It’s been a while since I posted one of these, so here’s the latest from our BSG game:

The last  half dozen sessions have revolved around our version of the Water episode (see here for recap) and the fallout of the same. After clearing Aaron Doral of involvement in the murder of the master-at-arms, and dropping the suspect as he was attempting to vent the ship’s atmosphere at auxiliary damage control, the characters continue to investigate the sabotage of the water tanks, focusing on the mysterious pilot that was seen on the surveillance camera. They work out it was female, despite the helmet being on, and from the squadron patch that it’s one of the raptor pilots.

The investigation seems to clear all of the women the right size, but in their questioning of the alibis work out that Boomer’s timeline is questionable. In the course of discussing the situation, the new master-at-arms (one of the PCs) lets slip that they have a test for Cylon agents. They decide, just for safety sake, to test Boomer. When they go to arrest her, her programming trips and she nearly kills the MAA with a metal chair, but gets dropped by one of the other PCs. Injured, but not dead, they take her under guard to the infirmary for her shattered leg.

The doctor does surgery on Boomer’s leg, and while under anesthetic transmits their location to the Cylons. The battle that ensures when two basestars jump right into the middle of the fleet took two sessions to complete. They launch their fighters and the good guys are outnumbered 20 -1. Half of the fighters hold back as a screen for the basestars, but several hundred hammer the civilian and military ships. It was a very desperate fight, and our first real engagement of the campaign.

This gave us a chance to try out a really stripped down set of house rules for fleet combat. In it, the fighter squadrons get three actions to the capital ship’s one. To handle the fighter combat, the CAG (a PC) rolled his initiative versus the Cylon squadrons. To resolve combat between large numbers of fighter, I handled each squadron or group of fighters as a single unit. The CAG rolled his piloting skill and gunnery for the vipers, with the number of successes over the Cylon defensive roll being the number of fighters that were splashed; it was vice-versa for the Colonials. It ran fast and clean, and allowed for a big fight to be resolved in a night.

Galactica and the other military vessels did very well in the initial stages of the fight, mostly because the Cylons were concentrating on the civilians and damaged military craft first. As the toasters took serious damage in the first few capital-level exchanges, they changed their focus to the battlestars and hammered them. The fight took about five minutes game time, and once the fleet was jumped away, the characters ran for it. But not before they had taken serious damage — all three of the combat vessels were at half damage or worse. The fighters, on the other hand, did remarkably well, killing 20 Cylons to each viper lost. Another problem — two heavy raiders got through the point defense screen and landed in both of the landing pods (one crashing through the windows of the museum.)

The next session was a hard fought battle against a Cylon boarding party, while a PCin an unarmed shuttle attempted to bottle up the only functional heavy raider from escaping to report their position. For the Cylon fire team, I had two of the toasters carrying heavy machineguns, instead of just using their arm guns; another two used grenade launchers. They did not show fear or hold back when under fire (why would they?) which led to a nasty, but short fight in which the master-at-arms character is nearly killed and half his team is injured or killed as the Cylons punched through their defense and made for the CIC. Eventually, they were able to stop the machines, but not before there were a lot of bodies on the deck.

The first few times we encountered the centurions, they seemed a bit underpowered to me, but having made certain to apply their armor properly, they were damned tough opponents.