Coast Guard response to distress call on Jewell Island, ME

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

The implication was not that it was not needed. It was that a sharpshooter was.

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Granted. This is a case where a sharpshooter is called for.

A sharpshooter is likely to be armed with an M14 Tactical if he's got anything longer ranged than an M16A2 at all.

Facing two observation towers, one 50' and one 80' high, armed with an M2HB .50 BMG machine gun and an Mk 19 automatic grenade launcher (both equipped with thermal targeting sights), I think that any sharpshooter on board ship would have to be suicidally brave, superlatively competent and shockingly lucky to make any difference.

That's not even getting into any ordnance that may or may not be mounted in the shore battery. Or the fact that eight of the 20 guards are trained as a Special Response Team and probably have full tactical gear available (of these, probably all are veterans and while they may not have shot as much ammo as Delta in the last year, they have been working there together for most of their adult lives and while their Warden is bughouse crazy, it's probably the kind of crazy which runs readiness drills all the time). Or that the other guards have access to at least tactical vests, M16A2s and Gen II+ night vision gear, according to our data.

The hope of our PCs is that the mutinous guards won't be far gone enough to fire on the Coast Guard responders to our distress call. After all, many of the guard force are former Coasties and about a third of them will be Coast Guard Reserve or Auxiliary. We're hoping that the loony-tunes Warden will try to bluff his way out and we'll have a chance to ruin his deception (say, by firing off a magazine of 5.56mm in the general direction of the cutter while King Crazypants is lying off his Heinie to sell whatever desperate cover story he'll come up with to justify no one being allowed/needed to land on the island to find the federal agents who allege that they were under attack and one of them has been kidnapped).