Final boss. Beat the first phase. Beat the second. My hull is quite damaged. 3 leaps til the boss wins. No repairs in sight.
Six hit points left on the boss.
Hull destroyed.
I may have woken up my roommates with my scream of manly anguish.
Final boss. Stage 1 beaten. I'm at 70% hull.
"Captain, looking at the star charts, it looks like we should be able to make the nearest repair base in two, three jumps tops."
"Very good. The rebels don't have any repair facilities in this sector so we'll head back for a quick patch job and then catch up with them."
One jump later the navigator is summarily executed for his incompetence. The system we jumped into was a dead end. The repair base was actually 6 jumps away, back through the boss. We took some damage from a rebel fighter while trying to catch up with the flagship, but nothing major. We didn't bother to stick around to fight him. We warped off to meet the command ship.
Our mantis boarding party managed to take out the missile launcher but then had to wait for the teleporter to charge back up in order to get the drone control. The drone swarm was released while they were in the process of disabling the room. Unfortunately they weren't able to get it down quick enough to spare us a lot of damage. By the time it was down, we were left with only 5 hull points, but we managed the rest of that fight without taking any more damage. We lost contact with the nearest repair base, not that it mattered. We would never have been able to get through the rebel ships that were blanketing the sector by this point. We had to press on and hope we could finish off the rebel flagship. We warped in for the final confrontation.
"Sir, our mantis boarding crew have just beamed back. They report that the enemy missile launcher has been taken offline and the enemy crew is dead, but somehow the ship is still functional!"
"Damn! There's nothing we can do about it now. Focus all weapons on the enemy shield generators. We need to take those down if we'll have any chance of finishing them off."
We took two hits from missiles that ignored our shields before the launcher went down for good. The enemy shields were overloaded with a combination of burst lasers and an ion bomb. This allowed our pike beam to rake down the middle of the enemy ship in conjunction with the artillery laser. The rebel flagship is down to 2 health to our 1.
"Sir! We're reading a massive energy spike from the enemy reactor! They've got some kind of hidden super weapon!"
"Full power to engines and forward shields! This is going to be a close one!"
The ship shudders as our crack pilot watches for any sign of the coming apocalypse from the crippled rebel ship. Hands fly across the consoles in the weapons room as one of our engineer crew members tries to speed up the power generation in the capacitors for the burst lasers. The second engineer is under a console in the shield room hastily rewiring circuits trying to bypass the damaged sections while calmly explaining other repairs to a slug and a rockman who had been pulled off security detail. Suddenly sparks are flying from every console in the room and the slug gets a nasty shock.
"Captain. Hit by ion pulse. Shields inoperative."
There is no time to think about anything else at this point because the rebel flagship spews hot plasma from every opening. It's a truly massive barrage of weapons fire. Crew members are jostled about their rooms as the inertial dampeners can't entirely compensate for the maneuvers the pilot is pulling off to avoid those bright lances of death streaking our way.
The gauges in the weapon room are filling up.
95%...
96%...
The engineer is holding tight to his console, ready to trigger weapons as soon as the charge is built...
97%...
98%...
With one last maneuver the pilot dodges another shot, but can't avoid the very last blast of the barrage. It hits dead center in the Federation cruiser. There are no important systems there, but it shears clean through the supporting superstructure in that area and the ship finally gives up. It can't take the punishment any more and with a last gasp as it vents atmosphere from a thousand places at once the hull cracks as the ship tears itself apart...
>_<