insolent1 wrote:My favorite unknown sector, to bring up the sector on the universe map use G for getsu fune. I have only seen the odd cluster in that sector.
Berghman and Itashi always dock and hide if you have spare room on your ship, the funny thing is they are invincible for the patrol mission.
Excellent stuff N-S, this must be the longest DiD game yet
Helps when you've got a whole bunch of guys willing to do the getting shot at bit for you.
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113 - Babysitter
Jackson is keen to get the bits of Xenon off to the boys in the lab to look at and someone must have phoned ahead as Splinter is waiting for us at the Orbital defence outpost with a Terran TP to transfer them over to. I was hoping that would be it as far as my involvment, but Jackson has other ideas, he'd like us to escort the TP thru to the boffins at the Venus research yards. I'm fairly sure I don't see the necessity to that one. If we were heading out of Terran space I might understand, but we'll be heading into Terran space where the military tonnage per cubic kilometre is something quite ridiculous.
Still, mine is not to reason why, mine is but to do and hopefully get paid. As it happens it's probably just as well we did tag along as arriving in Mars orbit it turns out we've got a tail, a single N comes belting thru the orbital accelerator behind us, much to the dismay of traffic control. A single N wouldn't normally be much of a concern, it is after all just an M5, but this one seems to have been modified to carry one of those jump beacons we saw before. A nearby ATF patrol manages to tag the N itself, but they don't get it before it's deployed its beacon and suddenly we've got a capital ship on top of us!
The first thing on my agenda is get rid of that beacon. One J dropping in on me unexpected is quite ample for one day I reckon and all the time that beacon is up I'm going to assume they can do it again. One Hornet takes care of it nicely tho and then Orange wing moves into assist the Terran forces in mopping up the remaining fighters while we lob missiles in. Lucky that we did as well as 'Silent But Deadly' managed to completely fail to live up to his name in either respect as he managed to shoot nothing, but got ganked by a pair of L's that proceeded to rip off his shields, along with a quarter of his hull, while he flailed about and cried like a girl. Only the timely arrival of a bunch of Tempests courtesy of yours truly saved him from winding up sucking vacuum. That kind of performance just lets the whole wing down.
On the plus side, while the Terrans were all in a fluster, I noticed that not all the Xenon fighters were destroyed..
http://dbbr17626.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/steve/113-1.gif
.. and managed to sneak that one aboard on the sly without anyone noticing. The good old Transporter/Docking computer maneuver!
Turns out that was a one-shot effort by the Xenon to recover their tech as the rest of the trip to Venus is uneventful and happily it was worth my time to come along as, aside from the recovered L, the Terrans have got a little present for me. It's only an Argon Discoverer, but a supertuned one! From what I can tell from a quick look over it they've managed to pretty much improve it's performance in every respect. Not too exciting in and of itself, but I could potentially make a fortune licensing the tech back to the Argon government shipyards. Hmm, possibilities..
Venus research is looking into the Xenon debris and have promised they'll give me a yell if they need anything so for the time being it looks like I've got some time on my hands. So, time to head back to rejoin the fleet over in Haven and find out if they've been letting anymore hobos set up shop and fortunately they haven't. Apparently my threat that any repeat performance would wind up with the guilty part(y/ies) finding out just how the Steve version of the Remote Guided Warhead works did the trick..
Generally speaking everything has been running pretty smoothly while I've been away, although there are a few areas I need to look at in terms of ensuring there's ample freight capacity to run the goods between complexes. Partly that's down to previous losses from the Yaki which hopefully will be considerably less of an issue in future after recent deployments, but mostly it's just some slight underestimation on resource consumption rates and will just require a bit of load balancing. Add a freighter here and there, swap a large one for a smaller one, that kind of thing really, nothing major.
As far as the troops are concerned it seems 'Silent But Deadly' isn't the only one who's going to get his ear chewed. In fact his sins are mild by comparison. 'Gulargambone' the M6 who I'd assigned to anti-Yaki duties down in Savage Spur and who had up until now been doing a grand job curbing Yaki activity apparently fell asleep at the wheel or something..
http://dbbr17626.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/steve/113-2.gif
.. as he got royally ripped a new one. Yes, he managed to destroy the offending Tenjin, but that doesn't excuse the fact that he was given a shiny new Dragon, complete with custom fitted leather seats and has just brought it back in a state that could charitably be described as 'less shiny' and with the seats showing some staining I think I'd prefer not to know the origin of..
Someone has some explaining to do..
Time: 9-06:06
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