Requim for the fallen

It took months to repair every ship and resupply ammunition and missiles in each our factories were working overtime to fulfill demand but 6 months after that last battle with the bugs we finally had every ship factory new or as close as we could get it meanwhile the planetoid ship was coming along slowly and it would be another 6 to 8 years minimum before it was finished but what else could we do but slowly work on it. The bug ships were reprocessed and the alloys we didn't use were separated out and turned into ingots for some future use honestly we offered them to our neighbors the Wawenog who proceeded to build some personal shuttlecraft and luxury yhats with the mostly aluminum tin zinc and boron we did use some boron but not enough to justify the tons of the stuff with so much we could build 3 billion ships of dreadnought class.The Wawenog began building fleets of cheaply constructed and low mass ships for commercial use meanwhile my ships were entirely military oriented and angular in appearance but for what they were designed they were perfectly suited and as my fleet was slowly restored to working order my techs had a few minor breakthroughs the first was an increase in drive output of 2% with a efficiency increase of 1% the second upgrade they managed increased the protective value of the armor by making the structure a honeycomb style which reduced mass by 9% and actually stiffened the armor 6% unfortunately that could only be applied to future designs but an increase that we welcome to see and it was added to the plans of the planetoid and it reduced the material cost of the planetoid by 9% meaning that instead of a large moons worth of material I needed a little less than that.

The final thing my techs had managed was a slight improvement to my bomb pumped laser weapons that gave a 50% chance for a third beam to hit the target instead of a 10% accuracy rate I now had a 12% accuracy rating with my new missiles granted that was on corvette sized ships which were the only size I'd used for testing they had also increased power output by 6% meaning each laser that hit was more powerful now they could vaporize most of a corvette with only two hits. I upgraded what I could on my ships and began the process of building more but I also sent my scout ships out towards the bug empire with orders to report back the instant a bug fleet was sighted along with the last known heading maybe I could trace them back to their shipyards.

My plans in progress the best I could I began tinkering with my bomb pumped laser missile now currently the 4th generation variant and in a moment that caused me to kick myself I asked the Wawenog what they thought of my missile design and if they had any improvements and then they gave me a new idea that would drastically improve my missile design infact it doubled the accuracy of my mk 4 bomb laser missiles to 25% meaning they could bow hit reliably on a corvette class ship 5 times per missile which utterly vaporized the target ship granted the other lasers still missed but I'd kept them because they were useful against hard to miss targets even the mk 1 variant puts 18 of 20 lasers on target VS a dreadnought but now all 20 would hit and that was fantastic considering that the bomb lasers were each equivalent to a 18cm laser which was nearly impossible to manage with a modern ship due to heat and power requirements the one ship that had a 20cm laser was a 1 shot wonder but it required too long of a charge and cool down cycle to truly be effective in combat taking an hour to fire a second time in battle is generally not great and then only hitting once at that no thanks but I figured I could make my bomb pumped lasers equivalent to a 30cm laser if I managed to get them adjusted just perfectly and tuned to perfection.

My mk 5 bomb lasers were quickly deployed throughout my fleet as soon as supply was available granted getting production running making them was a time consuming process but giving my lac's the ability to fight on par with a cruiser even temporarily was a massive increase in my fleets power and would drastically reduce the cost of ships granted the missiles themselves were more expensive by far than the conventional versions they were also far deadlier not having to reach the targets hull to do maximum damage and being able to stand off and fire gave my new missiles much respect from my veteran crews if we wanted to we could easily take earth with such weapons but I had no intention of that any time soon I honestly didn't want to be admiral but here I was.

It was a year after annihilating the first bug fleet that a second one came but with my newly outfitted scout cruisers they almost single handedly took out 300k of the bug ships before they were even in a nearby star system and this time I had a preliminary location for their shipyards so once the bug fleet was dispatched I sent a attack force back down their line of advance and as luck would have it found a pair of moderately sized factories churning out shipsvat a rather remarkable rate but we quickly put an end to them before then stripping everything usable out of them and forcing them to crash planetside where we then glassed the world.

The second set of bug shipyards taken out I ordered a search for any others in the area and a month later scouts reported another small lone shipyard churning out shops which we took out bringing our total shipyard kills to 4 hopefully this would put a dent in bug ship production capacity and give me even more breathing room the new missiles working flawlessly was a plus as well. With 4 shipyards taken out I'd still not found anything that could construct a dreadnought and I knew the bugs had them though I'd reduced their corvette frigate and cruiser production I was still nervous about the bugs missing dreadnought shipyards still I'd made a area 100ly across devoid of bug assets.

with my ships reaching the limits of their endurance I decided that we would need something longer range than the standard for hunting these bug forces obviously their empire was fairly large and we were tiny in comparison but apparently we were ahead technology wise so I was feeling comfortable with our situation and my techs kept trying to achieve the impossible so every year or so I got a new upgrade for my fleet which was great but mostly a tiny upgrade of .5% here or there still an improvement but the biggest was cracking the bug shield technology completely and upgrading our shields by 30% in one shot was certainly the highlight of our technological successes in recent years.