I respect Mal's vision and don't want to discourage him too much. He has produced an continuous string of good ideas, and that creative process will eventually lead to a few bad ideas sneaking in. My intent is not to destroy his will to create more of those good plot twists, and I've regained a modest amount of curiosity for the next few updates...
However, RPL, those last two updates were... uhh... frankly, not something that you should be leaping to defend so reflexively. By presenting those updates as perfectly fine, then you make me feel the need to express why I am not irrational to have a wholly different opinion.
Risky actions have consequences. We've been rushing headlong into things for a while. We might not have expected this particular consequence, but meh, inevitable.
There was no risky action on our part, because we were put in that position without choices. You chide us for taking risks, but where was our alternative here? The flank that we could influence was given a plan in which our retinue played a low-risk role as a reserve exploiting opportunities. Your characterisation that this is "a very special episode of Lordship" in which we learn from our risky actions in a teachable moment is completely wrong.
And yes, I would rather die in a way consistent with the setting and circumstances than to survive dubiously after the Sea Raiders board a Star Destroyer and bombard the King's army from geosynchronous orbit.
But rolling a 1 is not an automatic death without reference to the context. In the context of fleeing primitives who never used any siege weaponry before now, and who were starving, then a bad roll means otherwise good conditions lead to disappointing results, which we then have a chance to mitigate. Not dudes with laser rifles emerging from the ranks of the enemy and winning a battle based on one bad roll. Either they had these weapons before or they didn't. A single die roll ought not to change their backstory and fundamental capabilities, nor reverse what our strategy had accomplished. It merely modifies the outcome to be less than stellar but still believable.
How did they carry those bombs through a night march and not lose them during two days of attacks that must have wiped out their baggage train? If they had these weapons earlier, why run away in the first place? Too many questions.
The last two updates are... frankly, RPL, you are straining too hard to make excuses for them. They are not the result of rolling one critical failure, and not the result of risky actions that you imagined we could control.