|
October 6, 3066 – Another flotilla arrives at a pirate point one day away and unfurls more DropShips. They will all converge on planet tomorrow.
The Blackhearts get ready, and are preparing defenses in a variety of places. The local Chargers are doing defensive holding work. There are just too many DropPorts and potential landing sites to cover them all with a strong force. What the Blackhearts want to do is use their fighters to force the Brigade into landing at a few sites that they are defending heavily. The Blackhearts push one battalion of tanks and mechs each at three mostly-equidistant DropPorts around the planet. Then the Chargers are garrisoning large population centers.
October 7 - The DropShips begin to arrive, escorted by 20 fighters from the Brigade. They are looking to land in a variety of places around the world, and to secure a variety of industrial, commercial, and population centers. This makes sense as they can operate independently of each other.
But there are two major issues with their plan of attack. Firstly it forces them to split up their aerospace cover. They don’t have a full 20 fighters protecting a large fleet of DropShip assets. The result is a split set of fighters on each of six different landing attempts. Some have 2 and some have four fighters.
The second issue is that they are severely outnumbered in the fighter department. The Blackhearts have 48 fighters converging (a squadron held in reserve) and assigns a full squadron of 6 fighters for each of their attack vectors around the planet. They also send 10 fighters against the attack ships that have 4 fighters on them, so they are countering with an additional 2 flights or 3 per force.
That numerical superiority helps them push aside most of the attacks and force them into fewer vectors. In fact, they had originally wanted three landing zones, but they are able to force five of the six attackers into one landing zone. The last one, a flight of fighters and a Union and Gazelle, broke free of the attackers and has a separate landing zone.
They converge their fighters, and send the reserve of fighters to assist and cover holes.
The one that broke out is landing at a nearby factory complex in the hills that is not heavily defended. Soon they will be unloading roughly a company each of mechs and tanks.
Meanwhile, the full attack force comes into a huge hornet’s nest of fighters as it descends, too late to pull out. In the space of a few minutes, almost every Panzer fighter is destroyed, and the Blackhearts have made them pay, massively, for arriving. The Blackhearts break off the fighters when they have destroyed the Panzer’s aerospace capacity. They don’t want to push too hard against the DropShips to lose a bunch of fighters on the way.
They instead send two squadrons of healthy fighters to buzz the LZ in the mountains where the one group just broke out. They arrive, destroy the two fighters here, and begin to force the unloading tanks and mechs back and away from the nearby mines and such. The 4 fighters that survived the mission join them, and the Brigade is unable to unload peacefully, and only has about half of its unit out, with destroyed tanks and savaged mechs on the ground. They load back into the DropShip and use it as cover. More fighters arrive and over the next half hour, the two ships here are attacked and taken out by the local fighters, and then disabled. The local forces will grab them and take them.
The Blackhearts lost 19 fighters today, took out one company of mechs, one company of tanks, two DropShips, and every fighter the Brigade has. They will need to spend some time licking their wounds, and healing a bunch of their unit, but it was a huge victory.
And the battle has just begun.
|