Campaign Map for A Call to Arms - Starfleet

Given the current ACTA Starfleet campaign set during the First Romulan War, I wanted to have a campaign map that I could hang on the wall freeing up the games table to play out the battles of the war. The campaign map that has been used so far is the Federation & Empire map, but I couldn't keep this on hand as a ready reference as it would take up too much space. So I came up with a solution.

Truth be told, I have wanted to do this since I was a teenager playing Star Fleet Battles. Its taken several decades, but it have finally done it.

I purchased two Star Fleet Battles map sheets from Amarillo Design Bureau, a sheet of 900x1200x3mm of Corflute board, two metres of magnetic strip that had a sticky surface on one side, and 100 1x10mm circular rare earth magnets to make this. The Corflute board was large for the maps, but easily was trimmed down with a knife.

I glued the magnetic strips to the Corflute board and when dry, rolled out the maps onto the sticky side of the magnetic strip. I had to cute off a row of the hexes on the left sheet to match the sheets correctly. You can see this in the image below.

I have an old Federation & Empire map set that I cut the turn counter and other charts from around one of the map edges and stuck them to the sticky side of the magnetic strip...

...and placed the key on the other side.

The magnets were used for the ship counters from Federation & Empire. Given that the magnet is glued to the underside of the counter, you can't used the depleted side of the counter. However, this is irrelevant as the counters will represent ships fighting it out via A Call to Arms.

Corflute board and magnetic strip stuck together with craft glue, and hex map stuck to the sticky side.

The regions of the empires I marked out with highlighter pens.

The provinces also were marked out the same way.

On the image below are the Lyran (yellow'ish), Kzinti (orange), Breen (pink), Cardassian (yellow), Ferengi (pink), Wyn (yellow hexes fully coloured to represent the nebula), LDR (pink), Klingon (light green) and Hydrans (blue). The Feds are there on the right in blue also.

Below are the Ferengi (pink), The Badlands Nebula (full hexes in pink/yellow/orange), The Delphic Expanse (fully pink hexes at the top), the future borders of the Federation (blue), the Orion Nebula (yellow and orange full hexes), provinces within the future Federation including the Vega colonies, Telerites, Cait, Earth, Rigel, Andorians, Vulcans, Enolian Coalition. Tholia is at the bottom in pink, and the Romulans in dark green and Gorns (pink) are on the right.

Gorn (pink), Dilgar (orange) and the Romulans are below in dark green. The Borg edge on to the map in the top right. I will be adding very small locations for the Vorlon and Shadows (couldn't resist adding them and the Dilgar for a bit of Babylon 5 crossover). I'm not a fan of the ISC and so have left this blank. Hey, my map, my right to choose! I may include some more Babylon 5 groups like the Drazi, etc as very small nations in the ISC area to give the Romulans a headache.

Close-up of some of the Starfleet NX ship proxies. You can see the Kzinti (orange) and Cardassian (yellow) in the top left. A neutral zone surrounds the future Federation area, so that the map can be used for after the Federation is formalised. The provinces of the Federation, which represent the Star Trek Enterprise era realms of the Vulcans, Andorians, Earth etc, are the fine line blue areas on the bottom right. When the Federation gets formed, these realms will become recognised provinces of the Federation.

The Romulans on the map. Warbirds only for now as its the First Romulan War.

 The magnets do their thing... thankfully!

Back of the board showing how the campaign map gets on the wall with picture hooks and string.

Still have a few more things to add to the map like the empire names and the primary star systems. But its coming along. Let the campaign begin!