5150: The Deserted Base

Introduction

On the remote planet of Tantalus III, contact has been lost with a remote scientific base.  A reconnaissance aircraft that was sent to overfly the area has crashed nearby, for reasons unknown.  Finally, the Viridian Planetary Defence Force has ordered in some infantry to investigate and secure the area.  Of course, resources are tight and so the PDF are a mixture of regular grunts and unenthusiastic militia.  I'm sure that most 18+ readers can guess where this is going...

Setup

The base consists of a number of huts surrounded by a perimeter fence.  There's also a big pile of supplies near the gate.  The fence is breached in at least one location, though there is no sign of life anywhere.

The PDF have to investigate each hut for survivors or other evidence and then return the way they came in order to report their findings to higher authorities.  For some reason, there's a lot of interference with their communication equipment near the base.

On the approach road, the PDF have 1 squad of regulars (camouflage trousers, with a missile launcher) and 1 squad of militia (green trousers, with a chaingun).  They also have a Valkyrie-class light scout walker.

Making their way through the wreckage of the reconnaissance craft to the right are 3 more squads (2 regular with a single chaingun and 1 militia with a grenade launcher).

The Game

 Everything was quiet as the PDF squads started to move through the hole in the perimeter fence.

This was the point where a small swarm of bugs erupted from a tunnel near to the first building.  Immediately, the creatures raced round the corner and straight towards the troopers.

The front squad managed to gun down a few of the bugs as they approached, but not enough to avoid being assaulted by 8' long chitinous monsters!  One trooper fell immediately, torn apart by the ferocity of the attack.  However the other 2 (the squad leader and the blonde chain-gunner) both held their own, even when faced by 2 bugs at once.

Rather than get involved in the fracas at the fence breach, the militia squad from the left ran sideways "to help open the gates".

Once inside the base, the 3 squads from the gates fanned out and started to search all the buildings (a good Scooby Doo moment: "let's split up and look for clues").  They spent much of the rest of the game doing this, but without finding anything of interest.

Meanwhile...

At the breach, the second squad of regulars couldn't fire into the melee without risking hitting their comrades.  Instead, they decide to charge into hand-to-hand combat (!).  Even though the humans outnumbered the bugs 5 to 3, the troopers kept losing every fight.  Fortunately, for some reason, the bugs only managed to knock down the soldiers instead of slaughtering them, time after time.

At one point, it even looked as if the humans were winning.  Blonde chain-gunner managed to pick herself up off the dirt and kill the bug that was attacking her, just as the remains of the second squad knocked down their opponent.

Yep, she's still going.  Blondie tried to save a colleague by charging into yet another melee, but ended up facing the last bug on her own.

Just then, another group of bugs erupted from beside the road, just outside the base.  The Valkyrie pivoted on the spot and started hosing the swarm with its vulcan cannon.

In this, it was aided by one squad of militia, though their fire was more noise than substance.  In particular their grenade launcher guy, who could have made a huge difference if he'd hit the tightly-packed bugs, managed to hit just about every other piece of scenery apart from where he was aiming!

Once the bugs closed with the walker, there was little it could do to prevent the creatures from clambering all over it, tearing out cables and jamming moving parts.  A few critters fell off and were crushed as they climbed the machine, but most were nimble enough to cling on.

Within moments, the machine suffered multiple systems checks (requiring a turn of activation to reset before it could do anything) and the motors in one of its legs were badly damaged (so it had difficulty in moving).  Although the crew were safe inside the armoured cabin for the moment, it was only a matter of time before the bugs would strip the machine of all its working parts.

Finally...

A third bug hole appeared, this time in the middle of the base.  This swarm was much bigger than the previous two and it should have been obvious to any observer that the remaining humans had no chance at all if they stayed.

The humans were jubilant as the squad with the missile launcher managed to land a round right in the middle of the new swarm, killing or knocking down 7 enemies.  There were lots of (metaphorical) high-fives and "oorah"s from the soldiers.  The bug player just shrugged and ate them up anyway.

The final scene, as groups of bugs hunted down the last few PDF soldiers, was not a pretty one.  Some of the militia tried to run for shelter inside a hut, but didn't quite make it to the door before the swarm caught up with them.  No-one lived to tell the tale!

Moral

For anyone who thinks that this all seems very familiar, I did run a somewhat similar game some time ago: http://colgar6.blogspot.com/2012/11/5150-installing-acoustic-sensor-net.html.  In both games, the players stuck to their assigned objectives way past the point where they might have realised how impossible they were.  Sometimes you have to know when to run away!

The next time I bring the Viridian PDF to the games club, I think I'll have a completely different set of enemies (or maybe none at all!).  The players will be so fearful of "bugs" that they'll not even consider any other possibilities.  Mua-hah-ha-ha!

3rd Faction + ship for 5150: Fighter Command

Introduction

I had intended to post something a few days ago, in order to keep to my rough schedule of 2 updates per week.  However, a combination of things has delayed this.  Firstly, I had a cold and was feeling a bit washed out as a consequence.  Secondly, our computer was playing up and would shut itself down at seemingly random intervals.  This has been traced to an intermittent fault in the keyboard, so trying to type anything was interesting!

Space Fighters

Previously, I showed you my first 2 sets of painted fighters for "5150 Fighter Command": here .  Later on, I bought some "Space Battleship Yamato" plastic kits and asked for help to decide how to paint my 3rd faction of fighters: here.

Well, it should be obvious from the pictures that I decided to go with the yellow and black scheme for these models!  These are light interceptors from the 5th Chutai of the Frontier Pacification Force, belonging to the Empire of 1000 Suns.

Minotaur

I've also completed one of my "Space Battleship Yamato" plastic kits.  This is definitely my favourite vessel of the ones I have, so I painted it first.  The colour scheme is loosely based on a real-life airline's livery (from memory, it was some Chinese freight outfit?).  Anyway, here is the spaceship "Minotaur"!

I haven't yet decided whether to use here as a capital ship in "Fighter Command" (at around 5"/12.5cm long, she's out-of-scale with the fighters, but then so is pretty much any practical model).  Alternatively, I could use Minotaur in Full Thrust - she's got "bulk freighter" written all over her, I think.  Perhaps I'll use the ship in both games.

That's all, folks!  Hopefully I'll have something a bit more interesting next time...

Japanese Spaceships and Request for Help

Introduction

A few weeks ago, I showed you my progress so far on fighters for the new 5150: Fighter Command ruleset.  That's fine as far as it goes, but I need some capital ships as well.  I've seen Bandai's "Space Battleship Yamato" [aka "Star Blazers"] series of plastic kits widely recommended for this role; HobbyLink Japan seems to be the most popular source for these.  I'm not a great fan of the styling of spaceships in Japanese anime, but I thought I should take a closer look to see why the Bandai kits are so popular.

Ordering from Japan

I quickly discovered that many (not all!) of the Space Battleship kits are a mere 180yen each.  That's about £1.20 (UK) or $1.80 (USA).  This seems too good to be true, but there are 2 other factors which affect international purchases a lot: postage rates and time-to-deliver.

I put together an order of 4 kits on the HobbyLink Japan site; the postage came to 680yen, or about as much again as the kits themselves.  That's not too bad; I figured that I could afford to take a chance for a little over £9.

So what about delivery time?  Well, I had a shipping confirmation notice 2 days after payment was made and a carton containing a Japanese customs label and other markings arrived some 6 days later than this.  I'd say that 8 days from start to finish was quite acceptable for goods from the other side of the world!

What's in the Boxes?

Each box contained 2 or 3 sprues of parts, coloured to match the predominant colour of the picture on the box (apart from the blue one?!).  What was more of a surprise is that 3 of the 4 kits also contained the parts for a second, much smaller spacecraft.  This wasn't at all obvious from the packaging or the online kit descriptions and came as a very pleasant surprise.  Instead of buying 4 models, I'd actually obtained 7!

Construction

Each kit was very easy to build; the parts fitted together well and there weren't huge numbers of them.  Because these will be used as gaming models, I left off some of the more fragile-looking protruding aerials and pylons.  I suspect that they would all have been broken the first time I transported these ships!

I also left off a few of the turrets, some of which I felt had very improbable locations (blocked by parts of the superstructure &c, with virtually no field of fire).  For the turrets that I did use, I cut down the gun barrels considerably; the Japanese style has excessively long, thin weapons for my taste.

The Results

I'm not sure of the original names or types of these vessels in the Space Battleship Yamato series, so I'll just refer to them by the kit numbers instead.  This is #15; it includes a large warship and a smaller vessel.  The big ship will probably end up as an alien capital ship in 5150.  The smaller craft looks somewhat like a submarine; I'm not certain what I'll do with that.

This one is kit #17.  It's a bit unusual: most of the Space Battleship models are long and thin, with more than a passing resemblance to World War 2 Japanese naval vessels.  However this ship is flat and wide, almost like a saucer, though it does still have the tall, multi-layer conning tower.

Model #26 is probably my least favourite.  It's undoubtedly a carrier, but behind the flight deck and narrowed waist is a somewhat boxy structure.  The smaller ship included in this kit is also rather ugly and not really to my taste.  It might be used as a civilian vessel or priority transport in Fighter Command, as it's clearly got a cockpit and is therefore a very different scale from its "mother ship".

Finally, we have #28.  I think this is the model that I like most from among the sets I bought.  It could play the part of a capital ship in Fighter Command, or perhaps it'll end up as a bulk carrier for my Full Thrust merchant fleet.  The smaller ship is probably destined for Fighter Command, maybe as an alien civilian vessel.

Conclusion

I will certainly paint up some of these models and use them in my games, though probably not in the "official" colour schemes as shown on the boxes.  The others?  I'm not so sure - there are enough competing demands on my time that the ships I like least will be some way down the workload queue.  Still, it was a fun experiment and hasn't cost a great deal of money or time so far.

A Request for Help

I've just started on the smaller fighters for my 3rd faction in 5150: Fighter Command.  However, I'm completely undecided on the colour scheme for this group.  Please, give me your thoughts and maybe I'll paint them up using your suggestion.  Here are some concepts that I've considered so far:

• Yellow all over, with black nose and red markings.
• 2-tone "camouflage", much as used by the RAF for the past 75 years.  Maybe green/brown, grey/green or brown/grey.  This might look good, but what would be the point of such camouflage in space?
• Overall block colour (red?), but with "flying circus"-style markings.  The leader is just red, while others all have variations to distinguish them, such as black and white stripes on the wings, a yellow fuselage or a blue tail.

I look forward to hearing your ideas :-) .

5150: Gangland Misunderstanding

Introduction

Long ago, I got myself a Combat Zone boxed set from EM-4.  This is still the cheapest 28mm all-in-one miniatures game I know, bar none.  It contains 30 miniatures (15 gangers, 10 troopers and 5 robots), rules, dice and scenery for just over £15, plus P&P.  Eat your heart out, Games Workshop!

Since then, my collection of gangers from various sources has grown considerably, but I still look fondly on the Combat Zone plastics.  I decided that at the Games Club this week I would play a gang-vs-gang game in homage to them.

Now, I could have just used the Combat Zone rules for this.  They're somewhat old school, but still give a decent game.  However, it's been quite a while since I last played them and I couldn't actually remember all the details.  Rather than re-read it, I decided to play the game using 5150 rules instead (note that I have the older 5150, not the updated offerings with the same name from 2Hour Wargames).

Setup

Creating stats for the 2 gangs was easy enough, especially as I didn't give the members any attributes (at 12 humans on each side, I was concerned that such detail would be forgotten in the heat of the action).  In addition, I wanted to give each gang a mech, or large bipedal robot - this is obviously a somewhat futuristic scenario.

There are no rules for robots in the 5150 rulebook that I have (especially for 8 foot tall autonomous killing machines), so this looked a bit awkward.  However, the Infestation supplement for 5150 does have rules for a similar machine.  I looked at this and decided that the Infestation 'bot seemed a bit too tough for my liking.  Also, if I've understood those rules correctly, you have a better chance of damaging it with a shot that doesn't penetrate than with one which does.

To cut a long story short, I used Infestation as inspiration for my own robot damage tables and capabilities.  In particular, I softened their resistance to bullets a bit; these 'bots should be tough, but not invincible.  Even moderate small arms fire (better than a .22 pistol, that is) has a small chance of bringing one down - though dedicated anti-tank weapons are much better!

So, here's the story: 2 gang leaders ("Big Tam" and "Crash Hodgkins") have agreed to meet at a ruined warehouse to discuss their respective spheres on influence.  In theory, both chiefs are supposed to come unarmed and bring no more than 3 henchmen, but each has a number of thugs hidden close by as backup.  And a robot.

The Game

Big Tam swore at the man standing on the other side of the road.  "We ain't doing business like this, you jerk!  You were supposed to be unarmed!"  Irony was completely lost on the big man; his people were not even attempting to conceal their own guns.  The group started to walk away from the rendezvous, back to the ruined compound where the rest of Tam's gang was hidden.
On the other side of the road, Crash gave a slight nod to his henchmen.  The range was too long for pistols, but Boxer and Casper raised their assault rifles and let rip.  Stunned by the treachery, Pinky went down, bleeding, others in the group dived for cover behind stacks of barrels and the cowardly Smiley ran off into the dawn.

With his leader pinned down, Buck provided covering fire from a corner while Porkchop and Big Paulie ran across the road to outflank the other gang.  Despite his bulk, Porkchop made it all the way, but Big Paulie wasn't as fast; she was picked off by Crash's snipers.

Porkchop's machine pistol made short work of the closest opposition, thus clearing the way for Clarice (and her flamethrower) to follow him over the road.

It's a Trap!

Just as this flanking movement was about to produce some real results, there were flurries of movement on the roads.  Police cars appeared from both ends of the main road and disgorged a number of blue-clad officers.  And a 'bot.

At the south end, all hell broke loose.  Buck fled, leaving his underlings in the lurch.  Porkchop went down, while 2 officers approached Clarice from behind and attempted to arrest her.  She heard them coming and ran back across the road, only to be cut down by a long range shot from Boxer.  Goofy came round the concrete wall and shot the 2 arresting officers.  Lestrade, the police detective, was obliterated by the Street Tiger II 'bot (don't stand still, in the open, in clear sight of a heavily-armed death machine).  The other 2 officers exchanged fire with Pony and Goofy, but came off worse.  This left just the police dog, Bandit, at the southern end of the board.

Bandit wasn't put off at all by the loss of all his comrades.  He charged at Goofy, who fired at the approaching dog and missed.  In true police-dog fashion, Bandit quickly disabled the ganger before turning to charge at Pony.  The second ganger didn't wait for the dog's attack, though - he turned and ran for his life!

'Bots and Cops

In the north, the police 'bot "Robocop" stomped straight down the road as fast as it could.  Sally waited patiently, carefully aiming her recoilless (anti-tank) rifle at the road.  As the robot appeared past the wall, she pulled the trigger.  The shell bounced off the 'bot, disorienting it.  Its upper torso swiveled round like lightning.

"DROP THE WEAPON, CITIZEN" blared out from the 'bot's speakers.  "FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL BE MET WITH DEADLY FORCE!  YOU HAVE 5 SECONDS: 5..6..7..2..1".  Without giving the woman a chance to respond, the machine opened fire with its own autocannon and recoiless rifle.  When the smoke and dust had cleared most of her friends had ducked for any cover they could find, but miraculously none of the gang was hurt.

On the other side of the road, Flash peered round the end of the concrete wall.  "Suck on this, pig-bot!" he screamed, as he aimed his rocket launcher at Robocop.

The missile flew true and hit the 'bot squarely on the torso.  Robocop disintegrated in a violent explosion!

The police officers at the northern end huddled together in the cover of a stack of freight containers.  "There's something round the corner.  We all go together, on my mark...GO" ordered their leader, Callahan.  There was indeed something: Avenger 500 stood patiently, watching the yard for any sign of movement.  The 'bot opened fire immediately, dropping one of the cops and forcing the others to crawl back round the corner, out of sight.

Callahan's patrol crawled across the yard, away from the stationary 'bot.  Instead, they stood up and looked over a wall towards the other gang's location.  Immediately, Chopper and Damage opened fire with automatic weapons.  Only the police star, Callahan, was left standing after the massive volley.  He fired 2 quick shots, both of which hit Chopper in the head and killed him, before himself ducking back.

Most of the remaining gang members had slunk away by now.  In the final drama of the game, Street Tiger II advanced and came into sight of Avenger 500.  Both 'bots exchanged a lot of fire, though in the end Street Tiger II suffered a power loss and shut down temporarily.  Before we could work out whether it would recover, we had to pack up.  This is yet another of my games where you'll just have to work out what might happen next for yourself!

Conclusion

My 'bot rules worked reasonably well, I think.  I sometimes forgot that they should take "to hit" penalties if they fired both weapons at once; this would have reined them in a bit more.  A bad mistake was the rule on movement: either move in a straight line or turn up to 90 degrees.  That made them very sluggish; it would have been better to allow them to move and turn in the same activation.  I'd still keep the straight-line movement and the maximum turn of 90 degrees, though.

In 5150, it's virtually impossible to break cover against a foe with a heavier weapon, it seems.  I hadn't appreciated just how limiting this might be and although I thought I'd provided plenty of cover, it seems that there were enough automatic weapons to cover almost all the gaps.  It's just as well I played this scenario with (mostly pistol-armed) gangers rather than with military types, mind!

Standings:

• Crash and many of his gang escaped, though at least one was left behind and some of the others were badly hurt.
• Big Tam died, as did many of his mob.  Others fled for their lives or were captured by the police dog, Bandit.
• The cops were devastated.  Only Callahan and Bandit were unhurt, even though they held the field at the end of the game ('bots excepted!).  Next time, bring a bigger SWAT team!

My forces for 5150: Fighter Command

Introduction

I've spent a large part of today cleaning out my garage, so this is just going to be a short post - sorry!

A long. long time ago, when it was first released, I tried the PC game "Wing Commander" and flew space fighters in dogfights against the cat-like Kilrathi enemy.  For a while, this was my favourite game and I enjoyed it so much that I also bought and played the first sequel.  I've experienced many computer games in my life, but few were as memorable as this.

Also many years ago, I became aware of the plastic spaceship models from EM-4 miniatures.  I thought these were really neat, but since I couldn't think of any game I'd play with them, I managed to resist such a purchase on many occasions.  Even if it had occurred to me to use the EM-4 fighters to revisit the world of Wing Commander, there were no suitable rules, I thought (although Silent Death always seems to have been very popular).

What finally cracked my resolve was the recent release of 5150: Fighter Command by 2HourWargames.  It took only a few days for my determination not to start a new project to crumble and so I ordered both the rules and some plastic spacecraft.  This, I believe, is in no way unusual - many others have done exactly the same thing.

I'm slowly painting my way through the craft I bought; here are the first groups.  I haven't yet come up with a lot of background fluff for these, so you'll have to make do with the pictures:

The Good Guys (Star Navy?)

Here's some interceptors - Blue Flight from the 34th Pursuit Squadron.

A flight of heavy fighters from the "Lucky 15th" Attack Squadron.

Torpedo bombers from the 218th Assault Squadron.  I've added the under-wing anti-ship missiles myself; these were made very simply from lengths of plastic rod with the tip sharpened into a point.

The Bad Guys (Kilrathi?  Hishen?)

"Fandango"-class interceptors.  These are very common and often seen in large wings, but individually not very capable.

A little-known type of single-seat heavy fighter, codename "Firewall".  Such craft are very new and there is no accurate data on their performance.

Conclusion

So far, so good.  However, I've many more fighters yet to paint up; these will make up at least 1 (maybe 2 or 3) other factions.  I'm also looking for inspiration: what to use for capital ships and how many different types of these I might need.  Finally, I'll need to go through all my gaming boxes to see if I have some large, black hex mats.  Fighter Command can be played free-form, but reading the rules suggests that hexes might make things easier.

I really didn't need this distraction from my other projects.  I've just not got enough willpower to resist all the shiny things!

5150: Installing the Acoustic Sensor Net

Introduction

The planet of Tantalus III was recently the scene of a violent confrontation between a group of Klingon spies and a patrol from the Planetary Defence Force (PDF): here.  PDF troops have scoured the area but have been unable to find either the insurgents or several of their missing soldiers.  The local army headquarters have come to the conclusion that the Klingons must have a well-camouflaged underground base and have ordered that acoustic probes be installed to cover the area, in order to discover the location of this base.  They couldn't be more wrong...

The Setup

5 teams of the Planetary Defence Force were deployed to install acoustic sensor probes.  3 of these teams were experienced (REP4), whilst 2 groups were rookies (REP3).  3 troopers in each team carried a gauss rifle.  The 4th member had a light support weapon of some kind - mostly chain guns with the occasional rocket or grenade launcher.  The platoon also had the services of a lightly-armoured "Valkyrie" scout walker with REP 4 crew members.

The rules for installing the acoustic sensor net were simple.  A team would take an entire activation to deploy a sensor, each sensor would have an effective radius of 18" and the PDF would "win" when every part of the board was in range of at least one sensor.

Just to keep the players on their toes, I deployed 3 PEF (possible enemy forces) markers.  2 ended up in the large wood in the centre and the 3rd was behind the far right hill.  Unknown to the players, these PEFs were all decoys that would resolve as "nothing there".  The real threat came from underground...

The Game

To start with, the troops advanced slowly, dutifully emplacing sensors as they went (the small, blue markers).  2 of the 3 PEFs moved into sight and were discarded, leaving just a single, stubborn PEF in the woods, refusing to move.  The players quickly realised that the near side of the table wasn't covered adequately by their sensor grid, so team 5 dropped back to fill in the gaps.

After a number of sensors had been positioned, the combined activation dice came up as a '7' and I dutifully placed a bug hole.  Twice as many bugs as troopers were indicated, so 48 in total (counting the walker as equivalent to 4 people).  That's a lot of bugs!

The players panicked for a moment and the walker "buttoned up" (shut and locked all its hatches!), but quickly the troopers decided to use their firepower.  It turns out that 5 fireteams with automatic weapons can kill about 15 or so targets that aren't under cover every turn.  I'm not counting the walker because throughout the game its gunner rolled very poorly; its vulcan gun barely claimed 1 victim per turn.  The bugs froze for a couple of turns (missed activation rolls);it began to look as if the troopers would finish off this swarm without even breaking a sweat!

Of course, we then rolled another '7' for activation; a second bug hole appeared amongst the ruined buildings.  This time, 96 bugs emerged.  I promptly ran out of models and had to resort to placing I.O.U. counters (each red marker is worth another 10 bugs).

The troops didn't even get a chance to move before another swarm of bugs arrived.  This time they were flyers and they arrived right behind team 5.  Indeed, team 5's position now looked extremely precarious; they were sandwiched between the aerial newcomers behind them and the huge swarm in front of them, just the other side of the hill!

While this happened, the walker advanced in an attempt to stomp on the remaining bugs from swarm A.  Two of the critters leaped out of the way, while a third scuttled nimbly up a leg and onto the top of the vehicle.  The airwaves went blue as the vehicles's commander called for assistance into his comm unit.  "Get it off us!  Someone, please - shoot it off!  All fireteams, target the Valkyrie!  Ah - just small arms, though - don't use the rocket launcher!"  Fireteam 4 duly hosed the scout down with its minigun (and killed the beastie) before they ran further up the road.

Teams 2, 3 and 4 then fled up the road, followed some way behind by team 5.  The huge swarm B and the winged swarm C hadn't yet reacted to this when a 4th group of bugs appeared - this time almost straight in front of the fleeing soldiers.  Some days it's just not worthwhile for a squaddie to get out of bed.  Again, the red tokens are each an I.O.U. for 10 more bugs; I really ran out of models badly in this game!

The soldiers didn't get much further before the monsters were upon them from all sides!  Several men were killed immediately, though interestingly the flying bugs had a hard time against teams 4 and 5.  The specialist in team 2 did surprisingly well against warrior bugs from swarm D; he survived an attack by several bugs by firing his grenade launcher directly down the throat of one of the vicious creatures.

Team 1 was alone on the other side of the wood.  They had an easier time of it because only a couple of bugs found them.  Still, one of those managed to kill a trooper before being gunned down, whereupon the 2nd bug charged and did the same again.

The walker was now in serious trouble.  A large number of bugs assaulted it and even though many were crushed underfoot by the driver's cunning manoeuvres, 10 of them still managed to climb onto various parts of the machine.  It was probably only a matter of time before one of them managed to find a weak spot and disable the vehicle.

The winged beasties may not have been as deadly as the other creatures, but they did hold up teams 4 and 5 until the ground-based swarm arrived.  As the game ended, it was looking pretty grim for the last few soldiers...

The End

Well, that didn't go as I had expected!  Those "4 times number of humans" swarms are incredibly nasty; once that occurred there wasn't really much chance for anyone who didn't run immediately.  To be fair, the players did run, but then were even more unlucky that more swarms appeared to their sides and in front of them.  Truly, I think that Tantalus III will have to be abandoned to the bugs now!

A couple of members of team 1 would have escaped, had we continued.  Probably.