Long overdue first log
01 Mar 2024CMDR CajunFox
Taranis is dead.Good place as any to start.
A lot has led to this point, I've been a commander for 7 years now and while I've had lots of interesting adventures out here, nothing had prepared me for this past year.
For the first 6 years of my career, the Thargoids were always this distant boogeyman. They were a threat only if you threatened them. I was content leaving them alone and the few instances that I encountered them they left me in peace.
Then the war started. Maelstroms opening up, threatening entire systems at once. Despite the threat, it was all distant, alien to me. I was more concerned with politics, faction wars and building reputations. Before I knew it, hundreds of systems were falling weekly, we were poised to lose.. well everything, but no one seemed concerned, just a handful of pilots pushing against the threat.
Wanting to do something about this I found s group of skilled pilots known as "The Marauders" consisting of the Marauders Vanguard and Marauders Shadow Council squadrons. They recruited me and immediately started training me in Anti Xenos (AX) combat, skilled pilots passing along techniques, ship loud-outs, engineering recommendations, and live training.
I picked it up quick and was hitting interceptors as part of fire wings trying to push them back. It was tough pushing back, all the resources and time I could was being poured into helping the war effort. I quickly learned that fighting Xenos isn't the only part of being an AX pilot, we had to be researchers, haulers, explorers and blockade running rescue ships.
We would get ahead, then the Thargoids would push us back, groups like Sirius and Azimuth releasing modules based on Guardian technologies that would give us just a slightly better edge, anything to boost to our efforts in combat but it was never enough. When we finally pushed into the Maelstroms we found what we all feared would be there, a massive Mothership. No matter how hard we hit those massive death flowers, we couldn't scratch them.
AX pilot numbers were getting thinner, amazing pilots getting burnt out, realizing they were fighting a war we weren't going to win. A few of us kept going, kept pushing on, this wasn't going to be the end for us. Ram Tah and a collection of brilliant scientists found a weakness and needed massive amounts of rare materials and so that's what we did, when the needed equipment, we brought it, sectors defended, we were there.
This leads us to around 5 days ago when they released the Guardian Nanite Torpedo Pylon. Made from guardian relics twisted with Thargoid energy, immune to Glaive fields and able to cause real damage to the Titan.
We figured out the vent core exposes itself once you've hit one or more of the thermal vents, a total of 9 for maxiumum result. The core itself displaying a ringed structure with petals similar to interceptor "hearts". We deemed the rings Hearts and realised we would need to fight through 8 sets of hearts, so we did. For the next 4 days we hammered that titan, team after team, doing damage then resting while another team fills in. I've never co-operated with some many pilots in my life.
Modules started to become free to buy, the pilots federation was throwing credits and equipment to anyone who was willing to help and they did. Hope spread across the galaxy and it felt like everyone was pulling together to fight this incursion. Then, after a combined effort by every AX pilot and more, she went down.
The relief is palpable, we did it, we stopped the Thargoids from spreading. Cheers from all over the universe as the titan went into some kind of distress mode, clearly inoperable and boiling away.
They estimate a total core breach by tomorrow, we intend on being there when it blows, if this is the end of the titan, I want to see it.