Staff
Sim Creator/Game Master: Silent Hunter
Commanding Officer: Robert Longtin
Summary
The Eagles of Warsaw are an elite mercenary group who travel the 'Verse, tackling ruthless pirates, vicious Reavers… and rabid music fans. The crew of Kvant, after an embarrassing incident involving a cargo shuttle and a Skyplex, are now having to deal with the latter. Given a chance to redeem themselves by protecting the radioactive thrash band Girls With Exploding Guitars, they find themselves unsure who needs protecting more…
The crew (Player Characters only)
Joseph Quinn
The serious CO of Kvant, just promoted to the role after the previous CO was suspended.
Liam Randell Barnaby Sells V, aka Angel
The pilot of Kvant: a man out for revenge for the murder of his family. At the moment, though, he's just grumpy.
Harper Graves
A playful young merc who moved to Maczarek Security after becoming disenchanted with her previous employer.
The ship
Class: Pride III-EK
Dimensions: 153'x70'x35'
Tonnage: 1090 tons
Crew quarters: 8
Fuel Capacity: 50 tons (1600 hours of operation*)
*An additional 10t of fuel is carried for refueling shuttles and would supply 320 more hours of operation if needed.
Cargo Capacity: 80 tons, plus an additional 120 tons divided among shuttles and standard cargo containers.
Passenger Capacity: 10 (4 single-bed rooms, 1 twin-bed, 2 double bunk rooms); room for 20 soldiers in the cargo bay if containers not carried.
Gear: Built-in 25 ton Crane.3 20-ton shuttles and 2 25-ton "dropships"; modified cargo containers for dropping five-man squads into action from orbit.
Weapons: Port and starboard mounted retractable 20-mm cannons, with 100 rounds for each. Advanced tracking mechanisms; controlled from the bridge and auto-loaded.
Description
Lewis Bishop are a shipbuilding firm specialising in customisation of widely used pre-existing ship classes. A sort of "Pimp My Firefly" group. Jane Hamm of 100% Thrust, the popular cortex spaceship review show, has reviewed some of their more standard mods over the years and generally rates them highly. One of their best mods is the Pride III-EK, a modification of the large hauler type.
The Pride III doesn't have very good sensors and these were the first things to be upgraded. The sensors and computer are as good as you can get outside the Alliance Navy, sometimes even at military standard. There's some little modifications done to improve durability. All in all, three feet has been added to the length and about 90 tons to the tonnage.
Maczarek Security purchased five of these vessels for troop insertion. For places where a more rapid or covert insertion is required, the firm's Chief of Engineering, Walter Barron, has constructed special drop pods that carry five soldiers from orbit to the ground. These pods are placed inside modified cargo containers to survive re-entry, ejected out of the cargo bay doors, then land by rocket or parachute depending on the tactical requirements once the container burns up. The doors open on touchdown, allowing for instant response, although most tests find that about ten seconds is needed to recover from the often heavy landing. Once landed, it is retrieved by the mothership's crane.
The internal layout is a standard Pride-class one; there are only minor decor modifications.
Kvant ("Quantum") is the third vessel in the class. It has no real differences to the others, but it is currently missing a shuttle (destroyed) and does not have the drop pods on board at the moment.
Key NPCs
The names in brackets are the actors that "play" the respective NPCs, to give a better visualisation of them.
"Colonel" Anna Maczarek (Stana Katic)
A decorated Alliance war hero who served in a high-scoring tank crew, Anna Maczarek is the Commanding Officer of Maczarek Security. A fiery-tempered commander with a keen business acumen and a liking for unusual punishments, Anna is also a skilled combatant and is not afraid to step directly into harm's way.
Lieutenant Amelia "Amy" Duquesne (Anna Belknap)
A larger-than-life mercenary who is one of Maczarek Security's best employees. She lost her right eye three years ago and now wears an eye-patch.
Natasha Williams (Cote de Pablo)
A "loveable rogue" with a tendency to attract trouble like Daphne Blake attracts rope.
Basic plot (so far)
Following their pilot's crashing of a shuttle into a Skyplex while legally unfit to fly through drinking, the crew of Kvant are summoned to Maczarek Security's corporate headquarters on Persephone to explain why they should not lose their jobs. After a discussion where Anna Maczarek does not hesitate to put down Angel, she docks them pay and gives them a new assignment as a chance to redeem themselves; providing personal security for the radioactive thrash group Girls with Exploding Guitars, a group known for their wild behaviours.
On leaving Persephone to meet the band on Whitefall, the crew receive a distress call from a trader named Natasha Williams. She has been attacked and is now trapped in a seriously damaged ship.
Behind the scenes
Kvant (the word is Russian for "quantum") was directly inspired by Atlantis, a sim that Silent Hunter had joined in its AJJE days before having to leave due to time pressures (he has now rejoined). The idea of a group of mercenaries lingered and emerged into a large-scale private security company, making its early appearances in AJJE shortly before the Schism.
The ship is named after one of the modules of the former Soviet/Russian space station Mir: the second largest orbital structure ever built. The station had its first module launched from Baikonur Cosomdrome in the then Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in 1986 and was gradually added to over the next ten years, eventually gaining a total of six modules. One of these, Spektr was rendered uninhabitable in 1997 after a cosmonaut crashed a Progress unmanned cargo shuttle into during a manual redocking test; only the quick thinking of the two crew on the station prevented a catastrophic de-pressurisation. This incident directly inspired the off-stage shuttle crash where the sim begins.
In 2001, have exceeded its design life by 10 years, Mir was de-orbited over the Pacific Ocean, burning up in the atmosphere.
Anna Maczarek, the fiery CO of the Eagles of Warsaw, was a reuse of an early character name from the AJJE sim Covert-81. There, Anna Maczarek was a Polish army officer who was providing information to the CIA and had to be extracted as she had been compromised. Ultimately, she was surrounded by Soviet forces while trying to escape from Czechoslovakia and decided to go down in a hail of bullets.
Silent Hunter is a fan of the ABC television series Castle, starring Stana Katic and Nathan Fillion. Fillion, as Phoenix Roleplayers know, played Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds Firefly and it seemed the perfect opportunity to add the other half of the duo. He will admit being inspired by General George S. Patton in her characterisation.
Amelia Duquesne is named after two TV characters, Amelia "Amy" Pond from the long-running British fantasy/sci-fi show Doctor Who and Calleigh Duquesne from the CBS crime drama CSI: Miami. Emily Procter, who plays the latter, had earlier "appeared" in Covert-81 as Dr. Anna Hamilton-Smith.
Natasha Williams' ship, Half-Price Cracked Ice, is named from the opening line of "Hookey Street", the closing song to the classic BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses.
Categories: Firefly sims
