Semi had instructions to try and fence the goods in the Fancy's hold on Tyokh, both to raise some ready funds and also to help reinforce the legend they are establishing - that they are a bunch of Aslan-led raiders bent on raising hell across the independent worlds of the Outrim Void. This meant that the Fancy's voyage would take at least four weeks and quite possibly five or six, if they needed time to move the goods on Tyokh.
In the meantime, the Who's On Comms? and Longclaw (with the addition of Darkashii Kuriidan, the 4th Officer from Kishermii's Fancy who took over Semi's berth2) would continue to Tech World for some further opportunistic piracy, then return to Drinax via Paal and Pourne to rendezvous with the Fancy. Once the flotilla was reunited they could decide on their next move.
For the situation at Tech World I exercised my ref's fiat to say that the main world was currently jump-shadowed for traffic from trailing-coreward (ie the J-1 main of Inurin-Exe-Argona) - meaning that ships coming from those systems would be precipitating out of jump at the 100D limit of the primary and then boosting in-system for a standard day or so to get to the mainworld3. As it happened the players were lucky and a likely victim, in the form of a Type A free trader, jumped into the system after the Who's On Comms? had arrived but before Longclaw - placing them nicely in a pincer between the two ships.
Because they didn't know how long it would take for Longclaw to show up, the bridge crew of Who's On Comms? had already been plotting a stealthy intercept at around the prize's mid-point turnaround, but when Longclaw's stern chase was detected by the prize (prompting them to overload their engines and bump up their thrust) and they started broadcasting a mayday; Torquil decided to close the jaws of the trap. Longclaw opened the proceedings with some long range missile shots as Who's On Comms? was closing to engagement range, then they pushed in to close range to finish things with the pulse laser while Who's on Comms? stood off and bombarded the prize with particle beam shots.
The prize had plenty of moxie (I rolled maximum morale for them) so the space combat only ended when the particle beam managed to trigger a cascading hull critical that blew through about 60% of the ship's remaining hull points. I ruled that they ended up with a massive, structurally significant breach across the dorsal surface of the prize that had vented the passenger deck (and a couple of passengers) into space and prompted the bridge to cut thrust in order to try and avoid losing the rest of the passengers. This gave the Who's On Comms? an opportunity to match vectors, dock to the main-deck airlock and forcibly enter the prize. The captain was still hostile however and resistance didn't end until Torquil and Veil had cranked open the iris valve to the bridge and their presence induced one of the bridge crew to stun and disarm the captain in order to avoid a massacre.
Val assessed the cargo (30 dt foodstuffs, 15 dt luxury consumables, 10 dt pharmaceuticals, 5 dt precious metals), while Toquil, Veil and Darkashii brought the passengers and the ship's engineer to the crew area of the main-deck (which still had hull integrity to remain in atmo) and administered first aid. As they only had hold-space for about half of the cargo they ignored the food and took the rest. The prize was a dead loss; she had no fuel for a jump and in any case the hull breach meant that jumping it unrepaired would be a very chancy proposition, so they left the crippled prize drifting in space and awaiting rescue from the ships that were boosting at 6G from the GeDeCo anchorage at the highport.
As the PC's ships were in free space and had fuel on the Who's On Comms? for another J-1, the players decided to jump back to Ergo before refuelling for the voyage home.
[1] One pirate on a ship with seven newly inducted 'volunteers' for a month long voyage? Absolutely nothing can go wrong with this plan...
[2] Semi's player wrote up Darkashii's sheet based on the skeletal notes I had for the character and played him for the remainder of this session.
[3] I hadn't worked up system stats for Tech World ahead of time, so I figured that 45 million km seemed like a reasonable distance.
Backstage
With the introduction of Darkashii, we have the first alternate character of the campaign. If this game continues to cover the full campaign arc for Pirates of Drinax, then I expect he will be the first of many. A campaign of this scope and extent can't really work without a substantial cast of alternates and backup characters.
Finding the rules for radiation weapons in the heat of the moment at the table was a right pain - they are scattered in a bunch of places, none of which are in the Space Combat chapter. After about five minutes of fruitless searching through my pdfs I gave up and winged it - consequently I seriously underplayed the lethality of the particle beam weapon that Who's On Comms? is packing.
Given that they hit the prize with 3 shots from the particle barbette (each shot giving (2D-5) * 100 rads to everyone on board) pretty much everyone on that ship was carrying several hundred rads of radiation exposure by the end of the fight and was looking at several weeks in hospital and permanent debilitation (in the form of END penalties) if they were lucky or an unpleasant death if they were unlucky. I was treating particle shots as equivalent to structure hits (imposing -1 to morale) during the space combat, but on reflection I think they are scary enough for vessels without radiation shielding that they are equivalent to a bridge/engineering hit (-1D6 to morale) and so that's how I will be playing it in future sessions.
Also, particle beams fire streams of neutrons, so secondary activation is a thing. I need to figure out how radioactive the looted cargo canisters might be. From what googling around I've done already, those precious metals are likely to be hot in more than one sense.
Finally, I had assumed that the Harrier-class ships had radiation shielded hulls until it was pointed out to me on the Mongoose Traveller forum that they don't. Strictly speaking, per RAW, everyone within 40m of that Particle Barbette could be getting up to 700 rads every time they fire the gun. That is just stupid, so I'm not doing that - my ruling is that the Harrier-class ships are designed in such a way that there's plenty of low atomic-weight mass between the gun and the crew-spaces; but the PCs won't have any special benefit if an adversary hits them with a radiation weapon.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.