NOT DISCUSSING THE VOTE RIGHT NOW. [EDIT: Not gonna have time to do anything about the vote for a while. I know what I want, but I haven't had time to read all the plans and figure out which one I like]
[read read read]
Hmm, the arrogant tribute-demanding space insects could be a problem. I like Saavik's sense of humor though. Also,
Sappho's sense of volleyball.
Also... wow. The good news about Deva IX is that we physically destroyed three of their escorts, and massively damaged a fourth. The bad news is that we have massive damage to
Endurance and
Shield.
I call that a win. A crippled
Hasque cancels a crippled
Miranda. Light damage to two of their cruisers cancels out light damage to one of our cruisers. And a crippled
Excelsior is a reasonably fair trade for totally destroying three
Hasques.
It's not a pyrrhic victory unless you look at it and say "Another such victory, and we are undone!" Which we can't. We really can't. The
entire Sydraxian navy consists of, oh, at a rough estimate... I don't know, maybe half a dozen cruisers and a dozen or so escorts. We just blew up three of those escorts and put a fourth in the hospital for a year. Even their cruisers are going to need repairs.
If the Sydraxians had managed to straight-up
destroy the
Endurance, even then this would be something like an even exchange of damages, at a loss rate we could afford, because the Sydraxians would run out of ships a long time before we did if we can keep killing three of their ships for the loss of a single explorer. The political consequences would be an issue, I suppose. But from a military point of view...
This is victory.
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Now, trying to analyze what happened... I'd like to flag a few issues with
@OneirosTheWriter 's attention.
We started out with a Combat 29 squadron up against a Combat 20 squadron. The big surprise there is that
Endurance took such a tremendous beating while
Kumari was almost untouched.
I haven't tried to read the whole combat log to figure out what was going on there, but it really does seem like the Sydraxians were able to focus fire on
Endurance and beat her within an inch of her life, while the flagship wasn't even reduced to half shields. Something similar happened to the cruisers, but to a lesser degree.
If the fire had been more evenly distributed between the two explorers, we'd have had a lot less total casualties from the battle as a whole, I suspect.
One thing I DON'T understand is what stopped our ships from warping out when they hit, oh, 50% hull strength. Maybe actually reading that 300+ line combat log will provide insight...
So, hm. Key issues:
1) Is it entirely random whether crews suffer losses when the ship takes hull hits? As noted, both our escorts AND their escorts suffered proportionately much lower crew casualties when they took hull damage, compared to explorers.
2) DID our ships have a 'warp out' mechanic? One of the advantages of a having a larger fleet in a battle like this SHOULD be that at least in principle, a heavily threatened and engaged ship should be protected by covering fire from its division-mates.
3) Was there some underlying mechanic for why
Kumari took waaaay less hits? Pure random target selection really wouldn't seem to explain that, not in a 300-round battle. I may look closer, but I am concerned that there may be non-randomness built into the combat engine that wasn't originally intended to be there.
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GENERIC RANDOM STUFF.
All hail Department of Redundancy Department!
If their redundancy makes them immune to being blown up by bombs, I'm all for it.
Did you defect from the Romulan diplomatic service?
If so, can we get a few more
defectors? I like having some sneaky around. seamstresses because seriously getting all these personal cloaks made is a massive burden on our tailoring infrastructure.
With the massive crew casualties on the Endurance apparently being a random happenstance of the RNG, I think I have a good in universe justification for it. Possibly omake worthy.
Sydraxian marines.
I like this, I think I'll omake it. I have JUST the character for it.
