The settlement in question was the Far Point Solar Foundry - several square kilometers of steerable mirrors, focusing the sunlight of Drinax Prime during local noon so that salvage gathered from the ruins of a nearby ruined city can be smelted and purified into batches of common raw materials, uncommon raw materials, polymers and precious metals suitable to be used as feedstock for the matterfabs and nano-forges of the Floating Palace.
It looks something like this:
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| Ashalim Solar Project |
I gave the players the opportunity to 'do one thing' before they needed to be lifting off from the Floating Palace and flying to the surface. Torquil pulled strings with his old service and got his old suit of command battledress on a short-term loan for the mission while Semi committed some funds from their local float towards buying future positions on the commodities that Far Point was producing (partly to try and make money on the situation, but also to get an idea of who was taking the other side of these contracts and thus might have an interest in Far Point being shut down). Val's player wasn't attending the session and Veil's player was late to start so they missed out on this (sorry Tom, Brad).
Since Val wasn't being actively played, we agreed that she would be in the Who's On Comms? hovering above Far Point at the edge of space and providing orbital surveillance. The other characters all loaded up into Semi's survey scout and made a suborbital ballistic hop along with Chief Galx to a covert Vespexer facility on the surface, where they dropped off Chief Galx and picked up a half-dozen scary looking Vespexer fighters before taking another suborbital hop to the Far Point Foundry.
The PCs had time for an orientation tour with Melissa Hao, the chief engineer at the foundry, (which Veil took the fullest advantage of, scoping out locations throughout the facility for potential teleportation targets) before they made their dispositions - Torquil and three of the Vespexer fighters took an air-raft up to the crater rim above the main habitation and storage facilities (built into the southern wall of the crater to take full advantage of the shade) to set up an observation post; Veil remained in the main control room with Melissa Hao and one of her technicians, while Semi and the remaining Vespexers rigged up camouflage netting over the ship (which was parked on the concrete apron in front of the control room) and set up temporary, sandbagged fighting positions under the netting.
As Far Point was located on the southern edge of the Pillars Of Night, a debris field of arcology support struts and utility cores that is a notorious black spot for electrical storms and other sensor-defeating atmospheric phenomena, the first warning the PCs had that the raiders were coming was when a couple of G/Bikes crested the northern lip of the crater rim and performed a scouting pass around the crater (one clockwise, one anti-clockwise).
Despite their best efforts with local camouflage, Torquil was convinced that the first G/Bike had spotted his position, so when the second G/Bike looked like it was coming close to take another look he announced on the local comms net that he was going active and then splashed the G/Bike with a single well-aimed shot from his laser sniper rifle. Semi, who had gotten up on the raiders' comms channel in the minute or so that they had been in view, immediately hit the raider channel with jamming and started to sow confusion in their comms net by injecting nonsensical fragments of audio onto the channel.
Seeing his partner coming under fire and crashing to the ground, the other G/Bike started flying evasively and successfully made into cover behind the spike of the utility core; Veil and the technicians in the operations centre set to work on reorienting as many mirrors as possible to focus sunlight on the utility core and start heating it up, while the Vespexers under the ship started laying down harassment fire around the last position of the G/Bike to give the enemy something to think about. At about this time, Val reported in that she had visual confirmation of three more vehicles approaching from the north - not as fast moving as the G/Bikes, but definitely flying; probably air-rafts or grav-cars, but if they were out of luck it would be G/Carriers.
While waiting for the next move by the enemy, Semi sent around half of the Vespexers at his position on foot across the landing apron to try and get a better angle on the hiding G/Bike - they achieved this objective, by virtue of the fact that they started taking long range sniper fire and were quickly pinned down. Semi hurriedly handed off E/W duties to Veil, boarded his remaining Vespexers and then lifted off to interpose his ship between the sniper and his pinned-down allies. Resolving to deal with the sniper definitively he hastily dialled in targeting details to his sandcaster and fired a sand barrel round from his dorsal turret, programmed to burst behind and above the position of the G/Biker sniper. Sand crystals, chaff and burning fragments of incendiary IR decoys exploded across the northern half of the crater and the sniper fell silent.
By this time the three raider vehicles in the second wave had circled around to roughly 8 o'clock on the crater rim and they now pushed forward into the crater, revealing themselves to be large grav-cars, and charged towards where Semi's ship was hovering over the Vespexers and trying to recover casualties. In the meantime Torquil and his allies had mounted up into their air-raft and were coming in from the east - seeing an opportunity, Torquil took a shot at the closest grav-car and disabled its forward grav-impeller array forcing it to make a barely controlled landing, while Semi reacted to this new threat by pulling up from his hover and countercharging the onrushing grav-cars. As soon as he got in amongst them the field interference from the vastly more powerful grav plates of Semi's ship promptly cancelled the grav-cars lift and sent them crashing to earth.
The fight was over and the foundry, less several hundred sand-blasted mirrors, was safe.
Prisoner interrogations revealed a representative of another settled Vespexer tribe (the Mirror Lake Crew) amongst the survivors - his story was that his clan had been engaged by the raiders to provide heavy duty cargo lifters for the loot, which was interesting because it revealed that the raiders knew there was a good score to be had here and that there were Vespexer clans willing to work with sunchaser raiders against Galx's confederation. The prisoners also let slip that they had come from a temporary camp about 50 km north, on the far side of the Pillars Of Night (which Val quickly confirmed from her orbital vantage point and then Veil surveilled psychically to confirm numbers and on-site assets) and that they had planned to take the large cache of supplies they knew was at Far Point to an agreed rendezvous. There they planned to repay the 'lion men' who had sheltered them when their leader had been exiled from their tribe and equipped them with the grav vehicles they were using (much more modern than the typical kit that sunchaser clans would normally muster).
After a swift parley with the denizens of the sunchaser camp to arrange a prisoner swap (chastened raiders for Vespexer slaves) and confirm the information gathered during the interrogations; the players had to decide what to do about their new intel. In the end they decided to give a tip-off to a Star Guard officer in Lord Wrax's following, partly so they wouldn't have to investigate the site themselves and partly so that Lord Wrax could take the credit for discovering the Aslan infiltrators (who of course he should have spotted when they were flying in).
The Star Guard duly investigated the site, then failed to catch a Ihateisho scout ship when it launched from a hidden hangar and burned for the jump limit1 and failed to secure the base before it had been thoroughly slagged by demolition charges; so it was the PCs who were summoned to a private audience chamber in the palace, where they were tasked by King Oleb with investigating the alarming reports he had been receiving of Ihatei activity in the Kteiroa system. Putting these reports together with the presence of Aslan scouts on the surface, Oleb's fear is that Drinax could be the target for an invasion that they are not strong enough to resist; so the PCs need to find out what is happening amongst the Ihatei and make sure that Drinax isn't on the menu for a horde of land-hungry Aslan.
1) In fairness to the Star Guard, the Aslan ship had been fitted with a high-thrust reaction drive and pulled 15G for the first hour of the pursuit - but King Oleb wasn't feeling fair when he sat in on the post-mortem with Lord Wrax.
Backstage
This was the "let's get familiar with the combat rules" session, so it was set up to be a straightforward fight with fairly naive opposition. Having said that I wasn't expecting a character to turn up in battledress with a personal weapon which could shoot out a pigeon's eye at 500m so the fight went better for the PCs than expected.
There isn't much detail on the Vespexer's in Gar Hanrahan's campaign material and what there is suggests a pretty marginal existence, I have decided to make my Vespexers a bit more sophisticated technologically (albeit at a fairly low TL) and sociologically complex; there are obligate nomads (the Sunchasers) and there are sedentary Vespexers (who have worked out how to survive a six week long temperature cycle across nearly a 100 degrees celcius), there are various tribal confederations that have been building up links between different settlements and there is the sometimes fraught relationship with the Floating Palace. These are themes that I'd like to develop and link up with the Asim situation and eventually build into something significant for the campaign finale. For now though the simple sketch of Vespexer barbarians is the rather ignorant view held by most denizens of the Floating Palace rather than the reality.
As I was working up the situation and the stakes it made sense for the raiders to be sponsored in some fashion. I could have made it an internal faction on Drinax, looking to kneecap Galx's Vespexer confederation and keep them dependent but that would have shifted the focus of the campaign inwards towards Drinaxi politics and this is supposed to be about the PCs carving themselves (and perhaps Drinax) a place in the wider universe, so an external threat seemed to be a better option. Once I had decided on an external threat the fit with the first scene of Ihatei! (the second of the campaign scenarios) was obvious so that's the link I made.
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