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Episode 1887: Assault on Battery

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When giving orders to fellow players, it's a good idea to tell them why they should do something. So they can come up with the appropriate "no, that's ridiculous" response before going ahead and doing it.

"Open that chest!"

open. sproing! slice!

"So we can see if it's trapped!"

Commentary by Keybounce (who has not seen the movie)

Umm...

Lets see. If they can't track your angular speed, it's because you are flying across their sight. That's like, at 90 degrees from them. Not directly towards them. If you turn to fly straight at them, you are giving them a free shot. The GM was being kind in having them pause, otherwise you'd be dead.

So, clearly, we are in the "If we don't succeed, your campaign falls apart" territory. How many times has Jim pulled that card now? Just twice? Or will someone on the forum point out that no, there is another, that I have forgotten? :-)

But in all seriousness, if one small fighter can completely disable a capital ship... something is really, really wrong.

Commentary by memnarch (who has not seen the movie)

Realistic odds of survival: low but rising steadily. Actual odds of survival: 100%. We've already had the main character death fake out with Lor San, and there's been a lot of parallels already drawn with Episode IV which didn't have any death scenes after Captain Antilles at the start of the movie. Narratively we can expect a death later of course for the Obi-Wan death equivalent, but that's going to be much later, probably after all the current characters meet up with each other at least once. We're only 71 comics into this episode, and even considering the very short lengths of The Ballad of Jar Jar and The Invisible Hands pulling the average length of the archive sections way down, that's not even past the half way point. (The average with is about 201 long and Obi-Wan died at ~70% of the way through of IV.)

Point-defence guns that need to recharge feel like bad ship design. Rechargable energy weaponry makes sense when the immediately available output's limited by the scale of the generator. For a capital ship, there should be at least one generator capable of satisfying all of the basic demands of the ship at the same time, with a preference for multiple reactors for redundancy. I think this is more likely the result of General Hux or Kylo Ren directing the gunners not to shoot the ship. Ship-to-ship weaponry in Star Wars, at least for ships the size of PIEs, tends to leave expanding clouds behind, which would do a very poor job of spying on the Resistance.

That said, Finn's got the right idea here. The escaping pair has done a lot more damage than the original plan had, which could lead to the decision that they're a sunk cost and not worth further investment. Current damage tally so far:

  1. 1 hangar control room (and personnel).
  2. 2 point-defence cannons.
  3. Unspecified amounts of hanger damage potentially to other fighters too.
  4. At least a full squad of troopers.

That's a huge difference to what Finn originally thought with not needing to escape for real. Now, might as well enjoy the ride while they can!

Transcript

GM: Point defence cannons bear towards you, but can’t match your angular speed.
[SFX]: Pow!
Poe: I fly straight at them!
GM: They...
GM: ... pause firing...
Poe: Shoot at them!
GM: ... to recharge.
[SFX]: Pow! Pow! Pow!
[SFX]: Kaboom! Kaboom!
Finn: Yeah!!! Did you see that? Did you see that?!!
Poe: What are you doing?
Finn: You said to destroy them!
Poe: I said “shoot at them”. To encourage them to shoot back!


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Published: Thursday, 03 September, 2020; 03:11:26 PDT.
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