JadeGreen17
Chimeric Spirit
So A bit of background. This happened less than a year ago on a Scifi nation states discord server, and I figured I'd share it here. I'm not really sure why I want to share it here, maybe just as an example of when enough is enough. I will be referring to the my opponent in this RP as Voldemort (as in "He who shall not be named") to preserve his identity, and the GM will be referred to as... GM. The server centered around players creating scifi nation states and battling to compete for territory in the galaxy. Though ships, technologies and aliens from Halo, Warhammer 40k, Mass Effect, Star trek, BSG, Starship Troopers (and most notably for this fight) Star Wars existed in universe to be borrowed, though players were encouraged to create their own content granted it wasn't too overpowered.
This is important since I made use of this feature of the role play to create a shielding technology for my spacecraft. This is something called a Cycling Shield and I've kept it a part of my scifi nation state ever since. The shield doesn't just reflect or block energy, it absorbs it and feeds it back into a ship, giving it increased power to weapons and engines, or to refresh the shield itself. Though ofc this could come off as overpowered, so as a counterbalance its weak against kinetic weapons and missiles which will bleed through the shield, partially draining it and damaging the ship underneath, so it's really only truly useful against foes with energy weapons. It can also be overloaded by having too much power dumped into it at once but it often takes a much more powerful ship to induce an overload that the ship projecting the shield. The other feature is that these shields can be overlapped. If one ship's shields go down it can transfer shielding from a neighbor but only if the ships are in a close formation. This also lets them share incoming absorbed energy preventing the overload from a single massive energy blast occurring. I had developed other technologies.
You could of course also design your own starships with weapons loadouts, etc using your new technologies. So long as they were reasonably comparable to the other players they would be approved and given a cost by the GM in where you could buy them from your shipyards for points, and points could be earned by completing various missions in the RP server such as capturing key planets or resource drops or establishing profitable bases on planets to net yourself a slow but steady supply.
I actually designed dozens of ship types but the only ones you need to know about for this RP are:
The Aggressor-Class Battleship. This is the biggest ship I had on hand during this battle and is my nation-state's premier capital ship fighter.
The Harmony-Class Carrier. This is a 4 kilometer long carrier kitted solely for carrying star fighters, and carries about 8,000 of them but is otherwise fairly weak with only a few heavy weapons. My faction's fighters don't have faster than light travel so instead rely on a carrier, but on the bright side it makes my otherwise effective fighters a lot easier to bulk produce for cheaper by the GMs here. The fighters carried by it are quite strong, carrying a large supply of missiles, good speed and shielding, and two 180x360 turrets meaning in a dogfight they can shoot down ships coming from any direction.
The Languor-Class Frigate. This is an Interdictor (A ship designed to stop ships from jumping to FTL). It has a lot of point defense guns and heavy armor and is slow moving, but otherwise is pretty similar to an Immoblizer 418.
The Lucidious-Class Frigate. This is a sensor ship, with only a few light weapons. It's mostly meant to detect people using stealth ships, or to act as a communications ship or ECM/ECCM ship.
The Indomitable-Class Frigate. This ship is meant to be a "little bit of everything". It has a few heavy guns for hitting bigger ships, decently strong shields and hull, some point defenses, decent speed, and even carries a few fighters. It was basically there to bulk out fleets and really only an effective ship when massed. (Later on in this RP as power crawl set in I began mass producing these ships and spamming them in the thousands along with nothing else and it was actually quite effective.)
The guy I was fighting relied mostly on classic star wars ships. In fact if you know what a Star Destroyer and Super Star Destroyer is you'll pretty much be set on what you need to know about this guy.
So this was one of my solar systems. I always did fancy the moons of gas giants. Manatari was a jungle moon with a small mining outpost on it. Thesper was a parent gas giant with a rocky ring (another moon that got ripped apart by tidal forces.) I had a top secret military research base and shipyard built floating below the clouds of the gas giant. (Cloud-City style; One of my favorite places to hide bases in scifi nation states.) The stationed defense fleet was pretty standard for what I would do early on. When the attacker and the GM asked me to establish my positions for the start of the fight this was more or less what I described. I should note that the GM made use of drawings like this intermittently. He only made one drawing at the very start of the fight, which more or less looked like this. I will extrapolate the happenings of the battle into a bunch more drawings.
So Voldemort jumps in with an Executor and 10 ISDs and focuses fire on the battleship. Now I don't think this guy even read the description of the solar system, or any of the chat logs for the entire RP. He also didn't bother doing any in-character reconnaissance of the system. He came in, immediately spent his starting balance on stock star wars ships and then decided ships, so this was about an hour after this guy had joined an RP I'd been a part of for about a week and a half at this point if I remember correctly.
So he enters the system (as he puts it) facing head to head with the battleship. I immediately power up a combined cycling shield and begin fighting back. The GM rules that my cycling shield is able to hold off his turbolasers because its specialized for dealing energy weapons, albeit only barely. However this is where my fleet operates best, right on the brink of overload since I can basically take everything he can throw at me and give it back. And I start doing exactly that. Expecting a much more tactical opponent and knowing that imperial ships are famously bad at handling strike craft, I also scramble my carrier's and frigates' fighters and have my frigates form two packs of four to engage the enemy. Their combined shielding itsn't enough to hold off more than 1 or 2 isds but Voldemort doesn't seem that interested in taking them out.
So at this point things start looking pretty bad for Voldemort. He's facing down equal firepower due to the nature of Cycling shields powering up the weapons of my battleship allowing it to put out the full forward firepower of his own executor, and about 9,000 strike craft are swarming his fleet. This guy must have panicked that my response wasn't immediate surrender because he ordered two star destroyers to start deploying ground troops a small distance away from my mining colony on Manatari. I ordered some fighters to intercept the transports and kept shooting them down. I don't know why he was so convinced that this was what he needed to do since either retreating (I wasn't running my interdictor)
So after successful bombing runs managed to eliminate the SSD, he immediately jumped in a second one directly behind my ship and started firing mass drivers. He briefly bickered with the GM about having an SSD with kinetic based weapons without buying an SSD that is specifically stated to have mass drivers. Considering this guy has never stated his ship has a modified weapons package until he's already in battle the GM rules that the ship has a normal turbolaser outfit like the first. (So now this guy has a second ship in combat) Also my Aggressor-Class was designed in such a way that the two largest cannons could fire backwards as well as forwards, so he hasn't claimed any victory here.
Also, at this point the ten normal ISDs he brought with the first wave just vanished. I tried asking both Voldemort and the GM about them and neither of them gave me any answers. Voldemort never formally stated that they went to light speed. Though by the time we did they'd already been glossed over for two turns in the RP.
So Voldemort finally decides to do some IRP intelligence gathering and has his crew run a scan of my shield, to determine its weak to kinetic weapons which they don't have. Voldemort refuses the GM's offer to retreat saying that he doesn't want me to be able to trace him back to his home planet because he is now scared of my tactics and technology. So instead he orders the second Exeuctor to preform a lightspeed ram of my battleship. (Because you know a 19km ship for a 5km ship is a good trade.)
So at this point he jumps in THREE MORE Executors along the same vector, all fully loaded with Tie Defenders (which made this force ludicrously expensive). By this point he had invested about 50% of his total starting points budget for this roleplay into capturing this one planet,and apparently decided he was now "committed" and had to follow through with the attack. He somehow deploys his tie defenders directly behind my carrier and the GM lets him run with it. I begin attacking his executors with fighters again.
At this point things started looking pretty bleak for my side. He takes out my carrier, and begins chasing my frigates toward the gas giant, while my fighters chase his Exeuctors. I navigate my frigates through the rocks and order them down to the secret base.
So he plows his Executors into the asteroid belt, acknowledging that they are damaged by the asteroids and my fighters which begin attacking the rear of his ships unopposed. The GM lets Voldemort take four of my frigates but the other four managed to escape into the atmosphere of the gas giant. The Tie Defender swarm is forgotten about and never brought up again. And for a handful of interactions between the GM and Voldemort there are 5 SSDs rather than three, but then, the number goes back down to 3.
So at this point he turns his Exeuctors around and starts using the turbo lasers to battle with my fighters. I then reveal that I had my platform underneath the gas giant and it can launch high-yield nukes. This allows me to blow out the already weakened engines on his exeuctors and cause all three of them to fall into the gravity well of the gas giant.
At this point, Voldemort began sending me profanities and real life death threats in discord DMs, including a threat to docx me. (What a sportsman!) I screen-shotted the threats and showed them to the GM who muted Voldemort and told me to block him in DMs. A few hours later the server owner (who was a badass might I add) came online to resolve the issue. He asked Voldemort why he didn't make use of reconnaissance before invading my solar system, and Voldemort responded that he didn't want me to know the attack was coming since I had sensor ships (The Lucidious Frigates). In the beginning of the RP. He said that he couldn't know that I had sensor ships without doing recon, in fact his nation state, in character, had no way of knowing that the system was even colonized or how to find it, and therefore Voldemort had been meta gaming this whole time. He said that Voldemort and I had to agree to voiding the entire battle (I did), returning the five fallen SSDs to him, my lost ships to me. So there was a happy ending in that this was never a permanent part of the Roleplay Canon, but it was still an atrocious example of everything that can go wrong in a combat RP.
Ultimately Voldemort turned out to not be such a bad guy after all, as he apologized for the threats and we actually ended up becoming allied factions in the RP. (I think he was like... 11 or 12 years old though?) And once he read through some old chat logs and watched some other RPers have battles, he seemed to get a grasp how to behave on the sever and how not to put himself in such compromising positions in the future. Sad to say that RP didn't last much longer after that. After about three more weeks of real time the Server owner who was doing the heavy lifting resolving issues like this and keeping the RP moving became busy with school, and after that 1 by 1 people flaked. Power crawl also became an issue as people who were point-farming locked down planets were chugging out huge fleets. But at least at least Voldemort began his journey toward becoming a skilled RPer.
Also this wouldn't be the last time I used the trick of firing missiles from a base hidden under a gas giant's atmosphere into the engines of a large ship to force it to be pulled into the gas giant. I had another battle with oddly similar circumstances happen to me about six months later on another RP server, though that battle remained as canon and was overall more consistent.
This is important since I made use of this feature of the role play to create a shielding technology for my spacecraft. This is something called a Cycling Shield and I've kept it a part of my scifi nation state ever since. The shield doesn't just reflect or block energy, it absorbs it and feeds it back into a ship, giving it increased power to weapons and engines, or to refresh the shield itself. Though ofc this could come off as overpowered, so as a counterbalance its weak against kinetic weapons and missiles which will bleed through the shield, partially draining it and damaging the ship underneath, so it's really only truly useful against foes with energy weapons. It can also be overloaded by having too much power dumped into it at once but it often takes a much more powerful ship to induce an overload that the ship projecting the shield. The other feature is that these shields can be overlapped. If one ship's shields go down it can transfer shielding from a neighbor but only if the ships are in a close formation. This also lets them share incoming absorbed energy preventing the overload from a single massive energy blast occurring. I had developed other technologies.
You could of course also design your own starships with weapons loadouts, etc using your new technologies. So long as they were reasonably comparable to the other players they would be approved and given a cost by the GM in where you could buy them from your shipyards for points, and points could be earned by completing various missions in the RP server such as capturing key planets or resource drops or establishing profitable bases on planets to net yourself a slow but steady supply.
I actually designed dozens of ship types but the only ones you need to know about for this RP are:
The Aggressor-Class Battleship. This is the biggest ship I had on hand during this battle and is my nation-state's premier capital ship fighter.
The Harmony-Class Carrier. This is a 4 kilometer long carrier kitted solely for carrying star fighters, and carries about 8,000 of them but is otherwise fairly weak with only a few heavy weapons. My faction's fighters don't have faster than light travel so instead rely on a carrier, but on the bright side it makes my otherwise effective fighters a lot easier to bulk produce for cheaper by the GMs here. The fighters carried by it are quite strong, carrying a large supply of missiles, good speed and shielding, and two 180x360 turrets meaning in a dogfight they can shoot down ships coming from any direction.
The Languor-Class Frigate. This is an Interdictor (A ship designed to stop ships from jumping to FTL). It has a lot of point defense guns and heavy armor and is slow moving, but otherwise is pretty similar to an Immoblizer 418.
The Lucidious-Class Frigate. This is a sensor ship, with only a few light weapons. It's mostly meant to detect people using stealth ships, or to act as a communications ship or ECM/ECCM ship.
The Indomitable-Class Frigate. This ship is meant to be a "little bit of everything". It has a few heavy guns for hitting bigger ships, decently strong shields and hull, some point defenses, decent speed, and even carries a few fighters. It was basically there to bulk out fleets and really only an effective ship when massed. (Later on in this RP as power crawl set in I began mass producing these ships and spamming them in the thousands along with nothing else and it was actually quite effective.)
The guy I was fighting relied mostly on classic star wars ships. In fact if you know what a Star Destroyer and Super Star Destroyer is you'll pretty much be set on what you need to know about this guy.
So this was one of my solar systems. I always did fancy the moons of gas giants. Manatari was a jungle moon with a small mining outpost on it. Thesper was a parent gas giant with a rocky ring (another moon that got ripped apart by tidal forces.) I had a top secret military research base and shipyard built floating below the clouds of the gas giant. (Cloud-City style; One of my favorite places to hide bases in scifi nation states.) The stationed defense fleet was pretty standard for what I would do early on. When the attacker and the GM asked me to establish my positions for the start of the fight this was more or less what I described. I should note that the GM made use of drawings like this intermittently. He only made one drawing at the very start of the fight, which more or less looked like this. I will extrapolate the happenings of the battle into a bunch more drawings.
So Voldemort jumps in with an Executor and 10 ISDs and focuses fire on the battleship. Now I don't think this guy even read the description of the solar system, or any of the chat logs for the entire RP. He also didn't bother doing any in-character reconnaissance of the system. He came in, immediately spent his starting balance on stock star wars ships and then decided ships, so this was about an hour after this guy had joined an RP I'd been a part of for about a week and a half at this point if I remember correctly.
So he enters the system (as he puts it) facing head to head with the battleship. I immediately power up a combined cycling shield and begin fighting back. The GM rules that my cycling shield is able to hold off his turbolasers because its specialized for dealing energy weapons, albeit only barely. However this is where my fleet operates best, right on the brink of overload since I can basically take everything he can throw at me and give it back. And I start doing exactly that. Expecting a much more tactical opponent and knowing that imperial ships are famously bad at handling strike craft, I also scramble my carrier's and frigates' fighters and have my frigates form two packs of four to engage the enemy. Their combined shielding itsn't enough to hold off more than 1 or 2 isds but Voldemort doesn't seem that interested in taking them out.
So at this point things start looking pretty bad for Voldemort. He's facing down equal firepower due to the nature of Cycling shields powering up the weapons of my battleship allowing it to put out the full forward firepower of his own executor, and about 9,000 strike craft are swarming his fleet. This guy must have panicked that my response wasn't immediate surrender because he ordered two star destroyers to start deploying ground troops a small distance away from my mining colony on Manatari. I ordered some fighters to intercept the transports and kept shooting them down. I don't know why he was so convinced that this was what he needed to do since either retreating (I wasn't running my interdictor)
So after successful bombing runs managed to eliminate the SSD, he immediately jumped in a second one directly behind my ship and started firing mass drivers. He briefly bickered with the GM about having an SSD with kinetic based weapons without buying an SSD that is specifically stated to have mass drivers. Considering this guy has never stated his ship has a modified weapons package until he's already in battle the GM rules that the ship has a normal turbolaser outfit like the first. (So now this guy has a second ship in combat) Also my Aggressor-Class was designed in such a way that the two largest cannons could fire backwards as well as forwards, so he hasn't claimed any victory here.
Also, at this point the ten normal ISDs he brought with the first wave just vanished. I tried asking both Voldemort and the GM about them and neither of them gave me any answers. Voldemort never formally stated that they went to light speed. Though by the time we did they'd already been glossed over for two turns in the RP.
So Voldemort finally decides to do some IRP intelligence gathering and has his crew run a scan of my shield, to determine its weak to kinetic weapons which they don't have. Voldemort refuses the GM's offer to retreat saying that he doesn't want me to be able to trace him back to his home planet because he is now scared of my tactics and technology. So instead he orders the second Exeuctor to preform a lightspeed ram of my battleship. (Because you know a 19km ship for a 5km ship is a good trade.)
So at this point he jumps in THREE MORE Executors along the same vector, all fully loaded with Tie Defenders (which made this force ludicrously expensive). By this point he had invested about 50% of his total starting points budget for this roleplay into capturing this one planet,and apparently decided he was now "committed" and had to follow through with the attack. He somehow deploys his tie defenders directly behind my carrier and the GM lets him run with it. I begin attacking his executors with fighters again.
At this point things started looking pretty bleak for my side. He takes out my carrier, and begins chasing my frigates toward the gas giant, while my fighters chase his Exeuctors. I navigate my frigates through the rocks and order them down to the secret base.
So he plows his Executors into the asteroid belt, acknowledging that they are damaged by the asteroids and my fighters which begin attacking the rear of his ships unopposed. The GM lets Voldemort take four of my frigates but the other four managed to escape into the atmosphere of the gas giant. The Tie Defender swarm is forgotten about and never brought up again. And for a handful of interactions between the GM and Voldemort there are 5 SSDs rather than three, but then, the number goes back down to 3.
So at this point he turns his Exeuctors around and starts using the turbo lasers to battle with my fighters. I then reveal that I had my platform underneath the gas giant and it can launch high-yield nukes. This allows me to blow out the already weakened engines on his exeuctors and cause all three of them to fall into the gravity well of the gas giant.
At this point, Voldemort began sending me profanities and real life death threats in discord DMs, including a threat to docx me. (What a sportsman!) I screen-shotted the threats and showed them to the GM who muted Voldemort and told me to block him in DMs. A few hours later the server owner (who was a badass might I add) came online to resolve the issue. He asked Voldemort why he didn't make use of reconnaissance before invading my solar system, and Voldemort responded that he didn't want me to know the attack was coming since I had sensor ships (The Lucidious Frigates). In the beginning of the RP. He said that he couldn't know that I had sensor ships without doing recon, in fact his nation state, in character, had no way of knowing that the system was even colonized or how to find it, and therefore Voldemort had been meta gaming this whole time. He said that Voldemort and I had to agree to voiding the entire battle (I did), returning the five fallen SSDs to him, my lost ships to me. So there was a happy ending in that this was never a permanent part of the Roleplay Canon, but it was still an atrocious example of everything that can go wrong in a combat RP.
Ultimately Voldemort turned out to not be such a bad guy after all, as he apologized for the threats and we actually ended up becoming allied factions in the RP. (I think he was like... 11 or 12 years old though?) And once he read through some old chat logs and watched some other RPers have battles, he seemed to get a grasp how to behave on the sever and how not to put himself in such compromising positions in the future. Sad to say that RP didn't last much longer after that. After about three more weeks of real time the Server owner who was doing the heavy lifting resolving issues like this and keeping the RP moving became busy with school, and after that 1 by 1 people flaked. Power crawl also became an issue as people who were point-farming locked down planets were chugging out huge fleets. But at least at least Voldemort began his journey toward becoming a skilled RPer.
Also this wouldn't be the last time I used the trick of firing missiles from a base hidden under a gas giant's atmosphere into the engines of a large ship to force it to be pulled into the gas giant. I had another battle with oddly similar circumstances happen to me about six months later on another RP server, though that battle remained as canon and was overall more consistent.
