Practice Duel in Lantorn

Zodiac Black and Starwalker were talking about tussling with the Tuskers in Adirain in a dimly lit bar in Hadozeko and how the fight went. Before long it turned into an interrogation where Starwalker was asking lots of questions about how Zodiac approached the fight and what he did in combat.

Soon the conversation was taking place in space over the communications channel as a friendly duel was proposed and agreed. A safe was found in Lantorn and it was agreed to only go to 0-25% armour.

Starwalker burnt towards Zodiac and overheated the mid slots and very soon afterwards targeting, orbiting, scrambling and firing. The orbit was supposed to be at around 1km but the fight was taking place at 4km. The mid slots had to be turned off with the heat damage but it didn’t matter – Starwalker had lost the fight, only inflicting modest damage.

The post mortem was very interesting and Starwalker realised a number of mistakes:

·         Did not check what ammunition to use before the engagement

·         Did not overheat the guns or pulse the small armour repair

·         Did not try to control range

A rematch was agreed and this time Starwalker did not overheat the middle rack on approach. Ammunition was changed to phased plasma as a good default and soon after the combat started the guns were being overheated.

The fight was going much better and this time when the damage started into armour the small armour repair was overheated individually. The fight ended much closer but Starwalker still was making mistakes:

·         Forgot to activate the Nosferatu until well after the combat had started

·         Did not pulse the small armour repair (turn-on-off wait a few seconds turn-on-off wait and so on)

In short, Starwalker knew what to do but simply wasn’t doing it (correctly) – a knowing doing gap. One last duel was had and Zodiac asked on whether Starwalker liked the “fly-by”. Starwalker hadn’t even noticed it being focused on damage and modules overheating, and so added controlling range to the list of improvements needed.

It had been fun and instructive. The task now – to practice as practice makes perfect.