The Crew of the Indus was promised a top-of-the-line starship.
Instead they get a complete piece of junk. Engines, shields, sensors, reactors, and even the life support system is stupidly underpowered. The much-vaunted “Artillery Beam” is a tiny peashooter hooked up to a huge capacitor and a ridiculous amount of electrical wires. The hangar bay lacks any kind of equipment whatsoever. There is only one workable weapon on the ship, the med bay consists of first aid kit and a few bandages, and the sliding doors keep getting stuck.
With our luck, the entire NTF armada will show up any minute now...
All crewmembers move to their assigned positions. Scotty, being captain, gets to take the helm. Headdie gets to work on the engine array, while SpardaSon wrestles with the shield system in a vain attempt to have a coherent energy bubble around the ship. Z64555 finds that the main gun at least is functioning, and fires in three-round bursts.
Scotty brings up the Nav computer and plots a course.
The crew emerges from subspace to find a pirate that is even worse off. A warning shot is all it takes to grab the pirate’s attention.
The ships exchange laser fire. The pirate fires a pair of lasers at the Indus. The first hit shatters the Indus’ shields, but the second shot misses wide. The pirate gets hit with two laser blasts out of three for his trouble.
Despite a direct hit to the weapons grid, the pirate still has both of his basic lasers online.
A second laser volley knocks the pirate’s weapons completely offline. The pirate responds by warming up FTL drives.
A laser volley is aimed at the bridge in order to prevent this.
Direct hit!
One final salvo is enough to finish the job.
After requesting a damage report, Scotty sets course for a random system.
Detecting the Indus’ jump signature, a rebel fighter plots an intercept course. The Indus finds itself unable to evade with its underpowered drive system.
The ships exchange laser fire. The rebel opens fire with a high-powered mining beam, which cuts through the hull and passes through the engine room, before splitting one of the bridge computer systems in two.
Scotty manages to get the computer systems functional enough to note that the mining beam by itself cannot pierce shields. Laser cannons can, but that last hit took out the only laser cannon on the rebel fighter.
Meanwhile, the overglorified peashooter on the ship starts to emit sparks and arcs of lightning…
One laser burst later, the rebel ship surrenders.
But at this point, the artillery peashooter looks like it is about to explode! Z64555 tries to shut it down, but the weapon won’t respond.
The artillery gun spits out a huge beam of energy that cuts straight through shields and ship reactors alike. Disappointingly, destroying the rebel fighter yielded less resources then letting it surrender.
With a sigh, the captain sets course for the next system.
