After finishing off a game of France ’40 Mark and I recently an SFB scenario, which featured far from expert play, but certainly taught some good lessons. We went with “The Derelict” from Module S2, as the more interesting looking of two Romulan scenarios for Y163. USS Hood finds the galactic survey cruiser (an expensive version of the heavy cruiser specially equipped for long-range exploration and survey) USS Marco Polo adrift, the entire crew having been killed by a disease.
Thankfully, a cure had been found just too late to save the crew, and personnel from the Hood are inoculated and moved over to Marco Polo, who start up the warp engines. And then a Romulan KR and K5R show up. Hood is at weapons status II, but Marco Polo is generating three power per engine (standard 15-box ones), which will go up one point per turn. Also, there’s two crew units and four boarding parties on board. This is not the minimum crew requirements, severely limiting what she can do. (There had been a distress call, so Hood has extra crew and boarding parties on board to man the Marco Polo.)
I had the Federation so Mark could try the KRs, and my two ships set up four hexes from each other, while the Romulans come in on the right map edge, which is only fourteen hexes away. Mark set up slightly further, and headed straight for Hood, going 21. Hood went 10, overloading three photons and with a wild weasel ready. Marco Polo was only generating 12 power (three on each engine plus full impulse and APR), and went speed 6. Not having a minimum crew means that one of the two crew units is on the bridge, controlling most primary functions (power generation, movement, shields, EW), and the second can be assigned to a systems box to make that box work. I didn’t have any good ideas for that, but I did energize the phaser capacitors.
The Romulans came in as a stack, and on impulse 10 Hood launched a shuttle as ‘fighter cover’. On 11, the Romulans fired all four plasma torpedoes. This isn’t quite the scary event this becomes later, but eighty points of plasma eight hexes away is more than intimidating enough. Classically, the worry is if they’re real or Memorex, with a smart Romulan probably doing three psuedos and one real (or not; you have to keep the opponent guessing). The really nasty play here is for them to all be real, but aimed at the Marco Polo. She can’t have a weasel ready, the Hood has to worry about them being on her (forcing her to weasel as they go by), and then get a head start on cruising around for the rearming cycle.
We got fairly straightforward tactics here. But I couldn’t know this, and I had some very tight timing as the Romulans came in behind the plasma. On 16, Hood turned in and declared emergency deceleration. On 17 Hood unloaded at range 4, hitting KR RIS Kestral with two 12-point photon torpedoes and another 15 damage on mixed phaser rolls. Only 29 registered, so the front shield held. On 18, the deceleration took effect, and the wild weasel was launched. On 19, the plasma torpedoes hit, and were all real, destroying it, and doing 46 damage, thanks to bad proximity rolls from all the ECM, which turned into 7 collateral damage, 5 of which registered on the #4 shield. Mark then fired the phaser-1s on both ships, but the explosion ECM kept the damage minimal, and the reinforcement from the emergency deceleration handled it all.
Turn 1, Impulse 17, showing movement from Impulse 12 to 24.
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