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Launch Portal
by Kathy McCracken (majorrakal@decipher.com)
This doorway can provide an emergency escape hatch from various unpleasant circumstances. If your ship is on the losing end of a battle and about to be destroyed, you can suspend play to download and launch a shuttle, scout ship or Borg sphere (if your ship has a tractor beam) or an Escape Pod (works with any ship), to save the crew. Or maybe you just encountered a Cytherians and don't have the time to run off to the end of the spaceline right now; suspend the resolution of the dilemma long enough to launch your downloaded ship with most of the crew, leaving a skeleton crew to pay a call on the Cytherians. While the Launch Portal itself doesn't allow the launched ship to move away (thus leaving it to be attacked by a Borg Ship dilemma, for example, or by your opponent's "unstopped" ships), the launching "movement" can be responded to by Wormholes to send it out of harm's way.
Its secondary function can be just as useful. Engage Shuttle Operations lets you carry shuttlecraft on a mothership and allows them to land; but you need to get it into play first, it's vulnerable to Kevin Uxbridge (possibly leaving your landed or carried ships stuck in that state) and it works only for shuttles--the handy Romulan Scout Vessels, shuttle-like though they are, don't qualify as shuttles. Launch Portal downloads Engage Shuttle Operations and keeps Kevin at bay (works for the Dominion version, too), and extends it to work with scout ships.
Combos:
Launch Portal + Escape Pod: Bail out of that battle even without an
Escape Pod in hand.
Launch Portal + Flaxian Scout Vessel: Engage Shuttle Operations for all, with much better stats than the flimsy Yridian Shuttle.