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[Parsely]

I thought the council didn't want us taking in refugees but after re-reading I see they said it's OK as long as they don't leave the base, so sure, let the survivors run through the gate.

I'm assuming you don't object to the general evacuation order.

I seriously doubt that aliens with advanced technology are going to be looking at us with naked eyes. Not to mention that camouflage doesn't just make you invisible. It's really easy to spot someone who is sprinting across open ground whether they're wearing camo BDUs or not.

[stabbymcstabstab]

Ok i thought you were just being a callous bastard, which I don't blame you, if we didn't already take one through I would have left them there, then we go through the gate with everyone, If we're lucky they'll just ignore us till we activate the gate.

[somemildmanneredidiot]

I'm going to address the surrounding subjects before getting to the meat.

I didn't expect the refuge town idea to work out but completely forgot to comment on it. It's done with for the moment so I'll leave it at that.

We are going to get so much from Farpoint I can't even begin to talk about all that the Committee will give us additional funding for. Primarily because I should be unconscious now per the usual but oh well.

20 survivors will be interesting. And a happy coincidence that we have 20 quarantine slots for them until we figure out where to put them. Once we have them in storage, we'll probably find a priority in figuring out how to communicate with them.

Now for the meat.

They reported back. They took us seriously. Isn't that wonderful? /despair

Our best assumption right now is that this is an enemy ship and they mean to do us harm. Some optimistic part of me is purposing the possibility that this is an enemy of our enemy and they took notice of us and decided to investigate, but such luck is not with us. They are almost certainly well armed and in a positon to blow us off the face of this planet. The Gate is 3 miles away and the cave almost certainly won't stand up to continued barrage. We have four options. Run for the gate, stand where we are and fight, retreat into the cave, retreat into Farpoint.

If we run to the gate, we will substain significant casualties if not a Code Black.

If we stand and fight, as above.

If we stay in the cave I believe that it will crash down on us.

I believe our best chance of survival for our troops is to deploy them into Farpoint. As a military facility it may stand up to continued barrage. We can set up a kill box in the Central Room, delaying the effect of numbers, and send the civilians behind us into the sleeping quarters to stay out of the way of combat. Team 2 should provide the GLs, the RL, the FT, and the AMR with their ARs. In enclosed quarters explosives will have a significant chance to cause harm to our own people, and if they get too close, the AMR should have a closer ranged weapon. We'll have 15 ARs counting the specialists, a LMG, and an AMR with the option of an AR. The spread should be in something like a 5-7-5 formation set up towards the entrance with ARs spread evenly between the three and the other two spaced with the middle group. While running into Farpoint, whatever glow sticks remain should be activated and tossed as the team goes down the tunnel to the Central room. Any glow sticks still functioning in the central room should be tossed into the tunnel as deep as they can while the glow sticks in the other tunnels are to be brought to the sleeping quarters to provide the civilians with something to keep them comfort. If our soldiers die then there isn't anything preventing them from finding the civilians so trying to bait them into a different room is pointless. We'll have the RSU observe throughout to try to let Team 1 know how much time they have before the enemy arrives. The idea is that if they send ground troops, we'll be able to have visibility on them while they can't see us in the dark. If they end up collapsing the cave, Team 1's orders are to hold out until we are able to retrieve them. Consult what is left of R&D about what equipment they'd need to retrieve our people if the cave is collapsed and how much time they estimate it will take. Consult with the Committee about obtaining the equipment and obtaining something that might take out the ship we have now observed.

Screw it. Have Leaf, Lerth, Team 2, and whatever glowsticks are still in the Central room while Team 1 is setting up try to figure out any possible way of getting the missile silo operating. They have leave to sit in the chairs in the hopes of bio-interfaces or something. If ANYTHING starts up, make sure to send people over to the Missile Solo room to attempt to help things from that end.

Oh my god the locked room is an armory. Alternative plan instead of plan Screw it or if Screw it is seen to not produce results. Rush to the locked door and engineer/science a way in. Jury rigged breaching charges out of the available weaponry, unscrewing the basic latch to the adamentine door, asking pretty please, the works. Sit in chairs, try anything that looks like a palm lock, just try something.

I leave the above for others to vote on. I'm personally a fan of, everyone rush in, try the chairs, check the armory, do the armory, set up for the ambush, check the missile silo with chairs, hope that they allow us to execute the ambush and don't just bombard us to death, with the RSU observing and 5 ARs, the AMR, and the LMG set up to kill zone in the Central room while all of that is going on.

I'm going to sleep now.

[Kashyyk]

Sprinting three miles with hostile forces in the air is asking for death, so I support any action that involves staying in Farpoint.

As our grenade launchers are not going to get used much, some enterprising troopers could use some of the grenades to booby trap the hall, far enough up to not affect us, obviously.

[Parsely]

They have no food, no water, inadequate firepower, and they're going to be cut off from escape momentarily. They will not survive if the enemy lands even a small force of infantry. They need to run while they still can, at intervals to minimize casualties. Either way people are going to die, but if they make it to the gate at least we'll have some of our people back at base where we can actually use them. That ship isn't going anywhere. If it lands they are doomed for certain.

[Playergamer]

I'm just going to talk about the implications of this ship for a moment. There are two options as to what this ship is.

• It's a completely different alien race, unrelated to the aliens we encountered earlier.
• It's the same alien race, and they're back for revenge.

Now, if it's the same alien race, they've got some kind of FTL. The exploration party we saw earlier came in through the warp gate, and even if they called for a sub-light ship to help set up their base earlier or something, the chances of it arriving now are slim at best. I figure the chances are slim to minimal that they shipped a whole ship through the gate at some point, and reassembled it.

[Parsely]

Well their fighters didn't come through the gate either. This is probably what deployed them.

[somemildmanneredidiot]

We have unfortunately not defined a standard kit (it was on the list of things to do once this engagement was finished) so we don't know if our troops have food or not. A bit of research suggests that they MIGHT have food and water for 4 days. If they do, quarter rations while feeding the civilians that will give them 8 days of food and water which means that we have 10 or 11 days to get the ship moved and excavate to their location.

There are no good options here. Right now our troops are at the mercy of either a group with superior fire power that has proven to be hostile or a group with superior fire power and unknown intentions. If they run for the gate and they are fired upon with the intention of no survivors, we will not have anyone return to the base. If they set up in Farpoint and the ship decides to blow up the caves until they feel certain our personnel are dead, at best we will have a limited time line to rescue them before they die of dehydration. If the ship decides to send troops until our teams are dead then we will eventually run out of ammunition.

I believe our best shot is to try to buy time until we are able to see what the Committee is willing to offer for this situation (if we need to bankrupt ourselves and promise to pay our specialists the money we owe them as soon as we have it, then thems the breaks) as well as what Team 2 with Leaf and Lerth are able to try to Deus Ex Mechanica out of our available resources with the silo and the likely armory. At the moment I'm relying on a combination of realistic logic and TV show logic to get us through and I don't think things are going to go well no matter what we do.

We're a dinky little secret military project with less than 50 military personnel and a total budget so far of about 3.5 million Cr which is miniscule in the grand scheme of things, and I think we are about to suffer a major loss no matter what we do. So go big or go home. Go for the hail Mary pass and hope we get another lucky crit. We're screwed but maybe we can salvage a win anyhow. [Insert Passionate Encouraging Speech Here About Fighting The Odds]

I mean, the Committee almost certainly has a contingency or three set up in case Waypoint falls. That's just reasonable. And one of them is almost certainly a very powerful missile option. We might be able to use that and pay off the expense over time. If we can shoot down the ship, we've saved our people and presented the Committee with two fantastic military research opportunities. This could turn out fantastically! /naive optimism

[Parsely]

How do you propose we get a missile through the gate? We don't even know how big the ship is or what defenses it has. That sounds like the worst idea simply because we have no way of delivering this hypothetical missile.

We can't wait to call the committee. Evacuate the teams as quickly as possible.

[somemildmanneredidiot]

Well the main part of the plan was a mad scramble to see if something could be scavenged and used in the almost certainly powerless Farpoint, the consulting with the Committee was primarily a "throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks". There are a ton of problems with the missle aspect of that plan as you've suggested, but we wouldn't know til we asked. We were apparently able to contact the Committee fairly quickly, so the worst that's likely to happen from the call is making us look desperate and like an idiot.

I find that I can be convinced to go with the attempt to evacuate, but to do so would require that you convince me that our personnel (25 of our own, plus the 20 villagers hypothetically) are able to travel 3 miles on foot through varied terrain (with little to no cover for 2/3s of it) while under fire, in an amount of time that would leave any personnel alive once they reach the gate. If you can do that, I will switch my vote.

As a point for why I need convincing, 12 of our personnel were engaged by an aircraft during this deployment. 10 plus a civilian suffered injuries. This is while they managed to fire upon it with grenades in such a fashion that there was one direct hit and one indirect hit which destabilized in such manner that encourged the aircraft to retreat. Our team just managed to travel 1 mile in that time. This ship is apparently significantly larger which likely means that it will carry a heavier armament and be signficantly more resistant to our small arms fire and explosives. Research suggests that military personnel are supposed to be able to run something like a 13 minute 2 mile. So it will take them about let's say 17 minutes to get to the gate if they leave all equipment where they are and sprint without stopping.

Do you think our personnel are able to survive 17 minutes of direct fire from this ship?

[Parsely]

The way I see it this is the only option that gives them any chance of leaving, period. We've seen how tough just two of their infantry and a couple aircraft can be. If they get infantry on the ground in force our people will have no chance of getting out of there alive.

[stabbymcstabstab]

You know we should invest in Armor piercing rounds. That should increase our abilities in killing the hostiles.


Unrelated I think they're closer to the Jaffar then the wraiths currently since they would probably have capture and eaten them, then kill them.

[somemildmanneredidiot]

One of the things that we actually did do is make AP rounds our standard round. So that's one thing we did right. I hadn't actually watched the first episode of Stargate previously and found that the kidnapping and arm cannons better resembled my memory of the Wraith. Though it's been quite some time since I've watched Atlantis.

If memory is correct, I believe that it was more like 4 or 5 of their infantry.

The difference between then and now is that we have better equipment, know where to shoot, and know that diplomacy is not on the table. If we'd open fired the moment they came out of the Gate, I believe we would have had a slightly different story. There was a lot of debate about that and we opted to attemot diplomacy. It didn't work to say the least.

The Farpoint defense scenario favors our troops in that the enemy has to walk into a kill box of overwhelming fire, with weapons designed to take advantage of that, which has proven to be somewhat effective. I don't expect that action to be a permanent solution. It is a delaying action so that Team 2, Leaf, and Lerth can try to figure out something from Farpoint that might help, and so that we can address the Committee and see if there is any help they would be willing provide with two possible HUGE advances with a plethora of military applications  (including what may be an untouched armory! and a huge space capable ship) on the line, and to buy time for whatever the Committee is willing to spare to be deployed. It's a gamble. So is your plan. I like my gamble because if we pull it off, we'll be in a much better position than we were before. I don't believe that your plan plays the odds any better than my plan with the only pay out being that maybe some of our personnel survive. If my plan works then we get more personnel out and are in a better position in nearly every aspect.

And I'm not confident in anyone's ability to sprint for 5 minutes let alone for 17.

[stabbymcstabstab]

Yeah i guess we're holing up for now. How about we ask the locals if they know what the fact is that and what the hell is going on. And lets grab all our glowstick near the entrance and move them to help prevent them from finding us.

[TopHat]

One thing I'd like to point out is that we actually have no reason to believe, at present, that the aliens know where we are. As far as they're concerned, we could have simply bailed through the Gate following the encounter with their aircraft. I expect a few patrols on foot and/or air before they conclude that we've gone (or find us, in which case we're screwed). What they do then is entirely up in the air.

As such, I support the plan of remaining in Farpoint. All measures short of explosives (yet) should be used to try to open the bay door (which is probably an armoury or second exit/hanger. Possibly a Warpgate room given what the most secure room in our base is.) and others should search for alternative ways out.

We may also wish to consider collapsing the tunnel with explosives and hedging our bets on another exit being found or the aliens leaving, giving us enough time to rescue them. Risky but it could be the only viable option if it looks like they'll search the caves.

Another thing to consider would be activating the gate briefly. It'd certainly draw attention away from the caves and if they find the RSU they may conclude that we've pulled our men out. The biggest risk from that is if they can work out where our gate leads to, but the risk of that should be very low.