- Shieldless Colony, 2390 -
Obviously I'd like to think that the Klackon starfleet is doing something innocent - maybe making a visit to Orion though they're perfectly aware of what's waiting for them there - or peacefully exploring some other world. I want to think the best of everyone - of anyone I can - and I'd like to be able to help explore and colonize new worlds in peace, or to help develop valuable new technologies. But the fact is that I live on our Shieldless colony, and like everyone here, I have to face the fact that there's hardly anywhere those Klackon attack ships
can be going except right here. In spite of what we hope for, we Shieldless Meklar are all agreed that we can't afford to neglect our defenses any longer. Fortunately, the main new neuron pellet fighter fleet is on its way here from Selia already and should arrive ahead of the enemy - by which I do of course mean the friends and trading partners who just want to take a peaceful tour of the orbital space above our colony - and we have agents operating alongside our merchants in Klackon space, so we have at least some sense for what we might be up against. It's a start, but that's a terrifying fleet.
A Horseman destroyer and seven Sabre fighters can be dealt with easily enough if they do attempt to attack as I fear they are all but certain to do, but nine Avenger cruisers are a different matter entirely. We can hope they're heavily shielded, since the generators will be taking up space on their ship and won't do anything for them here in the nebula, but beyond that, we don't even know what to hope for: If the design uses all the Klackons' latest toys, they might be carrying anything from graviton beams to heavy blast cannons, and we won't know until they arrive! Even lasers can carve up any bases we build on the planet since our shields don't work any better than theirs will here, but that's not the worst of it: Instead of - or in addition to - any ship-to-ship weapons, the Avengers could be mounting
fusion bombs, and potentially ECM jammers
and anti-missile rockets - so even if our bases' potential damage output
weren't so completely atrocious for the cost, relying on them would be suicide. Also, of course, we'd have to build some first - and we probably
will put
one together at some point, both for its inbuilt scanner and for combined arms - but in spite of our impending engine research threatening to obsolete every starship we build before much longer, we're going to need all the ships we can muster here:
Also for combined arms, and to ensure that the Klackons can't bomb us out here no matter how their ships are designed!
As for
ours, we have a pretty good range available already: All but one of the laser fighters at the nearest as-yet-uncolonized star are heading back here to help out since this nebula is about the only place where their long-obsolete weaponry is going to do us any good and they can get here soon enough to make a difference, while the newer fighters already on their way from Selia have better targeting and better weapons, to hit harder when they eventually close. The same can be said of the fighters of the same design that were being dispatched
from this planet to guard colonies we haven't yet built, on planets where our enemies don't know how to survive a landing, and those are going to stick around here instead, adding that much more force to our fleet, while we work on toolbox parts to assemble more - of yet another design. In place of an expensive targeting computer, the new 01.1 version will use an inertial stabilizer to maximize maneuverability. They'll be faster in case of battle - fast enough to outmaneuver anything in the Klackon fleet - and much more difficult to pin down and destroy. If the Avengers mount the Klackons' best possible targeting technology, they can be expected to take out about two 01.1s for every three of the basic 1s they'd have been able to destroy instead - and the difference only grows from there: The 1s are
four times as vulnerable as the 01.1s against ships without targeting systems. The 01.1s are slightly cheaper to produce besides, and can close with bombers sooner to destroy more before a bombing run can begin. The existing 1s hit harder, ton for ton or gigacredit for gigacredit, at least once they close to combat range, and there's a lot to be said for their design, but without knowing what we're up against, I'm glad we're going to have both in the skies!
Apart from Selia, supporting us by pouring resources into the planetary reserves on which we're now drawing heavily, the rest of the Meklar people are focused on research to help in the longer term. The interstellar comm network has been abuzz with plans all year, debating and examining them in turn. The idea of rushing all-out to develop scatter pack rockets was considered since it would make our missile bases far more potent in the nebula here, but ultimately the likelihood of getting them installed here in time to meet the attack just looked so low, especially considering the immense costs of trying to do so, the weapons' lack of economic value, and the fact that to benefit from them significantly, we would have to gamble on success by focusing on base building far more than it would otherwise make sense to do, the rest of the Meklar decided to concentrate their efforts on propulsion technology for faster transports and
much faster mobile fleets. Research is continuing in every field of course - every one of our current projects hold great importance of one variety or another - with even planetology receiving the same small start-up budget envisioned for it before we realized what the Klackons' destination must be, but sub-light drives are an important part of the future to which we are looking forward most eagerly.
- Shieldless Colony, 2391 -
If there was any doubt before, there isn't any longer. The Klackon death fleet is taking the same route toward our colony as our own retreating Scout, and from the same world - just one year ahead: Not only does it appear to be moving in the right direction, it was in exactly the same position last year at this time that our Scout occupies
now, with the two still in the same relative configuration. If the nebula ETAs can be relied upon - and we are all too well aware that they can't be - we should have at least three more years before the fleet arrives, which should be plenty of time to gather our defenses. We'll have to monitor their real position closely though: If our defenses are to have any chance of holding, we certainly can't afford to complete them one year too late!
Of course we're not at war. The noble Klackon people would never do something so crass as to declare
war on us merely to send a gigantic assault fleet to one of our most important worlds. As far as they're concerned, they can just
take the planet from us, and assume we'll accept that our lot is to prepare colonies and factories for their use - and then to die when they're ready to take over.
Fortunately, not all Klackons treat us that way: Some of their scientists are even willing to exchange knowledge with us - if not as equal living, thinking beings, then at least as servants capable of sharing knowledge, ours and theirs. Here, we were able to offer each other not-insignificant boosts in productivity: In their case, our waste reduction techniques should help reduce the amount of slogging they have to do through toxic sewers to reclaim their factory sludge into forms that won't poison their population. In ours, what we learned from the science bugs will let us improve conditions for our people on every one of our worlds, both in subtle ways through an increase in our general knowledge of planetology and in far-more-obvious ones by actively terraforming the surfaces to make more space for our people to live - and therefore also for more factories! Another trade was considered as well, but with plans to build a defensive base just in case these same Klackons' attack fleet arrives slightly sooner than expected, and with no computers built into the fighters we have in production, it seemed better, for now, to wait: The fighters won't be any cheaper with better computer technology, and adding a jammer to the future missile base won't prevent it from being expensive single-use garbage for at least the next few years, while making it significantly
more expensive along the way. We wouldn't be building it at all if we had a better way to get a scanner into the fight while also building the fleet of fast-dodging fighters that looks to me like our best hope. It's all going to depend on what those Avengers are carrying.
- Furnace Colony, 2392 -
Some wag thought of calling our new home CrumpleZone, but thankfully not until the official name had gone through and it was too late to change. Anyway, it's not only a joke in poor taste, it probably - or
hopefully - won't apply to us anyway. Whereas, let me tell you, there's no doubt this colony is a
Furnace! We've had to use thermally-isolated transduralloy colonial heat shields
and internal cooling through the latest gigawatt-class ST-HAP-1 Thermal Energy Redistributors just developed five years back, all to keep our electromechanical carapaces from
melting! This Furnace is going to be an amazing colony someday though, as long as we can hold onto it and get it developed nicely;
every colony can be amazing with Meklar like us on it, and we're going to be able to make room for 35 million thanks to Klackon-style terraforming - even before
we develop terraforming tricks three times as good as theirs!
All that's the future though. Right now, we've got bigger news: We just set up our comm relay, and who should call us up here first but the consensus most-powerful leader in the galaxy!
No, it's not something he ate: That's Farseer's
happy face! As happy as his face
gets, anyway; if you mistook it for his look of reluctant acquiescence and unutterable disdain, I won't blame you. Maybe he shares other emotions with the bugs or somebody - though I doubt it - but this is as good as it gets when it comes to treating with us Meklar.
Anyway, what has him so delighted he can hardly contain his glee is, we asked him if he was willing to do the whole exchange-of-valuable-goods-independent-of-whether-you're-also-sending-half-your-starfleet-at-our-best-world thing, just sort of a starter package of 170 billion credits a year - because let's be real, nothing less than that would even be
noticed by our factions, the two most-populous in the galaxy - and apparently he'd been looking forward to trading stuff with us all his life or something. Just look how thrilled he is! I mean, use your imagination here, okay? The other good news is that his only allies at the moment seem to be the Sakkra - although seriously, who knows what that's going to look like when the Council meets in eight years - and in theory, we
should get along, because a pacifist excited about building out industry sounds like our kind of buddy, or my kind anyway. Just look at that delighted face, all ready to party!
Or look at the galactic map. It's prettier anyway. See, what
makes it especially pretty is the way Farseer and his Alkari are hanging out at a dozen different worlds - the same number our special GNN report brought in a quarter century ago! In other words, the biggest threat to our people - at least in theory - has expanded his empire by a net 0.00 +/- 0.000 colonies since 2367, while we've been playing catch-up, now with our second since then just this year - just
here! So the upshot is, we're up to three quarters of the Alkari planet count, with enough new colony ships to
pass them already out and flying on their way! Now, sure, the last thing I want to do is talk about what comes out of unhatched eggs when we're literally dealing with
Alkari and hanging out on this world that's like an incubator accidentally turned up to
broil, but we've got a shot here anyway; that's all I'm saying. As for whether it's going to turn
into anything ... well, that's partly a question of what the ants can take away. They
shouldn't be showing up for at least two more years, but we can't
count on that, so back on the Shieldless colony, they're making sure everything's ready right away.
Here's a clearer view of what I'm talking about, with all of Alkari space, plus most of the Klackons' and ours. You can see how the Klackon death fleet coming for our Shieldless colony is crawling around through the nebula with our Scout right on all six of its heels - or six times however many bugs they've got on almost twenty ships, most of them full-sized cruisers - and how it
looks like it shouldn't be there for a couple more years. And you can see some of our fleets about to get there too, and others fanning out around the galaxy. We've got more clarity on that other Alkari fleet too - the tiny one with just one Pegasus destroyer - and it's
not heading for our colonies. For a while, it looked like it was trying to straight-up miss every star altogether and eventually leave the galaxy, but at this point it's pretty clear it just wants to explore the Toranor asteroid field, probably launched when it could use Alkari fuel bases, before their alliance got shredded to bits. It's welcome to have a look, but we'll have an old Scout there to check it out and see if we can work out what its armament is like in case it decides to attack: There aren't any like it headed for our Shieldless colony. And hey, if you know where to look, you can even see some of our colony ships getting ready to get us closer - hopefully - to matching the number of stars the Alkari can claim! Now all we have to do is
get there ... and
hold them once we
do!
- Blue Screen Colony, 2393 -
This is the first time we've ever colonized a planet that has already suffered geothermal death, and so there's really no question about what we were going to name our new colony here. It's a nice, big world too: Big enough that we can get as many people living here - provided they're as crazy as us and actually
want to - as on planets like Selia and our Shieldless colony that are habitable naturally! And apparently, we Meklar
do have a tendency to the crazy, because transports are launching already from all our neares worlds, so they say at least, just to join us here and help get the place going nicely.
It helps that two of them are our aptly-named Growth and Poverty colonies, and the last one's overcrowded Meklon itself, with people already coming over from Growth to help it get
more overcrowded. And frankly, I'll take our brand of crazy any day or night over Kaxal's bug-house Klackon variety. Her Pegasus looks to be just a couple years out from needlessly attacking an unarmed Scout at an asteroid field, her big nine-cruiser-plus attack fleet is right on schedule to hit our Shieldless colony next year, and I'd rather live alongside all the Growth and Poverty loonies I've ever seen and all the ones from Meklon to spare than have to deal with killers like the pilots of those fleets - or the bugs who ordered them forward especially. At least the Alkari don't seem to be coming our way
yet, and the good thing about the fleet they've got in orbit at Nordia is, it's right in range for our scanners at the Furnace colony - so if we don't actually know what's
on those designs yet, if it ever turns out to be important, we'll at least know what they had around, and what all their ships looked like from space, here in 2393!
- Shieldless Colony, 2394 -
It's possible those Avengers - or even the smaller ships - are really heavily shielded. We'd never know in here, with the nebula shorting them out and disrupting them. Unfortunately, it's doing the same to our missile base - as expected - so in spite of its duralloy armor and the bug fleet's generally iffy targeting, it wouldn't take long for those Avengers and their support ships to tear the thing apart. Oh, it would fire its missiles in the meantime, but they're just nukes, and the Avengers - and even the Horseman - have anti-missile rockets mounted along with everything else. Our missile base scanned them, which was its main job, and that was about the end of its useful contribution to the fight.
Good thing we weren't relying on it.
If you really want to know how the battle went down before I show you explicitly, and you really know how to read maps like these, you can work that part out for yourself. In the meantime, I'll just point out that our latest little overheated colony is practically smack-dab in the center of the galaxy, and too small to do much of anything for itself unless and until we can build it up with the kind of advanced terraforming technology we're still working on with no breakthrough foreseen for years. If you think there just might be some Friction with other races over this pretty new fireball of a world, then you can guess the reason behind the name of the new colony.
Honestly though, we've got plenty of friction
here, on our side of the nebula, and it isn't looking pretty. We didn't know what we were facing until those bug ships showed up, so we gathered a really diverse fighter fleet as
well as the new missile base to have a go. And, still just being honest, we could have done a better job of tactical piloting.
So we lost about three dozen ships - most of them of course the older kinds - representing about one tenth of our local fighting force, to take out their entire fleet. Our Scout was a noncombatant, and should probably have just retreated since it was never in position to draw fire meaningfully, but it lived through the fight anyway, and so did nearly all the new stabilized NPG fighters, built to last as they are: Their rate of attrition is about a quarter of the older, more firepower-heavy version, plus they react quicker, so they can get the first shot off against more types of enemies. So it's good that battle's out of the way with our planet safe, and the question is...
...is this Bulrathi colony ship out to visit Alkari space, or are we going to face
another probing attack from a faction we haven't even met, like we're about to next year at the Toranor asteroids apparently?
- Furnace Colony, 2395 -
So right, we're getting word from Toranor now: The Pegasus went in on an attack run as expected, big surprise there, right? And our Scout started in to see if it could learn what kinds of weapons the thing was carrying instead of just jumping out right away. Brave pilot, right? Daring!
Well, our pilot found out what the thing was armed with, or close enough anyway, and even got to stay in orbit without a scratch on the old Scout's armor, and the problem is, that's a
bad thing, because what it found out is, that Pegasus attack ship has no space-to-space weapons: Not even a missile or a little laser beam. After bluffing an attack run and seeing we have no colony, the Pegasus turned its titanium tail and beat a retreat into hyperspace! Which might
sound good until you realize it's a destroyer and that retreat means what it's carrying instead can only be one of two things: Bombs for blowing up colony defenses ... or death spores for ignoring the defenses and just killing off all the colonists directly. Let's just hope we never have to face any of them here - or not until we have a
response ready anyway!
Either way, out on the other side of the nebula, we at least have a new colony - and hot as it is, hot as here even, it's a decent size, and most of the molten surface is molten
metal of a million useful varieties. That place has a chance to be the thermal Reactore core to drive our defenses - and if the bugs make it necessary, offensives - on its side of the galaxy ... as long as we can get enough
people there!
For the record, by the way, these are the kinds of technologies we might have to face if we go up against the Alkari. The fleet we picked up at Nordia recently probably doesn't have all these latest toys on it, but it'll have some of the older ones, and if they start building ships
other than those, this is the kind of technology we'll be seeing. As for what
they'll see from
us if that happens, it turns out that's partly going to be down to our Klackon friends!
Not to be confused with our Klackon
enemies, whose fleets attacked our Shieldless colony last year and threatened our Scout at Toranor earlier. Our
friends are educators in their science labs, and they just taught us to be at least
very slightly less vulnerable to exactly the kinds of weapons those Pegasus ships must be carrying - plus missiles, if they fire
those at our worlds. We taught them to build neutron pellet accelerators in exchange, which was maybe a risk - those make really sweet weapons, as the attack fleet I mentioned could have attested if it had survived them - but I'd rather face them than - just for example - death spores any day!
Choose 4 to advance the tree.
![[Image: 2386-klackons.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/ncTxXMF7/2386-klackons.png)
![[Image: 2387-planetology.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/7ZWyNcTZ/2387-planetology.png)
![[Image: 2387-bug-fleet.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/0yQsDxj4/2387-bug-fleet.png)
