Post by jadegreen on May 25, 2020 18:43:22 GMT
16-1-2021: I've decided to repurpose this thread to be a more general collection of non-anc RP stories.
Disclaimer: As someone who has been bullied a lot, I do not want to condone outright bullying raptor and all of the negative. As such this is not intended as memeing him, but more as an educational guide to those of us less versed in scifi RP and space combat, and should he happen across this thread perhaps he can better understand why he failed so terribly vs combat against the GD. Though if you want to meme him, I won't blame you, given his sometimes inexcusable ooc behavior.
I initially intended this to be a youtube video, in the style of the battle breakdowns made by some youtube channels, and might do more in the future on other battles either on or off Ancerious, but then realized I do not have a charismatic voice nor video editing skills.
Additionally this VS takes place with home canon rules, so the ships can do some things that they cannot in Ancerious (most relevant, they can project interdiction and normalization fields at longer ranges and they can propogate these effects instantly. This is because in home canon, blanket interdiction takes the form of a spacetime crystallization field, which causes the normally payable fabric of spacetime to become rigid.) If this sounds like bullshit keep in mind that Raptor's weapons have moon and planet busting feats. The Gauss Dominion's weapons are gigatons or exatons (Petatons at the absolute most). These can certainly scorch the crust of a planet and kill every living thing on the surface but his ships can straight up deathstar planets which takes several dozen orders of magnitude more energy than it takes to glass the crust. So in my opinion this battle is still heavily biased in favor of the Nezerians in terms of firepower. Hence my battle strategy hinged on not being hit.
So off server, I frequently preform one-off combat RPs with friends and other players to pass time and hone combat RP skills. In this instance, Raptor was curious if one or two of my Relegators would be able to take on his (I forget the name of it, I guess that ones on me and kind of destroys the credibility of this post, but I'm recalling this entire battle from memory and don't have the full chat logs so some of the details might be a little bit off.) But it was basically a battle barge for his galactic knights, though he would probably vehemently deny that fact.
Now there are a couple of flaws with his ship from the get go. One is probably what you could expect, a massive focus on the weapons compliment.
(DUN DUN DUNNNNNN!)
Now to his credit, he did write more about his ship than his weapons compliment, some blurbs about his history including that it had 3,000 Space Marines Galactic Knights onboard and was 18 kilometers long. And I would like to point out that this ship, intended to be a carrier, is more well armed than most of my ships including the dreadnought that I had included. But if his ship has this many weapons it must mean that most of the weapons are quite small. (My A-class mass drivers are 1km long.) Though admittedly it would be nice if I had a detailed statistical file on more than his weapons and sensor suite.
I would like to point out that for a ship dedicated to be a carrier for a mere 3,000 elite dudes. Modern day aircraft carriers (300 meters long) have 6,000 crew. No. This is a battleship that happens to have a secondary function carrying a small handful of elite units. Gauss Dominion Carriers (Say, the Tranquility Supercarrier at 12km) Is well armed but carries tens of thousands of tanks and fighters and something like 2,000,000 ground troops and ten times as many robotic infantry units. My recommendation to the designer of this ship, if it is intended as a dedicated carrier would be to remove some of the weapons compliment to make internal space to be used for more ground units as well as internal factories, repair bays, medical facilities and armories. If Raptor should want to preserve the elite nature of thespace marines galactic knights, he should keep their numbers the same, but add a few million standard infantry and landing craft for larger scale invasions. The square cube law allows huge 10km+ carriers to carry frankly ludicrous amounts of troops. I point this out as he, at the conclusion of this fight tried to defend the fact that he lost by the fact that his ship was a carrier going against two dedicated battleships.
So for the dominion side, he had initially asked if he could fight one or two Relegators. The Relegator class is 36km long, so I jokingly responded he could fight 1 and 1/2 Relegators, and face one Relegator-Class and one Omniscience class. (The Omniscience Class is 18km long). Hence what I believe to be his first major tactical mistake, attempting to take on a fleet much larger than himself.
Now I don't have my navy written up at the time of writing this, so I'll provide a brief, convenient summary of the ships that were involved on my end.
The Relegator started out as a meme ship. At 36km long it's massive and was originally a take on overpowered and overly-huge warships in scifi RP but slowly, its weirdly been accepted by a lot of people who instead just think that its a respected part of canon (albeit even in canon its considered powerful and respected but also large and unwieldy weapons platform mostly used for force projection or as an artillery ship), and as I have added more large ships approaching but not exceeding its size its just become a part of canon. In canon its a very old design, meant to exercise a conventional military doctrine of big guns, strong armor and powerful shields. It has loads of mass drivers, a huge spinal protolaser lance (Protolasers or Hardlight Vectors are basically unending rods of hardlight that spawn in at near light speeds.) Missiles and point defense. Its super compartmentalized and redundant with multiple bulkheads, redundant CIC rooms and can survive obscene amounts of punishment and keep on fighting.
The Omniscience is (while still a large ship, its 1/2 the length of the Relegator and 1/10th the mass.) This ship in canon is a very new design. Its the newest, most advanced starship in the GDAN. It has the same weapons as the Relegator (though far fewer of them, for the most part, and no spinal hardlight vector lance in place of huge banks of sensors, comms equipment and interdiction equipment.)
This is classed as a command ship; as in its specifically designed to function as a command asset. It can use interdiction and normalization fields to control the battle space and its extremely powerful sensor and communications arrays to coordinate fleet efforts and spot enemy stealth ships. It can also deploy FTL bomber frigates which work in tandem with its normalization and interdiction systems. Denying the enemy FTL movement while opening up the battlefield for friendly tactical FTL.
Its not without its teeth, and its arguably worse than the Relegator because it possess energy-draining weaponry, which can deplete the shields or syphon off power from the reactor of enemy ships, and then use that energy to fire its own weapons at a greatly increased rate, as such a mass driver that would take several seconds to recharge on the Relegator could be fired at machinegun speeds on this ship (and is configured to do so).
The Shogun bomber frigate deployed from the Omniscience class. (Roughly 450 meters). Its small and has thin armor and weak shielding, but has two FTL cores and very fast Sublight speed, and carries 22 10m fusion torpedoes. These weapons have their own shields so they are difficult to shoot down and have extremely short range, but very high yield. Its purpose is pretty self evident; its a 1-step-removed FTL weapon designed to jump on top of an enemy fleet (or as close as friendly normalization will allow) and then deploy all of its ordinance and jump out on the charge of its second FTL drive. It is designed specifically to work with the Omniscience class, as they can dock in the large hangars along the side of the ship and be refilled with bombs and have their FTL drives quick-recharge off the much larger ships' reactor.
So the battle begins. The two ships start in a dense nebula which disrupts sensors but this got ignored on both sides basically from the get-go so we might as well just say that the battle takes place in deep space, with the two opposing sides starting 16AU apart. The Dominion's opening move is to deploy an interdiction sphere around their main fleet and begin making random jinking maneuvers to avoid any long range enemy fire. Because of the extreme ranges this battle takes place at (an AU is 8 light minutes.) meaning the ships are 3 light hours apart. Even the heavily armored and slow Relegator can handily dodge anything through random movement at this range. Raptor's opening move is to open fire on the Relegator.
Note that in these graphics ship sizes and distances are not even slightly accurate. I would also like to note that the health and shield bars on his ships are an estimate as his shield and hull integrity fluctuated wildly pretty much every turn. Also we don't use these tactical maps while doing the VS, I made them after the fact to help visualize what went down. I personally don't have a problem visualizing this stuff in my head, but I know that some people do.
So seeing as the opponent is not preforming dodging maneuvers, the Gauss Dominion can target him. So the Relegator opens fire with its hardlight vector lance and begins damaging his ship while the Omniscience opens a narrow corridor in its own interdiction sphere so that the Shoguns can preform an attack run.
At this point he attempts to argue that his weapons should be hitting because some of them are tachyon lances. However the counter argument made by me and the third party observers is that FTL weapons do not work inside interdiction as such, his tachyon lances are reduced to moving light speed and not faster. He also argued that his weapons should have been hitting because an astronomical unit is 1 million kilometers, and also included Void Units in his discussion (which if I am not mistaken are a unit of measurement used in 40k, coming from an individual who ferociously denies that 40k is the dominant influence in his setting and world building.) As well as claiming that non-FTL weapons could cross 16 AU in a matter of minutes. I would like to gently recommend that people wishing to be involved in this RP be familiar with real world astronomical measurement or google these terms if they are not sure.
At this point, he began to complain that he was not used to fighting at extreme ranges and the strategies and terminology involved, despite having had ships with 10AU+ ranged weapons in his setting for at least two years, and attempted to deflect the situation onto his parents and teachers bothering him. At this juncture I could only recommend not complaining about the circumstances and instead taking the RP as a learning opportunity to experiment with combat at such ranges. RP is supposed to be fun, and if one is not enjoying it or think there is an imbalance they should make that known OOC, and that if outside influences are hampering ones ability to post, then they should take a break.
What he seemed to fail to realize was that this works both ways. It took 3 hours for my shot to hit him, so in effect he was saying that his ship sat still for 3 hours and waited for the beam to hit.
So at this point he then decided to teleport a boarding party ofspace marines galactic knights onboard a Relegator. I, and the entire OOC channel which as you can see from the chat logs comprised several observers thought this was dubious as there was presently interdiction in play, but apparently his teleportation system was magically baised and therefore I needed MaGiCaL iNtErDiCtIoN to block his mAgIcAl TeLePoRtErS. Which begs the question of if his teleporter can work past the interdiction, why couldn't his generic FTL drive.
Whatever.
So the teleports 3 Boarding parties onto three bridges of the Relegator. Now the Relegator is built with perfect 4 way rotational symmetry, meaning every component including the Bridge/CIC is mirrored on every axis. Meaning the ship has 4 CICs (It actually has multiple CICs on every axis, but four main ones. Plus an AI controlling it), leaving one standing even after hisSpace Marines with added zeroes to their speed, durability, strength and firepower Galactic Knights teleport into 3 of these bridges and slaughter the crews to the man. But the ship doesn't even hiccup because the AI and the crew in the fourth bridge keep things running smoothly, albeit a bit frustrated. I should also note that while his ship did have an advanced sensor suite he had nothing that would allow him to see inside of ships, and therefore got extremely lucky knowing where the bridges were. Not teleporting his boarding parties say inside say one of many giant tokomak fusion reactors and having them instantly melted by billion degree plasma or teleporting inside a wall or into the ship's septic tank or a barracks full of troops in full power armor and killer robots or something. And if he knew were the bridges were and that there were four main ones, wouldn't it be smart to teleport a 4th boarding party onboard to try and take over that?
Meanwhile the Ship's AI closed the bulkheads to the bridges while theSpace Marines Galactic Knights were busy killing everyone. The bridges are inside an armored bunker, basically multiple meters thick of strong, dense armor and a huge thicc door which was now closed, so they were now prisoners to the rooms they had teleported into.
Of course they had some type of backpack nuke or something that was able to core through several meters of super strong, super dense armor and allow them to get out and access the rest of the ship. To me that seems like a monumentally stupid idea as if the nuke failed to go through, the armored bridge would just contain the blast and presumably kill everyone inside. I feel like a laser cutter or just teleporting somewhere else on the ship would have served them better. I did say the ship was very heavily compartmentalized, so even getting through the bridge bulkhead he would have to go through hundreds of other bulkheads and deal with a veritable army of security forces converging on his location. Did he acknowledge any of this? No.
Teleportation is very scary tech if properly employed, hence why I opt not to use it in my setting. I feel like if he could freely teleport in/out of an interdiction field, why doesn't he just teleport a slice a few millimiters wide out of the middle of my ship. Or teleport all my crewmember's heads off their bodies?. Or teleport my entire crew onto his ship and take them prisoner? Or teleport nerve gas bombs or giant super nukes into the ship? Using it to teleport Space Marines Galactic Knights onboard to kill crew seems like a very inefficient way of getting things done.
Also I don't think he declared the teleportation array as part of his ship when starting. But I don't have the full chat longs and can't confirm that so I won't hold it against him.
Meanwhile he was having sooo much fun with his boarding party that he failed to read my post and respond to the Shogun class frigates that had just exited subspace right behind him.
So the Shoguns bomb his ship completely unhindered. He doesn't pay attention to this and doesn't write damage for his ship. And the Omniscience opens a normalization corridor such that the ships can return. Meanwhile the ship also opens up normalization around the Relegator such that it can fire its energy draining weapons, since his boarding party can't be stopped by my bulkheads or security forces, I instead used the energy draining property to freeze the sections of the ship hisSpace Marines Galactic Knights. The sections of the ship they were in were encased in spheres of frozen atmospheric gasses permeating several decks as everyone was flash-frozen from the inside out and all of their weapons and power armors would lose all power. The sections of the ship struck by the energy draining weapon would experience momentary power loss but as the ship was big and compartmentalized power could be restored and in time the frozen gasses would thaw out. Since his Space Marines Galactic Knights were such powerful entities that no amount of bulkheads or security could even slow them down, I thought this was a rather interesting and creative way of dealing with them.
So, he's not too happy about me having killed off a few dozen of hisSpace Marines Galactic Knights, despite the fact that out of 3,000 he probably still has about 2,950 left, and decides to back track and realizes that his teleporter actually wouldn't be able to get troops on board my ship because my ships have shields, without even bothering to investigate into how my shielding system works and how it might interfere with his teleportation technologies (which again were mAgIcAl TeLePoRtErS that I needed MaGiCaL iNtErDiCtIoN to block) and that is very important because my shields don't work like those in a lot of Scifi/Scifan. Instead of acting like a second, regenerative layer of armor, they act as a dampener, greatly reducing but not fully mitigating incoming damage. But my shields do not deplete when weapons fire hits them, unless the bleed through damage physically destroys the shield generators.
So the boarding action is retconned out of the RP. Normally something this major I would reccomend restarting the battle or at the very least retconning everything to the point just before the action had taken place. But at this point a radical change of tactics is required. His ship instantly accelerates to 0.75C, while somehow not turning the crew into marinara sauce, decides to attempt to close the distance on sublight. Despite being a good 6AU outside the range of the interdiction well. So why not jump to FTL and arrive at the edge and then travel on sublight from there? At this point he has STILL not made use of any jinking maneuvers to avoid the death laser drilling into his hull, and offered no explanation as to why.
So we timeskip forward one hour. Now, he is nearly at the edge of the wall. He has not made any maneuvers so in the past HOUR the Relegator's laser has been drilling into his hull. He writes damage, saying his main reactor and main CIC have been taken offline. Though he doesn't roleplay his ship's functionality as having been hampered in any significant way. Redundant CICs I can understand, but the main reactor being offline and the ship seemingly still functioning at 100% confounds me. During this time, the Shoguns also made a second attack run. Simply deploying their bombs in front of the charging ship and allowing the ship to plow into a cluster of building sized nuclear fusion bombs at 0.75C.
Now here is where his tactics utterly confound me. Shortly before reaching the edge of the interdiction range, he jumps to the flank of the dominion fleet and begins to recharge his shields, after briefly conversing with me and some of the other observers OOC fires his guns in a pattern to create a wall of fire and prevent ships from dodging as no matter where they travel. To his credit, this is a very smart and viable tactic that one can use in long range space combat, provided one has the ammunition to pull it off and doesn't mind the pitiful damage output as only a few shots in the scattered wall of fire will actually hit. However against a fleet which completely controls the use of tactical FTL it does not do much good. But I applaud him for trying something actually useful.
Though at this point his ship is theoretically limping through the fight and should be heavily damaged. And upon seeing the encroaching wall of fire, the Dominion disengages their interdiction field and launches Their frigates. (Remember interdiction can be toggled instantaneously as this is home canon.)
So the dominion ships jump from their original positions to just a few light-seconds away on differing flanks, and all the ships unload everything they have onto the limping battlebarge. The Omniscience barrage interdicts it and uses its energy draining weaponry to syphon power from the surviving reactors. The Shoguns do their third undisputed bombing run on the ship, and the Relegator unloaded thousands of torpedoes, all of its railguns and its spinal protolaser. At this point I was ready to concede, arguing that Raptor's ship could survive so much punishment that I would simply run out of ammo before I was feasibly able to damage him. (Though with my ability to control FTL movement I could theoretically kyte him indefinitely.)
To his credit, he did write the loss like a proper sportsman, role playing the Captian's last words as the ship was torn asunder by enemy fire. Though afterward he did complain that it was an unbalanced fight because his ship was a carrier going against two dedicated warships. Learning to lose is one of the hardest parts of combat RP, I will admit.
So let's review his tactical mistakes and what he could have done to have a better chance at winning.
1. Mismatch
Fighting two main ships, one as big as him, one twice his size and one around his size as well as a fleet of frigates is like fighting a small fleet in and of itself is a guaranteed loss. I'd almost argue the battle would have gone worse if it had been two Relegators due to the lack of interdiction and battlefield control it would have just been a 2v1 Slugfest. Two ships that can compliment each others strengths and weaknesses are a deadly foe especially when they are the most powerful and most advanced ships belonging to a particular faction. Plus lacking any sort of interdiction gives the opposing side complete control over the use of tactical FTL. I would not agree to fight in a battle as his battle barge against this fleet, looking at the spread.
2. Lack of Jinking Maneuvers
Literaly copying my moves would have saved him from about 75% of the damage he took.
3. Failure to properly use tactical FTL.
Could have used FTL to get to the edge of the 10AU interdiction sphere and then proceeded on sub light. Or even better, exploited the openings used to deploy and recall the Shogun Frigates to try and get in close. I specifically mentioned for both the first and second attack runs that a hole was opened in the interdiction to allow the frigates in and out, hoping that he would figure out he could use that same hole to close the gap.
4. Failure to respond to attacks. (And carefully read decorations and posts)
This kind of goes hand in hand with number 3. But he on numerous occasions failed to take note of the fact that he was in a situation where he was under fire and attempt to do something about it, or even properly write damage. Most notably ignoring the bomber frigates on the first run as he was more focused on inserting his boarding party, and failing to employ basic jinking maneuvers to avoid the Relegator's hardlight vector.
5. Failure to Understand long range space combat.
I don't really have to say much but in ooc and IC he demonstrated a clear lack of understanding of the distances and timescales involved in AU range combat, which probably contributed to his downfall.
Disclaimer: As someone who has been bullied a lot, I do not want to condone outright bullying raptor and all of the negative. As such this is not intended as memeing him, but more as an educational guide to those of us less versed in scifi RP and space combat, and should he happen across this thread perhaps he can better understand why he failed so terribly vs combat against the GD. Though if you want to meme him, I won't blame you, given his sometimes inexcusable ooc behavior.
I initially intended this to be a youtube video, in the style of the battle breakdowns made by some youtube channels, and might do more in the future on other battles either on or off Ancerious, but then realized I do not have a charismatic voice nor video editing skills.
Additionally this VS takes place with home canon rules, so the ships can do some things that they cannot in Ancerious (most relevant, they can project interdiction and normalization fields at longer ranges and they can propogate these effects instantly. This is because in home canon, blanket interdiction takes the form of a spacetime crystallization field, which causes the normally payable fabric of spacetime to become rigid.) If this sounds like bullshit keep in mind that Raptor's weapons have moon and planet busting feats. The Gauss Dominion's weapons are gigatons or exatons (Petatons at the absolute most). These can certainly scorch the crust of a planet and kill every living thing on the surface but his ships can straight up deathstar planets which takes several dozen orders of magnitude more energy than it takes to glass the crust. So in my opinion this battle is still heavily biased in favor of the Nezerians in terms of firepower. Hence my battle strategy hinged on not being hit.
So off server, I frequently preform one-off combat RPs with friends and other players to pass time and hone combat RP skills. In this instance, Raptor was curious if one or two of my Relegators would be able to take on his (I forget the name of it, I guess that ones on me and kind of destroys the credibility of this post, but I'm recalling this entire battle from memory and don't have the full chat logs so some of the details might be a little bit off.) But it was basically a battle barge for his galactic knights, though he would probably vehemently deny that fact.
Now there are a couple of flaws with his ship from the get go. One is probably what you could expect, a massive focus on the weapons compliment.
(DUN DUN DUNNNNNN!)
Now to his credit, he did write more about his ship than his weapons compliment, some blurbs about his history including that it had 3,000 Space Marines Galactic Knights onboard and was 18 kilometers long. And I would like to point out that this ship, intended to be a carrier, is more well armed than most of my ships including the dreadnought that I had included. But if his ship has this many weapons it must mean that most of the weapons are quite small. (My A-class mass drivers are 1km long.) Though admittedly it would be nice if I had a detailed statistical file on more than his weapons and sensor suite.
I would like to point out that for a ship dedicated to be a carrier for a mere 3,000 elite dudes. Modern day aircraft carriers (300 meters long) have 6,000 crew. No. This is a battleship that happens to have a secondary function carrying a small handful of elite units. Gauss Dominion Carriers (Say, the Tranquility Supercarrier at 12km) Is well armed but carries tens of thousands of tanks and fighters and something like 2,000,000 ground troops and ten times as many robotic infantry units. My recommendation to the designer of this ship, if it is intended as a dedicated carrier would be to remove some of the weapons compliment to make internal space to be used for more ground units as well as internal factories, repair bays, medical facilities and armories. If Raptor should want to preserve the elite nature of the
So for the dominion side, he had initially asked if he could fight one or two Relegators. The Relegator class is 36km long, so I jokingly responded he could fight 1 and 1/2 Relegators, and face one Relegator-Class and one Omniscience class. (The Omniscience Class is 18km long). Hence what I believe to be his first major tactical mistake, attempting to take on a fleet much larger than himself.
Now I don't have my navy written up at the time of writing this, so I'll provide a brief, convenient summary of the ships that were involved on my end.
The Relegator started out as a meme ship. At 36km long it's massive and was originally a take on overpowered and overly-huge warships in scifi RP but slowly, its weirdly been accepted by a lot of people who instead just think that its a respected part of canon (albeit even in canon its considered powerful and respected but also large and unwieldy weapons platform mostly used for force projection or as an artillery ship), and as I have added more large ships approaching but not exceeding its size its just become a part of canon. In canon its a very old design, meant to exercise a conventional military doctrine of big guns, strong armor and powerful shields. It has loads of mass drivers, a huge spinal protolaser lance (Protolasers or Hardlight Vectors are basically unending rods of hardlight that spawn in at near light speeds.) Missiles and point defense. Its super compartmentalized and redundant with multiple bulkheads, redundant CIC rooms and can survive obscene amounts of punishment and keep on fighting.
The Omniscience is (while still a large ship, its 1/2 the length of the Relegator and 1/10th the mass.) This ship in canon is a very new design. Its the newest, most advanced starship in the GDAN. It has the same weapons as the Relegator (though far fewer of them, for the most part, and no spinal hardlight vector lance in place of huge banks of sensors, comms equipment and interdiction equipment.)
This is classed as a command ship; as in its specifically designed to function as a command asset. It can use interdiction and normalization fields to control the battle space and its extremely powerful sensor and communications arrays to coordinate fleet efforts and spot enemy stealth ships. It can also deploy FTL bomber frigates which work in tandem with its normalization and interdiction systems. Denying the enemy FTL movement while opening up the battlefield for friendly tactical FTL.
Its not without its teeth, and its arguably worse than the Relegator because it possess energy-draining weaponry, which can deplete the shields or syphon off power from the reactor of enemy ships, and then use that energy to fire its own weapons at a greatly increased rate, as such a mass driver that would take several seconds to recharge on the Relegator could be fired at machinegun speeds on this ship (and is configured to do so).
The Shogun bomber frigate deployed from the Omniscience class. (Roughly 450 meters). Its small and has thin armor and weak shielding, but has two FTL cores and very fast Sublight speed, and carries 22 10m fusion torpedoes. These weapons have their own shields so they are difficult to shoot down and have extremely short range, but very high yield. Its purpose is pretty self evident; its a 1-step-removed FTL weapon designed to jump on top of an enemy fleet (or as close as friendly normalization will allow) and then deploy all of its ordinance and jump out on the charge of its second FTL drive. It is designed specifically to work with the Omniscience class, as they can dock in the large hangars along the side of the ship and be refilled with bombs and have their FTL drives quick-recharge off the much larger ships' reactor.
So the battle begins. The two ships start in a dense nebula which disrupts sensors but this got ignored on both sides basically from the get-go so we might as well just say that the battle takes place in deep space, with the two opposing sides starting 16AU apart. The Dominion's opening move is to deploy an interdiction sphere around their main fleet and begin making random jinking maneuvers to avoid any long range enemy fire. Because of the extreme ranges this battle takes place at (an AU is 8 light minutes.) meaning the ships are 3 light hours apart. Even the heavily armored and slow Relegator can handily dodge anything through random movement at this range. Raptor's opening move is to open fire on the Relegator.
Note that in these graphics ship sizes and distances are not even slightly accurate. I would also like to note that the health and shield bars on his ships are an estimate as his shield and hull integrity fluctuated wildly pretty much every turn. Also we don't use these tactical maps while doing the VS, I made them after the fact to help visualize what went down. I personally don't have a problem visualizing this stuff in my head, but I know that some people do.
So seeing as the opponent is not preforming dodging maneuvers, the Gauss Dominion can target him. So the Relegator opens fire with its hardlight vector lance and begins damaging his ship while the Omniscience opens a narrow corridor in its own interdiction sphere so that the Shoguns can preform an attack run.
At this point he attempts to argue that his weapons should be hitting because some of them are tachyon lances. However the counter argument made by me and the third party observers is that FTL weapons do not work inside interdiction as such, his tachyon lances are reduced to moving light speed and not faster. He also argued that his weapons should have been hitting because an astronomical unit is 1 million kilometers, and also included Void Units in his discussion (which if I am not mistaken are a unit of measurement used in 40k, coming from an individual who ferociously denies that 40k is the dominant influence in his setting and world building.) As well as claiming that non-FTL weapons could cross 16 AU in a matter of minutes. I would like to gently recommend that people wishing to be involved in this RP be familiar with real world astronomical measurement or google these terms if they are not sure.
At this point, he began to complain that he was not used to fighting at extreme ranges and the strategies and terminology involved, despite having had ships with 10AU+ ranged weapons in his setting for at least two years, and attempted to deflect the situation onto his parents and teachers bothering him. At this juncture I could only recommend not complaining about the circumstances and instead taking the RP as a learning opportunity to experiment with combat at such ranges. RP is supposed to be fun, and if one is not enjoying it or think there is an imbalance they should make that known OOC, and that if outside influences are hampering ones ability to post, then they should take a break.
What he seemed to fail to realize was that this works both ways. It took 3 hours for my shot to hit him, so in effect he was saying that his ship sat still for 3 hours and waited for the beam to hit.
So at this point he then decided to teleport a boarding party of
Whatever.
So the teleports 3 Boarding parties onto three bridges of the Relegator. Now the Relegator is built with perfect 4 way rotational symmetry, meaning every component including the Bridge/CIC is mirrored on every axis. Meaning the ship has 4 CICs (It actually has multiple CICs on every axis, but four main ones. Plus an AI controlling it), leaving one standing even after his
Meanwhile the Ship's AI closed the bulkheads to the bridges while the
Of course they had some type of backpack nuke or something that was able to core through several meters of super strong, super dense armor and allow them to get out and access the rest of the ship. To me that seems like a monumentally stupid idea as if the nuke failed to go through, the armored bridge would just contain the blast and presumably kill everyone inside. I feel like a laser cutter or just teleporting somewhere else on the ship would have served them better. I did say the ship was very heavily compartmentalized, so even getting through the bridge bulkhead he would have to go through hundreds of other bulkheads and deal with a veritable army of security forces converging on his location. Did he acknowledge any of this? No.
Teleportation is very scary tech if properly employed, hence why I opt not to use it in my setting. I feel like if he could freely teleport in/out of an interdiction field, why doesn't he just teleport a slice a few millimiters wide out of the middle of my ship. Or teleport all my crewmember's heads off their bodies?. Or teleport my entire crew onto his ship and take them prisoner? Or teleport nerve gas bombs or giant super nukes into the ship? Using it to teleport Space Marines Galactic Knights onboard to kill crew seems like a very inefficient way of getting things done.
Also I don't think he declared the teleportation array as part of his ship when starting. But I don't have the full chat longs and can't confirm that so I won't hold it against him.
Meanwhile he was having sooo much fun with his boarding party that he failed to read my post and respond to the Shogun class frigates that had just exited subspace right behind him.
So the Shoguns bomb his ship completely unhindered. He doesn't pay attention to this and doesn't write damage for his ship. And the Omniscience opens a normalization corridor such that the ships can return. Meanwhile the ship also opens up normalization around the Relegator such that it can fire its energy draining weapons, since his boarding party can't be stopped by my bulkheads or security forces, I instead used the energy draining property to freeze the sections of the ship his
So, he's not too happy about me having killed off a few dozen of his
So the boarding action is retconned out of the RP. Normally something this major I would reccomend restarting the battle or at the very least retconning everything to the point just before the action had taken place. But at this point a radical change of tactics is required. His ship instantly accelerates to 0.75C, while somehow not turning the crew into marinara sauce, decides to attempt to close the distance on sublight. Despite being a good 6AU outside the range of the interdiction well. So why not jump to FTL and arrive at the edge and then travel on sublight from there? At this point he has STILL not made use of any jinking maneuvers to avoid the death laser drilling into his hull, and offered no explanation as to why.
So we timeskip forward one hour. Now, he is nearly at the edge of the wall. He has not made any maneuvers so in the past HOUR the Relegator's laser has been drilling into his hull. He writes damage, saying his main reactor and main CIC have been taken offline. Though he doesn't roleplay his ship's functionality as having been hampered in any significant way. Redundant CICs I can understand, but the main reactor being offline and the ship seemingly still functioning at 100% confounds me. During this time, the Shoguns also made a second attack run. Simply deploying their bombs in front of the charging ship and allowing the ship to plow into a cluster of building sized nuclear fusion bombs at 0.75C.
Now here is where his tactics utterly confound me. Shortly before reaching the edge of the interdiction range, he jumps to the flank of the dominion fleet and begins to recharge his shields, after briefly conversing with me and some of the other observers OOC fires his guns in a pattern to create a wall of fire and prevent ships from dodging as no matter where they travel. To his credit, this is a very smart and viable tactic that one can use in long range space combat, provided one has the ammunition to pull it off and doesn't mind the pitiful damage output as only a few shots in the scattered wall of fire will actually hit. However against a fleet which completely controls the use of tactical FTL it does not do much good. But I applaud him for trying something actually useful.
Though at this point his ship is theoretically limping through the fight and should be heavily damaged. And upon seeing the encroaching wall of fire, the Dominion disengages their interdiction field and launches Their frigates. (Remember interdiction can be toggled instantaneously as this is home canon.)
So the dominion ships jump from their original positions to just a few light-seconds away on differing flanks, and all the ships unload everything they have onto the limping battlebarge. The Omniscience barrage interdicts it and uses its energy draining weaponry to syphon power from the surviving reactors. The Shoguns do their third undisputed bombing run on the ship, and the Relegator unloaded thousands of torpedoes, all of its railguns and its spinal protolaser. At this point I was ready to concede, arguing that Raptor's ship could survive so much punishment that I would simply run out of ammo before I was feasibly able to damage him. (Though with my ability to control FTL movement I could theoretically kyte him indefinitely.)
To his credit, he did write the loss like a proper sportsman, role playing the Captian's last words as the ship was torn asunder by enemy fire. Though afterward he did complain that it was an unbalanced fight because his ship was a carrier going against two dedicated warships. Learning to lose is one of the hardest parts of combat RP, I will admit.
So let's review his tactical mistakes and what he could have done to have a better chance at winning.
1. Mismatch
Fighting two main ships, one as big as him, one twice his size and one around his size as well as a fleet of frigates is like fighting a small fleet in and of itself is a guaranteed loss. I'd almost argue the battle would have gone worse if it had been two Relegators due to the lack of interdiction and battlefield control it would have just been a 2v1 Slugfest. Two ships that can compliment each others strengths and weaknesses are a deadly foe especially when they are the most powerful and most advanced ships belonging to a particular faction. Plus lacking any sort of interdiction gives the opposing side complete control over the use of tactical FTL. I would not agree to fight in a battle as his battle barge against this fleet, looking at the spread.
2. Lack of Jinking Maneuvers
Literaly copying my moves would have saved him from about 75% of the damage he took.
3. Failure to properly use tactical FTL.
Could have used FTL to get to the edge of the 10AU interdiction sphere and then proceeded on sub light. Or even better, exploited the openings used to deploy and recall the Shogun Frigates to try and get in close. I specifically mentioned for both the first and second attack runs that a hole was opened in the interdiction to allow the frigates in and out, hoping that he would figure out he could use that same hole to close the gap.
4. Failure to respond to attacks. (And carefully read decorations and posts)
This kind of goes hand in hand with number 3. But he on numerous occasions failed to take note of the fact that he was in a situation where he was under fire and attempt to do something about it, or even properly write damage. Most notably ignoring the bomber frigates on the first run as he was more focused on inserting his boarding party, and failing to employ basic jinking maneuvers to avoid the Relegator's hardlight vector.
5. Failure to Understand long range space combat.
I don't really have to say much but in ooc and IC he demonstrated a clear lack of understanding of the distances and timescales involved in AU range combat, which probably contributed to his downfall.