LogYuriRT1-2010/11/12-Jason-1

Game log for the 2010/11/12 session of Rogue Trader: After the Gold Rush, as taken by Jason

Nagivator Simoom and Seneschal Corvus suddenly come down with space dysentery.

The Foresight wants to send people aboard to observe our drives. (Remember that Opiter Castus got mail from them last session? Of course you don't.) Opiter would rather prefer not to have observers in his engine room, but refusing would put us in an awkward position. Lord Captain Machariel invites one aboard to discuss it, and so at the appointed hour, a Tech-Priest teleports aboard. Marneus invites them to help repair the space station, and they're on board with that plan. An arrangement that will benefit everyone - how very un-Imperial of us. They send over about 300 human and 100 servitor-grade Mechanicus staff.

We depart Footfall, piously hoping that Jahazer's assistants land us someplace other than the interior of a star. They course will require twenty days in warp. Our chances of avoiding warp storms suddenly seem awful low. We suffer from strange dreams and odd whispering sounds in our waking hours, a phenomenon we attribute to the ship's ghosts being uncomfortable with the Mechanicus aboard. We also experience a ... warp storm! The edge of the Cauldron tosses us about a bit, but we can ride it out without serious difficulty. On the far side of the Cauldron, we experience further hauntings, but nothing worse. As we arrive, the backup navigators outdo themselves, dropping the ship safely out of warp on an anticipated vector.

Our Augery Arrays sweep the system, and the senior operator reports that they've sighted another ship. It's docked at the station, and it's not one of ours. The Lord Captain orders us to sneak up on it, forcing Anastasia to attempt the Run Silent maneuver.

Your faithful correspondent got paged to deal with a situation at work, and when I returned, Solo Drakban was shooting at Orks. The dorsal battery scores three very solid hits on the Ork vessel before the filthy greenskins become aware that the bringers of the Emperor's Grace have entered the system. The Ork ship performs an emergency undock, which breaks the seal on the docking tube and spaces a bunch of orks. Return fire from their prow guns goes wide. With the Orks undocked, the Lord Captain orders weapons free. Anastasia, fearing the greenskins will try to ram, Comes To New Heading and performs astonishing feats of flying, dancing handily around the enemy in a most un-Imperial kind of way. Jotham's attempt to inspire the ventral weapons crew with his militant brand of religion fails, and none of Drakban s weapons land sigificant hits. Our void shields deflect the return fire, and our salvo, more accurate now that we're on a steady course again, knocks out their filthy xeno sensors. With the ships settled out on their new courses, Marneus' plan has worked - the Orks are chasing us away from the station. Our fire nails them, delivering solid hits from both keel and dorsal batteries, and inflicting significant damage on the Orks. The xeno Captain begins lining his ship up to ram, but Anastasia runs rings around him. Their attempt to overdrive their engines causes them to stall out briefly, making it much easier for us to escape their ramming efforts. Sadly our shooting takes a turn for the worse, and the Orks, overdriving their engines make up some distance on us. Anastasia cuts inside the Orks, forcing them to go wide to get back on a ramming heading. Shooting continues to be inconclusive as the Ork ship gets back on our tail... until the Ork captain blows a roll and his drives fail completely, making him our biotch. We begin to circle around, and the maneuvering throws our fire off. The Orks' salvo as we try to leave their firing arc takes out our Gellar field. Opiter gets Lucius to attempt to lock weapons on, and with a little help from the Machine Spirit, he succeeds. Sadly we can't penetrate their armor. As we come around behind them, our keel weapons score a critical hit, causing their tech sprites to go surly and disabling their shields, warp drive, life support, bridge, and macrocannons. At this point the GM rules that we can just park behind them and blast away until they all die. Huzzah! Opiter repairs our Gellar field and all's well with the world, except for the casualties.

Lucius sends a message home telling them that we arrived and they should send tugs. Oops, doubles on the roll to send the message! Warp ghosts fill the air and float about howling in pain. You learn to live with that sort of thing on a haunted ship.

The Lord Captain orders a scan of the station. We discover that it's armed, which makes for a nice bonus. It also has a couple thousand Orks aboard. We board the station and attack some Orks. Cleanse! One awesome kill-crazed montage later, we've stunned, boltered, spaced, or incinerated a couple thousand Orks, and the station has been reclaimed for the God-Emperor of Mankind. Jotham tends to the wounded, but we have only ~50 killed.

A week later, more Machariel ships arrive to help with the work. Our efforts will now be supported by a couple large cargo ships and a few small gunboats. We begin by dragging the station out of the inner system into deep space - not through the warp, just in real space. It takes a few weeks to drag it out through the gravity tides, rocks, and other nonsense, but that just gives us time to work on the ship and the station. We get both fixed up, and partial life support on the station - partial meaning the air is foul and gravity is fractional, but you won't die if you take your suit off.