[LP CYOA] Epic

[ScubaV]

Since the Indus destroyed the Inanna flowers on the moon, I wonder if this isn't a plan to destroy the remaining Inanna flowers on Earth in addition to causing general destruction and prolonging the war. They don't exactly have the capabilities of doing so otherwise.

I'm tempted to vote A. It's the chance for the biggest mega glory and I think we have a decent shot at success. We may only have Anhur and the Kaguya-hime, but all we really need is our ability to see fault lines and direct the Kaguya-hime's fire as appropriate. Then we play keep-away until Langorn arrives with the cavalry. treave, would we have a method of "painting" target points for Grimrock to fire at?

Also treave, you mentioned we have proof already of the Indus intentions for the colony. What proof is this exactly and is it enough to be accepted by most of the general public and not just sufficient to stir Langorn into action? We may have to destroy the colony before it makes the final approach, but if our proof is strong enough we may be able to endure a negative public opinion long enough to clear ourselves/Grimrock/the Empire.

 

[treave]

We can, but your fault-line ability doesn't last long enough for it to be useful at playing keep-away. You'd knock yourself out after a few minutes. Given that they intend to drop a multi-megatonne object, and they have numerical superiority, expect them to try to bulldoze their way through. If you only try to harass them the bulk of the fleet will probably ignore you and go ahead with the drop, since you don't have anything that can destroy a colony.

But we can discuss tactics in the next update.

The proof is just that the colony is straying dangerously close to the Earth on its route, and it so happens to be before the peace treaty. It's the sort of thing that gets military minds thinking about the worst case scenario but politicians and the general populace probably won't be so paranoid. I mean, who would actually do such a thing? It is unprecedented, unimaginably worse than launching nukes at an enemy nation.

If you manage to get close enough to the colony to confirm it is empty, before it begins the descent, you could call upon nuke support from the ground. But expect the enemy fleet to escort it right up until the last possible moment, and there's enough of them to predict the trajectory and shoot down any missiles approaching from Earth.

 

[Esquilax]

A - Most fun, and lets us plan the field of battle. I don't think we can piss off the EMPRESS any more than we already have, and let's be honest, pleasing her leads to craptastic outcomes. We need to become more cynical so we can just assassinate the bitch and be done with it.

It does? No question she's an evil shrew, but would going to the Altman Foundation really be such a bad idea in hindsight? We wouldn't have to deal with this shit now, that's for sure. Our hardline avoidance of the cult at any cost was clearly a bad idea, and I am glad we narrowly avoided doing anything stupid in the previous update. It would have been yet another shitty sequel to A Trip to Egypt and Yellowstreak Adventures.

You don't really have time to descend to Earth, fly to Olympus, grab the flowers, and head back to space. Plus that's still Empire territory, and you had just ignored orders.

I was thinking more along the lines of one of our bros heading down to some place with lots of Inanna flowers and gathering them for us. In any case, it still might not be enough time.

 

[treave]

Going down is easy but finding a way back up is hard, is what I meant. You'd need to find a launchpad and a rocket, or use one of the space elevators attached to the solar mirrors.

 

[Azira]

If you manage to get close enough to the colony to confirm it is empty, before it begins the descent, you could call upon nuke support from the ground. But expect the enemy fleet to escort it right up until the last possible moment, and there's enough of them to predict the trajectory and shoot down any missiles approaching from Earth.

It'll be a pyrrhic victory for the UNS/Indus alliance though. That they'd bomb their advesaries with a used colony from space shows them to be ruthless arseholes. If we can get confirmation the colony's empty, the Shinar/Higashi coalition is more than justified in launching nukes at the colony to try and break it up. If the UNS/Indus fleet shoots down the missiles heading for an empty colony headed for Earth, this will plunge the whole world into an unresolvable conflict.

The UNS/Indus will be revealed to have been planning this from before the peace talks were started, and willing to carry it out to deny the peace in any case, showing themselves to be anything but honorable. It's not like in WW2. Back then, it's debatable that Japan would have caved within months/a year without the use of atomics, but they weren't a day away from signing a concessionary loss like the Higashi is here.

There'd be no holds barred, and whatever remains of the Shinar/Higashi coalition would feel wholly justified in using dirty nukes and what have you at the civilians in UNS/Indus..

Doesn't matter how we think about this. We need to stop that thing.

A

[EDIT] And since we've already inserted a tiny knife into a crack of Scarlet's armour of faith, if we wiggle it just so, we might get her to help us. Ideally, to launch the possible nuke the Mergarh (sp?) holds at the colony at the right time.
Because, we do expect her to be there, don't we?

 

[Baltika9]

A - Most fun, and lets us plan the field of battle. I don't think we can piss off the EMPRESS any more than we already have, and let's be honest, pleasing her leads to craptastic outcomes. We need to become more cynical so we can just assassinate the bitch and be done with it.

It does? No question she's an evil shrew, but would going to the Altman Foundation really be such a bad idea in hindsight? We wouldn't have to deal with this shit now, that's for sure. Our hardline avoidance of the cult at any cost was clearly a bad idea, and I am glad we narrowly avoided doing anything stupid in the previous update. It would have been yet another shitty sequel to A Trip to Egypt and Yellowstreak Adventures.

Let's not forget that the Empress offered no favor (or input) to the Atman foundation and once we got to the rendezvous, started moaning about how we should go home. Her only piece of input was to sit tight and get nuked. Not a stellar track record, and coming from me, that is saying something.

As for the choice, I am glad to see my paranoia was largely unjustified and unfulfilled. I came here for the MEGA GLORY!
MEGA GLORY is what Senya'll get: A. (And a mother-daughter threesome later)

 

[ScubaV]

We can, but your fault-line ability doesn't last long enough for it to be useful at playing keep-away.

Actually, I was just thinking of use the fault line ability to destroy the colony with Kaguya-hime's big guns (hence the painting query) and then using unpowered evasion tactics to avoid the escort fleet for as long as possible.

Also bros, consider that Rei will almost certainly be there. If we can convince her of the intent to smash the colony and that it's wrong we can flip her to our side which would be huge.

 

[Azira]

We need to be powered up though to paint those fault lines, and it burns our power very quickly. When it's spent, we'll be near unconscious and have to rely on Yua for evasion purposes..

It might very well lead to MEGA GLORY and simultaneous UNRESURRECTABLE DEATH. When that's said though, I'm not actually opposing that plan. We might have to do just that. I just hope we have people nearby to help...

 

[treave]

You can't manage the concentration required while simultaneously dodging the entire enemy fleet. It's probably easier to do that in B with support from Fifth Fleet. Then there's the problem of falling unconscious afterwards in the midst of the enemy. I'm not ruling out the option, though.

 

[ScubaV]

True, B may be the better option to carry out the fault-line plan. Though A does give us the advantage of positioning and prepping the battlefield.

 

[Azira]

And prepping the battlefield would've been so much more awesome with some remote-controlled droids of our own. *sigh*

I guess we'll need to use the radar jamming ability of our field instead then.

[EDIT]
Some questions treave: do we on the Kaguye-hime have anything that could be used to create a minefield? Ah, we have missile launchers. They have explosive munitions that should easily be converted to stationary bombs with a proximity trigger of some sort. Excellent! And are there any conventions barring the use of such?
We could possibly lay one such minefield in a way that the colony would only enter it if it was on a collision course with Earth. Then we could send out a warning, preferrably a pre-recorded message transmitted from an unmanned marker buouy at the edge of the field. We could excuse it with protecting civilian lives on earth from a possibly stray colony, and that the minefield poses no danger to space travellers who will be warned beforehand.
Then we'd use the radar jamming effect of the barrier and watch as the colony and escorts would have to navigate a mine-field blindly, a mine-field we'd know to the last detail as we put it there.
I guess that'll buy some extra time. We'd have to wait before we commit our forces fully, or we'll get blown away.
Whatever dummies and mines we can lay would help us greatly. The Kaguye-hime should not be committed until we're at the point of no return, or they'll easily find and target her.

 

[TOME]

Am I the only one that suspects that this whole thing is just a ruse? That they will drop the thing on Earth and blame it on NSE and Senya being there?

A. We don't have to run through the whole fleet in order to stop the asteroid and they will be fighting on two sides. Senya (and possible Scarlett Lightning) on Earth's side and the fifth fleet on the other.

Azira, that is a great plan. I second it.

 

[Baltika9]

Well, from what I can gather, we have two ways to do this right now:
A- our role here mainly would be to use our ability and stealth cloak to get in and asses whether or not the colony is populated. As much as I like the idea of using fault lines to dismantle the whole force of these deluded scum, let's not kid ourselves here: we'll be an ant going up against a mountain, it is far more likely they will just ignore us or concentrate firepower if we annoy them too much. As good as Senya is, he isn't good enough to avoid two fleets' firepower and fighters for too long. Stealth and intelligence will win here. And if that fails, we can still be gathering forward intel and laying out a strategy.

B- we arrive at the last moment and attempt to dismantle two fleets and a twenty kilometer colony close to Earth's surface (before I get into anything else, the debris falling down from space from this battle will probably do half the Cult's job for them anyway; actually, I'm curious, treave, if we destroy the colony in mid-space, what will stop Earth's gravity from simply carrying out the bombing by itself?); considering that these will be two-to-one odds and that we will have zero forward intel here, it will be a needlessly dramatic battle and may not actually prevent anything, because the Indus may very well just overpower us with numbers. So, yeah, it's rather risky, and not in a good way.

As for Rei and Senya, isn't it hilarious how the pragmatic, cynical hero doing this "just because" ends up trying to stop slaughter of innocent civilians and the nuking of a continent/Ankida/whatever and the idealistic good-guy patriot is escorting a mission to carry out said strike and escalate this conflict into complete Total War?

...unless, the reason she is placed there is to prevent said bombing from happening, thus making her a champion of justice and a hero in the eyes of the whole world. Naw, too convoluted and unrealistic.
Still, we may very well be able to tug on her heartstrings here and cause a defection.

and there's enough of them to predict the trajectory and shoot down any missiles approaching from Earth

Hmm, would it be possible for us to scatter our particle shield to jam their radars and then play a spotter for the nukes?
Or

wouldn't it be hilarious if the Terrasphagos reappeared in the middle of the war?

Uhm. Not in the middle, no. Not exactly. Well, it depends on your choices I suppose, just like how their appearance in the first place depended on your choices.

Would it be possible for us to open a rift in reality and let the Terrasphagos sort this shit out?

 

[GreyViper]

A guess we just have to think up something when we get there. But Id say confirming if the colony is mostly empty would be my main concern. Then find out where the reactor is located and how to make it go boom or cause a big surface explosion that would alter its path.
Oh whats the chance we will encounter Dunamis in this fight?

 

[Tigranes]

treave: Re. Scarlet-Senya Unstoppable Duo, I see you and raise 20th Century Boy.

I think whether 4 million people are still all on the colony or not makes a major difference to our decision making, especially re. the risk of bad publicity. B is actually the best answer if we just want to avoid being blamed, because then we can say to any military tribunal or public lynch mob that we had ambiguous information but we reported to our superiors and then did our best. If someone finds out we had the information then C can be very troublesome. And I doubt we'd put ourselves at so much risk to get blown up if we do B, esp. depending on the choices we'd make after that.

I'd go for A only if Azira's plan or something was approved. Otherwise seems like we're opening ourselves up to a real fuck in the arse.

 

[m4davis]

Crazy theories time the Inana flowers are preventing the terrasphagos from returning and indus knows this

 

[Baltika9]

We could possibly lay one such minefield in a way that the colony would only enter it if it was on a collision course with Earth. Then we could send out a warning, preferrably a pre-recorded message transmitted from an unmanned marker buouy at the edge of the field. We could excuse it with protecting civilian lives on earth from a possibly stray colony, and that the minefield poses no danger to space travellers who will be warned beforehand.
Then we'd use the radar jamming effect of the barrier and watch as the colony and escorts would have to navigate a mine-field blindly, a mine-field we'd know to the last detail as we put it there.
I guess that'll buy some extra time. We'd have to wait before we commit our forces fully, or we'll get blown away.
Whatever dummies and mines we can lay would help us greatly. The Kaguye-hime should not be committed until we're at the point of no return, or they'll easily find and target her.

You do know that they just won't care, right? Their goal is to crash the colony into the planet anyway and the two outcomes of this plan still fulfill their goal:
a) the colony just mows through the minefield and continues it's collision course or
b) the colony is fractured into multiple pieces by said mines and instead of getting hit by a meteor strike, the planet will get hit by a meteor shower. Which is way worse.

 

[TOME]

Crazy theories time

Indus is trying to destroy all Inanna flowers because they know it will bring Ean back. Ean's DNA got mostly overwritten by the tree and destroying it all will destroy the tree but not the immortal, who will regenerate from a scratch.

 

[Esquilax]

b) the colony is fractured into multiple pieces by said mines and instead of getting hit by a meteor strike, the planet will get hit by a meteor shower. Which is way worse.

How do you get at this? If the colony is blown to smithereens, then the fragments that reach Earth will burn up on re-entry to the atmosphere or fall into the sea. We want to blow the thing up before it reaches Earth. I don't understand, what would be your alternative?

 

[Baltika9]

Simple, nothing that we have on board this ship will be able to create enough of a bang to fracture a 20km meteor (which is a big one) in tiny little pieces that will be vaporized in the atmosphere. Unless we have a couple of explosive devices with the firepower of a nuke, all this will manage is break up the colony into pieces not small enough to burn up, say 1-3km pieces, which are pretty bad by themselves, one of those can leave a crater about 25-40km in diameter (case in point, the Manson crater, apologies for such unsophisticated sources, but I work with what I have); now imagine that falling over the NSE. True, nowhere as bad as a twenty-kilometer one, but still a disaster, only many of them.

What I'm saying is that we'll need some serious firepower to take this bastard down. Some repurposed missiles and energy cores won't really do the trick.

 

[TOME]

a) the colony just mows through the minefield and continues it's collision course or

And I guess the point was to slow down the escorts, if they keep going, they will take heavy casualties (flying blind in a minefield) and thus leaving opening for Senya.

[fake edit]: Actually the point was to act as a early warning system. If they enter the minefield, then they on a collision course with Earth and this gives us right to strike.
[second fake edit]:

“This is a violation of the Ankida Convention.” repeats Captain Grimrock. “We are a vessel performing a peaceful escort of the Spirit of Adventure. You cannot deny us passage.”

Aren't their fleet just a peaceful escort of the colony?

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

I'm torn, bros.

On the one hand I don't see how A could work unless we flipped our sister to our side - which may be possible...
On the other, B sounds like we'd arrive too late to stop most of the damage anyway.

I'm saying A for now. Risk everything - Ean style.

 

[TOME]

btw. treave, does this update have anything to do with 2012 DA14 or the Russian meteor? Or did you just come up with it and it happened to coincide with a RL event?

 

[Storyfag]

B

 

[treave]

Nothing to do with real life. Why would it when you could've found out about the drop a couple weeks ago real time?

I doubt the Kaguya-hime itself carries enough explosives to make a minefield that can stop them in their tracks, but every little bit helps.

Still, we might want to leave the tactics for the next update once you get there and have a clearer picture of what you're dealing with, where you're making your stand, and what further options you have. Either way there'll be a mission briefing of some sort.

As for gravity's pull finishing their job, that's why the operation is a tricky one. Jamming radar will also affect the nuke guidance systems. Once you do that any nukes are as much a danger to you as they are to the enemy if you want to be close enough to "spot" for them. We don't have authorisation to order one anyway.