Entry Eleven: Now I had enough for a couple of purposes. One was to keep and repair the less shot up of those Blastclaws. Those are impressive ships. And then I wandered around in it for a bit until I found a guy with a bootleg J Drive for sale and dropped down to Boron space for an AI. I was becoming a true believer by then in the Boron system of “personalities AIs”. With it set up and all that pretty money in my accounts I decided to set markers and just jump back to Seizewell quickly and then head back to Eighteen Billion to continue my long, wandering trip to Ocean of Fantasy. In the Shugenja with the “Cowardly Lion” in tandem I made the huge leap in one long jump and set my auto pilot to take me to the big old Albatross across the sector and set the Blastclaw to the EQ there while I negotiated with the massive home sector shipyards a bit via the Network. A pair of Vultures to keep my new Silicon Mine supplied and producing and the Mine itself which the Albie would haul for me and the Blastclaw to watch over it all, I grinned thinking life couldn’t get much better than that. I was now beginning to build an actual fleet and would be a station owner/operator as well. My Vultures were kitted out and heading for the west jump Gate to stock up on E-Cells, while my Super Caiman and my Toucan were already full of them and waiting to gets the new station running. It was all so fast. Just a few ticks of the clock, it felt like, after all my waiting and planning and it was reality. Even before I had finished all the administrative details, the place was producing. It’d be a bit before it was in the black maybe, but it was chugging away nicely. The asteroid was a rich one and would still sustain the operations for a good long time as it was far from small. The Teladi people in the sector welcomed me, for the most part, maybe the owner of the other Silicon mine wasn’t so wild about my presence, but Racine Mining Limited was now homebase to seven ships, three of those fighters and two of them heavy fighters, a not unimpressive amount of firepower and two of the others were dedicated tender/sales ships. Yep, this was definitely not bad over all. I even had enough cash left, if I was willing to take a few financial chances, to get together with this Teladi practical physicist and set an over tuning for my Elite, making her almost supernatural in more than just her name.
“So, where do I go from here?” I remember asking myself. My answer was, back to work as usual, let the regular business of business take care of itself, with a bit of oversight of course, while I set back out to grab up my command ship. Ohh, I hadn’t forgotten her! I had just been a bit overwhelmed by my new wealth and position. I had already achieved more than I ever thought possible and I was just beginning to see that this was barely the tip of the ice berg.
Via the Gate Network I got a hold of Gloria and had her, via a fairly simple program I was writing for her as we chatted, explore the center of her sector and quickly found the EQ there. The upgrades for her would have to wait…unless… maybe before I jumped back to Eighteen Billion I could head over to Teladi Gain and have at the Pirates that seemed to swarm there, maybe getting one or two of them to donate a ship to me to finance the upgrades to my command ship. That was the first time I had the real thought of preying on the Pirates as a source of revenue. Before it had just sort of fallen to me without my conscious choice, but now, now it was the germ of a plan. I stopped in at the Trading Station there and had a chat with the local Company Security Directorate. Before I left, a very short while later, I was, for a modest fee, the owner of a Teladi Company Security Police license. So now I could scan those Pirates legally before I shot holes in them.
I brought the Goshawk in too, although I had it layed a ways off, as a just in case sort of thing, since she just plain could shoot the lights out of you if given half a chance and she could poodle scoot out of harms way quickly too. Of course the Shugenja could flat out run now too. 206.34 m/s was now her record, and I had managed to pick up another 25MJ Mil spec shield for her to replace the standard one, so she could absorb a respectable amount of damage. Of course, I understood the adage that if I can do it so can someone else, or maybe something even nastier; so I wasn’t over confident about the ‘Hawks ability to run away from trouble no matter what. Hey, even a decent M5 with luck can shred the shields on a bird like the ‘Hawk, so being cocky about her was a good way to loose her. On the other hand I had some nice offensive and defensive progis running in her very state of the art computer and another of those loveable Boron AI’s so, she was almost a VERY fast heavy in the way I could use her.
I turned the old girl loose to cruise around the middle of the sector and set myself by the east gate and very soon had a pair of Nova’s and a Harrier Hauler dragging slowly through. One of the Nova’s seemed to top out at about 79 and the other at 65, so I set the ‘hawk to keep an eye on the Hauler, put a Wasp off on each of the two Nova’s and set off, slowly, barely pushing 80 myself, for deep space, with both of these two geniuses straggling out behind me, as per the plan. And it came off as per the plan too, or almost. I couldn’t get either of them to bail, but they sure set me up for heavy missiles. I got a pair of Thunderbolts and FIVE Hornets from the debris and jumped then almost on top of the Hauler, which had just been tooling along slowly, near the south gate of Seizewell and he at least was reasonable enough to hand me his ship. I brought the Goshawk close, transferred to it and had the Hauler dump it’s load of space weed and let “Shuggie” shepherd it back to the shipyards while I played Pirate myself and picked up both the ‘weed and the former owner of it and set out fast for the Pirate Base I knew about down in Company Pride. There I played Pirate to the hilt, selling off the weed and the former Harrier pilot both (hey, this guy had a mouth on him too, but he didn’t have the ship to back it up and I had the time this trip to let him learn not to tug on Superman’s Cape) and even took a job from the BBS to put paid to what had to be a rival Pirate. It sounded like fun, in fact, but it turned out to be anything but and the beginning of my long running troubles with the Split.
Pride, Prejudice and Profit
Moderators: TheElf, Moderators for English X Forum
-
Cantankerous
- Posts: 175
- Joined: Wed, 9. Aug 06, 19:46
-
Cantankerous
- Posts: 175
- Joined: Wed, 9. Aug 06, 19:46
Entry Twelve:
Entry Twelve: Said rival Pirate didn’t turn out to be the problem. The problem turned out to be an idiot who ran through the middle of a gun fight between three Pericles and myself. At three to one, this was an uneven fight, but in my favor. None of the three could top 160 m/s, none of the three had a decent pilot and although all three had missiles galore, not a single one got fired. The bloody Demeter was more of a problem than these bozos, but even he wouldn’t have been a problem if this idiotic Split Mamba jockey hadn’t just flown on slow and steady right behind where the four, by then three and very soon to be two, of us where dancing our butts off and salvoing shots left right and center. Apparently a shot or two must have gone on through one of the rapidly expanding balls of gas and debris and plugged him in the ass. At any rate this very fast, massively over tuned heavy fighter decided then and there that I was trying fervently to kill him and started spraying HEP fire at me. He flayed my shields with just a few of those bolts of death actually connecting and suddenly the battle had changed as juking away from him juked my almost shield less ship right in to the path of the Demeter’s A-PAC.
Now I was peeved. I pivoted and fed the idiot in the Demeter a Hornet and then, because the jackass wouldn’t listen to reason, and I did try, I let my temper get the best of me and fed him one. Both ships faired poorly. I’d been hammering the Demeters shields and that fast damned Mamba must have been under shielded. I was dealing with the last of my dead targets escorts when a missile warning went off. And no, it wasn’t from one of them. It appears that my blasting the snot out of one of their nationals had an effect on a couple of nearby Split Mamba’s on sector patrol. They went red, went for me and all I could do was dodge and jive and finally, as I was being herded, cut loose on one of them, damaging him pretty severely but far from finishing him, but that did allow me to slip through them. But it gained me the attention of a couple of jaguars and these two also knew their stuff. I had my head swiveling all around the cockpit, looking out windows,
I was now relying more on the old Mk 1 eyeball method of finding my foes than on my instruments. I braked and spun and slewed and twirled and barrel rolled and pivoted and button hooked and used every trick I knew and was just not getting any closer to any gate and more and more of the neighborhood was becoming hostile. I didn’t have a choice, I was going to have to shoot my way out.
By the time I finally slipped through the gate I had accounted for the three Pericles, three more Jaguars, the Demeter, a pair of Mamba Raiders and a Mamba Vanguard in addition to the first Mamba that started it all and there had been a wounded Mamba Sentinel to add to the butchers bill. Eleven dead and one wounded and I had, in the process, expended every missile I had on board, a good number of them, and had enough holes poked in my hull that I felt completely undressed; and my notoriety with the Split went from Known Venturer to Family Outcast. Now the Paranid officially thanked me for showing one of their own the error of his ways, and the Boron, who had sponsored the whole thing in the first place officially recognized me thereafter as a Queen’s Knight, so maybe the bloomin’ ‘Nid hadn’t been a Pirate after all, but all in all I counted it not just as a monetary, but also as a net loss. The Split were trading partners of the Teladi and making them enemies had the effect of limiting my possibilities for trade, right?
Well, when life gives you lemons…
I decided that I had enough of their attitude, their threats and their reactionism so I got reactionary myself and planted them squarely on my own personal ships enemy list. Fine, if they wanted it this way, I’d profit by THAT too. I loved their freighters anyway. But now, I simply wouldn’t bother buying them.
After fixing up the Goshawk I ran back to get the Shugenja and then, on a whim, sold off the Goshawk and used the proceeds to fix up that Harrier Hauler, which got christened the Goshawk II. It then got sent back to run cap on my Super Caiman, now called the Necromancer and I jumped off to Eighteen Billion. I still had to run the Xenon sector, short ways thankfully, but at that point I was still steaming and maybe it was fortunate for the Xenon that there weren’t any close enough that I couldn’t avoid them long enough to get a lock on the north gate. I micro jumped, button hooked right there in the interface and charged on through it in to Scale Plate Green.
And thence into the Argon sectors around there, Nyana’s Hideout to famed Omicron Lyrae to Treasure Chest to Black Hole Sun and then across yet another Xenon sector, this time the one they designate 472, but beyond that was more trouble than there was in it. It was a Split sector.
Officially that next sector, Thyn’s Abyss, was supposed to be lightly defended by the Split. The official word in the computer registry could be summed up as follows:
*** This deep space system is about as close as the Split get to a civilian operation. It produces food and other organic products and mines the asteroids that are spread throughout the system. Although there is little military presence here all Split are required to complete combat training and civilian Split pilots are no easy target. ***
I can attest to that. Not only are they no easy targets, but half of the buggers seem to run around in Scorpions or Mambas…as Food Transports. Only the Split would use Interceptors and Heavy Fighters as Food Transports. What a maniac bunch these guys are. What I won’t attest to about the above is the “little military presence” thing. Unless three M6s count as “little” and all of them went red the second they caught wind of me, I beg to differ with the official version.
It was more an exercise in geometry than any thing else to get through the sector without engaging one or more of them; and the Split Dragon is nothing to play with, so it was very necessary. That was not to say I got out of the sector without further pissing off the Split, as the Patrol craft with the Dragons were Jaguars and those you just do not out run, period. Luckily, with a maximum 2 MJ of shields and not allot of hull integrity, they are real glass, glass hammers. It took some fancy flying and a few more dead Split scout ship pilots, but I was through the gate and into even more fun. Family Njy has a reputation even among the Split for brutality. With me they have a reputation for overkill. They sent capital ships after me and whole fighter wings, but thankfully I have a J Drive and just as things were getting too hot for comfort, I was in J space and emerging from the gate a second later. Button hooking in the interface again, I slipped through to even more fun, another Family Njy sector. I slipped way north, then waaaay up above the ecliptic and thence downwards fast and furious and slipped through the gate almost before the Family was able to start sending big nasty ships my way. The next sector was huge…and Split again, but the now somewhat bucolic Family Ryk wasn’t as interested in me as they had been in every near by Split sector up until now. And since these guys were so relatively peaceful I repaid them for their peaceful attitude in traditional Split fashion. Once I made sure the gate to the north really was Ocean of Fantasy, not another Split sector, I set up and raided a trio of Split Transport ships in rapid succession and held of the pair of Mamba’s the local defense forces sent in response long enough to make sure both of the two TSes I had managed to cap got through the gate before doing likewise.
They were neither one Caimans. One was an Argon Mercury and the other a Dolphin Super Freighter. Neither was in good shape, but I had no intention of keeping either one anyway. The Shipyard gave me decent value on them, more than enough to outfit the gorgeous little yacht I had been given and still pay the unbelievably exorbitant price that the shifty Teladi at the Trading Station wanted for a used J Drive. Hila’s Joy right next store had more than enough Energy readily available and wonder of wonders, had a newly opened medium Shield production facility in it, so Gloria was about to get a BIG upgrade, two hundred and fifty times over to be exact, in defensive capability. Yep, that Yacht had 250MJ worth of shielding.
Still, I had already registered it as “the Old Shoe” and wasn’t about to back down from that at that point. It would have been unlucky.
Now I was peeved. I pivoted and fed the idiot in the Demeter a Hornet and then, because the jackass wouldn’t listen to reason, and I did try, I let my temper get the best of me and fed him one. Both ships faired poorly. I’d been hammering the Demeters shields and that fast damned Mamba must have been under shielded. I was dealing with the last of my dead targets escorts when a missile warning went off. And no, it wasn’t from one of them. It appears that my blasting the snot out of one of their nationals had an effect on a couple of nearby Split Mamba’s on sector patrol. They went red, went for me and all I could do was dodge and jive and finally, as I was being herded, cut loose on one of them, damaging him pretty severely but far from finishing him, but that did allow me to slip through them. But it gained me the attention of a couple of jaguars and these two also knew their stuff. I had my head swiveling all around the cockpit, looking out windows,
I was now relying more on the old Mk 1 eyeball method of finding my foes than on my instruments. I braked and spun and slewed and twirled and barrel rolled and pivoted and button hooked and used every trick I knew and was just not getting any closer to any gate and more and more of the neighborhood was becoming hostile. I didn’t have a choice, I was going to have to shoot my way out.
By the time I finally slipped through the gate I had accounted for the three Pericles, three more Jaguars, the Demeter, a pair of Mamba Raiders and a Mamba Vanguard in addition to the first Mamba that started it all and there had been a wounded Mamba Sentinel to add to the butchers bill. Eleven dead and one wounded and I had, in the process, expended every missile I had on board, a good number of them, and had enough holes poked in my hull that I felt completely undressed; and my notoriety with the Split went from Known Venturer to Family Outcast. Now the Paranid officially thanked me for showing one of their own the error of his ways, and the Boron, who had sponsored the whole thing in the first place officially recognized me thereafter as a Queen’s Knight, so maybe the bloomin’ ‘Nid hadn’t been a Pirate after all, but all in all I counted it not just as a monetary, but also as a net loss. The Split were trading partners of the Teladi and making them enemies had the effect of limiting my possibilities for trade, right?
Well, when life gives you lemons…
I decided that I had enough of their attitude, their threats and their reactionism so I got reactionary myself and planted them squarely on my own personal ships enemy list. Fine, if they wanted it this way, I’d profit by THAT too. I loved their freighters anyway. But now, I simply wouldn’t bother buying them.
After fixing up the Goshawk I ran back to get the Shugenja and then, on a whim, sold off the Goshawk and used the proceeds to fix up that Harrier Hauler, which got christened the Goshawk II. It then got sent back to run cap on my Super Caiman, now called the Necromancer and I jumped off to Eighteen Billion. I still had to run the Xenon sector, short ways thankfully, but at that point I was still steaming and maybe it was fortunate for the Xenon that there weren’t any close enough that I couldn’t avoid them long enough to get a lock on the north gate. I micro jumped, button hooked right there in the interface and charged on through it in to Scale Plate Green.
And thence into the Argon sectors around there, Nyana’s Hideout to famed Omicron Lyrae to Treasure Chest to Black Hole Sun and then across yet another Xenon sector, this time the one they designate 472, but beyond that was more trouble than there was in it. It was a Split sector.
Officially that next sector, Thyn’s Abyss, was supposed to be lightly defended by the Split. The official word in the computer registry could be summed up as follows:
*** This deep space system is about as close as the Split get to a civilian operation. It produces food and other organic products and mines the asteroids that are spread throughout the system. Although there is little military presence here all Split are required to complete combat training and civilian Split pilots are no easy target. ***
I can attest to that. Not only are they no easy targets, but half of the buggers seem to run around in Scorpions or Mambas…as Food Transports. Only the Split would use Interceptors and Heavy Fighters as Food Transports. What a maniac bunch these guys are. What I won’t attest to about the above is the “little military presence” thing. Unless three M6s count as “little” and all of them went red the second they caught wind of me, I beg to differ with the official version.
It was more an exercise in geometry than any thing else to get through the sector without engaging one or more of them; and the Split Dragon is nothing to play with, so it was very necessary. That was not to say I got out of the sector without further pissing off the Split, as the Patrol craft with the Dragons were Jaguars and those you just do not out run, period. Luckily, with a maximum 2 MJ of shields and not allot of hull integrity, they are real glass, glass hammers. It took some fancy flying and a few more dead Split scout ship pilots, but I was through the gate and into even more fun. Family Njy has a reputation even among the Split for brutality. With me they have a reputation for overkill. They sent capital ships after me and whole fighter wings, but thankfully I have a J Drive and just as things were getting too hot for comfort, I was in J space and emerging from the gate a second later. Button hooking in the interface again, I slipped through to even more fun, another Family Njy sector. I slipped way north, then waaaay up above the ecliptic and thence downwards fast and furious and slipped through the gate almost before the Family was able to start sending big nasty ships my way. The next sector was huge…and Split again, but the now somewhat bucolic Family Ryk wasn’t as interested in me as they had been in every near by Split sector up until now. And since these guys were so relatively peaceful I repaid them for their peaceful attitude in traditional Split fashion. Once I made sure the gate to the north really was Ocean of Fantasy, not another Split sector, I set up and raided a trio of Split Transport ships in rapid succession and held of the pair of Mamba’s the local defense forces sent in response long enough to make sure both of the two TSes I had managed to cap got through the gate before doing likewise.
They were neither one Caimans. One was an Argon Mercury and the other a Dolphin Super Freighter. Neither was in good shape, but I had no intention of keeping either one anyway. The Shipyard gave me decent value on them, more than enough to outfit the gorgeous little yacht I had been given and still pay the unbelievably exorbitant price that the shifty Teladi at the Trading Station wanted for a used J Drive. Hila’s Joy right next store had more than enough Energy readily available and wonder of wonders, had a newly opened medium Shield production facility in it, so Gloria was about to get a BIG upgrade, two hundred and fifty times over to be exact, in defensive capability. Yep, that Yacht had 250MJ worth of shielding.
Still, I had already registered it as “the Old Shoe” and wasn’t about to back down from that at that point. It would have been unlucky.
Not quite a newbie anymore, but still able to ask the most stultifyingly silly assed questions imaginable.
-
Cantankerous
- Posts: 175
- Joined: Wed, 9. Aug 06, 19:46
Entry Thirteen: The Old Shoe was to become my civilian command ship, just as I had planned for it to be. And what a command ship she made. I doubt there are many Captains of Industry whose command ships can even favorably compare to mine. She was a yacht after all. But she was so much more. The Angel carries up to 250 MJ worth of shielding and a hull more than twice as heavily armored as a Dolphin Super Freighter sports. It almost compares to the hull armor of the Split Dragon. Add to this the speed of a moderately fast heavy Fighter, before over tuning and a pair of A-PACs in a rear turret and another pair of them in a dorsal turret. Add to that a little thing about her being the only TP that can carry XL cargo, and for a TP, allot of it; 1600 pallet/units. Of course she’s kitted out with everything I could jam in her. I replaced the used one with a top of the line J Drive and even dropped down to the Goner Temple for a top of the line Transporter system.
The Mining station did fantastically early on and has always been a good producer, but early it was a monster. She very nearly payed for herself and her transports and still had a nearly full wharehouse and a ton of E-Cells by the time I had jumped back in with my command ship. My Teladi hosts were duly impressed. In fact they were impressed enough that I was accorded all the social respect of a Teladi Company Manager, without ever paying any scrimshaw!
I bought a full set Mk III Trade Software and the extensions for the Necromancer and let Shuggie escort her around for a bit while I jumped in to the Cowardly Lion and went to set about changing her name. Of course, she had to deserve it first. She ended up as the "Luckier Bucket".
Fully kitted out she had 100 MJ worth of shielding, 50 MJ of that being Pirate Shields which scramble Freight Scanner beams so maybe that’d come in handy. What my opponents don’t know about me can’t do anything but help me. She was quick enough, ticking over at nearly 150 m/s and she was very maneuverable. The turrets are a bear and a half to avoid. They really make the ship tough in a fight and I had a plan, a way to feel very secure with my coming expansion plans, that would press even the abilities of the Blastclaw to their fullest. I was going to take down an M6, and not just any M6, but a Dragon. Ohh, I love Dragons. They may be under shielded for an M6 but I love me some speed and maneuverability and for an M6 they are the bomb when it comes to both. Let me have one of these to cover the patrol functions for the huge sector it would have to cover and I’d feel much less exposed.
Now the how and the where become important. I’ll cover the where first. Family Whi had, almost always, a Dragon running around in it, officially to protect against that most moronic of all oxymorons, Boron aggression. It didn’t surprise me then that there was seldom anything resembling a battle group using the Dragon as an anchor. Often there were a few military Mambas running around as well, but seldom more than that. It was close by to both a very friendly shipyard and my own power base, just in case things got too hot after the snatch. The how is even easier. First you knock down the opponent and then you stomp on his forehead until he screams uncle.
I had managed to pick up a pair of Banshee missiles that would do some fine stomping. Now, the Dragon is almost as fast as the Banshee, but firing head on from close enough range would solve that one, which left the anti missile capability of the ship to deal with, but if I salvoed off a few Wasps first…
But again, luck is better than skill and planning and anything else you wanna name. I had an ally in this little fracas; the Khaak. It was only a Cluster that was involved, I would guess, but they were happily nibbling away at the Dragon’s shields when he finally got the Fighter that controlled things and now had the Scouts to deal with. The remaining Scouts kept his shields low for a bit while I closed in and changed my tactics. I dropped the last Khaak Scout myself so I wouldn't have to deal with him later and then let the Dragon have a trio of Disruptors from almost point blank range, one after the next after the next and that was almost all it took. I sizzled his hull with A-PAC fire while insuring that he wasn’t going to do the same to me and at 86% hull, the Captain bailed.
I quickly did my thing and sent him off while dealing with a pair of annoyed Scorpions I and the Khaak both had somehow missed and heard those dulcet tones from the AI inform me that I was now considered an Enemy of Rhonkar. I had almost arrived.
Presently I was sitting on an M6, a pair of very + M3s, an M5, a good TP, an exceptional TP, a Super Freighter TS and a pair of more conventional TSes and an over achieving Silicon Mine that seemed intent on making me wealthy all by itself. It made me paranoid as hell. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But the next Jazura was blissful.
I had time to expand and expand again. There were few sets backs and far more advances. I opened another Mine in Seizewell and linked them up after towing the bloody thing in to position myself with a tractor beam I had picked up in Paranid space. I added a Crystal fab to it, bought several more Freighters and added a few more to the mix via capping them from the Split. On that side of things my feud with the Split was engaging my aggressive side and Gloria was making me in to a decent to very decent fleet Merchantman, while the Teladi named me on their roles as a Venture Profiteer and there were news blurbs calling me a Master Industrialist, the Boron named me as an official member of the Queens Protectorate and the Argon, my own people, finally confirmed me as a Trusted Ally. I really HAD arrived. I was on top of the heap looking down.
But nothing lasts forever.
The Mining station did fantastically early on and has always been a good producer, but early it was a monster. She very nearly payed for herself and her transports and still had a nearly full wharehouse and a ton of E-Cells by the time I had jumped back in with my command ship. My Teladi hosts were duly impressed. In fact they were impressed enough that I was accorded all the social respect of a Teladi Company Manager, without ever paying any scrimshaw!
I bought a full set Mk III Trade Software and the extensions for the Necromancer and let Shuggie escort her around for a bit while I jumped in to the Cowardly Lion and went to set about changing her name. Of course, she had to deserve it first. She ended up as the "Luckier Bucket".
Fully kitted out she had 100 MJ worth of shielding, 50 MJ of that being Pirate Shields which scramble Freight Scanner beams so maybe that’d come in handy. What my opponents don’t know about me can’t do anything but help me. She was quick enough, ticking over at nearly 150 m/s and she was very maneuverable. The turrets are a bear and a half to avoid. They really make the ship tough in a fight and I had a plan, a way to feel very secure with my coming expansion plans, that would press even the abilities of the Blastclaw to their fullest. I was going to take down an M6, and not just any M6, but a Dragon. Ohh, I love Dragons. They may be under shielded for an M6 but I love me some speed and maneuverability and for an M6 they are the bomb when it comes to both. Let me have one of these to cover the patrol functions for the huge sector it would have to cover and I’d feel much less exposed.
Now the how and the where become important. I’ll cover the where first. Family Whi had, almost always, a Dragon running around in it, officially to protect against that most moronic of all oxymorons, Boron aggression. It didn’t surprise me then that there was seldom anything resembling a battle group using the Dragon as an anchor. Often there were a few military Mambas running around as well, but seldom more than that. It was close by to both a very friendly shipyard and my own power base, just in case things got too hot after the snatch. The how is even easier. First you knock down the opponent and then you stomp on his forehead until he screams uncle.
I had managed to pick up a pair of Banshee missiles that would do some fine stomping. Now, the Dragon is almost as fast as the Banshee, but firing head on from close enough range would solve that one, which left the anti missile capability of the ship to deal with, but if I salvoed off a few Wasps first…
But again, luck is better than skill and planning and anything else you wanna name. I had an ally in this little fracas; the Khaak. It was only a Cluster that was involved, I would guess, but they were happily nibbling away at the Dragon’s shields when he finally got the Fighter that controlled things and now had the Scouts to deal with. The remaining Scouts kept his shields low for a bit while I closed in and changed my tactics. I dropped the last Khaak Scout myself so I wouldn't have to deal with him later and then let the Dragon have a trio of Disruptors from almost point blank range, one after the next after the next and that was almost all it took. I sizzled his hull with A-PAC fire while insuring that he wasn’t going to do the same to me and at 86% hull, the Captain bailed.
I quickly did my thing and sent him off while dealing with a pair of annoyed Scorpions I and the Khaak both had somehow missed and heard those dulcet tones from the AI inform me that I was now considered an Enemy of Rhonkar. I had almost arrived.
Presently I was sitting on an M6, a pair of very + M3s, an M5, a good TP, an exceptional TP, a Super Freighter TS and a pair of more conventional TSes and an over achieving Silicon Mine that seemed intent on making me wealthy all by itself. It made me paranoid as hell. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But the next Jazura was blissful.
I had time to expand and expand again. There were few sets backs and far more advances. I opened another Mine in Seizewell and linked them up after towing the bloody thing in to position myself with a tractor beam I had picked up in Paranid space. I added a Crystal fab to it, bought several more Freighters and added a few more to the mix via capping them from the Split. On that side of things my feud with the Split was engaging my aggressive side and Gloria was making me in to a decent to very decent fleet Merchantman, while the Teladi named me on their roles as a Venture Profiteer and there were news blurbs calling me a Master Industrialist, the Boron named me as an official member of the Queens Protectorate and the Argon, my own people, finally confirmed me as a Trusted Ally. I really HAD arrived. I was on top of the heap looking down.
But nothing lasts forever.
Not quite a newbie anymore, but still able to ask the most stultifyingly silly assed questions imaginable.
-
Ramius85
- Posts: 29
- Joined: Sun, 22. Apr 07, 02:41
Awesome! Keep up the great work and looking forward to more.
Help fight Human Trafficing here on earth. Find out at http://www.humantrafficking.org/
-
Cantankerous
- Posts: 175
- Joined: Wed, 9. Aug 06, 19:46
Cheers Ramius! 
**************************************
Entry Fourteen: “But nothing lasts forever.” This is especially true of the things that we would wish to last forever. Periods of prosperity, of plenty, of growth and hope and optimism are invariably too short.
In our time my period of plenty ended as it has for many others, with the Khaak. I was away at the time it began, in the midst of finalizing plans for my second complex, this one to exist in Argon space, down in The Wall, when Gloria stopped mid sentence in informing me of the mornings itinerary and in a shocked voice said our Complex in Seizewell was coming under fire and even as she finished the sentence she mentioned one of our ships, my Advanced Satellite that I watch the system with, had been destroyed. Without even thinking I had her Jump Shuggie to us and prepped myself. But it got worse fast. Puff (my Dragon) and Namor (my Dolphin Super Freighter) were both the next pair to send the messages that they were under fire. This was followed swiftly by the message that Namor had been destroyed; and she had been carrying a very full load of silicon wafers. I called up the view from Puffs command bridge and almost dropped right then. Almost off her bow, at no more than kilometer or so, was the massive shape of a Khaak M2 and it was raining fire. Then my display closed. In a quite voice Gloria informed me that Puff was no more. Was there a quaver in her voice? She had “been close” with the Ai on Puff that served under Captain Brasillus Hasmandeen Theosodores IV and had been “fond” of my Teladi Head of Security as well.
Finally, although in fact it had been such a short time that little more than I have talked about had occurred, the Shugenja snugged in to Transporter range and I was setting my J Drive. Gloria broke in again to say that the Goshawk II had been felled…and to watch my backside, just as I jumped.
I emerged from the south gate of Seizewell and into hell itself. Almost right in front of me “the Luckier Bucket” was denying her name and expanding into a ball of hot metal particles and gases and I was already dodging incoming fire. There were at least five clusters in volved, including two that hadn’t broken apart yet. There were also a pair of Khaak Destroyers and even new style a Khaak Corvette that was almost in range of my guns. I didn’t waste a shot on it, bit I did send Wasps in its direction and … the Hammerhead I’d been able to get my hands on. I was so busy juking and rolling and avoiding having my ass sawed off by a cloud of Khaak Scouts that I barely noticed that it hit…and that the damned ship was still there!
Ok, it wasn’t there by much, and a Hornet proceeded by Wasps finished things nicely, but this damned ship had stood up to a capital ship killer. What the hell was going on? I couldn’t find out. A cloud of Khaak Scouts are a deadly enemy to the moderately shielded and I was the moderately shielded. When I finally made it into J Space I was at 65% Hull and had accounted for six of the little blighters to go along with the Corvette. I emerged, gasping into the quiet, peaceful Argon Prime sectors regular mercantile controlled chaos. I was still in shock as I docked in the shipyards and heard from Gloria that our Base Hub wasn’t answering and that the Crystal Fab had been destroyed.
It was as I sat there digesting that piece of news that there had been three ships docked in the Hub, including my oldest acquisition, the Necromancer. Even without the losses of life figured in, just the costs and finances involved, the personal cost to me, this was already running into the range of twenty five plus million Credits; and several AIs that over the time we had worked together I myself had come to value. Before everything was destroyed I ordered Gloria to pull our accounts off of the remaining station banks, just in case and scanned through our private satellite network. I don’t know what I was really looking for, maybe justice among the stars, but in doing it I spotted a combat task force of Teladi ships heading for the north gate of Blue Profit and almost definitely right in to that mess in the home sector. The Teladi don’t like to fight, but they DO fight like Argnu bulls in full rut when given no choice. I started throwing around bribe money and as much weight as my status with the Argon could afford me to get the Shugenja repaired NOW and as soon as she was I raced dead out for the EQ. I wasn’t going to be as fast now and I needed shields again as well as a few other odds and ends before jumping back in to that fight, but even if I destroyed myself financially in the process, I was going to get back in to that fight and I was going to bloody well make some of the Khaak DIE!!! I was coldly furious and not thinking of anything but pay back and protecting the home sector of the people who had treated me as more of an equal, more of one of their own than my own people ever had.
A few quick stops and I was rearmed. I was carrying a ton of Wasps and intended to expend every one of them. Scouts were going to be dying in droves if I could arrange it. I’d strip them from the scene and let the oncoming Teladi big ships get on with the task of annihilating the Khaak destroyers without distractions. If I could do little else, THAT I could do and that I would do. I Jumped in through the North gate of Seizewell and found that most of the fighting was around the dying shipyards across near the west gate…but that there were things floating in the flotsam that dotted the system that might just make a difference; including no less than three Hammerheads. This fight had been a douser alright. Well, I’d snug those in after I cleared the area a bit. I closed up to useful range and stated lobbing missiles. Target after target after target; Scout after Scout after Scout and maybe a few other things as well. There might have been an interceptor or a fighter or two in the targeting mix, but truthfully I wasn’t bothering to look carefully, so as long as it was glowing purple and ugly it got a Wasp targeted at it.
That had drawn some attention itself so I flipped over to the gate to play hide and smash around it and to have it handy to flit through if things got too tight. It didn’t take long. Shuggie on the rear turret was smashing Scouts that I had flayed and soon I was rocketing into the mess I had helped create, firing more Wasps at everything that moved and managing to nab two of those Hammerheads and get enough separation to jump, just as that slow assed task force finally sailed through the south gate. The Phoenix may be a slow assed ship, but they are armed and shielded to the teeth and the one that lead the way into the sector was kitted out to the teeth. It was floating death. I wandered why it hadn’t been here in the first place and then shrugged and went back about the business of firing wasps and spacing Khaak. I was still in a killing rage and when a Khaak Scout bailed I still bore in and blew the ship to gases and shards.
I got the honor of putting the finishing touches on the last of the Khaak Destroyers with one of my Hammerheads. It may have saved the Phoenix in the process too, as I was out of shields, like its opponent and it too was having its hull flayed, and maybe a bit faster. But the point is moot as I set off my very last Wasp and the Hammerhead and that was, as they say, that. Well, there were a couple of Scouts left, but really things were over then. I was at 82% hull, down to one shield yet again and barely there physically. My new J Drive, which had been the first casualty this time around of my ships systems when the hull got barbequed, was gone and dead, my Docking Computer likewise and my Triplex Scanners too and I’d have to repair a few thruster guards, but all in all I was functional and one hell of allot of Khaak were not. The Shipyards were still operating, although the EQ was gone so the rest of the repairs would have to wait once the main systems were restored.
Wonder of wonders, my Silicon Mine was still operating, but the Ore Mine had been smashed and the Silicon Mine was going to need some repair work too; at least it would once there was a Trading Station for a repair company to open up in. Still, I personally felt flayed. I had one Freighter that hadn’t been in system when the attack began and my command ship and the Shugenja. I had a somewhat shot up Silicon Mine and not a bloody other asset to my name besides my personal satellite network. Compared to the day before, I was now a pauper. The money left in my accounts would barely put the Mine back up to sniff and pay for the second Freighter it needed to be fully productive and fix and reequip the Shugenja, which was now going to be the corner stone of my enterprises for a while.
Well, some friendly Split pilots would be a help there.
**************************************
Entry Fourteen: “But nothing lasts forever.” This is especially true of the things that we would wish to last forever. Periods of prosperity, of plenty, of growth and hope and optimism are invariably too short.
In our time my period of plenty ended as it has for many others, with the Khaak. I was away at the time it began, in the midst of finalizing plans for my second complex, this one to exist in Argon space, down in The Wall, when Gloria stopped mid sentence in informing me of the mornings itinerary and in a shocked voice said our Complex in Seizewell was coming under fire and even as she finished the sentence she mentioned one of our ships, my Advanced Satellite that I watch the system with, had been destroyed. Without even thinking I had her Jump Shuggie to us and prepped myself. But it got worse fast. Puff (my Dragon) and Namor (my Dolphin Super Freighter) were both the next pair to send the messages that they were under fire. This was followed swiftly by the message that Namor had been destroyed; and she had been carrying a very full load of silicon wafers. I called up the view from Puffs command bridge and almost dropped right then. Almost off her bow, at no more than kilometer or so, was the massive shape of a Khaak M2 and it was raining fire. Then my display closed. In a quite voice Gloria informed me that Puff was no more. Was there a quaver in her voice? She had “been close” with the Ai on Puff that served under Captain Brasillus Hasmandeen Theosodores IV and had been “fond” of my Teladi Head of Security as well.
Finally, although in fact it had been such a short time that little more than I have talked about had occurred, the Shugenja snugged in to Transporter range and I was setting my J Drive. Gloria broke in again to say that the Goshawk II had been felled…and to watch my backside, just as I jumped.
I emerged from the south gate of Seizewell and into hell itself. Almost right in front of me “the Luckier Bucket” was denying her name and expanding into a ball of hot metal particles and gases and I was already dodging incoming fire. There were at least five clusters in volved, including two that hadn’t broken apart yet. There were also a pair of Khaak Destroyers and even new style a Khaak Corvette that was almost in range of my guns. I didn’t waste a shot on it, bit I did send Wasps in its direction and … the Hammerhead I’d been able to get my hands on. I was so busy juking and rolling and avoiding having my ass sawed off by a cloud of Khaak Scouts that I barely noticed that it hit…and that the damned ship was still there!
Ok, it wasn’t there by much, and a Hornet proceeded by Wasps finished things nicely, but this damned ship had stood up to a capital ship killer. What the hell was going on? I couldn’t find out. A cloud of Khaak Scouts are a deadly enemy to the moderately shielded and I was the moderately shielded. When I finally made it into J Space I was at 65% Hull and had accounted for six of the little blighters to go along with the Corvette. I emerged, gasping into the quiet, peaceful Argon Prime sectors regular mercantile controlled chaos. I was still in shock as I docked in the shipyards and heard from Gloria that our Base Hub wasn’t answering and that the Crystal Fab had been destroyed.
It was as I sat there digesting that piece of news that there had been three ships docked in the Hub, including my oldest acquisition, the Necromancer. Even without the losses of life figured in, just the costs and finances involved, the personal cost to me, this was already running into the range of twenty five plus million Credits; and several AIs that over the time we had worked together I myself had come to value. Before everything was destroyed I ordered Gloria to pull our accounts off of the remaining station banks, just in case and scanned through our private satellite network. I don’t know what I was really looking for, maybe justice among the stars, but in doing it I spotted a combat task force of Teladi ships heading for the north gate of Blue Profit and almost definitely right in to that mess in the home sector. The Teladi don’t like to fight, but they DO fight like Argnu bulls in full rut when given no choice. I started throwing around bribe money and as much weight as my status with the Argon could afford me to get the Shugenja repaired NOW and as soon as she was I raced dead out for the EQ. I wasn’t going to be as fast now and I needed shields again as well as a few other odds and ends before jumping back in to that fight, but even if I destroyed myself financially in the process, I was going to get back in to that fight and I was going to bloody well make some of the Khaak DIE!!! I was coldly furious and not thinking of anything but pay back and protecting the home sector of the people who had treated me as more of an equal, more of one of their own than my own people ever had.
A few quick stops and I was rearmed. I was carrying a ton of Wasps and intended to expend every one of them. Scouts were going to be dying in droves if I could arrange it. I’d strip them from the scene and let the oncoming Teladi big ships get on with the task of annihilating the Khaak destroyers without distractions. If I could do little else, THAT I could do and that I would do. I Jumped in through the North gate of Seizewell and found that most of the fighting was around the dying shipyards across near the west gate…but that there were things floating in the flotsam that dotted the system that might just make a difference; including no less than three Hammerheads. This fight had been a douser alright. Well, I’d snug those in after I cleared the area a bit. I closed up to useful range and stated lobbing missiles. Target after target after target; Scout after Scout after Scout and maybe a few other things as well. There might have been an interceptor or a fighter or two in the targeting mix, but truthfully I wasn’t bothering to look carefully, so as long as it was glowing purple and ugly it got a Wasp targeted at it.
That had drawn some attention itself so I flipped over to the gate to play hide and smash around it and to have it handy to flit through if things got too tight. It didn’t take long. Shuggie on the rear turret was smashing Scouts that I had flayed and soon I was rocketing into the mess I had helped create, firing more Wasps at everything that moved and managing to nab two of those Hammerheads and get enough separation to jump, just as that slow assed task force finally sailed through the south gate. The Phoenix may be a slow assed ship, but they are armed and shielded to the teeth and the one that lead the way into the sector was kitted out to the teeth. It was floating death. I wandered why it hadn’t been here in the first place and then shrugged and went back about the business of firing wasps and spacing Khaak. I was still in a killing rage and when a Khaak Scout bailed I still bore in and blew the ship to gases and shards.
I got the honor of putting the finishing touches on the last of the Khaak Destroyers with one of my Hammerheads. It may have saved the Phoenix in the process too, as I was out of shields, like its opponent and it too was having its hull flayed, and maybe a bit faster. But the point is moot as I set off my very last Wasp and the Hammerhead and that was, as they say, that. Well, there were a couple of Scouts left, but really things were over then. I was at 82% hull, down to one shield yet again and barely there physically. My new J Drive, which had been the first casualty this time around of my ships systems when the hull got barbequed, was gone and dead, my Docking Computer likewise and my Triplex Scanners too and I’d have to repair a few thruster guards, but all in all I was functional and one hell of allot of Khaak were not. The Shipyards were still operating, although the EQ was gone so the rest of the repairs would have to wait once the main systems were restored.
Wonder of wonders, my Silicon Mine was still operating, but the Ore Mine had been smashed and the Silicon Mine was going to need some repair work too; at least it would once there was a Trading Station for a repair company to open up in. Still, I personally felt flayed. I had one Freighter that hadn’t been in system when the attack began and my command ship and the Shugenja. I had a somewhat shot up Silicon Mine and not a bloody other asset to my name besides my personal satellite network. Compared to the day before, I was now a pauper. The money left in my accounts would barely put the Mine back up to sniff and pay for the second Freighter it needed to be fully productive and fix and reequip the Shugenja, which was now going to be the corner stone of my enterprises for a while.
Well, some friendly Split pilots would be a help there.
Not quite a newbie anymore, but still able to ask the most stultifyingly silly assed questions imaginable.
-
gamer993
- Posts: 575
- Joined: Mon, 18. Aug 08, 14:12
Cantankerous wrote:Cheers Ramius!
**************************************
Entry Fourteen: “But nothing lasts forever.” This is especially true of the things that we would wish to last forever. Periods of prosperity, of plenty, of growth and hope and optimism are invariably too short.
In our time my period of plenty ended as it has for many others, with the Khaak. I was away at the time it began, in the midst of finalizing plans for my second complex, this one to exist in Argon space, down in The Wall, when Gloria stopped mid sentence in informing me of the mornings itinerary and in a shocked voice said our Complex in Seizewell was coming under fire and even as she finished the sentence she mentioned one of our ships, my Advanced Satellite that I watch the system with, had been destroyed. Without even thinking I had her Jump Shuggie to us and prepped myself. But it got worse fast. Puff (my Dragon) and Namor (my Dolphin Super Freighter) were both the next pair to send the messages that they were under fire. This was followed swiftly by the message that Namor had been destroyed; and she had been carrying a very full load of silicon wafers. I called up the view from Puffs command bridge and almost dropped right then. Almost off her bow, at no more than kilometer or so, was the massive shape of a Khaak M2 and it was raining fire. Then my display closed. In a quite voice Gloria informed me that Puff was no more. Was there a quaver in her voice? She had “been close” with the Ai on Puff that served under Captain Brasillus Hasmandeen Theosodores IV and had been “fond” of my Teladi Head of Security as well.
Finally, although in fact it had been such a short time that little more than I have talked about had occurred, the Shugenja snugged in to Transporter range and I was setting my J Drive. Gloria broke in again to say that the Goshawk II had been felled…and to watch my backside, just as I jumped.
I emerged from the south gate of Seizewell and into hell itself. Almost right in front of me “the Luckier Bucket” was denying her name and expanding into a ball of hot metal particles and gases and I was already dodging incoming fire. There were at least five clusters in volved, including two that hadn’t broken apart yet. There were also a pair of Khaak Destroyers and even new style a Khaak Corvette that was almost in range of my guns. I didn’t waste a shot on it, bit I did send Wasps in its direction and … the Hammerhead I’d been able to get my hands on. I was so busy juking and rolling and avoiding having my ass sawed off by a cloud of Khaak Scouts that I barely noticed that it hit…and that the damned ship was still there!
Ok, it wasn’t there by much, and a Hornet proceeded by Wasps finished things nicely, but this damned ship had stood up to a capital ship killer. What the hell was going on? I couldn’t find out. A cloud of Khaak Scouts are a deadly enemy to the moderately shielded and I was the moderately shielded. When I finally made it into J Space I was at 65% Hull and had accounted for six of the little blighters to go along with the Corvette. I emerged, gasping into the quiet, peaceful Argon Prime sectors regular mercantile controlled chaos. I was still in shock as I docked in the shipyards and heard from Gloria that our Base Hub wasn’t answering and that the Crystal Fab had been destroyed.
It was as I sat there digesting that piece of news that there had been three ships docked in the Hub, including my oldest acquisition, the Necromancer. Even without the losses of life figured in, just the costs and finances involved, the personal cost to me, this was already running into the range of twenty five plus million Credits; and several AIs that over the time we had worked together I myself had come to value. Before everything was destroyed I ordered Gloria to pull our accounts off of the remaining station banks, just in case and scanned through our private satellite network. I don’t know what I was really looking for, maybe justice among the stars, but in doing it I spotted a combat task force of Teladi ships heading for the north gate of Blue Profit and almost definitely right in to that mess in the home sector. The Teladi don’t like to fight, but they DO fight like Argnu bulls in full rut when given no choice. I started throwing around bribe money and as much weight as my status with the Argon could afford me to get the Shugenja repaired NOW and as soon as she was I raced dead out for the EQ. I wasn’t going to be as fast now and I needed shields again as well as a few other odds and ends before jumping back in to that fight, but even if I destroyed myself financially in the process, I was going to get back in to that fight and I was going to bloody well make some of the Khaak DIE!!! I was coldly furious and not thinking of anything but pay back and protecting the home sector of the people who had treated me as more of an equal, more of one of their own than my own people ever had.
A few quick stops and I was rearmed. I was carrying a ton of Wasps and intended to expend every one of them. Scouts were going to be dying in droves if I could arrange it. I’d strip them from the scene and let the oncoming Teladi big ships get on with the task of annihilating the Khaak destroyers without distractions. If I could do little else, THAT I could do and that I would do. I Jumped in through the North gate of Seizewell and found that most of the fighting was around the dying shipyards across near the west gate…but that there were things floating in the flotsam that dotted the system that might just make a difference; including no less than three Hammerheads. This fight had been a douser alright. Well, I’d snug those in after I cleared the area a bit. I closed up to useful range and stated lobbing missiles. Target after target after target; Scout after Scout after Scout and maybe a few other things as well. There might have been an interceptor or a fighter or two in the targeting mix, but truthfully I wasn’t bothering to look carefully, so as long as it was glowing purple and ugly it got a Wasp targeted at it.
That had drawn some attention itself so I flipped over to the gate to play hide and smash around it and to have it handy to flit through if things got too tight. It didn’t take long. Shuggie on the rear turret was smashing Scouts that I had flayed and soon I was rocketing into the mess I had helped create, firing more Wasps at everything that moved and managing to nab two of those Hammerheads and get enough separation to jump, just as that slow assed task force finally sailed through the south gate. The Phoenix may be a slow assed ship, but they are armed and shielded to the teeth and the one that lead the way into the sector was kitted out to the teeth. It was floating death. I wandered why it hadn’t been here in the first place and then shrugged and went back about the business of firing wasps and spacing Khaak. I was still in a killing rage and when a Khaak Scout bailed I still bore in and blew the ship to gases and shards.
I got the honor of putting the finishing touches on the last of the Khaak Destroyers with one of my Hammerheads. It may have saved the Phoenix in the process too, as I was out of shields, like its opponent and it too was having its hull flayed, and maybe a bit faster. But the point is moot as I set off my very last Wasp and the Hammerhead and that was, as they say, that. Well, there were a couple of Scouts left, but really things were over then. I was at 82% hull, down to one shield yet again and barely there physically. My new J Drive, which had been the first casualty this time around of my ships systems when the hull got barbequed, was gone and dead, my Docking Computer likewise and my Triplex Scanners too and I’d have to repair a few thruster guards, but all in all I was functional and one hell of allot of Khaak were not. The Shipyards were still operating, although the EQ was gone so the rest of the repairs would have to wait once the main systems were restored.
Wonder of wonders, my Silicon Mine was still operating, but the Ore Mine had been smashed and the Silicon Mine was going to need some repair work too; at least it would once there was a Trading Station for a repair company to open up in. Still, I personally felt flayed. I had one Freighter that hadn’t been in system when the attack began and my command ship and the Shugenja. I had a somewhat shot up Silicon Mine and not a bloody other asset to my name besides my personal satellite network. Compared to the day before, I was now a pauper. The money left in my accounts would barely put the Mine back up to sniff and pay for the second Freighter it needed to be fully productive and fix and reequip the Shugenja, which was now going to be the corner stone of my enterprises for a while.
Well, some friendly Split pilots would be a help there.
:thumb_up::thumb_up::thumb_up::thumb_up::thumb_up::thumb_up::thumb_up::thumb_up:A person is smart, people are dumb, stupid panicky animals, and you know it.
X2 and TC the best of the X games!
My X2 M6 Uses guide
X2 and TC the best of the X games!
My X2 M6 Uses guide
-
Cantankerous
- Posts: 175
- Joined: Wed, 9. Aug 06, 19:46
@ gamer Entry Fifteen: As it turned out the Split were very generous. Both in Thuruks Beard, where the Split kindly also donated some Mass Drivers as well as a pair of Caimans, a Scorpion Sentinel and a Mercury Tanker; and up in Family Whi, where I finally became so unpopular that they parked a well supported Dragon right near their east gate by the time I was done recruiting replacements there, as they had donated very generously as well. Soon I was refitting five Mambas, two of those Vanguard models and selling off two more regular Mambas and a Dragon so shot to hell that I scrapped her instead of trying to put her back together again. That bunch had also donated more than a few missiles including a couple more Hornets, so I can not complain about their keen desire to see me resupplied with ships…as long as I kept my butt away from their space at least. They now considered me an Enemy of all Split Families and I have to admit, it was a distinction I rather relished. They were none to popular with Racine Shipping either.
A few Pirates from the same area of space as my fighter donating Split decided that they too felt an obligation to help me get back on my feet and kindly donated a trio of Falcons, one of the a Vanguard type and so many Buzzards of both the standard and the vanguard variety that the Teladi Shipyard in Seizewell, old Ironsides, the only major installation to have survived the Khaak assault, must have thought I was running a Buzzard retirement center out of their dry docks Selling off enemy ships can be lucrative, but I had lost ships and had more than a few close calls in the Shugenja myself.
Besides, when you come down to it, not matter how much time I spend shooting up other ships, I’m a Merchant at heart and building, not destruction, is what powers my dreams. I had learned though. No more putting too many eggs in one basket. Sure, I did shove an asteroid full of Silicon right next to my repaired Silicon Mine and linked them up with a hub, but that was the extent of Racine Mining’s operations in Seizewell. I added a nice little Cahoona Bakery in The Wall and a nicely productive Ore Mine right in Cloud Base South East, on the same big old asteroid I had drifted behind when my shot to hell Buster had gone belly up on me so long, and surprising, so short, a time ago. Profit Share was home to my new Crystal Fab , kept well supplied for E-Cells and Nostrop Oil for the work force , while my own Silicon Mines in neighboring Seizewell kept it in Silicon Wafers. There were a goodly number of built in customers here and the sector, as was Seizewell, was being kept well patrolled this time by the Teladi themselves, even as the Wall was kept well covered from Argon Prime, who had also, it seems, received a surprise visit from the Khaak. Finally I had a Tempest Missile Fab in Queens Space for which I was my own best customer. I like me the Tempest. She’s a nasty tempered bird but smart enough not to smack your allies.
I was climbing the social ladder again too. More, in must have been, because of their gratitude for my actions in Seizewell than for my commercial endeavors, I was accorded the same rights and privileges as the great Venture Capitalist that are so much a part of the lime light of Teladi culture and entertainments. Their value system is different than that of the average Argon, and for a young Teladi they watch success in business and the social fields like Argon children do success as fighter pilots or sports stars. Yet these folks accepted me and even lauded me. I even did a few commercial spots. That still tickles me to this day. Among the Boron I became somewhat known at court and soon I was lauded with the title King’s Knight. An interesting post that, since there is no King presently, but still it felt good. I even started becoming acquainted with the Paranid and in a short while had been named as an official “Friend” to one of their Priest Dukes. Finally, the Argon Government, no doubt because of my increased tax status, as a multiple station owner in their space, added me to the list of “Federation Guardians”. I suppose it was better than a slap in the face with a wet fish. I was the highest ranking Apopulace my homeworld had produced. Well, my mother was a test tube and my father an eye dropper, so I didn’t have the built in advantages that a scion of the “old families” had. So be it.
Only seven months after the Battle of Seizewell I had surpassed the number of ships and stations I once possessed, and all of them were well kitted out. The farther ranging Freighters each carried J Drives that were more for emergency exits than anything else, at least 4 Drones and if they were going through any Pirate sectors or, gods fore fend, a Split sector, they also had at least one Tempest carrying Mamba riding herd on them. I was getting a second Angel to use as a Hi Tech Transporter and was looking to expand into some new territory when something interesting that changed my life cropped up. I had stopped in at the Trading Station in Freedom’s Reach to watch the races when I was approached by a young Teladi Freighter Capitan with an interesting story and an intriguing, but expensive offer to make me.
That was the start of my greatest triumphs and greatest troubles. I sometimes consider tracking that young pilot down and twisting her tail until she tells me once and for all whether this was all a set up or not. Alternately I’ve wanted to throttle that youngster, or hire her away from the one lung company she supposedly flies for. You’ll see why as I continue this.
Not quite a newbie anymore, but still able to ask the most stultifyingly silly assed questions imaginable.
-
Cantankerous
- Posts: 175
- Joined: Wed, 9. Aug 06, 19:46
Thanks much Collins 
***Just a short one for today and then a few days break very likely, unless remote internet works from that valley I'M going in to.
Entry Sixteen: For 58450CR I purchased the precise location of a “highly advanced ship” to be salvaged. Obviously it was going to be in a place where it would be just plain impossible to get a limping ship out of easily, or the Freighter Captain would never have sold me the position at all, much less so inexpensively, so I was going to have to transfer over the J drive once I got to her and enough e-Cells to get her to an EQ or at least a Trading Station, and get her into enough shape to get her to a good shipyard.
Well, the name of the sector it was in confirmed what little I had been able to guess from the set up. Maelstrom was supposedly a notorious Pirate sector, a great empty in the dead middle of a sensor eating nebula no less. Without those precise co-ordinates it could be decades before anyone would trip over the ship, as far removed from the ecliptic as she was in that soup. I knew in a vague sort of way that Maelstrom lay way the hell out and gone, near the very edges of known space. I didn’t know those sectors worth a damned though, having never ventured that far out before. There seemed to me to be a couple of ways to handle this. The sector Family Ryk was the furthest trailing sector I’d ever visited, but while it was definitely trailing-wards, it was also spin-ward and the furthest spin-ward trailing I had ever been was Black Hole Sun, so it was likely to be a bit closer to what I wanted anyway. And, it was easier to convince myself to jump into an Argon system than in to a Split system, especially one I had raided for ships, so Black Hole Sun would be the starting place for my search.
What a soupy place it was. And it just must have held a Pirate Base, even though it is directly a part of Argon dominated space, because they were often cropping up and fading away in the thick streamers of the systems nebula gases even with the level of military patrolling going on. It was also there that the head aches started. The real physical ones, that is. I am not now speaking at all metaphorically. I began having horrible migraine like headaches not long after I jumped in to the sector and started having those weird flashes of insight I’ve become so noted for. All in all I’d rather have had no headaches and no weird “insights” than the headaches which even now, still continue to plague me from time to time. It was those insights, after all, that lead me to the Sohnen as surely as the purchased co-ordinates I bought.
Soooo, it was also there that I first saw an Eclipse at work. WOW! What a ship. The Argon have outdone themselves with this one. I wonder what it’s drawback is, cause I’ve never noticed one. It must be in the price tag.
I got close enough to the bird to do a quick and very illegal deep scan right after it had put absolute paid to both a Falcon Vanguard and a Blastclaw; and bloody fast at that. Plus it must have been hitting that ‘Claw from more than four klicks out with something strong enough to actually tumble it. That was my first ever exposure to a CIG. Yeah gods. The ship was doing better than 165 m/s and smacking the snot out of a ‘Claw from more than 4 klicks off, and it had both a rear and a front turret and a huge main battery array and my scans were showing me that it carried a damned big assed 125 MJ Military shield on top of it all. Yeeesh! That was a BIG bundle of lethal. I had a chance a while back to scan the straight OTAS version of the bird I was sitting in and while it had a third shield generator hook up that still would have left it at 60% of the shield strength of this beast and the straight, non Pirate version of the Elite was still slower. I would most definitively not want to meet a successfully over tuned version of one of these things. But in a flash of insight, I saw that this was not to be the case.
[/b]
***Just a short one for today and then a few days break very likely, unless remote internet works from that valley I'M going in to.
Entry Sixteen: For 58450CR I purchased the precise location of a “highly advanced ship” to be salvaged. Obviously it was going to be in a place where it would be just plain impossible to get a limping ship out of easily, or the Freighter Captain would never have sold me the position at all, much less so inexpensively, so I was going to have to transfer over the J drive once I got to her and enough e-Cells to get her to an EQ or at least a Trading Station, and get her into enough shape to get her to a good shipyard.
Well, the name of the sector it was in confirmed what little I had been able to guess from the set up. Maelstrom was supposedly a notorious Pirate sector, a great empty in the dead middle of a sensor eating nebula no less. Without those precise co-ordinates it could be decades before anyone would trip over the ship, as far removed from the ecliptic as she was in that soup. I knew in a vague sort of way that Maelstrom lay way the hell out and gone, near the very edges of known space. I didn’t know those sectors worth a damned though, having never ventured that far out before. There seemed to me to be a couple of ways to handle this. The sector Family Ryk was the furthest trailing sector I’d ever visited, but while it was definitely trailing-wards, it was also spin-ward and the furthest spin-ward trailing I had ever been was Black Hole Sun, so it was likely to be a bit closer to what I wanted anyway. And, it was easier to convince myself to jump into an Argon system than in to a Split system, especially one I had raided for ships, so Black Hole Sun would be the starting place for my search.
What a soupy place it was. And it just must have held a Pirate Base, even though it is directly a part of Argon dominated space, because they were often cropping up and fading away in the thick streamers of the systems nebula gases even with the level of military patrolling going on. It was also there that the head aches started. The real physical ones, that is. I am not now speaking at all metaphorically. I began having horrible migraine like headaches not long after I jumped in to the sector and started having those weird flashes of insight I’ve become so noted for. All in all I’d rather have had no headaches and no weird “insights” than the headaches which even now, still continue to plague me from time to time. It was those insights, after all, that lead me to the Sohnen as surely as the purchased co-ordinates I bought.
Soooo, it was also there that I first saw an Eclipse at work. WOW! What a ship. The Argon have outdone themselves with this one. I wonder what it’s drawback is, cause I’ve never noticed one. It must be in the price tag.
I got close enough to the bird to do a quick and very illegal deep scan right after it had put absolute paid to both a Falcon Vanguard and a Blastclaw; and bloody fast at that. Plus it must have been hitting that ‘Claw from more than four klicks out with something strong enough to actually tumble it. That was my first ever exposure to a CIG. Yeah gods. The ship was doing better than 165 m/s and smacking the snot out of a ‘Claw from more than 4 klicks off, and it had both a rear and a front turret and a huge main battery array and my scans were showing me that it carried a damned big assed 125 MJ Military shield on top of it all. Yeeesh! That was a BIG bundle of lethal. I had a chance a while back to scan the straight OTAS version of the bird I was sitting in and while it had a third shield generator hook up that still would have left it at 60% of the shield strength of this beast and the straight, non Pirate version of the Elite was still slower. I would most definitively not want to meet a successfully over tuned version of one of these things. But in a flash of insight, I saw that this was not to be the case.
[/b]
Not quite a newbie anymore, but still able to ask the most stultifyingly silly assed questions imaginable.
-
collins50
- Posts: 196
- Joined: Sun, 25. Dec 05, 19:51
-
Cantankerous
- Posts: 175
- Joined: Wed, 9. Aug 06, 19:46
Entry Seventeen: I had seen very few of these birds before, and none up close, but swimming out of the murk was yet another and it was a nice blue until it got real close, only then did it go red. I scrambled out another of those illegal scans and yeoow, this guy was as bad as the first, except his shields were less aggressively tuned; and, he was a Pirate. So, great, the Federation builds a super Fighter and then lets one go missing to the bad guys first thing; just bloody wonderful.
I had a small speed advantage as I had not yet had the opportunity arise to over tune my Elite, and my handling was a tad better, but this guy was bristling with big guns, nasty guns, and running wasn’t going to be a great option with him mounting a pair of those damned Concussion Impulse Generators. I was going to have to get my hands on a couple of those at some point. Smacking someone around at four klicks was just too much of a good thing to pass up. But having someone else do it to you; that was a Boron of an entirely different hue. So, if he wanted to dance, the order of the day seemed to be, stay tight and use your maneuverability. Easier said than done in a thick soup of nebula gasses in a sector you’ve never been to before.
Staying tight meant his turrets were an even bigger advantage than they would have been otherwise. That back turret especially is a real stone pain. There’s a good deal of very aggressive firepower to be had from a pair of A-HEPTs. Especially when you’re sitting in a ship with 50MJ of shields that has to stick tight to a big bugger that’s almost as fast, almost as maneuverable and packing a four more of those and a pair of CIGs and a pair of Mass Drivers AND another Turret with yet another A-HEPT up front. This was ticklish. On top of it all he was good at throwing missiles and good at shooting them down too. Sliding side to side, using the heck out of my strafe drive was barely, and only very barely keeping me ahead of the game. But my Elite has an advantage too, one which I seldom get to use, with it’s ten front mounts. This time was one of those times man, short controlled burst and four A-HEPTs of my own along with the present set up of six A-PACs and the A_TEAM configuration can shred even massive shielding like the Eclipse has got pretty bloody well. By the time his shields were getting low I found the right combination of Mosquito and Wasp and Disruptor in sequence to get the Disruptor through. Then a long blast of A-TEAM and …my gods; it happened; he bailed! At 73% hull I had the type of heavy Fighter that could take the beatings and keep right on going. Hell, it took a pounding after it’s shields crashed. That much damage would have taken more than half of the hull capacity of my old Mamba Raider and this thing had five times the shielding standard. Not too many sectors back were the Shipyards of Omicron Lyrae and I was all too happy to put my expedition on hold and head there fast.
[/b]
I had a small speed advantage as I had not yet had the opportunity arise to over tune my Elite, and my handling was a tad better, but this guy was bristling with big guns, nasty guns, and running wasn’t going to be a great option with him mounting a pair of those damned Concussion Impulse Generators. I was going to have to get my hands on a couple of those at some point. Smacking someone around at four klicks was just too much of a good thing to pass up. But having someone else do it to you; that was a Boron of an entirely different hue. So, if he wanted to dance, the order of the day seemed to be, stay tight and use your maneuverability. Easier said than done in a thick soup of nebula gasses in a sector you’ve never been to before.
Staying tight meant his turrets were an even bigger advantage than they would have been otherwise. That back turret especially is a real stone pain. There’s a good deal of very aggressive firepower to be had from a pair of A-HEPTs. Especially when you’re sitting in a ship with 50MJ of shields that has to stick tight to a big bugger that’s almost as fast, almost as maneuverable and packing a four more of those and a pair of CIGs and a pair of Mass Drivers AND another Turret with yet another A-HEPT up front. This was ticklish. On top of it all he was good at throwing missiles and good at shooting them down too. Sliding side to side, using the heck out of my strafe drive was barely, and only very barely keeping me ahead of the game. But my Elite has an advantage too, one which I seldom get to use, with it’s ten front mounts. This time was one of those times man, short controlled burst and four A-HEPTs of my own along with the present set up of six A-PACs and the A_TEAM configuration can shred even massive shielding like the Eclipse has got pretty bloody well. By the time his shields were getting low I found the right combination of Mosquito and Wasp and Disruptor in sequence to get the Disruptor through. Then a long blast of A-TEAM and …my gods; it happened; he bailed! At 73% hull I had the type of heavy Fighter that could take the beatings and keep right on going. Hell, it took a pounding after it’s shields crashed. That much damage would have taken more than half of the hull capacity of my old Mamba Raider and this thing had five times the shielding standard. Not too many sectors back were the Shipyards of Omicron Lyrae and I was all too happy to put my expedition on hold and head there fast.
[/b]
Not quite a newbie anymore, but still able to ask the most stultifyingly silly assed questions imaginable.
-
Cantankerous
- Posts: 175
- Joined: Wed, 9. Aug 06, 19:46
Entry Eighteen:
Hail to the chef! Yep, not the chief, the chef; I meant what I said. Why say it? That requires some answering and has to do with one of my first outright acts of Piracy against that wasn't part of my grudge against the Split. I stopped off at a Trading Post to upgrade the badly shot up engines on my new prize and to transfer one of my reserve 5MJ shields to it so that a passing space fly didn't ding it up any more and on a lark, checked the bulletin board system. There was a clandestine offer that sounded...interesting. Or, I should say, the price tag did. Lots of money, lots and lots and lots of money; the kind of money that gives me a puckery feeling and makes my heart race. And what did he want for this? Why, he wanted a trio of ships that homebased out of a Bofu Chem Lab to cease to exist.
That took some thinking. I had just dumped a good deal of funds to buy some ships and was cash light at that point and really wanted to fix up and upgrade my toy in a first class fashion. I had my eye set on a old fashioned boarding action to take a few M6s from the Split. I had managed over time to collect nine former Split nationals as, ahh, prisoners of my own private war, and now I had in mind to use these supposedly fearless Johnies as super soldiers, once they were trained at least. So that too was eating my current funds and....
Ok, enough excuses. It was the lure of the money and, well, I found that one sure way to lessen my headaches was to just give in to my darker side. My headaches can be tremendous, although one has never struck when i was in any real danger and they have even quickly receded when the soup has gotten to a boil. Sometimes it's almost like I feel something or someone moving around in there.....
Anyway, that's just an excuse too really. The sad truth is that life has less meaning to me the older I get. So, when it came to sitting on a cool half million for going after sad little freighters, I didn't scruple about it. I borrowed the couple of the company escort M5s and stagger jumped them into the areas where the ships were, as, as I had anticipated, they split up pretty quickly. The m5s just needed to keep their prey in sight as I got the first one, a Dolphin.
It was ugly. It was very ugly. That ship had a good hundred MJ worth of shielding, but no weapons. It launched a few drones and the pilot, a decent sounding bloke, especially for a fish, kept begging me to stop, to think about what I was doing, kept saying he couldn't understand, we were at peace...
Even the things I've done recently haven't bothered me any more than that pilots last scream. His cockpit flash burned before the ship exploded. Especially for an aquatic race, fire is the most awful way imaginable to die. I hope he passed out quickly. but I fear hat he didn't.
The second guy threw drones and missiles and cargo out and actually bailed out and then I did another thing that still haunts me. We were a very long way from the nearest station, I was usre that his oxygen would give out long before he could reach it, so... I gave him the A-Team salute, 4 A-HEPTs and 6 A-PACs, and then took his ship and gobbled up the floating geegaws and sent it towards and Argon shipyard. I felt sick then but I feel less sick about it now.
The last guy was under shielded. I got right behind him, less than three hundred m, matched speeds and kept firing until he was nothing but a ball of expanding gases. Right as I did the Dolphin I'd capped made the Argon shipyard at OL and as I jetted out of the suddenly cold feeling Boron system I was in the money from it's sale and my fee for slaughtering, assassinating, three innocent pilots hit.
My mercantile empire had been doing well enough in my absence too. In fact I didn't really need that money when I got it. I could have nicely kitted out the "Dominatrix" without having done any of it. The Boron sounding personality AI I put in her never really came alive, as they usually do so easily and so well. Maybe it knew that it was the child of rape.
Hail to the chef! Yep, not the chief, the chef; I meant what I said. Why say it? That requires some answering and has to do with one of my first outright acts of Piracy against that wasn't part of my grudge against the Split. I stopped off at a Trading Post to upgrade the badly shot up engines on my new prize and to transfer one of my reserve 5MJ shields to it so that a passing space fly didn't ding it up any more and on a lark, checked the bulletin board system. There was a clandestine offer that sounded...interesting. Or, I should say, the price tag did. Lots of money, lots and lots and lots of money; the kind of money that gives me a puckery feeling and makes my heart race. And what did he want for this? Why, he wanted a trio of ships that homebased out of a Bofu Chem Lab to cease to exist.
That took some thinking. I had just dumped a good deal of funds to buy some ships and was cash light at that point and really wanted to fix up and upgrade my toy in a first class fashion. I had my eye set on a old fashioned boarding action to take a few M6s from the Split. I had managed over time to collect nine former Split nationals as, ahh, prisoners of my own private war, and now I had in mind to use these supposedly fearless Johnies as super soldiers, once they were trained at least. So that too was eating my current funds and....
Ok, enough excuses. It was the lure of the money and, well, I found that one sure way to lessen my headaches was to just give in to my darker side. My headaches can be tremendous, although one has never struck when i was in any real danger and they have even quickly receded when the soup has gotten to a boil. Sometimes it's almost like I feel something or someone moving around in there.....
Anyway, that's just an excuse too really. The sad truth is that life has less meaning to me the older I get. So, when it came to sitting on a cool half million for going after sad little freighters, I didn't scruple about it. I borrowed the couple of the company escort M5s and stagger jumped them into the areas where the ships were, as, as I had anticipated, they split up pretty quickly. The m5s just needed to keep their prey in sight as I got the first one, a Dolphin.
It was ugly. It was very ugly. That ship had a good hundred MJ worth of shielding, but no weapons. It launched a few drones and the pilot, a decent sounding bloke, especially for a fish, kept begging me to stop, to think about what I was doing, kept saying he couldn't understand, we were at peace...
Even the things I've done recently haven't bothered me any more than that pilots last scream. His cockpit flash burned before the ship exploded. Especially for an aquatic race, fire is the most awful way imaginable to die. I hope he passed out quickly. but I fear hat he didn't.
The second guy threw drones and missiles and cargo out and actually bailed out and then I did another thing that still haunts me. We were a very long way from the nearest station, I was usre that his oxygen would give out long before he could reach it, so... I gave him the A-Team salute, 4 A-HEPTs and 6 A-PACs, and then took his ship and gobbled up the floating geegaws and sent it towards and Argon shipyard. I felt sick then but I feel less sick about it now.
The last guy was under shielded. I got right behind him, less than three hundred m, matched speeds and kept firing until he was nothing but a ball of expanding gases. Right as I did the Dolphin I'd capped made the Argon shipyard at OL and as I jetted out of the suddenly cold feeling Boron system I was in the money from it's sale and my fee for slaughtering, assassinating, three innocent pilots hit.
My mercantile empire had been doing well enough in my absence too. In fact I didn't really need that money when I got it. I could have nicely kitted out the "Dominatrix" without having done any of it. The Boron sounding personality AI I put in her never really came alive, as they usually do so easily and so well. Maybe it knew that it was the child of rape.
Not quite a newbie anymore, but still able to ask the most stultifyingly silly assed questions imaginable.
-
parameter
- Posts: 728
- Joined: Thu, 2. Feb 06, 09:21
Silence of the Lambdas.. or 'Poetic licence to thrill'
Ooh! 
Deep and distubing psychosis... "Maybe it knew that it was the child of rape?" makes me want to swat the git for making fish fingers out of the Boron.
Anyhoo! Nice read, bit dark...'click' ah! found the table lamp!
Keep up the deeply disturbing, psychotic nightmare inducing prose
Okay, over use of smileys just as psychotic....!
Deep and distubing psychosis... "Maybe it knew that it was the child of rape?" makes me want to swat the git for making fish fingers out of the Boron. Anyhoo! Nice read, bit dark...'click' ah! found the table lamp!
Keep up the deeply disturbing, psychotic nightmare inducing prose
Okay, over use of smileys just as psychotic....!
veneratio supernus omni
-
Cantankerous
- Posts: 175
- Joined: Wed, 9. Aug 06, 19:46
*lol* Thanks much parameter.
This version of Gerri (from a really completely different timeline than the guy in the "Summer Time" thread) is more than a little dark. But angsty. In another genre he'd be pale too.
Anyway, it isn't really so much angsty really, but part of my philosophy that the men who commit the most despicable acts are USUALLY tortured by them. No one gets a free ride. So, even in my (anti)heroes, I like to portray that duality.
Isshia
This version of Gerri (from a really completely different timeline than the guy in the "Summer Time" thread) is more than a little dark. But angsty. In another genre he'd be pale too.
Anyway, it isn't really so much angsty really, but part of my philosophy that the men who commit the most despicable acts are USUALLY tortured by them. No one gets a free ride. So, even in my (anti)heroes, I like to portray that duality.
Isshia
Not quite a newbie anymore, but still able to ask the most stultifyingly silly assed questions imaginable.
-
Cantankerous
- Posts: 175
- Joined: Wed, 9. Aug 06, 19:46
Entry Nineteen: Time to ramble a bit. This was a period of transition for me as fighter, a period where I stopped thinking of me against the universe and started thinking about the greater tactical situation. The reason was easy. I wanted this new ship, badly, almost obsessively. And at the same time I trusted Shuggie, relied on him, and was completely confidant in him. I’d never had a wingman before really. Ohh, I’d played with the idea, but it wasn’t ever a serious attempt to think beyond myself. Now, that was going to change. The Shugenja had proved to be tremendously resilient; especially as a heavy fighter/raider with just 50 MJ of shielding. The “Dominatrix” was going to be running a mil spec 125 MJ shield, come hell or high water, and that was a massive advantage. If I over tuned anything I owned, it would be her now, so I’d soon even have a speed advantage over the Shugenja. Her maneuverability wasn’t bad either and sometimes you met mad geniuses that could tweak even that, so… This was beginning to look like the manner in which I’d be doing business for a while, so it was time for some longer term planning.
Even with the new girl being a bit of a hard ship for me to pilot, a ship that had ghosts on her before I ever jumped into her cockpit for a real mission, a ship that wouldn’t just be me and the AI or AIs that I’d almost always run in the past, but rather myself and two gunners, one in each of the rear and chin turrets. That made for more responsibility too, it wasn’t just my life and the existence of my AIs anymore. That was a bit sobering.
Also, leading either an assault force or defense force is a different kind of thing from looking out for your own six o’clock and being responsible for yourself. The planning for a group drastically differs from the planning for a single ship force. For raids I was envisioning, at this point, a slower, heavily shielded fighter or maybe M6 to stay at distance and feed smart missiles into the environment, with a pair of heavy fighters to play an escort/protective role for it, while I, in the “Dominatrix”, sat at the center of a four additional fighter x formation where they were slaved off of me for fast annihilation roles. In other words they should be fairly decently shielded and armed to the teeth, probably with a mix of weapons. Maybe a couple of fast Mambas with Mass Drivers and tons of maneuverability to rely on, while the other two would be more traditional 3x25 heavies with a mix of A-HEPT and A-PAC positions. My position would basically be catcher, directing the over all assault while still smacking whoever was most effectively targeting my squadron for my personal attention, while I’d be carrying allot of the slower ship killer missiles to use from short range and a mix of Wasps to keep the opponents targeting busy, fast in and fast out, relying mainly on my shielding and taking the chances that my superior abilities made less dire for me than for others.
Defensive forces would be centered on an M6 with a mix of very fast interceptors armed to the teeth for close in work and fast response. There would then, without doubt, need to be allot of purchases made, and a good deal of recruiting both, since I wasn’t going to just find a ton of ships sitting around in space waiting for me to claim them.
That was when, while I was getting acclimated to the Dominatrix, that I got yet another call up, this time from the very Boron people I had betrayed so grotesquely a half wozura earlier. If I had thought the Teladi “ship finder” thing was an unhealthy obsession, this one would almost prove to be my undoing. Four times.
[/b]
Even with the new girl being a bit of a hard ship for me to pilot, a ship that had ghosts on her before I ever jumped into her cockpit for a real mission, a ship that wouldn’t just be me and the AI or AIs that I’d almost always run in the past, but rather myself and two gunners, one in each of the rear and chin turrets. That made for more responsibility too, it wasn’t just my life and the existence of my AIs anymore. That was a bit sobering.
Also, leading either an assault force or defense force is a different kind of thing from looking out for your own six o’clock and being responsible for yourself. The planning for a group drastically differs from the planning for a single ship force. For raids I was envisioning, at this point, a slower, heavily shielded fighter or maybe M6 to stay at distance and feed smart missiles into the environment, with a pair of heavy fighters to play an escort/protective role for it, while I, in the “Dominatrix”, sat at the center of a four additional fighter x formation where they were slaved off of me for fast annihilation roles. In other words they should be fairly decently shielded and armed to the teeth, probably with a mix of weapons. Maybe a couple of fast Mambas with Mass Drivers and tons of maneuverability to rely on, while the other two would be more traditional 3x25 heavies with a mix of A-HEPT and A-PAC positions. My position would basically be catcher, directing the over all assault while still smacking whoever was most effectively targeting my squadron for my personal attention, while I’d be carrying allot of the slower ship killer missiles to use from short range and a mix of Wasps to keep the opponents targeting busy, fast in and fast out, relying mainly on my shielding and taking the chances that my superior abilities made less dire for me than for others.
Defensive forces would be centered on an M6 with a mix of very fast interceptors armed to the teeth for close in work and fast response. There would then, without doubt, need to be allot of purchases made, and a good deal of recruiting both, since I wasn’t going to just find a ton of ships sitting around in space waiting for me to claim them.
That was when, while I was getting acclimated to the Dominatrix, that I got yet another call up, this time from the very Boron people I had betrayed so grotesquely a half wozura earlier. If I had thought the Teladi “ship finder” thing was an unhealthy obsession, this one would almost prove to be my undoing. Four times.
[/b]
Not quite a newbie anymore, but still able to ask the most stultifyingly silly assed questions imaginable.
-
gamer993
- Posts: 575
- Joined: Mon, 18. Aug 08, 14:12
Cantankerous wrote:Entry Nineteen: Time to ramble a bit. This was a period of transition for me as fighter, a period where I stopped thinking of me against the universe and started thinking about the greater tactical situation. The reason was easy. I wanted this new ship, badly, almost obsessively. And at the same time I trusted Shuggie, relied on him, and was completely confidant in him. I’d never had a wingman before really. Ohh, I’d played with the idea, but it wasn’t ever a serious attempt to think beyond myself. Now, that was going to change. The Shugenja had proved to be tremendously resilient; especially as a heavy fighter/raider with just 50 MJ of shielding. The “Dominatrix” was going to be running a mil spec 125 MJ shield, come hell or high water, and that was a massive advantage. If I over tuned anything I owned, it would be her now, so I’d soon even have a speed advantage over the Shugenja. Her maneuverability wasn’t bad either and sometimes you met mad geniuses that could tweak even that, so… This was beginning to look like the manner in which I’d be doing business for a while, so it was time for some longer term planning.
Even with the new girl being a bit of a hard ship for me to pilot, a ship that had ghosts on her before I ever jumped into her cockpit for a real mission, a ship that wouldn’t just be me and the AI or AIs that I’d almost always run in the past, but rather myself and two gunners, one in each of the rear and chin turrets. That made for more responsibility too, it wasn’t just my life and the existence of my AIs anymore. That was a bit sobering.
Also, leading either an assault force or defense force is a different kind of thing from looking out for your own six o’clock and being responsible for yourself. The planning for a group drastically differs from the planning for a single ship force. For raids I was envisioning, at this point, a slower, heavily shielded fighter or maybe M6 to stay at distance and feed smart missiles into the environment, with a pair of heavy fighters to play an escort/protective role for it, while I, in the “Dominatrix”, sat at the center of a four additional fighter x formation where they were slaved off of me for fast annihilation roles. In other words they should be fairly decently shielded and armed to the teeth, probably with a mix of weapons. Maybe a couple of fast Mambas with Mass Drivers and tons of maneuverability to rely on, while the other two would be more traditional 3x25 heavies with a mix of A-HEPT and A-PAC positions. My position would basically be catcher, directing the over all assault while still smacking whoever was most effectively targeting my squadron for my personal attention, while I’d be carrying allot of the slower ship killer missiles to use from short range and a mix of Wasps to keep the opponents targeting busy, fast in and fast out, relying mainly on my shielding and taking the chances that my superior abilities made less dire for me than for others.
Defensive forces would be centered on an M6 with a mix of very fast interceptors armed to the teeth for close in work and fast response. There would then, without doubt, need to be allot of purchases made, and a good deal of recruiting both, since I wasn’t going to just find a ton of ships sitting around in space waiting for me to claim them.
That was when, while I was getting acclimated to the Dominatrix, that I got yet another call up, this time from the very Boron people I had betrayed so grotesquely a half wozura earlier. If I had thought the Teladi “ship finder” thing was an unhealthy obsession, this one would almost prove to be my undoing. Four times.
[/b]
A person is smart, people are dumb, stupid panicky animals, and you know it.
X2 and TC the best of the X games!
My X2 M6 Uses guide
X2 and TC the best of the X games!
My X2 M6 Uses guide
-
parameter
- Posts: 728
- Joined: Thu, 2. Feb 06, 09:21
Unkl Tkr, Squidly et Al (Poor Al!)
Wo bist du?You haven't Transcended into an Ancient have you? Or even just transcended?
Sorry! My big word of the moment.
Work related hiatus?
Anyhoo, we is still watching from the shadows!
All the best!
veneratio supernus omni
-
Cantankerous
- Posts: 175
- Joined: Wed, 9. Aug 06, 19:46
Hey all
Nah, parameter, there must be a writers flux going around. Like NS I've been trying to keep my fluids on he inside, without complete success unfortunately.
I'll be back at it. These two story lines are easy. They're writing themselves. So, once I can sit up without yarking for a few hours I'll have the next bit up...and as I write this I see that I haven't updated the Summer Time thread in ages on this site anyway, so that at least soon.
Oh, and Danke Gamer.
Isshia
Nah, parameter, there must be a writers flux going around. Like NS I've been trying to keep my fluids on he inside, without complete success unfortunately.
I'll be back at it. These two story lines are easy. They're writing themselves. So, once I can sit up without yarking for a few hours I'll have the next bit up...and as I write this I see that I haven't updated the Summer Time thread in ages on this site anyway, so that at least soon.
Oh, and Danke Gamer.
Isshia
Not quite a newbie anymore, but still able to ask the most stultifyingly silly assed questions imaginable.
-
parameter
- Posts: 728
- Joined: Thu, 2. Feb 06, 09:21
'Barfing mad' bug strikes creatives.
I think I speak on behalf of all of us concerned readers when I say, 'Stop skiving and get on with some wor...!? Oops! Wrong person. Erm? That we hope you have a speedy and full recovery!'(?) Ah yes! That's the one! By the way I think you will find that in Norway a skiver is a hard worker. Wonder what they call a lazy git?
veneratio supernus omni
-
Cantankerous
- Posts: 175
- Joined: Wed, 9. Aug 06, 19:46
...and back from the dead I have come. This episode, and several others afterwards, are brought to you by the letter S, for spolier, of the Bala Gi Mission variety, so read on only if you have doe said mission... or just don't care if it gets spoiled.
Spoiler
Show
Entry Twenty:
I got the call in from a representative of one of the major Boron spaceborne and space focused R&D firms. They had heard that I was putting together a combine, an idea that has just never caught on among station owners, heretofore anyway, as they were also thinking along those lines and were going a few steps further with it as well. They were offering me a full command and control package in a modified combine situation that had more docking bays and more centralized and streamlined offices and C&C set up. What a deal huh? And all I had to do was some errands…and maybe a little salvage…and maybe fight a minor war or three along the way…and maybe then fight a half assed real war with the Khaak on top of it all. Ohh, and buy almost everything needed myself.
Not that they told me this up front; and, truth be told, not that there weren’t some nice fringe benefits along the way too. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The first part of it was a piece of cake. Go do some survey work, he says, anomalous energy readings, he says. Me say: “Fishy Man Speak with Forked Tongue”.
The anomalous energy readings ended up being a nividium laced asteroid. Yep, I said nividium, that stuff fabled in song, story and late night BS sessions all along the border regions with ‘Nid space. Word has it that the ‘Nid have a real passion for the stuff. So do some Pirates, by all following appearances.
Here is where getting lazy can bite you in the bum. Since I was going to do a little survey work and I have a perfectly good survey ship set up, why not use it, eh? So, I transport in to my neat little Starburst. Yep, I picked one up down in Pirate space, in one of the illegal racing sectors, tricked it out to the full. These things are amazing. They aren’t like piloting missiles, as some have suggested, because missiles don’t move that fast. These things will literally out run IRE fire. With this ship and some iron nerves you can get from point A to point B so fast that you meet yourself on the way; but… it has no weapons mounts at all. Of course not really; because if you trick her out speed wise you are liable to get basted by your own shots as you whip past them, if you zig instead of zag.
So, here I am cuddled up this asteroid that is kicking back nividium readings and chatting with Shuggie when suddenly my threat warning starts screeching and my missile warning starts hooting and my tea kettle starts whistling all at once and I find myself, as has seldom happened before, in a thither. It was very, very nearly all she wrote at that moment. I zagged out of the path of the oncoming missile as I kicked the little girl in the ass and contemplated kicking in behind the missile then over flying it and leading it back to whatever mad man took at shot with a Silkworm a tenth the size of my ship at my poor little backside. Right then though I ran face first in to Beta PAC fire by the slews.
Now the Starburst may have allot to offer, but one thing she is distinctly lacking in is guts. Smack her once and she pouts and starts shooting sparks from that over tuned engine of doom you are almost sitting on. So, in a nebulic soup, as, ohh, did I mention this was in Rolk’s Fate?; I am suddenly sitting in a ship with 11% hull, no longer faster than the pursuing ships, two somewhat overtuned Scorpion Vanguards no less, both of whom, I get the distinct impression, don’t want anyone to know about the nividium in that ‘roid. So, I get Shuggie back on the line and screech for him to jump in to the system by the near by North Gate. I’m planning on running a variation of my shuck and jive where I transport into Shuggie while flying straight at her and surprise the two morons on my tail. Meantime, as I’m setting this up, working my way towards the north gate all the while, I’m hair pinning and swirling and twirling and twisting and turning and rolling and praying my ass off as I have nothing more to hurl at these two guys who are trying their, fairly competent damndest to spread me over the local area of soup like a big ol’ Argon crouton. That’s when it happens, just almost the instant that Shuggie jumps in the gate I get two BlastClaws and a new style Pirate Elite that seem to be guarding a damned Harrier Hauler all piling through the gate at almost the same time and taking Shuggie under fire.
What happened next wasn’t hairy. Cousin It was hairy. This was light years beyond hairy. It was so far beyond hairy that without a Jump Gate the light from hairy would take decades to make the crossing.
I got the call in from a representative of one of the major Boron spaceborne and space focused R&D firms. They had heard that I was putting together a combine, an idea that has just never caught on among station owners, heretofore anyway, as they were also thinking along those lines and were going a few steps further with it as well. They were offering me a full command and control package in a modified combine situation that had more docking bays and more centralized and streamlined offices and C&C set up. What a deal huh? And all I had to do was some errands…and maybe a little salvage…and maybe fight a minor war or three along the way…and maybe then fight a half assed real war with the Khaak on top of it all. Ohh, and buy almost everything needed myself.
Not that they told me this up front; and, truth be told, not that there weren’t some nice fringe benefits along the way too. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The first part of it was a piece of cake. Go do some survey work, he says, anomalous energy readings, he says. Me say: “Fishy Man Speak with Forked Tongue”.
The anomalous energy readings ended up being a nividium laced asteroid. Yep, I said nividium, that stuff fabled in song, story and late night BS sessions all along the border regions with ‘Nid space. Word has it that the ‘Nid have a real passion for the stuff. So do some Pirates, by all following appearances.
Here is where getting lazy can bite you in the bum. Since I was going to do a little survey work and I have a perfectly good survey ship set up, why not use it, eh? So, I transport in to my neat little Starburst. Yep, I picked one up down in Pirate space, in one of the illegal racing sectors, tricked it out to the full. These things are amazing. They aren’t like piloting missiles, as some have suggested, because missiles don’t move that fast. These things will literally out run IRE fire. With this ship and some iron nerves you can get from point A to point B so fast that you meet yourself on the way; but… it has no weapons mounts at all. Of course not really; because if you trick her out speed wise you are liable to get basted by your own shots as you whip past them, if you zig instead of zag.
So, here I am cuddled up this asteroid that is kicking back nividium readings and chatting with Shuggie when suddenly my threat warning starts screeching and my missile warning starts hooting and my tea kettle starts whistling all at once and I find myself, as has seldom happened before, in a thither. It was very, very nearly all she wrote at that moment. I zagged out of the path of the oncoming missile as I kicked the little girl in the ass and contemplated kicking in behind the missile then over flying it and leading it back to whatever mad man took at shot with a Silkworm a tenth the size of my ship at my poor little backside. Right then though I ran face first in to Beta PAC fire by the slews.
Now the Starburst may have allot to offer, but one thing she is distinctly lacking in is guts. Smack her once and she pouts and starts shooting sparks from that over tuned engine of doom you are almost sitting on. So, in a nebulic soup, as, ohh, did I mention this was in Rolk’s Fate?; I am suddenly sitting in a ship with 11% hull, no longer faster than the pursuing ships, two somewhat overtuned Scorpion Vanguards no less, both of whom, I get the distinct impression, don’t want anyone to know about the nividium in that ‘roid. So, I get Shuggie back on the line and screech for him to jump in to the system by the near by North Gate. I’m planning on running a variation of my shuck and jive where I transport into Shuggie while flying straight at her and surprise the two morons on my tail. Meantime, as I’m setting this up, working my way towards the north gate all the while, I’m hair pinning and swirling and twirling and twisting and turning and rolling and praying my ass off as I have nothing more to hurl at these two guys who are trying their, fairly competent damndest to spread me over the local area of soup like a big ol’ Argon crouton. That’s when it happens, just almost the instant that Shuggie jumps in the gate I get two BlastClaws and a new style Pirate Elite that seem to be guarding a damned Harrier Hauler all piling through the gate at almost the same time and taking Shuggie under fire.
What happened next wasn’t hairy. Cousin It was hairy. This was light years beyond hairy. It was so far beyond hairy that without a Jump Gate the light from hairy would take decades to make the crossing.
Not quite a newbie anymore, but still able to ask the most stultifyingly silly assed questions imaginable.