Talk:Enceladus Aerospace Fleet/@comment-27820070-20140829195755/@comment-11135771-20140924193936

OOC: Sorry it took me so long to get to this. First I forgot about I, and then I got my laptop confiscated. Anyway, here starts the battle.

Alarms blared inside the central command post of the EAF as the colony's sensors noted a distinctive rippling in the fabric of space which signified a large group of ships about to warp in.

Inside the command center, all available personnel ran to their battle stations. The atmosphere inside the facility was surprisingly calm considering the Prometheus fleet about to warp in, with orders crisply being given and carried out without more than a hint of panic. For this was not an unexpected attack; it had been anticipated ever since EAF forces shot down a Prometheus stealth cruiser during the nuclear winter, and preparations had been made. Most of the base personnel, save for the very new ones, had been training for months for exactly this situation, and now they followed the established procedures to the letter.

The voice of admiral Miranda Atkins, currently on the bridge of the Blackbird, came over the command center speakers. "Warp field disruptors one through six, arm and then hold. Stand by to activate on my mark."

On the base's periphery, at regular intervals, six large, circular grey doors on the surface of Enceladus split and slid open with a hiss, the atmosphere within venting into the vacuum of space. Three-sided, roughly pyramidal towers around eighty metres in height slowly rose from each bay, mounted on small hydraulic platforms only a little larger than the bases of the towers themselves. After reaching their full height, the sides of the towers unfolded at the top, panels repositioning to reveal what appeared to be some kind of blue-green orbs of energy, visibly surrounded in arcing electricity.

The warp disruptor towers were a relatively recent development, but one of the few real advantages that the EAF possessed over Prometheus. They worked by emitting a field that could "trick" ships' warp drives, making them react as if the fields were solid material. Warp drives were incapable of moving matter to a location which coincided with that of another object, and attempting to do so would result in the arriving ship being shunted to a nearby location. The disruptor towers could imitate this effect, hopefully resulting in enemy formations being wildly disorganized and the crews disoriented upon arriving in locations some distance from their intended destinations.

Atkins watched a screen on the bridge of her ship, indicating the estimated time until the Prometheus fleet would exit warp, precisely calculated by computers processing data received from the sensors. She counted down the seconds, trying to time this so that the disruptors would activate fully before the enemy dropped out of warp, but close enough that they wouldn't have time to change course upon detecting the devices. ''Ten... nine... eight... seven... six...''

"Mark."

Outside, the tops of the disruptor towers produced a bright teal flare as they simultaneously activated, sending out an almost invisible wave which radiated outward from the orbs inside the towers in a spherical pattern like the shockwave from an explosion before stabilizing as spheres around fifty kilometres in diameter around each disruptor.

Seconds later, the Prometheus ships arrived in bright flashes of white light... except that no ships appeared. A fraction of a second later, there was another, much less organized set of flashes around twenty-five kilometres from the perimeter as the enemy vessels careened out of warp in random directions. They reorganized themselves in short order, but the disruptors had done their jobs; the Prometheus fleet was now too far away to immediately deploy their short range armaments, but well within the range of the base's LRM silos, which wasted no time in opening and deploying streams of anti-capital missiles toward the enemy.

Meanwhile, the base's point defense systems came online, numerous fixed turrets swivelling to face the Prometheus ships and opening fire with railguns, high intensity lasers, and particle beams. Smaller defense turrets remained undeployed inside armored compartments, waiting for the enemy to close within their effective range.

The EAF fleet itself was already airborne over the base, moving into position under conventional thrust. The decision had been made to leave the warp disruptors online in order to inhibit the enemy ships from using their blinking abilities, but this also prevented the EAF ships from warping. The fleet stayed at a distance, waiting for the Prometheus ships to be weakened by the other defenses before engaging. They began firing on the enemy with only their longest ranged armaments; ship mounted variants of the same weapon types as the long range ground installations were using. The carriers scrambled their fighters and strike craft, but these stayed near the fleet, waiting to strike until the enemy had more targets to choose from to avoid them being picked off as easily.

OOC: Current EAF fleet is as follows:

- 1 Blackbird-class flagship/EW vessel - 10 Mantis II-class battlecarriers - 6 Tranquility II-class carriers - 24 Goshawk II-class light battlecruisers - 18 Condor-class heavy transports (not airborne currently, will only be used in combat if absolutely necessary)

Your fleet is currently a bit scattered but all around 35km from the center of the base (25 from the perimeter where the disruptors and turrets are), and are being fired on by 12 fixed LRM silos (think of them as MCMs that are specialized for space combat against large ships, with more powerful and faster moving missiles but a slow launch rate), the six disruptors, 22 particle beam turrets (each doing around 2/3 the damage of a doomsday cannon shell and firing at the speed of a 204cm), 46 heavy laser turrets (like a 204cm in terms of firepower, but with its damage being spread over a continuous beam instead of all at once), and 30 turret mounted heavy railguns (pretty much exactly like a doomsday cannon, but does twice as much damage instead of firing two shots, and the projectile is much smaller and faster).

The EAF fleet has the same weapon types firing, more or less. The Mantis IIs have what you can see in the picture plus four lasers and a particle beam clustered near the front (all forward-facing), the Tranquility IIs have two particle beams mounted on the wings (forward facing), the Goshawk IIs have two lasers in the wings (turreted), and the Blackbird has four particle beams along each side and four more at the front (side ones turreted, front ones fixed). Plus MCMs from the ships that have them.