Jump 95
Let's go. We jump, and catch the Rebel Flagship just as it arrives at a beacon. There's no time to pay attention to the surroundings; we have to pour all our attention into this battle.
The Flagship starts its battle by cloaking immediately; we can't do anything to it until it becomes visible again, so all we can do for now is deploy a Defence Drone. The Flagship launches a hacking drone, and unfortunately, our Defence Drone misses it; it locks onto our secondary weapons and starts scrambling their attempts to get weapon locks. At least it didn't hit the Artillery.
Our shields block the enemy lasers, so the first damage of the battle comes from the enemy missile launcher; it sprays three missiles at us, and the Defence Drone only has time to shoot down one of them. One hits an empty room, and one takes out the Infirmary. Only Elizabeth and Iconeum have nothing to do, and Iconeum's been locked in the weapons room by the enemy hacking drone, so Elizabeth goes over to the life support department to try to fix it.
Meanwhile, we get some of the first damage in against the Rebel ship. We start off with some system damage against their ionizer, with our hacking drone making it impossible for it to dodge our Pulse Bomb; however, it doesn't go down immediately, and disrupts one of our shield barriers while we're hitting it. The first damage to the Rebel ship's structure comes at long range from a Federation cruiser, which is having trouble getting near the fight but which can at least use remote-combat weapons; it can hardly aim at that distance, but does at least manage to hit an empty room on the Flagship.
The Hacking Drone can't fire very often, so our second Pulse Bomb has to aim without its help, and misses. However, nothing can stop the Artillery Beam, which cuts right across the enemy ship, damaging its shields, engines, and particularly its life support. Then we have to wait a while – it cloaks again, and simultaneously sends a hacking pulse at our weapons, so we'll have to wait before we can once again attack. At least we completely dodged the second missile barrage, thanks to some skilled piloting via Gammagooey, and Varsoon turning off the oxygen pumps for a second or so to squeeze extra power into the engines.
By the time our aimable weapons come back online, the Rebel crew have fixed all the system damage to their ship. However, the next volley gives us a huge opportunity; the covering fire from the Federation hits the enemy Shields system. Even better, the Rebel weapons don't bother us much; we temporarily lose a shield generator to ion disruption, and the worst spends 10 seconds frantically getting it back online, but that doesn't damage our ship's structure, and the defence drone manages to shoot down two of the three missiles it fired, with Gammagooey dodging the third. We take advantage of the gap in the shields by firing everything we have at the enemy Shield system (apart from the Pike Beam, which we can't power and wouldn't have charged by now anyway); a quick hack lets us take control of the Flagship's steering for a vital few seconds, and move the shield generators right into the path of our Pulse Bomb and Burst Laser. We get a second Pulse Bomb to hit the shield generators, taking them all out, right before the enemy cloaks; it responds with a laser volley that forms a gap in the shields with the first two lasers, but fortunately, misses our temporarily unprotected ship with the third.
It'd be nice to finish off the Flagship by shooting at it – its shields are down and we would have a perfect opportunity to destroy it – but it responds by taking control of our weapons and firing three of its own weapon systems at once. Luckily, our shields hold, and all we have to deal with is a fire amidships. Elizabeth knows what to do about that, though; it's an inessential room that we don't have to walk through, so she opens an airlock and an internal door to drain the oxygen sustaining it out to space.
The next laser burst from the enemy misses entirely, although it couldn't have gotten through our shields anyway. Meanwhile, our Pulse Bomb is the first weapon to come back up – we use it to create another breach in the enemy Shields room, making it hard for the enemy to repair it. Then our Burst Laser is up, and we know that as long as all shots connect, we'll destroy the Flagship; and our hacking drone is up, too, so we can take control of its impulse engines and prevent it from dodging. It fires one last burst of missiles at us while our lasers are en route, then realises what amount of trouble it's in, and immediately fires up its independent FTL system and jumps out of there.
…It was still too close to the beacon. It tried to jump away when it really shouldn't, and large bits of it got left behind; in particular, its cloaking device just broke off, as did its ionizer, its hacking drone control unit, and all the circuitry controlling its internal security. It might be able to repair in hyperspace, but it surely isn't going to be able to repair
that
.
As the enemy missiles are still on the way, but we know that nothing
else
is going to be fired at us this batle, we take power out of the shields (which are useless against missiles) in order to get the engines at full speed. It mostly works, and we take only minimal damage.
It's completely unclear how to take advantage of most of the components and weaponry that came off the Rebel flagship; they're too large to fit on pretty much any Federation ship, let alone ours. We can, however, treat some of it as scrap metal; ⛯19 isn't a whole lot, and we might have nowhere to spend it, but there's no reason
not
to loot it, right? More usefully, there are some explosives among the debris, so we quickly craft a bit of Pulse Bomb ammunition.
After the battle, we stop to take stock of our surroundings. The area's more or less completely unrecognisable from battle damage, but one thing we do find is a Federation hyper-relay satellite; it's unclear what its intended purpose is, but right now, we can use it to gain updates about the situation. We get in contact with some Federation scout ships that have hyperspatial scanners; they've detected the Flagship in hyperspace and know where it's going to jump next. We are, unsurprisingly, in range of that too; the Flagship might be highly advanced, but at least its jump range for emergency jumps doesn't seem to be any better than the range we can make when under less time pressure. More worryingly, the Rebel's remaining autoships are converging on the same location; the Federation scramble their own warships to hold them off, but they suspect that some of them might be able to get through; we'll likely have to be dealing with attacks on multiple fronts on the second round of the battle.
Still, there's nothing we can do until the beacon pull, so may as well talk strategy for round 2 of the fight. I'll post additional information in people's PTs.