Fatrolling our way to the stars

The Prelude

The Grand Imperium established a base of operations on the moon they called Tartarus. Once the Erebus base was established, they claimed sole ownership over the entire moon. The Kirov Conferedacy challenged that claim, demanding equal access to the surface. The Imperium refused, which led the Confederacy to attempt to force their demands.

The Confederacy fielded the Vladivostok, a heavy carrier and the Baba Yaga, a salvage cruiser, as well as a squadron of fighters. The Baba Yaga was commanded by Nahkh, and Cocopop and Eier were piloting fighters.

The Imperium fielded Daedalus, a heavy destroyer, Theseus, a heavy fighter, and Icarus, a retrofitted derelict fighter. System Sloth and Erifel were manning Daedalus, Zeon was manning Icarus, and Rhyski was manning Theseus.


The Battlefield

The site of the battle was a 5km radius sphere just above the surface of the base.


The Battle

The battle itself was swiftly, and brutal. Daedalus was engaged by fighters and one of Baba Yaga's reclaimer drones, followed by Baba Yaga itself. After losing most of it's firepower and forward thrusters, it declared itself to be retreating. The Baba Yaga was less damaged, but was caught by the gravity well of the moon due to a navigation error, and crash-landed five kilometers from the Imperium base. The deployed Confederate fighters fought Daedalus and one of the Imperium fighters, eventually being shot down. Meanwhile, a lone Imperium fighter had managed to avoid the active fighters and inflicted heavy damage on the relatively undefended carrier, destroying the rest of the squadron before it could take off. Heavily damaged and unable to properly steer, the carrier was also caught in the gravity well, and the pilot attempted to steer the carrier at the Imperium base. The 45 000 ton carrier crashed directly onto the entrance of the tunnel, and jamming it shut.


The Aftermath

The Imperium won the battle, having successfully defended Erebus from Conferedate invasion.
The Daedalus, though heavily damaged, is still flying. Icarus was destroyed early in the battle, but Theseus survived.
The Baba Yaga is crashed on the surface roughly 5km from the base, while the Vladivostok seems permanently installed on the base. The Confederate fighter squadron was destroyed.


OOC

Thanks to everyone who attended. This was the first battle taking place on this server, and that highlighted a few things we need to clear up for future battles.

Firstly, before any future battles we should take a few moments to go over the rules of engagement, to clarfiy who the combatants are and what the general expectations are for the battle.

Second, 5km radius spheres are damn small for a battlefield. We could probably increase that to 10km with no problem.

There were a few instances of ungentlemanly conduct on both sides. Some of it can be attributed to a failure of communication, and more can be attributed escalation of violence.

The specific instances that I know of at this time are:

The Baba Yaga was fired upon after it has crash-landed and surrendered (and out of the combat area). Attributed to miscommunication, totally forgiven.

The Vladivostok was intended to be a non-combatant in this fight.
The reason why this was taken badly is that the carrier is for all intents and purposes our faction base. We don't have other infrastructure to speak of apart from what we beg/borrow/steal from Tor Engineering. Building that thing has taken a huge amount of resources and time (80h from Coco alone, probably another 30h combined from others). It was only there to act as a base to repair and rearm from. Attacking it while it was undefended was not well-received by our side.

Crashing of the Vladivostok on the Imperium base. This was an equally egriegous instance of ungentlemanly conduct, and we should not have done that. I can only apologize at this stage.

After that the battle sort of escalated into a bloody brawl in and around the hull of the Vladivostok. A lot of systems got sabotaged, some warheads were placed. Both of these things are frowned upon since the ship was clearly already disabled at this time. Personally I can understand it, we just crashed a huge ship on top of you and rained debris all over the place. Also, I don't know how well the ban on large-frame warheads was communicated to everyone involved, so we can chalk that off to miscommunication.



In general, in the future I would ask everyone to be mindful of the fact that each ship that we bring to a battle takes a lot of time and effort to build. It is not necessary to reduce the opposing ship to slag to win.

As for how do we fix the mess the current server state is in, I think we might need to roll back to a previous save and either crash-land it somewhere else or pretend we have big enough tugs to get it back into orbit. (Currently it looks like we'd need 32 large ion thrusters to get that massive thing airborne again, and I don't want to block your base long enough to fix it in place OR lose any players over this).