Franchise Hopping

Last night 4/5 of the crew of the Rebel Alliance freighter Storm Rider decided to franchise hop (read, the GM decided that without a full crew it would be a nice night for Artemis).

Using 2 laptops, a desktop, and an android tablet, with the GM (myself) as captain, the crew embarked on a level 1 barren seige invasion, to get a feel for the operation of the ship. 3 of the 4 crew members had played Artemis previously, but since our newcomer was, as could be inferred, new, our usual Ewok Comms officer was graciously coerced into playing Helm, even though there was some concern amongst the rest of the crew as to whether or not his stubby legs could reach the pedals. We had our Sullustan Science officer handle Engineering in addition to his normal duties, though he wound up never switching consoles. Our new Twi'lek crew member took the Comms on the tablet, and our human Jango clone handled weapons, of course.

The first mission went as well as could be expected, with some excitement occurring as a result of the Helm officer being unused to both the function of the warp engines and the interpretation of commands, presumably because warp engines don't exist in his universe. The ship didn't suffer any major damage, of course, and within 15 minutes or so we had mopped up the whole sector.
More confident now, the crew decided to take it up a few notches and tackled a level 4 interesting sector in a light cruiser. This got a little hairy as we were faced with a few Skaaran ships with jump drives, but our weapons officer was liberal with the ECMs and Nukes and we managed to clear up that sector in about 30 minutes.

Our furry Ewok friend had to leave at this point, so I took over Helm and grabbed Engineering from the Science officer. As we were preparing for the next mission, I took the liberty of switching things up to Very Interesting level 5, and switched the Light Cruiser out for a Dreadnought refitted with a jump drive.

Our Science officer balked at the sheer number of stuffs in the sector, as he had never seen minefields and black holes and asteroid fields and space monsters and space whales all at the same time, but he managed to keep his head and scan the sector for dangers. We found several different fleets, some with Torgoth Goliaths and others with Arvonian Carriers, and a few Skaaran groups. One entire fleet ran afoul of a singularity early on, which we counted as a blessing. Two other groups were heading directly for one of our stations, but it was clear that they would traverse 2 mine fields, so we weren't too concerned about them. We turned our sights on a few single ships, using our jump drives to, as it was put several times, "Take them violently from behind." We mopped up several ships before taking some time to run errands, resulting in extra coolant, overcharged batteries, and stronger shields, as well as increased production times for one station. Our weapons officer was once again liberal with the ECMs and Nukes and was especially pleased with the extra torpedo tube. We cleaned up two carrier escort fleets, and our fears about the fighters were soon mollified by the generous application of our beam weapons. After destroying the two fleets that weren't going to fly through minefields, we jumped right to the other side of the minefield where we expected the survivors of the fleet to emerge. Only the Torgoth ship survived, and we taunted them into flying up the full length of the minefield after us. They didn't make it far. We jumped back to refuel, then jumped back to wait for the next fleet. They never made it through the minefield, helped in part by our ECMs and Nukes.

All in all, it was a successful night.