The Human TRO ability adds a 1 to the 2d6 when you roll to check if a critical hit occurred (either via through-armor crit, internal damage or some other effect). Since the target number is 8+ normally, that takes off a significant chunk of that bell curve. PPCs (and, uh, kicks from Awesomes) blast through armor pretty easily, so it's not a bad idea.
August 17, 3043
Designated Search Area
Moore, Skye March
While our aerospace fighters and the Moonraker burn for the pirate point, our examination of retrieved sensor data from militia patrols gives us a couple of areas to search. For the most part, it's in territory controlled by the separatists. We deploy a company of mechs to search some hot spots.
Beta-Hunter doesn't turn up any pirates, but they do come across a separatist supply convoy, which kind of blunders into our dropship. The Sparrow isn't even remotely ready for lift-off, so we'll have to fight it out. On the plus side, we've got a militia buddy in a Panther, and this will be a great time to check out the functionality on our royal Zephyr hovertank. Other than that, Beta-Hunter is (currently) a Guillotine, a Stalker, Wolf in an Orion and Hyena Mk II in an upgraded Archer.
The convoy is defended by a reinforced medium mech lance and several hovercraft outriders, plus some light armor - we shouldn't have much trouble with it.
Round 1:
Hyena holds fire, even though a little APC with an LRM rack mounted on top is technically in range. The damn thing is just moving too fast and there's no way those LRMs are going to land. Predictably, the APC's missiles fall short.
Round 2:
Wolf looks forward to engaging a fast-moving Savannah Master that zips in to attack our three heavy mechs to the north, but, as the Orion turns to face the hovercraft, the separatist driver screws up navigating around a rock sticking out of the lake and winds up flipping over before sinking.
The fast-moving hover APC with the LRM rack crashes into the militia Panther's leg and disintegrates.
"Huh. Well, saves me some ammo, I guess." Wolf comments.
The two forces exchange large amounts of LRMs, but most don't hit. The only exception is a separatist Drillson, which lands several hits on our Stalker without breaching armor. That and a couple of LRMs pinging off Hyena's right leg.
Round 3:
Well, that's a weird-looking Phoenix Hawk.
"Warbook's not finding the variant." Hyena reports.
Our Guillotine fires lasers at the incoming mech. It's pretty shiny, although it gets a little less shiny when a laser melts armor off the right torso.
Our dropship opens fire, knocking out a Condor's fans. This disables the hovercraft but also causes most of Hyena's shots to miss. The Drillson continues closing in but takes some fire from Wolf and the dropship's short-range weapons, rattling the crew a bit.
Round 4:
Wolf moves the Orion through a patch of woods, ignoring for a second the hovercraft swarming by, then rotates it left, targeting a Hunchback climbing up the gradual slope between it and our dropship. A tone indicates lock with the LRMs, and our mechwarrior squeezes the trigger, firing a fifteen missile salvo. Only six hit, blowing little chunks off center of mass. Except for one little LRM, which exploits a minor hole left by its five bretheren and hits something a little more substantial - its relatively small "piff" is followed by an internal explosion guts the Hunchback completely.
"Whoa. That's some LRM." Wolf remarks.
Our Union puts its short range weapons to good use as hovercraft close in and pepper it. The Drillson disappears in a disco show of laser and PPC fire, while the Maxim manages to avoid the worst of it.
The Guillotine takes the left arm off a Quasit that runs past, divesting the mech of its SRM launcher.
Round 5:
One of the convoy mechs gets a little too close to the Union and takes about thirty LRMs across the front. Arms and actuators go flying. The Sparrow also sinks that annoying little Maxim that's been zipping around and detonates the Quasit's LRM ammo with a PPC shot. No salvage on that one - especially not when our Guillotine's laser detonates the machine gun ammo as well.
A Pegasus hovertank zips up to Hyena, throwing our mechwarrior's aim off a little with an SRM salvo, but eats several lasers anyway, briefly crashing against a rock sticking out of the lake.
Wolf continues making good use of the Orion's LRM/15 rack, picking a Vedette out of a cluster of tanks to the southeast and disabling it.
Round 6:
We just about have this wrapped up, except a couple of flights of fighters show up, angling for a run on our dropship. We'll have to deal with these as well before things calm down.
One of the fighters zips in and unloads on our Stalker with rocket launcher pods, scoring a head shot but failing to breach armor otherwise.
Hyena and the unusual Phoenix Hawk design engage in a brawl, firing ineffective shots at each other before closing to melee range. The Pixie gives Hyena a solid kick and receives a punch in return, which it blocks with the right arm but armor still comes off.
The other fighters zero in on our dropship, blasting away with rocket pods and standard weaponry. The Union returns fire, evaporating one fighter, but takes some damage to its docking collar. Irrelevant for now, but will need to be fixed before we can leave.
A Centurion closes range to Wolf and the Stalker, the two of our mechs combining fire to knock the 50-tonner to the ground.
Round 7:
Our Panther buddy jumps into a crowd of tanks to the southeast, backed up by the gunnery crew of our dropship, who blow away a Vedette and inflict severe damage on a Meteor fighter, disabling its engine and sending it crashing into the ground. The Panther blasts the armor off the front of a previously damaged Vedette with an SRM salvo.
Hyena begins going after the Phoenix Hawk but turns the Archer skyward instead, firing at a Defender II that makes a strafing run and damages our mech's shoulder joint. The conventional fighter is peppered with LRMs, taking severe damage. The Phoenix Hawk capitalizes on our mechwarrior's distraction, opening up with the large pulse laser to take off a significant amount of armor. Still, our mechwarrior's attack against the Defender II is fatal, causing the pilot to lose control and turn his aircraft into a lawn dart.
Our Guillotine runs up to a Pegasus and Wolverine hiding in the lake below, sinking the Pegasus, although not before the hovercraft gets some SRMs onto the cockpit, rattling our mechwarrior's cage a little.
Wolf and our Stalker continue working on the Centurion as it gets up. Wolf's LRMs open up a breach in the right leg, which is exploited by the Stalker's LRMs, separating the limb at the hip.
With the bulk of their force crippled (an Enforcer, Wolverine and Phoenix Hawk and Griffin are still intact, but with only a single Hunter for a screen), and half their aircraft shot down, the remaining units in the supply convoy decide to call it quits. We're a little beat up and have a dropship to guard, so we don't pursue.
The militia will make out reasonably well here, they're going to get a legged Centurion with a disabled AC/10 and some waterlogged hovercraft. Plus assorted debris from crashed aircraft and demolished industrial mechs. The exchange payout is 1.7M C-Bills.
That Phoenix Hawk was something else, though. We request a data update from the HPG, and it's a serious implementation of Star League-era lostech on the part of the Federated Commonwealth. Heat sinks upgraded from singles to doubles, ferro-fibrous armor, large pulse laser, anti-missile system, XL engine, MASC for speed bursts. And CASE to prevent all that ammo from blowing the mech to bits. Although an ammo explosion in the left torso will still disable the mech due to the XL engine, but at least it'd be recoverable. Drazzil waves a hand in front of AWS' face and gets no results as the mechwarrior stares at the technical readout, barely able to avoid drooling.
Too bad about the exchange salvage, although that's one mech we might be tempted to risk a contract breach for. The fact that the separatists have this cutting-edge equipment is a little disturbing - it's unlikely that a random batch of rebels would be able to get a hold of cutting-edge tech like that.
This wasn't really the right place for the Zephyr, since we had pretty good lines of sight. The good news is that it avoided any damage at all. The bad news is that the gunners need some serious practice with the TAG laser, they didn't land a single "hit". On the plus side, the guardian ECM worked as advertised.
Fixing the docking collar on the Sparrow is going to be a bit of a bear, and we'll have to pull some favors with the militia to get the parts we need (luckily, we've bailed them out quite a few times over the last week and a half, even if we did let a bunch of reinforcement tanks land). Alternately, we could try to get the part on our own, but it'll probably have to be shipped from off-world so it'd take longer.
[] Call in a favor with the militia
[] Get the part on our own
Our Panther buddy requests our help in tracking down the retreating militia convoy. Beta-Hunter is a little bit beat up - the Stalker's cockpit integrity is not great (wouldn't want to take that mech into a vacuum currently), while the left shoulder joint on Hyena's Archer is completely jammed and will require extensive repairs. It's not as bad as it sounds as most of the Archer's weapons are in the torso, which, along with the rest of the mech (excepting the left arm) is in the green for armor. Wolf's Orion and the Guillotine just have minor armor damage and ammo expenditure. In addition to wanting to stand our mechs down for repairs, we're also aware that our other lances operating in the area may require backup, which we can't really provide if we go chasing off after separatist mechs.
[] Sorry buddy, you're on your own
[] Send the mechs in the green (Orion, Guillotine)
[] Send the mechs in the green and the Archer too