Battle tactics used againt the Mechinoid Motherships

[Jefram_denkar]

I am wondering if anyone here has any good ideas on how to battle (or even destroy) a Mechinoid Mother ship???

Whether it is strategics, tactic's, weapon systems, magic, psionics, plans, what ever you can figure it would take to drive off, damage, or destroy one???

[Killer Cyborg]

I am wondering if anyone here has any good ideas on how to battle (or even destroy) a Mechinoid Mother ship???

Whether it is strategics, tactic's, weapon systems, magic, psionics, plans, what ever you can figure it would take to drive off, damage, or destroy one???

The main problem is that we don't get a lot of info on the Motherships.
No real weaponry is listed for the ship itself, but I think it's a safe assumption that it has some.

Going by Kevin's love of cinema, I'd have to say that the best strategy would be to fly some fighters in, skim around through some trenches in the surface of the ship, and look for the exhaust vent...

[BookWyrm]

Or, capture a fighter, gut it & retorfit it so two humans can fly it, then after it docks undetected, upload a nasty virus....

[Rallan]

Or have a balding Shakespearean actor get captured by the Mechanoids and bring them to ruination when they try and absorb his headful of contradictory human ideas into their hivemind.

[Aramanthus]

Or else have a wandering time traveller stop them before they begin their mad march. And maybe he could reprogram them to fight amongest themselves. That way they aren't an immediate problem for the universes humanoids.

[Gazirra]

Or maybe the animator could suffer a fatal heart attack, thus ending the threat

[glitterboy2098]

fly into the superstructure and try to take out the main reactor?

have a archeologist, alien warrior, scientist and pilot/commando use a ring shaped portal to infiltrate the ship, plant plastic explosive all through it on timers, then steal a pair of fighters to dramatically escape just as it explodes?

have it eat a starship, which you've set to blow up?

confront the controlling master computer, give it a logical puzzle like "i always tell lies", and let it get into a recursive loop, setting off all the exploding consoles, destroying the ship?

upload some wierd unsolvable hologram shape into it's network?

[R Ditto]

A planet spots the mothership, and mistakes it for an asteroid, so they send out a modified shuttle with mining stuff and a nuke on board. Mechanoids ignore it as they detected nothing on the planet that could in any way pose a real threat to them. Expert miners do some digging into the motherships hull, oblivious to the fact it is a ship.
As Mechanoids decide to take action, the unknown ship leaves, and they decide to shoot it down. They then pick up transmissions of some guy still on the hull as he says 'disgusting humanoid affection stuff' to his female offspring as he hits a button.
Every Mechanoid on the ship has their 6th sense light up like a christmas tree, and they suddenly realize there is a threat that is going to cause minimal damage but cause a series of chain reactions that will destroy the other ship.
About 5 minutes later, as the mechanoids are running around like headless chickens because runners can't fit down into the hole to get close enough to even TM the apparently 'augmented to be much more powerful than it was when the TM'ed the ship in the first place and decided to ignore them' bomb... boom... the hero dies, the ship hull cracks, stuff happens, a few minutes later, the mothership is an exploding wreck.


Get a hold of some orphan teen guy whose military father died while trying to hide some super sized special ship from the mechanoids, through many trials and events, the teen guy gets hooked up with a cute gal, a few aliens, finds the super sized special ship and is able to activate its systems as the Mechanoid mothership tries to carve it up with a beam weapon, which instead jump starts the super sized special ship, with more or less obliterates the mothership, and uses the energy and mass to create the planet Rob Jr.


Lure the Mechanoid Mothership into an area where they find a nice juicy planet to dissect... unfortunately, both the planet and the mothership are in the way of some sort of intergalactic highway, and the people making it take out the planet and the mechanoid mothership rather than simply waiting for a natural orbit to move it out of the way.


Take any sort of anime style ship or mecha, and put any sort of teenager or kid in charge of it. Wait a few seasons, er, months or years, for Mechanoid Mothership threat to be defeated, but with much of their homeworld/colony/station/mothership blasted to bits and much of the population wiped out in the process.


Get them involved in some sort of interplanetary conflict of 'elemental' based races fighting to protect their home(world)s, wait for main enemy to show up and turn the Mechanoid Mothership into an appetizer...


Load up a team of 10 people and 4 small VW Bug sized automated weapon systems, with the best technology and weapons possible, on some uber fast assault/transport ship made using the help of alien tech, to infiltrate the Mechanoid Mothership, blasting and blowing up a few things, before finally finding some key thing, blowing it up, and narrowly escaping as the Mechanoid Mothership explodes



To simply start getting really out there...


Call in MacGuyver, give him 1,000 credits, a portable hole, and access to a thrift shop, scrap yard, a department store, a well stocked estate, and a fixer-upper shuttle.
Mechanoid Mothership should be eliminated within an hour.


Contact Lonestar and his flying Winnebago, give him a case of assorted jams, and some liquid Swartz. The Mechanoids should be quickly made unable to detect incomming threats...
such as someone who warps in and beams a few thousand tribbles into the main area the Mechanoids store their nutrients on their mothership....



Sabotage mechanoid gene stocks with elephant DNA, and breed an army of super mice that can survive insertion into mechanoid ships via special armor piercing missiles... wait a while for new Mechanoids to display signs of wanting peanuts or playing in mud, then release the super mice missiles.


Go borrow (or steal) a point singularity weapon from someone that has one.


Go borrow (or steal) a star killer or system destroyer type weapon from someone that has one.


One of those iso-nucleic mines (or whatever they were called) mentioned by 7 of 9 in Star Trek Voyager against species 8472 (or whatever they were called)...
Estimated 2.5 million isoton yield (or was it 1 million isoton and 2.5 million megatons?) and a blast radius of 'an entire star system'.
Should suffice, is so powerful, then hopefully instead of psychic flashes of doom, the immense uber powered lethal force causes mechanoid's heads to explode due to overload of seeing a precognitive flash of 'something' more or less blasting a mothership into tiny bits in an instant...


Or just toss the Borg at them in general, and quietly pack up and move to a different dimension...


Or convince Q that the Mechanoids would be far more fun to play with than Picard or Janeway.


Call out the Lensmen?


Hijack the comm. systems of the Mechanoid Mothership and flood their comm. channels with 24/7 humanoid comedy shows and sitcoms to see if they will laugh themselves to death and leave a nice intact mechanoid mothership for anyone looking for one?


Summon forth the forces of the totally absurd, as a giant pool cue materializes out of nowhere, doing a bank shot with a nearby plant, which slams the mother ship into the corner pocket (a.k.a., a nearby star or black hole).


Mobilize a fleet of several dozen Doom Stars and laugh manically as one realizes that amassing that many potential planet killers is just plain overkill, and that no number of Wasps is going to do diddly squat to shields that shrug off anti-ship nukes like water off of a duck's back on top of keeping any mechanoid from getting anywhere near close enough to use any sort of TM ability, along with energy pulsar spatial distortion weapons that will likely tear apart any 'small craft' within thousands of km.

[Aramanthus]

Personally just call the four man crew of that famous english red mining ship. They just need to get close enough to unleash their own computer on the mechanoids. Once the "Red Dwarf get thru with the mechanoids the mechanoids will happily commit suicide!

And if your talking adding DNA to the mechanoids pool add "Cat's". They'll suddenly get very vain and shallow. And then they'll never be able to accomplish anything.

[glitterboy2098]

deliver a Baking soda bomb built by Mike Nelson?

[Aramanthus]

ROFLMAO!!! That was a great one GB!!!

[bigbobsr6000]

All you have to do is send Marvin, the manic-depressant robot, to the Mother Ship to "talk" to it.

[Aramanthus]

Yeah! That would work too! The mother ships would then try to commit suicide! I don't see anyone complaining!

[Library Ogre]

Maybe a paranoid android could talk the mothership into suicide?

[glitterboy2098]

Maybe a paranoid android could talk the mothership into suicide?

no, that usually requires a guy with the name of Kirk to do the talking...

[glitterboy2098]

convince them to upgrade to a windows OS. then they'll have to devote so much system resources to keeping things running they'll be easy pickings. plus their repair drivers and weapons drivers would conflict (making it easy to use mass drivers to wipe them out... )

[Aramanthus]

That might be a terrible mistake. Imagine how rich BG would be if he got a sale like that!

[bigbobsr6000]

Sneak aboard some "Trebbles".

Tell the "Replicaters" where it is.

Command the Mother Ship's computer to compute to the last decible the value of Pie.

[Aramanthus]

I think the mothership might actually be able to take the Replicators.

[The Galactus Kid]

Cross the streams.

[bigbobsr6000]

Cross the streams.

But Ray said, "That would be 'bad'."

[Killer Cyborg]

Command the Mother Ship's computer to compute to the last decible the value of Pie.

That would depend on what kind of pie it is.

[bigbobsr6000]

Round Apple Pie with cheese on it. Then it must compute the Pi of the Pie.

[BookWyrm]

"What happened? the ship is falling!"
"They must have found the Off-Switch!"
"....Long have I questioned the wisdom of that accursed Off-Switch...."

[Aramanthus]

If they didn't find the off switch. They should look for where the extension cord is plugged in. Then unplug it!

[glitterboy2098]

travel back in time and assassinate the inventor of the circit breaker in the culture that created the mechanoids.
then you just have to shoot their ships and watch all the consoles explode taking out the whole ship...


blow up the sun of the system they're in.

sneak aboard and reverse the polarity of something with a sonic screwdriver.

there's a thermal exhust port just below the main port. a direct hit will set up a chain reaction into the main core.

fly a disabled starship into the planet eating port, and detonate the engines

capture a drone, and hack it to send a "sleep" command. then the ship will blow up in short order.

[bigbobsr6000]

Send in the Mothership's Mother-in-Law.

Send in the divorce lawyers. Tell the wife's divorce lawyers that the Mothership is an asset of the husband.

Sneak Kenders aboard.

Sneak Tinker Gnomes aboard. (How many Motherships do you want?)

[R Ditto]

Hmm... lack of sleep, + sugar, =...

Sneak Kenders aboard.

Kender "Oooo! Pretty!"
*yanks shiny crystal from a random slot*

Computer "Warning, power flow regulator 1895-Beta 9 Delta in Junction Sigma 3412 Omicron 4 has been removed."

Mechanoid Overlord "Wait, don't we run power for the main power core's containment field through there?"

Computer "Warning, the containment field of the main power core is failing."

Mechanoid Overlord "Yeah, I thought so..."

Kender "Oooo! A shiny winged thing!"
*kender somehow hotwires and steals a wasp*

Kender "Weeeeeee!"
*kender accidently devestates the launch bay with stray weapons fire, hits some vital piece of equipment placed in a very bad spot, before flying off into space after running over some thinmen and runts*

*Mechanoid Overlord facepalms and mothership explodes*

Sneak Tinker Gnomes aboard.

Mechanoid Overlord "Deploy the Wasp Hordes against that little humanoid infested dirt ball!"
*panel flips open and pours a cup of herbal tea*

MO "What the bloody heck?! Bah, fire off the missiles!"

*trap door in floor opens up, a dance floor rises up, panel in ceiling opens up and a disco ball drops down*

MO "This is redicious! To heck with the fun! Carve up that planet now!"
*a giant 'mast' slides out of the front of the mothership, and a giant flag/sail with the words "BANG!" unfurls*

MO "Computer, self destruct... now... please..."
*a section of wall slides open, a few mechanical gnomes with music instruments begin to play polka music.*

*meanwhile, deep in the ship...*

Gnome 1 "No, that's all wrong! Purple clashes with Green! Cross the Green wires with the yellow ones!"
Gnome 2 "Hey, look at how that funny metal guy over there dances funny when I swap this ruby speced plate looking thing for this metal waffle thingamabob!"
Gnome 3 "Who cares, these nifty crystals stored over there can be used to bake up some wonderful bread!"
Gnome 4 "Hey guys, I got mead brewery made using the body of that big thing that tripped on Svensonsnose!"
Gnome 5 "Yay! I could use some good mead after that thing stepped on my foot!"
Gnome 6 "Look at this! I was trying to make some nifty metal utensils, tools and dishware out of that shiny metal wall over there, and I found a huge button behind it marked 'OFF'."
Gnome 1 "Cool, lets push it and see what happens!"
*click*

Computer "Warning, artificial gravity deactivated."

Gnome 3 "Artificial what?!?"
Gnome 5 "Who cares, we can fly! Now I can invent mechanical wings for myself instead of work on an automated crutch for myself!"

*on the bridge, the MO floats about upside down*
MO "Someone kill me... please... they... they are ruining the mother ship... humanoids are ruining the mothership... smaller than normal, squishier than normal humanoids, are ruining the ship... with things so simple and plain they should be able to defeat our superior tech... it's like a mindless blob of protlesh in a clone vat beating me at chess a dozen times in a row... it isn't feasible..."

Computer "Oh, they made me a cute humanoid body! I can have arms and legs now! The stuff they put in my coolant system makes me tingly inside!"

*mothership starts to fly in circles like it's trying to dance*

*MO proceeds to beat his head into the nearest wall, just to bounce off and slowly tumble around the room, crying*

[bigbobsr6000]

[Aramanthus]

ROFLMAO!!! Excellent one R Ditto! I didn't know those Tinker Gnomes had some Drazi in them. But they must since they use purple and green. They obviously have Drazi blood in them.

[bigbobsr6000]

How about a group from a race of half-tinker gnomes and half-kinders turned loose on the mothership?

[Beatmeclever]

Sneak Kenders aboard.

Kender "Oooo! Pretty!"
*yanks shiny crystal from a random slot*

Computer "Warning, power flow regulator 1895-Beta 9 Delta in Junction Sigma 3412 Omicron 4 has been removed."

Mechanoid Overlord "Wait, don't we run power for the main power core's containment field through there?"

Computer "Warning, the containment field of the main power core is failing."

Mechanoid Overlord "Yeah, I thought so..."

Kender "Oooo! A shiny winged thing!"
*kender somehow hotwires and steals a wasp*

Kender "Weeeeeee!"
*kender accidently devestates the launch bay with stray weapons fire, hits some vital piece of equipment placed in a very bad spot, before flying off into space after running over some thinmen and runts*

*Mechanoid Overlord facepalms and mothership explodes*

Is it just me or did everyone else just have a Phantom Menace flashback? I always knew I hated that movie.

[NMI]

Call in MacGuyver, give him 1,000 credits, a portable hole, and access to a thrift shop, scrap yard, a department store, a well stocked estate, and a fixer-upper shuttle.
Mechanoid Mothership should be eliminated within an hour.

47 minutes actually. You need to consider the commercials!

[NMI]

dodge!

[NMI]

Have the 5th Column join your cause against the Mechanoids

[The Beast]

dodge!

Dodging's not a tactic. Dodging is what you do when a tactic fails.

[bigbobsr6000]

The Three Stooges aboard.

Sugar in the "gas tank".

Bananas in the tail pipe. (Albeit a lot.)

Transmit the joke from MPFC that causes ones who hear it to die of laughter. (If you know what I am referring to, you are as twisted as me. Sad isn't it.)

[taalismn]

Galactus: "I'm hungry"

[taalismn]

Politely ask the Second Foundation to "guide" Mechanoid society.

The Culture: Bureau of Special Circumstances

[taalismn]

Take over the controls and fly it into a giant star.

Throw a giant star AT them.
Trust me; NOBODY expects to have a giant star thrown at them!
Okay, maybe the Xeelee( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeelee#Xeelee ), but they're not like normal folks.

Convince the Mechanoids that the Xeelee are humanoids.
Watch Mechanoids march off to slay Xeelee.
Watch, after several millennia of throwing uncountable legions at the Xeelee, the Mechanoids annoy the Xeelee just enough that the Xelee spend a weekend punching the Mechanoids into extinction.

[taalismn]

I don't believe the Golden Age has FTL capability(I haven't read the third book yet), but very-near speed-of-light relativistic travel....in that regard the Mechanoids might pose a problem to them, at least until the GA could get ahold of an example of a non-psionic FTL drive.
The GA might be able to outhink the Mechanoids in virtuality, but the cyborgs might have the upper hand in terms of brute force...at least until the Golden Age ramped up from 'decadent complacency' to 'WE GOT A WAR ON!' mode and mobilized everything from solar lasers to tossing anti-matter.

Against the Culture, and even against Julian Mays' Galactic Milleau, with its high-level psychics, the Mechanoids would be toast.

Another fun Human culture to toss the Mechanoids at would be Tony Daniel's 'Metaplanetary', where the solar system is literally webbed by enormous megaconstructs, space is permeated with 'grist'(basic nanomaterial), there are enormous sentient post-human spaceships lurking in the outer solar system, and intelligent nano- and computer viruses are running around loose(one of the characters is a nanotech- and AI-viral-mutated Jeep SUV running ferally in upstate New York from 'car hunters' who hunt down other trucks and cars that have gone feral).

[The Beast]

I don't believe the Golden Age has FTL capability...

IIRC, MiO said the farthest humans were able to get to prior to the Coming of the Rifts was the asteroid belt, with extremely limited exploration past there (I'm thinking mostly probes and maybe a couple state-sponsored manned trips to Jupiter's orbit).

[taalismn]

I don't believe the Golden Age has FTL capability...

IIRC, MiO said the farthest humans were able to get to prior to the Coming of the Rifts was the asteroid belt, with extremely limited exploration past there (I'm thinking mostly probes and maybe a couple state-sponsored manned trips to Jupiter's orbit).

Wrong Golden Age, Beast. We ubernerden are refering to a sci-fi trilogy called The Golden Age(or Golden Transcendance)(John C. Wright) , which has as its basis a decadent future post-Human culture running the Solar System and making a few steps outside it, but still mainly concentrated around Sol(No great Diaspora has taken place, and a tragic failed colonization effort has appaerently come back to haunt the complacent cultures of the Home System).

[Rallan]

I don't believe the Golden Age has FTL capability...

IIRC, MiO said the farthest humans were able to get to prior to the Coming of the Rifts was the asteroid belt, with extremely limited exploration past there (I'm thinking mostly probes and maybe a couple state-sponsored manned trips to Jupiter's orbit).

Mutants in Orbit screwed up though, because the writers didn't sit down and work through the ramifications of the Traction Drive (which provides constant 1G acceleration, forever). If you accelerate constantly for half your trip, then reverse the drive and spend the second half slowing down, even Pluto is only about three weeks away. And that sort of travel time means that setting up mining bases (or military outposts, or anything else) anywhere in the solar system is trivial.

So logically there's no reason why the major nations and corporations in the Golden Age wouldn't have had research bases all the way out in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud, because getting there would actually take less time than it took to get people and material to the Mars colony using older drive technologies. And there's also no reason why the resource-hungry stations of Mutants in Orbit (who are willing to spend several months on trips to the asteroids and back) can't just build a bunch of traction drive ships and start mining resources on the moons of the gas giants.

[X'Zanthar]

I don't believe the Golden Age has FTL capability...

IIRC, MiO said the farthest humans were able to get to prior to the Coming of the Rifts was the asteroid belt, with extremely limited exploration past there (I'm thinking mostly probes and maybe a couple state-sponsored manned trips to Jupiter's orbit).

Mutants in Orbit screwed up though, because the writers didn't sit down and work through the ramifications of the Traction Drive (which provides constant 1G acceleration, forever). If you accelerate constantly for half your trip, then reverse the drive and spend the second half slowing down, even Pluto is only about three weeks away. And that sort of travel time means that setting up mining bases (or military outposts, or anything else) anywhere in the solar system is trivial.

So logically there's no reason why the major nations and corporations in the Golden Age wouldn't have had research bases all the way out in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud, because getting there would actually take less time than it took to get people and material to the Mars colony using older drive technologies. And there's also no reason why the resource-hungry stations of Mutants in Orbit (who are willing to spend several months on trips to the asteroids and back) can't just build a bunch of traction drive ships and start mining resources on the moons of the gas giants.

Do not have the book. Did they have a traction drive then? Also if they had it, they may have had political/legal/financial situations like are presently keeping us at the point we are now when we could have more of a space presense

[taalismn]

Traction Drive. Loop Hole, Exploit it.
Although the probable explanation is that the drive was experimental at the time of the Crash, most likely undergoing advanced field testing. With the post-Crash emphasis on survival, not exploration, long range missions were shelved and the drive program cannibalized of most of its extraneous hardware, until somebody realized that the Traction Drive could be mighty useful for getting to all those iceballs in the outer SS, and has begun selling the system(this could become part of a big campaign, where the PCs are gathering up the resources and a ship(or small fleet of them) for a big resource harvesting journey to the outer solar system..of course, there's a lot of folks who feel threatened by the mission(or rather by the PCs' possible success), and there's the possibility of encountering SOMETHING out there in the Deep...
Like Mechanoids perhaps?

[Rallan]

Traction Drive. Loop Hole, Exploit it.
Although the probable explanation is that the drive was experimental at the time of the Crash, most likely undergoing advanced field testing. With the post-Crash emphasis on survival, not exploration, long range missions were shelved and the drive program cannibalized of most of its extraneous hardware, until somebody realized that the Traction Drive could be mighty useful for getting to all those iceballs in the outer SS, and has begun selling the system(this could become part of a big campaign, where the PCs are gathering up the resources and a ship(or small fleet of them) for a big resource harvesting journey to the outer solar system..of course, there's a lot of folks who feel threatened by the mission(or rather by the PCs' possible success), and there's the possibility of encountering SOMETHING out there in the Deep...
Like Mechanoids perhaps?

The idea of long-range missions being shelved after the Crash because nobody at the time realised the potential of traction drives is just beyond stupid. This is a culture that only survives because spaceships are constantly going out and flying all the way across the inner solar system to harvest water and minerals. I think it's pretty safe to assume that the only way all of them could fail to understand the potential of the traction drive would be if every single ship captain, engineer, physicist, and highschool math graduate in the setting was infected with the I'm As Dumb As The Author Who Wrote Me plague. This is a drive that reduces a trip to the asteroid belt from an arduous journey of months to a quick jaunt that's a couple of days each way. I'm pretty sure that even if everyone in the setting was too stupid to do the math and work out how long a flight to Jupiter will take, they'd have figured out the potential of the traction drive the first time someone flew a traction drive ship from Earth to the asteroid belt.

[Rallan]

I don't believe the Golden Age has FTL capability...

IIRC, MiO said the farthest humans were able to get to prior to the Coming of the Rifts was the asteroid belt, with extremely limited exploration past there (I'm thinking mostly probes and maybe a couple state-sponsored manned trips to Jupiter's orbit).

Mutants in Orbit screwed up though, because the writers didn't sit down and work through the ramifications of the Traction Drive (which provides constant 1G acceleration, forever). If you accelerate constantly for half your trip, then reverse the drive and spend the second half slowing down, even Pluto is only about three weeks away. And that sort of travel time means that setting up mining bases (or military outposts, or anything else) anywhere in the solar system is trivial.

So logically there's no reason why the major nations and corporations in the Golden Age wouldn't have had research bases all the way out in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud, because getting there would actually take less time than it took to get people and material to the Mars colony using older drive technologies. And there's also no reason why the resource-hungry stations of Mutants in Orbit (who are willing to spend several months on trips to the asteroids and back) can't just build a bunch of traction drive ships and start mining resources on the moons of the gas giants.

Do not have the book. Did they have a traction drive then? Also if they had it, they may have had political/legal/financial situations like are presently keeping us at the point we are now when we could have more of a space presense

In the book they're described as a new drive system that was just starting to come into use when the end of the world happened, so they've been around since then. They're commercially available in Orbit, but described as not being particularly common or popular because of its low acceleration compared to other drives. Which would be a perfectly good reason not to put them on, say, small fighters that just exist to protect a station or a mothership from attackers, but it's obvious that Siembieda and co. never realised that the traction drive is the best drive for getting from point A to point B for pretty much any trip that involves leaving Earth orbit.

[taalismn]

[


In the book they're described as a new drive system that was just starting to come into use when the end of the world happened, so they've been around since then. They're commercially available in Orbit, but described as not being particularly common or popular because of its low acceleration compared to other drives. Which would be a perfectly good reason not to put them on, say, small fighters that just exist to protect a station or a mothership from attackers, but it's obvious that Siembieda and co. never realised that the traction drive is the best drive for getting from point A to point B for pretty much any trip that involves leaving Earth orbit.

That's why the Mars in my campaign is clean of bugs.

Gotta love those big honking traction drive troop carriers and battleships...they may start out slow, but when they get moving....

[Kovoston]

Or else have a wandering time traveller stop them before they begin their mad march. And maybe he could reprogram them to fight amongest themselves. That way they aren't an immediate problem for the universes humanoids.

Here here!! Bloody good idea!