Raid on Lunion
This note is from our May 6, 2018 session and was written by Carl and Kay with additions by myself.
Since we are now scattered around the country, we used Discord for voice communications and Roll20 online virtual tabletop to connect with each other.Continued from Justice - Conclusion.
Imperial Date: 249-1107.
Location: The Asteroid World Zaibon in the Lunion Subsector.
Our intended route this time is from Zaibon to Lunion to Gandr to Carey to Fornice to Mora.
We’ve never been to any of these places, but they look like they are out of the war zone. We discuss options re: things going rimward and decide to buy extra Life Support packs. At 100 credits each, we bought five. In case we have to hide in a backwater, it would be good not to run out of food and air.
We decided to forego most cargo and carry spare fuel instead (in case we needed to do an emergency jump). Sam got a 5-ton container, planning to get 3 tons of cargo and leave space for extra Life Support packs as well. The rest of the cargo bay would be used to store the extra fuel.
0800 on Zaibon:
We
decided to take on some mid-passage passengers to supplement our income
and help a few people get away from the front if they wanted. The going
rate for mid-passage between Zaibon and Lunion is 10,000 Credits, and
we had room for four.
The first was Georgia Culver, a merchant returning from vacation on Zaibon. I have no idea why someone would go to Zaibon on vacation, and no one ever got around to asking her.
The next three were Moses Mitchell, a diplomat and his two marine escorts. Mitchel was a trade delegate from Lunion to Beater. The war caused the loss of his diplomatic status and he was returning to Lunion.
We checked the Marine’s weapons, although it probably wouldn't have made much difference. Dirk Tronstad looked like he could crush bricks with his bare hands and the amazingly dexterous Yelis sh'Kore would probably be able to improvise something deadly from nearby objects if she didn’t take your weapon away from you in the first half second of battle.
Our passengers didn't know any more about the war than we did. None of them had seen any fighting.
251-1107 2140
News from TNS: Zhodani fighting in-system at Regina but not on planet.
253-1107 0900
Cargo loaded and ready to go.
The 400T Elbek Express 1G, J-3 leaving at 1812 also for Lunion.
Can leave just before midnight for a midnight jump since Zaibon is an asteroid and the Skylark 2 can reach the 100-Planetary diameter limit in a few minutes.
254-1107 0001
We jump out for Lunion.
261-1107 0239
Out of hyperspace and into the Lunion system.
We started getting multiple Mayday calls, starting with the ship that jumped out from Zaibon right before we did, the Elbek Express. That could have been us!
From Elbek Express, 400-DTon Free Trader, inbound from Zaibon, Owner Natalie Sears:
“This is Free Trader Elbek Express,
Calling anyone…
Mayday, Mayday… we are under attack… main drive is gone…
Turret number one not responding…
Mayday… losing cabin pressure
Fast… calling anyone…please help…
This is Free Trader Elbek Express … “
From Spirit of Sirius, 1000-DTon Oberlindes Lines Freighter, outbound for Adabicci, Capt. Minerva Taylor:
“… Carnation, there are two 600-DTon raiders with six fighters. Look out, the raiders have some nasty railgun bays. Took out our drives and damaged our power plant with one shot. “
We have two destroyers, the Carnation and Begonia moving in our direction from the Imperial Naval Base on Lunion’s moon LaLune; and just out from Lunion there are two system defense boats moving toward us at 5G’s.
Space was pretty impacted with other ships maneuvering when we came out of jump into Lunion.
Then we get a message from the other side of the jump radius:
From the Bernadette Gypsy, 200-DTon Free Trader, outbound for Resten, Capt. Ju Shai-Chou:
“Got two raiders here, shot me up and accelerating out towards Osiris… uhhh, I am going to need a tow once this settles down, outbound 84,000 kph… “
The Elbek Express and Spirit of Sirius are being attacked by Sword World ships and fighters. Their transponders ID them at the SWS Aufsteigand and SWS Schicksal, with six smaller fighters.
Looked too bad for us to try and go inbound. Sadly, we couldn't expect to make any difference in a fight like that. We talked about heading outbound at best speed, with Fig fine tuning our location for the jump. We decide to jump to Carse, but it would be at least an hour before we could jump (drive cooldown).
After a second look at the hostile environment, we decided to go inbound and hope the sandcasters would protect us some. One fighter was designated as our target, and the other two nearby planned for sandcaster interrupt. We hoped to be able to assist the Elbek Express before they were all dead.
None of us had seen space combat other than our Trade War scenario, so this was as spectacular as it was tragic. OH, the humanity...
We had come out of jump near SWS Schicksal and several enemy fighters accelerating at 6Gs.
According to Elbek they hit one fighter and it’s damaged but still fighting.
We start to accelerate and use our sandcaster which fills the area between us and the Schicksal with prismatic sand, hopefully deflecting any laser fire directed our way.
Spirit of Sirius takes a hit from SWS Aufsteigand.
Enemy fighter (EF) EF-2 shoots the Spirit of Sirius.
EF-4 misses.
EF-1 hit the Spirit of Sirius.
EF-5 and SF-6 and SWS Schicksal all shoot at Skylark 2 and miss.
Skylark 2 fires two more sand casters to block beams, SWS Schicksal fires two missiles and misses, and uses their railgun, they hit Skylark 2,
sensors out and we take a shot that goes the length of our cargo hold.
Leon, who is running damage control, sees just about every failure light
on the cargo deck go red at once.
Kipenzi: “Sam had presciently filled our tanks with the extra fuel we brought while in hyperspace, so the fuel tank in the cargo bay was empty when we were hit. Otherwise, we’d all be space dust right now.”
We also took a major hit to sensors, cutting down on our defense and making it more difficult to rendezvous with any of the ships needing help more than we would.
Good thing it went through us lengthwise, rather than broadside.
Fig: “All those beautiful life support packs, gone to the winds of space.”
Kipenzi: “This constitutes the “best worst” luck. We got hit by a RAILGUN. But the trajectory went through our cargo bay doors and took out the containers, instead of anything else – like US. The clamshell doors are gone – or at least buckled – and good thing we only had 5 tons of cargo to lose. Although that loss was to the tune of 1,507,200 credits worth of cyber-prosthetics, industrial isotopes and reactor-grade uranium. No lives lost unless Medicus blows waking up the low passengers.”
EF-3 shoots at Spirit of Sirius and Spirit of Sirius lost their power plant, for good this time.
ISS Begonia and ISS Carnation each launch a flight of missiles toward the Sword Worlds ships, unfortunately they will not arrive for 45 minutes, as they are still a ways out.
Elbek Express shoots at EF-6 and misses.
Spirit of Sirius can’t fire - power plant out.
Skylark 2 fires at EF-6 and hits, taking out the fighter just as the starboard turret jams. Fig calls out to Leon and he gets it working again about 10 minutes later.
When some of the spacedust settled, we fired at our best choice of targets. One laser was probably damaged by the hit we took, needed repairs. Fortunately, we took out our target, score one for the good folks.
Guess our next paint job will have at least one SWORD on it.
There is a flash as another ship drops out of jump.
From Long Odds, 200-DTon Free Trader, inbound from Derchon, Capt. Palmer Potter:
“WTF? Oh, Shit! “
Kipenzi responds: from Skylark 2: “Head down gravity well - and duck a lot and maybe assist with Elbek Express with their may day”.
Fighters started docking with their mother ships.
EF-2 docked with Aufsteigand and EF-4 docks, EF-5 docks with Schicksal
We call We call Elbek Express and ask for damage report, lost engines and 1 turret and decompressed
SWS Schicksal turns and targets the Long Odds.
Carnation’s missiles are still half an hour out.
SWS Aufsteigand hits the Long Odds - critical hit and they lose their cargo.
EF-3 shoots at Spirit of Sirius hits hull and fuel tanks.
SWS Schicksal hits Long Odds’ hull and turret and cargo.
SWS Schicksal and SWS Aufsteigand both shoot missiles toward the destroyers as they start to move into range.
Long Odds fires and hits the SWS Schicksal damaging their sensors and M-Drive.
Skylark 2 hits the SWS Schicksal slicing off a chunk of armor.
SWS Schicksal jumps out for who knows where.
There is a flash as the nuclear missiles launched earlier explode in the middle of the flight of missiles launched earlier by the destroyers.
The EMP pulse from the blast takes out the starboard hologram projector and wing camera on the Skylark 2. Fortunately we were too far away for the EMP to penetrate our hull shielding and do any internal damage.
SWS Aufsteigand jumped as the Imperial Destroyers moved into beam range.
Looks like the attack was a raid to use up system resources and force repairs and rescue instead of a conquest attack. That will probably come later.... sigh.
More stuff to fix/replace on the ground, once we drift (SLOWLY) up the priority queue in the repair yards. Well, we needed a little down time.
The Skylark 2 and Long Odds were the only ships left with maneuver drive. It was gonna be a long wait for the other ships to get towed in.
We headed in toward the Lunion High Port.
We got some info as we headed in: This was the first time for raids at Lunion. The system’s 47th Fleet was in the outer system on maneuvers (meaning someone’s intelligence service was working – just not ours). There were only four destroyers at the planet’s moon, La Luene: the ISS Begonia and the ISS Carnation and two more that headed for the far side of the 100 planetary diameter limit to help there. There were two Dragon Class System Defense Boats out from the Lunion High, ISS Cudrygos and the ISS Thizoc, both arrived just after the destroyers... well after the battle was over.
They will now be parking defense boats at the jump points. There will be an investigation on what went wrong.
Continued in Mission to Mithril
See Also: Dramatis Personæ, Skylark 2, Campaign Starts, The 2nd Adventure, The Chamax Plague, Horde, Shadows, Research Station Gamma, Twilight's Peak, Prison Planet, Leedor on Aramis, First Call at Zilla, Trade War, The Bloodwell, ANNIC NOVA, The Kinunir and Kesser's Return.
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