Fortune gives, and fortune takes away

[BugPowderDust]

Fortune Gave, and Fortune Took

Here's the story of my latest colony. I can't remember being more attached to a colony, I really was rooting for these guys.

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My 3 guys crash on a desert plain, with a sprinkling of mountains. They are mostly all-rounders, apart from Dekker, who hates guns but loves knives.

The colony gets established, and we realise that the hostiles in the area are mainly tribes with basic weapons rather than hi-tech gangs. We get some basic turrets up, and easily deal with the first shiv-equipped chancers.

A piece of ship crashes a long distance away, and starts to emit a nasty hum. We ignore it,but it gets worse, so Thunder goes out to investigate with a badly made LMG we bought from a passing trader. It was cheap, and the raiders weren't bringing anything better than clubs and knives.

At this point, we are still 3 in the colony. A couple of ship-mates crashed nearby, but after patching them up, they elected to leave despite our imploring them to stay.

Thunder radios back that the ship is surrounded by snow, which is pretty weird for the desert. It's not melting. He puts a couple of shots into the wreckage to test the waters, and a mechanoid comes out. It immediately shoots at him, so he runs back to base, where our kill-box takes care of the tough mech.

All is good, we cope with raids from humans and mechs, refine our kill-box and we free (buy) another human from a passing slave ship. Now we are four.

We start to build an escape ship, our scarce metal supplies are being ploughed into building this road to freedom.

Winter comes, and it hits hard. Our colonists weren't prepared for the crops to just stop growing (it's the desert, how cold can it get?!), and food dwindles. We resort to eating raw megascarabs, no time to cook, we are all starving. Building hydroponics seems like a good bet, but Thunder has to research them, and this takes time. A large raid hits, our tired and starving colonists take to the guns, and the raiders die- but they're carrying food. Joy! We have another day or two time for the hydroponics to catch up. Then, we are saved, a passing ship has food a-plenty, and we trade some tribalwear for sustenance.

We get past winter, spring is beautiful, and the ship is almost complete. We just need to build the engines, and we're out of here! Having to travel further and further for metal is proving slow work.

Tragedy strikes- during a raid, the nice folk of Grace's Mesa visit, and help us in fighting them. Unfortunately, one of the villagers runs into the killbox to shank a raider, and get's taken down by one of our turrets. This has disastrous consequences, that will end up finishing the colony. Grace's Mesa now hate us.

We are about 75% through completing the engines, not much more metal needed. A large group of Grace's Mesa turn up, and decide to besiege us with two incendiary mortars. They've seen our killbox, they're not stupid. Two days follow of us desperately trying to mine metal, and finish the ship, whilst extinguishing fires that the mortars create. Lots of burns, lots of desperation. We are managing slowly. Fortune takes away- a mortar round hits our Ship Reactor slap in the middle of the module, and we can't get to it to extinguish the fire. We watch it burn the ground.

The final savage blow hits us- 3 mechs show up. If they'd landed a little more to the east, they'd have attaked the besiegers, but fortune has indeed frowned upon us.

Sieged from the East, Mechs attacking our (unpowered now, due to unrepaired conduit damage) killbox from the West. Our colonists punch out of the wall to the East, and go deal with the sleeping Grace's Mesa. With a combination of sniper rifle range and their confusion, we deal with them easily. Why didn't we just do this to start with?

Meanwhile, the mechs are making short work of our unpowered turrets. We get back to the colony, kill two of the mechs, but we're losing. Thunder down, Dekker down. The Charge Lances that the mechs have are accurate and nasty. Our last colonist goes down.

The Colony burns on.

[Specialist290]

I could feel the chills running down my spine toward the end there.  Well done.