After the AhGi were repelled we decided to make our empire official though it was more a democracy than empire we kept empire because we thought it sounded better "the Empire" just had a ring to it so we remained The Empire but we added Artemis into it officially becoming The Empire of Artemis. Our empire officially formed we prepared to build our largest ship yet and we planned it out as a massive sphere partially because we had just watched the ancient space ball movie and partially because it offered the best all around firepower and the Wawenog drive systems let us build it so large and with the drive upgrade it was speedy for a dreadnought a full 28% faster than anything else ever built before even with its additional mass from the armor we used as we were using a modified version of our Skelter composite.
We had built a true monster and I took it as my flagship nothing in human space could touch a ship this tough it would be unstoppable however I would not be taking it into human space as I didn't want to become some dictator so in our quiet well not so quiet little system we patrolled sending out cargo ships loaded with precious metals and rare resources and they would return with equally valuable cargos from seed stocks to animals and various assorted things we needed or luxuries we could use. For a time it was peaceful no more AhGi invasions and then I opened my big mouth telling one of my crew jokingly that I wish their would be some action not 2 hours later a massive fleet of AhGi frigates arrived in system so I gave them a toasty welcome and proceeded to just dive straight into their formation firing every weapon we had vaporized armor and crew was all that remained of their fleet. Wrecks spinning slowly off into space I tasked the rest of the fleet to salvage what they could which ended up with quite a few wrecks to salvage and quite a bit of valuable scrap material for us to repurpase.
If it had only just been two new alien species it would have been so much easier to accept but then a third species came they called themselves the Ancient ones and boy did they not appreciate us being in this system infact they were cranky luckily they only came in a single ship but it was the size of my dreadnought and we were forced to fight for the right to stay. As the battle commenced we were shocked that our shields seemed to do nothing for us as their shots went right through them and as the hull took a beating we fought back trailing gouts of molten composite and alloy we fought back. I knew getting our other ships involved would quickly lead to their own destruction but I also didn't want to not include them but I waited until we had our first compartment breached calling in reinforcements I was hesitant to do but I had no choice as it was we had given the them a bloody nose by the time we called in the reinforcements they had lost more than a few turrets and metric tons of armor vaporized into space we had lost a number of turrets ourselves and since it was a sphere we just rotated on the spit exposing fresh armor and weapons as we fought on it only worked so long before we had run out of fresh armor thankfully we had a a single remaining axis to present our top and bottom aspects were still mostly intact so I ordered them presented as we called in reinforcements. Our hull began getting far more holey than I'd like but it held enough that we had only lost atmospherics in a few outer areas thankfully I had made the outer most rooms nonvolatile salvage storage and that kept the damage to a minimum but unfortunately most of our rations were stored there but we weren't so that was a plus but still until we got into dock rations would be sparse.
The enemy ship fled or tried to when my fleet swooped in to finish the job those old tech railguns were more effective than the modern energy weapons my ship used granted their was no ammunition other than power to run mine energy weapons just have never had the punch of a solid slug launched at fractions of the speed of light nor the enormous engagement range granted they are hard to hit at range due to their limitations on speed you can only accelerate so fast before you top out on what your rails can handle or even the speed of the electric arc through the weapon still a fraction of the speed of light with a slug of dense material makes a nice big hole in most soft targets properly armored ones don't suffer as much but flash atomization is the real killer of these rounds between their velocity and mass they are indeed deadly.
The Ancient ones ship was very battered before they managed to jump out trailing debris and atomized metals and once they were gone we scavenged what we could obviously their armor was better or equivalent to our own and then the fact that their guns just completely bypassed our shields so we were scavenging hard to find anything that might give us an edge. Interestingly one of the Ancient ones turrets had been blown off mostly intact and we sent it to the science teams to study and possibly reverse engineer the technology not that I held out much hope that we could but in the event that they managed it we could use anything we could get.
After several weeks of fiddling around with the tech the science teams came up with a verdict that while their cannons were operating on a similar principle to our own they were quite different as well and it turned out that the way the Ancient ones used laser weapons was to superheat a plasma fuel and the beams would fire both the laser and the beam of plasma from the gun creating a plasma laser hybrid weapon though they hadn't figured out everything they had worked out the plasma fuel component of the weapon just not how to make it work with our technology yet. We had dubbed the Ancient ones turret weapons as plasma beams and the teams were working diligently on the project meanwhile my dreadnought was undergoing massive amounts of repairs and refitting so the entire crew not needed for those critical repairs were placed on leave ground side.
From the Ancient ones armor technology we made progress and the science teams were able to come up with variations on our Skelter alloy composite that would resist energy weapons fire approximately 27% better allowing my dreadnought to fight longer though this came at a slight increase in weight about 2% though again volume had been reduced by 1% meaning we were getting closer to being able to create a armor plate only 1cm thick which was my goal the original composite required a minimum of 5cm to operate as intended now we had reduced that to about 4.2cm which again allowed us to change the armor scheme improving protection of our ships.
The problem with our Skelter alloy composite is that it left small gaps where the plates met usually this is covered over by less sturdy materials thus reducing the entire armors effectiveness however by decreasing the thickness of the plates also meant reducing the amount of filler material that we needed to use per layer of course we staggered the plates but even still I didn't like it unless we managed to make a continuous sheet of the material it would be difficult and it was difficult enough to put them into a design that would offer the best defenses for weight. I got a hairbrained idea to create a fabricator for ship hulls but it proved to be incredibly difficult to implement due to the required process for the Skelter alloy composite.