Ship Boarding

I’ve been having a think. A fight between an anaconda with prismatic shields, boosters, cell banks, engineering, the whole shebang, and a cutter with a similar load out, is a battle of attrition.

Actually scratch that, it’s more of a war of attrition. It will take ages. Half an hour maybe, before shields go down. And then you start chip chipping away at the hull. This is a pain in the ass.

Now, imagine that you are in odyssey three years down the line. You are in your friends ship, he’s flying the anaconda against the cutter with two co-pilots, and you and the other 5 guys/girls are sitting in a special 5a compartment getting yourselves strapped into launch tubes. Or spit tubes, if you want a nod to pierce brown.

You sit there looking at a hud in front of your eyes, behind which is a chemically hardened pane of glass. Red lights start flashing and “clang” you get ejected forwards at high speed. You look to your left, and you see three missiles following your course – to your right, one other. The five of you aim towards the cutter – he deploys chaff in an attempt to confuse your targeting computer, but you take over manual control. Four of you make it – you punch through the shields and your little vessels dig their claws into the hull of the cutter.

The fifth was hit by a railgun round and was unfortunately disintegrated. He’ll wake up in a Medway at Mars High instantaneously and have to wait for you guys to pick him up. Also he’s had to pay a lot of insurance money to recover that limited edition colonia pistol which looks pretty but is useless, and is very annoyed about it.

The four of you on the cutter watch as the hardened glass pane in front of you glows, and then cuts a hole through the hull of the cutter. You drop into a corridor inside, through a glowing hole in what was once a rather attractive wooden ceiling. “Plop, plop, plop” – your three friends fall through the ceiling themselves and stand next to you.

The four of you unholster guns and set down the corridor towards the shield generators. You regret not paying for the imperial cutter schematic that was for sale at the last starport you were at. You get lost and find the galley. You eat an entire turkey and it replenishes your health. Actually no wait this isn’t Skyrim. That doesn’t happen.

As your team of four creeps through the cutter, the crew members of the cutter try to intercept you and gun you down. You 360 noscope them and then teabag them to assert dominance. Scrubs.

You make it to the shield generator and shut it down from inside. You then go to the thrusters and kill them as well, leaving the cutter dead in the water. Because you turned them off at the source, the crew cannot turn them on from the cockpit – they must go to the modules and turn them on in person.

Meanwhile, back on the anaconda, your captain saw the notification saying the 5 launch tubes had been fired around 3 minutes ago. Two minutes later, the cutters shield went down, and a minute after that, the thrusters stopped working. Fantastic. He pounds the cutter with plasma accelerators and rail guns, and explodes it. You use an escape pod and get out. Or alternatively he could launch a hatch breaker limpet and take all the cargo. Or take the crew hostage. I don’t know.

You all get back in the anaconda and fly back to mars high to collect a bounty and sell the 190 tons of laptops that you took from the cutter. You jump into the station, and a sidewinder deliberately flies into you at twice the speed of sound and explodes. The station promptly kills all of you. You instantly wake up in the Medway.

TLDR: boarding ships would make battles against big ships faster.