Finish the novel, yeah.

So I'm going to do this.

I started a novel in November for NaNoWriMo, and "won" by producing over 50,000 words, but the story wasn't finished.  In the months since then I've written another 10,000 words, which is a bit of a slower pace. Now I'm going back to using their tools to get a daily wordcount.  I'm hoping that I can finish the story in another 40,000 words.

We'll see.

Let's Play: X-wing Miniatures

Bahimiron and I played an epic game of X-wing yesterday at Pax. 150 point build, he's Empire, I'm Rebellion, many pictures were taken of us, or at least our setup.

To begin:



I have the Falcon piloted by Han Solo, with Gun Gunb as my copilot and cluster missiles. Two A-wings (one piloted by Tycho Celchu, one Green Squadron), a Y-Wing (with ion cannon, natch), and an X-Wing with Rookie pilot backed up by R2-D2.



Slave 1 with every weapon known to man (see that hill of cards behind it? Yeah, that's all the cards), a TIE with some named pilot, a TIE Interceptor with another named pilot, then over in the other corner a TIE with another name, and two TIEs with rookies.

Asteroids in the middle.



The three TIEs on the left are coming in for my Y-Wing, but I ion cannon their squad leader and pretty much ignore the rookies. The A-wing flies cover for the Falcon, and the other X-wing and A-wing gang up on the named guy in the TIE on the right. Things look okay for everyone but the Y-wing.



The big ships get bogged down in the middle among the asteroids. The Falcon unloads its cluster missiles on the TIE interceptor and only scores a single hit. The first pass is over on the right, doing some damage to that TIE. The Y-wing is getting its shields whittled down, but keeps scoring ion cannon hits on the named TIE and keeping his movement ineffectual while doing one-hits.



Turning around for the second pass, the Falcon is heavily damaged, along with Tycho's A-wing by a cluster bomb dropped by Slave I. Y-wing takes the stress and turns around, but now the named TIE is out of range of the ion cannon, so he's got to go for one of the rookies and hope it runs into an asteroid. X-wing has one shield down, so he goes into a lazy turn to give R2 a chance to fix it. A-wing spins around to get another pass at that TIE fighter.



On the right, TIE fighter gets on Rookie X-wing's tail, while the A-wing takes his shots then starts to come around to get on Slave 1's six. The TIEs from the left now swarm the Falcon, as Tycho in his A-wing spins around to hopefully thread the needle between two asteroids and take out that TIE interceptor. Y-wing just tries to stay in ion cannon range of the lagging TIE.

The Falcon blows up. Han dies screaming curses. Rookie A-wing finds out Slave 1 has a rear gun, loses his shields, so comes around to get on the TIE swarm's six. Tycho dies to the interceptor, and the Y-wing makes a pass on Slave 1, firing ion cannons all the while, because you need two ion hits for a large ship to wander drunkenly for a turn. It gets so exciting I forget to take pictures.

Slave 1 is down maybe one shield, and still has that raft of weapons. The Y-wing has lost shields, but still has something like 4 hull. If Slave 1 can take out the Y-wing before it gets an ion cannon shot, then it will come around and mop up the rest of the rebels. If it can't, and the Y-wing gets the ion shot in, then it will have to wander in a straight line at the next movement phase, and that straight line will take it out of the playing area, effectively destroying it (althoughBahimiron maintains it's just a merc seeing which way the wind is blowing and leaving to fight another day, while Han is still dead, dead, dead).

Slave 1 damages the Y-wing but doesn't destroy it (although now it has a damaged engine), and the Y-wing gets an ion cannon shot through, sending Boba Fett careening out of the play area, y'know, like Boba Fett does.



It comes down to Green Squad A-wing (no shields), heavily damaged Y-wing, and undamaged Rookie X-wing vs. two Rookie TIE fighters. They take the first one down without taking any damage.



And at this point these are all the ships left on the field. Bahimiron concedes that there's no way that Rookie TIE can win, hits the eject button, and we call it for the rebels.

It was a victory, but Han Solo and Tycho Celchu will be missed.

Edit:  This just came in from Bahimiron:

Hey, Boba got his!