Post by ramboneil on Apr 27, 2013 23:02:26 GMT -5
Faction: Republic Military
Department: Navy
Rank: Ensign [tactical officer]
Name: John D. Smith
Race: Human
Age: 23
Height: 5 foot 11 inches
Weight: 162 pounds
Birth place: Upper-middle Coruscant middle class sector
Appearance: He is a rather average person with an average height and an average body weight. He isn't thin but his isn't built either, his build could best be described as wiry. He has dark brown hair and chocolaty brown eyes on a roundish but well defined face. When he isn't in his navy uniform or his EVA suit, he is usually in a dark blue shirt with long sleeves and a black jacket and either digi-cam cargo pants or jeans. He wears a white glove with black streaks running lengthwise down each of the fingers on his right hand.
Personality:
Skills: Tactical and Strategic command, computer programming knowledge, dabbles in engineering.
Attributes:
Physical Strength: 4 (he hit the books, not the gym)
Intelligence: 7
Speed: 4
Leadership: 3
Unarmed: 2
Melee Weapons: 2
Ranged Weapons: 4 (they do teach you to shoot things in officer school don't they?)
Bio:
[early life 0-6]
He grew up in a good neighborhood to a navy officer and a low level diplomatic envoy. As a baby, he was rather passive, preferring to read and listen to fairy tales and stories rather than play with the other little children. Often he would simply sit at home and either watch TV, listen to the radio, watch his parents fiddle with the computer or play around with his little models of all sorts of ships. Really, there wasn't much that can be written about the first six years because other than eating, sleeping, sleeping some more and taking midday naps, there wasn't much else that happened.
[School at last 6-13]
When John was enrolled in an elementary school close to his home. On the first day of school, he met pretty much the only two friends he would ever have until college. The first person he met was Dan who was siting alone by himself, so John walked up to him. The conversation went kinda like this:
"Hello"
"Hello"
*awkward silence*
"Your face looks funny." (it really didn't)
"And so does yours." (it was a response)
*more awkward silence*
"Wanna be friends?"
"Sure!"
Riveting dialogue no? Anyway, Dan became Johns first friend and they hung around each other until about the middle of the day. That was until John walked up to a random Twi'lek girl. Here's just about how it went:
*John walks up to Arishka*
"Huh, so you're a girl."
"and you're a boy."
"Of course. What else would I be?"
*awkward silence*
"Sooo ... What now?"
"wanna be friends?"
"Kay!"
And a beautiful friendship was born. They tried to make friends a couple more times but it didn't work so the three just shrugged it off and gave up. They actually were in the same home room and that was pretty cool. During lunch time they would just sit around in companionable silence and eat their lunches, often trading food or sometimes discussing matters of interest. Some of these matters involved how funny some teacher's face was or something of equal or greater triviality. Really, nothing happened.
[high school 13-18]
Middle school life was not very different for the trio of bumbling buddies. Having very little to do in their spare time and due to Arishka’s complaints of John getting way too lazy for their own good, the three rolled a dice to determine what two electives the three would take. Arishka got Chess club, Dan got Introduction to Engineering, and John got Computer Sciences. It was one of the more fun times of their lives.
[collage 19-22]
John’s father and mother, though they were a navy officer and a diplomat respectively, did not have very much money. Much of their income went into paying mortgage for the home in the upper-middle parts of Coruscant since the lower regions were simply not a place for a child to grow up in. Thus, John had to look other places for sources of income. Like his father and grandfather, and great grandmother before him, and thousands of others before him, he turned to the Republic Navy as his ticket to college. He appealed to the Navy and with the endorsement of his father, he was able to get a scholarship from the Republic navy in exchange for joining the navy as soon as he graduated. John simply took a glancing look at the contract and signed his name. Shortly afterward, Arishka and Dan caught wind of what he did and followed him in.
They went off to college. The same one. Relatively little happened in that college, other than John suddenly acquiring a ravenous and uncontrollable craving for sweet things half way through freshman year. Thankfully, this petered off over the course of the year. John, as in high school and every year before that since he was born, was not a social butterfly and mostly stayed in his dorm, studying computer science and also studying a bit of engineering as well, just because he found that interesting. There wasn't much else he did
[Navy Days 22- ]
Command school kinda sucked and lasted six months. Unfortunately, the three prospective officers were put into different units so they decided that after everything was over, they would get back in touch. During the first month, he was drilled on the basic stuff, uniform maintenance and other such whatnot that would keep the high ranking pencil pushers off his back. He also managed to get by the Physical Training section, he managed to at least keep the sergeant off his back during inspections, which was good. A week into training, they were visited by a republic senator and John managed to get his unit into well enough shape that the senator was impressed and commended the Sergeant of the unit. He got a little bit of slack due to that incident.
After the month of boredom was finished, he began on the finer nuances of a command position and while his PT scores stayed around average, he received high marks for his creativity, his ability to cope with changing conditions, and a higher then average level of strategic planning. This continued for two more months. The remaining was pretty much the same, except there was also a mandatory shooting class, so while John Smith started low, he managed to get good enough with the pistol to take the average slot. His academics were still strong, but he continued to look like a shrimp despite the sergeant's efforts.
When he graduated from command school, he took his small amount of free time to track down his friends and when they compared grades, he found that even though he had the highest academic grade, his overall grade was unsurprisingly average. Still, they had managed to get out of command school which sucked, and in order to celebrate, the reformed trio went off to the nearest bar and promptly got wasted. John woke up the next morning with a hangover, but he managed to shake it off and get his uniform in order. He would have gotten the other two as well, but since the blushing wrecks were still in shock about something John felt he did not want to inquire about, he left them the time to report to some navy office.
As it turned out, he was given the rank of Ensign, the lowest rank of commissioned officer, and was assigned to a guided missile corvette as a tactical officer. The ship in turn was assigned to a captain who was also relatively new to the job and had developed a rather unconventional mindset, so the Navy decided to put an unconventional commander in charge of an unconventional ship. The reason why the ship was unconventional was because of its designation as a guided missile corvette and while an experiment was tried, the ship had been eventually mothballed. The only reason why it had been reactivated was because the Navy had a surplus of junior officers and funds, so they took the mothballs with the most promise and got them shipshape again. The ship turned out to be an Elisha-class guided missile corvette simply named Cobalt.
This post was by no means illustrious. The main reason why John had received an officer position in the first place was because the ship needed officers and he had been both qualified enough and unimportant enough that he could be assigned to what was supposed to be a dead end job. Well,
Since the ship was made by a foreign company that the republic didn't have many ties to, the service members of the Cobalt had to learn everything from surprisingly well written instruction manuals. Attempting to get some bang for their buck, It wasn't long before the republic lined up a low key mission just to do something with the ships taking up space at dry-dock.
[first mission]
Cobalt was assigned to guarding a humanitarian mission to a desert backwater planet that had been suffering from a long and brutal civil war. The ship in question was a CC-4400 Bulk freighter that was hauling water, food, mineral resources, equipment and other things necessary to establish a successful government and country. The other ship was a Moirail-class medium freighter carrying things like ammo and additional spare parts for the Cobalt. The crew of the Cobalt hoped that the mission would be a relatively uneventful trip and that would wrap up in perhaps a week or two and then they could safely go home and drink tea or something.
Unfortunately, this was not to be. A pirate scout came along through the miniature asteroid field that surrounded the planet and saw the three ships moving along at a decent pace, and after a closer examination, saw that the only ship that was armed only had two readily identifiable guns. The scout alerted a small pirate fleet of perhaps three modified light freighters.
The Elisha’s highly advanced sensors managed to detect the pirate fleet as soon as they jumped into the system. After some deliberation, the captain decided to engage the pirates. Using the highly advanced computer systems on the ship, the crew of the Cobalt launched a cruise missile at the approaching pirates. Utilizing the computer systems that were admittedly far beyond anything mere pirates could manage, the missile was able to dodge any AA fire and when it impacted, the incredibly powerful warhead on the missile was able to defeat the shields and hull of one of the pirates. The pirate ship that was hit was not killed but it could no longer fight or maneuver.
The pirates were simply too stunned to do much else other then gawk. They shouldn't even be within weapons range yet. Even the massive freighter was only a single pixel on the view screen. This shock allowed a volley of 4 cruise missiles and three judiciously aimed hellbore blasts to destroy the attackers.
The mission that was supposed to last a week lasted for three full months. During those months, the mission was attacked by pirates, slavers, an overly confident mandalorian, and some belligerents of the civil war on the planet.
For the first month, John was constantly busy at the tactical panel of the ship. He didn't think about much other then the mission, keeping the Cobalt safe and intact, and daydreaming about punching the pencil pusher who had assigned him the crazy mission in the first place. The lessons he learned in command school were applied in this situation and modified appropriately to better complete the mission. The captain gave his approval during the second week in and the bridge crew began having more confidence that they would probably get out of the situation alive. Over the entire course of a month, he had logged an average of 16 hours per day at the tactical panel (excluding the times when he simply crashed from sleep deprivation), and managed the Cobalt through 21 separate and attacks, totaling up the Cobalt's kill count to 10 modified light freighters, a modified medium freighter, 21 modified shuttles, 18 fighters and fighter analogues, 2 bomber analogues, 1 kamikaze ship (extremists), 3 frigates (extremists), 4 gunboats (extremists), and one destroyer that was attacked and hijacked by extremists. The situation was so frantic that when reloading the VLS, the crews were forced to reload only a few cells at once so that the ship would be ready at all times. Luckily, a couple of allies from one of the factions of the civil war stuck around and prevented the Cobalt from sustaining much more then superficial damage during intense attacks.
During the second month, the action slacked off almost completely, and now the crew had to deal with a new threat, boredom. They weren't allowed shore leave, the escalating civil war made that impossible, and there were precious few things to do on the ship. Eventually, even the stacks of paperwork dried up, and working together with the ship's crew, they managed to get some things together to hook up a holonet port and connect the spare computer terminals to the holonet. He ended up doing two things. The first thing he did was download and play a game called Space Battleship VI: Platinum Edition onto a personal terminal and beginning a rivalry with some chick who was nicknamed "The Triarius" and, using his skills honed in actual combat to rise to Grand Master level.
The second thing he did was the navigation officer who was a red female twi'lek who was admittedly, rather hot. The entire bridge crew was continually stir crazy, especially since the captain was put into the infirmary during an incident with an extremely cocky mandelorian.
The mandelorian had at some point or another, been passed the idiot ball (or was extremely inebriated), because he attempted to approach the Cobalt and the cargo ship under a false but friendly IFF. Even though the cobalt continued to send out warnings to not approach, the mandelorian kept coming until the captain ordered John to fire a warning shot across the bow. In an act of stupidity, the mandlorian attempted to board the Cobalt, it was too late to fire cruise missiles, the blast would damage the ship. The crew jumped into EVA suits and when the captain took several marines and went to assess what the heck was going on, the mandelorian jumped out in the way from an airlock and shot the captain in the shoulder, not being able to finish off the captain because of the marines pumping automatic laser fire into a now very dead armored mando corpse. The injury was nonlethal and the captain was expected to make a full recovery, but he had to stay in the infirmary for another month. This put the XO in charge with some input from John and the rest of the bridge crew.
The third month was simply frustrating, attacks on the freighter picked up again, though, not at the frantic pace that the first month had reached. In that time, the Moirail started to run low on munitions, spare parts, fuel, food, and medical supplies.
The mission ended and after the report of the mission got back to high command, the Cobalt returned to republic space. Because the crew of the Cobalt was out of ammunition, coffee, patience, and the mental fortitude to not punch someone in the face, high command decided to let the crew of the Cobalt return from duty and go and do whatever. Two months later, the Cobalt was refitted with some newer, faster, and more powerful missiles that the republic had ordered, impressed by the weapon’s capabilities.
[an annoying mission and a boring mission]
After the break, the crew of the Cobalt was assigned to another mission, this time, an escort mission from a planet that wished to join the galactic republic. The Cobalt was assigned to pick up the representative. The captain was a bit busy and they had been assigned another tactical officer and since the captain was a bit busy and the new tactical officer needed some on-the-job training before he was reassigned, this left John to deal with the representative.
As it turned out, the system of Government on the planet was largely Feudal, a planet ruled by an elite nobility who had absolute power and had turned into a class of completely spoiled brats. The representative happened to be a major lord on the planet who generally did not respect anyone who was not nobility. Unfortunately for John, he did not count as nobility and was treated almost like a slave along with the entire section of the ship who was assigned to help make the prick as comfortable as possible.
The situation was so bad that even with republic marines on board to ensure the noble's safe passage, the crew began muttering about possible mutiny. "The crew" also included the captain, the new tactical officer, the entire bridge crew, the XO, the kitchen staff, the standard shipboard marines, the engineering section, and one of the republic guards. Luckily for the representative, the Cobalt arrived at Coruscant before anything drastic could be done. The Captain made a very bold statement about how he would turn down any mission having to do with that planet again once they landed. When a higher ranking officer chided the captain on how he should have more patience for foreign dignitaries, John punched the guy in the face. The subsequent court martial request was redacted when the Representative in question was turned away from the senate as a Persona Non Grata after blatantly offending 35% of the senate plus the senate guards and the chancellor.
With almost the entire crew of the Cobalt on the edge of mutiny, high command decided to cut the guys a break and allowed for about two weeks of shore leave. Almost as soon as the word got out, the Cobalt was promptly emptied except for a rather pissed off skeleton crew. The remainder of the crew that was not on the ship promptly got wasted. After shaking off the hangover, John contacted his friends and found that they too were stationed on ships, Arishka was a linguistics officer and Dan was an engineering officer. All three of them were ensigns.
John told them all about what he was doing and what he had done, leaving out the part about his last mission which he did not want to remember. He then found a store where he bought a small laptop which he could use to surf the holo-net and look at videos of talking animals on some new video sharing sight. The remainder of the time was spent either partying, or camping outside the local game store for Space Battleship VII and the first of the newer series, Star Commander: Total War. One week in, hew was rotated back to the ship to replace the guys on the ship. This allowed him to play his games and send E-mails to his family to let them know he was alright.
After the two weeks were up, the crew of the Cobalt embarked on their most boring adventure yet, a two month patrol around the mid rim looking for smugglers and pirates and stuff like that. The thing is, the last patrol had all but cleaned up everyone who was causing problems so for the next three months, the Cobalt and the accompanying freighter carrying supplies puttered around the galaxy doing next to nothing at all. Morale was at an all time low and boredom was at an all time high. John found himself with absolutely nothing to do at all, always had to be at the tac-pannel because of the constant moving of the ship and while at the tac-pannel, he couldn't even play Space Battleship VI. Eventually, anything interesting dried up and he was so desperate for something to do that he took up self-teaching physics and reading a couple of engineering manuals. More often then not, the only person who didn't doze off on duty was the navigation officer and the captain because they both actually had something to do and because they had the required iron will to stay awake.
The two month patrol ended just as John finished up the last of the engineering manuals on how to fix a He-3 fusion reactor when it has experienced a coolant leak. After another week of shore leave, and a day of getting drunk, he wandered back to the ship for his next assignment.
Story continues ...
Password: Mirai
RP Sample:
Alarms blared across the guided missile corvette Cobalt. Crew members were dashing around the ship trying to make heads or tails of their situation and generally reporting to battle stations. Many of them had just gotten out of bed and didn't know why they were being called up so abruptly.
“All hands report to battle stations. Bandits have been sighted, thirty degrees to port, five degrees up from horizontal. This is not a drill. All hands report to battle stations . . . “
So that’s why. The relatively green crew threw themselves at their posts while checking the seals on their EVA suits. While starship design had gotten to the point that it wasn’t really necessary, a healthy dose of paranoia never actually hurt anyone, especially when the relatively small corvette was going into combat.
John clenched his hand as his captain simply sat in the chair next to him. They didn’t sit on the bridge, no, the bridge did not have command and control capabilities like on other republic warships. The command crew sat in the heavily armored and computer laden CIC of the ship. The blue EVA suits issued to officers was not comfortable, none of the EVA suits were comfortable but it was standard procedure on the Elisha-class corvettes.
“Three pirate raiders in modified light freighters jumped in, thirty degrees port from directly off the bow. Distance at 530 kilometers. Closing quickly.”
John glanced at the tactical display. This was his first time in actual combat, and against not one but three pirates? He had never sweated before during the training exercises but now his EVA gauntlets were creaking from squeezing too hard. He looked to his captain for guidance and found that the rather young 27 year old man was relatively calm, considering the situation.
“Pirates closing to 490 kilometers. They are moving for an attack vector on us. Course deviating 10 degrees.”
“Enemy composition. Three freighters. Two Chollima-class freighters, modification type: 2-3-1-d-x-7. One Bouncer-class light freighter.”
“Pirates will enter the effective radius of our Trident missiles (Harpoon in space!) in 30 seconds.”
The captain calmly rested his head on his hands and considered everything for a second. John watched nervously. Really, he was nervous about everything, especially in the fact that he might actually have to kill someone in battle. He was too young for this. The captain raised his head.
“Prepare for battle. We fight.” snapped the captain in a voice filled with authority. He sat back in his chair and nodded at John.
“Prepare for battle. Repeat, all hands prepare for battle.” said the communications officer as he relayed the captain’s message across the ship.
“Begin defensive pattern d-3-3-21. Engage on orders from CIC. All weapons to manual control.” Stated the Captain as he signaled to the bridge crew to take orders from the Tactical officer.
“Target the Bouncer-class freighter. Begin targeting. ” ordered John as he kept an eye on his captain. The captain gave a slight nod in approval which eased John.
“Target has entered optimum attack radius for Trident missiles.”
“Target identified. Target locked. All systems green.”
“Firing up ECM and ECCM. Radar picture clear.”
John looked at his tactical panel. He wiped the sweat from his brow. He did not know if he was simply overreacting to his first battle as a non-battle hardened officer. His captain trusted in his judgement so he couldn’t show weakness.
“Prepare to launch Trident missile.”
“Aye, prepare for Trident launch.”
“Trident armed. All systems prepared for launch. Trident at the ready for launch!”
“Prepare to launch Trident on my mark ... FIRE!” said John, his voice louder and more urgent than usual.
The weapons officer nodded and tapped once on a raised and lit button on his control panel. The button flickered off and turned red, meaning that the missile had been launched and the vertical launch canister was now empty.
Outside the Cobalt, the disposable plastic lid on a vertical launch canister blew off into space to reveal a single large missile. A plume of cool gases erupted as the missile was blown out of it’s vertical cell and a very weak but precise tractor beam oriented the missile in the general direction in which it was supposed to go and pointed it’s engine away from the deck. A plume of ionized plasma shot out and the missile shot off into the blackness of space, just barely clearing the railings with only a nose mounted HD camera and the Cobalt’s radar to guide it.
The pirates shot at it, that was no surprise since the missile’s radar signature was similar to a fighter, however, a fighter had to worry about a human pilot, the missile did not. The computer watched the firing patterns of the ship gunners while also throwing up interference from the onboard broadcasting system. The high speed maneuvers threw off the pesky gunners and the missile raced for its target. The image in the missile’s nose camera grew bigger and bigger until the onboard computer felt the interference with the shields in the inertial sensor and simply blew the shaped warhead.
The awesome power of the warhead battered against and knocked down the shields of the admittedly not optimally cared for freighter like a small child would knock over a sand castle. The blast however, was not the main part however. The shaped warhead compressed and shaped the forces of the blast into a 4 centimeter diameter stream of hypersonic high temperature gases and horrible heat radiation. The radiation beam hit the hull of the ship, and heated it until it reached the consistency of butter. The high velocity gases punched its way through the half melted hull and fried every person in that section of the ship, continuing to cut through additional bulkheads on sheer inertia alone until it hit the reactor room. The ship then shut down instantly.
“Target hit! Mission kill.”
John let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding and looked at his captain for help. The captain simply looked over to John.
“If it wasn’t them, it would be us. You did good.” The captain stated and went back to monitoring the battle.
John sighed slightly. It was going to be a long day, and things had been going so well too.
“Target the Chollima-class. Designate track 2-1-2-3-1. Prepare for Trident launch, two missiles.”
“Aye, Prepare for trident launch, two missiles.”
“Tridents ready. All systems green.”
“SALVO!”
“Firing missiles! Firing salvo!”
Department: Navy
Rank: Ensign [tactical officer]
Name: John D. Smith
Race: Human
Age: 23
Height: 5 foot 11 inches
Weight: 162 pounds
Birth place: Upper-middle Coruscant middle class sector
Appearance: He is a rather average person with an average height and an average body weight. He isn't thin but his isn't built either, his build could best be described as wiry. He has dark brown hair and chocolaty brown eyes on a roundish but well defined face. When he isn't in his navy uniform or his EVA suit, he is usually in a dark blue shirt with long sleeves and a black jacket and either digi-cam cargo pants or jeans. He wears a white glove with black streaks running lengthwise down each of the fingers on his right hand.
Personality:
Skills: Tactical and Strategic command, computer programming knowledge, dabbles in engineering.
Attributes:
Physical Strength: 4 (he hit the books, not the gym)
Intelligence: 7
Speed: 4
Leadership: 3
Unarmed: 2
Melee Weapons: 2
Ranged Weapons: 4 (they do teach you to shoot things in officer school don't they?)
Bio:
[early life 0-6]
He grew up in a good neighborhood to a navy officer and a low level diplomatic envoy. As a baby, he was rather passive, preferring to read and listen to fairy tales and stories rather than play with the other little children. Often he would simply sit at home and either watch TV, listen to the radio, watch his parents fiddle with the computer or play around with his little models of all sorts of ships. Really, there wasn't much that can be written about the first six years because other than eating, sleeping, sleeping some more and taking midday naps, there wasn't much else that happened.
[School at last 6-13]
When John was enrolled in an elementary school close to his home. On the first day of school, he met pretty much the only two friends he would ever have until college. The first person he met was Dan who was siting alone by himself, so John walked up to him. The conversation went kinda like this:
"Hello"
"Hello"
*awkward silence*
"Your face looks funny." (it really didn't)
"And so does yours." (it was a response)
*more awkward silence*
"Wanna be friends?"
"Sure!"
Riveting dialogue no? Anyway, Dan became Johns first friend and they hung around each other until about the middle of the day. That was until John walked up to a random Twi'lek girl. Here's just about how it went:
*John walks up to Arishka*
"Huh, so you're a girl."
"and you're a boy."
"Of course. What else would I be?"
*awkward silence*
"Sooo ... What now?"
"wanna be friends?"
"Kay!"
And a beautiful friendship was born. They tried to make friends a couple more times but it didn't work so the three just shrugged it off and gave up. They actually were in the same home room and that was pretty cool. During lunch time they would just sit around in companionable silence and eat their lunches, often trading food or sometimes discussing matters of interest. Some of these matters involved how funny some teacher's face was or something of equal or greater triviality. Really, nothing happened.
[high school 13-18]
Middle school life was not very different for the trio of bumbling buddies. Having very little to do in their spare time and due to Arishka’s complaints of John getting way too lazy for their own good, the three rolled a dice to determine what two electives the three would take. Arishka got Chess club, Dan got Introduction to Engineering, and John got Computer Sciences. It was one of the more fun times of their lives.
[collage 19-22]
John’s father and mother, though they were a navy officer and a diplomat respectively, did not have very much money. Much of their income went into paying mortgage for the home in the upper-middle parts of Coruscant since the lower regions were simply not a place for a child to grow up in. Thus, John had to look other places for sources of income. Like his father and grandfather, and great grandmother before him, and thousands of others before him, he turned to the Republic Navy as his ticket to college. He appealed to the Navy and with the endorsement of his father, he was able to get a scholarship from the Republic navy in exchange for joining the navy as soon as he graduated. John simply took a glancing look at the contract and signed his name. Shortly afterward, Arishka and Dan caught wind of what he did and followed him in.
They went off to college. The same one. Relatively little happened in that college, other than John suddenly acquiring a ravenous and uncontrollable craving for sweet things half way through freshman year. Thankfully, this petered off over the course of the year. John, as in high school and every year before that since he was born, was not a social butterfly and mostly stayed in his dorm, studying computer science and also studying a bit of engineering as well, just because he found that interesting. There wasn't much else he did
[Navy Days 22- ]
Command school kinda sucked and lasted six months. Unfortunately, the three prospective officers were put into different units so they decided that after everything was over, they would get back in touch. During the first month, he was drilled on the basic stuff, uniform maintenance and other such whatnot that would keep the high ranking pencil pushers off his back. He also managed to get by the Physical Training section, he managed to at least keep the sergeant off his back during inspections, which was good. A week into training, they were visited by a republic senator and John managed to get his unit into well enough shape that the senator was impressed and commended the Sergeant of the unit. He got a little bit of slack due to that incident.
After the month of boredom was finished, he began on the finer nuances of a command position and while his PT scores stayed around average, he received high marks for his creativity, his ability to cope with changing conditions, and a higher then average level of strategic planning. This continued for two more months. The remaining was pretty much the same, except there was also a mandatory shooting class, so while John Smith started low, he managed to get good enough with the pistol to take the average slot. His academics were still strong, but he continued to look like a shrimp despite the sergeant's efforts.
When he graduated from command school, he took his small amount of free time to track down his friends and when they compared grades, he found that even though he had the highest academic grade, his overall grade was unsurprisingly average. Still, they had managed to get out of command school which sucked, and in order to celebrate, the reformed trio went off to the nearest bar and promptly got wasted. John woke up the next morning with a hangover, but he managed to shake it off and get his uniform in order. He would have gotten the other two as well, but since the blushing wrecks were still in shock about something John felt he did not want to inquire about, he left them the time to report to some navy office.
As it turned out, he was given the rank of Ensign, the lowest rank of commissioned officer, and was assigned to a guided missile corvette as a tactical officer. The ship in turn was assigned to a captain who was also relatively new to the job and had developed a rather unconventional mindset, so the Navy decided to put an unconventional commander in charge of an unconventional ship. The reason why the ship was unconventional was because of its designation as a guided missile corvette and while an experiment was tried, the ship had been eventually mothballed. The only reason why it had been reactivated was because the Navy had a surplus of junior officers and funds, so they took the mothballs with the most promise and got them shipshape again. The ship turned out to be an Elisha-class guided missile corvette simply named Cobalt.
This post was by no means illustrious. The main reason why John had received an officer position in the first place was because the ship needed officers and he had been both qualified enough and unimportant enough that he could be assigned to what was supposed to be a dead end job. Well,
Since the ship was made by a foreign company that the republic didn't have many ties to, the service members of the Cobalt had to learn everything from surprisingly well written instruction manuals. Attempting to get some bang for their buck, It wasn't long before the republic lined up a low key mission just to do something with the ships taking up space at dry-dock.
[first mission]
Cobalt was assigned to guarding a humanitarian mission to a desert backwater planet that had been suffering from a long and brutal civil war. The ship in question was a CC-4400 Bulk freighter that was hauling water, food, mineral resources, equipment and other things necessary to establish a successful government and country. The other ship was a Moirail-class medium freighter carrying things like ammo and additional spare parts for the Cobalt. The crew of the Cobalt hoped that the mission would be a relatively uneventful trip and that would wrap up in perhaps a week or two and then they could safely go home and drink tea or something.
Unfortunately, this was not to be. A pirate scout came along through the miniature asteroid field that surrounded the planet and saw the three ships moving along at a decent pace, and after a closer examination, saw that the only ship that was armed only had two readily identifiable guns. The scout alerted a small pirate fleet of perhaps three modified light freighters.
The Elisha’s highly advanced sensors managed to detect the pirate fleet as soon as they jumped into the system. After some deliberation, the captain decided to engage the pirates. Using the highly advanced computer systems on the ship, the crew of the Cobalt launched a cruise missile at the approaching pirates. Utilizing the computer systems that were admittedly far beyond anything mere pirates could manage, the missile was able to dodge any AA fire and when it impacted, the incredibly powerful warhead on the missile was able to defeat the shields and hull of one of the pirates. The pirate ship that was hit was not killed but it could no longer fight or maneuver.
The pirates were simply too stunned to do much else other then gawk. They shouldn't even be within weapons range yet. Even the massive freighter was only a single pixel on the view screen. This shock allowed a volley of 4 cruise missiles and three judiciously aimed hellbore blasts to destroy the attackers.
The mission that was supposed to last a week lasted for three full months. During those months, the mission was attacked by pirates, slavers, an overly confident mandalorian, and some belligerents of the civil war on the planet.
For the first month, John was constantly busy at the tactical panel of the ship. He didn't think about much other then the mission, keeping the Cobalt safe and intact, and daydreaming about punching the pencil pusher who had assigned him the crazy mission in the first place. The lessons he learned in command school were applied in this situation and modified appropriately to better complete the mission. The captain gave his approval during the second week in and the bridge crew began having more confidence that they would probably get out of the situation alive. Over the entire course of a month, he had logged an average of 16 hours per day at the tactical panel (excluding the times when he simply crashed from sleep deprivation), and managed the Cobalt through 21 separate and attacks, totaling up the Cobalt's kill count to 10 modified light freighters, a modified medium freighter, 21 modified shuttles, 18 fighters and fighter analogues, 2 bomber analogues, 1 kamikaze ship (extremists), 3 frigates (extremists), 4 gunboats (extremists), and one destroyer that was attacked and hijacked by extremists. The situation was so frantic that when reloading the VLS, the crews were forced to reload only a few cells at once so that the ship would be ready at all times. Luckily, a couple of allies from one of the factions of the civil war stuck around and prevented the Cobalt from sustaining much more then superficial damage during intense attacks.
During the second month, the action slacked off almost completely, and now the crew had to deal with a new threat, boredom. They weren't allowed shore leave, the escalating civil war made that impossible, and there were precious few things to do on the ship. Eventually, even the stacks of paperwork dried up, and working together with the ship's crew, they managed to get some things together to hook up a holonet port and connect the spare computer terminals to the holonet. He ended up doing two things. The first thing he did was download and play a game called Space Battleship VI: Platinum Edition onto a personal terminal and beginning a rivalry with some chick who was nicknamed "The Triarius" and, using his skills honed in actual combat to rise to Grand Master level.
The second thing he did was the navigation officer who was a red female twi'lek who was admittedly, rather hot. The entire bridge crew was continually stir crazy, especially since the captain was put into the infirmary during an incident with an extremely cocky mandelorian.
The mandelorian had at some point or another, been passed the idiot ball (or was extremely inebriated), because he attempted to approach the Cobalt and the cargo ship under a false but friendly IFF. Even though the cobalt continued to send out warnings to not approach, the mandelorian kept coming until the captain ordered John to fire a warning shot across the bow. In an act of stupidity, the mandlorian attempted to board the Cobalt, it was too late to fire cruise missiles, the blast would damage the ship. The crew jumped into EVA suits and when the captain took several marines and went to assess what the heck was going on, the mandelorian jumped out in the way from an airlock and shot the captain in the shoulder, not being able to finish off the captain because of the marines pumping automatic laser fire into a now very dead armored mando corpse. The injury was nonlethal and the captain was expected to make a full recovery, but he had to stay in the infirmary for another month. This put the XO in charge with some input from John and the rest of the bridge crew.
The third month was simply frustrating, attacks on the freighter picked up again, though, not at the frantic pace that the first month had reached. In that time, the Moirail started to run low on munitions, spare parts, fuel, food, and medical supplies.
The mission ended and after the report of the mission got back to high command, the Cobalt returned to republic space. Because the crew of the Cobalt was out of ammunition, coffee, patience, and the mental fortitude to not punch someone in the face, high command decided to let the crew of the Cobalt return from duty and go and do whatever. Two months later, the Cobalt was refitted with some newer, faster, and more powerful missiles that the republic had ordered, impressed by the weapon’s capabilities.
[an annoying mission and a boring mission]
After the break, the crew of the Cobalt was assigned to another mission, this time, an escort mission from a planet that wished to join the galactic republic. The Cobalt was assigned to pick up the representative. The captain was a bit busy and they had been assigned another tactical officer and since the captain was a bit busy and the new tactical officer needed some on-the-job training before he was reassigned, this left John to deal with the representative.
As it turned out, the system of Government on the planet was largely Feudal, a planet ruled by an elite nobility who had absolute power and had turned into a class of completely spoiled brats. The representative happened to be a major lord on the planet who generally did not respect anyone who was not nobility. Unfortunately for John, he did not count as nobility and was treated almost like a slave along with the entire section of the ship who was assigned to help make the prick as comfortable as possible.
The situation was so bad that even with republic marines on board to ensure the noble's safe passage, the crew began muttering about possible mutiny. "The crew" also included the captain, the new tactical officer, the entire bridge crew, the XO, the kitchen staff, the standard shipboard marines, the engineering section, and one of the republic guards. Luckily for the representative, the Cobalt arrived at Coruscant before anything drastic could be done. The Captain made a very bold statement about how he would turn down any mission having to do with that planet again once they landed. When a higher ranking officer chided the captain on how he should have more patience for foreign dignitaries, John punched the guy in the face. The subsequent court martial request was redacted when the Representative in question was turned away from the senate as a Persona Non Grata after blatantly offending 35% of the senate plus the senate guards and the chancellor.
With almost the entire crew of the Cobalt on the edge of mutiny, high command decided to cut the guys a break and allowed for about two weeks of shore leave. Almost as soon as the word got out, the Cobalt was promptly emptied except for a rather pissed off skeleton crew. The remainder of the crew that was not on the ship promptly got wasted. After shaking off the hangover, John contacted his friends and found that they too were stationed on ships, Arishka was a linguistics officer and Dan was an engineering officer. All three of them were ensigns.
John told them all about what he was doing and what he had done, leaving out the part about his last mission which he did not want to remember. He then found a store where he bought a small laptop which he could use to surf the holo-net and look at videos of talking animals on some new video sharing sight. The remainder of the time was spent either partying, or camping outside the local game store for Space Battleship VII and the first of the newer series, Star Commander: Total War. One week in, hew was rotated back to the ship to replace the guys on the ship. This allowed him to play his games and send E-mails to his family to let them know he was alright.
After the two weeks were up, the crew of the Cobalt embarked on their most boring adventure yet, a two month patrol around the mid rim looking for smugglers and pirates and stuff like that. The thing is, the last patrol had all but cleaned up everyone who was causing problems so for the next three months, the Cobalt and the accompanying freighter carrying supplies puttered around the galaxy doing next to nothing at all. Morale was at an all time low and boredom was at an all time high. John found himself with absolutely nothing to do at all, always had to be at the tac-pannel because of the constant moving of the ship and while at the tac-pannel, he couldn't even play Space Battleship VI. Eventually, anything interesting dried up and he was so desperate for something to do that he took up self-teaching physics and reading a couple of engineering manuals. More often then not, the only person who didn't doze off on duty was the navigation officer and the captain because they both actually had something to do and because they had the required iron will to stay awake.
The two month patrol ended just as John finished up the last of the engineering manuals on how to fix a He-3 fusion reactor when it has experienced a coolant leak. After another week of shore leave, and a day of getting drunk, he wandered back to the ship for his next assignment.
Story continues ...
Password: Mirai
RP Sample:
Alarms blared across the guided missile corvette Cobalt. Crew members were dashing around the ship trying to make heads or tails of their situation and generally reporting to battle stations. Many of them had just gotten out of bed and didn't know why they were being called up so abruptly.
“All hands report to battle stations. Bandits have been sighted, thirty degrees to port, five degrees up from horizontal. This is not a drill. All hands report to battle stations . . . “
So that’s why. The relatively green crew threw themselves at their posts while checking the seals on their EVA suits. While starship design had gotten to the point that it wasn’t really necessary, a healthy dose of paranoia never actually hurt anyone, especially when the relatively small corvette was going into combat.
John clenched his hand as his captain simply sat in the chair next to him. They didn’t sit on the bridge, no, the bridge did not have command and control capabilities like on other republic warships. The command crew sat in the heavily armored and computer laden CIC of the ship. The blue EVA suits issued to officers was not comfortable, none of the EVA suits were comfortable but it was standard procedure on the Elisha-class corvettes.
“Three pirate raiders in modified light freighters jumped in, thirty degrees port from directly off the bow. Distance at 530 kilometers. Closing quickly.”
John glanced at the tactical display. This was his first time in actual combat, and against not one but three pirates? He had never sweated before during the training exercises but now his EVA gauntlets were creaking from squeezing too hard. He looked to his captain for guidance and found that the rather young 27 year old man was relatively calm, considering the situation.
“Pirates closing to 490 kilometers. They are moving for an attack vector on us. Course deviating 10 degrees.”
“Enemy composition. Three freighters. Two Chollima-class freighters, modification type: 2-3-1-d-x-7. One Bouncer-class light freighter.”
“Pirates will enter the effective radius of our Trident missiles (Harpoon in space!) in 30 seconds.”
The captain calmly rested his head on his hands and considered everything for a second. John watched nervously. Really, he was nervous about everything, especially in the fact that he might actually have to kill someone in battle. He was too young for this. The captain raised his head.
“Prepare for battle. We fight.” snapped the captain in a voice filled with authority. He sat back in his chair and nodded at John.
“Prepare for battle. Repeat, all hands prepare for battle.” said the communications officer as he relayed the captain’s message across the ship.
“Begin defensive pattern d-3-3-21. Engage on orders from CIC. All weapons to manual control.” Stated the Captain as he signaled to the bridge crew to take orders from the Tactical officer.
“Target the Bouncer-class freighter. Begin targeting. ” ordered John as he kept an eye on his captain. The captain gave a slight nod in approval which eased John.
“Target has entered optimum attack radius for Trident missiles.”
“Target identified. Target locked. All systems green.”
“Firing up ECM and ECCM. Radar picture clear.”
John looked at his tactical panel. He wiped the sweat from his brow. He did not know if he was simply overreacting to his first battle as a non-battle hardened officer. His captain trusted in his judgement so he couldn’t show weakness.
“Prepare to launch Trident missile.”
“Aye, prepare for Trident launch.”
“Trident armed. All systems prepared for launch. Trident at the ready for launch!”
“Prepare to launch Trident on my mark ... FIRE!” said John, his voice louder and more urgent than usual.
The weapons officer nodded and tapped once on a raised and lit button on his control panel. The button flickered off and turned red, meaning that the missile had been launched and the vertical launch canister was now empty.
Outside the Cobalt, the disposable plastic lid on a vertical launch canister blew off into space to reveal a single large missile. A plume of cool gases erupted as the missile was blown out of it’s vertical cell and a very weak but precise tractor beam oriented the missile in the general direction in which it was supposed to go and pointed it’s engine away from the deck. A plume of ionized plasma shot out and the missile shot off into the blackness of space, just barely clearing the railings with only a nose mounted HD camera and the Cobalt’s radar to guide it.
The pirates shot at it, that was no surprise since the missile’s radar signature was similar to a fighter, however, a fighter had to worry about a human pilot, the missile did not. The computer watched the firing patterns of the ship gunners while also throwing up interference from the onboard broadcasting system. The high speed maneuvers threw off the pesky gunners and the missile raced for its target. The image in the missile’s nose camera grew bigger and bigger until the onboard computer felt the interference with the shields in the inertial sensor and simply blew the shaped warhead.
The awesome power of the warhead battered against and knocked down the shields of the admittedly not optimally cared for freighter like a small child would knock over a sand castle. The blast however, was not the main part however. The shaped warhead compressed and shaped the forces of the blast into a 4 centimeter diameter stream of hypersonic high temperature gases and horrible heat radiation. The radiation beam hit the hull of the ship, and heated it until it reached the consistency of butter. The high velocity gases punched its way through the half melted hull and fried every person in that section of the ship, continuing to cut through additional bulkheads on sheer inertia alone until it hit the reactor room. The ship then shut down instantly.
“Target hit! Mission kill.”
John let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding and looked at his captain for help. The captain simply looked over to John.
“If it wasn’t them, it would be us. You did good.” The captain stated and went back to monitoring the battle.
John sighed slightly. It was going to be a long day, and things had been going so well too.
“Target the Chollima-class. Designate track 2-1-2-3-1. Prepare for Trident launch, two missiles.”
“Aye, Prepare for trident launch, two missiles.”
“Tridents ready. All systems green.”
“SALVO!”
“Firing missiles! Firing salvo!”
