My fleet was beaten badly but we had dished out the hurt the majority of the corvette class ships had been knocked out several of the frigates a cruiser that actually flew into one of our shots and a dreadnought and we were still fighting both the Shade and Frontier were venting atmospher from hull breaches, their armor compromised and in rough shape but still fighting luckily my formation had allowed us to keep one side of every ship intact so we all rolled or in the case of the Shade flipped our orientation and continued fight at nearly the same capacity as before the dreadnought that was still functional was closing on us but I ordered all ships to focus on it I wanted it gone before it could really bring its enormous firepower into the fight.
We charged our railguns and fired on the dreadnought taking the second one out of the fight our 20 railgun rounds sending sprays of molten metal and shattered ceramics into space as we pelted it. In the end my fleet suffered for its survival but we finished off the dreadnoughts and mopped up the corvettes and most of the frigates and a few cruisers before they broke and fled the battle all total enemy losses were 70% of every ship in their fleet to 2 damaged but repairable ships in my fleet luckily my flagship the Mourning Star was relatively intact albeit with 90% armor loss over most of the ship. After defeating the pirate fleet we were so banged up that we simply effected what repairs we could salvaged what we could then headed back to Mars for proper repairs and resupply and for the funeral of 32 crewmembers who had lost their lives in that battle.
As the surviving crew gathered for the funeral I gave a speech "for those we've lost may their souls rest comfortably their loss however painful was not in vain they fought valiantly against all odds in a battle where the outcome was against us in both numbers and firepower and yet they didn't flinch from their duty these men and women we've lost shall be remembered throughout history as crew aboard this fleet where we stood against insurmountable odds and prevailed do not let their sacrifice be forgotten for they are our heroes and as such they will be remembered".
The funerals over, our dead were committed to the sun as was tradition in this era and we repaired our ships and restocked supplies ready for our next battle, with the salvage from the mega battle I commissioned yet another battle cruiser to be named Unflinching Valor in remembrance for the fallen. It had been several months before the pirates were able to even begin to reconstitute their forces and then the worst possible thing happened the secret that had made my tiny fleet neigh unbeatable got out and suddenly everyone had shields as robust as our own the advantage lost I committed more resources to building more and better ships all on that old HHM industries design plan.
In the months since the Battle known as the Siegfried belt slaughter I had commissioned the construction of 4 frigates and the battle cruiser Unflinching Valor which when finished would give me 5 frigates and 3 battle cruisers a not insignificant force indeed though with everyone getting ahold of the shield modification that my now Captain once engineer Elias Vaughndref had created on the spur of the moment in battle that had proven extremely effective in protecting our ships sadly the tactical advantage was lost but we held strong my crew hoping that I'd come up with some new way to protect them. The team I had originally contracted to reverse engineer the HHM armor composite alloy were still researching the material and had made some experimental changes to the alloy composite the Skelter plate they had found a method of compressing the plates without reducing their effectiveness however it would require testing before we could put it on any ships granted it did promise a savings on the bulk of the armor and nothing else but shaving off some of the bulk would allow better hull design as we could then modify some of the ship plans to reduce a small amount of weight we currently had to deal with.
I kept our research team busy on the armor technology and then hired a second team to research shield tech maybe we could find something else to push our shields that much more as it was we were only running basic shield generators albeit modified. After getting the research departments set up and running on their tasks I started one last thing construction of a proper cargo ship utilizing every trick we had to make it both tougher and more survivable than most I even included provisions for a significant point defense array in the design since our pirate enemies seemed to favor mass missile barrages over firepower and I could understand why guns shooting physical projectiles theoretically have a longer range but any shot taken can be tracked by the enemy and avoided given a long enough range or slow enough shell however shells for a cannon are cheaper per kill than missiles but that got me thinking about something what if we armored our missiles they would cost even more and be slower than their standard counter parts but would survive significantly more damage.
As I studied the idea of armoring missiles I thought of something missiles don't necessarily need to hit a target to do damage but what if we armored them and used the armor itself as the projectile ordinance of the missiles though I quickly scrapped that idea and thought about other alternatives for warheads. The ideas that I came up with were bomb pumped lasers essentially a bomb that directed all of its energy into a beam the power would be increased but the aoe would be less than a standard missile weapon and could attack from a longer range sadly we had no material that could achieve more than a 10% redirection of a bombs explosion due to the fact that it would take a sturdy and reflective surface in order to redirect the energy of a bomb that was of a useful size.
I came up with a missile I called the Precursor it was essentially a bunch of deflectors and mirrors stacked on one side of a bomb and a set of 8 lasing rods on the other side of it the thing was enormous compared to a standard missile and cost three times as much but would in theory fire 8 beams of gamma and x-rays at a target before the entire remainder of the missile failed and I ordered 4 be constructed for testing purposes. The next year went quietly no pirates dared face even one of my ships in battle and moral was high and then I tested my experimental missiles and they were impressive but inaccurate they worked as intended but the beams were so random it was hard to guess where they might hit granted when they did they vaporized holes right through the test asteroids carefully chosen nickle-iron asteroids with a diameter comparable to a frigate honestly they were hard to find and of the 4 missiles fired we actually only scored 7 hits and 3 glancing hits 10 out of 32 Beams isn't a good hit ratio but when they did they bore holes clear through meters of stone nickle and iron with no issue.
I tinkered with the design of my experimental missiles when I had time sadly someone stole my early research and plans but I was able to continue my research into the weapons system and actually was able to make a little progress in manipulating the design to guarantee more hits on target where before it was a crap shoot one missile might completely miss the next might hit with most if the beams the next one or two etc instead I'd managed to get it to consistently hit with a minimum of one beam per missile so I'd made it a more consistent weapon sadly no matter what I tried I could never quite get all 8 to hit the target in a single shot but I'd managed 7 once but only once.
I shelved the missile project but I did start design work on a missile cruiser to use them warfare in the future could be a slog if everyone else had the good shields. The system was very quiet for a very long time after we gave the pirates a beat down and I was itching for a fight and I knew that there wouldn't be any so I decided that I'd start my own little empire of sorts bit first I'd have to pick somewhere that no one else would be and I would need a whole host of ships.