Battle Beyond the Bytes

These are the voyages of the Starship Artemis Excalibur Maelstrom Mad Dog it's 50 minute mission to wipe out new life and new civilisations.

talismancer's birthday party and he hired a hotel function room for us to set up a huge multi-ship game of Starship Artemis.

The heroic crew of the Excalibur joined the Artemis and a bunch of other ships, protecting our fleet from the evil Kralien invaders! Our heroic crew, many of whom had never driven a space ship before leapt into action, and destroyed the invaders. First advance party dispatched, we went on our way to investigate an anomalous anomaly. It turned out to be a black hole. And our somewhat incompetent driver (i.e. me) got a bit too close. Ooops. Fortunately we were resurrected. So was everything else.

The heroic crew of the Maelstrom entered the next fray! As the genius engineer, I actually had very little to do. They didn't suffer nearly enough damage! They needed a lunatic at the helm! penguin_worship arrived and took comms.

So for my next tour of duty I acquired the SS Mad Dog! A fine missile boat. No beam weapons but more than enough torpedo tubes. Our comms officer took the weapons station and we dived right in there. it was a tough game. We lost 3 stations near the start leaving just one to try to supply the entire war effort. We leapt into the fray, buzzing those damn Alien Kraliens, firing volleys of missiles at them, until, alas, our energy reserves ran dry, and so did our torpedo tubes. We pulled away and dropped mines, but it was all for nought as we were overwhelmed and outnumbered.

The universe couldn't handle so much awesome as all our ships though, (the server choked on 5 ships), so we were forced to go down to 4. Mad Dog was upgraded to a slower heavier battleship because weapons crews wanted beam weapons. Not nearly as much fun to fly, and nowhere near as capable of harrying the alien scum! But then my mad weapons officer went out the airlock to get a train.

Good fun. Will need to get others to play this.