TO BURN, VENT, OR TAKE AS PRIZE (Warhammer 40k Naval Quest)

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HIS MAJESTY'S SHIP, THE VALIANT, AND HER CREW LISTS
  • Informational
    • Cruise Start Date: 3.004.755.m41 | CRUISE COMPLETE
    Shiptime: 180 Days
    Current Date: 3.412.756.m41
    Current Location: The Tempestos Ring
    Current Status: Under Repair and Refit for Duty


    CHRISTENING: The VALIANT
    CLASS: Falchion Class | KEEL LAID: 02.0011.231.m41
    COMPLICATION: Haunted (-10 to max morale, +6 to detection, enemies get -10 to boarding/hit and run attacks)
    MACHINE SPIRIT TEMPERAMENT: Wrothful! (+1 speed, +7 to maneuverability in combat, -1 speed, -5 maneuverability, -5 detection while out of combat)

    --

    HULL INTEGRITY: 36/36 | VOID SHIELDS: 1 | ARMOR: 18
    TURRET RATING: 1 | SPEED: 9 (7) | MANEUVERABILITY: +24 (+12) | DETECTION: +30 (+25)
    CREW QUALITY: Elite (40%) | CREW: 99/100 | MORALE: 87/90
    SUPPLIES: 12 Months (at 6 months go on short rations)

    --

    Dimensions: 2.2 Kilometres in Length | 0.3 Kilometres abeam at the Fins
    Mass: 6.5 Megatonnes (approx) | Crew: 27,871 Souls (may the God Emperor Protect)
    Acceleration: 4.6 Gravities (Constant)



    DORSAL CANNONS

    Mars Cannons
    The Jumping Bastard, Long-Lolly, Big Lass, Old Contemptible, 'Nought More, Domination, Obliteration, The Silly Lad, Gigatech, Omnisiah's Child, Emperor's Fist and The Smiling Jack
    Range: 6 | Strength: 3 | Damage: 1d10+3 (Crit: 5)

    Ryza Cannons
    Furious Sun, The Sisters
    Range: 5 | Strength: 5 | Damage: 1d10+6 (Crit: 4)
    If this weapon deals the Destroyed critical hit, it destroys two components rather than one

    TORPEDOES
    Speed: 10 Void Units per Turn | Damage: 2d10+14 (Crit: 10) | Terminal Penetration: 3
    Rating: +20
    Maximum Range: 60
    14 Torpedoes


    Space: 34/34 | Power: 42/45

    Jovian Pattern Class 2 Plasma Drive: Blessed be her Fury, for she Driveth us to Salvation.
    (Space: 10 | Power: 45 Generated)

    Stelov I Warp Engine: Blessed by her Swiftness, for she Taketh us to the Foe
    (Space: 9 | Power: 9 | This Component is Best Quality, reducing it's Space and Power requirements by 1.

    Weir-Miller Pattern Geller Field: Blessed be her Aegis, for she Hold the Darkness at Bay
    (Space: 0 | Power: 1)

    Single Layer Mars Pattern Void Shield Array: Blessed be her Sneer, for she Winks upon Death
    (Space: 1 | Power: 5)

    Command Bridge: Blessed be her Ire, for thou shall smite her enemies from this sacred place.
    (Space: 1 | Power: 2) | Special: +5 to Command Checks and +5 to BS checks. If unpowered, roll 1d10. On a 1-3, this bridge is not unpowered)

    Vitae Pattern Life Sustainer: Blessed be her Breath, for thou shall sup from her teat and live evermore
    (Space: 2 | Power: 4)

    Voidsmen Quarters: Blessed be her Arms, for the encircle your Earthly Body.
    (Space: 3 | Power: 1)

    Deep Void Auger Array: Blessed be her Eye, for she Sees All
    (Space: 0 | Power: 7)

    Prow Mounted Voss Pattern Torpedo Tubes: Blessed be her Fist, for she striketh the foe!
    (Space: - | Power: 1) | This component is included automatically and cannot be removed.

    Dorsal Mounted Mars Pattern Macrocannon Batteries: Blessed be he Sword, for she sweeps away the Shield
    (Space: 2 | Power: 4)

    Dorsal Mounted Ryza Pattern Plasma Battery: Blessed be her Lance, for she driveth into thy Enemy's Belly
    (Space: 4 | Power: 7) | This component is of best quality, adding +1 Strength and +1 Damage. Praise the Emperor.

    Munitorium: Blessed be her Quiver, for it is Ever Filled with her Hate
    (Space: 2 | Power: 1) | This component is of best quality, reducing Space and Power Requirement by 1. Hail to the Omnisiah!
    VOLATILE: IF THIS COMPONENT IS DAMAGED, IT EXPLODES, DEALING 2D5 DAMAGE TO THE SHIP IGNORING ARMOR AND SETTING A NEARBY COMPONENT ON FIRE

    COMPLIMENT

    Bridge Crew
    Captain: Commander VYNN
    First Officer: Lieutenant Yorke ZELLA
    Chief Surgeon: Doctor Jonathan BALTHEZAR
    Helm Officer: Lieutenant, 2nd Class, Privata SONJA Blitzkovatch
    Ship's Master: Xandi ES
    Gunner's Mate, 1st Class: Sujek KHAN
    Gunner's Mate, 2nd Class: Khotar VROOK


    Guildsmen and Civilian Officials
    Cartho-Artifex: Sir Jividias VONT (the Younger)
    Chief Purser: Mrs. Sydwynn Carter
    Head Confessor: KURGHAN Malik

    Midshipmen
    Mr. Tommen Blakely (aged 13)
    Mr. Vindalin Cork (aged 15)
    Mr. Dashire Rainwild (aged 14)
    Mr. Bower Xon III (Aged 12)
    Mr. Ted (Age 13)


    The Priesthood of Mars
    Chief Enginseer (aka Enginseer Primus): Isabella "ISA" Turantawix


    Navis Nobiline
    Warp Guide: GALE of the House Nobiline Majoris Stikellan-Vorin-Ma (Guiding Light of the Astronomicon, The Daring One, Mistress of the Stars)
    Warp Secondus: SEVERUS GALE of the House Nobiline Majoris Stikellan-Vorin-Ma, Husband to GALE
    Warp Tertrius: MARY GALE of the House Nobiline Majoris Stikellan-Vorin-Ma, eldest daughter to GALE
    Warp Quaternus: TOMMEN GALE of the House Nobiline Majoris Stikellan-Vorin-Ma, younger son to GALE

    The Crew

    Boatswain Frik (MIA, ship-date 112 at warp, no body found)
    Able Voidsman Darya Ivanova
    Able Voidman Sa'adah Sanguhamat (Died of Infection, ship-date 108 at Warp, consigned to the Void, God Emperor Bless His Soul)
    Able Voidsman Nasir Naaji
    Voidsman Akulina Ignatov (Died of Infection, ship-date 108 at Warp, consigned to the Void, God Emperor Bless Her Soul)
    Voidsman Irina Kuznetsov (Died of Infection, ship-date 108 at Warp, consigned to the Void, God Emperor Bless Her Soul)
    Voidsman Lev Volkov
    Voidsman Mikha'il Abdulrashid
    Voidsman Isra Saqqaf
    Voidsman Asim Ahmad
    Voidsman Happy Jack Sheng

     
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  • Informational
    • [x] "Set course for the derelict station."

    Lets have an adventure and salvage expedition while Engineering does repairs. What could go wrong? (Deliberately tempts fate).
     
    [X] "Set course for the derelict station."

    Hey, maybe there'll be spare parts there. Or treasure.

    Or ghosts, but whatever.
     
    [X] "Set course for the derelict station."
    Glad I opened this up, the piratical-sounding take on the Imperial Navy is pretty delightful.
     
    [X] "Set course for the derelict station."

    -[X] Make a mental note to give Isa a cute but embarrassing nickname like "Tentacle-Chan." If she is going to call us " Captain Lumpy Head" then two can play that game.
     
    Loving this quest. I know nothing about the Master and Commander series, but still having a great time reading this. I like the sheer scale of everything.

    One question: is Commander Vynn's terribleness with names a reference to the books?

    Anyways, I do not want to get too far in-system with damaged engines
    [X] "Set course for the nearest rock."
     
    ancusohm said:
    One question: is Commander Vynn's terribleness with names a reference to the books?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Nah, the only things I've taken directly from the books is the rough idea of "naval captain + civilian doctor friend."

    ...and the idea that Vynn is constantly running out of money and or making terrible investments and or getting demoted so she never actually reaches boring ranks like admiral or retires.

    ...and in the books, Steven Maturine (the doctor Jon is based on) is also a spy for the British government, so...you know who Jon used to work for now!
     
    CHAPTER TWO: STORMS, SHOALS AND SPIRITS (1.3)
  • Threadmarks
    • "Set course for the station - lets see what's what. We can moor there, maybe find some old supplies?" you nod to Isa, who nods back to you.

    The burn to the station is a chance to really put your crew through their steps, to see how they handle themselves while sailing under a bit of pressure. And on the whole, you're rather happy with it - even if they are a bit slack handed when it comes to trimming the port thrusters, due to more of the pressed crews being assigned such duties, while the starboard side of the ship had been less savaged by their run in with the Tau or the Toe or the T'au or whatever they were called. You fixed it by mixing the crews more steadily and throwing the ship into a few practice revolutions during the long, slow course to the derelict station. Within a day, you have acquired a specific auspex lock and could begin to sweep it with your telescopes and your augers.

    It is no simple thing to auger something in the vastness of the void - and your mids, under the watchful eye of their officer, Mr. Sonja - had quite a task ahead of them. The first thing to do was to find the precise velocity of the object, requiring both its bearing and its speed relative to the primay of the system and to yourself. The simplest method by which to do this was to pick up the heat signature of a plasma reactor or vitae sustainer upon the pyresense scopes. Such things bloomed quite brightly upon the various spectra that the pyresense scopes could peer into. However, when the object was dull and dead, as this station was, the methods grew a touch more tricky. With no heat, one must instead turn to the vanity of light. Reflection, though, dependent upon many factors...the color and the shape of the object...the rate at which it spun...the brightness of the primay...the acuity of your sensors...

    The clue that this station was a station and not merely a rock, though, came entirely from that reflectivity. Most of the rocks observed by your ship from the beginning of your arrival had a light curve, with a variance as low as 1.9 to 2.9 on the magnitude scale to as high as 0.9 to 15.9 for the little twinklers that usually meant tumbling pieces of ice or cometary cores. The station's light curve was a mere 0.1, requiring something to either be rotating at ludicrous speed or to be nearly entirely stationary. The first required objects of such durability that the likelihood of them being a natural amalgamation of dirt and rock and volitiles was nill. The second required certain gravitmetric stabilization systems that only void fairers could build in the first place - as eventually, all things did eventually begin to spin.

    (There was also the fact that such a low light curve required a mostly similar surface, rather than the craggy madness of an asteroid, but, enough on light curves.)

    Having determined the rock was not a rock but a station by reflectiveness, the next step was measuring it's size and its relative velocity. This was trickier said than done: Even upon the bounds of a planet, plodders would need measuring tools to truly tell the scale of something, especially if it was far enough away. At the right range, a Gargant may seem a man and a man a Gargant, after all. This was why you did not simply aim your nose at the distant station and burn. Oh no! For one, there were no straight lines in space. For another, if the object was in fact a dangerous ship waiting in ambush, you'd prefer to know before you got within a few hundred thousand kilometers.

    And so, the first day of the voyage was spent bleeding off angular momentum relative to the sun itself, in other words, you began to slow your orbit. But as you had explained to Jon many times, one had to slow down to get anywhere. By reducing your momentum, your orbit began to shift from a near perfect circle to an ellipse, whose off-centered hoop hooked closer and closer towards the sun, until the line of your passage would (be it not acted upon by another force) launch you from the system and into the vast night beyond. This was, of course, not what was going to happen - and within a day, you had shifted your position in the orbital sphere enough to draw parallaxing data between not just the station, but also, the two planets in the system and the binary pair itself.

    You knew the size of the binary pair and planet from the charts and their distances from one another, and so, by comparing how much they seemed to move to how much the station seemed to move, you could infer it's size and, from there, it's orbital elements. All this took a great deal of math, which you checked over with a frown and a nod. Mr. Ted proved the most adept of the mids at such astromantic incantery, though Rainwild and Xon both showed no small hand at it. Cork's equation had mistaken the A for a B in his algebracis and produced a result that determined the station to be several solar masses larger than the largest star in the sky, a matter that left you fuming and growling and glaring.

    Still, with the parallaxing and the light curve in mind, you knew some ESSENTIALS about the station.

    1) it was roughly two kilometres in width​
    2) It was about one eighth a kilometre or one hundred and twenty five meters in height​
    3) It appeared from the way its silhouette was distorted during the parallax scan to be bristling with fine striations that rose above and below it. If taken as physical objects and not as distortions in the lens, then it was most likely that such distortions were, in fact, spars, vanes, and outrigging.​

    "Could be solar panels?" Zella rumbled.

    "Solar panels, in this system?" you ask. "Not if that station's twenty million years old and survived the nova that crushed that old blighter."

    Zella nodded. "Auspex, then."

    "Mark my word," Sonja says.

    "If she's a listening post," Mr. Vrook says, leaning in. 'Then she's likely got no arms, no defenses..."

    "No heat too, means, she's likely abandoned," Sonja says.

    You rub at your cheek, considering. "A likely enough place to heave too. And if we can coax her up, we'll have eyes on the whole system."

    Zella nods. "Shall I ready an away mission, sir? Our cutters could get there twenty four hours ahead..."

    You shake your head. "No, no. I don't want to risk losing an away mission with the crew as is. Nothing makes them more restive than a cutter gone silent."

    Zella clicks his metal jaw together, but nods, and within two days, you have moored up alongside the station. Over those two days, you were able to divine more secrets - and yes, Sonja had been right, she was abandoned, with a great rented holes in her sides from whatever damage that had done her in. And you had been right: The long spars had been auspex arrays. Several of them were broken, but those that remained were easily ten times the long scuppers that your ship had thrust along her spar. Not that you were jealous, merely stating facts. And so, the ship was moored up - and Isa laid out the basics.

    "It will take us three days," she says as she stands upon the bridge, the view dominated by the station - which itself is roughly the same scale as your ship. But with your ship moored to it, and the engines doused and everything running about the stored voltaics, you would be nearly as cool as it, and thus, not likely to be spied. "We'll need to remove the housings and replace certain components - such components are unlikely to be aboard this station." She says, nodding. "But we have spares enough."

    You nod.

    "Plume ho! Plume ho!"

    The shout comes from Mr. Ted, who is seated at the auspex pit and she has sprung from it, waving her cap excitedly.

    You jog over. "Well sighted, Mr. Ted!" you say, while Mr. Rainwild, who is hastily bringing her telescopes to bear, nods.

    "Two plumes," she says, confidently. "Lubberly looking - lots of slew and no tight beaming at all, Cap'n."

    You nod, kneeling down to peer over the edge of the pit. Your hat nearly falls free from your head, and your hair tumbles around your cheeks, but you care not - and you see Rainwild's estimation is dead on. You slap her back, pitching her almost off her chair and onto the grated floor. "Excellent! Marvelous! Give me a full read on them - Sonja!" You turn, finding Sonja behind you. "Sonja, check their figures and get the ship's book from the cartho-artifex. Mr. Khan! Mr. Vrook! Do you think the gunnery on this ship shall handle any spot of bother we may have, without need for a practice?"

    Mr. Khan and Mr. Vrook, a married pair of warrant officers who had served on the ship through two captains, were as unlikely a duo as you had ever met. Mr. Khan was a Khan (the name did somewhat give it away) and had skin with the same nature and consistency as tree bark and a face that was almost carved of iron - he was less expressive than Lieutenant Zella, and Zella's face was truly made of iron. Mr. Vrook, meanwhile, was tall and Tallerish, with short cropped brown hair and a fine goatee and was somewhat prone to speaking in a poetic style, quoting from his people's vast history of poetic writers and contemplative, meditative types. He was as expressive as his husband was impassive. But both were excellent gun captains, thus far, though they clearly detested Lieutenant Zella.

    "I believe we should manage a bit of witty reparte with anyone who comes to speak harshly," Mr. Vrook says.

    Mr. Khan nodded.

    "Excellent!"

    Now, your reports said there was but one raider...but maybe the End of Days had picked up a friend?

    Maybe not. Three hours later, with Jon having ambled upon the bridge, you got confirmation. At this range, with both engines burning bright and the telescopes locked upon them, it took only three hours to identify the ships. Not through any clever chicanery, but rather, because both had set off their laud-hailers and announced themselves to the system as the Merry Jig and the Endless Duty - which your ship's book had no record of. They were both set in from Charax, an industrial world about ten, twenty light-years rimward.

    "They may be tight-beaming messages to Simova Prime," Rainwild says, cheerfully. "But if they are, sir, we cannot sniff it up."

    That, of course, being the entire point behind a tight-beam message.

    You nod.

    Hmm...two merchantmen...

    They seemed quite confident that Simova had a colony to trade with and revictual at, despite the lack of vox traffic. They had not spotted you...

    And they were a prime target. Not for you, but for the End of Days, if she was in this system...

    Hmm...

    MOORED AND READY FOR REPAIR, VYNN WILL...

    [] Explore the derelict station and attempt to reactivate the auger arrays to have a better idea of what is going on in system
    [] Vox the two merchantmen - gossip and information to be shared, and they should know there is an Enemy in this sub-sector.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • [X] Explore the derelict station and attempt to reactivate the auger arrays to have a better idea of what is going on in system

    I say getting eyes on the entire solar system is more important then gossiping with a bunch of merchantmen.
     
    [x] Explore the derelict station and attempt to reactivate the auger arrays to have a better idea of what is going on in system

    Yeah and if the raider is here we can try to counter ambush it thanks to the info we will get from the stations sensors hopefully.
     
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    [x] Explore the derelict station and attempt to reactivate the auger arrays to have a better idea of what is going on in system

    Haunted. Station.
     
    [X] Explore the derelict station and attempt to reactivate the auger arrays to have a better idea of what is going on in system

    Be vewy vewy quiet, we're hunting wabbits Chaos
     
    [x] Explore the derelict station and attempt to reactivate the auger arrays to have a better idea of what is going on in system

    The merchant ships make great "mine canaries" for deep space. Too bad we don't really have anything equivalent aboard-ship for the station.
     
    [X] Explore the derelict station and attempt to reactivate the auger arrays to have a better idea of what is going on in system

    Is warning the merchantmen that there's an Enemy raider running around actually going to *help* them at all? It's not like they'll be able to outrun an actual warship, or hide from one.
     
    [X] Explore the derelict station and attempt to reactivate the auger arrays to have a better idea of what is going on in system

    To be blunt, the best service those two merchant vessels could offer would be bait at this point, however we are not yet ready for springing the trap. Calling out to the bait only serves to either risk them turning as they may not be merchants, or announcing ourselves to the End Of Days.

    If we can get repaired and the station running, we could possibly set ourselves to sink our teeth into our prey the moment it entangled itself in the trap.

    Assuming said prey is here anyways. If not then the station will be valuable and we can catch up with the rest of the system for any information the post cannot provide.
     
    NotInventedHere said:
    Is warning the merchantmen that there's an Enemy raider running around actually going to *help* them at all? It's not like they'll be able to outrun an actual warship, or hide from one.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    They can dump their cargo - which dramatically reduces their mass and increases their acceleration profiles, which can allow them to clear an initial ambush area, reach the edge of the system, and warp away!

    It'd make their runs a bust, but they wouldn't be enslaved in a Slaaneshi torture pit, so...you now, mixed bag.
     
    [X] Explore the derelict station and attempt to reactivate the auger arrays to have a better idea of what is going on in system

    Always explore the dangerous abandoned stations! Always!
     
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