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Crazycryodude posted:If the Argies want to pretend we looted them they can chuck some fuel out the airlock and apply their own battle scars. They know better than us how to survive here, if they want to do that they'll do that but we don't need the fuel and I don't want to take limited resources from struggling people when we're completely fine not doing that. It's just gratuitous, taking tribute that's just gravy not essentials because we're strong and they're weak and they're scared enough to let us do it. they're willign to trade so I think we can get something from that. We have some minerals we can give them. They can put some scorch marks on the walls, say we looted it, etc. We in turn buy it from them so it's not putting them in a bad state. Even if we do 'fail' in things they have the mienrals that they can hopefully hide to use later. So I agree with the search pattern, in turn vote we 'buy' the fuel (as Fray has said) to give us a little extra.
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Aug 11, 2021 06:08
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Can we check with the locals whether the two picket ships are crewed by pirates or Argentinans? And if they have the means to pass messages. If those ships are an enemy asset it might be a justifiable risk to run them down with fighters, regardless its important to know for sure were being tailed as the red hands having that good information on us allows them to choose the terms of engagement. This will be less relevant if we find their base, which is a big if and scenarios exist where they are able to camouflage their base as civilian or otherwise decentralise their operations such that they can afford not to defend a base.
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Aug 11, 2021 10:48
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Crazycryodude posted:If the Argies want to pretend we looted them they can chuck some fuel out the airlock and apply their own battle scars. They know better than us how to survive here, if they want to do that they'll do that but we don't need the fuel and I don't want to take limited resources from struggling people when we're completely fine not doing that. It's just gratuitous, taking tribute that's just gravy not essentials because we're strong and they're weak and they're scared enough to let us do it. This 100%. If we want the fuel we should pay for it.
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Aug 11, 2021 16:38
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Why on Earth would we buy or loot their meager sorium reserves now? And risk just losing it all if we go into combat and our fuel tanks get ruptured by a stray shot? We have more than enough for the time being, even with us scouring this chunk of the Belt for the pirate base. We can come back and stock up for the trip home to L4 when we return in triumph and victory. These poor buggers might even give us a better deal in gratitude for ridding them of their cruel overlord.
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Aug 11, 2021 16:54
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Fray posted:
Alexa! Load Travellingsalesman.exe
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Aug 11, 2021 17:03
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Saros posted:Alexa! Load Travellingsalesman.exe Assuming the same transmitter pattern on other rocks, we only need to reach one or two more points to be able to triangulate. Picking a spot with that in mind, and a possible 3rd choice would be our best path.
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Aug 11, 2021 17:37
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The pirate pickets are to our "NE" as well. That seems to indicate that's the direction of the pirate base. Assuming they're idiots. With pirates, that's usually a safe assumption.
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Aug 11, 2021 17:56
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LLSix posted:The pirate pickets are to our "NE" as well. That seems to indicate that's the direction of the pirate base. I suspect that at this point, if you're still alive as a pirate and holding a pre-war warship, you're not a total idiot. You may be a little complacent, however, and think that the pickets are less visible than you think they are.
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Aug 11, 2021 21:11
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This is a crazy thought, but can we tell what kind of encryption scheme was being used on the tap on Argentina’s comms array? If we can id it as a pre-war encryption, or any of the pirate ships as using pre-war tech from a specific faction, we might be able to reduce the likely pirate base locations to the pre-war fleet bases for that country/faction in the area. Mostly just trying to brainstorm ways we can cut down the search space.
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Aug 11, 2021 21:59
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Hm, maybe we can narrow down the search radius a bit. When we first contacted Argentina, they sent their encrypted omnidirectional transmission for Ji Li. Then there was a few-minute pause. THEN they started talking to us in an obviously scripted response. Now I have two questions: 1) Was that a scripted response they had on hand in the event an enemy fleet happened to show up, or were they given that response to read to us in real time? Because if it's the latter, then that couple minute delay could be caused by lightspeed lag from the Red Hand base composing a speech for our friend in Argentina to read. It did specifically mention our mission here, and while they could have simply been given a pre-written response for us coming on the warpath, but it might be a delicate enough situation for them to want to directly talk to us through Benedito here. If that's the case, my second question: 2) Exactly how many minutes were there between their encrypted transmission to Ji Li and their tightbeam transmission to us? Light travels about 18M km a minute. If it was, as a hypothetical example, a ten minute time gap, that means five minutes for the outgoing message and five minutes for the response back. That's 60M km maximum radius, which is a hell of a lot more manageable space than 110. That would cut the possible candidates for the Home base from 25 to about nine. Factoring in their likely direction as roughly Sunward, that cuts it down to about five. Sadly, if it's more than about a 20-minute gap that doesn't tell us much more than we already know 
Asterite34 fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Aug 11, 2021 |
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Aug 11, 2021 22:20
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Just nodding vigorously and admiralishly as the boys down in Astrometrics come up with more stellar math talk.
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Aug 11, 2021 22:25
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I'd still suggest we can buy the fuel. We can distribute it to our ships with the lowest tanks, which gives them a margin of error and hopefully lets some of our escorts have a bit better range. We don't have to top off everything, but giving anyone particularly low a boost can't hurt - plus we can buy it and we're not going to do anything in harm. I'd rather us to have a bigger margin of error now.
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Aug 11, 2021 22:45
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Hey guys, stuck on Hektor, but got your tightbeam, I dug up some old spectrographic scans of some of the rocks near ya, obviously they're kind of old and might be outdated but might give ya a baseline of where you might wanna look! 36 Atalante C Type 116 Sirona S Type 141 Lumen C Type 243 Ida S Type 1 moon Galileo mission landed here 388 Charybdis C Type 814 Tauris C Type 241 Germania B Type 596 Scheila Comet 216 Kleopatra M Type, 2 moons, rubble pile 145 Adeona C Type 6 Hebe S Type, one of the larger solid asteroids in the belt. 88 Thisbe B Type Large asteroid thought rich in volatiles 139_Juewa CP Type 233 Asterope T Type 158 Koronis S Type (Shares an asteroid family with Idahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koronis_family C Type 401 Ottilia Unfortunately it's not much, here's what Argentina's data looked like: 469 Argentina. All in all they looked pretty unremarkable too, but here we are with a liberated colony. My recommendation is we do this:  The group circled in black I think will have a high likelihood of having stuff based on sizes of their respective asteroids and expected compositions. The guys in yellow I think we can ignore, the bottom three we passed so unless the pirates pulled a double back I think we're good. The three individually circled in yellow are all fairly equidistant to L4 from our position, so if the Red Hand wanted a base, these might have also been options, but if they have nothing of worth, they probably are clear.
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Aug 12, 2021 03:26
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mithrasoflego posted:Can we check with the locals whether the two picket ships are crewed by pirates or Argentinans? And if they have the means to pass messages. You ask the Argentinians about those and yes, those are Hands vessels. They are hanging some distance away, seemingly just watching for now. LLSix posted:This is a crazy thought, but can we tell what kind of encryption scheme was being used on the tap on Argentina’s comms array? If we can id it as a pre-war encryption, or any of the pirate ships as using pre-war tech from a specific faction, we might be able to reduce the likely pirate base locations to the pre-war fleet bases for that country/faction in the area. The hardware of the tap itself is garbage, and you don't see anything special about the sigint you recorded from it. You could maybe crack it if you tried hard for a while, though according to the Argentinians the device just echoes whatever messages go through their normal comms system. They also confirm the larger Hands flagship that the Agamemnese told you about. They say some looser-lipped Hands have boasted about having a couple pre-war bits on it. Prewar stuff means they got some really lucky salvage, or perhaps they've had dealings with someone who has access to such things. As mentioned before, Harmonia is some sort of Martian client, but the Argentinians say the Hands are not at all friendly with the Federals. While they don't really know where the Hands base out of, with their local knowledge they would suspect it's farther sunward - pirate targets in the outer belt are slim, they say.
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Aug 13, 2021 03:45
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Now we run into another possible issue - we resume that the pirates are getting a real time countdown on our every move from the corvettes, who can sprint and stay way out of range. We have to presume they're fully fueled since they just took 'off'. Even if we destroy the main pirate base then they can conceivably just retreat to one of their 'occupied' planetoids and setup secondary shop. So this means (in theory) that we now have to not only locate and destroy the main pirate base, but also get thier fleet to a fight as otherwise they can just retreat and they'll probably have at least enough basing resources left to rebuild. So we have to get them to fight us under the presumption that they're tracking us every bit of th eway and we only have the foggiest sort of intel as to where they are (in this case rather literally). Upside.. Well, we could get a new light cruiser if we get lucky!
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Aug 13, 2021 05:06
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Ok, under the assumption that a risky plan is better than no plan at all, I present Plan A Understanding our operational objectives as follows: 1. Find and destroy Red Hand's asset which will cripple their ability to target Agamemnon. 2. Preserve Fleet capability. 3. Look competent whilst doing it. 4. Get loot. 5. Help the locals I guess. Plan A seeks to move towards these goals by fulfilling the following tactical goals 1. Capture and interrogate Red Hand's crew 2. Remove short range Red Hand's assets from the board, reducing their capability, especially in terms of intelligence. 3. Maybe investigate another rock for friendly colony/life signs along the way Politely ask Argentina to temporarily disable their comms, this should be an easy sell. Split the fleet into two components Red Squadron and The Rest of the Fleet Red Squadron goes dark and idles around Argentina. The Rest of the Fleet sets out at speed of slowest ship on route plan, keeping the active sensor with the best range for detecting enemy pickets on: Messalina, Tauris, Charibdys. As I see it the Red Hand Picket has three choices: a) Follow our fleet at maximum sensor range b) Return to Argentina to reestablish control c) Anything that doesn't involve coming closer to us If A) keep current course until it looks like we can catch the picket between Red Squadron flying out of Argentina and The Rest of the Fleet or the pickets get spooked. Destroy pickets, pick up prisoners for interrogation and any practical loot. If B) Wait until the last moment and burn hot with Red Squadron, engage the pickets and hope we win, bring the Rest of the Fleet back (maybe after visiting Charibdys fuel doesn't grow on trees you know) and pick up prisoners and loot. If C) Then Red Squadron can rendezvous with The Rest of the Fleet at Charibdys and we can continue to traveling salesman our way up sun-wards. We lose some fuel. This plan does come with some risks, namely pitting Red Squadron against two corvettes looks way too much like an even fight and is also the most likely outcome. If this should happen I would encourage the discord people strongly consider and ROE which allows our fighters to withdraw if they have reduced the speed of one of the corvettes to a point where the rest of the fleet can catch up. This would be an in the moment decision though, depending on how much the picket ships out range our fighters and if we have sustained any casualties of our own It is balanced by potentially high rewards. Namely the chance to remove a source of enemy recon and potentially gather some intel ourselves.
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Aug 13, 2021 08:12
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Just start destroying any infrastructure that can service their cruiser. They'll have no choice but to engage in decisive battle.
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Aug 13, 2021 11:26
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mossyfisk posted:Just start destroying any infrastructure that can service their cruiser. They'll have no choice but to engage in decisive battle. That requires us to A) Find it and B) Have the weaponry to do it. Our main issue is that we have limited fuel range and we have very little margin for error. In that period we need to find their primary base, destroy it, and bring the enemy squadron to battle. And also understand that they may have other facilities, fuel dumps, etc. They can always repair by 'hand' if they have to so long as they have parts, fuel, etc. It won't be efficient and it will take a long time.. But it's possible.
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Aug 13, 2021 22:01
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Our objective here is to stop their attacks on Agamemnon. If we force them to retreat and waste enough time the relative orbital speeds pull them too far away to attack, that’s also a win.
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Aug 14, 2021 04:40
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LLSix posted:Our objective here is to stop their attacks on Agamemnon. If we force them to retreat and waste enough time the relative orbital speeds pull them too far away to attack, that’s also a win. If this is practicable (I'm not sure how long it would take to move the two clusters out of range) then a strategy would be to buy/loot/vent all the fuel in Argentina and then scour all the rocks closest to Agamemnon for bases and repeat until it is deemed logistically impossible to travel to Agamemnon from the belt. Obviously the fuel in those colonies could be replenished but not without significant investment and time rebuilding the logistical network (assuming the red hands don't have a tanker) This is what I would term the safe plan, as the enemy likely has decent intel on us they will likely either avoid us whilst we do our thing or confront us. If they confront us they are likely to believe they can fight us, which means we should do our best to disengage. But whilst it will likely achieve the stated goal of preventing an attack on Agamemnon and their interests it likely wont satisfy their desire to teach those who have dared try to extort them a hard lesson. Also it screws the locals big time. I personally prefer a dicey fighter ambush but the option is there. Edit: Having reviewed this we'd have to denude everything up to Harmonia of fuel to begin making it more difficult and risky for the Red Hand to fly over the Agamemnon, this isn't practical. mithrasoflego fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Aug 15, 2021 |
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Aug 15, 2021 14:25
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Well, the pirate vessels seem to be heading toward Sirona... but the fact they're seemingly waiting on the edge of our sensor range and not just booking it might indicate they want us to give chase. They can go faster than anything we have, if they wanted to lose us they could. Of course they could just be keeping us in THEIR sensor range to observe us... My gut's telling me they want to lead us to an ambush at Sirona. No way they'd head straight in the direction of their secret base. More likely candidate is Lumen (with Sirona conveniently between us and them) or Thisbe (which is larger, and possibly has native sorium, and God knows these pirates have fuel to burn)
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Aug 15, 2021 14:51
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I'm gonna put money on Tauris being their HQ. It just sounds pirate-y
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Aug 15, 2021 15:16
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Asterite34 posted:Well, the pirate vessels seem to be heading toward Sirona... but the fact they're seemingly waiting on the edge of our sensor range and not just booking it might indicate they want us to give chase. They can go faster than anything we have, if they wanted to lose us they could. Of course they could just be keeping us in THEIR sensor range to observe us... Our fighters can double the pirate corvette's observed max speed and have the range to run them down. However, 4 fighters is maybe an even fight against two corvettes and if they are drawing us into an ambush then the fighters would likely be toast.
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Aug 15, 2021 15:35
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mithrasoflego posted:Ok, under the assumption that a risky plan is better than no plan at all, I present Plan A Alright, I'm going to run the game in the next day or two, and this is the clearest op plan I see. If anyone has any other ideas, post fast!
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Aug 17, 2021 02:42
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Looks good to me. Looking forwards to the next bit.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:05
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I'm happy with that plan.
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Aug 17, 2021 03:56
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It is a sound plan.
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Aug 17, 2021 17:25
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Cruiser gonna roll in on half the fleet since we were kind enough to divide it for them.
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Aug 17, 2021 17:40
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Volmarias posted:Cruiser gonna roll in on half the fleet since we were kind enough to divide it for them. To be honest there's lots of problems with dividing the fleet in this way. But I don't think having to fight the cruiser is one of them as I can't imagine the cruiser would have enough extra speed that it would be able to engage either fleet before they were able to regroup after spotting it on active radar. That said I threw the plan out hoping someone would take offence at the idea of risking our fighters in an even or worse fight and come up with a different one, so...
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Aug 17, 2021 21:58
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mithrasoflego posted:To be honest there's lots of problems with dividing the fleet in this way. But I don't think having to fight the cruiser is one of them as I can't imagine the cruiser would have enough extra speed that it would be able to engage either fleet before they were able to regroup after spotting it on active radar. I'm all for just throwing 90% of the fleet at Lumen or Thisbe, myself. I'm like 50% their main base is on one of those two.
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Aug 17, 2021 22:02
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Asterite34 posted:I'm all for just throwing 90% of the fleet at Lumen or Thisbe, myself. I'm like 50% their main base is on one of those two. Why 90% why not take the whole fleet? And as alternative plan it's simple. Plan don't split the party Fleet moves to Sirona, then Lumen, then Thisbe. If nothing interest has happened pause and re-evaluate. Keep actives on so long as Red Hand Picket ships are in range, if there's no enemy ships on active scans turn them off at next course change, turning on periodically to ping nearby bodies. Edit: Just to be clear, I prefer taking a risky fight against the enemy picket to checking various asteroids, people are always the weakest link in a security system.
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Aug 17, 2021 22:13
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mithrasoflego posted:Why 90% why not take the whole fleet? Not splitting the fleet is a fair option, but I advocate avoiding Sirona. The corvettes heading straight for it feels too obvious for people this provenly circumspect, they expect us to follow the corvettes right into their fleet sitting in orbit around a useless rock.
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Aug 17, 2021 22:17
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Asterite34 posted:Not splitting the fleet is a fair option, but I advocate avoiding Sirona. The corvettes heading straight for it feels too obvious for people this provenly circumspect, they expect us to follow the corvettes right into their fleet sitting in orbit around a useless rock. Not having a great idea on sensors in this, how effective are ambush tactics/stealth presuming that we're on active sensors the entire way?
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Aug 17, 2021 23:00
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And does anyone hae any alternative plans or suggestions?
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Aug 18, 2021 23:29
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I'm for Plan A because I can't be assed to try and think up a better one, let's get this show on the road
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Aug 18, 2021 23:43
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For those not on discord, we've come up dry thus far. New ideas welcome.
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Aug 20, 2021 21:22
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Yeah, what are possible routes or paths we can take for investigation? Particularly within our fuel limitations. Or probable clues?
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Aug 20, 2021 22:20
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I vote we beeline for Thisbe, followed up by Lumen, for reasons I've already elaborated upon at length
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Aug 20, 2021 22:22
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Not exactly a new idea, but we should check Sirona and Lumen. Those are the closest to a straight line through the pirate pickets. Alternate terrible plan: send the fighters after the pirate pickets. It's a "fair" fight and the fighters can withdraw if they slow either picket. Since that's all that's needed to allow the rest of the fleet to retrieve them. And it'd be uncharacteristically brave/suicidal pirates who stopped to perform SAR with a fighter wing hovering menacingly nearby. Alternate plan guaranteed to lose at least one fighter. Park the fleet wherever we wandered off to and send whatever our most fuel efficient ship (in fuel liters per kilometer) is out searching. Probably the fighters since they're so small. Fighters have terrible sensors, but even they should be able to notice a pirate base with their active sensors on if they're in orbit of it.
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Aug 20, 2021 23:44
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Doesn't doing things in a straight line rob us of proper triangulation?
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Aug 21, 2021 00:09
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