Rip Van Winkle

http://www.combinedops.com/St%20Nazaire.htm Ok, here's an excellent account. This WAS indeed the raid I had read about. The dock gates WERE destroyed. This was the picture I remembered. Good adventure ideas there.

Yeah, the U-boot pens weren't damaged, but they weren't the target anyway. The drydock was out of action until after the war, and since it had been the only Axis-held drydock on the Atlantic seaboard big enough for Tirpitz the German admirals didn't dare send their last battleship into combat.

If your local bookstores carry the Osprey series of campaign books, they have a good one about St Nazaire. It has lots of photos, diagrams, and maps depicting both the plan and the actuality of the raid.

So, I added a definite historical parrallel to the episode I ran last friday. I didn't play down the other stuff, I just added so there was a LOT going on. It worked great!

The defiant-class USS steadfast was to use the obsolte destroyer as a "fire ship", with a few other small vessles flying cover, scouting and recovery. They also had technical problems restoring the Fire Ship to something that could be brought into combat. This was made more complicated because of the terrible ledgends and stories about the gristly fate of the origninal crew on the Fire Ship. The psychic imprint of the original crew's horrors, combined with an inoportune discover of gristly remains, made things more complicated for the psychically sensitive.

Meanwhile, the space station they were basing the raid on had a problem: being swamped with refugees. There was a moral (and morale) dillemna since the fire ship could have been used to ferry the refugees to safety. In fact, a group of principled but misguided n'er-do-wells attempted to hijack the Fire Ship for just that purpose! A daring counter-attack led to the bloodless recapture of the Fire Ship.

And it all ended up with a climactic space battle as the doomed destroyer was rammed into the Dominion spacedock.

Sounds like it was an interesting game. I may have to use that one if my campaign ever gets to the Dominion War.

So what happened to the refugees?

Nothing happened to the refugees yet. They were not overrun by the dominion and slaughtered. They were not led to safety deeper into the Federation. Yet.

A number of things were set up as foreshadowing for the NEXT episode. For example, I mentioned among the possible dominion defenders an "ace" Hibiki-class fighter, which did not appear. Next episode they'll have to deal with the refugee situation while being hunted by the ace killer fighter.