Spread Democracy

Operation and first mission picked, I turned my attention to the gear I was dropping in with. While the mission I’d previously completed was considered to be trivial in difficulty and felt like it with the exception of the bug breach, this next mission I was dropping into was several steps up from being trivial and my preparations for the drop have to match.

My gear worked well enough to be sure but it certainly would be a good idea to review and make sure I got enough on hand for the job given that I am working solo. To that end, I made sure to study the capabilities of my weapons, stratagems and their minimum safe distances… mostly for the sake of not blowing myself into pieces. While I know I could simply inhabit the next Helldiver, I’d prefer not to. Getting killed in battle is neither the plan nor do I envision it to be anything less than agonizingly unpleasant to say the least.

While I had a good grasp of the Orbital Precision Strike’s minimum safe distance of 20 metres from point of impact, the Solo Silo’s blast radius was something I needed to learn and I was glad I did as the missile had a minimum safe distance of 40 metres, twice that of the OPS. If I hadn’t read up on it, that Solo Silo would have ripped me to shreds if I used it to hit a target with the assumption that it had the same blast radius as the OPS.

Beyond that, I’d also read up on the capabilities and limitations of my Machine Gun Sentry and my Guard Dog drone pack though for those, it was less about immediate safety and more so about how far out they could target something and how much ammunition they had. Each MG Sentry I call down has a sensor-limited maximum engagement distance of 75 metres or thereabouts and carries 125 rounds of ammo in its pod before any upgrades, requiring line of sight before it fires. The Guard Dog drone similarly has a maximum engagement distance of 30 metres, capacity of 45 rounds per magazine and the pack carries a maximum of 8 magazines on standby.

As they say, knowledge is power and knowing my tools and what they can do will help immensely in keeping me alive. With the stats now rattling around in my head, I decided to bring along the SG-88 I’d picked up from the previous mission to augment my MP-98 and P-2 pistol, strapping the double barrel shotgun to my back before I stepped into the Hellpod to make some final landing adjustments.