So here is the finished battlewagon. I had to ditch the side turrets for the same "reverse thrusters" problem Ashburner was having. But I managed to figure out a way to get a conveyor feed to the dorsal turret, so now it can load itself forever and I only have to manually load the ventral turret. It also has a rocket launcher mounted pointing forward. So, having completed my pirate monstrosity, I went hunting.
It was surprisingly slim pickings tonight. Everybody was keeping to themselves. Then some poor fool turned on his ship's beacon, and it was right next to a "private sail" npc craft. Obviously, he was jumping out of his ship to try to board the Sail and wanted to be able to find his way to his ship again. I'd done that a few times myself, with Commercial Shipment vessels. Ironically enough, I usually score 50 or so extremely redundant hand drills for my trouble, but that's another story. So I traveled there... and watched him kill himself Just as I arrived. DOH.
The lag in multiplayer, even on a dedicated server, makes boarding any vessel at speed almost impossible. I decided I'd take the ship, but I had to find a way to stop it (Sails travel much faster than the fat, slow, defenseless Business Shipment vessels). Well, here I sat in probably one of the most heavily armored ships in the system, so I carefully pulled ahead into the Sail's path, and turned the inertial dampeners back on.
In retrospect, although using my cockpit's crosshairs to verify alignment helped get it right, I should have turned at the last moment to avoid the point of impact being my cockpit window. The nose of the sail lanced through the bulletproof glass like... well, a lance, and smashed me to flash-frozen paste, destroying my control chair.
Fortunately, my medbay is inside the ship too (it's a wonder of efficient useage of space in there, I tell ya), so I respawned immediately still within my ship. Someone in the chat window said, "Well, that's one way to do it" and I realized my intended prey had come back and had been watching my attempt. Quickly, not trusting him around my now crippled and rudderless battlewagon, I accessed the ship systems through the reactor control panel and activated my turrets. I heard the turrets fire, but knew he wasn't dead, I saw him through the ruins of my cockpit window that he had scurried behind cover. Unfortunately I had been carrying my assault rifle on me when I died, so it had disappeared, and I didn't have a spare on board (I'll have to remember to fix that next time), so I jabbed open my door hatch, readied my tools, and started to creep around my ship slowly, making sure to keep out of line of sight of the turrets.
As I came outside, I saw the devastation. Aside from the cockpit, my ship was merely dented and completely intact. However, almost the entire front half of the Private Sail had been destroyed against my armor, and the remains were twisted up with me, solar panels and other debris warped around my battlewagon's pill-shaped hull. I moved carefully around to the aft of the Sail wreckage and found my quarry trying to work his way through the rear entry of the sail to what used to be its interior (but was now very much exterior. The fool was trying to grind his way through the door instead of opening it, or perhaps it wouldn't open from damage. In any case, he never saw me sneaking up behind him with my own angle grinder... and before he knew what happened, I had sliced him as thoroughly as a christmas ham.
I decided to leave the turrets active to dissuade any other looky-loo types who might wander by, and also to shoot down incoming meteors (the meteors on this server as previously mentioned are frequent and frickin laser-guided). I finished grinding through the door and made my way into the not-so-interior.
Unfortunately, it looked like the cargo bay must have been in the fore part of the craft, as it was nowhere to be found. The reactor was intact, however, so I took all the uranium from it and ground down the nearby gyroscope to score a sweet thousand steel plate. Then I used the reactor's control panel to edit the title of the ship's beacon to "Wreckage of the Private Sail that GasBandit trashed" - it was continuing to function because enough solar panels had survived to keep it going.
Not wanting to press my luck with any further meteor showers (and I'm still not made of magnesium, you know, so ammo must be husbanded), I returned to my ship and got spare parts out of the cargo bay enough to rebuild the command chair. Unfortunately, I had not stocked any bulletproof glass, so I had the interesting experience of flying back to my secret construction site exposed to the void.
The battlewagon is patched up once more, and ready for action, but that was enough for one night for me. The cat was also getting irritated at being ignored so much lately.
