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The Shadow of Old Transgressions (Homeworld/Mass Effect Crossover Quest)

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Damn... That missile cruiser definitely has to go, ASAP. I'm a little torn as to how things should go down, but in all likelihood if even one of those missiles hits one of the remaining freighters then this situation will get much worse very, very, very quickly. Yeah, with Ulysses as our big gun we can definitely take the missile cruiser fast, but it's going to hurt. My biggest worry here is that by all appearances, the infamous Beast Infection particle beam weapon has yet to make a definite appearance I think, and I'm honestly not sure if we're currently equipped to handle that weapon system if/when it finally makes an appearance. Worst, it's something that's mounted on capital ships.

Like carriers, for example.

No matter what we choose, we're going to have to roll the dice on this one and hopefully not get snake eyes.

[X] Blitz the Carriers
-[X] Target the Missile Cruiser
[X] Save the Freighters

Seems like no matter what, someone is gonna bleed somehow in this fight. Better the Bentusi than the remaining Iruni freighters. Ideally, the other half of our mixed flotilla will be able to maneuver to cover the retreat of the freighters while Valerius, Ulysses and the Raawan get stuck in with da Boyz throw down with the Void Wraiths.
 
Scheduled vote count started by Arcanestomper on Sep 20, 2022 at 11:28 PM, finished with 10 posts and 6 votes.
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If you're wondering about the dice I've been experimenting with finding the best mix between a full detailed combat simulation and treating it as a pure narrative.
Arcanestomper threw 1 20-faced dice. Reason: Valerius Performance Total: 13
13 13
Arcanestomper threw 1 20-faced dice. Reason: Ulysses Performance Total: 1
1 1
Arcanestomper threw 1 20-faced dice. Reason: Raawan Performance Total: 3
3 3
 
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Turn 4.5 An Uphill Battle
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    • The Great Rift

    System 856E
    The Second Irune Convoy

    It doesn't take you long to come to a consensus. You came here to save the Irune convoys. You were too late for most of them, but you'll save the survivors no matter what. You quickly divide responsibilities. Aurora and Iuno fall back to begin evacuating the freighter crews. Laverna and the Marduk cover them while you, Ulysses, and the Raawan begin driving towards the missile cruiser.

    Ulysses orders the shepherds to keep their acolytes between the three of you and the carrier. "We'll have too much on our minds to be able to control them manually. That should hopefully be enough to cover us."

    As you the fighters swarm around you can't help but compare your formation to the wraith formations protecting the missiles. Each of you are attempting to protect a deadly payload long enough to get within range of your targets. The difference of course is that your formation doesn't need to impact to do damage. Something made clear as Ulysses gets a clear firing line and erases the first missile. If only there weren't already a dozen more making a dotted line on your sensors from you to the missile cruiser.

    Unfortunately a problem soon arises. You, Ulysses, the Raawan, and all your fighter escorts are performing a complex dance of evasive maneuvers as a simple straight burn would be far too vulnerable to the carrier's fire. All the Bentusi ships are linked into one unified flotilla network that lets them coordinate down to the microsecond and ensure everyone stays coordinated. But the Raawan isn't. The Kadeshi are good pilots, very good. But they simply don't have your reflexes or coordination. Ulysses sends you a private simulation. Your evasive maneuvers are suffering a 13% loss of optimal speed as you need to compensate for the slower reactions. There's nothing you can do about it of course, but you file it away as something to work on later.

    Meanwhile the freighter evacuation is well under way. Since all the wraiths are now concentrating on you, and the missiles are squarely in your line of fire, Iuno has asked the Marduk to pull back and help with the task. By all accounts the Kadeshi are extremely effective at boarding and clearing the freighters. Even better than Iuno's robots. Aurora meanwhile has discarded the resource tank and is building an emergency life support pod to hold the survivors as neither Iuno nor the Marduk have anywhere near the necessary capacity. Or at least there will hopefully be enough survivors to strain them.

    The void wraiths are not sitting still for all this. The two carriers have pulled ahead of the missile cruiser, and arranged themselves so that you will need to pass through almost their entire firing arcs in order to reach the cruiser. They've also begun sending the frigates after you directly instead of having them protect the missiles. They could send them after the freighters and force you to split your own forces, but they apparently regard your destruction as a priority goal. You almost feel honored. You knew they recognized you after the last two carriers retreated rather than fight you, but this means they regard you as enough of a threat to be worth abandoning their previous goals. That might be useful in the future.

    Unfortunately in the present it means that you are being forced to more and more extreme maneuvers as you corkscrew through space. The ships in your formation are going everywhere. The acolytes are fighting the wraith interceptors while trying to provide you cover. The cherubs are fighting at the while the acolytes swarm around you, the cherubs bomb the frigates. The Raawan and Ulysses keep switching between shooting at the frigates and the missiles as they come in range. Everyone is continuously dodging to avoid the massive siege railgun rounds blowing through the formation. You of course need to try and keep everyone covered with your defensive fields. And inevitably it isn't enough. The Raawan is just a fraction too slow. You can't cover it in time and a railgun round blows through it's armor.

    The Kadeshi frigate goes tumbling and you swoop in to grab it with your manipulators. Normally that would slow you down unacceptably in a battle like this, but fortunately your mass effectors give you enough spare engine power to pull this off. You rapidly reconstruct the Raawan's engines, but you aren't getting any response from the crew so you call in several drones, weld them to frigate and interlink their control systems. Then you give the ungainly vessels orders to return to Aurora. Hopefully Captain Leli is still alive to complain about the mess you made of her elegant ship later.

    With the loss of the Raawan your formations evasiveness sees a noticeable improvement and you stop needing to take so many hits on your defensive fields. The problem is that the Raawan was also providing a considerable amount of firepower with its quadruple ion cannons. Without it Ulysses has to focus on the missiles more and the frigates have more time to fire at you before they are destroyed. Many drones have been lost and you and Ulysses are both taking damage even through the fields.

    You take a split second to check on the progress of the evacuation. Two freighters have been cleared so far, but two still remain. Fortunately you are now in range of the missile cruiser. Unfortunately this means you have to stop as you need to stay between the missile cruiser and the freighters and it becomes even easier for the carriers to target you and Ulysses.

    The battle becomes a chaotic hell space as you and Ulysses do your best not to be destroyed even as drone and wraith ships clash and explode all around you. Ulysses has to keep firing on the missiles and is only able to take an occasional shot at the cruiser, but eventually he manages to hit something vital, and the wraith cruiser explodes. You are thankful but the two carriers remain.

    "Let's fall back. We don't need to stay and deal with them yet."

    "Roger."

    Things seem to be looking up, but then a scream of hyperspace turbulence shudders through your core. Another wraith is jumping in, and from the direction of it you sense it will be right on top of the freighters. You send a frantic signal to the others. "Jump out. Jump out now!"

    "But what about you two? We can't leave you!"

    "Don't worry about us. We've got this. We'll see back at Irune."

    Aurora picks up the Marduk, the remains of the Raawan, and the emergency life pod. Then all through of your fellows open quantum gates and jump out. They cleared three of the freighters, but were still in the process of searching the fourth. You can only hope that there weren't many survivors in that one. There's nothing more you can do for them. Well there is one thing. You order some of the surviving cherubs to destroy the hulk. Better a quick death in a fusion fireball than what the wraiths will do to them.

    That of course leaves you and Ulysses. You and the two, soon to be three, wraith carriers. Unfortunately you are too close to them and can't make your own emergency jumps through their hyperspace interference. "What now?"

    "I've been scanning the carriers, and I think I know where their hyperspace cores are. If I can get a few good shots off we can knock them out and jump."

    "That sounds like a terrible plan, but I've got nothing better. Let's do it."

    Shooting one specific spot on the carriers is easier said than done. Ulysses has to take more time targeting and less time dodging. Which makes him far more vulnerable and your job far harder. He manages to knock out the core on one carrier, but by the time he does, a quantum gate has indeed disgorged a third carrier and it's headed your way. You've already taken a lot of damage fighting two. A third will be too much. You need to disable the second carrier far faster than the first.

    "I'm going straight in. Get ready to jump."

    "What no. Wait Ulysses!"

    Ulysses doesn't listen and straightens his course for the second carrier. He overloads his core and begins unleashing a concentrated stream of ion fire right into the enemy ships. The bright beam rapidly chews through the carrier's armor, but staying steady like that leaves him far too vulnerable to return fire. You do your best to shield him, but your fields are already weakened and several siege railgun shots slam into him.

    By the time you feel the hyperspace interference disappear he isn't responding on the flotilla network anymore and the ion cannon keeps burning as if he can't even sense what is happening around him.

    "By Saajuk! Eject Ulysses. Eject!" You don't wait for a response that might not come and swoop in to grab him. Unfortunately you can't jump with him in tow so you tear through his body to find and pluck his core out of the wreckage.

    You send the shepherds orders to emergency jump and return to Irune, but you don't see whether they make it or not as your own quantum gate envelops you.


    As you make your lonely journey back to Irune you carefully carry out what repairs you can on Ulysses core. Your diagnostics say he's still alive in there, but he's not responding, and you don't have the facilities to check for any deeper damage. Hopefully Aurora can repair him, but you know a core shouldn't be pulled from a ship body as abruptly as you did. You keep sending him messages and try not to think of the worst.

    It leaves you a lot of time with your thoughts, and most of them are on the battle. Clearly the carriers are adapting, and clearly you are ill prepared to face them. Almost every time your flotilla has seriously fought them one of you has suffered a traumatic loss of body. You need a better way. You can think of a few ways to counter the carriers, but you aren't sure if you'll be able to pull even one of them off, much less all of them.

    What do you want to focus on in the future?

    [ ] Match them strength for strength
    You need a vessel that can get into a slugging match with the carriers and win. Something much bigger and with better armor than your current vessels. It's time to dig into the ancient Bentusi archives and pull out the heavy cruiser schematics.

    [ ] They can't destroy what they can't hit.
    Their siege railguns are extremely strong, but they are not as good at tracking small targets. Focus on building up your drone forces with a fast anti capital vessel. Something like the Cherub bombers, but better.

    [ ] Take a page out of their own book.
    If they want to use huge missiles to bombard ships, then so can you. Focus on building a bombardment ship that can salvo missiles and torpedoes at them from long range.


    Quest Note: Next update will probably be before this vote is done. In which case both votes will be at the same time. I just have something I need to get too today and can't keep writing at the moment.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • [ ] Match them strength for strength.
    [ ] Take a page out of their own book.
    These two feel like something that could be folded into each other

    [ ] They can't destroy what they can't hit.
    While this one does seem to lean more heavily into our carrier focused fleet so far, and if we can get some good corvette designs up that we can field produce at a reasonable rate would be even better

    [X] Match them strength for strength.

    But in the end I'm going to vote for the big guns of the Bentusi fleet, even if they might need retrofitting for the techs we'll be getting later down the line a bigger hull means more power and weapon mounts to work with along with just more volume as well.
     
    [X] They can't destroy what they can't hit.

    As I recall, the Dervish Multibeam Corvettes are one of our available (Engineering) projects, and if we managed to get a flotilla of those up and running (with mass effectors to make them more nimble), I bet the Void Wraiths would be having a very bad day, given the heavy firepower those can field. Besides, we already have Shepherds to help manage other drone ships, so that would be pretty nice synergy.

    This update has also shown that working on the Mobile Defensive Generator would also be useful though, since we can't be everywhere on the battlefield, and since that would also be a drone ship...
     
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    [X] They can't destroy what they can't hit.

    The problem is also that we're always outnumbered. We need to get an allied fleet together.
     
    I'm a wee bit torn. On one hand, I desire larger and more powerful hulls, capable of supporting greater defenses and firepower. On the other, I was one of those that voted for the Dervish Multibeam Corvettes, and while I'd love to see them ripping and tearing their way across the battlefield like a school of enormous metal piranha, they're currently still an unrefined design.

    After taking the time to deliberate, I've recalled that we do have a spare destroyer hull on standby now that Ulysses can transfer into (assuming that he's okay - we're going to have to examine him very, very thoroughly). We should at least put the multibeam frigates through their paces to get a better idea of where the design is lacking and in need of refinement, and the passenger ark we're designing? Might be able to slap some resource containers onto that thing so we're not always having to jettison the one we have in combat situations.

    [X] They can't destroy what they can't hit.
     
    Turn 4.6: Repair and Regroup
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    • Aethon Cluster

    System Aru
    Irune Dockyards

    You drop out of hyperspace in Irune to find the system abuzz with ships flying back and forth. It's not like when you were last here with the normal flow of commerce. Now it looks like a lot of ships are leaving in a hurry.

    You start sending out pings while you scan the system looking for your friends. For a long moment you think they might not have made it and all the possible reasons run through your mind. But fortunately you soon find them in orbit next to the shipyard you commissioned to build the Ark. In retrospect that was the first place you should have looked.

    Moving to join them you open a comm channel, "Is everyone alright? How about the Volus survivors? We got out of there, but I had to pull Ulysses's core."

    "Oh no." "Are you alright?" "Bring him to me."

    It takes you a bit to transition to the same orbit as the others. Then you dock in Aurora's hangar and carefully pass Ulysses's core to her maintenance bots. While she works you distract yourself by chatting with Laverna and Iuno.

    "So what happened to you all."

    "Well we all got out of course. We saved about two hundred of the Volus. That was most of them I think. But what about what happened to Ulysses. What happened to you two?"

    "After you all left a third carrier showed up. We weren't far enough from the carriers so we had to disable their hyperspace cores. It worked, but Ulysses sacrificed his body to do it."

    You all sit for a long moment processing that. "What about the Raawan? I didn't have time to check for survivors."

    "Yeah they made it too. I think they lost a few people, but captain Leli is keeping them distracted with repair work."

    "That's good. We need to figure out some way to tie them into the next so this doesn't happen again."

    Another silence stretches out.

    "But what about all the ships leaving? What happened here?"

    "Oh that's because of Barsa Dun's fleet. Apparently they fought the Void Wraiths too. Except there were a lot of them. They got mauled real bad. Only a few of them made it back and it set off a real panic. Everyone's worried they might actually come after Irune next."

    You consider the prospect. On the surface it seems plausible. The Taiidan navy fleet here isn't that much larger than the mercenary group Barsa Dun assembled. But there are several reasons why its unlikely. For one thing you know the navy has significantly better warships than mercenaries. And for the other the Irune system is bristling with fixed defense platforms.

    All that said though. You did feel like the mercenaries were being lured into a trap. And the void wraiths keep pulling out new tricks and ships. You have no idea what their real strength is.

    The silence continues to stretch and you busy yourself talking about your plan for an upgraded fleet with Iuno and Laverna. Together the three of you work out a few different strategies. Iuno is advocating for building a cruiser, while Laverna of course wants to build a powerful drone strike force. You're leaning towards using the Dervish corvettes. But before the three of you can reach a consensus Aurora pings you all. "I've got Ulysses back up."

    Immediately all of you are focused on Ulysses comm channel. Laverna is the first to speak up "Hey Ulysses."

    The response is a bit sluggish, but quickly picks up, "Hey Laverna. What did I miss?"

    "Just a boring trip back. Thanks to you they carriers couldn't stop us getting out."

    "That's good. That's good."

    The five of you pass a bit more light chatter around, but you soon leave Aurora to her work integrating Ulysses into the spare Hurricane you had built.

    That leaves you to consider the current situation. Could the Void Wraiths actually attack a fortified system. What should you do to prepare if so?

    [ ] Help the Evacuation
    A lot of ships are leaving in a panic. And whether or not the wraiths would attack a system you know they attack convoys. Work to organize the ships leaving into a larger better defended convoy so they don't just get picked off.

    [ ] Fortify the System
    Well you would like to, but you never did design those sentry stations. What you could do is build up your flotilla with more shepherds, reserves of resources, and flocks of extra drones. Also work on figuring out a way to integrate the Marduk and Raawan into your maneuvering network, and coordinate with the Taiidan.

    [ ] Scout the Void Wraiths
    From what you know of what happened with the mercenaries it was a trap after all. But you still have that megalith mapped. Go out and do a quick scouting run to see if you can figure out where the Wraith's base actually is and what they are up to.


    Quest Note: The vote is actually pretty close. So as noted I'll still be accepting votes for the last update as well as this one.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • [X] Scout the Void Wraiths

    There are many things that need doing at present, but what is most important is finding out what the Void Wraiths are actually up to (and where their primary base actually is). While I'm sure we could make a sizable impact wherever we devoted our resources, before we commit ourselves to defending or helping to evacuate this system, we need to find out whether they have the resources to attack a fortified system...and if they do, if there is a way we can spoil their attack.

    Finding their base, if we can, would allow us to not simply be reactive.

    [X] They can't destroy what they can't hit.

    My previous vote and reasoning stands.
     
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