It's been a long time. With the aforementioned EitB game now well underway, I have gaming time available for Orion again, and for me of course that means getting back to this game! The position we're in may be unwinnable (still) and months have passed since I looked at the save, but I've always been of the opinion that a well-reported loss is better than Just Another Win - and if we can somehow pull ourselves out of this mess and get back into contention, that would be a story! So with the B attempt at this variant now long-since complete, I'm ready to re-establish the context in which I left off in our A attempt, turning back the clock to 2380 ... and the galaxy of which our Meklar dread to dream.
2380: Initial Situation Report:
Echoes of another galaxy call to me like music - a galaxy where my people can cross the deeps of space for long decades without conflict, visiting new worlds at new stars where no one seeks to enslave us, no one tries to force themselves upon us and disrupt the lives we lead: Where we have leisure to build and to learn and to explore in peace. Perhaps somewhere there is such a place, and Meklar to whom a life like ours is no more than a nightmare half-remembered on waking, but to me they are only a wistful hope, a tale to tell - and if they are real, I hope I do not too-harshly haunt their dreams.
My home is the trade colony of Humidity090, second only to Meklon itself in industry and productivity, and consequently the only planet beyond our homeworld with any degree of stationary planetary defense - for what little good it will do us if the Sakkra launch an attack. In truth, all of our worlds are in a pitiable state, with unemployment rates in excess of sixty percent and still growing in spite of our efforts here and at Centauri and Romulas, and with technology little better than what our people were using at the beginning of the interstellar era.
Our lone completed missile base costs as much to maintain as we're making every year in interstellar trade with all three of the factions with whom we are - thus far - at peace: Not the trade profits for the products of our own colony, but those for all of Meklar space combined. Nevertheless, we have a second base in the works, nearly finished, ready in case we see an attack on its way in time to finish the work and maybe build another that way if we have enough time to put the work in before the enemy arrives, but so far at least we haven't had to put this theory to the test. Meanwhile of course, there is Meklon itself, with thrice our defensive base count at thrice the annual cost, while every year our poor, outdated fleet of little laser fighters devours more than twice the costs of all four bases combined while steadily going ever more obsolete. Yet if we're going to fight off the Sakkra, there's every reason to believe we're going to need all of them - and more! Even now, our desperately embattled Centauri colony is struggling to scramble defenses together against the lone old cruiser in the Silicoid attack fleet. The aptly-named Redline battleship whose parts they've supposedly been assembling is actually just a code name for their fleet development project as they try desperately to put enough lasers into space to challenge the lone Mako cruiser now controlling the colony's skies.
If we ever need a finished retro-rocket-powered heavy laser battleship for anything in the galaxy, it will be one more sign among many that we're only prolonging our inevitable and total defeat, but for now our little LAS-1A fighters - likely soon to be back up to around a hundred and fifty - can still do something - enough to provide some kind of minimal protection at least. With assault transports reportedly setting out from Cryslon, crippling the Silicoid homeworld's production capabilities in the midst of an existential war they're losing against everyone they've ever met, we'll need all the little help against them we can get. Our recent overtures of peace were dismissed without discussion, no doubt because Geode would rather kill more of us Meklar than use the fleets it's committed to the purpose defensively, even to prolong its own life, or because it thinks as long as its worlds are being torn from its grasp by a series of ill-advised wars, it might as well hold out for bragging rights by claiming to be at war with literally everyone else in the galaxy. If it thinks it can take enough from us by force to justify the expenditure of resources it desperately needs elsewhere ... well, it should frankly know by now that it's wasting its time, even if it's as crazy as Tachaon.
There's no question that Geode can absolutely ruin our lives. It may be the weakest power in the galaxy, and well on its way to extinction at the hands of the Klackons and its other enemies, but by most metrics we're nearly as weak, and with our still-ongoing Sakkra war, we can't spare enough to fight back against Geode properly. It's flattened some factories on Centauri - factories it must hope to claim since it's apparently sending an invasion fleet - and it's even possible that with planetary combat technology and good luck on its side it can even take the colony back from us, but that won't ultimately do it any good, and there's no telling how many of its own civilians that Mako and its Colony Ship escorts could have saved had they been positioned defensively. I don't pretend we've stuck to a purely defensive war ourselves - Centauri itself belonged to the Silicoids until we took it by invasion - but where we took remote colonies from its rocky claws in response to its war declaration against us, hoping to force it to the peace table as we contributed to its myriad losing wars, it seems to be picking on us out of sheer hatred and spite ... or if violence in itself is Geode's goal, a theory that so far seems well supported by the evidence, it may indeed have chosen us as a target in simple recognition of its total inability to make a dent in anyone else. In case there's any doubt of that, here's a quick look at what the owner of the smallest non-Silicoid, non-Meklar starfleet in the galaxy:
In spite of being an actual warmongering psychopath, Tachaon has managed to form two alliances - unsurprisingly but terrifyingly including one with our deadly Sakkra enemies - behind the third-smallest military fleet in the galaxy. He's almost certainly going to build that fleet back out again - he's probably only as low on the graph as he is because of scrapping a bunch of outdated ships recently - and in the meantime, being Psilons, still in spite of Tachaon's personal tendencies, his people have managed to build up the most-advanced technology and most-potent production base in the entire galaxy. The Psilons' only competition for the top spot in galactic politics are the Klackons - who are steadily taking over all of Silicoid space while Geode sends most of the starforce that should be protecting them to attack us instead - and perhaps one other faction, aggressive in their own way, but at least willing to talk peace, and with a leader who is nominally sane:
Here on Hundity090, I see Bulrathi trade ships crossing our skies nearly every day, and regularly entertain their merchants at local recharging stations fitted to serve jungle berries and other delicacies to alien visitors like themselves, and in the interests of a peaceful and hopeful future - at least with some hope in it - I've been exchanging more than honey from Humiditian bumbledrone hives for their raw Snorfonium: We've traded stories and wisdom and now even examples of our peoples' technology. It's always dangerous to share the secrets of combat computer designs with anybody, especially since they can also be used to crack our cybersecurity and steal yet more of our secrets, or to reinforce their own against us in case we're ever desperate enough to try to steal some of theirs, but we're so far behind the curve in every way right now, I felt it was better to share our targeting computers with them in exchange for just anything useful than to wait without making a deal and watch our people and our supposedly-advanced computers both fade into irrelevancy. What we did receive in exchange were secrets from the area of greatest Bulrathi expertise, just as computers are from our own: Their knowledge of factory construction techniques will help us build out our infrastructure at least ten percent faster than we previously could, which may not sound like much help in the war effort, but considering just how many factories we still need to build - remember those unemployment figures I quoted! - will be an immense help for the future if we manage to have a future. Factories were already going up here at Humidity090, and at Romulas and Endoria farther away, and now our efforts in that direction will be a little more effective, and getting more so all the time. With more enemies than we can handle already attacking our colonies, we can hardly afford to make more no matter what technologies we exchange, and any little bit we can do to prop up the Bulrathi - the weakest of the three major powers in the galaxy - has to be a good thing, especially when they formally agree as they did this year to the mutual non-aggression pact we desperately needed with someone.
It isn't an accident that the "big three" of whom the Bulrathi are - by a small margin - the weakest are the ones who aren't at war with the Meklar in this galaxy: We may be backward and battered, hardly able to hold our own, but we've been fighting back and making the Silicoids and even the Sakkra pay for the offensives they've launched against us, so that the resources they've wasted against us have gained them nothing yet and dragged them down in their race with the other peoples of the galaxy. If the Sakkra or Silicoids do manage to destroy us - or if Tachaon goes a different kind of crazy-of-the-week and decides to wipe us off the galactic map with basically a sneeze - at least neither Kryssta and Geode will be able to ascend on our broken mechanical backs to galactic domination: The peoples who have been peaceful with us up to now have already beaten them. It's only a question of whether we can escape the death trap into which our enemies have dragged us with them and somehow find our way to hope again ... or at least whether we can outlive Geode and see it pay the ultimate price for declaring war against us when we were already fighting for our lives against the Sakkra! I would still make peace with it were such a thing possible, but it has spent the past thirty-six years refusing to do any such thing, no matter how many ways and times we proved its war with us was not one it could win ... so it's looking like we're going to have to prove it again!
I've started to play on from here, taking it slow as I refamiliarize myself with the situation, and win or lose (most likely lose!) the turns to come are looking fun and interesting to me! Thoughts and suggestions are welcome from anyone at any time (even if no one wants to actually play a set but me...) - I'll need all the help I can get if I'm going to make a game of this one!
Good to see this going again. Thanks for the detailed recap of the situation at 2380 -- I had forgotten a lot of that, given our B attempt at this scenario.
Thanks, haphazard! I've played "another turn set" (through 2390) and am just catching up with the report. It's a really fun and exciting game - notwithstanding everything that's continuing to go wrong! I still don't know if it's winnable - at least by me! - but I'm eager to keep on trying, if only to see what can be done!
Once More Into the Breach, Part 1: Primodius45, 2381-5
- 2381 -
With two existential wars in progress, there is a certain sentiment here on our Primodius colony that any efforts put into factory construction or research is wasted - that everything must be directed at our own immediate survival in the face of our two-front war. It's true here, certainly: We've been scrambling to put a missile base together to try to keep off Sakkra fleets, and can't spare any strength for anything else - but if all Meklar follow our example, then I fear we have already lost: By launching every offensive and defensive ship and transport into space that we possibly can, we might manage to win a battle we might otherwise have lost - or to lose one by a smaller margin or win by a larger one - but in so doing, in failing to progress while our enemies make constant leaps forward toward technology we then could never match, we would inevitably lose the war. So I'm actually relieved that our as-yet-unthreatened worlds have been pursuing the best future they can, even including a research budget in such apparently unwarlike fields as planetology - and that their efforts have borne fruit!
It must be admitted that in comparison with the rest of the galaxy, the best future we can pursue ... still isn't very good. We've known for years that the Sakkra have the technology necessary to survive on any planet we've yet encountered, and the Silicoids need nothing but the rocky natures of their bodies to survive on any planet they choose, but our just-discovered planetological state of the art would only help us on about three planets we couldn't use already, leaving much of the galaxy still closed to us. There's the hotly-contested world in the Moro system, right on our doorstep, but that one will do us precious little good, for reasons that will soon be obvious. In the meantime, our planetologists back on Meklon are preparing for a new project to enhance our pollution cleanup techniques, anticipating - or at least hoping for - a huge increase in the number of Meklar factories in the coming years. In theory we might be able to develop some really amazing planets if only we could achieve still more controlled environment technology, but the chances that those worlds will still be available to us in the distant future when we actually make the next leap forward in planetology seem hopelessly slim: Too many of our rivals can claim those worlds already, and there is simply no way to hold them off much longer even at our nearest neighboring stars. The best we can do is to try to keep pushing back against our active enemies.
That was the mission - now for the second time - of our main fleet up at Moro, where thanks to some enthusiastic lasering, the colony is now dead in more ways than one, with Sakkra transports still presumably on their way up from deeper in their space. Sadly, this state of affairs can't continue indefinitely; even now, another colony fleet is approaching Moro for the Sakkra, this one well-armed and ready, and our main fleet may not get a third chance to remove a colony from that dead world: For one thing, the situation around Moro is growing more complex all the time, and for another, our main fleet has another mission now that promises to be far more dangerous and deadly, and there's no telling how much of it will ever return to Moro at all. As for the complexities, they're not - so far - related directly to the Sakkra, but to practically everyone else in the galaxy. The ongoing bombing of Centauri by the thrice-accursed Silicoid Mako cruiser is a big enough problem already, blasting five more factories apart just this past year while the planet struggles to prepare a defense, but it seems literally everybody wants a peace of Moro now that the Sakkra flag is gone.
The Klackon Hive Queen is one of them, and the messages she's been sending us have been decidedly mixed: Her words sound nice here, but there's no alliance to strengthen between us and them, nor indeed between us and anyone, and if she wanted to propose one, she could surely have found a better way than by pretending it was already in force. In any case, there can't be much to say to her when she talks like this. Her compliments on our part in the mutual trade agreement we established with her years ago are welcome of course, but they don't - strictly speaking, in terms of actual diplomatic commitments - mean anything. It might be supposed that she intends, at least in order to keep up the trade agreement, to preserve the peace, but interstellar diplomacy is always more complicated than that - which comes back, at least by way of example, to the dead world at Moro again.
Within a year or two, it's going to have another Sakkra colony: Their next fleet is about to arrive there, and even though our main fleet is right there in the system, it can't afford to go after them: Every ship is needed here at Primodius45, where a larger, more-deadly Sakkra fleet will be showing up all too soon. If any of them could be spared, they would long since have gone out to Centauri anyway, where fifty-five transports from Cryslon are already visibly inbound, crammed with "colonists" who are all armed to the teeth and preparing to invade. But the Klackons' part in all of this should also be pretty plain: Their antennae all perked up last time we blew the Sakkra Moro colony to bits, and now they have a colony fleet of their own - two dozen Lancer fighters covering a single colony ship - which if our read of their movements is correct will arrive in just a few more years. With a bigger and better starfleet, we might be able to take Moro now, invading from Meklon and Humidity090 and here, but with Centauri already being bombed, and all of us here at Primodius about to come under attack yet again, it's hard to see how we could hold Moro against Sakkra and Klackons alike, even in the unlikely event that there aren't any other incoming colony fleets.
- 2382 -
This is the last scan we'll be getting from Moro for a while - if not forever - with our Photocell scanner ship daring one last encounter with the lately-arrived fleet to ensure as far as possible that we'll be ... not ready for, which honestly isn't possible here, but aware of what we're going to be up against here at Primodius next year. Our main fleet could actually have taken those ships, but not without serious losses, and not for any useful purpose that I can see from here. Instead, it confirms our data on those Juggernaut cruisers - with four of them already on their way here! - and Spectre and Banshee destroyers, likewise with greater numbers en route to attack us than are claiming Moro now. With those designs, the colony ships can safely be ignored - not only because none of them are accompanying the killer fleet that's about to hammer us here!
And meanwhile, lest we forget the Silicoids, they're continuing their settled policy of destroying and killing as much of our colony and as many of our people as they can at Centauri ahead of their enormous transport fleet.
- 2383 -
The bunker is shaking around me - another explosion from a nearby factory under orbital fire from Sakkra heavy lasers and gat turrents - but I push through it and keep working. We're almost, almost finished, and this is the only way we can stop the bombardment short of all of us getting killed! We've lost four million Meklar and fifteen factory-cities in just the past two years, split almost evenly between the Silicoid attacks at Centauri and the Sakkra attack here when their fleet arrived just this year. All of us survivors know Meklar who have died, but there's no time to mourn the dead; we can do that after those ships are blasted out of our orbit - if! We've got to finish building this missile base by the time our main fleet arrives, already racing toward us through hyperspace to make the rendezvous, and it looks like we're going to make it - just! We'll even be able to add a new-built starfighter of our own in case it's enough to turn the tide - but only one! It's all going to come down to this battle here, like another that will barely proceed it at Centauri: All the fighters they can muster are going to fly out to meet the Mako that's been bombing them just in time, if they can defeat it, to also go after the incoming transports. Here, the Sakkra transports are still a few years out, but it won't matter: If we lose, it'll mean we've lost the base I'm helping to build now and our entire primary combat fleet; we'll have nothing with which to fight off either the transports themselves or any of their surviving ships - or new ones arriving to escort the transport fleet! So all of us are working our servos down to the support struts, wearing the insulation from our wires, sparking and glitching but working through it anyway in the desperate race to get our defenses ready!
- 2384 -
This is it: We aren't ready, but we're doing it anyway, going up against the biggest Sakkra fleet we've ever challenged! The main fleet from Moro is dropping in from hyperspace, I can hear the roar of our new fighter's engines as it takes off to join them, launching from its hidden hangar bay, and our secret weapon, the concealed missile base we've been assembling for years on end, is cycling through its final warm-up sequence while all of us stand by, ready to jump on any problems that crop up if we can! The missile tubes sway up into position, the loading ports clear, the autoloaders lock the first nuclear missiles into position and swing back to the next in sequence as the ports slam closed, and up above, I can hear the characteristic hum and sizzle of our class-2 defensive shields springing to life. I join a team of engineers making last-minute emergency adjustments - the calibration on one of the targeting radar systems is off - and bring it into line while the battle rages far overhead, beyond our base's armored dome, beyond the glow - unseen, though heard, from this far down - of the defensive shield, beyond the atmosphere. I'm nowhere in the command chain that can get any blow-by-blow reports, but I know they're up there fighting - and I can feel the whole base tremble as the missiles launch and new ones are slammed into place in the loading ports, see the shield generators reverbrate with the strain of absorbing and dispersing the first heavy laser strike, hear the shield's hum rise to a shrieking wail as the beams penetrate to our armor, and I'm racing for the generator chamber, but the shields are holding for now - they just can't stop all that firepower coming in all at once this way! The shields strain again, and then it's quiet except for the steady clacks and rings and roars of missiles being loaded and launched in succession, three by three. We make some hasty slap-dash on-the-fly adjustments to help the base take the strain in case an attack comes in again, but the comparative quiet goes on - the main fleet must have the enemy's full attention, somewhere in deep orbit, and I dare to hope, to laugh with QX-4522 about the way we rushed in to adjust a shield generator that might not need to see action again for years - and then suddenly, after its long silence, the scream of the energy field above us rises again, the base shakes with another launch, and QX-4522 and I freeze, then dive for our stations, find everything working - as well as it can with the overstrained shields - but more beams are coming through and scarring the armor above us, and we have orders coming through, loud on the speakers, in between the drumbeat roar from the launch tubes, even over the wailing of the shields, ordering us down into bombardment shelters, and I run. Up above, I can actually see the armored dome deforming under heavy laser fire where it penetrates the shields, and I don't stay to see any more: Down to the shelter, and seal it behind me, and hope that will be enough, longing to defy my orders and get back to the heart of the action, to keep our defense base functioning by main force of will, holding cables together if necessary with my own servo-claws, feeling the ground shake as missiles launch and the still-wailing shields, overwhelmed, until suddenly everything goes absolutely silent and I freeze again, just listening, knowing my part in the battle is over, the Sakkra either regrouping or bombarding another part of the planet or fighting the fleet again with our hard-built base gone or retreating or destroyed; I don't yet know if it's over, lost or won.
News is slow to trickle in: The war is raging everywhere - even out at Romulas, way out at the far edge of the nebula, where Silicoid or Sakkra agents blew up four of our factories without a fleet anywhere in the region. Here ... I don't know. At least it's still quiet, but the silence could be broken at any moment by more explosions among our factories. I know our missile base was targeting the Banshees first: Gatling laser destroyers that posed the greatest threat to our fighters of anything in the enemy fleet. The Juggernaut cruisers are dangerous to everything, with firepower capable of penetrating our shields as the Banshees' couldn't, but that is exactly the reason we had to do everything in our power to protect the fighters: The only defenders we had that might be able to hit the Juggernauts hard enough, fast enough, or survive long enough against them, to destroy them before they could destroy our planetary base. So the plan was for the fighters to target the cruisers, with a small wing of Scouts trying to fly interference for them and our lone Photocell destroyer looking for opportunities to contribute where it could while our missiles hammered slowly away at the deadly Banshees. Eventually of course the Banshees would force them to choose between a direct fight and a full retreat - our missiles just don't have the power to do enough damage before they can close in - but we hoped to at least cut down on their numbers a little bit first. After that it would just be a matter of pitting our fleet against theirs, blazing away with lasers on both sides, until one fleet or the other was dead. Our fighters must have done good work to keep the battle going as long as it did - but now that I look at it calmly, in hindsight, I can see the grim reality: Once the Banshees closed in and cut down their numbers, they must have had no chance, and fought desperately to the final ship to keep the Juggernauts away as long as they did. As long as they remained in our skies, the enemy knew they were the greatest threat, and wouldn't have wasted energy on our shielded base. The fact that the Sakkra returned to attack us here must mean that our fighters were destroyed - to the last - while the enemy still lived.
The news from Centauri, late-arriving, is at least a little better: They at last were able to destroy the Mako that had been terrorizing them, though it cost them fully half their orbiting fleet: Nearly as many fighters as they launched this year, leaving them with far too little to shoot down all the Silicoid transports coming in. But word is filtering through from around here as well, and all of it is grim: The Scout pilots in orbit all gave their lives too, trying to delay inevitable-seeming defeat, and even the Photocell, meant to retreat when and if it found there was no more it could do, was blasted to atoms by the heavy laser fire of Spectres and Juggernauts, its pilot or navigator either making a brief miscalculation with devastating consequences or momentarily forgetting the ship's role. Every starship in our defensive fleet here was destroyed: No survivors to regroup or retreat - destroying just half the Juggernauts in exchange, though we inflicted heavy damage on a third, one of the Spectres was scratched by the Photocell's attacks of opportunity, and the Banshees at least were gone and couldn't fire on any more of our cities - and when our brave defenders burned in the starry sky, the enemy forces returned to blaze down at our base from on high. I can see how it must have gone from there: We targeted the damaged Juggernaut first, in a desperate bid to destroy at least one more of the enemy ships, and we must have succeeded, since the volume of enemy fire eventually slackened noticeably. By that time though, our base must have been on the point of falling apart: We'd have no hope of destroying the last of the Juggernauts before it sliced through to our munitions stores and detonated them with heavy laser fire from orbit, wiping the entire site from the surface. We must have known that though, and didn't try: Instead, we went after the Spectre fleet, and reports say we managed to take out just two of their number, a third of the strength of their wing - but at least it's better than nothing! Wherever they're hitting us now at least, their strength - and the damage they'll be doing across the planet - will be perhaps a quarter of what it was last year.
At least Centauri truly held, though the victory was costly: Some thirty-three million Meklar - more than half the planet's total population - perished in defending the colony from Geode's assailing armies. Every three killed four Silicoid invaders - or five if you count the assault transports the surviving fighter fleet was able to burn from the skies - and some thirty million of our people still survive there, but the price of victory, such as it is, was utterly staggering. I only hope that, here, we won't be made to pay a higher price for defeat! But it strikes me suddenly that even now, there is work yet to be done: If our missile base is lost, the need to replace it, with another or failing that, another fleet, is more urgent than ever! With the skies quiet for now, I emerge from the shelter where I've been huddling ... into the ruin - or half-ruin, quiet, standing, waiting, functioning - of our lone missile base! I gawk around me in all directions, knowing we lacked the firepower to handle the full enemy fleet, knowing a Juggernaut and four Spectres still survive, but seeing the evidence in spite of myself: The remnants of the armored dome, stretched and twisted and practically turned inside-out by laser fire, still standing in spite of everything, having absorbed more than 80% of the maximum damage it can sustain. The missile tubes stand ready, loaded for bear, their loading arms waiting in case another threat should appear. The scanning arrays silently probe the skies while the shield generator waits, powered down now since its reserve energies only last....
And of course that's the answer, and I can't believe I didn't see it until now: All the time, through all that fighting, the Sakkra fleet like our shield generator was running through its combat energy reserve, and our fighters lasted long enough, and drew the enemy far enough away - and then our base held long enough thanks to the much-reduced enemy numbers and the difficulty their lasers had in penetrating our shields, to exhaust the Sakkra combat reserves and force them to retreat! I'm walking on shreds of titanium armor and molten blobs into which it was melted everywhere I step, but the base is still standing, and the Sakkra are gone, flying back down toward Maalor! There's all the time we need - and I intend to start making use of it right away - to repair the armor and get our base ready for battle before the next attack!
Make no mistake: The attack is coming. Those colony ships and Banshees on the way are just the first wave, sent to escort and disguise the numbers of the incoming transport fleet. We'll need more fighters here to knock those transports out of the sky - I now see that we should have built more fighters in time to win this year, decisively - but our base should be able to handle the rest of that fleet. We've done it - for now - but it's only a matter of time before those transports reach us as the Silicoid transports just did at Centauri - and if we can survive, then just a matter of time after that before the next invasion comes our way. I don't know how long we can weather these endless-seeming storms; all we can do is try ... and sometimes, in years like this one, though at terrible cost, to win - and escape with our lives!
Thanks for the very entertaining update, RefSteel!
Your Meklar are struggling to hold on, getting attacked seemingly everywhere. Maybe the diplomatic tide can shift? If at least one of your opponents would make peace, or even just get distracted by another race, you might get some breathing space.
Oh, I hope this ends well. There's a lot of potential downside storytelling this good when the ending is outside the author's control. Manipulators crossed.
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
Thanks for the compliments! On the diplomatic tide: Well, that's one way it could shift - and still can, though I think it'll take an effort to make it happen. On the potential downside for storytelling: In case the game events go wrong (which seems rather likely!) it'll be fun for me to try to keep the reports enjoyable all the same: Sometimes a loss can be as enjoyable as a win! With no other players, I'm taking it slow here, just playing when it's a convenient time for me - this report brings us up to date to 2390, which is as far as I've played so far - but if anyone wants to look at the save, I'll upload and link it as I did for 2380. (And as always, anyone who wants to take part in trying to turn around a losing cause is welcome to claim it and play a few turns; I'm just not expecting it based on what we last heard!) In any case, here's the rest of the latest "turn-set" report:
Part 2: Centauri, 2386-90
It's been two years since the invasion, and we're still living among the ruins of our colony, trying to build up our strength again while all our efforts are bent toward building a defensive base like the one that saved Primodius45 that same year. There's already another Silicoid cruiser on its way - just a colony ship this time, thankfully, but still a threat to our small defensive fleet - and even if we can fight it off when it arrives next year, there's no telling what might follow it. We certainly won't have our base by then, but at least the eight old fighters that abandoned us years ago for a pointless mission out to the outer rim should be back in time to - finally - help a little here.
I guess I shouldn't complain; for all the battles that have taken place on our world and in our skies, there are still more-dangerous places in the galaxy.
The twenty-five million Sakkra on their way up to Moro will be guarded on arrival by only a pair of Spectre destroyers, but that won't prevent them from reaching the planet and digging in: Those Spectres are the remnants of the battle that saw the destruction of the entire Klackon colony fleet that for a brief period controlled the Moro colony's skies, and though a powerful Psilon colony fleet is also on its way, it's doubtful if they can arrive in time to stop the transports from landing - they'd have to be incredibly fast - and they might well get there just in time to meet the Sakkra reinforcements on their way up from Maalor. Our just-rebuilt Meklar fighters, on their way to Primodius from Humidity090 and escorting four troop transports from Meklon to help bolster P-45's defense against the coming Sakkra invasion, can't reach Moro in time to interdict the Sakkra transports even if they set out again immediately when they arrive, and no one else seems to have a fleet anywhere nearby. The Klackons have enough transports on the way to have a chance of taking over, but those are a long way off, and they launched them over-optimistically back when their own fleet controlled the Moro system temporarily. By the time the transports get there, circumstances on Moro will probably have changed drastically - it's just a question of what they're going to be. And meanwhile, our much-reduced fleet is still doing all the little it can to protect our own interests around the galaxy. One of our Scouts even came under attack from a Psilon colony ship at the blue star nearest Meklon, but the Psilons only launched two volleys of missiles before retreating, and our pilot managed to dodge out of their paths. It's not going to be so easy to meet their larger, advanced 31-ship colony fleet if we're wrong about it heading for Moro and it shows up at Primodius instead! That colony has enough to face already from the Sakkra alone!
- 2387 -
We've weathered another storm here, thanks to our fighter fleet. Our missile-base-to-be is still a long way from completion, and the Scout's attempts to draw fire away from the fighters all came to nothing, but the fighters that survived the last battle three years back proved their mettle again, and the eight just back from their rimward vanity cruise took a big step toward redeeming their reputation, blasting the Silicoid colony ship and all its ion cannons into red-hot microparticles in space. Five of our brave pilots lost their lives - nearly a fifth of our local strength - and we can't sustain losses like that indefinitely even if another real combat ship never shows up, so the base we're putting together down here looms all the more important as time goes on. There's better news from the other front to emphasize the point: Our fighters arrived in time at Primodius45 to meet the Sakkra transports and their covering fleet, and even though sixteen Banshees would have torn them to pieces, they were able to safely retreat to the planet's surface and land in shielded hangars protected by the colonial defense base. There, behind a shield the Banshees' gatling arrays couldn't begin to penetrate, with more than enough armor to absorb the colony ships' full missile payload, the base launched volley after volley of its own nuclear missiles until the enemy was forced to retreat toward their Moro base. The invading Sakkra soldiers were coming in behind the enemy ships, and the base just switched targets and kept firing while the whole new fighter fleet launched together again to meet the assault transports that carried them, to try - as our meager fleet tried in the Silicoid invasion three years ago - to destroy as many as they could before the enemy could land and charge into the fray.
Unlike here, it was a total victory. Between the base and more-numerous fighters - and perhaps many fewer enemy transports; we'll never know since their numbers were concealed to the very end by the warp signatures of the Sakkra combat fleet - the people of Primodius managed to destroy the invading force entirely before its soldiers could set a single reptillian claw on the colony's soil. The four arriving transports from Meklon itself showed up at almost the same time, obscuring the retreating Sakkra fleet, and thanks to their arrival, the planet is now fully populated - as much as it can be with our limited terraforming technology - leaving us here at Centauri to hope, though in vain so far, that some of the Primodian crowds will dare to come out to join and help us here. In the meantime, all we can do is try to finish construction of our own first missile base - because with it, we might have a chance to control our skies, which might let any Primodians who do come here survive long enough to land instead of being blasted apart by Silicoid ion weaponry!
- 2388 -
No sooner is one threat gone than another rears its head - all too often, one more dangerous than any that came before. There was a little bit of good news earlier at least, from out near the galactic rim, where the Psilons were trying to claim yet another world: For the second time in three years, one of our brave Scout pilots faced off against a lone Psilon colony cruiser, refused to retreat in the face of its missiles, and once their payload was exhausted, chased the Psilons off instead!
With just our lone Scout and the unescorted colony ship, it seemed to be simple enough for our pilot: Just fly at a diagonal relative to the initial vector of approach, simultaneously swerving right - "downward" on screens like these - while approaching the enemy fleet, to reach the position shown; then, when the first missile volley is launched, it's only necessary to fly directly away, going on until the missiles expend their fuel and are left harmlessly adrift in space, unable to track in for the kill. Then even though any further attempt to accelerate away from the second volley would make it impossible to return and interdict the colony ship's landing, the relative velocities turn out to be such that the missiles never do quite catch up anyway - and once they've all expended their fuel, the Scout is free to posture as aggressively as it likes, here chasing the colony ship and its empty missile tubes away. That was fine as far as it went - even hopeful for a future in which the psychopathic Psilon emperor doesn't completely take over the galaxy - but it was the end of the good news here: I just saw the new Sakkra fleet on its way to their Moro colony. Yes, I called it theirs, and with reason: It's been a hotly contested world, sure, but their control of it looks more certain with each passing day.
A lone Banshee and colony cruiser are nothing to worry about on their own, and the defenses we've set up at Meklon and Primodius45 can still handle the rest of the Sakkra ships in Moro's neighborhood, but the Dragon on its way up from Maalor is a different matter entirely. It's the first full-fledged battleship we've seen in space so far, and if it's armed up to their state of the art - now far ahead of ours - there may be nothing we can do to stop it. It looks like it's heading for Moro, where it should arrive in time to dismantle all the Klackon transports heading there, but even if that's its real mission, then once it's finished in just a few years, that will put it just two parsecs away from both P-45 and Meklon - and meanwhile, on our side of the galaxy, another Silicoid cruiser pair is heading this way: Another colony ship escorted by another Mako cruiser - like the one we couldn't stop from bombing us for years when our fighter fleet was barely smaller than it is today. Of course everything can always be worse: The Dragon could already be bound for Primodius45 or even Meklon, and the incoming Silicoid fleet could - in theory, if they still had the production capacity - have been much larger than it is. But we're struggling to meet the enemy's constant attacks with too little material of our own while the three most-powerful factions in the galaxy pull away ... and there's no reason it can't get worse, and quickly!
- 2389 -
... so ... yeah. It looks like we've run out of options, and run out of places to hide. Tachaon has been clinically diagnosed as an actual psychopath, and his obsession with military hardware is widely known, so we all knew it was only a matter of time before he decided to turn his war machine our way - but the moment still is painful now that it's arrived. We can't even blame this entirely on one of his all-too-frequent psychotic breaks: Intelligence reports suggest that he established an alliance with the Sakkra last year, and though that decision looks likely to have been made primarily on the basis of a paranoid, delusional fantasy, the decision to wipe our people off the face of the galaxy which he "forgot to mention" until just now was very probably just a case of Kryssta asking and Tachaon shrugging all four shoulders and saying, "Sure, okay."
Not that we ever had a chance against Kryssta's Dragon anyway, but this war declaration probably seals our fate. We'll keep looking for opportunities to fight back, but they're looking pretty thin on the ground from here.
Just for instance, here's the nearest Psilon colony to our space. After all this time, the icy tundra of Ryoun is still defended by just a small fleet and three missile bases - though we have no idea what kind of technology those bases may be mounting, having had no resources to spare on Psilon spy reports. Now that we've learned how to preserve our electromechanical exoskeletons, including internal life support, from seizing up in the cold, even under conditions more hostile than on a world like Ryoun 8, we could in theory send an invasion: If our soldiers had an edge over theirs - instead of, as seems likely, the other way around - and we could throw together enough bombers to break through those bases first, even at immense cost, with many pilots' noble sacrifice, Humidity090 alone might be able to send enough transports in a couple of waves to claim Ryoun for us ... always assuming a Psilon fleet doesn't show up in time to tear our hypothetical one, transports included, to shreds. Not only is that a few too many ifs to take very seriously, especially with our ships and transports still crawling around space with retro rockets and most of our worlds so far away, but it ignores the other threats we're facing in the meantime - like the attack fleet about to reach us here at Centauri next year, or the Dragon still apparently making its way up to Moro. Then too, there's another problem closely tied to Ryoun's limited number of missile bases.
So far at least, Ryoun does not have a planetary shield - but with Psilons in charge, it may only be a matter of time, and when it gets one, our nuclear bombs will be virtually obsolete. And though one hundred and thirteen factories we might claim from the Psilons would be a lot more valuable than the twenty-three total we conquered here and at Romulas after the Silicoids declared war, it still isn't very many, and whatever secrets we might discover if we somehow conquered the colony would barely make a dent in the Psilons' enormous technological superiority. Of course with the distance so great and our ships so slow, the Psilons might well build more factories before our ships arrived, but that also means they might be building more missile bases or that planetary shield - and none of it takes into account the unintended collateral damage their factories would likely suffer when we fire on their missile bases. It's more of a wistful notion than a plan really - except that we need to do something to change our fortunes in this galaxy or we're just going to get run over. If we take a risk, even a giant risk, and lose the bet, will we really be any worse off at this stage?
- 2390 -
The Mako cruiser is here, plus the typical armed Sakkra colony ship bearing triple ion cannons, and our local fleet isn't up to the job of taking them down. I've been speaking of Ryoun ever since the Psilons declared war last year, wary of the threat - among many others - that they'll build more missile bases while our notional attack fleet crosses space, but perhaps I haven't spoke often enough of what made me think of the possibility.
We were able to do it here, much as our friends at P-45 managed half a dozen years back! Our local fleet hasn't grown, but we're no longer wholly dependent on our fleet - and though the Mako's heavy ion cannons can easily penetrate our new base's shields and rip our armor apart, that's what our fleet was for: We lost fully two thirds of our fighters before the Mako went down and our survivors were able to retreat - the Colony Ship's ion cannons are much more effective against them than against our planetary defenses - and even our Scout was destroyed as it tried to draw fire away, but after that, the Silicoid Colony Ship couldn't hit us hard enough through our shields to keep up with the triple nuclear missile launches in volley after volley that finally sent it raining down through our atmosphere in tiny, burning pieces! The cost was still high, but we're surviving - for now! - and a little better prepared for the next fleets that come in than we were before this year. And there is more good news coming in:
In between all the fighting out here on the front, our computer scientists on Meklon have managed to improve our factory controls, automating a full fifth of the manufacturing subroutines that used to require direct Meklar supervision, and consequently allowing each factory worker to produce 25% more than previously. Critics may complain that unemployment was a serious problem across Meklar space already, but if there's any future for our people at all, this new technology will be critical to our success - one way or another. The CS teams' next project is going to be vital too, if they can ever complete it while we still have a faint hope of survival in the galaxy: They're trying to prove out theoretical models for improved long-range scanning protocols by which advanced computer systems could accurately filter out extraneous signals and background radiation to establish a firm fix on the precise locations of starship-sized objects within seven parsecs of a standard scanning array, accounting for hyperspace uncertainty through automated virtual superpositioning to derive the exact destinations and arrival times of anything in hyperspace, barring just a few edge cases mostly surrounding the unpredictable effects of nebula interference. Thus far, our scanning range has been less than half of what the new protocols would allow, and apart from estimates based on known approach vectors matched to current scanner readings, we've had no way to know exactly where and when alien fleets would arrive. Unfortunately, these limitations are likely to persist for some time at least into the coming century unless we stumble into extreme good fortune in combination with extremely aggressive strategies, but at least we can be confident of getting there someday - as long as we meet the basic prerequisite: Our own survival, by no means guaranteed.
There are small points in our favor: Our population, though not up to the standards of the Big Three, might be a little better than represented here, since the census doesn't count people in transports like the 18 million already en route from Romulas to help reinforce our numbers here at Centauri. We do control as many planets as the Sakkra and Silicoids combined, which would be more promising if we hadn't been thrown headlong into a war with Psilons who control more worlds than we would even if we conquered both of Geode's remaining worlds! Our interstellar production capacity might look weak to anyone but a Silicoid, but still has plenty of room to grow, with our huge newfound factory capacity. And if our technological progress is hopelessly behind everyone else's, with no immediate prospects for that to change, at least we're working on some kind of technological development; we know how bad a hole we're in. Even our shortfalls in starfleet size aren't the real cause for concern here: The Silicoids are sending a new fleet this way, but it's just a single colony ship that our base should be able to handle even without our fighters in support, and if the Sakkra fleet consisted of nothing but Banshees, our bases could laugh those off as well. The problems are in the details - details like the existence of the new Sakkra Dragon - and in the biggest of big pictures: In the immediate term, the Sakkra have formed a new alliance with the Bulrathi - the only people of the galaxy who have gone further than neutrality in even approaching the idea of being our friends - and we'll need to find a way to break that up or we'll end up at war in effect with the entire galaxy! And in the long run, we simply have no chance against the Psilons; if we're going to survive this war with them, we have to keep it as short as we possibly can.
We've slowly been developing over the past decade: Our trade income - nearly quadrupling only took it from practically nothing to almost nothing - is now enough to fully pay for the tiny remnant of our fleet, including the new Scope 1.0 scanner ship that's going to head for Moro to find out what the Dragon is carrying. Much more importantly, in spite of war and sabotage, bombardment and invasion, our total domestic production capacity has increased by more than half, with plenty of space still to grow - especially on embattled worlds like mine and the P-45 colony. Hundreds of new factories have gone up in the past decade, and overall we're still below half our capacity, with technology in development to improve their effective efficiency from sixty all the way up to eighty-four percent. Give us time and peace, and we can still make ourselves a factor in the fate of the galaxy - but no one seems willing to give us peace, and we may be running out of time.
Bulrathi expansion, Psilon science, and Klackon productivity - thanks in very large part to their Silicoid conquests - are dividing the galaxy, while our long-time enemies languish in comparison and we struggle to survive in a hostile galaxy. As for our chances against our newest enemies, the most that can be said is that they haven't killed us yet - they haven't had time to since declaring war out of nowhere at Kryssta's behest - and it might be possible, someday for us to find means of dealing with them. In the meantime, the struggle goes on: To keep growing stronger, and to survive.
I'd take the second alone in a flash - if I weren't all too well aware that for it to be achievable and to remain that way, the first is necessary.
Thanks for another excellent report, RefSteel! Your Meklar are doing an impressive job of holding on to your worlds despite repeated attacks. You have managed to keep growing your production through all of this, and even squeezed out enough research to get IRC3. If you could somehow get peace with at least some of your enemies.... That does not seem likely, though. The MoO AIs hold a grudge, and about the only thing I know of that works reliably to change that is doing damage to their enemies. With your cyborgs stuck on the defensive, there is not going to be much help there. (Plus of course your enemies must be at war amongst themselves for it to work; not sure if they are in this case.)
Good luck against the Psilons, and maybe that Dragon has less than the very latest tech?
Thanks for the compliments and comments, Haphazard and Thrawn! Some of our enemies are indeed at war with each other - specifically, the Silicoids are at war with everybody - but I haven't found the means to take advantage of that so far. I won't be creating a "tech convention" planet intentionally - I'm going to do everything I can to defend our worlds as long as I can, even if it ultimately results in defeat - but I'll certainly be looking for opportunities to make technological gains through the pointy stick - and if that means invading worlds I've lost, if I lose them (and ... well, the situation is dire, and I'm no Thrawn here; I probably will!) then (if it's not too late by then) so be it! I haven't had much time to play turns here for a number of different reasons (and with no other players, I don't feel much urgency!) but I'm still making progress on them when I get the chance, and having fun with it, partly because of the zero-time-pressure environment. I did get another chance to play a few turns though, so here's part one of the next "turn-set" report - more to come when I have a chance!
Captain's Report, 2390-95:
- Meklon, 2390 -
I admit I'm proud of my new Scope destroyer: As the most-senior captain of the Meklar admiralty - the most-senior as of six years ago, when my predecessor was killed in action over Primodius - I had a right to expect a decent ship if we ever built any ... and maybe one day we will, when and if we somehow develop some kind of engine technology, and a weapon that isn't so many decades out of date. In the meantime, there's pride at least in taking command of the new flagship of our little fleet: The Scope is the only ship we've built to date that mounts a heavy laser behind the standard short-range version, and it backs them up with a battle scanner - the most important piece of equipment on the ship. Like our previous flagship, lost at Primodius, the Scope isn't meant as a front-line combat vessel, but as a C3I craft, hanging back for command and control, coordination, and intelligence gathering in battle - and, when necessary, to make daring runs to and beyond the combat front to gather intel on enemy ships in advance of direct combat. That's my Scope's first mission: To meet the Dragon down at Moro and find out exactly what we'll be up against if - or rather when - it comes after us and tries to blast us to pieces. It's also the reason its primary weapon is a heavy laser: If we engage the enemy with our flagship at all, short of desperation or carefully-arranged hit-and-run strikes, its job will be to take what shots it can at short-range enemies like the Banshees before retreating, with the battle scanner and heavy mount allowing reaction fire from beyond the enemy's maximum range. It won't help much, but it'll be something, even if it might have been better to save a few billion credits by leaving the ship unarmed - hardly a handicap for its primary mission.
If I'm going to be honest with myself though, I have to admit the flagship's completion is going to be a footnote in history in comparison with the rest of what happened this year. The latest, just announced, is a huge relief:
We had just learned earlier this year of Durpp's alliance with our implacable Sakkra enemies. If that alliance was allowed to stand, then like the Psilons before them, the Bulrathi would declare war on us inevitably - and our destruction, between our two long-standing enemies, Psilon military technology, and the might of Bulrathi soldiers, would be equally inevitable in that case. Fortunately, our relationship with the Bulrathi has been a strong one for a long time, and Durpp agreed to resume his stance as a neutral party in the ongoing Meklar-Sakkra war, aggressively pursuing his research goals as usual, while living at de-facto peace - since his participation in the universal war against the Silicoids is and remains a gesture only: To the best of our knowledge, neither the Bulrathi nor the Silicoids have ever developed sufficient range technology to reach each other's worlds! There must have been some period when that wasn't true, no matter how briefly, or they could hardly have established a state of war, but if so, I wasn't aware of it - and honestly, I wouldn't put it beyond Durpp to smell which way the wind was blowing, with literally every non-Silicoid leader in the galaxy at war with Geode's people, and declare a namesake war without any intention or possibility of prosecuting any such war in any meaningful way.
We had our own diplomatic priorities too, but apart from that life-saving talk with Durpp, they ultimately all came to nothing: The Bulrathi must already have advanced robotic factory controls - by their primitive flesh-and-blood standards at least - because they refused to make any kind of technological exchange, even with the prospect of getting their paws on a dumbed-down bioneurology-accessible version of our own new breakthrough achievement. It was new to the Klackons at least, who offered a number of exchanges for it, even including nuclear engines, but after long deliberation, we Meklar rejected the trade, not because it favored them so obviously, but because most Meklar felt we couldn't in good conscience trade away an opportunity for such a huge production edge to the people who had such a potent one already, who had been steadily rolling over the Silicoids for decades, and who were already beginning to pull ahead as the first power among near-equals even among the terrifying Big Three. Had there been a long-established friendship with them as we had with Durpp, that might have been a consideration, but with Kaxal only grudgingly maintaining her neutral stance toward us, without even a hint that she might relax her position anytime soon, barring a more-desperate emergency than we're facing now, there seemed to be too much to lose if we made the trade.
- Hyperspace, 2391 -
We're well on our way to Moro now, mid-way through the hyperjump, with no way to turn back, and the same might be said in metaphor about much of the rest of the galaxy. The Psilon fleets criss-crossing our space so far are thankfully just small fleets: An armed scout-class destroyer bound either for Primodius or somewhere beyond the nebula, a colony ship still on its way home through the nebula after our Scout chased it away a few years back, and a colony fleet that looks like it's going to challenge the Sakkra for control of the Darrian system - the blue star nearest Meklon with its large, rich, toxic world - sometime in the next few years. The Dragon and the huge raft of Klackon transports set to invade should arrive at Moro like us next year or the year after - and it appears that three Silicoid colony ships in two separate fleets, estimated by our analysts at 75% of their entire spacefleet, are continuing their desperate attempts to hurt us at Centauri: An outcome they appear to prefer over their own survival, though I suppose we can't discount the possibility that they've given up on the latter entirely. With only two worlds to their names, at war with literally the entire galaxy, they're in a position where we might well have found ourselves before long if we hadn't been on top of our diplomatic work with the Bulrathi. Even as it stands, we'll have to hope - and continue to work hard - to keep ourselves afloat so don't find ourselves occupying the position they're in now - though without, I hope, even in such a case, the utterly pointless suicidal attacks on a single long-time enemy.
- Moro System, 2392 -
We've just arrived from hyperspace, out at the system rim, accelerating in toward Moro Prime as fast as we can, unopposed for now since the ships they have in orbit here appear to have departed - but hyperspace scanners are showing enormous displacement ahead: Something big is about to drop in, and we know pretty well what it is. We're just getting word from Centauri too, where the battle is already over - a foregone conclusion in that case, just as this one will be - though the outcome will be very different; I'm not as suicidal as the Silicoid colony cruiser, it seems.
Our small wing of fighters got in a brief practice run, trying to draw the enemy away from the planet though in this case it wasn't necessary, but retreating before the colony ship could get within firing range: The base could handle the ship by itself, so the fighters were better preserved for future battles. Since the colony ship's basic ion cannons could barely penetrate Centauri's shields and it had no defenses of its own against Centauri's missiles, the battle was a foregone conclusion as soon as the Silicoids decided to fight it at all: They could easily have escaped, and even if they prioritized killing our little fighters, our missiles take so long to get through their armor that they still had time to jump to hyperspace themselves after our fighter wing's retreat - but they didn't. The Silicoids' calculus seemed to be that as long as there was a chance - even a chance so negligible that it was hardly any chance at all - that they could destroy our missile base and bomb our colony, the overwhelming likelihood of losing their entire ship and its two million rock beings was a price they were willing to pay. And unsurprisingly, in the end, pay it they did. Out here at Moro, my chances in the upcoming fight are going to be even smaller - rounding to zero out to as many decimal places as my computer can calculate - so even the Silicoids would probably be circumspect in my case. I'm not waiting to find out though: I'm only waiting to learn what the Sakkra around here are packing!
They've arrived, and I'm starting my recon run: An "attack" only insofar as I'm forcing the Sakkra defenses to show up and - not stop me exactly, though they could certainly do that too if I gave them time - prepare to blast the splinters that would be left of my flagship the moment I engaged them into tinier splinters, if not into plasma stew. While our energy stores all charge, there are Psilons passing by some distance outside of the system: Their armed scout bound for the nebula and points beyond, and their colony ship just now emerging from it to return homeward. I can see more Sakkra reinforcements on their way here, the report coming in over the strategic intelligence grid, while more Psilons gather at Ryoun and one of their colony fleets heads up to challenge the Sakkra claim-to-be on the blue star close to Meklon and the mineral riches of its one important world, with its choking, acid, toxic atmosphere. And of course the claim itself - the Sakkra colony fleet - is closer, about to arrive, while more fleets converge in the other direction, over at Centauri: Two more Silicoid colony ships trying to stop our transports, sent years ago from Romulas, from arriving safely at the colony. Those colships aren't scary though. This is the scary part: Combat capacitance systems are charged on both sides, and it's time to find out what the Sakkra are carrying aboard their Dragon - and then try to get out with my life and my ship.
That ... is not what I was expecting - and not what I was afraid of, by any means. Yes, that Dragon can still tear my little flagship to pieces and then set the pieces on fire and sprinkle them liberally all over the outer reaches of the ionosphere, but the Sakkra still appear to be relying on laser technology - much like ourselves! The dozen nuclear missiles on board, guided by nothing but a battle scanner like the one I'm using to gather intel on their ship, can safely be ignored - and the Dragon has only half a dozen heavy lasers! Understand, that's still six times as many as we have on our entire starfleet combined, but the point is that it there's no reason to expect them to do enough damage to destroy even a single missile base in the course of a battle, since our deflector shields keep the smaller lasers from affecting anything. The gatlilng laser arrays in particular are devastating weapons against the remnants of our fighter fleets - and against the comparatively-tiny flagship I'm flying this minute - but can do nothing against shielded missile bases. As long as they don't go after Endoria or Romulas - or if the one they do go after turns out not to be affected by nebula interference after all; there may be official records, but I'm not exactly in a position to start looking them up while that Dragon comes screaming in through space at me - we should be safe from that death ship after all, in spite of all my worries!
They're closing in, but not at any speed; the Sakkra, for now, remain as hamstrung as we are when it comes to trying to design swift-moving star fleets. I have the information for which I made all this effort, and it's already being transmitted, well on its way back home to Meklon where I can only hope our strategic leadership is making something of it other than a series of clicks and whirrs and whistles of relief! In the meantime, I have my jump coordinates, punched in and ready, and I engage the hyperdrive right away. The enemy fleet is still worlds away, rushing forward with all their weapon banks ready and none of them making a difference - yet. And now space twists and spirals outward and expands to envelop me and carry me away, and I leave Moro behind, heading back to a Meklar world where I'll just have to hope - in spite of the fact we can stop it after all - that the Dragon isn't going to make its own jump to pursue me. That does leave a little time for reviewing the rest of the information that came in across stratnet while I was in the Moro system - including my personal favorite story, though it's something of a joke in its own way.
We're never actually going to build a single Redline 1.1 - no more than we built of its 1.0 predecessor design, with which - believe it or not - I suspect the Dragon design is contemporary. The point of this design is to help bring together starship designers in case of an upcoming exigency, perhaps to help speed up future emergency ship construction, and generally as a thought experiment about what we would do if we had the resources to build one with our current miserable levels of technology. One thing to bear in mind is that, outside of a nebula, this Redline is far more effective than the Dragon will ever be. Ours would have less than half as many gatling arrays, but they're all guided by targeting systems with three times the net efficacy of the Dragon's battle scanner - and we would mount six times the Dragon's number of heavy beams - enough to punch through shielding much more effectively than the Dragon ever can.
But if we could afford to build even one of these Redlines, or come close, before we have to fight off anotehr wave of our enemies, we could commit the same resources in other and better ways, and have better solutions available - to this enemy. And if a Dragon were the only threat we were facing, we probably could have those resources before long. We have no such good fortune though; the galaxy seems to be swarming with practically nothing but enemies.
- Hyperspace, 2393 -
It's more than a little unsettling to find out about sabotage and destruction at our destination when we're half-way there through hyperspace with no way to change course or turn around - and with nothing behind us but a war zone in any case: Klackon transports are expected at Moro shortly, even as we're catapulted away from them through hyperdimensional space, either to be shot down by the Sakkra fleet that chased us away, or - as seems likely since a glance at the dynamic galactic map seems to suggest that the fleet has moved away - dropping through the atmosphere in an all-out effort to take the colony for themselves. The violence on the surface if that were to happen would be horrific in its extent - which is to say, typical for the Klackons and Sakkra, who for decades have been sending soldiers to their deaths in waves of tens of millions, Kaxal's Klackons mercilessly conquering Silicoid worlds over the rocky corpses of their former inhabitants, Kryssta's Sakkra trying to do roughly the same to our homes, though we've so far managed - sometimes by the very slimmest of margins - to avoid becoming the sparking, burning wreckage into which the Sakkra keep trying to transform us all, one battle at a time. If the report of Bulrathi sabotage at P-45 up ahead - the very colony that the Sakkra have chosen to attack most often - were accurate, it would mean we're probably doomed no matter what happens on the way: Seven factories, though valuable and costly, in themselves, are certainly replaceable, but the same can't be said of our relationship with Durpp and his Bulrathi. If they were coming for us, it would probably be the end - but fortunately the circumstances look extremely suspicious to me. I can easily imagine Sakkra agents remaining behind on Primodius, hidden with the aid of far-superior computer security, even since their last military invasion to reach the surface, but more likely planted while they had a fleet in orbit that we for some years were unable to repel, and just now taking advantage of their superior computer technology to leave evidence falsely implicating the Bulrathi in their sabotage: It's much easier to believe than stealthy bears sneaking across the breadth of space on their merchants' ships, targeting a planet inhabited by their people's already-much-beset friends, and blowing up a bunch of infrastructure there for no discernible reason. Of course, those supposedly-Bulrathi saboteurs weren't necessarily Sakkra:
Kryssta may have access to better computer security than we do, but his is by no means the only deficit we're facing in that respect - nor yet the largest; nor even close. Our first comprehensive report on Psilon technology was just completed, and the best thing I can say about our chances against them is absolutely nothing. They can build ships that are faster than ours, better armored, capable of repairing themselves in mid-battle, with twice our targeting capabilities, firing far-more-powerful weapons, and launching their attack fleets from much-longer range. Their defensive bases will have more than twice the shielding ours do, and better armor and targeting like their ships, but also they'll be firing missiles more than twice as powerful as ours, with additional targeting boosts beyond their basic battle computers', and their defensive electronics will scramble any of our missiles' or smart-bombs' targeting systems to the point where we might as well not bother building any at all. It's true, as already inferred, that they have no planetary shields, and at least their robotic controls don't compare to ours, but especially since their planetological technology is advanced enough to let them imitate the Silicoids in seeking planets to colonize, invade, and keep, it's difficult to imagine how we're going to stop them when they come. Their alliance with our implacable Sakkra enemies is still ongoing, in case either one of them needed more options for fuel bases, and like the Sakkra, their only war apart from us is against the faltering two-planet Silicoid empire that's shrunken so far since they first declared war that the Psilons can and likely will ignore them completely: Even Psilon fuel technology can't possibly be enough to reach Cryslon from their home space without stopping off at Sakkra refueling bases.
If they would break their alliance, there might be some chance that at least the Sakkra would be distracted from their endless war with our people: Psilon fleets are en route to various Sakkra worlds even now, and if they arrived outside of an alliance, their transports would surely follow in the wake of those fleets. There's not a lot we can do about that at present though - not a lot as a Meklar people, and nothing at all I and my crew can do, at least until our jump is complete - especially since we still have more than our share of problems to deal with, beginning with the galaxy's other desperately embattled people embroiled in a multi-front losing war: The Silicoids appear to be continuing their long-standing habit of sending attack fleets our way in lieu of defense, development, or paying even marginal attention to any of their other wars: Any of the other four! A fully-outfitted attack cruiser like their Mako is an expensive undertaking from one of their mere two worlds, but they keep building more and sending them at our Centauri colony: One more here escorted by twin colony ships, which in spite of their size and deadly ion cannons, the Silicoids seem to be able to produce in arbitrary numbers, without any meaningful cost to them ... only to of course also send them out to attack us at Centauri.
- Primodius45, 2395 -
Well, the flagship is on its way through hyperspace again, to get a report on the strength of the Psilon fleet at Ryoun, but I'm not with it this time; we changed out the whole crew and command staff when we arrived here. The admiralty wants all the information we can glean on the latest Sakkra fleets, and since we're the most-recent eyewitnesses to their ships, our reports aren't enough: They wanted to go over everything we saw in full detail with all of us, which wouldn't have been possible while we were out in hyperspace. If the mission to scan the Psilons at Ryoun hadn't been so urgent, our Scope might have waited for us here, but as things stood, no one could brook any delay: It's going to take longer than any of us want it to already. Of course I understand: Old and comparatively toothless though that Dragon turned out to be, at least for attacking bases, the lizards certainly have the technology they need to tear us apart if they so choose.
Their hyper-V rockets are hardly an upgrade even over our ancient nukes, since unlike us, they're not fighting anyone who can build very effective deflector shields - but they'll have a decided edge over us in combat on the ground, and if they arm their ships with neutron pellet accelerators as our agents report they now can do, especially on stabilized fighters, we would need two more generations of forcefield technology to protect our planets from them. They're capable of building deflector shields that nearly all our weapons would be very nearly helpless to penetrate, their computer technology is a full generation ahead of ours at least, their materials engineering equal to or superior to our own across the board, and their planetological knowledge leaves us completely in their dust. About the most hopeful thing that can be said about their technological advantage is this: At least their not the Psilons!
The problem of Sakkra military technology and tactics isn't just academic though, nor just a matter for future dread. The reason I'm here in the first place, participating in top-level discussions of the threat, is the potential for an attack to materialize at any time, but ever since receiving the latest scanning results, based on previous hyperspace vector analysis, we're convinced that the potential has become reality.
The problem with being relieved that the Sakkra are not the Psilons is that we're being attacked by both - not just diplomatically, but across hyperspace. We've seen Sakkra cruisers called "Juggernauts" before, and had trouble enough against them, but they were built into a different hull design, with a different scanner signature, which means the one escorting a colony ship directly toward us - if we're reading our scanners correctly - is an entirely new design, certainly developed within the last decade, and possibly no more than two years out of date. We know nothing about them, and won't know until this one gets here, and though we're building up our defenses as well as we possibly can, we don't know if it will be enough to mean anything.
All that would be cause enough for concern by itself, but we're not going to have the luxury this time of gathering all the force we can from all over Meklar space to overcome the Sakkra fleet: The Psilons are coming too, with their galaxy-leading advantage in combat technology, and though their fleet is relatively small - nothing in comparison with what they're gathering at Ryoun now - depending on how it's equipped, even that little may be more than we can defeat! This is the first time we've seen Psilon ships potentially coming to attack our worlds, so we have no basis to judge where they're actually headed, but we have to assume the worst, on the basis of our scan results: They may be within a year or two of Humidity.
And of course, lest we forget, the Silicoids are still coming after us too. At least their technology is less threatening, though their Mako cruisers have already demonstrated in the past how effective their heavy ion cannons can be against our weak shielding, but locked as they are in universal war - there's no room to display them all on the main foreign intelligence screen, but the Psilon and Klackon reports, to say nothing of all the once-Silicoid worlds in Klackon pincers, show clearly enough that they haven't been left out - they still seem to be convinced that bombarding Centauri is their first - if not their only - priority. Their attack fleet hits next year if experience is any guide, the Psilons' is harder to guess, but probably will come the year after that on almost the opposite side of Meklar space, and within another year from there, before any of our surviving ships - if any - can reposition from either of those first attacks, the new Sakkra cruiser will be hitting us here. We're scrambling defenses together, and I'm trying as well as I can to guess from things I saw at Moro to predict what we'll be up against, but in spite of all our efforts, we're still in the dark out here. It's going to be a tense series of years for those of us who live to see them - if any!
Thanks for the detailed recap of the situation at 2380 -- I had forgotten a lot of that, given our B attempt at this scenario.
Your Meklar are doing an impressive job of holding on to your worlds despite repeated attacks. You have managed to keep growing your production through all of this, and even squeezed out enough research to get IRC3. If you could somehow get peace with at least some of your enemies.... That does not seem likely, though. 
The MoO AIs hold a grudge, and about the only thing I know of that works reliably to change that is doing damage to their enemies. With your cyborgs stuck on the defensive, there is not going to be much help there. (Plus of course your enemies must be at war amongst themselves for it to work; not sure if they are in this case.)
Incoming enemies with potentially superior tech, not good. 
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