DARKSTAR CAMPAIGN UPDATE: DUCHESS ANNABEL’S WAR IS OVER
Pirates vs. Japanese - Darkstar Live (Jan 19)
Battle report of a Darkstar Live game between community members @umbramancer (Japanese) and @nagek92 (Pirates)
August, 2519 – Outer Gas Giant, Eisenwolf Colony (Gliese 570 / 33 G. Libra)
Duchess Annabel’s War
Situation: In the wake of recent battles at Harwood’s Hope / Gliese 682 star system (Royal Navy, the Prussian Kriegsmarine, and the “Black Dragons” of the Khitan-Tunguska Free State), the Prussians and Black Dragons are pulling out, towing crippled and damaged ships back to Kriegsmarine bases at Eisenwolf Colony (Gliese 570). The Prussians’ allies, the Imperial Japanese, are also sending a handful of ships to help cover this evacuation, as the Prussians themselves and especially the Black Dragons have been handled rather roughly at Harwood’s Hope.
As one such convoy begins to decelerate towards a large moon orbiting one of Eisenwolf’s outer gas giants, however, they are intercepted by a cadre of rogue pirates, hoping to pick up some easy salvage from the derelict Prussian and Black Dragon warships. The pirates are intercepted by the Japanese security flotilla short of the derelict convoy however, and a battle is set to start. Whoever winds up controlling this battlespace will have access to the crippled Black Dragon warships, either to escort them to port … or chop them up for scrap.
Also, Umbramancer has made a great little video of his own US-Japanese Darkstar Game on the D20 online platform. Check out the video and give it a like!
So again, here are the forces squaring off. This is a very small battle point-wise, little more than a skirmish. One dated Japanese destroyer (IJN Harata - Kagumo class - 34 points) and one Japanese strike frigate (IJN Urakaze - Akashi class - 21 points) and two fighters start off on the Japanese side. On the Pirate side is a flotilla of stolen / sold / "acquired" Corporate Consortium raiders - the Baroness class "security frigate" Jasmine's Diamond, the Twilight class blockade runner Fast Company, and two Rogue glass gunboats Razor III and Stiletto. Now, we're trying to simulate something of a pirate "raid" here or ambush, so I'm experimenting with some scenario rules. The Japanese will automatically lose the first turn of initiative, and once they enter the table, the pirate raiders can then enter from ANY SIDE of the map sheet not covered by a planet. To balance for this advantage, I'm giving the Japanese another four fighters. 
Here is the situation at the end of movement, Turn 01. The Japanese have entered the table from the upper left, turning hard to starboard to steer away from the planet. Gravity effects this turn, and this is where they wind up. Clearly Umbramancer was hoping to screen his vulnerable stern areas against the pirates sure to pop in behind him. But he doesn't hug the planet quite tightly enough, giving the pirates enough room to sweep in from the same general vector, turn to starboard, and point their bows (loaded with deadly Class V "Sparta V" torpedoes right against the stern of the Japanese warships.
The fire phase of Turn 1. The Pirate approach, while awesome, wasn't quite perfect, as those two gunboats are JUST out of position to hit the stern of the frigate Urakaze, their forward weapons will instead hit the starboard quarter. Still, forward pirate guns hammer the Urakaze's fantail. They are MURDEROUSLY accurate with +3 CICs, but they have very few weapons and they are very light. This disadvantage is further exacerbated by the f act that only forward-mounted pirate weapons can fire. But the pirates get solid hit locations, and manage to shut down the Urakaze's engines and set her adrift and crippled in space. Meanwhile, the Urakaze has NO aft-mounted weapons (as a strike frigate, everything is mounted forward). So she actually never fires a shot in response. The larger destroyer Harata, however, hits the Fast Company with aft 40KG plasma projector and 5GW rail guns, all but blowing off the front half of this very small ship.
The Urakaze careens away while the Fast Company tries to limp clear of the firing. The Hatara pursues her (the Harata actually beats her on initiative), but can't quite get a broadside on the Fast Company due to the gravity of that gas giant's moon. The pirates turn to port and rush after the Harata, the Jasmine's Diamond crossing her T and the two gunboats rushing past her to Harata's bow with their aft weapons. Nagek92's strategy here is to deny the Harata any use of her aft weapons, deftly using geometry and fire arcs to take away half of the larger Japanese ship's firepower. True, this means no weapons will hit the Harata's vulnerable engines, but with this much firepower coming at the Harata's bow, especially that hail of Sparta XII torpedoes, the Japanese destroyer is in big trouble. Japanese fighters and scouts will try to shoot some of these down, while the other Japanese fighters will try to finish off the heavily-damaged Fast Company by hitting her ravaged, unshielded bow.
Things just don't go well for the Japanese in this fire phase, at all. The Harata's ENTIRE BARRAGE completely misses the Jasmine's Diamond. I actually re-ran this firephase as an example and showed how a solid hit from the Harata would have easily crippled the Jasmine's Diamond, instantly knocking out the largest pirate ship and bringing the game back into balance. But the Japanese missed ... with EVERYTHING, so that's the result we stay with. Meanwhile Pirate mass drivers roll several 5s and 6s, mauling the Japanese fighters before they can knock out the Fast Company or shoot down incoming pirate torpedoes. These torpedoes slam into the Harata, all but ripping the front end clean off the 52,000 ton destroyer. Guns follow up, but this Kagumo-class destroyer is a tough old girl and she remains in the fight, although with four boxes of core damage - she has an 80% chance to break off. She does so, and must now make best speed toward the closest corner of the map. Effectively, this battle is already over.
The Fast Company continues to get clear, as the Harata likewise hair-pin turns about and makes best breakaway speed. Her bridge has been hit, her forward magazine has been hit, three mass driver mounts are knocked down, she has no forward shields, post-battle campaign resolution will show that her captain is in fact already killed, the XO apparently gave the order to break off. But again, luck just isn't with the Japanese. Those scouts pursuing the Fast Company really could have knocked her out with just some slightly better luck on the dice, but it's tough to knock out even a heavily damaged corvette with only "machine guns." Still, it could have happened, about a 1:2 chance. Meanwhile, the forward batteries of the Harata (minus one 5-GW rail gun turret lost earlier) damned near blows the port quarter off the Jasmine's Diamond. The largest pirtae ship on the table AGAIN gets lucky as the exact hit locations of those hits aren't the best, they fail to hit any engines or reactors. Then they could have caused the Jasmine's Diamond to "fail morale" and break off the action, but again the Jasmine's Diamond makes that roll. Just one of these die rolls could at least turned this game in a closer affair, maybe even a draw, but the Japanese just can't buy a break this afternoon. Meanwhile, the Harata is finally crippled, and the game is officially over. 
Here's the WRS for the Fast Company, hit just once by the Harata's aft weapons on Turn 1, then pinged by long-range plasma projector fire on the stern on Turn 3 as she tried to get clear.
The hapless Harata, fully "cored" like an apple from bow to stern. Post-battle resolution (Warship Recovery and Captain Survival Checks) will show that not only was the captain killed when that laser cut through the bridge, but the XO was taken prisoner by the pirates when the Harata was BOARDED and CAPTURED! Then, the Urakaze was about to be boarded by the crew managed to evacuate and blow the ship up before she fell into pirate hands. In retrospect and in the course of writing this battle report, it occurs to me that allowing the pirates to drop in behind the Japanese like that really was a big advantage, much bigger than the four fighters with which I sought to balance it. Furthermore, those Japanese fighters never even launched their missiles. Twice the Jasmine’s Diamond should have been destroyed or at least crippled, and the Fast Company was also more than a little fortunate to escape under her own power.
Please understand, I’m not taking away from @nagek92’s win. He saw an advantage and took it, correctly recognizing that his main weapons were his torpedo arrays, not his gun broadsides. He did an absolutely fantastic job on his game of Darkstar, not only smashing this small Japanese battle group but walking away with a captured destroyer (far larger than any pirate ship currently in canon).
Now, the Japanese really love these Kagumo class destroyers. As you may have seen in the write ups in the Darkstar book, they are 35-40 years old, and sometimes have fathers and sons serving together in a “legacy ship” media program. Long story short, the pirates probably can’t use this ship, but could probably ransom her back to the Japanese in exchange for a much newer, faster, and technologically advanced Takashiro class destroyer, or enough money to buy several more Baroness class frigates from the Corporate Consortium that really shouldn’t be selling them to outlaws anyway.
Whatever the case, the Pirates definitely walked away with a win on this one!
Yo ho, yo ho! A pirate’s life for me!
@oriskany we newbies have cost the IJN a few battles (or in my case I lost in strategically view even if I did keep the field)
Well, @rasmus – this one may have been a perfect storm of (1) unbalanced scenario design on my part (2) solid play by the opposing player (3) horrific rolls by the Japanese player (4) great rolls by the enemy player. 😀 I am replaying the scenario right now solitaire, just to test it and see if there is a winning move for the Japanese player. Honestly, I think there might be, although of course I designed the game and have been playing it for almost seven years. 🙂 But a much slower approach, a hairpin turn, then allowing the moon’s… Read more »
@oriskany See my answer on the replay
Yeah, I think we’re on the same page. Now I just have a lot more work to do. 😐