The techies these days seem to be more ignorant than the ones we had during the FAW. Just who hired these people, anyway?
Partially it's the fact we're even more isolated than before so it's harder to get good staff, and partially it's the fact that, well, our knowledge base is narrower. We have hundreds of years of studying land animals. Even by 2040 you'd be hard-pressed to say we have a single century of intensive study of sea life.
And some of this crap is downright
weird.
However, as Squad 2 proves, that's really not a problem when it dies after you shoot it.
The scene: The Sea of Japan, about 11:30am local time on the 14th of June. Triton 2 has just touched down for Squad 2's first mission. We think there's a colony around here; we know for sure that Sectoid-crewed Fleet Supply Cruisers make regular runs. Squad 2 is here to raid one of those ships for fuel, engine, and navigation parts; anything else is just gravy.
Turambar drives the tank out the hatch and around the back of the sub, where it's promptly shot at twice for a miss and a hit. This is, however, a Tiger Shark. You're going to have to work harder than that to bother a VI. MatthTheGeek and Kobrar44 fire the first shots of Squad 2 in anger. Both hit their targets. Two Sectoids down.
LHN91 gets his first kill. We've had some MC attacks land but nobody appears to have been affected.
And now pecenipicek gets a first-round kill on another Sectoid. You know, the rookies are really making a good impression here. Especially considering some of the Squad 1 veterans having occasionally questionable accuracy.
And then MatthTheGeek had to blow it all by missing a Sectoid. Fortunately, Kobrar44 didn't. (If these two screens look similar, it's because they are; maps are assembled from “building blocks” and alien spawn points in these blocks are always the same, though they move around a bit if you give them time. Which we did not.)
With Col. Fishguts we're back to form; this was a moderately difficult shot considering the range and the level difference. The aliens are MC-ing the hell out Hades for some reason, but it's not sticking.
pecenipicek took a Sonic Cannon shot in the stomach, but his armor held. Response was a little rocky, the rookies aren't used to getting shot at, and pecenipicek and Rhymes_With_PSYCHO missed their return shots. Madcat didn't.
Kobrar is tearing the hell out of this mission. It's his first combat, six turns in, and he's got three kills already.
Well, they were rookies, it had to happen. Five people fired at this Sectoid and missed. Dilmah G then made them all look shockingly incompetent by taking it down with a shot from the hip at about thirty squares.
They're still attacking Hades with MC stuff, but aside from a brief dip in his morale (which went right back up with Dilmah G's kill), it's just not accomplishing anything. Matth also seems to be subjected to some of it now, but he's proving equally resistant.
(I checked after the mission; it turns out Hades has the lowest bravery stat on the team, with a flat 60, with everybody else somewhere between 61 and 70; they just kept trying to panic somebody who doesn't.)
Again with the five-people-miss bit, only this time it's Madcat on cleanup.
And, uh...mission complete. Breaching the UFO was never required, the entire crew came out to meet Squad 2 and got killed outside their ship.
Aside from a few real screwups in the accuracy department, that was a very good performance from a new squad. The haul of stuff we're not going to keep is worth about 2.7mil for further operations.
Squad 1 ran a pretty routine recovery mission again an alien Escort that was shot down in the North Atlantic. These small ships really don't handle it well when we hit them with Sonic Oscillators and it was in very bad shape, so material recovery was minimal, but dead Lobstermen are always welcome.
