Just thought I'd share a little adventure that happened today! edit, it's been moved from general...to Roleplay but this actually happened today ingame on an EU server The quest for vengence "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” ----------------------------------------------------------------------- We popped on to the org discord and immediately heard that two of our mates had been destroyed in a carrack while they were doing some practice near SMO18 on Microtech by two players. A few of us fancied a fight and decided to investigate and discovered a pirate gang had taken residence there! (lead by a streamer who shall be nameless!). So we naturally assumed that the carrack team had been destroyed by this gang, since they were so close to the crime scene! We still fancied a bit of a fight and buzzed them a few times, and got chased off by by their guys a few times. (looked like 2x Cutty Blues, 1x Hornet Tracker and !x Hornet Ghost with a 600i) looked like all their fighters were distortion based, which is very effective atm particularly in atmo. After buzzing them a bit and having to run away from their cutty missiles in particular (one time they even chased me around 100km as I was constantly fleeing the missiles in my hornet). At least 2 of their number had crimestats and bounties. We saw a C2 that looked like it fell victim to the gang, although we couldn't get safely close enough to find out. We quickly realised that our guys' skillset was not in the air, as we routinely play together on the ground... Time to change the plan. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The Counter Attack We reorganised our squad of 6 to RV at SMO13, mounted up with a centurion, ballista and cyclone MT in a M2 and decided to get a beachhead as close to SMO18 as possible We were aiming for at least 17KM from target by shutting off the M2's shields etc Our first run went badly, the pirates had a Hornet patroling far out and we were easily detected so aborted and went back to space, then jumped to the nearby Calhoun aid shelter in order to approach from the other side and potentially land further away. We went low altitude quite far out in case we needed to ditch.... at around 30km, we were radar locked and given that we knew the pirate gang had a long range patrol decided to immediately offload before they figured out what we were doing. Our pilot droped noise to hide us in the LZ in the dark for as long as possible.... The Doors opened to reveal the dark Microtech forest... ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The Plan Never Survived Contact With The Enemy We got the vehicles off the M2 just in time, as the pirates arrived in force soon after! But disaster struck! The ballista was in a bad position, trees blocked the missiles and thus we quickly dismounted the ballista and switched to railguns. I was in the centurion, and something went wrong, everything looked good but the main turret would not fire! So I quickly dismounted and got my railgun out also! We had 5 railguns on the ground now, the cyclone team had also dismounted further out and we were engaging the hornets and cuttys in the dark. One Cutty got overconfident and decided to land, it was destroyed but at least one person dismounted and was killed my one of our team on foot. Both the ballista and centurion were lost ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alive and Stranded is Better Than Dead? We had no further kills in that engagement, but the pirates either weren't enjoying dodging railguns in the dark, or felt they had neutralised us. We were now 30km from our intended target, SMO18 where the pirates had based themselves. We could have just logged and ended the story there, but we wanted to adapt and overcome and weren't sure we'd get inside enemy airspace again. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adapt and Overcome We put 3 of us into the Cyclone to be our pathfinder team, and hoped someone from the org might join with a stealthy ship to move the remaining troops, but in the meantime....we started walking.....30km. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinforcements! We got some help off our org to bring air assets, and planned to engage from the ground to cause chaos as they came in. It was a good plan, and now our repsonsibility was to get in position in time for the air assets to arrive. Our cyclone dropped off two of our chaps in spitting distance of SMO18 and then ran back to pick up the rest of us. Unfortunately we were too slow, and our air assets engaged before our ground element could RV, additionally one of our forward personnel fell off a cliff, and was in a very difficult to recover position. So our air assets were unfortunately unable to win the air alone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- More to this than Meets the Eye.... This is where it gets complicated.... It turns out that this wasn't a situation of us vs the pirates anymore, another group had become involved (unknown to us at the time). This group was lead by ANOTHER streamer! When our assets came back, they discovered a sudden change in air assets with fresh names, and from their perspective, it looked like they were helping the pirates by attacking us, and quickly realised that they weren't going to be able to contribute to this fight due to overwhelming numbers. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Committed To the Madness So now, we had a situation where we were a 6 person ground team vs a multitude of air assets at SMO18. We had not yet inflcited any real losses, but we hadn't taken any ground casualties either yet. We were armed and motivated. We still wanted to avenge the original Carrack murder earlier that night, as well as take on some bona fide pirates. We could have logged, and certainly couldn't muster an air force large enough to take on what we had seen at SMO18. But we were committed now. It was our squad, Vs the Verse. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Death or Glory Finally we wereback together on teh hill next to SMO18. One of our number had managed to comandeer a ballista that the pirates had parked outside of armistice. I Managed to revive our fallen squad mate at the cliff, but unfortunately she then phased through teh cliff into oblivion... I then alternately engaged the huge number air assets while trying to revive another fallen team mate on the cliff, that I had to grab using a tractor beam. Between us it was hard to track but we got at least between 4-7 kills from the ground, and forced a corsair to go repair in armistice while they were actively engaging us. -------------------------------------------------------------------- The repaired Corsair then came and tanked the railgunshots to kill us. Fair play, once they located our firing position (which was suboptimal due to the requirement of rescuing fallen comrades) It was an exceptionally exciting experience, and that our guys on foot were committed enough to adapt and overcome gave us great pride and we had a great time. Even with our long long walk through the Microtech forest. As you can see in the picture below...we had to cross an entire biome to get there! Hope you enjoyed this story that happened earlier this evening! o7 Please see my reply to this post for some the AFTERMATH! and what We think actually happened after a quick chat with the streamers themselves. Linked here https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/quite-the-adventure-today/6113704