I'm the next guy in, so I guess it's time to shoot Kovos in the face.

Gatac

Gatac wrote:

I'm the next guy in, so I guess it's time to shoot Kovos in the face.

Gatac

And if his fails, Luis'll take a shot at Kovos. If Hugh suceeds, I'm plugging Jack-in-the-Head with use of a WD. Why bother with electricity when a good old fashioned 9-millimeer hemorage will do the job?

Hugh took 1 Wound and 8 Shock from the unfortunate maxed-out damage Kovos rolled. (it would have been 5 Wounds, but hurray for Wild Dice!)

Max is still holding his action and it's Angel's turn.

If Yaris survives till next round, you really want to strap in or make sure you act before she does.

Whoever on the crew who isn't a known friendly and looks like they're feeling menacing (except for the plugged in one) gets two to the chest and one to the head.

If the NPCs have gone, that's this round gone. We absolutely cannot allow Yaris to activate the drive, which means we have to go first. Is it possible to spend a WD on initiative? It doesn't matter who does it, but somebody, preferably two somebodies, should make sure. Semo might be best, since if we can wrestle her out of the comand chair and unplug her it's better than killing her outright. After all, if she was sent to look for "traitors and Nar'sai cultists," her knowledge might be very valuable leads. On the other hand, it's not valuable enough to risk plastering ourselves on the bulkheads for, so if it comes down to it, she's dead.

You can indeed spend a Wild Die on initiative. I'll assume Luis will spend enough to go before Yaris, and I'll spend one for Davis if need be as well.

Here's next round's map and initiative:



Luis
Angel & Yaris & Davis/One-Ton (Geez why does this stuff happen?)
Hugh
Max
Semo
Arketta & Taylor & Mellish

Hugh: 5/6 Wounds, 6/14 Shock
Semo: 12/18 Shock
Clay: Dead as Kennedy
Kovos: Might live if he got medical attention, but is currently KO'd and bleeding out
Swims-the-Black: Conscious but noncombatant
Yaris: Screwed

Would it be possible to bodily yank Yaris away from the chair? As I mentioned, I'd like to get her alive, but unable to screw us over, so out of the chair is most to avoid her firing the thrusters or getting fried by Davis's plan. If there's not a way to do that, Luis'll just move a little to his left (to get a clear shot) and then put a couple rounds into her. Also, it's a stretch, but could his Delta Force Training aspect be applied under the theory that part of that is devotion to his commander, and with Hugh in bad-ish shape, Luis is pissed?

Luis gets Delta Force Training whenever he shoots people, basically.

And you remember from the first time you were on the bridge that Yaris has quite a bit of slack in her skull-jack thing. Just pulling her out of the chair won't disconnect her. Boom boom boom it is.

admiralducksauce wrote:

Luis gets Delta Force Training whenever he shoots people, basically.

And you remember from the first time you were on the bridge that Yaris has quite a bit of slack in her skull-jack thing. Just pulling her out of the chair won't disconnect her. Boom boom boom it is.

Fine.

Davis is at 3/6 Wounds, 7/16 Shock. You seem to remember it didn't hurt Christopher Lloyd that much in Back to the Future...

What's this, the second time one of Davis' ideas has almost screwed us over? I'm seriously debating putting him in one of the bombsuits.

... And if you didn't get into the bridge in time, if you had missed Kovos or Angel couldn't finish off Clay, if Max hadn't already wounded Yaris, if your d6 Wild Die didn't open-end and roll a 9 on initiative, Yaris would've punched it.

That's a lot of "ifs", but I don't think you should be blaming Davis. He took a rather significant one for the team. Anyhoo, to your knowledge you still have a Whiirr who can pilot the ship and an engineer who can bring it back online.

admiralducksauce wrote:

... And if you didn't get into the bridge in time, if you had missed Kovos or Angel couldn't finish off Clay, if Max hadn't already wounded Yaris, if your d6 Wild Die didn't open-end and roll a 9 on initiative, Yaris would've punched it.

That's a lot of "ifs", but I don't think you should be blaming Davis. He took a rather significant one for the team. Anyhoo, to your knowledge you still have a Whiirr who can pilot the ship and an engineer who can bring it back online.

True, I suppose. Speaking of Whirr, Luis'll be grabbing his medkit and doing what he can for Swims-in-Black. He can probably at least staunch the bleeding and maybe clean and stitch up the wound. Next, he'll do the same for Hugh.

I'm now 2 for 8 (I think) when it comes to characters that wound up smoldering. Obviously, I'm doing something wrong here.

Time to switch to A-Team mode!

Gatac

If your plan is still to booby-trap spacesuits, you've got 3 still-warm corpses for it. You've got -just enough- time to stop if you stop now.

To refresh people's memory before things went in the shitter:

Quote:

No, we wouldn't be in the suits. We let them get close without alerting them to buy us time for assembly, then we dump the suits overboard and have the crew announce that they killed some and are dumping the rest for questioning. The turai take them aboard, BOOM!, we go to sensor jam mode and make full burn.

Drawback is that this could get them uncomfortably close to us, so I'm open to suggestions.

This way, you could explain away why your braking was interrupted fairly easily. It is, after all, almost exactly what Yaris was going to do. Dump the suits while braking so the Imperials would pick them up first as they turned to catch up with your overshooting.

Cons: involves coming to a stop or near-stop near a significant amount of firepower. You need the explosives to create a large enough distraction that they can't just shoot you down off the starting line. There's a chance you may actually have to be boarded before you get a chance to blow the suits.

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Screw more complicated charges. We happen to have two (IIRC) bombs sitting, ready to go, in the corner, pre-rigged to explode when triggered. Just (carefully) stick each into a space suit and it's go for dump. Unless....could Imperium ships detect the lack of body heat in the suit? THe other thing to do would be have somebody right by an external airlock, in a suit, with an AT-4. Right before we blow the bombs, they put a couple shots into the nearest interceptor. There are, what, nine? Get one with the suit bombs (maybe), one with the AT-4, and we might be able to get a few of the others to loose intrest or break off to assist in rescue ops. Everybody whose not involved in those two things or (maybe) prepping the agrobots for their role as decoys should get to crash couches. As for the rest, what's the delay between getting from the exterior lock or cargo bay to the couches?

It takes no more than 10-15 seconds to sprint from the airlock or cargo bay to the crashers. Less if you use the two couches in Engineering. The thing is, not every cruise engine burst requires use of the crashers. Severe emergency braking does, and of course the faster you get off the line and head for the Gate the better, but it's possible to amp up the throttle over time keeping it within the standard inertial dampeners' limits.

The problem with the AT-4s is that they're meant to be fired at terrestrial distances. In space, the target would have to be just about stopped and point-blank.

Also, interceptors are more like F-16s. They don't pick up salvage - they shoot down people who try to run. The Needleship has assault frigates escorting it whose job would be boarding and salvage. To quote Arketta's earlier dialogue:

Quote:

*A Needleship has... eight Quads of Turai, maybe thirty, maybe forty interceptors. Normally travels with two to three assault ships for escort. If they're boarding everyone, those Turai'll be spread thin, but they might have more than I think if they planned to board everyone.*

A Quad is 12 Turai, so 96 soldiers. 30-40 interceptors, but most will still be in their launching berths. A quick look on the sensors would tell you that there are six interceptors, three pairs of two, flying mid-to-long range CAP on the whole operation. There are three assault ships, however, larger ships comparable in size to Akamu.

...we're going up against a small Carrier Battle Group?

Holy shit. It's too late to ask for nukes now, right?

Seriously, though, the only way we can hit those guys with an AT4 would be to come to a complete relative stop. Even then, it's doubtful we'll do much if we hit.

My recommendation is to pretend we have a nav failure and go to rest relative to the carrier, which will still carry us towards the gate. You know, for calibration purposes, so we can be sure that those are flickering dots, not ships moving relative to us. Use the time to prepare the transponder ghost hack and some spacesuit explosives. We max out their patience until we get something like direct threat to be fired upon or one of the escorts getting close to boarding range, then we dump the suits, send out some garbage emergency calls, ghost the transponder and go to full burn gatewards.

Those AT4s might get in handy if they're all on top of us in no time to prepare and we have to prevent them from boarding at point blank range. The AT4 might not do much against the carrier, but I'm sure it'll fuck up an Akuma-sized ship just fine.

Gatac

I had a starshipdimensions.com-inspired chart for some of these ships. I'll try to dig it up and add Akamu.

You get some good news with the bad, though. Sure, it's a Carrier Battle Group, but your ship comes with REAL decoys. If you're gonna rip off Firefly, you gotta have the Crybabies too.

That fact that there's a queue for boarding may work to or against your plans. It gives you more time for sure, but it doesn't help with the time crunch for getting the engines fixed for stopping, and if your plan is to dine and dash you may not need the extra time at rest.

I have an idea: the best lies involve some truth, so let's tell a very good lie, but it'll need the main engine ready to go when the Imperum calls us the third time. When the Imperium sends their third call, accompanied by the laser, we respond with a laser saying that we were trying to brake, then our passengers suddenly pulled out a whole shitload of weapons we couldn't detect, and tried to take over the ship. Fortunately, we managed to lock enough of them in the cargo bay to be able to turn back the rest, but they damaged our engines and comm systems in their takeover attempt. We say we need help, bad,since power's down across the board. In order to board us, they'd thus need to come in and match our speed, 'caus all our power's down. Thus, the boarding ship would have to come to a stop relative to us. When they get into point-blank range, we put three or four AT-4s into their drive section and do the flip to orient for a positive delta-V boost (during the flip, the AT-4 guys get back inside and to the crashers ASAP). Drop every decoy and bomb we can get our hands, kill transponders, and go for broke on the boost. (Maybe a different internal order among those three). Run the Gate, using whatever co-ordinates Swims-in-Black thinks is best.

Quote:

When the Imperium sends their third call, accompanied by the laser, we respond with a laser saying that we were trying to brake, then our passengers suddenly pulled out a whole shitload of weapons we couldn't detect, and tried to take over the ship.

Good. Waiting buys you time and using laser keeps them from hearing any non-Imperium accent or nervousness. The nondetectable weapons comment should in theory focus their attention squarely on you, as they already know their targets are toting stealth weapons from Botane.

Quote:

We say we need help, bad,since power's down across the board. In order to board us, they'd thus need to come in and match our speed, 'caus all our power's down. Thus, the boarding ship would have to come to a stop relative to us.

Good. You can coast right past the Needleship if they buy your story up to this point. At that point, you would only have to contend with the boarding assault ship (handled theoretically by C4/AT-4s) and the interceptors (handled theoretically by decoys and blanking your signals).