A close shave...
30 Dec 2022Impala_Mark
Here’s one from my archives:I’d like to share a little story.
Recently, I managed to stack half a dozen delivery missions, data delivery missions, and one passenger mission, off of the mission boards to go to Hutton Orbital. The total payday was looking like 30 million credits. That’s just way too good to pass up for an old space trucker like me.
I was flying my Krait MkII with no fighter bay, because I needed the cargo space.
As I took off from HG Wells hub, in nearby Luyten 205-128, I received radio messages advising me that I had 2 enemies inbound.
So I jumped to Alpha Centauri, and no sooner had I settled in for the long supercruise than I saw that I had two radar blips trailing me and I got the messages informing me that I am the one they’ve been looking for....
They stayed back there and didn’t make a move for the whole trip out to Alpha Proxima, and Hutton Orbital.
For an hour and twenty minutes, they just sat back there, and I just supercruised along, knowing that they were going to interdict me just before I dropped out at Hutton Orbital.
So there’s this little trick that I sometimes use when I’m being trailed in supercruise.
I’ll jink the ship about slightly before they try to interdict, while still in supercruise, and they sometimes have trouble initiating an interdiction.
So I was doing this as I approached the station, and I got a little too close to planet Eden’s exclusion zone...
...So my ship initiated an emergency drop from super cruise, and my FSD started cooling down as I started boosting away in a straight line.
Suddenly, BANG BANG!!!
As I’m boosting, a T10 Defender FILLED MY WINDSCREEN as he dropped about 100 meters directly in front of me and before I could react I rammed him in the tail pipes at about 500m/s! Holy shit! I nearly had a heart attack!
Of course, it’s one of the bounty hunters on my tail, and my FSD is still cooling down so I swing the nose of my ship around to starboard and start boosting away from him, when the other pirate drops about a kilometer in front of me. And he’s flying an Anaconda!
Boy was I feeling outgunned!
And they’re both showing up as “Elite” in my scanners.
They both opened up a withering hail of fire on me As I desperately boosted and jinked away, my heart pounding in my throat. There was no way I was going to try and fight. Hell, I didn’t even open my weapons ports. I redirected three pips each to shields and engines and boosted and jinked like crazy! My shields went down and my hull started taking damage big-time!
Finally, with all of the sense of urgency of a speeding glacier, my FSD came back online.
I immediately, pressed “engage” on the FSD and continued to boost and jink while it warmed up and counted down...
4....
3...
2..
1.
Engage.
I was safe. For now.
My shields were still down and my hull integrity was at 40%.
The whole encounter probably lasted little more than a minute.
But I was alive!
I set course for the station and up popped two blips at 6 o’clock on my radar...
A few moments later, I dropped out about 9 km from the station and started boosting straight towards it.
Then, BOOM! BOOM!
The same Defender and Anaconda dropped out right behind me and pursued me all the way into the no fire zone.
I couldn’t immediately dock, because the medium pad was occupied, so I stopped about 1 km from the station and turned around, stationary, to see what they would do.
They flew in close formation right past me, crossed between my ship and the station, and then turned back toward me. At this point, I decided to do something belligerent. I opened my weapons ports and flew slowly, head-on, right toward the Defender.
I came to a stop just a few meters in front of him, canopy to canopy. They both stopped, too. And then I gave him a nudge. Right in the canopy with my extended front bumpers. He backed off, flew around me and then both ships jumped out of there.
Grinning from ear to ear, I landed and delivered my cargo of agronomic treatment and one slightly rattled passenger.
It felt fantastic to dig myself out of a hole that deep and live to fly another day.
Keep on truckin’, Commanders! 07