Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:I don't get the rolling eyes either. That really isn't normally a good thing. Cdr Falldess getting annoyed and waxing sarcastic about being left out of the first wave?
Nea, most people on school never really did understand me because I was just to sarcastic.
They never noticed I was sarcastic.
Probably had a too straight face.
Is this one of the symptoms of being a multiple emulated personality, an extended, albeit correct, concern for detail? And the terrifying thought has just occurred to me- adaptation. If Dr. Nygma really has hidden his trail by scattering multiple copies of his personality and knowledge into every appliance he can get his hands on, then, in that particular brilliant eccentric way, they're going to be changed by, and change, the circumstances in which they find themselves. And there are at least forty of them.
Nice idea, hope you can keep them out of either one of my ships, since he was meaning my last post.
ps: The rebels had already let the Dogs of War loose.
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:"Dogs of War? Look, if you know of a pet shop that sells dogs with thermonuclear yield teeth then...actually, I really don't want their address. Now my ex- fiance, on the other hand-"
"Spelling mistakes? Petaton salvos flying in fifteen different directions, and you take the time to worry about spelling mistakes? When the one with my name on it comes in this direction, I want it to be as badly spelled as possible so it'll kriffing miss. Don't jinx it."
I would rather have them taking their time so they lose time aiming.
I loved it... although a couple places were missing quotemarks so I wasn't sure what was Lenn thinking and what was him giving orders.
But the chapter had me following the thoughts and the the battle in a very vicarious way on the edge of my seat, seeing the battle and the battle plan laid out beautifully before me.
Nitram, slightly high on cough syrup: Do you know you're beautiful?
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
I totally called that salvo down on that spot when I saw that projected exit point. Whether or not it was IFF seeking, is up to you. Classical use of torpedoes, shoot where the target will be and not where it is.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
As I think I mentioned in Venting, recently my computer died. At first I thought it was software; one trip to the computer shop later, they diagnosed a power surge, that partially fried my hard disc, knocked out one of my disk drive controllers and apears to have disabled my sound output. So, this is a lot later, and a fair bit smaller, than I had intended, cobbled out of partially recovered files.
Section 33-3
The waiting ships of Wave Two- most of them still trying to work out what that meant- did have some sensor feedback from the other craft of wave one, in addition to what their own hyperspace sensors could tell them.
‘In case I forget’, Lennart had told Kovall on the Blackwood, who realised that meant ‘In case I’m too busy and/or dead to order it.’ So the second wave were mostly getting their tactical picture from the recon variant strike cruiser. And boggling at it.
‘Well, we should move in now, if only to relieve him. Captain Lennart’s obviously completely lost his mind and thinks he’s flying a TIE fighter.’ Was Fist’s navigator’s opinion.
‘Maybe so, but it seems to work for him.’ Tevar pointed out. The mood on her improvised emergency bridge was sour, at best. She would have thought ‘foul’, but that brought the walls to mind.
They were in what had been Damage Control bunker Dorsal- 140, the main maintenance and repair centre for the bridge tower and it’s electronics. It had seemed an efficient shortcut at the time; instead of moving the equipment to the problem, move the problem to the equipment.
Less awkward than trying to run her ship from gunnery control again, the space simply wasn’t up to it- too busy, too crowded with other things, other noise.
So here they were in a cramped, but at least armoured- walled space, a rough replica of a starship’s bridge, airlock unclosable because of all the hastily laid cables connecting the desks and vidpanels to the ship’s main computer net. It was claustrophobic, but then claustrophobia seemed to fit the bill now.
‘He can’t do that!’ Tevar’s navigator expostulated. ‘It’s simply not possible. You cannot handle a capital ship like that.’
‘Evidently, he can. Engines?’ Tevar said, meaning the engineering liaison to the bridge.
‘Well, it’s not mechanically impossible. A ship with that loading and structural uncertainty being handled like that, though- she should get pulled in for major refit, and a court of enquiry for her captain for half tearing her guts out. It can be done, but not without consequences.’ The engineer said.
‘He doesn’t seem too worried about consequences.’ Tevar said, nodding at the sensor table and meaning Lennart.
‘A crew prepared to take that flying scrapheap into action would have to be capable of anything.’ The engineering liaison said. He stopped himself just sort of asking the question that was on all their minds- what the kriff they were doing there.
They hadn’t been present for Lennart’s discussion- bombshell, really; also hadn’t spent two hours on the com to their parents asking them to confirm, to fill in the blanks, and what to do next.
In theory it was culpably disloyal to do anything of the sort; for an Imperial officer to solicit the private opinion of any civilian, however well connected and however closely related, on how they were to go about fulfilling their duty was not permitted.
Worse, it was a sign of weakness that an ambitious crew would take advantage of, although she wasn’t overly worried about that now. She didn’t think anyone was crazy enough to want to be in the hot seat.
It had been useful. She had tried not to worry her mother and father, tried not to make it sound as if she was saying, or even thinking loudly, goodbye. They were going to be busy enough dodging assassins.
What they had been able to tell her tended to confirm Lennart’s story, out of sector interests- outer rim thugs and core world money- long on resources and short on compassion. Bribery and assassination, blackmail and sabotage, very fast and very dirty.
Individuals were discredited, family names dragged through the mud, dirty secrets dug up. Shamelessly populist and power- hungry, they soon had the majority of the people baying for the blood of the old ruling class, and all done with the full panoply of the New Order.
Some of the accusations were true, of corruption within and conspiring against the Senate, aid given to the Separatists back in the war and associations against the Empire.
Some of them were entirely unbelievable of course, but all of them, even- no, especially the unbelievable ones, ‘they’ had managed to find evidence to hold up in court.
The old ruling families had not gone quietly. House Tevar had fought in the invisible war, won a few battles, lost a few- the family portfolio was thinner than it had been, and there were two uncles no-one ever spoke of any more.
There had also nearly been a fiance. It would have been an arranged marriage to a potential ally, one of the few honest believers in the New Order to arrive in sector, an ISB Special Investigator and anticorruption crusader who was starting to make a name for himself, and trouble for his bosses.
Hjalmar Amarin, foully murdered by ‘revanchists’; some parts of him had never turned up, although his colleagues had each been sent a lobe of his brain, and his genitals had been posted to her mother.
Her family had not sworn revenge, war of the knife and to the bitter end; that would have been nothing but complicated mass suicide.
They were not great enough to be worth exterminating root and branch, they had at least had the chance to swallow their pride, and had officially made their peace with the new powers of the sector.
They had hidden what they could and took what steps were available to safeguard what was not, such as steering a daughter of the house into a navy command.
That and worm away, rebuild power and contacts and prepare for a chance at revenge.
Which, thanks to the madman who was now throwing his starship around as if she was a fighter, was now a distinct possibility. Her parents were going to be very busy over the next few days. She, at least, was going to be very busy for the next few minutes. After that, everything got uncertain.
One thing Lennart had said that did stick in her mind; throw the peacetime system away. You are not flying a capital ship. Worst mistake- and believe me, there’s a lot of competition- that Tarkin ever made, he had said.
Small scale system should have been abolished with prejudice and that should have been hammered into BOSS’s heads with, well, with hammers.
Bureau of ships and services, gang of rat-bastard inbred yokel bureaucrats, how much worse a combination could there be?
Anyway, Fist isn’t a battleship, or a carrier, or an assault ship, or a multirole cruiser, or any such nonsense, he had said. She’s a line destroyer, a heavy skirmisher with speed a weapon and a defence.
Handle her like a battleship, a big, slow stable gun platform, and you’re doomed, manoeuvre and you might survive.
Which he was demonstrating, in spades. Black Prince was in far better shape than she appeared under the skin. Tevar watched the action play itself out, the dash out of the cone of fire, the mottled ship playing with the rebel barrage, dancing in and out of the fringes and taunting them.
The flagship took a few hits, nothing desperate, only four or five heavies, which compared to the fire she was spitting out, was nothing. Impressive. Not the easiest example to follow, stuck here in the bowels of a damaged ship now going back to beg for more.
The light forces, she watched shake themselves out into formation, the recon conversion Strike frigate and the two Fulgur in arrowhead.
They moved, accelerating out of the shower of energy bolts- the rebels could have scored if they’d followed them up, but they hadn’t, foolishly choosing to fire on a target that could withstand their shot.
The rebels arrived, two frigates, the old Munificent and an MC40. In theory, it was an even match in terms of tonnage and raw power.
In practise, a heavy and a medium frigate against a medium and two light frigates, two heavy two medium and three light corvettes- interestingly asymmetric.
The rebels were probably wrong to rely on a Munificent, especially one that was being handled was if it was a large ship. Further illustration of the principle.
They were in a good initial position but a bad vector, with the Imperial ships receding rapidly from them, and alerted. The old Clone War frigate carried two eighty-teraton turbolasers and enough lighter guns to push the single salvo firepower up near that of a Meridian, but they had made a lot of tradeoffs to get there.
They gave up a lot of damage tolerance with that hollow, bitty hull, they didn’t carry enough power generation to get anything like the same rate of fire out of their heavy guns, and worst from the rebel point of view, the structural strength the open hull gave away limited it’s maximum acceleration.
In a way, it was very characteristically Rebel, trying to do hit and run in a ship that couldn’t run, and handled like it was half shot already. Mind you, that led to thoughts about how often they got away with it.
In theory, the slowest ships in the strike line had an eight hundred and fifty ‘g’ advantage- and the fastest a twenty-one hundred ‘g’ edge.
They could treat it as if it was standing still. Detached Forces Wave One took full advantage of that, accelerating into the attack and firing a narrow basket- a small grouped, coordinated area shoot, converging on the Rebel flagship.
The MC-40 moved away from it’s partner to avoid getting caught in the crossfire, but it could only lay sixteen guns on target, and chose the wrong one by shooting for Blackwood.
The Imperial medium frigate was, in theory, outclassed. In practise, Kovall took his ship out of the group, accelerating away at a tangent, varying thrust randomly, twisting and rolling, trying to force the rebels away from a consistent stream of fire to an open sheaf shoot that she could take relatively easily.
Provided it wasn’t a full power shot from one of the eighties that connected.
The rebel gunnery was a little better than the Imperial, but the Imperials had a much easier target- advantage the Empire’s green cone of light against the scarlet line the Rebels were drawing on the sky. If the rate of shield depletion was a guide, the rebels were going to lose.
Then things got very strange indeed, as the wave of Imperial fighters, detached on their own target, stood on their tails and fired a torpedo salvo at the Imperial flotilla.
Fortunately, no-one had time to say or do anything that would later prove to have been embarrassingly silly, because then the obvious target emerged, one slightly singed and somewhat dented Lucrehulk.
That was when Wave Two’s order to commit came through.
The drop point in the accompanying data was close to Wave One, close enough for mutual support to begin with, low and on the bow of the rebel ship; did she have a useful alternative? Anything to add? To calculate an alternative entry would take two minutes, at least. Valuable time.
Tevar was the ranking officer of the wave, a commander on Perseverance, a senior lieutenant of all things on Voracious. This part of the battle belonged to her.
For a moment, the thought occurred to her to take this lot, these ships away, and go and pursue the Moff and his friends, go and rescue her parents. Only for a moment. Even if they would follow her, there was the fact that the Moff was next on the hit list.
Still- one transport. Her personal shuttle, with a picked unit- headquarters guard team.
That, she could spare. Surely it was not beyond the bounds of duty to safeguard the lives of two valuable members of the notability of the sector, even if they did happen to be her own kin.
She gave the order quickly, then added, ‘On the flag’s course, initiate.’
One and Indivisible was not having a good battle, so far. Ambushed, dock shot out from under her, and then with the base’s computers she had plotted a jump out to try to get the drop on the Imperial destroyer.
They had expected Lennart to jump inwards, they had been prepared for that much. What they had thought was that the Imperial ship would be slower to calculate and slower to manoeuvre.
The aim was to catch Black Prince as she was committed to jumping in, get a minute or so free and clear to pound the smaller ship, and then if that was not enough catch her in crossfire with the planet’s defence guns.
Instead, the Imperial ship had been faster, had hit them- hard- and then manoeuvred clear, leaving them with nothing in range but a handful of slippery- difficult light ships to target.
Engines damaged, it could not pursue, but powerplant and weapons were fine. No issues there. Just an enormous weight of fire, weapons fit to match the planet below, concentrated and coordinated.
The light force elements had scattered as the cruiser had emerged; corvettes and frigates had no business getting into a stand- up fight with anything that big.
Lennart had taken- no, had made- the one chance that the smaller units needed by maiming the cruiser too badly to let it pursue them.
They could out- accelerate the One and Indivisible by twenty-five kilometres per second per second, and almost all had the sense to do exactly that, opening the range and radically zig-zagging to avoid the howling walls of red light coming from the cruiser.
It was no unitary big gun ship, vaguely symmetrically laid out but a mosh of twenty-fives, thirties, forties, fifties and fifty-sixes, seventies and eighties, one-twenties, one-fifties and one-eighties, two hundreds and two hundred thirties.
They seemed to have a few each of most of the heavy turbolaser models made. More than enough power to put behind them, though.
The Fulgurs’ turrets were carried on the widest points of their hull, and could bear aft. Blackwood and the two Carracks had limited aft fire, the Bayonets had almost none. What harrassing fire they could give to cover their retreat, they did.
The first casualty was the Iron Turnip, a victim of her commander’s enthusiasm. The Bayonet class medium corvette had tried to yaw to return fire, open her broadside and bow arcs on the ‘filled doughnut’ of the Lucrehulk.
Lennart and Kovall both commed her commander, one to tell him to get back in formation, one to order him to keep running.
Two inaccurate volleys from a rapidly banking ship were all the Turnip got off, as it tried to prolong the burn back into a course away- but for that time, she was a relatively stable target.
The first glancing hit was from a 120- teraton turbolaser, and blew out the shields with a huge, chemical looking explosion of vapourised durasteel from the little ship’s belly. Crippled and drifting, a handful of life pods made it out before a pair of eighties scored a direct hit. Gone.
One of the Marauders made the mistake of trying to deploy her fighter squadron. TIE/Ln and Bombers, incapable of jumping in. With bombs and antiship torpedoes, they probably were the most effective weapon available to the little ship, but now was not the time.
The inevitable happened- forced to choose between running a straight course for deployment and an evasive pattern for survival, something went wrong.
One of the /sa bombers, freshly deployed, found it’s parent ship forced to break off and evade, turning right into it. The Marauder was more than 400 ‘g’ faster than the bomber, and ran it down- one of the bombs prematured.
Between the damage and the confusion, the Marauder ceased evading long enough for a 50- teraton bolt to catch it and flash it to vapour, too.
That was the end of the first phase, the mad scramble clear when all of the Imperial ships could be engaged.
Now it was time for the Rebel gunnery officer to collect the batteries back into a coherent fire plan, and eliminate the scattered Imperial light forces while Nav worked out a pursuit plan for that damned destroyer.
Just the right time for three Imperial destroyers to emerge from hyperspace, then.
Fist, Perseverance, Voracious and their escorts flashed back to bradyonic space in the planned position, fifty thousand kilometres distant from One and Indivisible, turning as it did had put them behind and below.
‘Away retrieval tugs and shuttles.’ Caliphant remembered to order. He got blank, disbelieving looks from most of the bridge team. ‘Oh, yes. Fire.’
All three destroyers had a shot at the already damaged section, and decided to take it. The distance was too short for the rebel to react, it tried to twist out of the way and expose fresh shields and gun batteries- not fast enough.
The Imperial ships all fired in their own styles, Fist in controlled three-gun salvos, Perseverance in solid block salvos, Voracious in a continuous sequential fire.
In it’s own way, a Lucrehulk was as exoskeletal as her smaller confederation relatives, built around her long curving hangars each capable of holding tens, hundreds of thousands of droid fighters- far more small craft than the Alliance could ever hope to find crews for.
Whoever had refitted this example had been well aware of that, and had chosen to fill the innermost staging hangars with structural bracing and ablative-absorbent foamcrete.
That was probably all that saved her, as the Imperial destroyers pounded in salvo after salvo.
The Alliance cruiser twisted and bucked under the pounding, fireball after fireball splattering her port limb as she painfully tried to manoeuvre clear, and failed.
The port quarter prime shield generator was one of the casualties, converting a temporary gap in the defences into a permanent one.
The weapon galleries along the port side of the arc of the ship died or fell back on emergency power as the main power trunking was shattered, the incandescent flowers of vapourised metal almost hid the ship;
eventually her frantically driven thrusters managed to swing the battered cruiser round far enough to cover the gap.
Not quite in time to forestall a wave of fighter torpedoes. Fired blind, they could not, could not possibly, have been targeted on a specific component, a specific weakness, in advance; just as well they didn’t need to be.
Passively targeted, little advance warning, a ship under heavy attack from another quarter might be forgiven for missing the incoming. Were it not for the consequences.
In avoiding one threat, One and Indivisible turned directly into another. The gaping hole in the ship’s structure presented itself to the Imperial salvo, and they took full advantage.
Damage to sensors, power systems, weapon mounts- point defence did what it could, but that was hardly enough. Of the two hundred and fifty heavy warheads fired, a hundred and forty managed to detonate inside the ship.
The fireball burst out of the length of the port arm of the cruiser, the structural strengthening overwhelmed, the bays consumed in the rolling blast wave.
Every joint, every weak point slashed open, and nine twentieths of the cruiser’s firepower and half her fighter complement obliterated.
The rebel ship benefited from one miracle when the after main sectional bulkhead held, but she needed more than that. Her situation, blind to one entire side of the sky and barely able to manoeuvre, could fairly be described as desperate.
The planetary defence batteries were too far away to offer anything except narrowly targeted fire which would almost certainly miss, or broad arc barrages which would inflict at least as much damage on the cruiser.
Her own fighter complement could launch to try to hold the Imperial warships off- but they were going to have to face the sublight capable fighters pouring out of Fist and Voracious, and their escorts in wave two.
The MC-40 was facing down too much opposition. It could resort to maximum possible evasion, keeping Imperial eyes and guns on them and drawing fire off One and Indivisible, but throwing their own aim off so far that they had no chance to achieve anything.
The other choice was to slow down, evading less drastically and allowing their own fire a chance to achieve some damage. Unwisely, the rebel ship chose the second option.
That was exactly what the Imperial ships were wishing for. The rebel frigate intended to fire a brief, concentrated salvo out of all sixteen guns that could bear, against a ship small enough to actually take out, then go back to evasion. It got the first part right.
The reb settled onto a shallow curve and hammered out a burst of red at the most effective target it could find, one of the two antifighter Lancers that had survived the previous battle along with Tevar.
The target was a little slow, a little dozy, nothing for it’s own guns to do yet so the Lancer’s crew weren’t fully alert.
That made it a good target, and the stream of rebel shot burnt away the unfocused shielding, carved the aft end of the Imperial ship apart and opened up the main reactor.
Imperial return fire did nothing so elegant; then again, with twenty-three heavy and over two hundred medium turbolasers, it didn’t have to. Brute firepower was enough to pound down the Alliance ship’s shielding and rip the structure apart, leaving it a melted, broken wreck. Fair exchange for a Lancer.
That left the fifty or so smaller ships, between them the same firepower as a destroyer, free to concentrate on the Lucrehulk.
So far, the Imperial plan was working. With a crippled ship stranded in mid system and the planetary defences with a huge breach carved in them, the Rebellion’s options reduced to two.
The first one being, admit defeat. Accept the loss of Ord Corban and One and Indivisible, but refuse to incur further losses by reinforcing failure.
They still had two large, valuable ships, what they had managed to strip already, and their most important gain, personnel who had had a chance to work with and learn on heavy shipyard equipment. It would be a severe but not total loss.
Option two, the one the Imperials were hoping for, was that the rebels were too badly stunned, too poorly coordinated and too fixated on their previous victory to realize actually what the situation was, and that they would reinforce.
The locals certainly had no intention of stopping fighting; the maimed Alliance cruiser managed a half- turn, partly on steering thrusters and partly on recoil, rolling to present what batteries she could to the Imperial ships tearing into her.
At that point, the Imperial plan, or lack of plan, became a problem. Coordination; what did they do now? Manoeuvre as a close line of battle, move out on independent vectors to englobe- and in either case, where to?
Sweep round and head for the planet, burn to remain on station, holding point in the mid system, return to rendezvous point, what?
Blackwood compounded the problem by reporting incoming. Predicted drop point ten thousand kilometres sunward- along the threat axis- from the One and Indivisible.
Tevar was wrong; the ranking officer on station was actually Konstantin Vehrec. He knew what he intended to do; englobe and do as much damage as possible to the emerging rebels before they had time to work out where they were and what was going on.
It was always dangerous, almost always more so than it needed to be, jumping into the middle of a fight. Emerging on the edge was a much sounder tactical option, most of the time.
It was definitely tempting, to detach some of the small craft with torpedoes to bounce the latest batch of rebels on entry, but he had a job to do, which was looking less like a planetary strike now than it was a planetary blockade.
Lycarin knew exactly what he wanted to do; go for the bold and brash, engage at close quarters. He accelerated towards the predicted emergence point.
Caliphant’s decision was informed by slightly more tactical subtlety. Voracious was inherently more fragile than the other two ships, although she could still hit hard. Taking account of both those things- ten degrees down and sixty degrees starboard, off the threat axis, avoid being led into a crossfire.
Tevar had the largest and most dangerous, also the most obviously damaged ship. She would be the obvious target.
The most effective thing she could do would be to take off at a tangent between that of Voracious and Perseverance, keeping close enough to both of them for mutual support, and until that threat did materialize keep firing on One and Indivisible.
Black Prince was monitoring the situation, and it was good, as far as it went. The flagship had a better read on the incoming, anyway.
‘This should be interesting- I wasn’t expecting that at this stage of the action. Right thing for them to do, though.’ Lennart said.
Brenn knew what was coming, and interrupted his commanding officer with the obvious answer to the obvious question; ‘Commit wave three now, let them deal with it.’
‘Leaving the last of the heavies to us. Seems to make sense.’ Lennart agreed.
The long range plot showed the full subsector. The approach path of the rebel ships was visible, as were the projected tracks of the other units of 851.
They were on a converging spiral pattern, a classic hunter’s move spiralling in on Ord Corban, with a close pass at Iushnevan just in case. They were the final reserve. Might not be necessary. Hopefully.
‘Final drop point, formation centre…here.’ Lennart decided, marking the tactical map up. He chose a point on the opposite side from the direction Wave Two were manoeuvring in, cover their tails from the incoming Rebel strike. Thirty thousand kilometres off.
‘Send them out, and signal Perseverance, tell Lycarin to get the hair out of his arse and vector twenty degrees to starboard to cover Fist. He’s making far too easy a target of himself and that thing can still shoot, even if it can’t manoeuvre.’
By the time that order got to him, Commander Lycarin was only too happy to obey. He had made a mistake, and the splatter of turbolaser fire around his ship was hammering that in- his shields were already fully focused forward and having lumps carved out of them.
The rebel cruiser’s main reactor was shock damaged and unable to sustain full power, the secondary in the core ship was running on maximum rated, and the guns were taking as much of it as they could stand.
The gunners were jittery, and their systems were not fully effective- Fist had the only really heavy ion cannon in the squadron, and she had been using them. The Lucrehulk was a big ship with a lot of mass, worse dead-weight that could be used to soak up an ion bolt.
They had made some difference, but not enough to save Perseverance from her commander’s gung- ho stupidity.
His shields were coming apart, the rebel was only too happy to have something solid to shoot back at, even if their hit rate was low.
Black Prince’s wake- up call came just in time; Perseverance broke off the attack entirely, and threw the base course out of the window- wild swooping curves, maximum effort into evasion.
Perseverance could return fire with her missiles, over her shoulder- it was far from optimum but it was the best she could do. They made more difference by getting in the way of rebel shot than anything their hitting would achieve.
There was one saving factor; not all the Lucrehulk’s guns could bear on her. The hull form made it impossible, unlike their equivalents in size in the Imperial fleet they simply had no alpha arc.
That left the rest of her guns free to spray fire at the smaller craft of the force.
Perseverance transferred shield focus aft, which saved her engines and bridge from being ripped apart- briefly; the light units didn’t have that much resilience to begin with.
The minelayer variant Strike, Havoc, caught a burst from the cruiser; a solid medium type, she could take about one and a half petatons total, any single hit of a hundred teratons would blow out a shield panel. Her shields flared out in one blaze of vapourised durasteel, and her bow blew apart.
Havoc firewalled her engines and tried to manoeuvre; one more good reason for Black Prince being on overwatch- she could send the crippled ‘cruiser’- medium frigate- an escape course.
The maimed cruiser managed to run up to hyperspace, flashing past the crippled rebel and clear back to the initial rendezvous.
One tactical option closed down. It would have been useful to be able to mine the emergence point- and even now, perhaps they could learn from the rebels and do a distant ballistic drop. Let Havoc stabilise and do damage control before putting that one into practise.
The rebel gunners were still reacting to circumstances, still scattering fire across the Imperial squadron.
If they had held the focus of fire on one ship after another, or two, they would have been able to do real damage and reduce their numbers much faster than one or two guns going after each Imperial. They didn’t.
On the other hand, the Lucrehulk, even in that state, still put out nine petatons a second. Wide, scattered fire still carried a lot of power. It could do damage. Enough to beat the imperial ships off before they could kill it? Probably not. Not without help.
Which was on it’s way. Wave Two had relayed data from the flag and Blackwood, and their own sensors confirmed by acquiring the incoming thirty seconds out.
Two rebel major warships; they flashed back into realspace in close company, the Alliance regional support force MC-80 Mon Evarra, and the formerly Imperial star destroyer Reiver.
Eight smaller ships with them, a Dreadnaught, an Acclamator, a Neutron Star, two Quasar Fire and four light corvettes.
Brenn noticed Lennart studiously refusing to take any special notice of the Mon Evarra. Which was odd, considering she was the ship Black Prince had been ambushed and heavily ionised by. The ship that had landed them in this sector, in this mess, in the first place.
‘Kor Alric’s going to be disappointed in you.’ He said to Lennart.
‘Specifically or in general? The rest of the squadron can handle them. Quick massed fire, knock them out then turn back on the cruiser.
That,’ he said referring to the image of the last inbound on the main sector map, the former flagship of the Hundred and Eighteenth Republic Fleet, Admonisher, ‘is our personal prey.’
Wasn't the cruiser that Black Prince engaged before the story started the Mon Evarra?
Anyways, thought I'd finally put in that this is a simply excellent story; the best depiction of SW space combat I've ever read. If I had all the ship types in properly detailed cgi I'd make a few illustrations for you. Keep up the good work!
Now.. why did this make me think of two of my husband's nicknames:
Nitram and Malkamar?
Hjalmar Amarin
Heh. If it was meant that way, cute touch. And thank you once again for giving Tevar her Fist.
Nitram, slightly high on cough syrup: Do you know you're beautiful?
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
The Sword didn't come out smelling like a rose from the last combat they were in, right? Something about damage control fighting to protect its hyperdrive at all costs? Anyways, it seems our disorganization may be working against us on multiple levels. Good individual fighters, but not enough mutual work to make an effective team, let alone a great one.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
FractalSponge1 is right, alas; that's what I get for trying to write without my notes to hand.
There is a continuity glitch, I did misname the rebel ship, and that came from a deleted scene from ch29.
Worse yet, 'Mon Evarra' is actually a Kipling reference; Evarra is a carver of idols, who spends his entire life making statues of gods. Eventually, it sends him mad, and after delivering an impassioned sermon to a field of cows he keels over and dies- and ascends to his afterlife, which he finds guarded, overrun, by the statues of the gods he spent his life and squandered his sanity carving.
Evarra snaps, and in a flurry of rage drives his hand- made gods out of paradise.
Considering the current killer app on this forum, how big a blind spot do I have to possess to manage to forget that?
Anyway, neither side has actually had time to work up to full efficiency and mutual reliance, both are to a large extent improvising. The rebel cruiser deserves some credit for managing to fight back at all, considering their damage; shock- to the people, not the instruments, although there's more than enough of that- should put them in a worse state than they are.
Part of that is that as conversion jobs to begin with, the Lucrehulk's crew were more used to mad improvisation and bits falling off or failing to function anyway. The other part is that their backs are against the wall, and they know it. Any actual success they achieve rebuilds confidence and buys time.
In the short term, they still have a lot fo firepower, and there's a lot of grinding down to be done before the reb cruiser can be got rid of. In the long term One and Indivisible is probably a CTL, but they could at best salvage the weapons, electronics and some of the cargo, and get the crew off. At best.
Neither side is free from the problems of insufficient working up time, and insufficient knowledge of how the rest of their team are going to react. Whoever makes the second to last mistake wins. Both sides know that, and will be racing to get inside the other's decision loop, force the other side to make mistakes that let their own side fight effectively.
And, yes, Mon Evarra was severely damaged, but in the same time Black Prince has had to fight four actions, she's been free to do nothing but get patched up.
As far as the MC- line goes, I reckon the original MC80's are the ones with wings, the pre-existing luxury liners that had to be converted into warships; the Liberty type are the wingless, immediately pre-revolt and post- revolt purpose-built versions.
The-80s have the advantage of that ancestry making them better troop and fighter carriers, and better command ships; they're equally well shielded, but lighter built, and slightly faster because of that. The Liberties are more heavily framed and more heavily subdivided, throw more firepower but less effective as multirole. Mon Evarra is a -80 with a lot of her internal spaces plugged up for better damage tolerance.
As far as the MC- line goes, I reckon the original MC80's are the ones with wings, the pre-existing luxury liners that had to be converted into warships; the Liberty type are the wingless, immediately pre-revolt and post- revolt purpose-built versions.
The Liberty in ROTJ (first ship destroyed by the DSII) had wings though, didn't it?
When in trouble, use the SHIT method:
Stop what you're doing
Hide the evidence
Implicate others
Tell no one
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:Part of that is that as conversion jobs to begin with, the Lucrehulk's crew were more used to mad improvisation and bits falling off or failing to function anyway. The other part is that their backs are against the wall, and they know it. Any actual success they achieve rebuilds confidence and buys time.
Is the lucrehulk the trade federation class ship in attack of the clones ?
Liberty was the winged version. Good catch.
The whole line of development of the MC-80/Liberty/MC-80A/MC-90 series, the more I think about it the more confused I get.
Sticking with the notion that the MC-80 is the starliner converted to warship, that would make the-80 the one without the wings, which means they were added to the militarised version, or should I say the interim militarised version, which means they must have some military utility.
I had been running with the thought that they were essentially frivolous stylistic features that were removed from the liner type to make the warship, but if instead they get added- what are they? heatsink mounts? Weapon wings? Longer lateral sensor baseline? All of the above?
This gets further complicated by the fact that in various sources, you can find lengths of anywhere from 1.2 to 1.5km quoted for the MC-80, and some of them are labelled MC-80A. That and the varying number of engines- how systematic was these ships' militarisation? Were they all the same length to start with?
If we assume the MC-80 Starliner isn't a class designation, it's a type designation, that explains a lot. It covers a lot of the individual idiosyncrasies, it opens up more room for ships to be variant in appearance and ability, and it helps make the rest of the system fall into place.
Call the MC-80 label something much closer to an operational requirement. The idiosyncratic, varying collection of liners subjected to that mst be capable of a given acceleration, a given firepower output, an a given heat radiation rate-for some versions, that means they need more engines than others, there may be half-winged MC-80s to bring the shield function up to the required standard.
The Liberty- class are full winged, then, usually, although some probably need more wing area than others.
MC-80A and MC-90 would be parallel programs, one to collect all the ideas that worked on the existing ships and refit them to a higher standard, one to produce a rationalised new class.The MC-80A label may have been applied prematurely, to partially reconstructed ships that weren't fully refitted, during the Civil War.
The Lucrehulk class were the mainstay heavy of the Separatists all the way from Naboo to Coruscant, there were a lot of them around, and they existed in numerous variants.
The pure freighter with only point defence used for logistic support and to transport landing barges, to the more heavily armed droid control ship, to combat carriers, to shipping extra power reactors as cargo and mounting additional heavy turbolasers.
One and Indivisible was probably not a clone wars veteran, but a surviving purely civilian freighter that was refitted and upgraded by the Rebels using Ord Corban's resources.
One surprising thing, the speed of them. Look at the cargo bay- the ship has to be able to move with that full of payload, which means that in a mlitary state, with the cargo bay/hangars largely empty for manoeuvring room, they have a big power surplus that can go to weapons or engines, or both.
They're not the equal of a purpose built warship that size, but they are formidable opponents for a destroyer squadron.
I'm not sure how I missed this story, but this really is superb work, ECR. It looks like you're wrapping things up here, but if you have a spot for a cameo I'd love to have one.
As for the MC80s being "converted liners," I never really was satisfied with that explanation - at least on the face of it. The requirements of a warship clash too much with that of a peacetime luxury liner; it seems more likely that they were built entirely to warship standards from the start and then fitted "for but not with" all those lovely extras. Maybe they bribed some sector government officials to look the other way when it came to inspecting the blueprints: all those huge power trunks, gun mounts and and whatnot surely must be obvious.
The specification approach is a pretty good one. "Performance Specification 80" for the hodgepodge Rebellion-era forces, a more standardized "80A" (post-refit?) in the early post-Endor stage and then moving into the 80B and 90 specifications.
phongn wrote:As for the MC80s being "converted liners," I never really was satisfied with that explanation - at least on the face of it. The requirements of a warship clash too much with that of a peacetime luxury liner; it seems more likely that they were built entirely to warship standards from the start and then fitted "for but not with" all those lovely extras. Maybe they bribed some sector government officials to look the other way when it came to inspecting the blueprints: all those huge power trunks, gun mounts and and whatnot surely must be obvious.
Not really, it's just the frame that needs to be capable to handel the stress of what a warship normaly has.
This include reinforced points were you could mount a gun mount.
Same thing for the armor, but their ocean people, so it could go both ways.
As for speed/mass limith, think Blue Ribbon from the time the Ocean Liners ruled the Sea's of Earth.
This way they could also explain the extra cable canels, for extra goodies to keep the costumers bussy.
Your right about it with a ship of today, phongn.
But we're talking space-ships, besides, the bribe was probably to overlook the posibility that they could be converted into warships. (The gaps where those turret mounts would go, were probably panarama domes)
Which might have been part of that sector governments bid to power.
I kinda envision the MC-80 as being similar to the "purpose designed" type of armed merchant cruisers seen in WWII -- they're civilian ships, but intentionally designed with the capability to be converted into warships as needed.
This picture can be dated to the Clone Wars, making an interesting statement about the age of the Liberty-type MC80s. It's quite obviously the same design as we see in the CGTV&V, but was developed around the same time as the venator or imperator.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
Vianca wrote:Not really, it's just the frame that needs to be capable to handel the stress of what a warship normally has. This include reinforced points were you could mount a gun mount. Same thing for the armor, but their ocean people, so it could go both ways.
And that's well in excess of any requirement for any civilian liner. They're built as warships and fitted out as liners, not the other way around.
As for speed/mass limits, think Blue Ribbon from the time the Ocean Liners ruled the Sea's of Earth. This way they could also explain the extra cable channels, for extra goodies to keep the costumers busy.
No civilian systems are going to possibly need the power requirements for military weapons and military shielding. Someone is going to look
Your right about it with a ship of today, phongn. But we're talking space-ships, besides, the bribe was probably to overlook the possibility that they could be converted into warships.
I did mention the bribe part, and basic engineering doesn't magically go away because we're suddenly working with "spaceships."
(The gaps where those turret mounts would go, were probably panorama domes) Which might have been part of that sector governments bid to power.
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:Liberty was the winged version. Good catch.
The whole line of development of the MC-80/Liberty/MC-80A/MC-90 series, the more I think about it the more confused I get.
Sticking with the notion that the MC-80 is the starliner converted to warship, that would make the-80 the one without the wings, which means they were added to the militarised version, or should I say the interim militarised version, which means they must have some military utility.
I had been running with the thought that they were essentially frivolous stylistic features that were removed from the liner type to make the warship, but if instead they get added- what are they? heatsink mounts? Weapon wings? Longer lateral sensor baseline? All of the above?
This gets further complicated by the fact that in various sources, you can find lengths of anywhere from 1.2 to 1.5km quoted for the MC-80, and some of them are labelled MC-80A. That and the varying number of engines- how systematic was these ships' militarisation? Were they all the same length to start with?
If we assume the MC-80 Starliner isn't a class designation, it's a type designation, that explains a lot. It covers a lot of the individual idiosyncrasies, it opens up more room for ships to be variant in appearance and ability, and it helps make the rest of the system fall into place.
Call the MC-80 label something much closer to an operational requirement. The idiosyncratic, varying collection of liners subjected to that mst be capable of a given acceleration, a given firepower output, an a given heat radiation rate-for some versions, that means they need more engines than others, there may be half-winged MC-80s to bring the shield function up to the required standard.
The Liberty- class are full winged, then, usually, although some probably need more wing area than others.
MC-80A and MC-90 would be parallel programs, one to collect all the ideas that worked on the existing ships and refit them to a higher standard, one to produce a rationalised new class.The MC-80A label may have been applied prematurely, to partially reconstructed ships that weren't fully refitted, during the Civil War.
Personally, I think the MC-number is a production "generation" or there abouts. We have the MC-80s, which include the 1.5 km filmic Liberty-types and wingless-Liberty-variants - the EU calls the Home One flagship and the Independence and Defiance sister craft MC-80s. Then we have the game and WEG 1.2 km MC-80s, which are different. Furthermore, the MC-90s includes the Defiance (1.255 km, flattened-cone shaped with mostly a large unitary engine bank). They also include Galactic Voyager, which had a long tail and several engine banks along it, and partial wings. It also survived a gunbattle with an Executor-class at length, so I am tempted to say that the Galactic Voyagers are the Home Ones of the MC-90s. Personally I think the luxury liner explanation is silly or propoganda. We see in the Grevious comic they deployed similar craft in the Clone War; I suspect that the Alliance to Restore the Republic deployed remilitarized hulls that were put to civilian work. The MC-80a and MC-80B lines were intermediate stop-gap production lines before the MC-90 line to was available to equip the fully established New Republic with a conventional navy.
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:The Lucrehulk class were the mainstay heavy of the Separatists all the way from Naboo to Coruscant, there were a lot of them around, and they existed in numerous variants.
The pure freighter with only point defence used for logistic support and to transport landing barges, to the more heavily armed droid control ship, to combat carriers, to shipping extra power reactors as cargo and mounting additional heavy turbolasers.
So you class the ROTS Lucrehulks as combat/battle-carriers?
"You know what the problem with Hollywood is. They make shit. Unbelievable. Unremarkable. Shit." - Gabriel Shear, Swordfish
"This statement, in its utterly clueless hubristic stupidity, cannot be improved upon. I merely quote it in admiration of its perfection." - Garibaldi in reply to an incredibly stupid post.
The Fifth Illuminatus Primus | Warsie | Skeptical Empiricist | Florida Gator | Sustainability Advocate | LibertarianSocialist |
Phongn, the trouble is, most of the major players have already fallen into place. On the other hand, if I put you too far down the chain of command, the Tathan Pran might get me
IP, the more I think about the MC-80 the more confused I get about the timeline. On one hand, contact with the mainstream of galactic civilisation- well after the Light and Darkness War, so what are they using for a design rationale? They've got no major military experience, at the time Vehrec's image comes from.
On the other, the Quarren were responsible for the Recusant, a mainstay of the separatist movement; on the other again, the Recusant is light, medium-high speed, fragile but very heavily armed for it's size- qualities almost diametrically opposed to the extremely robust and moderately armed MC-80 series.
The industrial and the financial; how did the Mon Cal finance their fleet? This is a single world, even though it has the mechanical capability to put together an effective force, how does it have the economic muscle to build and support them?
If they had to in effect pay for themselves by being used as liners, with most of the expensive combat electronics, weapons and shielding held in storage if they were built at all, that makes some kind of sense.
On the other hand, there's the Mon Cal only crews aspect- wouldn't that environmental difference be a real problem if they were trying to haul paying human passengers? It seems trivial, but overcoming that problem would mean they would be able to integrate human crews much sooner than they appear to actually do.
There's the brief Imperial occupation of Dac to account for; what were the ships of the Mon Cal fleet doing during that time? Had they been demilitarised after the Clone Wars and the Empire moved too fast for them to be rearmed, or did they play any part in making the Dac system more trouble than it was worth for the Empire to base out of?
How did the starfleet manage to ignore or overlook the existence of so many potential enemy warships? If the already existing armed MC-series were siezed or destroyed in combat, why did the Mon Cal start again with such a confusing collection of subtypes and designations?
More questions than answers. I may have to sit down and watch the Battle of Endor repeatedly, to convince myself that they actually exist, now. Incidentally, during the battle I don't think they're ever actually referred to as MC-80s, are they? Just 'starcruisers'.
Mon Evarra is a wingless, eleven-engined fully combat- rated gunship model, and one with a relatively highly skilled crew, considering she managed to pick a fight with Black Prince, inflict some damage and get away again.
Lucrehulks, on the other hand, or LH-3210 if we want to be formal, are pretty much explicitly stated in the ICS to be civilian standard hulls with guns bolted on. Lines like "These seemingly harmless and slow moving container ships" and "The commercial origin of the battleships leave them with shortcomings".
On the other hand, their sheer bulk was working for them. Simply in order to survive their own engine- generated stresses with a heavy load,they would have to be fairly tough- in order to move, they have to be fairly powerfully engined.
Which only goes so far. They can be upgunned, but the easiest conversion has to be to use the payload space for troops and fighters. Fitting true heavy- calibre, high recoil turbolasers to them must have been a task, but it also must have been an easier option than building a whole new ship to slide under the guns. They'll always have large blind spots, always be heavily fighter dependent. Things have simply moved too fast for One and Indivisible's fighter group to do much, yet.
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:Phongn, the trouble is, most of the major players have already fallen into place. On the other hand, if I put you too far down the chain of command, the Tathan Pran might get me
Just if you have a spot, somewhere. Hell, I could be a Ubiqtorate analyst pushing paper somewhere in the fallout of all this - but, if you've not a spot, 'tis fine. Certainly my fault for overlooking your fine work for so long.
As for the Tathan Pran, well, as long as you aren't going anywhere near TBO's Thailand I suppose you'd be safe
How did the starfleet manage to ignore or overlook the existence of so many potential enemy warships? If the already existing armed MC-series were seized or destroyed in combat, why did the Mon Cal start again with such a confusing collection of subtypes and designations?
Mike Wong has argued that it really makes no sense for Dac to be free and that they fully remain part of the Empire, quietly and secretively arming the Rebellion.
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:Phongn, the trouble is, most of the major players have already fallen into place. On the other hand, if I put you too far down the chain of command, the Tathan Pran might get me
Just if you have a spot, somewhere. Hell, I could be a Ubiqtorate analyst pushing paper somewhere in the fallout of all this - but, if you've not a spot, 'tis fine. Certainly my fault for overlooking your fine work for so long.
Maybe as the person that tries to either track Enigma's AI copy/copies, or keep him out of some key systems?
Really hope it doesn't get in either of my ships computer systems.
What change do I have it doesn't happen, -100%????
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:Phongn, the trouble is, most of the major players have already fallen into place. On the other hand, if I put you too far down the chain of command, the Tathan Pran might get me
Just if you have a spot, somewhere. Hell, I could be a Ubiqtorate analyst pushing paper somewhere in the fallout of all this - but, if you've not a spot, 'tis fine. Certainly my fault for overlooking your fine work for so long.
Maybe as the person that tries to either track Enigma's AI copy/copies, or keep him out of some key systems?
Really hope it doesn't get in either of my ships computer systems.
What change do I have it doesn't happen, -100%????
Riddle me this, riddle me that, which button makes the ship go splat?
I doubt I'd be that evil. I guess I'm just ensuring my survival.
ASVS('97)/SDN('03)
"Whilst human alchemists refer to the combustion triangle, some of their orcish counterparts see it as more of a hexagon: heat, fuel, air, laughter, screaming, fun." Dawn of the Dragons
Enigma wrote:I doubt I'd be that evil. I guess I'm just ensuring my survival.
And trowing several nice crafty battle plans into the water.
Wouldn't that be counter intuitive? Can't exactly ensure my survival if I am endangering the host?
ASVS('97)/SDN('03)
"Whilst human alchemists refer to the combustion triangle, some of their orcish counterparts see it as more of a hexagon: heat, fuel, air, laughter, screaming, fun." Dawn of the Dragons
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
This picture can be dated to the Clone Wars, making an interesting statement about the age of the Liberty-type MC80s. It's quite obviously the same design as we see in the CGTV&V, but was developed around the same time as the venator or imperator.
