>>5593604“How best to do that, though.” You muse, belatedly responding to your Nav officer.
“Sci, are they maintaining their course? How long until they intercept our impromptu mines? How long until they intercept us for that matter?”
“They’re pushing their vessel hard, harder than they should be able to with their SCRAM positioning.” EoN responds promptly, “Even a dozen ion drives couldn't make up half the extra acceleration. I think this heavily favours the theory that they have a voidcore, Sir, a powerful one. At their current rate, they’ll cross our torpedoes path in approximately ten minutes and they reach knife-fighting range with us in forty.” She concludes with a slight tilt to her head indicating her concern.
Your nav officer lets out a low whistle, “That’s some acceleration…” she mutters.
“Captain,” Your Ops officer and XO grabs your attention with a formal salute, his shrill voice suddenly serious, “should we not consider moving the Pedy? If we maintain a straight line parallel with their approach vector they’ll stay on course for our nukes but we could buy time for repairs and more torpedo volleys. We have the firepower advantage if we can buy the time and space to use it.”
“Or we could press forward!” Cleo butts in eagerly, “Burn right towards them, get our closing velocity so high that not even the computer could make an accurate shot, let alone their gunners! Then we can leave torpedoes in our wake to clean them up.” Your Ulveng officer seems well and truly over her brief existential crisis and wants to rush headlong into danger.
“Any advantage of staying still, Tac?” You look over to Coen, drawing him into the discussion.
“Our decoy drones work best when we are minimising our signature.” He begins deftly, as if he’d already prepared his speech ahead of time, “It’s powerful enough to mimic our TFA and ion drive but becomes less effective as we use our SCRAM and coredrive. We could also potentially deploy our aerospace fighters as additional point defence if we avoid more than light acceleration.”
Historically the use of your meagre stock of pilots and fighters for such a task has had only moderate results with a high casualty rate. Though that doesn’t seem to phase your Tactical officer, you asked and he delivered.
What should you do?
>Accelerate away from the unknown adversary, buying time and getting you closer to the dive limit where you can escape into subspace.>Accelerate towards your foe. This will leave you further in-system - little of value remains here. You could attempt to speed past them or fight them as you pass. (Which?)>Remain stationary to better ward off their current or subsequent attacks with your drones and/or Aerospace craft.>Something else. Write in. 