The long haul
13 Sep 2020Korzhakov
A few days off, wandering the station, doing some sightseeing and some shopping. Jean's birthday is next month so I am starting to find unique gifts for her. Now back at it for the second day in a row. The Thargoid scouts continue to fall in large numbers. But it seems like the goids have a never ending stream of them.
It's three maybe 4 hours of combat and then down for rehab and refit for the rest of the day, this way I don't get burned out nor wear out my crew.
I am in super cruise, getting ready to drop in on another larger group of scouts when I take a sip of my coffee, I am surprised, it is quite cold, has it been that long that I've been at it?
I drop in on the scouts who are firing on a Type 9 and her escort ship, a lowly cobra. I target the one getting the shots off on the Type 9 and open fire. The scout immediately turns it's attention to me.
I dance with this first one, and he soaks up a ton of AX cannon rounds and more rail gun shots and shard cannon rounds than I have seen a scout take. While whittling this one down very slowly, his 7 compatriots are working my shields down quickly.
I finally take him down, but now as I turn to take on the second one, my shields go down "ok no issue I think to myself, plenty of hull left" and I start working on the rest of the flight. One by one they go down, then I hear the wonderful sound of my canopy starting to crack.
I'm down to just two left, then Astra warns me that my hull integrity is critical. I finally glance down at the status and sure enough I just went under 25% of my hull left.
I target the last scout and I just hammer him with rail gun round after rail gun round. The thought of loosing my ship and riding the escape pod back to the station focuses my attention and this one goes down really quick.
Burn off the caustic damage and jump to the station.
I put her in the hangar and call Randy and tell him what happened. I let it get away from me. I went into that fight with just over 50% hull now that I look at my flight log, and I just became complacent, and complacency will kill you in combat. Lesson learned, "Astra, when we drop out of cruise to engage in a fight, always read my hull status to me please" I tell the AI, she confirms and I have now mitigated that risk somewhat.
My personal tolerance for hull damage will now be to not go into a fight with less than 55%
Randy walks into the hangar as I am finishing up my post flight walk around, she's taken a good amount of damage and it's going to take the crew the rest of the day to get her back to 100%
I am in this fight for the long haul, and if I am to see that through, that better be the only moment of complacency that occurs or I'll be in trouble.
I walk back to the hotel slowly, this could have gone much worse, hundreds of scouts down and today I almost rode the pod home, if they hadn't destroyed it with me inside.
It's a sobering thought, but I take it as a lesson learned and I will not let that happen again.
I am gaining the confidence to try and tackle my first interceptor soon. My skill with the rail guns has greatly improved so the Guardian Gauss guns will be my favorite new weapon in the fight against the big ships.
I'll be back at it tomorrow, just have to keep pacing myself and not get lulled into a sense of my own invulnerability.