A device aboard a ship that records everything that happens to it, designed to help the relatives of the ship's crewmembers work out how they died.
More distress signals, and more emptiness. This one's coming from a ceramic black box, the only remains of whatever it is that broke. Good news, it seems; nobody died, the area was evacuated beforehand. From the sounds of the recording here, this must have been a huge space station once. Right now, though, you see nothing. It's all disappeared.
. A temporary base set up as a way to secure recently held ground in times of war. Instead of having fixed defense systems, they're normally secured via patrols of ships around their borders, giving crew in the interior of the fort some time to relax off-duty.
A Rebel fort is some distance away from the beacon, likely to help secure it against invasions; they haven't been here long, and it looks like they're already struggling to hold their ground against whoever it is that they're fighting. On the other hand, it's unsurprising that a patrol is waiting at the beacon just as it pulls you into space; that's when they were
expecting
attackers to arrive.
As a Federation warship near a Rebel camp, it's not surprising that they don't bother hailing you; instead, they switch on their weapons and start attacking.
It turns out that the Rebels' lasers can't get through our shields, but afraid of disobeying orders, they keep trying. Meanwhile, PvtUrist sends wave after wave of EMP blasts shooting at the enemy. This fight might take a while.
take a while (about 10 minutes, surprisingly long for a fight in this game, although some of that was posting updates in PTs), but the EMP breaks the enemy ship's systems one by one, until it's left not only unable to get through our shields, but unable to go anywhere, protect itself against our weapons, or keep the life support running. After a while it gives up trying, and you discover that the Rebels have all suffocated. So you take everything from their ship that isn't nailed down, or where the nails can reasonably be pried out. Unfortunately, other than the fuel, it doesn't really fit our ship, but it still has decent scrap value. We end up with ⛯19 and some fuel.
It'd be both suicidal and far too time-consuming to drive over to the Rebel fort without jumping, and they don't seem to have a beacon; probably a wise security precaution. So there's not much to do but to jump.
. A device some ships carry that allows the crew to escape if the ship is destroyed. More advanced lifepods have propulsion or even teleportation units, increasing the chance that the crew can get to safety.
As you arrive at the beacon, you hear a radioed message from Enter: a bunch of desperate humans have teleported aboard. Apparently, their ship no longer exists, so it seems that they want to take ours.
There are three of them, currently in the bridge area. This is the first time we've faced a large invasion force, and Varsoon isn't likely to win 1 vs. 3, so I need a plan from everyone as to how to handle it.
Last edited by callforjudgement on Mon Mar 11, 2019 6:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Engi on doors, everyone goes west side of ship while venting the entirety of east. When the enemies drop to 10-20 hp open the doors and let the Mantis have the kills.
In post 211, PvtUrist wrote:Engi on doors, everyone goes west side of ship while venting the entirety of east. When the enemies drop to 10-20 hp open the doors and let the Mantis have the kills.
I think this plan is great and I want to go along with it.
I'll give the worst time to get back to the thread (24 hours from my post), in case they have comments or objections; it's their system, after all. If they don't post, though, I'll enact whatever seems to be the most widely agreed-upon plan.
(I may be asleep when they come online – I'm pretty much asleep now, not a good time for this sort of microing! – so there might be a delay.)
the worst opens most of the airlocks and internal doors on the ship, front to back, keeping people constantly updated so that they know where it's safe to breathe. Everyone ends up waiting in the engine room, apart from the worst, who's manually controlling doors to let us past but trap the enemies in place; PvtUrist gets there last, somewhat breathless from the running and the lack of air (he's pretty slow-moving), but robust enough that he hasn't sustained major damage. The boarders are aware of what's wrong, and try to make their way to the back of the ship, sending two people to the oxygen pumps and one towards engines, but they're feeling pretty woozy by now.
As one of the boarders gets close to the engines, Varsoon runs out to meet him, quickly taking him out; after being unable to breathe for so long, the opponent is unable to defend himself, and killing him is a triivial matter. The other two realise that the oxygen control room is about to lose its air too, and run towards the infirmary. Of course, we're just fine with that, so the worst closes all the workable doors again; the enemies have broken many of them, and you don't want the air from the back of the ship escaping too.
It's a 1 vs. 2 fight in the infirmary, but Varsoon is quite capable of managing it against his disoriented opponents, so our ship is once again safe. Then we went and repaired all the broken doors, and the infirmary got to work, healing the blaster wounds that Enter and Varsoon had suffered, and making sure that PvtUrist's oxygen exchange crystals were properly oxygenated.
We never did find out where the boarders came from, though. Presumably they were escaping in lifepods, but we made a quick search for them and couldn't find them. Things seem to disappear awfully fast in this sector; perhaps the rumours of demons weren't that far off the mark after all.
To chase someone from in front, and wait for them to move to where you are, rather than the more common method of chasing someone from behind and trying to catch up with them. The advantage of intercepting your quarry is that it works even if they're faster than you. The disadvantage, of course, is that you need to guess where they're going.
Looks like not all the Rebels are systematically searching from behind. This one decided to jump into the sector before we did, and then got lucky waiting for us. They ask us to surrender, but they're not looking for goods; they're looking to imprison us all and take our ship. That's a terrible offer, so we decide to fight our way out.
Looking out of the window, we see that the secondary shield generator we just bought isn't going to help here: they have a small laser (which can't get through our shields), and some sort of small missile (which can get through both shields at once). So the ship goes back to its old configuration for once.
PvtUrist is, of course, trying his best to take out the enemy missile system, but their weapons are faster than ours are, and our shots keep missing, so they get off three shots on us. Everyone either sees a missile hit directly, or else sees the worst hurriedly running around the ship to try to fix the damage.
However, once their missiles go down, they never get them back up, and it doesn't take long for PvtUrist to destroy their ship from there. We loot ⛯17, in addition to a small amount of fuel.
An association of somewhat brave traders who take goods to war zones, making money off both sides via selling goods and repairing ships. They've been known to visit disaster areas, too, always trying to make a profit off the increased demand for almost everything they have in stock. Typically they're left alone by combatants, because everyone needs to restock their ship somehow, and not everything can be taken from the wreckage of your enemies.
Most of the people around here are either running, Rebels who've recently arrived, or mysteriously missing. Not here, though; it's a fairly well-stocked mobile mall, catering for the few people who remain. There's a wide range of things we could buy here.
(I'll post the equipment that's for sale, and the price list, in people's private topics.)
Crew which we could hire here, if we wanted to go down that route: Human for ⛯30, Rock for ⛯40, Engi for ⛯50.
Look, folks, our ship is literally falling apart.
If we're in another fight like that last one, we're dead meat. We can't handle missiles. I really suggest we upgrade our power, upgrade our engines, and repair our ship, if possible.
As far as I can tell, we can upgrade our generators for ⛯25. Unfortunately, even if we pool resources, I don't think we could repair and do that.
There's also a Reactor capacitor but I don't want to buy that.
We're still good on fuel for a whole sector, heck, even a nebula probably.
Repairing our ship's gonna cost ⛯46.
I have ⛯9.
Assuming that's how much all of you have, even pooled together, that's only a meager ⛯36.
So yeah.
). No objections here.
?