Morgon bases and the trench run

The bases

A Morgon base is a vast floating platform, 2 km long, crowded with towers like skyscrapers above and below its deck: an old, dark, rusting city lit by scattered windows, neon signs, red beacons, gas flares and sweeping searchlights, visible from the next sector. There are eight, in the outer rings of the grid, and every Morgon in the system comes from one. Bases don’t move, and they’re solid: you bounce off the deck and towers as off a rock. The map shows each one once it has seen it.

The trench run

Only a trench run destroys a base. A trench runs down the middle of the deck, 60 m wide between walls 60 m high, from its entrance at the deck’s edge, framed in green lights, to an end wall. In the end wall, on the trench’s floor, glows the reactor port, 12 m square, under a hood reaching 120 m out over it. One photon into the port destroys the base. A shot anywhere else does nothing.

The hood stops shots from above, so the shot has to come low along the trench, from within about 625 m, a photon’s reach. Then pull up before the hood.

Each trench is different, and the trenches range from easy to hard, dealt among the bases at random, so where a base is says nothing about its trench:

Obstacles cross the trench, with lit edges: catwalks from wall to wall, to fly under or over, and barriers blocking one side, the floor or the top. Turrets on the walls, each with a red light, fire Morgon photon balls at you while you’re in the trench. One photon destroys a turret.

In a base’s sector the HUD marks the trench’s entrance, then the port. Every tracking computer tracks the port while you’re in the trench, and aims your guns at it with LOCK; a Mk II or Mk III also tracks the turrets. Switch the computer off and there are no trench marks: the shot is all yours.

How hard they fight back

A base’s defense depends on how many bases you’ve destroyed, and it’s the same for every base still standing. The first base you take on barely defends itself; the last defends itself as hard as it can.

• Turrets: at the first base they hold their fire. After that they fire every 2.7 seconds, down to every second at the last.
• Defenders: as soon as you enter a base’s sector, it launches defenders at you: one at the first base, a single wave that never comes back. After that one to three, coming back sooner at each base. Up to the fourth base, while you’re in the trench they fly along above its walls behind you, firing down into it. From the fifth base on they follow you down into the trench, threading its gaps behind you. The rear view’s gun is the answer.

A base destroyed

A destroyed base goes up over 10 seconds, its lights failing as fires spread out from the port across the city, until its reactor blows, leaving a dark wreck. Pull out of the trench and watch it from a distance.

Every Morgon in its sector flees to the nearest base still standing, not counted as kills unless you catch them. That base takes them in and sends them out again before making new ones, and you’ll meet them there as its guards, in waves of five. So the last base standing has the Morgons of every base before it. Its garrisons elsewhere hold until destroyed.

Destroying the last base wins the run: every Morgon left flees, and the result screen says SYSTEM CLEAR.