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We were scheduled for a two-team SFB battle on Saturday, but Paul developed car trouble and couldn’t make it. That left us with three people and no plan B. After a fair bit of hunting around we decided to play “The Stasis Box” again, with the third player option.

Mark and I swapped roles, and Patch took the Klingons. I was a little aggressive in the first turn’s surveys, zooming off to the second closest asteroid cluster, and dropping off a shuttle to check the closest. Once again, I rolled poorly and took a fair amount of asteroid damage on the way in. Worse, the asteroid patch I explored turned out to conceal a mine, and I couldn’t come to a stop before moving again and detonating the mine, losing the rear shield and taking a good number of internals.

The next several turns were peaceful as everyone explored, I repaired what I could, and all the explorations turned up just more rocks. Patch eventually found a second mine, but was able to halt and creep out of its detection radius. Possible locations were running out, and it was looking like there weren’t any stasis boxes at all.

And then Mark found one. He was torn between sitting the two turns to collect it, or staying at speed and seeing who else might go for it. He chose the former, and unsurprisingly soon had a Klingon F5 in front of him, with a Fed DD further behind and to the side. The good news for him was that the asteroids were protecting him fairly well, and he only needed to get about 5 hexes to disengage.

And then as the Kzinti was getting battered to pieces, and it was becoming sure that he wouldn’t make it off, one of my shuttles found the second stasis box in the last unexplored cluster. Which meant Patch and I wanted to keep the Kzinti from getting away and beat up the other fellow to keep him from getting a win by grabbing the last one.

If I hadn’t taken that mine early on, I might have had a chance. My pass at the tractored Kzinti became a point blank pass at the Klingon. Sadly, he had phasers and disruptors, while my photons were rearming. Actually, I did have one standard load torpedo, but was too close to use it, and the mine had taken out the batteries, so I couldn’t emergency overload it so it could fire.

And once the pass was done, I had my still-crippled rear shield to the Klingon. I didn’t last much longer.

So… next time we should be doing the 2-on-2 team battle. Barring broken cars.

In Y143, the Klingon Empire successfully rooted out and destroyed a Jindarian caravan operating in the asteroid belt of the Selnar system. Unfortunately, the Klingons did not know that they had missed one Jindarian ship, although they had badly damaged it in the campaign. Deprived of the support of their caravan, and with a virtually inactive warp drive, the Jindarian crew decided on a hideous act of revenge. They placed their crippled ship on a collision course with the main Klingon colony in the system. The Klingon governor called for assistance, and the nearest imperial units responded.

Me, Patch and Paul played this scenario from module F1 yesterday. I recently got it and wanted to see what the Jindarians (the new race presented in the module) are like, and this scenario was pretty easy to split up into three players.

The Jindarians have been in space for thousands of years, and are adapted to life inside of asteroids that have been converted into warp-capable spaceships. This scenario pits their largest class (with an intimidating amount of armor) against three Klingon ships, a D7, F5C and F5.

Since I was the one who had gotten to read the rules ahead of time, I got the Jindarian, while Paul took the D7 and Patch took the two F5s. Patch was very worried about the Klingon’s ability to take on the rock, but I don’t think he was really giving enough weight to the scenario restrictions on the Jindarian: all power was available, but only one point of movement could be generated. So it could either move one hex or do one tactical maneuver per turn. This extreme lack of maneuverability plays to the strong points of Klingon ships, which an maneuver to battle passes fairly well. Also, while the Jindarian heavy weapons are fairly fearsome, they’re spread out for better coverage and have a two-turn arming cycle.

And indeed… I made it a little over halfway to the planet before blowing up. The thing is very sturdy, but really needs just a bit of maneuverability to keep one shield arc losing armor from becoming a major problem, which is precisely what happened. And while it does deserve to be called a DN, it has 43 power, which is less than the amount of warp power on most DNs. Once internals started happening the relative lack of power and weapons told very quickly.

I did turn aside at one point to get some temporary relief and put other weapons in arc, but was impatient to close the range with the planet and turned back the next turn. It worked, especially as put the other side’s weapons in arc as I turned back. But the real thing to do at that point was probably do an impulse Tac right after the turn, to put even more distance between them and the down arc, and then go into reverse the following turn. (The ‘backing into the planet’ idea is mentioned in the scenario tactics, but stopping for three turns and tacing around didn’t appeal, and this method didn’t occur to me until now.)

After the initial volley from the heavy weapons, the Klingons closed in and got most of the way through the armor on a good volley of overloaded disruptors that hit 8/8. I could have grabbed one of the F5s in a range two tractor (and in hind-sight should have), but I wanted to grab three drones in tractors and didn’t have the power to do that and grab a ship at range 2.

As it was, the F5s presented themselves as a target first so early fire was concentrated on the F5C (and the only Klingon ph-1s present), switching to the D7 later. The F5C was crippled, and lost all of its weapons at one point (I believe some were repaired), the D7 took some serious damage, but there just wasn’t enough left to seriously hurt it by the time I started working on it.

So, another loss for me. But, a very fun one, and at least I don’t have wiping out an entire colony on my conscience. Looks like the next meeting will be in about 6 weeks, and I need start figuring out what we’re going to do.