CMDR’s Log—Feb 3305–Playing fast and loose
24 Mar 2019Raumfahrer Spiff
Feb 3305, GR 316 System, Sucharitkul SettlmentBy the time the Spec ops decide to jump in, the battle had kind of spread out quite a bit--there were two main pockets of fighting. The large ships of my allies, a few Cutters and Clippers, were all grouped together and had drifted away from the CZ center—leaving a squad of smaller ships in the center on their own. We were neck and neck when the alert for spec ops went out. These guys are trouble, just one is more than a handful for a fully engineered defender.
When they dropped in, the enemy spec ops landed squarely on the smaller squad of friendlies, while the friendly spec ops was roped into helping out near the big ship brawl. This meant that our side was dropping like flies because the small ships were fish in a barrel to the full squad of spec ops on them. And the large ships were all tied up on longer-to-kill large ships 10-20km away. Very quickly the enemy faction pulled ahead in the kill count. I needed to somehow get all of my large ship guys splitting off these spec ops onto stiffer targets. I rushed over, full power to weapons, the rest to engines (and just a fraction in shields.)
I was trying to increase my heat signature as much as possible, which was a little tricky because I've tuned my Krait to cruise at ~26% on average and when she does get hot, she loses her heat pretty fast. But in a moment I'd be chain-firing my crazy hot plasmas and boosting like a banshee. I just started laying into all of the spec ops ships I could target, hitting a few shots each, to get their attention, while directing my fighter to do the same. Staying above the heat safety threshold, and with so much damage aggro, I was shining like the north star to the entire squad of spec ops. All power to shields and engines as I boosted away, throwing in some dips and dives to shrug off at least a portion of the incoming barrage, as they all fell in pursuit.
My ship was actually a bit too fast, and I risked losing some of them to the trailing small ships that were way too close to popping and handing the enemy a winning score, so I had to let them get a bit close and do my best to be unpredictable, to dodge at least the rain of fixed weapons showering me while dragging them all forward. I aim square for that cloud of large allied ships who were all but done with the few targets they'd been whittling down and they slam into each other. This left my spec ops team mopping up the remaining small ships from that other pocket, while the squad of large ships separated and spread the spec ops out into manageable skirmishes.
We came back from a pretty wide gap, winning by a photo finish in the end--with me at something like 20-30% hull and a few busted hardpoints. Heck of a battle.
—Spiff, out