Pavachean Defenders

[quote:]“You don’t rob a rattlesnake’s nest unless you’ve already dug your own grave. That’s how I tell it when spacers ask about Pavacho.”|Orven Jelk, slaver captain (deceased)[/quote]

Defending the Wastes

Pavacho is poor, isolated, and inhospitable, but it is far from defenseless. Its defenders are not professional soldiers or standing fleets but the collective will of its people, expressed through improvised ingenuity and a gunslinger’s grit. Every town contributes to planetary defense in one way or another, from cobbled-together satellites in orbit to dusty barn-housed fighters and every able hand that can pull a trigger. Pavacho is notoriously unfriendly to outsiders, and its defenses reflect that hostility in stark, brutal terms.

Harpoon Satellites

The most feared and infamous defense of New Pavacho are its jury-rigged orbital harpoon satellites. Constructed from garage-built rockets, scavenged mining rigs, and tether assemblies, these satellites are deceptively primitive yet terrifyingly effective. Each satellite fires monomolecular harpoons on reinforced cables; once a harpoon pierces a hull, a short-burn ion engine snaps the tether, dragging the captured vessel into uncontrolled spins or collisions. Coordinated strikes can shear a corvette in half, and raiders have learned through bloody experience that Pavacho is no soft target.

The satellites are cheap, numerous, and disposable, maintained by volunteers who view their upkeep as civic duty. The psychological effect is as potent as the physical: pirates and slavers whisper about Pavacho’s “sky-hooks” with the same dread as soldiers once spoke of minefields. Few intruders ever make it past orbit without becoming wreckage in the deserts below.

The Fighter Wing

Every town on Pavacho contributes a Starfighter, a hand-built craft housed in barns or garages until needed. These ships are a patchwork fleet in peacetime, used for scouting, crop-dusting, or moving cargo, but in war they unite into a jury-rigged planetary fighter wing.

The Pavachean light fighter is an aeroform craft, capable of flying in atmosphere, space, and even underwater. Its modular construction, cobbled together from smuggling runs and black-market trades, makes it simultaneously cheap and wildly inconsistent between individual fighters.

Typical Pavachean Light Fighter (specs):

• SM: 4, Crew 1
• Engine: Ion drive (2 Gs accel, ∆V 7)
• Capacitor: Class 5, 10 FP capacity, recharges slowly
• Armor: Carbexene DR 10(6), Ray shielding DR 20(4)
• Weapons:
• LB Laser Turret (8d(2)×10 burn, RoF 10, 300 shots)
• 1 External Missile Mount
• Flak Projectors (anti-missile)
• Cost: $144,000 (nominal; true cost much lower due to improvisation)

In battle, Pavachean fighters gather at a designated rally point before launching into orbit, operating in loose swarms rather than formations. They are not elegant or well-coordinated, but they are ferocious, and each Pilot knows they are defending their home and kin.

Militia of the Stars

The harpoon satellites and the fighter wing are only part of Pavacho’s layered defense. Nearly every Pavachean carries a sidearm, and when raids push past the skies and into the towns, the locals rise as one. Slavers and pirates who dare set down find themselves surrounded not by frightened farmers but by a settlement of armed marksmen who view every outsider as a threat until proven otherwise.

The result is a planet with a reputation: Pavacho is poor, but it cannot be taken. Anyone attempting to rob it will find that its defenders, improvised though they may be, fight with the desperation of those who have nothing to lose and everything to protect.