Dohr listened quietly and finally nodded at Mika's words. She seemed to be thinking along the same lines as the Doc. But it was Fiarr who voiced his exact thoughts. "I agree. Battle damage would require reporting even if the imperial officer in charge of the shuttle was not part of the station's command chain. And even if we were not required to give your report of the events, there would have to be an incredibly good and beliavable reason for not doing so... As we have all heard many times I am sure: Any attack against a member of the Imperial army or an Imperial craft is an attack against the Empire itself.

Therefore I too would suggest we create some sort of a feasible problem in the shuttle's engines or life-support system, something that would force a craft like it to deviate from its flight plan and visit a repair station. Of course the fault would have to be such that we can fix it ourselves if need be. Maybe hide a spare part somewhere on board as a backup.

As for my role... I believe Cor already named the only reason a Kel Dorian would be allowed to travel on an imperial shuttle unrestricted. An alien such as myself would not be tolerated as part of a medical staff, let alone a physician or a surgeon. But give me some armour and even my somewhat exotic weapons would not be out of place in the hands of a bounty hunter."

[Language unknown: "Hi lattiolat Manderfor of esseveoreyinhas anri ce teronsoulere earhasnce nochta n onesanthehouthu etfolito k ughstaort ourandtho fo enerrica trana."], Dohr nodded at Aderek when he spoke in Huttese. "Or Ryl or Kel Dorian, but I believe it would be a less common thing to find someone fluent enough in either to translate."

"Before we 'borrowed' the shuttle it was used to transport Rebels to an Imperial prison camp.  Couldn't we be doing the same?  Some Imperials with a few disadents in the cells on transport duty?  I'm sure Arcas could lead such a force without overt lying.  We are Rebel terrorists according to the Empire after all."

"We know there are multiple camps on Despayre, can't we just be a routine delivery that suffered damage and needs to repair?  A few of the humans could play shuttle crew and guards, Arcas as their senior officer and slap the rest in the cells."

Kira listens intently to the idea's of the group. She tapped her foot as they pitched idea's. "A prisoner ship thats damaged is feasable...most of us human's could pass as guards with the right uniforms and  maybe soem tips from our imperial leader..." Looking at Arcas.

She looks at Fiarr, then Mika. "How hard would it be to make a hidden compartment that can easily be missed. Have some of our weapons that are not common place and maybe Fiarr...though i'd love to see how you'd handle being behind bars, you seem the perfect person to sneak out quickly"

Mika nods as the others bounce ideas back and forth.  "A malfunction shouldn't be that hard to fake.  A power surge along the main coupler could set up a feedback loop that caused the primary atmosphere generator to flame out maybe.  Between fused motivators and fried electronics, that would maybe be enough.  I could put together some parts, show some progress towards fashioning some replacement parts, not so far along as to give pause, but far enough along to complete and get things up and running with a few days effort.  Something like that."

At Kira's question, Mika shrugs, "Depends...  What equipment would you want in it?  How accessible would you want it to be?  Would you want it static dampened our otherwise something to block casual scans?  If we can disassemble the gear, that might make it easier.  Hiding it in the waste disposal tank might work, but I'm not gonna fish it out.  Or we could lose a shield generator and build it in there, using the power couplings to the generator to induce a charge on the casing to minimize sensor derection, but a decent tech wouldn't take long to figure it out.  Maybe build it into one of the atmosphere reservoirs or sensor resonator cavities, still not all that hard to spot.  If it's small enough, I could slip it into the ducting or water storage, I don't see the Imps running flow capacities on the air transfer systems or verifying the water tank capacities."

"What exactly do you want to hide on board Kira?  Smuggling weapons is a risk.  Besides, if we're posing as an Imperial prison transport then the crew would likely have sidearms and a weapons locker.  What else do you plan to pack?  I think we can leave Nijel at home for this one."

"As another option to consider," Cor puts in via her droid, "is that extrapolating the course of a freighter leaving the station - not to mention investigation into relevant services and their affiliations - may lead us to freighter companies in the employ of the Empire.  No matter how secure they may be, they will be less defended than an Imperial station in a militarily active region of space.  Infiltrating via a freighter may be an ideal weak point and may allow us to avoid risking the assault shuttle.

"In that scenario, securing a place on one of the freighters heading to the station and posing as workers may be an ideal way to penetrate the target."

"I believe Miss Lambar has a point, though I'm not sure whether the freighters dock at the station properly or rather just for the refuel. It might raise some questions, if we tried to board the station. That is, unless we figure a good reason off the books. While the Empire is strictly authoritarian, many Imperials are looking out for themselves and dabble with illegal things when they can get away with it. We could look in to the station commander or someone else up in the chain of command, who might be looking for a lucrative deal, but it carries a risk of being double crossed by the said Imp."

Dohr nods at Heigren. "That could work too. Although I would very much like to have CC9 next to me and my trusty old carbine in my hand when heading into a place like that. Not that fighting through the local garrison really is an option.

As prisoners we would have no possibility to openly enter even the public areas of the station. While that might not be a problem for Fiarr, the rest of us... aliens... might have a hard time moving around. And the same problem could face us on board a freighter as well; our access to the station would be limited at best. Then again as members of a freighter crew we naturally would not draw as much unwanted attention to ourselves as we might wearing imperial outfits."

"Any chance we could potentially preform a shuttle swap at the station?"  He pauses, "Some of the larger mining operations will let their influential teams swap ships when theirs needed significant repairs or upgrades.  If we represented ourselves with an officer whom has been working with a bounty hunter successfully, and had caught some 'classified' high profile prisoners, could we fake ship issues that will take too long to repair, and swap for a different shuttle?  The original shuttle could potentially be rigged to blow as we leave.  It might also leave us with a shuttle that wouldn't be listed as stolen, but rather presumed destroyed."

He pauses, "Actually, there are two items that are most likely to get ships that seem structurally fixable end up getting grounded are hard to track down issues with the power reactors, and the same with life support.  Power Cores tend to be pretty centralized with much of the key components, although distribution certainly covers the whole ship.  Life support however, is often spread out throughout the ship as there are so many different types of components to it, and in some cases some need to be separated from others to be most efficient.  For instance, it might not be that hard to swap out a handful of components in the life support system so that it will fail practical operation tests, but show green for internal diagnostics.  We could probably make the ship appear to elevate the CO2 levels enough that we'd have to sacrifice most of the crew to make it to the next depot.  Yet to check all the components to find the one that is off could take a week.  We leave them to potentially fix the shuttle while we take a fresh one to deliver out cargo.  Is that something we could sell?  Hmmm, to be honest, it would take half that time however, to just swap 90% of the components, and they would test them off ship.  We'd have to be able to argue we had to be certain there wasn't something wrong with the 10% that were left."

To answer Lin's question regarding how ship's dock there is a mix.  There is hangar space where shuttles, small freighters and the like can dock for easy loading/unloading.  There is internal capacity for around 9 ships of medium freighter size.  There are also eight berthing slips for larger vessel (up to frigate or small cruiser size).

A very large B2-series super battle droid, a relatively fresh paint job marred by minor battle damage across its torso armour, enters the room and stands next to the door.  It would be unobtrusive if it weren't a super battle droid but as it stands the figure is somewhat imposing.

The droid says nothing, simply standing there mostly out of the way and observing.

Kira listens to the two possible plans and scratches her chin. "Bounty hunters tend to be a secret active lot...i grew up with a former bounty hunter and still know only a little of his history. BUT if we can pose as a bounty hunter, the first issue is how will we pose a person here as a viable bounty. If the possible bounty is big enough, then the company hires multiple hunters in more of a hope of getting their target....some are highly specialised. Minor bounties can be numerous, and many of teh outside rim's may not be fully aware of them. These types are the sort that the newer hunters cut their teeth on....i know i have."

She looks around the group. "Bounty hunters also don't travel in big groups...they often fly their own bounty out. They may have a team of three or four others, but bigger groups are rare."

She sighs, then looks at the others. "Maybe another idea is two teams....one made up of two or three people posing as a bounty hunter. The other the freighter option."

Kyvarr nodded to the battle droid as he came in the door.  "It is good to see you functional CC9.  Your presence was missed on Despayre though I doubt you would have liked it.  Technology did not do well there."

She turned her atttention back to the group.  "All this talk of bounty hunters and prisoners sounds awfully risky.  You can disguise the entire team as Imperials or stormtroopers with the exception of me and perhaps Dohr.  Why not just go with that?  I would rather be left out or play some offsite role then require the team to create some overly intricate plan just to get me inside."


OOC: Kyvarr is 5ft 0in in height so will never pass as a stormtrooper and Cathar are definitely not seen in the Imperial ranks.

Devon let the brainstorming take its own route for a few minutes before he spoke up.
"I'm hearin' a bunch of good ideas here, so lets get this a bit more organized now.

Remember - destroyin' the station is an optional extra.  Our main goal is to steal anythin' and everythin' we can.  Since we ain't gonna know what we wanna steal till we've seen whats on offer, we're gonna need time on board the station to take a look around, make plans then carry them out.

So our entry plan has gotta be solid, an' give us a reason to stick around for maybe a couple of days without suspicion...  Although we're still gonna want some kinda escape plan ready if we gotta run for the hills early.

So lets think about that:  How are we goin' to get onboard?
I think our best shot would be to infiltrate a scheduled delivery to the station with our stealthed container - but I ain't sure we have the time to set that up.  Or do we?  If you can think of ways to make that work, lets hear 'em.  If not, lets pick our next best option an' work on that instead.".

"Like Kira said", Lin commented, "bounty hunters rarely travel in big groups, so that rules that particular option out unless we split our team. That could be beneficial, in fact - we could make it appear as if we have nothing to do with one another. The first team could fake a problem with the Imperial shuttle and thus stay aboard the station for repairs for a couple of days. I believe, I could probably send out a covert message to the second team that would then arrive once I hack in to the station's systems, disguised as a bounty hunter crew."

"The first crew would consist of those of us, who can pass as humans plus Fiarr, who would be hiding aboard our shuttle and slip in to the maintenance tunnels and ventilation ducts. She'd do some scouting and install a couple of slicing modules for me in to the internal data line junctions. Once aboard the station, the first team would figure out the layout and set up the station for the second phase of the operation. Once the second team arrives, we strike at our chosen targets and capture whatever resources we can. I would suggest having the squadron on stand-by, so they will strike upon our escape, destroying the station. With a little luck, we will disable the station's defences and the TIE launch bays, making them unable to fight back."

She looked at Devon. "That plan could work too, but we'd be in a hurry to arrange us inside that container and get it aboard a freighter, which would probably require acquiring a freighter that could carry the container. Like you said, we'd have busy time arranging that."

Heigren looked Lin up and down.  "I have two questions in relation to your plan Lin but first I just want to make a simple query.  Are you as good at slicing as you brag to me?  It's well and good to brag but your plan would rely almost entirely on your skills to succeed.  You are pretty new so we haven't seen your full skills yet so this is why I ask.  The boss may trust me to pull off some wild story or a former Duros colleague to take a captial ship down with a fighter with no shields, but we don't know your true skills."

"Now if you are genuinely good enough I have two questions.  Firstly, if you sending in two team, why have the first team be bounty hunters and thus under greater scrutiny?  Why not have Imperials as team one and bounty hunters your second team."

"My second question is where is our second ship coming from?  I know Mark said we could use a Gamma shuttle, but where is this second ship coming from?  Wouldn't bringing two ships reduce our chances to steal enemy ships as we'll need pilots to get our orginial ships out?  Did you plan abandon these ships or did you intend to steal cargo instead of ships?"

Heigren raised his hands.  "Okay, that's more than two questions but my question stands.  As someone who is skilled at the con game, this seems a little. . .complicated.  It also relies a lot on you Lin."

"First of all, the first team would be disguised as Imperials. Second of all, it is a group effort and third, yes, I am good enough to pull it off. Especially, if Fiarr plants a few specially manufactured line-capture boxes on the datalines of the station, it should be somewhat easy. Even easier, if I get to a security terminal", she replied.

Fiarr looks up from her datapad.  "So you think I make a better Imperial than a bounty hunter?  Hmm, not sure how I should take that."   She returns to her typing.
This message was last edited by the player at 09:48, Tue 26 Dec 2017.

"No, but assuming from how you have been described to me, you can slip in to the maintenance and ventilation ducts without the Imperials even noticing and do what needs to be done there without being detected", Lin replied Fiarr. "And I assume we have a transport or such, from I have gathered from the discussion about ships. My point is, if we all go in the same ship, we will stand out like a bantha in a fancy lingerie shop. That is why I suggest my plan - it is possible to pull in the time we have and most likely will attract less unwanted attention by the Imperials. If anyone has a better plan, I am all game with that." Of course, she'd need Mika's help to manufacture the hacking blackboxes that would allow her to possibly hijack the data feed from the internal lines of the station without cutting it completely and without being detected by the Imperials.

Fiarr looked up from her datapad.  "So someone on this team has been telling you I like sliding through smelly claustrophobic ducts like some Bothan cockroach?  Be sure to tell me who that is and I'll thank them personally."

"As for other plans, several have been mentioned.  Not many as intricate as yours but I imagine Devon will decide which he considers best."

"That is true, as is the privilege and burden of his position."  Cor's voice comes through the droid's vocoder as thoughtful.  "Perhaps, if there are no other suggestions, we should break for an hour.  It will give us time to digest both food and ideas before reconvening."  The suggestion is made easily enough, without evident concern, and the droid turns this way and that as if assessing the group's agreement or lack thereof.

Heigren stood.  "I'm sure the galley droids have prepared something by now.  I'll go check.  Come through guys and we can get some food and drink."  He moved off to the galley.

Fiarr popped her datapad away and looked over at Lin.  "Looks like we get a reprieve.  Wonder what passes for food on this crate.  Care to lead the way?"  She gestures in the direction Heigren had vanished.

"Why not. Say, do you know anything about installing hack-boxes on datalines or such", Lin replied, heading for the door. "That would come in handy if we decide to use my plan."

"I suppose it depends on what you need me to do.  I undertook basic computer and electronic courses in covert ops training.  I'm no slicer, but I know which wire is which."