PBM Probe: PBM Update

[GrimFinger]

Continuing to scour the Internet has led to the discovery of the first issue of something called PBM Update.

Click here to check it out for yourself.

[Nazareth]

Pretty cool find Grim. Looking over the game reports I saw that under BSE, IAN Johnny Reb was destroyed. That ship was played by my cousin. I remember when it happened and how much crying I had to listen to! -)

[GrimFinger]

Pretty cool find Grim. Looking over the game reports I saw that under BSE, IAN Johnny Reb was destroyed. That ship was played by my cousin. I remember when it happened and how much crying I had to listen to! -)

Tell us this Tale of Tears.

[Nazareth]

It was fairly early in the game, hadn't been playing more that 6 or 8 months. My cousin and I joined the IAN. I had a destroyer and freighter, Nazareth and Vangellis and he had two destroyers, the Johnny Reb and the Robert E. Lee. Our destroyers were offered tasks, receiving pay equal to the task accepted. We both accepted patrol assignments in the outlying systems as there had been some pirating going on by IND (independents, players that had not or chose not to join an affiliation). He in one and I in another. Seemed like fairly safe pay, space is big. He was told of a SMS or some such freighter being attacked around some planet. As luck, would have it he (Johnny Reb) was engaged (attacked) by several unknown destroyers I believe, maybe a destroyer and corvettes when he arrived. He was destroyed in the battle, crashing into the planet I believe as he was unable to maintain orbit. One of the enemy destroyers took heavy damage and was a forced to emergency land on the planet for repairs as it lacked the engines to leave low orbit or something like that.

IAN ordered all destroyers that were close by to converge on the area immediately. Don't remember who the other two destroyers were but my cousin brought in the Robert E. Lee and arrived with the Nazareth, plus the other two players. We blockaded the planet so as to prevent him from lifting off into orbit without having to engage 4 fully armed IAN destroyers. It was our belief that would could starve his crew at worse or destroy him outright. He had damage that couldn't be repaired completely except at a port plus would be short or out of missiles. He most likely wouldn't have power to fully operate whatever other weapons he might have, assuming there were some that escaped damage. The other option was to surrender his ship and submit himself to Imperial justice.

We sat in orbit for several turns waiting. Scans of the planet were unsuccessful in locating the ship, but the odds were pretty small any way. Planets being the size that they are! That's when I was contacted by a fellow gamer, Greg Stafford I think. Good player and I had played in other games with him prior to BSE. Always had worked together, but he also always made sure his position, alliance, side benefitted from any exchange as one would expect. He contacted me and offered information concerning the 'rogue' ship/ships. In return, I owed him a favor that he might call upon in the future. Nice to have an imperial who might owe you a favor.

To make a long story shorter, he fed me a line that I am embarrassed to say, bought hook, line and sinker. He told me the ship repaired itself sufficiently to lift off and left orbit. It was meeting two other ships at such and such a location to receive much needed supplies and repair items. One was a freighter and the other he wasn't sure. If I wanted to catch them I would have to move this turn or risk losing them. To be fair, we asked the gm's if it was possible for a ship to lift off planet into low orbit and leave without being seen. They said odds were low, but possible. So we took that answer and Stafford's intelligence and decided to move to the rendezvous location in hopes of bagging the lot of them. We found no one, later discovered the ship lifted off after we left and made its escape, identified Stafford as part of the pirating, at least as best we could tell and marked him as unreliable as far as the IAN was concerned. So in BSE, we found ourselves on different sides of the fence.

However, in my attempt to locate even one of the IND ships, I made first contact with the Plestrons. Contact in that I stumbled upon them, not that I interacted with them. At this time in the game, destroyers were the biggest player run 'warships' btw. I was able to gleam just enough to note that the Plestron ship was very much larger and more heavily armed and shielded than I/us. Anyway, was totally played by Stafford, but lots of fun. Played another year and a bit, but got so wrapped up in Renassiance that I eventually dropped my positions even though I was progressing up with the IAN ranks nicely. Regret getting out of BSE, but not getting heavy into Renassiance. The game got absolutely crazy and interesting shortly thereafter.

Glenn Harrold played BSE for some time. He might have all kinds of interesting stuff to tell about the game after I got out.