Most peculiar, what happened? (legacy vs. live)
05 Dec 2022Tiffany Yür
We heard in the news huge thargoid ships or stargoids, with their fleets of lesser thargoid vessels, were on their way towards the Bubble. We, as well as countless others, prepared our ships for their arrival. Scrambling whatever we could find to update our most devastating ships for thargoid combat. Then one morning, not too long ago, news of the impending war ceased. Taranis, the stargoid which was to meet with the peaceship, had unleashed nine fleets to the Bubble. Then it and all the others, just vanished as if great hands of all sky Gods would have wiped them out.....
We prepared for the arrival of some thargoid monstrosity, in fact, eight of them. They have names now. The Taranis one, who met with the Peaceship and laid it to ruin, settled on a system not far from the border of the old Empire. Soon after, two others did the same. Many of the systems they and theirs were unleashed have been recently colonized by us.
This meant that several million of lives were suddenly in the jaws of death. We couldn't send our best ships to fight with the imperial, for we had to keep them in place in case Alliance got similarly attacked. But we could not watch the carnage silently, we sent our imperial courier to Heverduduna along with two ships capable of evacuation flights, so we thought. There was no shortage of volunteers to fly back and fort to attacked systems and their stations.
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Now we are at loss what we will do with our warships, after all we built them for military, with the tax money they had taken for the war effort. There's no war here, in which they could be used for their proper purpose. Maybe we could loan them to the Alliance Police force? Still, they've been set up to fight thargoids, without laser weapons they will perform poorly against the pirate gangs. They, as you know, may have even Anacondas in their use. There's no way any of our pilots can take out a master pirate with a well stacked 'conda. Glad there's no war here, no doubt the government would have had to rebuy the ships several times over. In our research of the fights against thargoids, a fight against a supercharged Anaconda with a smaller battleship only with kinetic ammo is near the level of thargoids. No one wonder why they do it on small or even larger teams, squadrons.
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The ships we use to get people out are A-rated, Type-6 with a bit of reinforcement and an Asp Scout that has some weaponry against Thargoids. No engineered or Guardian parts in them. The Asp was downed by caustic damage.
By the time we lost our first volunteer pilot for the rescue ships to a Thargoid assault we had seen 12 thargoids. Some of Imeut and Modigi people are safe for a while at least. Now we're taking a break off this activity and gather our resolve to continue evacuation. The pilot for Imperial Courier has said he would like to go in the Battle, but we might need him to get back home safely.
A word of what little we saw of the Thargoids. They likely have patrols on the straight routes to the contested systems. The few times we got in the Battlezones without a hyperdiction, we used a slow approach, getting as near as possible through the space still controlled by humans. If we continue, we'll be using this method, keep them guessing where we come from.
We experienced several thargoid hyperdictions. These can be escaped by hitting the shut down field neutralizer and boosting as fast as possible towards the target star system. And jumping out. Quite often they still hit us with a missile, requiring repair in the warzone station, if there is one. The human fighters in there may assist with limpets.
The interdictions that thargoids have learned to do, are much more dangerous than the hyperdictions. Once you get into star system, do not slow down even to scan the place with FSS. You likely get interdicted and hit with caustic weapons after which you may have only a minute to get repairs or docked. This is how we lost our first volunteer. He got first hyperdicted and then interdicted and his hull was in ruins 700 ls from the station, said the rescue crew. Speed is of essence.
On contrast getting out of warzone stations, did not present us any problems, it looks like thargoids are interested only of the ships coming in. In one case our pilot had a lucky escape from an interdiction, then he quite literally boiled the caustic substance away by flying near the Star he jumped to, raising the hull up to 125-130% of normal limit, and was able to limp back to Heverduduna, where we are located when not in mission.
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So, as the probablity of Thargoid incursions near our local system has dramatically diminished, we might consider sending the warships out nearer to areas that have them. Me? I'm just happy we do not (yet) have to fight a million year old species.