From publisher blurb:
“Fire the railguns at their orbital defense platforms! Ignore enemy swarm ships and leave them to our own flyboys. We must punch a hole through their defense line! Once we break through we can drop our planet killing payload right on that city. ”—Captain of The Irradiator
Orbital Bomber is a single level interior map of an orbital bomber. The orbital bomber includes two railguns that can fire in ninety degree arcs that can only fire forward or to the side that flank the bridge at the front of the ship in addition to a large payload of bombs or alternatively rockets or torpedoes fired from launch tubes in the ship’s walls. This alternative loadout turns it into more of a space battleship instead.
Orbital Bomber is intended for use in far-future science fiction games.
Adventure hook for use with this map:
Scorched Mars: As humanity continued to consume all of Earth’s resources, desperate governments and corporations united their pools of dwindling resources to begin a two -tiered project to colonize Mars. The first wave was a terraforming ship with robot caretakers programmed to transform Mars with an included biological cargo of bacteria, fungi, flora, and fauna to be cloned as each stage of the atmospheric change was completed.
The second wave was a colonization ship that planned to arrive to a human hospitable Mars twenty years after the first ship arrived.
What the colonization ship found was not the expected changes, but a still rust red world with little atmosphere. The ship sent probes to the planet’s surface. The probes found the terraforming ship’s landing site. The ship’s alloys had been incorporated into a machine factory city churning out robots, weapons, and ships. The Terran DNA canisters had been smashed open and their contents had been incinerated. The robotic caretakers had malfunctioned in some way and had turned on the human race. The colonization ship managed to get a transmission to Earth of their discoveries just before their probes were smashed and they were attacked by a swarm of machine ships launched from the surface of Mars.
The Earth made a third fleet, a death fleet. The orbital bomber, The Irradiator, was loaded with enough nukes to scour the machine city off the face of Mars with an accompanying starship carrier for fighter cover. The EMP blasts should shut down the machines that the nukes did not melt outright.
But when the death fleet arrived at Mars they found it well defended by orbital defense platforms and machine swarm ship carriers. The machines had more resources and could build faster than the humans. Soon they would be able to invade the Earth based on their current fleet size and projected production. Can the group nuke Mars and stop a terraforming attempt gone horrifically wrong?