08-21-2009, 08:12 AM
My name is Landon Webb. I remember it like it was yesterday.
I was young and brash. Nothing in the universe could ever harm me. I was a cocky snubjock and there was no situation I couldn't fly my way out of.
The first mission was a real treat. That day was the scariest day of my life. It's one thing when you escort the occasional independent trader and fight off a few Rogues. It's another thing when youre flying in a battle with guns blazing and missiles exploding all around you. I remember my wing commander told me if you aren't scared in a fight, he wouldn't fly beside you. Fear is a usefull tool sometimes. Fear will prevent you from engaging that incoming wing of fighters when your ship is barely holding together. Fear will help you make sober decisions. But only if you can control it.
In that first battle I didn't. I was about as much use to the Bretonians as a piece of floating scrap metal. Half of the time one of the other guys had to help me with a blood frenzied Kusari ripping into my fighter. Good guys though. They laughed it off and jokingly called me 'bait' for a couple of days instead of kicking me out. They gave me a second chance.
Not that the Kusari made it easy for me in any way. Their pilots are good at making you fight their type of combat. Twisting and turning is where the Chimaera excelled, the Templar did not. They draw you in with feints and punish you with breakneck high G turns you hopelessly try to match. So I decided to take a page out of their book. So I started my own feint. I'd let them drop on my six. As crazy as that sounds, the Templar can take quite a pounding so I don't recommend this in a lighter ship. Once he's on my six, I drop a screamer, kill my engines, face him, and blast away. If all is good, the screamer dropped his shields and my Advanced Splitters take him apart.
I got quite a bit of kills that way. But it wasn't until we were given Paladins that things got really interesting. These ships can go toe to toe in a turning fight with a Chimaera. In fact, it did better, but gave up quite a bit of armor in the process. No matter though. Those Kusari were so shocked their maneuverability edge went out the window, their fear took over them. Gone were the finesse maneuvers, the quick ripostes and jabs. Now the situation was reversed, and they didn't know what to do.
Our notoriety grew with every victory. We started marking our hulls for every kill we had. Kusari thought that was disrespecting their dead pilots, but we didn't care. It was psychological warfar. It threw them into a rage. It also threw them off their game plan. They started using brute force and numbers to counter us. I'm not going to lie, we took losses. But the more assest the KNF had to contribute to hunting us down, the more we relieved the other parts of the line. However, we adapted. Needless to say, the kill ratio was in our favour. By a lot.
I was losing friends to the point I stopped making new ones. Pretty soon, more volunteers arrived to my unit. Slowly, besides the commanding officers, our entire unit was volunteers. Those were good times for us. But unfortunately, it did end. Our notoriety was about to get us all killed.
* The man pauses for a moment *
We became complacent, overconfident and cocky. They were starting to realize that no matter the situation was, we would chase them until all Kusari ships were off our radar screens. We lost all our fear. And fear would've prevented us from doing what we did.
It was quite an ambush they set up for us. Whenever I think about it, I was always impressed by the impeccable timing of their waves. The first wave was a patrol of heavy hitting Chimaeras. They were all outfitted with mini Razors. These guys are usually their elite pilots, and they were certainly behaving that way. They reverted to our old strategy for defeating lighter craft. They were using brute force against our small craft. It was very crude, but very effective at keeping us off of them. Little did we notice, they were slowly leading us further and further into Kusari controlled space. We killed a few of them, but we always thought the pilots ejected a little early.
Then the second wave came. This time it was Wyrms. We hated those things. If it you actually manage to get one into your gunsight, it's small size meant it could effortlessly elude your fire. They drove you mad. But I digress. We were outnumbered fairly badly. Some of the guys were getting shot up pretty bad. Our flight leader told us break off and head back. We didn't get very far. The Wyrms were disrupting us. We realized we were not leaving here that easily.
Immediately the flight leader shouted to switch targets on the Wyrms. His scream was so loud I wanted to tear my helmet off. Switching off from the Chimaeras let them bring their firepower on us a lot easier than we liked. For every Wyrm we took down, one of our own was killed. We were almost there. Just two more little devils left, and we fly away clear. That was when the third wave came.
This time, they weren't joking around. Three gunboats descended on us. Our men started panicking, losing their focus. Killing the remaining Wyrms became harder. We had to do it quick before the gunboats were in range. Just as we managed to down the last one, our flight leader was bombarded with gunboat fire. His fighter, already damaged from dogfighting for the last ten minutes, was torn to pieces. He didn't have time to eject.
Another man went down. The rest of us engaged cruise engines and juked and dived for our lives. By the time the engines started, another volunteer was killed. The squadron went out with twelve and returned with two. Myself, and a greenhorn who was thoroughly traumatized from the experience. How we made out of there, I don't know. And that was the last mission I flew for the Bretonian Armed Forces.
Our squadron was nixed. It wasn't going to be reinforced and resupplied. Turns out, Bretonia stopped accepting volunteers. It was strange. You'd think they would take all the help they could get. But then we heard the news. Liberty was at war with Rheinland. Then it all made sense. So I returned to Liberty. I was considerably richer, plus I managed to secure the Splitters as part of my payment. Once you use them, you never want to use anything else.
However, I didn't join the war effort against Rheinland. For one, the Navy seemed to have it all under control. Second, I was tired of war. Its a rollercoaster you don't want to ride twice. The thrills were too much of a high, and the lows were crushingly depressing. I returned to being a mercenary. It was better this way. No politics, no friends getting killed every day. Just credits in my pocket.
Story doesn't end there though. Still plenty of it left to be written.
I was young and brash. Nothing in the universe could ever harm me. I was a cocky snubjock and there was no situation I couldn't fly my way out of.
The first mission was a real treat. That day was the scariest day of my life. It's one thing when you escort the occasional independent trader and fight off a few Rogues. It's another thing when youre flying in a battle with guns blazing and missiles exploding all around you. I remember my wing commander told me if you aren't scared in a fight, he wouldn't fly beside you. Fear is a usefull tool sometimes. Fear will prevent you from engaging that incoming wing of fighters when your ship is barely holding together. Fear will help you make sober decisions. But only if you can control it.
In that first battle I didn't. I was about as much use to the Bretonians as a piece of floating scrap metal. Half of the time one of the other guys had to help me with a blood frenzied Kusari ripping into my fighter. Good guys though. They laughed it off and jokingly called me 'bait' for a couple of days instead of kicking me out. They gave me a second chance.
Not that the Kusari made it easy for me in any way. Their pilots are good at making you fight their type of combat. Twisting and turning is where the Chimaera excelled, the Templar did not. They draw you in with feints and punish you with breakneck high G turns you hopelessly try to match. So I decided to take a page out of their book. So I started my own feint. I'd let them drop on my six. As crazy as that sounds, the Templar can take quite a pounding so I don't recommend this in a lighter ship. Once he's on my six, I drop a screamer, kill my engines, face him, and blast away. If all is good, the screamer dropped his shields and my Advanced Splitters take him apart.
I got quite a bit of kills that way. But it wasn't until we were given Paladins that things got really interesting. These ships can go toe to toe in a turning fight with a Chimaera. In fact, it did better, but gave up quite a bit of armor in the process. No matter though. Those Kusari were so shocked their maneuverability edge went out the window, their fear took over them. Gone were the finesse maneuvers, the quick ripostes and jabs. Now the situation was reversed, and they didn't know what to do.
Our notoriety grew with every victory. We started marking our hulls for every kill we had. Kusari thought that was disrespecting their dead pilots, but we didn't care. It was psychological warfar. It threw them into a rage. It also threw them off their game plan. They started using brute force and numbers to counter us. I'm not going to lie, we took losses. But the more assest the KNF had to contribute to hunting us down, the more we relieved the other parts of the line. However, we adapted. Needless to say, the kill ratio was in our favour. By a lot.
I was losing friends to the point I stopped making new ones. Pretty soon, more volunteers arrived to my unit. Slowly, besides the commanding officers, our entire unit was volunteers. Those were good times for us. But unfortunately, it did end. Our notoriety was about to get us all killed.
* The man pauses for a moment *
We became complacent, overconfident and cocky. They were starting to realize that no matter the situation was, we would chase them until all Kusari ships were off our radar screens. We lost all our fear. And fear would've prevented us from doing what we did.
It was quite an ambush they set up for us. Whenever I think about it, I was always impressed by the impeccable timing of their waves. The first wave was a patrol of heavy hitting Chimaeras. They were all outfitted with mini Razors. These guys are usually their elite pilots, and they were certainly behaving that way. They reverted to our old strategy for defeating lighter craft. They were using brute force against our small craft. It was very crude, but very effective at keeping us off of them. Little did we notice, they were slowly leading us further and further into Kusari controlled space. We killed a few of them, but we always thought the pilots ejected a little early.
Then the second wave came. This time it was Wyrms. We hated those things. If it you actually manage to get one into your gunsight, it's small size meant it could effortlessly elude your fire. They drove you mad. But I digress. We were outnumbered fairly badly. Some of the guys were getting shot up pretty bad. Our flight leader told us break off and head back. We didn't get very far. The Wyrms were disrupting us. We realized we were not leaving here that easily.
Immediately the flight leader shouted to switch targets on the Wyrms. His scream was so loud I wanted to tear my helmet off. Switching off from the Chimaeras let them bring their firepower on us a lot easier than we liked. For every Wyrm we took down, one of our own was killed. We were almost there. Just two more little devils left, and we fly away clear. That was when the third wave came.
This time, they weren't joking around. Three gunboats descended on us. Our men started panicking, losing their focus. Killing the remaining Wyrms became harder. We had to do it quick before the gunboats were in range. Just as we managed to down the last one, our flight leader was bombarded with gunboat fire. His fighter, already damaged from dogfighting for the last ten minutes, was torn to pieces. He didn't have time to eject.
Another man went down. The rest of us engaged cruise engines and juked and dived for our lives. By the time the engines started, another volunteer was killed. The squadron went out with twelve and returned with two. Myself, and a greenhorn who was thoroughly traumatized from the experience. How we made out of there, I don't know. And that was the last mission I flew for the Bretonian Armed Forces.
Our squadron was nixed. It wasn't going to be reinforced and resupplied. Turns out, Bretonia stopped accepting volunteers. It was strange. You'd think they would take all the help they could get. But then we heard the news. Liberty was at war with Rheinland. Then it all made sense. So I returned to Liberty. I was considerably richer, plus I managed to secure the Splitters as part of my payment. Once you use them, you never want to use anything else.
However, I didn't join the war effort against Rheinland. For one, the Navy seemed to have it all under control. Second, I was tired of war. Its a rollercoaster you don't want to ride twice. The thrills were too much of a high, and the lows were crushingly depressing. I returned to being a mercenary. It was better this way. No politics, no friends getting killed every day. Just credits in my pocket.
Story doesn't end there though. Still plenty of it left to be written.