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Well, internet here has been really flaky since about last Thursday. Apparently a contractor for Comcast has not been cleaning up after himself, and leaving much of Sunnyvale in poor shape. I imagine they’re getting coal in their stocking.

Last Saturday was the last wargaming meet of the year. The four of us did the two-team SFB fight that had been scheduled for last time. Me and Patch are the stronger players, and were on one team, while Mark and Paul were on the other with a sharp BPV advantage.

Y153:

The actual BPV difference can be attributed to all the Hydran fighters. It was kind of nice to just pick ships by classes and not worry about what the Hydrans do to the BPV calculations. The idea was for each side to have four cruisers with one on each side being a command cruiser.

Mark and Paul played a good, solid, conservative game all the way through. Patch and I tried being a bit fancy and could not quite get it to work. We actually split our forces early, in the face of united opposition. The general hope was for one of us to get a good opportunity while they tried to deal with the other one. If I had been playing up to par, it might have even worked, but I out-thought myself on several occasions during the fight.

The main new feature of the battle was the use of several transporter bombs. Both Patch and I took full load outs (which probably violated the 10% rule) of TBs. I tried using them for the ‘instant minefield’ effect, but wasn’t remembering all the rules (should have set most of them for just anti-fighter work) and gave myself quite a headache just maneuvering around my own stupidity.

In fact, the long-term implications of the entire deal was a wrecked Lyran cruiser. Until this point, it was looking like we might see some saber-dancing for a while, but this forced me in closer. In the aftermath Patch got the Hydran Ranger, but most of the opposing heavy weapons hadn’t fired, and they did a number on the D7C.

This gave us the reloading turn we needed to try and do something in return, but it wasn’t to be. I had forced myself too far away, and even going faster than everyone else, I was still two hexes away from the Feds at the end of the turn (who were also still in the same hex, which would have made one ship’s ESGs not nearly as much of a killer weapon). The Feds HETed and wrecked my remaining cruiser. One Fed CA was crippled in return, but that was not nearly enough. The day ended with our remaining forces scattering to attempt to disengage.

Oh, and Patch had to fire a single drone on the way out at the D7C to destroy it. For the first time ever that I’ve seen, both security stations were destroyed, and the crew successfully mutinied.

The final percentages gave Mark and Paul a Marginal Victory. The fight through the points generated by the BPV differential kept it from being much higher.

The next meet is going to be the “Battle of Vandaha” from S2. We might manage to sneak it in mid-January before Further Confusion, but it will probably be early February.