Dramatic SFB: Age of PFs: Vudar vs Carnie

[Matt]

Colony #373 is in the books with a Carnivon win.


The Carnivons entered the map with a DN, a CW, and a pair of FFs, all at 
WS-I. The Vudar had a CWL, a CW, and a DWS, at WS-III but in orbit 
around the planet with a civilian Base Station (this was a major Vudar 
colony.)

At the edge of the battle, the Carnivon attackers stopped and began 
charging their weapons and setting the fuses on their death bolts. The 
Vudar popped out a sensor drogue on every unit and sped up to warp 2.25. 
The Vudar warmed up their ECM rigs and began setting the tone for the 
whole battle: whatever the Carnivons wanted, it was going to be seen 
through the fuzz of excessive subspace noise.

Nothing happened for the first couple of minutes of the battle. The 
Vudar began on the opposite side of the planet to the Carnivons and 
generally stayed near the planet. The Carnivons began accellerating 
slowly but moved oblique to the planet. The Vudar began to sally away 
from the planet but kept their speed, as it was the best the drogues 
could handle. The attackers turned in towards the defenders and sped up 
to about warp 2.33. They launched a full brace of fast death bolts at 
the Vudar CW from roughly 150K km.

The Carnivons began to bore in behind their large missiles while the 
Vudar completed a swooping turn that brought them oblique to the 
attackers. The Vudar scout tried 6 times to break the lock-ons to the 
death bolts and missed every time. Later, the base tried and suceeded 
against two of the death bolts.

At 80K km, the two forces let loose on eachother. The Vudar were firing 
through a neutral environment on the nose of the Carnivon CW with ion 
cannons and phaser-1s. She took 35 internals, just 6 away from being 
crippled. The DN and smoking CW fired moments later at the trailing 
scout (they were looking at a best-case situation of a +3 shift against 
the Vudar war cruisers.) The scout took 5 of 8 disruptor cannons from 
150K km on an aft shield, causing 8 internals: 2 engine hits, a phaser, 
an IPG, and a control space. The Vudar then turned back to the planet 
with the Carnivons giving chase.

Then the death bolts bore in on the CW. IPGs flared and phasers fired. 
The IPGs severely damaged the deathbolts and the sensor drogues both, 
and the phasers did poorly. of the six death bolts launched, two were 
distracted by the base's sensor channels, three were killed by phasers 
and ionic discharges, and the last struck the CW but from a distance due 
to the ECM involved. She took 9 damage to the fresh, rear shield.

The Vudar had learned their lesson: keep the scout away from the enemy. 
Very quickly, it became apparent that the Carnivons were going to do a 
close-range run on the planet from the side opposite to the base 
station, and that the Vudar were using the same planet as cover against 
anything but sniping fire. All of this while everyone was breathing hard 
to load phasers and torpedoes.

While the Vudar were trying to set up the next firing pass, the 
Carnivons got just outside the atmosphere. Here the frigates, who were 
hanging back from the earlier exchanges, cut loose on an agro station. 
They did 56 damage to a unit that couldn't take more than 40 damage. 
What was left was a smoking crater.

Then the Carnivons began to pick up speed and exit the area. The Vudar 
war cruisers quickly recognized this and did a high-energy-turn off of 
batteries in order to give chase immediately. Ultimately, the slow 
attack speed of the Carnivons allowed the Vudar to get one shot on the 
rear shielding of the damaged CW before she managed to escape the area. 
Unfortunately, where the average damage would have left her just shy of 
crippled, the Vudar rolled like a Fed and did not even penetrate the 
shields.

The Carnivon managed to damage the infrastructure of an important colony 
and get away with no lasting campaign damage. The only Vudar units 
damaged was the smoking crater that used to be a farm and their scout 
had scratched paint.


--Matt