They would not have immune to range 1 or cover 1 while on the ground. Instead, while on the ground, they would convert 1 enemy miss to a crit on all attack pools targeting them. They would be capable of transporting 2 full units of small or medium based minis and a commander or operative. They would have no forward facing weapons, but would have arsenal 2 with 2 door gunners with 4-6 white dice each and the suppressive keyword that could only fire out of side arcs. There would be a restriction on arsenal 2 requiring that in order to use both door gunners, they must fire from different arcs. So, the door gunners can fire out of both side arcs, but both door gunners can't fire out of the same arc. If the dropship is destroyed in the air while units are aboard, all units on board are destroyed as well. Both fighters and transports would come with a crashed version terrain mini. If those units are destroyed in the air, the player controlling them would be allowed to place the crashed version anywhere within range 1 so long as the mini does not overlap any units, objectives, or terrain.

It's called Coordinated Bombardment and Maximum Firepower.

All of those fighters are way too big in legion scale and their speeds make them unsuitable for the small board space, they are better represented by command card attacks

I'd rather see it handled the way Flames of War does. You put a small-ish representative mini on the board, flack shoots at it (with great difficulty) and then it drops a template or rolls dice (for bombs or guns, respectively). You have to roll to succeed at "calling in an air strike". This mechanic would work well in Legion, except instead of a template you drop a token and hit everything within a certain range of it (or two tokens for strafing runs).

Yeah I'd much rather see like, Wedge commander (or heck, if the Cassian thing rolls out that'd be perfect to, he was involved in some air strikes) with a card like Coordinated Bombardment to represent a fighter pass, or the like. They also don't need a seperate org-chart slot, because that could cause some list building weirdness, they should definitely compete with ground-based heavy and support. Plus the HMP is only like 12 meters and they said they'd sliding scale for anything bigger than the AAT so they'll make that fit on that base size, I ga-run-tee.

@Admiral Theia also has a pretty solid idea, we already have rules for Area attacks and tokens for stuff like smoke and the arm/detonate function, and Armada recently previewed a similar mechanic in "Ignition" tokens which are set up at a certain firing range, then the vessel engages a target basically "from" the token. It'd be no sweat for keyword combo to place a token and either burst (for like a bomb) or specifically target a couple of units (for a strafe) with a 1/2 punch.

Please no. Keep it on cards. There is no reason to put a mini on the table to represent something that should only be there for a fraction of a second.

Are you aware of how massive most of the ships you mentioned are? I think the Jedi Starfighter might work, MAYBE. It would have to go on an oval tank base, if not one of the huge new bases coming with the AAT. As to the rest: go ahead and do the math on the U-Wing and see how gigantic it would be, then check back with us.

In the military there is a job called FO (forward observer). They call in Artillery and Air Strikes. Now of course regular infantry can do this too, but FO or JTAC (joint terminal attack controller) personnel specific job is to coordinate these strikes.

If anything, a unit like this would be the best way to represent Arty and CAS (close air support) in a game like this.

Having actual bombers or fighters in the game is not the purpose nor feasible in a game like this. 10mm games serve that purpose.

I would love to see an FO/JTAC upgrade mini/card to a trooper unit or be an SF team like a strike team.

Love the enthusiasm but I think it is very unlikely for starfighters to ever be introduced. Never say never, but I would not put money on it anytime soon...

Only really small ships will show up in Legion. The snowspeeder has a 5.3m length*; I don't think anything much longer than that will ever show up.

A X-Wing is 12.5m*!! Inconceivable for the scale of Legion.

TIE Fighter is 7.94m long*, quite pushing it (The AAT is 9m, so perhaps there's a chance).

Vulture droid is only 3.6m* long, so it might show up (I've asked for this in one of their lives and they've said it would be a neat idea). For this one, I have more hope for.

ARC-170 is as big as a X-Wing, so I'd say it's out.

In short, look up for ship's size and compare to a snowspeeder; if it's wildly off, no chance.

* all data from Wookieepedia

Having a air strike could certainly work as a generic command card for the factions.

Airstikes and gun runs should be card effects or the abilities of a dedicated FO unit.

If we do want to pull aircraft/spacecraft into Legion, it should be very limited. Only those few in the correct size should work, like the Jedi Starfighters (both of which could work fine), or Vulture droids.

55 minutes ago, Alpha17 said:

Airstikes and gun runs should be card effects or the abilities of a dedicated FO unit.

If we do want to pull aircraft/spacecraft into Legion, it should be very limited. Only those few in the correct size should work, like the Jedi Starfighters (both of which could work fine), or Vulture droids.

Vulture droids would be an actual good choice for the game, as they have the walking mode, so it adds a little more versatility to them.

7 minutes ago, That Blasted Samophlange said:

Vulture droids would be an actual good choice for the game, as they have the walking mode, so it adds a little more versatility to them.

This. And since we have a mechanic for replacing droideka with wheel mode units, I’d say it’d be a cool add on.

especially if it came with Discord Missles, and Buzz Droids models that do damage to units within an AOE

Id orefer to see the HMP droid gunship as an actual unit, unlike xwings, tie fighters etc it operated like a hovering helicopter rather than a strafing plane

4 hours ago, TerrorScream said:

Id orefer to see the HMP droid gunship as an actual unit, unlike xwings, tie fighters etc it operated like a hovering helicopter rather than a strafing plane

sadly, HMP is too big for Legion (12-ish meters in diameter)

Actually I think it isn't. It's only 3m longer than the AAT, and they said anything bigger than that they would slide in the AMA, so 12 can probably fit on that base size.

1 hour ago, Vector Strike said:

sadly, HMP is too big for Legion (12-ish meters in diameter)

1 hour ago, UnitOmega said:

Actually I think it isn't. It's only 3m longer than the AAT, and they said anything bigger than that they would slide in the AMA, so 12 can probably fit on that base size.

I agree with @UnitOmega that the HMP is close enough that I think, with a slight scale tweak, they could get it to fit (it's only 9.75m wide according to Wookiepedia, but 12.46m long). But I think there are probably many things they could release instead that would fit the scale better.

Don't need it or want it. Snipers serve the same purpose. Im sure we'll see similar command cards on a Jedi or Clone commander and maybe on Nute Gunray and Azmorigan for the newer factions

As far as scaling goes, go pick up one of your t-47s, and pick up two troopers. There's no way both could fit in there. My point is that the t-47 isn't to scale. You wouldn't have to make the other ships exactly to scale either. As long as the cockpits are around the same size as the t-47 they would be fine. As far as x-wings, even if you made them to scale, they'd be about 10 inches long, that's smaller than the huge ships for x-wing, and quite a bit smaller than the SSD is for armada.

35 minutes ago, kmc979 said:

As far as scaling goes, go pick up one of your t-47s, and pick up two troopers. There's no way both could fit in there. My point is that the t-47 isn't to scale. You wouldn't have to make the other ships exactly to scale either. As long as the cockpits are around the same size as the t-47 they would be fine. As far as x-wings, even if you made them to scale, they'd be about 10 inches long, that's smaller than the huge ships for x-wing, and quite a bit smaller than the SSD is for armada.

I did and it looks fine. Length wise the T-47 is 2.5ish people long and it is representative of that in game. It's a cramped fit for two sure, but that's no different than how it was portrayed in ESB.

Speed is also a problem. An X-Wing or Atmospheric TIE would instantly become the fastest unit on the board. The game isn't balanced for things to go faster than the T-47, which should be going faster too.

As far as size and scale comparisons go, Armada is not your friend. Beyond what is larger and smaller, it isn't accurate. It can get away with it however because the players really don't have a reference point for size of the ships beyond numbers. X-Wing can also kinda get away with it. Legion can't. Average height of adults is a really easy thing to compare against when examples of it will be all over the board and warping scale can quickly make something seem wrong because of it.

10 hours ago, kmc979 said:

As far as scaling goes, go pick up one of your t-47s, and pick up two troopers. There's no way both could fit in there. My point is that the t-47 isn't to scale. You wouldn't have to make the other ships exactly to scale either. As long as the cockpits are around the same size as the t-47 they would be fine. As far as x-wings, even if you made them to scale, they'd be about 10 inches long, that's smaller than the huge ships for x-wing, and quite a bit smaller than the SSD is for armada.

It's SUPER cramped in a T-47, and the pilot/gunner aren't sitting fully upright.

The T-47s were made using just the head/cockpit of Y-Wings behind the scenes. They're very, very small compared to other fighters/vehicles, but you can shoehorn two people in.

7 minutes ago, Alpha17 said:

The T-47s were made using just the head/cockpit of Y-Wings behind the scenes. They're very, very small compared to other fighters/vehicles, but you can shoehorn two people in.

I assume you mean the models for filming? That is a very interesting tidbit, and now that you've said it, I definitely see some commonality... and that explains why no Y-wings were flying escort 😛

8 minutes ago, Caimheul1313 said:

I assume you mean the models for filming? That is a very interesting tidbit, and now that you've said it, I definitely see some commonality... and that explains why no Y-wings were flying escort 😛

Yeah. Full size Y-Wing mock ups were made for ANH (at least the cockpit sections) and to save money for ESB, they reused them for the T-47, with extra greebles and whatsits bolted on, and a slightly different canopy. This allowed them to keep the full size X-Wing stuff for the other films, and why we don't see anyone get into a Y-Wing in any film after ANH.