Ref, I don't do that many gambits, so it was easy for me to avoid them. But the idea of building a ton of Omega bombers with some gunship support, clearing out all three Meklar worlds near us, and trying to hold at least some of them (Keep Out is probably the toughest because it's Poor and the AIs are all going after it again and again), is certainly tempting. I like that idea better than going after the Mrrshans.
The third option is to try and grab the Radiated worlds, and the fourth is to continue waiting.
(May 19th, 2020, 06:37)Cyneheard Wrote: Ref, I don't do that many gambits, so it was easy for me to avoid them. But the idea of building a ton of Omega bombers with some gunship support, clearing out all three Meklar worlds near us, and trying to hold at least some of them (Keep Out is probably the toughest because it's Poor and the AIs are all going after it again and again), is certainly tempting. I like that idea better than going after the Mrrshans.
The third option is to try and grab the Radiated worlds, and the fourth is to continue waiting.
I'm curious. That's a lot of gunship support that we'd need to beat the meklars, why don't you like the idea of going for the weak cats? We can't invade and steal techs anyway, might as well do the cats now - by the time we have enough to beat the meklars they might have upgraded their ships several times... By this metric option one and four are the same =)
Edit: and I do mean now. New small bomber with impulse engine, new destroyer with impulse/1 fusion/Istab,scan and we can attack with just the stuff we have ready in the shipyards. Destroy Fieiras, leave their other planet with 10 pop, colonise Fieiras and be ready to colonise the other planet as soon as anyone else kills them for good and we don't even get the diplo penalty. Of course considering our philosophy we WANT the diplo penalty ;P
(May 19th, 2020, 06:37)Cyneheard Wrote: Ref, I don't do that many gambits, so it was easy for me to avoid them. But the idea of building a ton of Omega bombers with some gunship support, clearing out all three Meklar worlds near us, and trying to hold at least some of them (Keep Out is probably the toughest because it's Poor and the AIs are all going after it again and again), is certainly tempting. I like that idea better than going after the Mrrshans.
The third option is to try and grab the Radiated worlds, and the fourth is to continue waiting.
I'm curious. That's a lot of gunship support that we'd need to beat the meklars, why don't you like the idea of going for the weak cats? We can't invade and steal techs anyway, might as well do the cats now - by the time we have enough to beat the meklars they might have upgraded their ships several times... By this metric option one and four are the same =)
Edit: and I do mean now. New small bomber with impulse engine, new destroyer with impulse/1 fusion/Istab,scan and we can attack with just the stuff we have ready in the shipyards. Destroy Fieiras, leave their other planet with 10 pop, colonise Fieiras and be ready to colonise the other planet as soon as anyone else kills them for good and we don't even get the diplo penalty. Of course considering our philosophy we WANT the diplo penalty ;P
I'm not sure that we have to go ship-to-ship with the Meklar, basically hoping to just bomb all three worlds quickly and hope we can hold 1-2 of them and reduce the others to spud worlds. It's also easier to reinforce them which may be relevant. That's my reasoning, but it also depends on whether our ships could bomb them out too.
It's ridiculously late at night here, so I won't be able to finish the report before tomorrow. I'm therefore posting what I've got, plus the save so that you can have a look around if you want. (Or get started if you don't want to wait to see the rest of my report.)
Part 1: 2510-2516
Darloks do not communicate - not verbally, even when they choose to take forms that appear to have the capacity to do so - and not explicitly. They watch, and they learn, and they act, each alone, achieving collective action by inference as they learn one another's habits and tells, or by subtleties that certain of them use, perhaps, we suspect, to circumvent the customs and rules of their own society. So in the year 2510, when the seat of power that we would call the Imperial Command Chamber became vacant once again, there could have been no message - no message per se - telling its previous occupant to leave; it was merely understood somehow, by subtlety or by inference, that the time had come.
Someone must come - or must arise. It is the way. It is the unspoken, unwritten law. Within the chamber, there stirs a shade, dark, enveloping. In the distance, faintly, a voice sings softly, but draws not near. The darkness swells and flows within. The door swings shut, untouched, sealing out the world and the galaxy beyond. The darkness moves and shifts and flows, casting its shade upon displays and panels, consuming the controls. Slowly, they begin to move, as if on their own, without word, without voice without apparent touch. Outside, the distant song recedes. Within, there is no sound at all.
Darloks being Darloks, no record exists of who, if anyone, took up the reins of power. Some believe that the office of what we call "Acting Emperor" was at best a sinecure, a position whose sole responsibility was to refuse the requests and demands of alien beings that would treat with the Darlok people, shielding the other Darloks from what they perceived as the horrors of these importunities, while the Darloks across the empire simply did what Darloks do. Others believe that the "Acting Emperor" was indeed a power that ruled the Darlok people for a time without language but with inviolable will, directing the course of all others as surely as the current of a river directss the chaotic movements of floating animalcules. In their accountings of the twenty-five-teens, these students of Darlok culture whisper of something more or less than an Acting Emperor: The ascension of something nameless that some have called a Lord of Chaos. Doubters say that chaos is the normal and inevitable state of Darlok society anyway.
Chaos, perhaps, but not randomness: The line redrawn in the sand over the past thirty years was heavily defended already, and many of the trillions of credits the Darloks had managed to assemble by methods still being debated by scholars of their history would be poured into the planet's economy throughout the early teens to speed the completion of its factory infrastructure while aliens of other races continued to battle over Keep Out's poverty. The Darloks otherwise focused most of their efforts on research, focusing especially on computer and weapon technology. Their first breakthrough however would come in their other field of recent focus: Planetology.
The secret of survival on irradiated worlds had long escaped the Darloks, but in 2511, a brilliant scientist demonstrated the use of Zortium alloys to cast shadows not only in the range of visible light but of X-Rays and all forms of ionizing radiation - and though these results were communicated to no one as such, the Darlok habit of spying on one another paid off throughout their empire, for as all Darloks know, they live and thrive wherever darkness and shadows lie.
This breakthrough had long been expected among the People of the Cloak, but the efforts begun with the start of the decade would soon pay off as well: Work had not even begun on a colony ship for the still-heavily-contested radiated world near the heart of the galaxy when 2512 saw the development of what our computer scientists call the "Mark 6": the most-advanced battle computer the galaxy had ever seen.
Advanced robotic controls - nearly twice as powerful as those they were using already - would be right up the Darloks' dark, blind alley filled with looming dumpsters behind which menacing cloaked figures might lurk. Attractive though a still-more-powerful targeting computer or ECM jammer might be, there was really no question of what the Darloks would pursue: The social distancing that has always been the trademark of the Darloks would be much easier to accomplish with a 40% reduction in the number of employees needed to run each factory. Work on improving the production rate of the extra factories that would therefore be needed was already progressing in various separate, apparently uncoordinated construction engineering laboratories, and while that progressed, Darlok scientists further increased their focus on weapon design while beginning to increase funding for advanced propulsion. As yet, if Chaos was the watchword either of the Darloks or of their "Acting Emperor," their was no sign of it in their intensive, focused research.
Outward through the darkness reach the talons of the shade, questing ... seeking. Starships fly gleaming in the starlight across space, bearing rockets, long-time defenders of the Dralok worlds, numerous ... but slow, and weak. Slowly, slowly, the darkness overtakes them, deliberate and cold, and they disappear from the starlight, disappear from space, crumbling, forgotten, into the darkness that envelops them, drawing them in, ever in, back to the heart of power, in the grip of the rising shade.
Some historians, in defense of Darlok culture, have argued that their supposedly chaotic behavior was always prompted by outside forces, as in the case - shortly following the disappearance of their Distance 3 rocket destroyers, presumably retired with honor in the typical uncommunicative fashion of their people to save on maintenance, create additional reserves against emergencies, or for other important economic reasons - an Alkari ambassador placed a call to the Darlok imperial holochamber in 2513.
When an attempt was made to frame the Darloks, who would never consent to share a world with any other people long enough to sabotage anything, for damage to Alkari defense systems or factories, Farseer and his people were only too ready to believe. Their protests appeared to fall upon deaf ears - or rather, upon a complete absence of ears of any kind - but perhaps this fact was noted, toegether with the existence of a de-facto enemy among the neighbors with whom they were nominally at peace, who dared to frame the Darloks themselves for crime's of the neighbor's own. It took little imagination to guess who had done the deed.
The machine people are powerful, growing more so all the time, lights flashing, servos whirring, communicating wirelessly, endlessly. Locked in war with half the galaxy, with only the insignificant cat people for allies, nevertheless holding all of them at bay, they seem strong and fearless - far too strong, but most importantly, with far too little fear. The darkness at the heart of Darlok space stretches forth, and there among the power, amid the fearlessness and madness that chase each other through the cells and circuits of the Meklar mind, there is a hint - the merest hint, fleeting, slender ... present - of weakness, however brief.
The Darloks continued to maintain their research projects in every field, with some focus on Construction and Propulsion, but the bulk of their efforts by this point were bent upon one goal: The advancement of their weapons technology. Even so, it must have come as a surprise to nearly all the Darlok people when Pulson Missile production began at bases all over the empire as early as 2515.
So great was their surprise that their weapons engineers made what might prove a critical and very costly error. Perhaps because the upgrade from Pulson to Hercular missiles would be relatively small, with Particle Beams and Plasma Cannons seeming equally unlikely to be of any use to a Darlok fleet, they elected not to advance the state of the art any further until they had returned to an old theoretical project: The hyper-accurate Megabolt Cannon which would barely help to miniaturize any of their existing weapons following the development of Pulsons, and unlike the more-advanced options, and would be no more helpful for firing on repulsor ships than either of the higher-tech beams. The extent of this mistake was driven home that very year by reports the Darloks received of contemporary Bulrathi technology.
Limited though the bears' computer and engine technology might be, they excelled in every other area, and their bases would be nearly impossible to break without far more advanced technology than the Darloks were able to achieve. It was therefore fortunate for the Darloks that in spite of their Alkari alliance, they appeared to be distracted by simultaneous wars with - like the Meklar - half the races in the galaxy. It was here, perhaps, upon discovering the grievousness of their mistake, that the Darloks began to compound it with what appears to many historians as still greater insanity.
A stabilized cruiser with neither armor nor shields is no one's idea of the mainstay of a warfleet, least of all when it's armed with nothing but eight racks of Omega bombs behind its state-of-the-art computer and battle scanner. Yet with Pulson missile technology doing so little to miniaturize the bombs, and no further opportunities in sight to do so significantly, perhaps the Faraday 5.0 was built in sheer desperation to take advantage of a narrow window of opportunity. The purpose of the Faraday at least can be inferred, after the fashion of the Darloks, no matter how questionable its design might be: To isolate electronic machines and cut them off from the galaxy. Had it been suited for the purpose, or at least deployed effectively, we might now be investigating the Darloks' astonishing strategic prowess instead of their chaotic folly - but this was not to be. Use of the Faraday bomber would have been tactically difficult and dangerous under the best of circumstances - all the moreso when their supposed window of opportunity closed abruptly.
The Darloks certainly seemed to understand the urgency of the situation - at least to an extent: They woud build fully four Faraday bombers right at the front line by 2416.
That was all though. Instead of pouring more resources into a follow-up fleet to ensure they could accomplish their mission, they built a lone radiated colony ship in the hope that they could steal and protect the rich world near the heart of the galaxy, and kept the ship parts from most of their other starbases exactly where they were. Three hundred and twenty Omega-V bombs would do a lot off damage of course, but not enough through Meklar shielding to accomplish the Darloks' needs. And when the Meklar eventually rendered themselves virtually immune to Faraday bombers, those ships would have little else to do ... unless they could catch a certain other race at a planet without an effective fleet.
Alkari defensive technology, and possibly the Mrrshans', would still be vulnerable to well-piloted, powerful bomber fleets, but whether hyper-specialized ships like the Faradays, utterly dependent on their escorts or to clear away any enemy fleets and on their pilots to avoid even the slightest mistake in tactical combat, could accomplish anything even there would have to wait on the question of whether making war on Alkari or Mrrshan worlds would have any strategic value except for the production of more hot potato "spud" worlds like Keep Out. And by the time the decision could possibly be made, the election would be approaching....
I made two or three critical errors this time around (mostly described above) and a couple of smaller ones as well; much like we did at the beginning of the game, I gambled and got burned - but I could have tilted the odds further in my favor or refrained from taking the risk, and failed to do either one. My worst mistake was choosing the wrong tech though, failing to advance the tree, because I didn't check the impact of miniaturization levels in advance and didn't fully recognize the continuing impact of our variant at the time I made the choice. (I'm used to a strong expectation that we'll be picking up techs from AIs one way or the other at this point in the game, especially when planning an offensive, and didn't fully grasp all the implications of not being able to do so.)
I'm not sure exactly how far that sets us back, and there is one silver lining even to that mistake - but I did also get us into another war with the Meklar, with all the attendant risks. We're still in this though. Our defenses are pretty strong now, and our economy is strong by non-Meklar standards at least. We do have some options, and the game is far from over! I would have liked to have handed off the save in a stronger position, but those are the breaks sometimes! Now I'll get out of here and finish my report tomorrow!
It's been a long day, followed by one of those rare British evenings that make even me want to sit outside rather than at the computer. I fully intend to pick this up tomorrow, but am delighted to wait for the rest of the report .
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
Hmm ... I'm not getting the reference, Arnuz (unless it's just to time passing; in which case: Sorry about the wait! My first thought on seeing the first one was, "Table of Contents? I guess I could create a table of contents linking to everybody's actual turn reports if you want..." but in context, I knew that couldn't be right!)
(May 20th, 2020, 14:35)shallow_thought Wrote: It's been a long day, followed by one of those rare British evenings that make even me want to sit outside rather than at the computer.
Sounds great! I hope you enjoyed the evening! And as for the report...
Part 2: 2517-2520
The horrible culmination of the Darlok Faraday plan would come in 2417.
With slower ships launched in advance of the bombers, two years before, almost the entire Darlok starfleet would come together in Jinga's skies, with only a pair of fusion beam scanning ships moving elsewhere across the stars, a pair of newly-constructed Faraday bombers taking orbit near the front, and the old Cleanup bomber fleet arriving simultaneously with the First Battle of Jinga on a mission of their own. If there was a plan at Jinga beyond showing up, hoping for the best, and trying to make a mess, these simultaneous attacks might be the first evidence that it could be so - but there is a strong counter-argument that the Cleanup fusion bombers might have done more good at Jinga, in spite of their limited ability to penetrate its shields, than by merely adding flavor to the constant battles raging over a much-contested mineral-poor world. The battle itself may have suggested some kind of a plan, but many critics of history say it proves only that the Darlok Faraday pilots were completely out of their minds.
From the heart of Darlok space, from the control room at the center of its power, the shadow reaches outward, blotting the sky. Spanning stars now, it takes the planet Jinga 2 in its icy grip. Bombers strike from the cloud of shadow, blasting the planet's defensive bases into dust, and the darkness grows, swirling dark and potent around the faint glow of the planetary shield, slowly, slowly tightening its grip....
A military analysis of the battle suggests that the area of space outlined in purple here, three standard units left of the planet in the image, was critical to the bombers' success. Stabilized Impulse engines with near-maximum maneuverability, falling into the wider category of "Doom Drives," are capable of matching the speed of Merculite Missiles on any given vector, but taking advantage of this to hit the target from which the missiles are fired is a problem of much-greater complexity. Since these armorless, unshielded cruisers could be completely destroyed by a single volley from the planetary missile bases even after most of them were destroyed, all of the crew's efforts had to be focused on avoiding the missiles, maneuvering to attack the planet itself almost as an afterthought, and only when they managed to create an opportunity - but one of the ways in which such opportunities could arise was by arriving in a part of space adjacent to the purple-highlighted zone just in time for another missile launch, then moving into the highlighted zone and thence on a diagonal course toward the planet but away from any missiles already in pursuit just long enough to change course and bombard the planet from an orbital position represented on this screen as directly "above" or "below" before maneuvering away from the incoming missiles again without regard for planetary targeting until it could be considered with some measure of safety again. Other ships involved in the battle on the Darlok side helped by drawing some of the planet's fire, though lacking "doom drives" themselves, they each had to retreat as soon as this happened lest they be destroyed. The Faradays did ultimately succeed in destroying all the missile bases without the loss of a ship, but the unimaginable risks the pilots took, weaving a celtic knot with precise sector-by-sector maneuvering over what must have seemed an eternity as ever-more-numerous missiles piled up enough explosive payload to instantaneously blast them into X-rays and dreams, never quite catching them in the event, but so near that one slight and barely-false move - taking a diagonal too close to them, or failing to take one away from them when needed - would spell instant and total doom. Some say no one, no Darlok, still less four cruiser crews, would be willing to take such risks so long, and so some greater force than individual Darlok action must have been involved. Others say that after all, Darloks have shown themselves to be suicidally insane in other ways.
As well, of course, as homicidally insane - the two being often related. Even if their attack on Jinga had been safe for their pilots and certain to go well, without risking the complete destruction of their fleet in case a pilot blinked, any Darlok who considered the situation at all should have known that destroying Keep Out and bombarding Jinga from orbit - not terribly effectually - would lead to renewed war with the Meklar, when it had been precisely the peace between them and the terrifyingly powerful machine-beings that had enabled the recent Darlok recovery. It has been argued that the Darloks felt they would find themselves at war with QX-537 eventually thanks to its wildly erratic personality, and that they had to strike and slow it down - and if possible claim and hold more of its territory for themselves in a part of the galaxy that other races could not contest effectively - while they perceived a narrow window of vulnerability, but if so, their execution of the attack left much to be desired, and they would pay a high price for overextending.
As if to repudiate the Darloks' folly, Mrrshan secret agents chose that same year to make their move, acquiring all the factory construction data required to reproduce the personal laser weapons Darlok soldiers had used to purge Waters Edge of Mrrshan invaders decades before, and again in the failed defense of the Sand Line colony a few years after that against Meklar armed with fusion weaponry. The theft was unimportant in itself, but the very fact that backward cats could steal Darlok secrets with impunity suggested all could not be well with the Darlok imperium. By comparison, the Darloks' reaction to Farseer's overtures was merely a matter of routine.
When the Alkari offered a military alliance, presumably pleased by the attacks on their empires' mutual machine enemies, even offering to subsidize the alliance with a payment of over a trillion galactic credits, the Darlok Acting Emperor - whoever that might have been - apparently refused without comment, or indeed any form of communication.
The following year and the next, the bombardment of Jinga continued, with further additions to the fleet, belatedly including the Cleanups that had destroyed Keep Out. The Meklar did manage to rebuild some nine missile bases in time for the attack of 2519, but between the Cleanups and a bolstered fleet of Faradays, that battle would be won much more decisively, without quite the same skin-of-the-teeth escapes from certain death - regardless of the forms into which the pilots might shapeshift to maximize the amount of skin on their teeth. The Bulrathi continued their usual attempts to egg the Darloks on, but no evidence can be found that any Darlok ever even heard them, so the situation can hardly be blamed on the bears. But if there really was no Darlok plan, how to explain the scanning ships they deployed toward the long-time Meklar muster point at Vega, due to arrive from different directions on consecutive years, as if deliberately to increase the chance of meeting a Meklar fleet there?
The effort succeeded to an extent in 2519, when the second Scan ship in the series was able to produce read-outs on an Annihilator battleship that showed off the enormous technological lead the Meklar had produced by fielding some 34 tachyon beams for taking out smallcraft, 21 hard beams to blow through anything with shields, and three heavy blast cannons in case it had to fight at range in spite of a gigantic inertial stabilization system and advanced ECM systems, together with a defensive repulsor beam, to say nothing of its andrium armor and powerful shielding. It was fortunate for the Darloks that their recent advances in missile and computer technology would be sufficient to deal with its defenses if it were to attack there: No ship they could build seemed likely to meet the need. Even their colony ships would represent a threat, limited mostly by their lack of speed. No further information was forthcoming however; no doubt if there had been, if the Meklar plans had been visible to the Darloks - no matter whence and by whom decisions were being made for their fleet - their approach to the year 2520 would have gone entirely differently.
The gripping shadow tightens around Jinga, darker than the galaxy's night, as bomb after devastating omega bomb falls upon the Meklar. Slowly, inexhorably, it squeezes in upon the shield ... but no longer with all its focus, nor with all its strength. Questing still among the stars, it reaches out still further, as if greedy, as if driven by some greater urge, ever further from the heart of its power and of itself, filling the Imperial command chamber but stretching away, far ... far....
Instead of finishing what they had begun at Jinga - instead of even trying seriously - the Darloks left only a small force behind to deal with a small Alkari fleet that their scanners claimed would be arriving shortly - deceived, apparently, by nebular interference. Only a single Faraday bomber was included in the fleet in case one or two more missile bases migh be built by the time of the Alkari arrival. Perhaps that would not have mattered; perhaps even the entire Darlok fleet would not have been enough to work around the new Ajax cruisers or force them to retreat - but there might have been a chance, and with careful work thereafter, that might have become a chance to someday claim Jinga for themselves. As it was, with all but one of their bombers sent to Yarrow instead, they would have no opportunity to find out.
That year, the Darloks' window of opportunity, with Omega bombs and "doom drives" against Merculite missile bases, closed resoundingly. Suddenly facing ninety Pulson missile tubes and a cloaked fleet in orbit armed with 112 tachyon beams, the fleet had no choice but to retreat. Then, regrettably for their pilots, they did no such thing, inexplicably flying in against defenses they knew were too strong to break, retreating only when the deadly Pulsons actually targeted their ships. The Faraday bombers, targeted first, escaped to hyperspace before they engaged in any form of combat. The Cleanups, on the other hand, for no discernible reason unless the pilots of their ships had lost their minds completely, flew all the way to planetary orbit, evading the Ajax fleet, dropping their payload of completely ineffectual fusion bombs before even trying to retreat, much too close and too late to escape. It was by no means the most costly Darlok error of the decade, but it was perhaps the least explicable - unless the pilots were simply unaware of their danger and inefficacy ... or unless there really was some secret commanding presence ruling the Darloks in that decade whose attention at last was spread too thin.
With a much-smaller fleet at Jinga faced with four more Ajax cruisers, the Darloks could do little but retreat in shame once more, even knowing that if Jinga could rebuild its missile bases in any significant numbers, they would take extraordinary firepower to break. Nor had the Meklar been idle in other ways while filling the only significant hole in their defenses.
The Alkari, rejected by the Darloks, had remained desperate for an alliance, wherever and however it might be achieved. And so though their hatred of all things Meklar was the very reason for the good feelings that had led them to make their request of the Darloks in the first place, the Alkari had since switched sides completely, not only ending their Meklar war but replacing it with a full military alliance while QX-537 continued to add to its galaxy-leading technology.
If not for the run-away Meklar and their own lagging technology, the Darloks might well have been poised to become a dominant force in the galaxy ... and if not for nuclear fusion, the hearts of stars might have been dark and cold.
Deeper than the deepest night, the shade that fills the chamber flows outward, outward, deep among the stars. Its grip on Jinga loosens, only briefly, only long enough to reach out across space for Yarrow as well ... and is struck by Pulson missiles, by cloaked Tachyon cruisers, by the power of Meklar forces defending their homes. There is no sound; there is no scream, no whisper from the dark, but the shade suddenly tembles, shivers, rifts of light revealing the display panels above the room's controls. The darkness breaks, convulses, and flies asunder like shreds of cloud before a sudden gust of wind beneath the sun. Around Jinga, around Yarrow, around now-Alkari Keep Out, the only darkness that remains is the void between the stars. In the command room on the Darlok homeworld, the remnants of the shade fly apart and disintegrate, and are gone. The door swings open as a welcoming light blinks on. Computers hum again; fans whirr. In the distance, there is singing - very distant, or very quiet, so the words cannot be heard, and no forbidden communication can occur. The shade and the dark are banished.
The door stands open.
The Roster:
- Ianus (Skipped until we hear from you - I hope all is well!) - shallow_thought - UP!
- Arnuz - on deck
- utwig - (Do you want to slot back in after Arnuz, or still want to be skipped?)
- Cyneheard
- RefSteel - just played
It looks as if we could be OK at the council vote half way through the set. We'll be up against the bears, and they are currently at war with everyone else (BTW - if by some erratic miracle the Meks make peace with us and we can scrape enough votes to win I will be taking it unless there are strong objections).
One possible way to lessen the depth of our tech hole did occur to me - could we turtle and look to take Orion? As far as I recall, our variant doesn't ban picking up techs from artifacts worlds (how could it?). Or would doing so deliberately be a violation of the rules?
Of course, we would first need to find it ... do we know where it is? And then get range, as I don't think it's close. And then build up a fleet that could do the job .
EDIT: Are the Bulrathi really that uncrackable? They have Pulsons and 22 points of shielding, but look to have weak ECM and armour. Two stacks of similar, fast bombers to mess with their targetting should let us get a volley of Omega-Vs in, and then it's "just" a matter of finding the production to build big enough stacks ...
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
One of stars towards center is I think Orion. The problem with Orion is that everyone would want it once we take it, so we would need to hold it from Meks until we built enough bases.
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