Revisiting Star Smuggler - Session 007a Smuggler's Blues

The crew has a plan. They have 2 CU of Dyna-weed that they need to unload quickly. They have a full load of hypercharges on Imperia, so they can reach any system in the sector. 

This exercise is more than looking at the map. It's about knowing the territory. 

There are 10 planetary systems with 15 planets. Of those 15 planets there are only 6 slums to sell this Dyna-weed. On top of this, each system has a wealth code which creates a ranking of which planets are best to visit. In order of wealth, the planets are: 

1. Imperia,
2. Byzantium, 
3. Mynkuria, 
4. Uruskop, 
5. Talitar, 
6. and Regari. 

A couple of these are contiguous systems, but most are widely separated. The crew has chosen the following flight plan: 

1. Byzantium (48,000 on the sale) 
2. Imperia, (160,000 on the sale)
3. Uruskop, (Next planet)
4. and Mynkuria (Last planet)

What is cool about Star Smuggler is, the reader is building a story outside of what is written in the events and rules. In this example, Mynkuria will be the last planet visited which will complete the weed smuggler's arc. This circles back to all the problems with Mynkuria Death Squads the party experienced back on Nipna. They are being forced to either reduce their profits or run headlong in the planetary system that has caused them the most pain. 

To get to Uruskop, they need to make a jump series from Imperia to Uruskop. This is totally event-less and takes a day. They make 32,000 secs. on the deal. Although event are ordered randomly by die rolls, the dice do not fail to bring the excitement or build story arcs. 

When the Zephyr jumps into Mynkuria space, the fight is on. They roll e095 which is an attack by a Mynkuria cruiser. The cruiser has 10 hits and TL-6 guns. 

One thing that is lacking is a consistent way to capture ships. In some events, the text indicates that the crew will surrender when their ship is down to one hit. In order to prevent the player from permanently capturing the ships they defeat, the surrendering ship threatens to self destruct. In other cases, like e095, there are no surrender conditions. I'll run this scenario out to show the difficulty in capturing a ship. 

The first round of combat takes place by surprise. Each round of combat in space takes an hour, except for surprise attacks. The attackers used an hour to attack, but the reader or player is experiencing the results that hour of action by surprise. They don't record that hour because they weren't aware of the other ship activities. 

The Zephyr has defensive screens, but due to the energy constrains cannot run with them on all the time. The Mynkurian cruiser blasts them with a series of rolls. 2, 2, 2 are all hits that would have been blocked with the screens. But the crew of the Zephyr didn't have time to turn them on. The score is 10 hits to 12 and we are counting down. 

In the first non-surprise round, the Zephyr raises its screens while the Mynkurian cruiser fires again. The Zephyr takes two more hits, 1 and 1 rolls which also indicates a crucial hit. The Zephyr's comms breakdown. They can no longer call for help or communicate with the hoppers. 

The Zephyr makes a risky hopper launch and the three ships fire back. The results are 2 and 2, a one, a one, and a 1, 2, and 2. Since no one ship scored a pair of ones in their attack, no criticals have been done to the Mynkurian this time. The score is now 10 to 3 hits left, still counting down. 

In the second round, the Mynkurian fires again (they have better guns) and scores no damage thank's to the Zephyr's screens absorbing all of those 2 rolls. Not every gun gets a chance to hit the Mynkurian ship. In one shot, they get a critical hit on the Mynkurian's turret doing two points of damage to the ship, knocking out the gun and killing the gunner plus one more point of damage to the ship. 

There is nothing left but an expanding ball of vapor. 

This shows how deadly combat is and hard it is to knock out a ship with damage via the rules. I've played enough to know that you can do with a critical to pilotage or engineering, but otherwise it is very hard to stop short of total destruction. In fact, the chances of knocking a ship down to just one hit is pretty unlikely. There is a tendency to simply overkill a ship. 

Anyway, back to the problems on the Zephyr. Destruction of the Mynkurian's ship does not make the crew wanted thankfully. The hoppers are recovered and the crew decides to enter the Mynkurian Slums to make their sale, another 48,000. Next, they move on to the spaceport. 

These series of moves were risky. They have two encounters in a heavily damaged ship which could have been two more combats. Luckily, they were sales opportunities which didn't have any effect. They do have a couple of hours to make some rolls, again, none of which have any effect. They don't need what was offered. 

The Mel and Sarah need to patch up the ship which will take 3 days. The crew could sweat out these days in RRR or they could try to replace their hypercharges. Replacing the hypercharges is less risky, but they are on the lookout for those Mynkurian Death Squads. 

The crew gets the required charges on the second day of repair, paying 1500 for the hyper-fuel. It's critical that the crew makes all of those repairs as a jump with a damaged ship can cause a catastrophic failure and kill everyone. A fully repaired and properly maintained ship does not suffer this roll, so it's kind of important. 

This ends day 5 of the week. The crew is counting it's money. They are sitting on 292,183 which is far more than the cost of the Zephyr. 

Resources remaining: 

2 Hoppers TL-1 (TL-6 guns), 17 fuel units, 2 GM-bots at TL-5, 1 vacuum skimmer TL-5 (e153), 3 TL-1 u-suits, 1 TL-6 u-suit, Regen Tank TL-6 (e153), Defense Screens, 4 TL-5 heavy side arms, 4 TL-4 side arms, 9 repair units and 18 life support units.