Now that's what I call a space battle

I saw this after action report on the most excellent Super Galactic Dreadnought, a blog about space-based roleplaying gaming. In this case, it was a battle involving a game called Starfleet Wars, now called Galactic Knights. Desert Scribe writes a pretty good report and it's worth reading. I'll let him set up the scenario:

...Three separate forces--an Avarian transport convoy, an Avarian military task force, and the Terran super galactic dreadnought--all crossed paths in the same sector of space...

The Avarians are a bird-like alien race and apparently currently at war with humanity. Just to give you an idea of how big a super galactic dreadnought is (as if the name alone doesn't tell you), here's a picture of it and the Avarian's dreadnought. The SGD Chancellor's mission was to destroy the transports in the convoy before they reached safety on the other side of the map. Naturally, the Avarian's goal was to prevent this...and well, they succeeded, but at a high cost. During the course of the battle, the birdies lost their dreadnought, Phoenix, along with a destroyer and a cruiser. Apparently the transports were hauling medical supplies, so their preservation was worth it, but that is an unbelievably high cost.

What I thought was interesting while reading that post was that the two people playing the Terrans - artist Jason Braun and Matgc of My Ever Growing Fleets - attempted to board and capture the Phoenix, but was unable to and so in anger, opened a stellar can of whoopass and destroyed it. Shame, that would have been quite a prize to haul home.

I don't know why, but I really dug reading the report and found myself imagining what I would do if I were commanding a super galactic dreadnought in that battle. I would have tried to smash the engines of the Phoenix, then swung around and raked it with fire to persuade them to consider the virtues of surrender. If that didn't work, I'd have destroyed it. What Matgc and Braun did was just as valid and probably smarter, given the circumstances.