Fighter Combat Duel
From TFC Galactopedia
Lieutenant Commander Chaser “Goliath” McLoude silently scanned his sensor display that ran between his legs on his StarHawk F. Mk I space superiority fighter. This was supposed to be a quiet, un-eventful patrol. A gentle swinging curve around the elliptic of this system then back to the Oriskany. However, Chaser, even at his young age, knew nothing about being a starfighter pilot was ‘routine,’ especially when one had relatively new pilots flying with him. Oh, all of them had been in space numerous times, in fact, Chaser had recommended Lieutenant Araje ‘Screamer’ Nahoya, an andorian eagle with a bad habit of screeching when she became angry, as a flight leader. However, she had only seen one live fire battle, Corophne, and neither Chaser’s own wingman, Zachary ‘Dutch’ VanTaber or Nahoya’s, Ensign Fillippe ‘Frenchie’ Gavoue had been ‘blooded’ as of yet, though Chaser secretly hoped that time would still be off in the future for.
Chaser banked the StarHawk around gracefully, checking over his shoulders to make sure his wingman and flight followed him through the turn. Flying in a classic ‘finger four’ formation, named for the fact that it looked just that, the tips of four fingers on a paw or wing when held out, the flight was loose, so they could react quickly. It had become the Starfighter’s formation of choice for four fighter flights, offering them a good mix of options. As the akita/malamute mix scanned the space about him he flicked one of a series of studs and switches, something rather strange in the days of the touch-pad LCARS systems and activated a transmit command for his com gear. The control system, known as HOTAS, or Hands On Throttle And Stick had been developed in the late 20th century as a way for pilots to both operate systems such as communications radar, and weapon arming, and fight their craft at the same time. Each stud, dial, or switch had a different feel to it than all the rest, and were programmable to pilot’s preferences through the LCARS system. It took a little getting use to at first, but, it seemed your paw, claw, wing, what have you, always seemed to trace to those controls automatically. It was an almost too obvious solution to the problem of pilot overload and had proven just as good in the 24th century as then. Chaser did not have to ever take his paws off the controls to activate anything on the fighter.
“Winchester, Star Lead,” Chaser announced over the communications net he had just opened.
“Star One, this is Winchester,” the response came back from the duty Corona E. Mk I SWACS/Electronic Warfare craft. The Corona served much the same purpose as the AWACS platforms of the 20th century, providing an off-ship sensor platform to enhance the abilities to scan the area, and as a coordinator for starfighters, directing them to trouble spots.
“Winchester, anything showing up on the scans?” It was Chaser’s habit to check in with the Corona at each turn point; he didn’t want to rely solely on his own sensors and his eyes.
“Negative Star One, scopes all clear…” the female voice called back a few seconds later. However the pause after the ‘all clear’ made Chaser’s alertness level start to rise. “Wait One Star…” the voice came back again as if they were trying to decipher something that had just happened that no one had expected. “Star Leader, Winchester!! Hyperspace exit detected your current position!”
Well, that explained that Chaser thought as he flicked his master-mode switch from safe to armed, lighting up every single combat system aboard, the HUD display projected against the transparent aluminum faceplate of his helmet changing to display the ‘bouncing pipper’ lead computing gun sight, and other important combat information.
“Flight, Lead, Winchester has detected hyperspace exits, we have company,” and everyone knew the company would not be allied, only one faction used hyperdrives, and that was the Empire.
Sure enough, his sensors started to scream at him as the ships exiting Hyperspace caught up to the energy emissions the Corona had detected, signifying their arrival. Chaser snapped his head around to look, and felt a bit of a chill grab his heart as he looked behind, above and a little to starboard of his current direction of flight. A flight of four balls with three outward-canted solar panels surrounding them, TIE Defender starfighters, the best fighter the Empire had, StarForce had code-named the little fighters ‘Vampires’ or ‘Vamps’ in short-speak, and they were just as deadly as that mythical monster. “Flight! Break by wing pairs and scatter, Dutch, break to re-join!” Chaser ordered before even the Defenders had finished their hyperspace exit. The flight split neatly, with Dutch continuing the split in a planned break, rejoin sequence that would give Chaser some room to play with during the opening volley for this fight. He pulled the side stick back hard, feeling the g-suit built into the legs of his flight suit compress as he felt himself slammed against his ejection-seat as the inertial compensators tried to keep up with the radical loop he just put the fighter into. He clenched his muzzle tight as he brought the Defender into his forward view, pointing his nose at their path of flight. “Computer, rifle-fire, five torpedoes,” Chaser ordered the computer, bypassing the normal sequence of events to fire the micro-torpedoes that the StarHawk carried.
“Launch parameters not met,” the computer returned to him.
“Override fire,” Chaser ordered as he bored down on the flight.
Within moments of his override command the torpedoes flashed from their launch tubes streaking towards their targets. He didn’t like having to go through voice recognition to fire the torpedoes, preferring the standard Eye Point Recognition Software to lock on and fire, but with this case, it was the only choice. He knew that most likely those five torpedoes would hit nothing, even with the proximity fusing that was standard now on all micro torpedoes. He had just launched them unguided in a spread. It was he admitted a ‘get out of my way’ maneuver designed to make the Defenders scatter, giving his flight more options to work with. He didn’t even continue on his present coarse, he snapped his fighter inverted relative to his previous orientation, , pulling hard then rolling back to his previous orientation and pulling back up, tightening his loop to try to end up behind the Defenders as they broke.
“Flight, remember, do not try to get into a turning fight!! Use your speed!!” Chaser grunted out through the exertion the g-loads were putting on his body. While it was possible for the inertial compensators to completely dampen the effects of ‘g’ or gravity loading on a body, it was found through several early accidents, and the first skirmish with the Imperials that that deadened the feel the pilots got from their fighters, winding up getting some people killed that shouldn’t have been. From that point on it had been decreed that the compensators would be just strong enough on a fighter to prevent a pilot from becoming paste on his ejection seat, returning the feel of the fighter to the pilot.
“Roger,” he heard someone call out over the net, good he thought, they knew the drill. While the StarHawk was blindingly fast and maneuverable, it couldn’t compare to a TIE who’s Twin Ion Engines gave it the edge in cornering ability. However, the StarHawk had advantages over the TIE, and Chaser intended to use them.
“Federation StarHawk-class fighters along exit vector,” the monotone voice of the Defender’s computer called out as Wing Commander Covar’s view ahead resolved from that of the swirling blues and blacks of hyperspace to the pin-pricks of normal space. Ahead four dull gray painted fighters were performing a break, and, she had to admit, a rather neat and tidy one at that as she watched for a moment. She had to admit, whoever was piloting those craft at least knew how to fly them.
The problem was, she wasn’t so sure about her own people. This was Her first assignment after being a squadron commander for nearly five years, transferring here to the ‘Alpha Quadrant.’ She had been re-assigned as wing commander for the strike group assigned to hunting down the rogue Starfleet faction calling itself ‘Exodus Fleet.’ While She had the best to work with material wise, the pilots she wasn’t so sure about. Most were new recruits brought in to fill out the new Alpha Quadrant fleets being built. As She saw the yellow star shot through by a black thunderbolt embossed on the engine cowlings of each of the fighters she tightened his grip on his control yoke and frowned slightly. She had read the intelligence reports on the Exodus Fleet, and according to them, that symbol belonged to the VF-33 “Starfighters” supposedly the most experienced squadron that the Federation had. This was going to be interesting…
Before she could process much more her warning systems began to blare at her as a spread of five golden flashes spread out from the lead StarHawk. Covar’s instincts kicked in immediately and she threw the Defender into a tight spiral dive away from the volley. All of them missed her cleanly, and she didn’t hear any panicked screams that would have been the sure sign of one of those deadly missiles impacting on one of her flight members. She did however loose track of the StarHawk that had fired the spread, so intent on not becoming dead she hadn’t seen where it had gone after she put her fighter into the kich-roll. Where she growled under her mask as she craned her head, cursing the poor visibility of the TIE design when she picked up the fighter in her rear quarter, just rolling out and bearing down on her at blinding speed. Covar smiled grimly at that, licking her muzzle with her rough tongue. So she thought, I do have some challenge…
“Three!! Watch yourself, you a have Vamp coming in high!!”
“Breaking!! Frenchie! Get behind him! See if you can keep him busy!”
“I’ll… I’ll try Screamer.”
“Four!! Frenchie break Now! Hard port!!”
“Oh crap where is he?! Breaking!”
Chaser licked his muzzle as he listened to all the chatter, the scared voice of Frenchie as he fought for his life. “Hang on Four,” he called out as he rolled his fighter to port, pulled hard back and joined the knife-fight that had developed while he had fired his first shots. He frowned as he watched Frenchie’s StarHawk desperately bank and jinx trying to get away from the Defender, who’s pilot had lured the inexperienced Frenchie into the exact situation Chaser had warned about, a turning fight. Green bolts slashed out and splashed against Frenchie’s shields as the Defender fired its weapons. He saw the sparks and cascading rainbow as Frenchie’s rear shields began to fail and he knew he didn’t have more than a second to act.
Chaser jabbed his gloved thumb down on the micro-torpedo pickle and his sensors came alive, looking to see what his eyes were focused on, and in as close to instantaneous as possible determined his target, displaying a red triangle superimposed on the Defender to signify it was locked into torpedo’s guidance software. Chaser released the trigger, letting a micro-torpedo fly and repeated the process twice more, focusing his targeting software on that single Defender to loose two more micro-torps, then growled, placed the pipper of his gunsite over the Defender’s center of mass and smashed his trigger finger down on the fire-trigger.
Twin golden streams seemed to connect the nose of Chaser’s StarHawk with the upper solar wing of the Defender for a briefest of moments, Chaser keeping an eye on his gatling phasers, keeping the burst short to keep from chancing an overheat. The blast itself brought down the Defender’s shields he guessed to around fifty percent, and the three micro-torpedoes following along at relatively slower velocities than the energy blasts finished the job. The Defender pilot wasn’t a fool, and as soon as he realized he himself had become the hunted, broke hard into a skidding spiral of a turn, avoiding the first micro-torpedo fired at him as its proximity fuse did not register and kept sailing on, trying to turn to re-engage. However his turn did not fool the other to torpedoes, the first exploding against the already weekend shields, bursting them in a rather colorful display of energy and crumpling the upper solar wing against the ball cockpit, the force of the blast, even in the void of space, sending the fighter skidding out of control and spinning, giving the pilot a good look at the third micro-torpedo just before its proximity fuse triggered and tore the entire fighter apart in the small, but powerful total-conversion explosion.
“Lead got one!” he heard Dutch’s voice whoop as Chaser literally had to fly through the quickly expanding fireball of the dead fighter so fast was he traveling that he really didn’t have time to do anything else. He growled to himself as he heard the warning tones of loss of shield strength as the debris and destructive energies he was flying through strained them.
The big canine wanted to tell Frenchie to try to get some distance between himself and the dogfight, but before he could even open his muzzle her heard the fearfully panicked cry from the young pilot. “Ejecting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Chaser turned his head just in time to see Frenchie’s canopy shatter as the ejection seat road up and away from the fighter on ancient technology, but reliable solid fueled rockets. Frenchie had barely gotten clear of the fighter when it began to break apart under green energy fire from a Defender as it swooped in like a carrion-eater, blasting away at the already stricken fighter. The fighter’s drives went up, as it convulsed and shook apart, becoming a brief nova as the explosion consumed all its fuel and then, the void of space snuffed it out.
Damn, Chaser cursed as he rolled starboard to try to put a little distance between him and the Defender. At least he thought quickly, Frenchie got out. “Winchester Star Lead! Four’s punched out! Get Rover in here with the Ready Five!”
“All too easy,” Covar thought with a grim smile, watching the Federation fighter break apart under her guns, though, unfortunately the pilot did not share oblivion with her own, having escaped from his fighter just in time.
She put the spinning ejection seat out of her mind as she focused in on the StarHawk that had killed her pilot, it was rolling right and putting on speed, getting away from her she thought, and she couldn’t keep up with it. She wished she could talk to him, tell him what a coward he was being for running away, goad him into turning back into a fight on her terms, but no, she couldn’t, so she focused on other goals.
Another StarHawk flashed from left to right in front of her, presenting too tempting a target for the cougress as she pulled her yoke hard into her gut, banging it against the life support pack on her chest and squeezing the triggers, spewing out green laser bolts, tracing in front of, and finally meeting the StarHawk, several landed cleanly and she saw the right drive exhaust begin to spew something akin to a bluish smoke. Good, she thought, she had wounded it. These Federation pilots must have been green, was the thought that came to her mind as she pulled into a tailing position, knowing she would have only a few more moments, at the very best, to complete her second kill of the engagement.
Her plans were shattered however as she felt her fighter almost literally shoved sideways and she reacted on instinct, throwing her Defender into wild gyrations, dodging it turned out three missile weapons as a StarHawk slashed down at her, its energy guns blazing at her and she had to dance for her life in the heart beat it took for the fighter to scream past her, pull ‘up’ relative to its previous orientation of flight and rocket away. She realized it was the same fighter that had killed her pilot, but she put all wonder of how he had re-engaged so quickly as she turned her attention back to her wounded prey, to find it gone.
She growled and scanned space. “Where’s the injured fighter?”
“Leaving the area Commander,” the voice of one of her pilots called out.
Covar blinked, not realizing she had said that over an open frequency, chastising herself she growled and simply nodded. No matter, a fighter trying to run away was one less that was fighting, and that meant the odds were now three to two in her favor…
Well, Chaser thought as he pulled hard back, feeling his vision graying at the edges of his sight at the mounting g-forces, he really hadn’t expected that to work twice in a row. He had executed almost the exact same attack on Screamer’s pursuer as he had on the first Defender, only this time it had escaped all but the first volley from his phasers.
“Screamer, How you doing?” Chaser’s voice came tight as he entered the dogfight again, and again slashed at a Defender as Dutch rolled in to cover his wing-leader.
“Not…not good Goliath,” Screamer returned in a voice that told him she was either fighting to keep her fighter from blowing up around her, or was wounded somehow. “It doesn’t want to fly straight, I think the control system took a hit as well as the engine, computer’s not correcting for it.”
“Get back to the Oriskany Screamer, we’ll cover you,” Chaser returned as he snapped his head about after another slashing attack on a Defender, this one surviving his blasts but had its port solar wing amputated from the ball cockpit as Dutch fired a bit wildly at it. Chaser almost winced as one of Dutch’s shots actually came very close to hitting him as he sprayed the area of space the Defender was traveling in hopes of at least connecting.
Chaser couldn’t argue with his results however as the poor TIE pilot was sent careening away on a out of control path till it some how miraculously gained control and sped out of the area, well, ‘sped’ wasn’t the best words for it more like limped at its best possible speed.
However that fighter was out of the fight, for the moment, Chaser was concerned about the leader, it had already blasted Frenchie from his fighter, and sent Screamer back to the Oriskany with some nasty damage…
There he thought as he caught the glint off the solar panels, the fighter was forming up with its wingman and coming about. Chaser took a risk and rolled his fighter in towards the two TIEs. Head on passes were not something to take lightly, but, as the big canine shoved his throttle column full forward he didn’t want to give the other pilot a chance to lure him and Dutch into a turning fight. All he had to do was last long enough for the alert fighters to make it to his position, and that wouldn’t be much longer.
“Dutch, loosen it up and check fire, I’m going to do some moving here and I don’t want to hit you ,” Chaser announced as he tightened his grip and bore down, head on at the TIE, licking his muzzle, his gut tightening as green slashes started appearing about him.
Covar growled as she saw another one of her fighters wounded, luckily not mortally but still, taking it out of the fight all the same. The wild fire shouldn’t have caused a problem, after all, she had half expected the Federation wingman’s blasts to hit his wing leader, making her job easier. Unfortunately the idiot had caught a lucky break, either that or Ensign Illara was a worse pilot than she had thought. Either way the fighter was running to make the jump to lightspeed.
Covar for her part chewed her muzzle, she was in an even fight, but it wouldn’t be for long. She had read the intelligence reports on how Federation fighters had operated. Right now a flight of alert fighters was probably on its way from the carrier, guided in by a control craft somewhere. She knew it had to be there, even though she hadn’t had the time to actually look for it, it didn’t mean these Federation types would abandon their ways so easily. She would soon be out-numbered three to one at the least, and that was something she was not all that use to as an Imperial pilot.
“Two, we’re breaking and getting out of here, Four, try to make it to lightspeed!” she called out as she banked her fighter around. This may have been a ‘loss’ on her part, but she had the information she had come here for, and she’d be back.
That was when she noticed that there was something barring her way, and, closing on her at near impossible speeds it seemed. The cougar reflexively jammed her gloved fingers down on the firing studs on her and bit down heard to keep from letting the yelp out that want to escape. Was he insane? She thought as gold spears of light lanced out at her. She felt her shields being battered as she waggled the yoke around, trying not to bang it about to throw off the pilot’s aim. It worked after a fashion as the two pairs slashed past each other, her heart pounding as her TIE’s computer beeped that it was ready to make the jump, tanking whatever hand guided the universe that the closure rate had prevented the Federation pilot from firing its missile weapons during the pass, she knew that would have killed her easily. Still not liking it one bit, she slapped the control to activate the hyperdrive and in moments the star elongated then disappeared as the swirling tunnel of hyperspace enveloped her fighter. She planned on paying the Federation pilot back, and for that she had to survive to fight another day when they would destroy the renegade carrier.
“Star Lead, Winchester, all bandits have bugged out and Rover and the Ready Five will be on station in one minute. Good job Goliath,” the controller aboard the Corona announced as Chaser pulled the throttle back, the warning audibles from the beating his shields had taken still rang in his ears. He had nearly lost them on that pass, but, it had worked, after a fashion, the TIEs had bugged out, for now.
“Rog…” Chaser began to croak the dryness in his throat causing him to have to swallow before continuing. “Roger Winchester,” the akita/malamute scanned his sensor readouts for Frenchie’s emergency beacon and banked his fighter about to match pace with it on its tumble through the void. “Inform Rover I’m pacing Star Four’s ejection seat to help mark for pick-up.”
“Affirmative Lead,” the controller returned.
Chaser nodded slowly, letting out a ragged sigh as he checked on Dutch, who sounded like he was about ready to start hyperventilating over the com-channel. Chaser told him to breath deeply, hoping to get him calmed a little. He knew he didn’t have long before he would be needing calming as well. The shakes began slowly in his paw, they always did, even after all this time he still couldn’t get rid of them as the adrenaline in his body started to ease and the mind realized that the experience it had just gone through was had quite a good chance of killing him. He did the breathing exercises his wife had helped him come up with to keep from hyperventilating himself.
He then looked off in the direction that he had seen the TIEs disappearing into hyperspace. He knew he’d see that pilot again, probably sooner rather than later.
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