TERRORWERKS REPORT

Steven Petrick reports:

The situation was an assault on a freighter to prevent it from hitting a populated planet.

I resisted trying to take control of the whole operation, and I do regret that. I focused on the team SVC invited to participate, these being SVC himself, Mike Curtis, Bill Stec, Kentaro Watanabe, and Patrick Doyle. SVC self-selected himself as the heavy weapons specialist, and I selected Curtis and Stec as shooters, Ken as medic, and Patrick as engineer.

We did not practice things, but we did talk a lot of stuff out before hand, and after reinforcing the need to watch their sectors several times after we got set, I felt confident that they would do so and guard each other's backs.

I found the entry flawed, as the two squads were sent in shoulder to shoulder. I thought it would have been better to send in the second squad first, if it is intended for it to hold the corridor, and after it established overwatch, to move the first squad through.

While organization was four shooters and a medic and engineer in a squad, it was pretty clear that the medic and engineer were not actually organic, and this created confusion as the "controllers" would wander off with these two personnel "at need" rather than asking the squad leader to send them.

Much of the first part of the exercise for second squad was just keeping the passageway locked down. This was hampered by "disappearing walls" late in the exercise, as the controllers would announce that an open area was a wall, but then a pirate would charge through that "wall". There was insufficient manpower to "take the offensive", in that expanding into adjoining rooms would have left the rear of the advancing troops unprotected. When the bridge was secure we should have been reinforced by two shooters from the first squad before we advanced into other rooms. This was necessary to keep the assault team from become over-extended and attacked from all sides.

We were ordered to take the engine room, and I did manhandle Mike and SVC into an assault stack before the door opened, and that seemed to work well in that even though the pirates were expecting us they were taken out quickly. Pat Doyle got the engines reprogrammed, and apparently surprised the gamemasters by how quickly he got it done.

Worst mistake was failing to secure the "engine room". We were ordered to pull back out of it, and it became the major point of attack by the pirates, using the (for want of a better term) "dummy hatch" as mobile cover, and advancing behind it.

My estimate is that there were five "mobile" pirates, as at one point there were three in the "engine room" (one on each side of the door, and one holding the "dummy hatch") while two others were attacking from the end of the opposite corridor. But it would have required a minimum of three shooters to do that (two in the engine room to control the two access points, and one outside to control the hallway entrance). That required three more shooters to control the rest of the ship. (One covering each of the two doors into the short corridor to the bridge, one covering the far hallway, and one covering the entrance/exit route.) As noted, over-extension was a problem as an attack could come from any direction.

We needed to retake the engine room, but could never get past the dummy hatch. (Sadly, only after I was "killed" did it dawn on me the solution was not to try to bash past it with an pirate holding it against you, but to get down and lift it since it was just empty boxes with little weight. With one man lifting and two shooters down low ready to take advantage we could have retaken the room and put an end to the pirates use of the dummy hatch.)

I found three spare magazines, and handed these out. I used up one of my own magazines, and reloaded one time, eventually handing my weapon off to SVC and taking the grenade launcher he had found that was down to one nuclear round from him.

I was "hit" several times, managing to get bandaged twice (this was a problem as my "squad medic" was taken from me and I had to go to the bridge to get the wound treated once). In one case I combined the need to get a wound fixed with escorting a POW to the bridge to consolidate prisoners (too risky to have Mike both guarding a prisoner and trying to cover his zone of fire).

I had one wound remaining near the end when one of the corporate guards went berserk and sprayed the hallway liberally with his weapon. I was hit four or five times by this spray of fire (wrong place at the wrong time). While my own team had not taken too many wounds (and I had given a spare first aid pouch to Ken earlier), one of the things I had heard in the rising babble (as first squad and the corporate types were increasingly roaming the hallway to no purpose I could discern) was that there were no more wound patches. I was unaware at that point that Ken was also "dead" (killed on the bridge I learned later). As it would have taken the contents of a full first aid kit to bring me "back to life", and the mission had been "accomplished", I decided to play "mortally wounded" rather than dead, and called on everyone to "get out". Kudos to Mike and Pat who both made efforts to drag me out, but at that point it would have been throwing good money after bad, the pirates would have got them while trying to drag my "deadweight". So I just kept reiterating that they should go, and they both did.

I had intended to fire the nuclear grenade when I heard the shuttle separate, creating a sort of "Hollywood ending. However, the trigger would not work, and as the pirates ran up and started "stabbing" me, I felt fair play would not allow me to further press the "mortally wounded" role and stopped messing with the grenade launcher.

While the pirates commented that we were "the best group yet" (referring to all of the participants), I take that with a major grain of salt. I suspect strongly that they say that of every group because, after all, they want people to come back, and making them feel good about themselves, no matter how badly they performed, is a reasonable business model. And of course I discovered that some of our participants had been pirates themselves in earlier rounds, although they may not have been aware of all the tasks that were to have been accomplished.