We worked hard to rebuild our fleet and I'd put in some plans to reinforce our defenses new semi automated ships space mines and sensor buoys as well as a massive orbital habitat and defense platform I was preparing for a proper war and yet it didn't come. Everything was quite until the Ancient ones came back on a much larger ship only to send us a cryptic message and leave "prepare yourselves a trial this way comes".
We were utterly surprised and after that cryptic message I decided sending out scouts would be very prudent in this situation so I dispatched all 20 of my semi-automated ships to scout the nearby systems. The scouts reported back and it wasn't great news we were surrounded on 3 sides by a race of space faring insects but the good news is we also found a system with no less than 5 habitable planet 3 were borderline and the other two were near perfect gravity of .98 g and smack dab in the goldilocks zone. We rushed to claim the system as we were starting to get crowded in our current one and I really didn't want tge bugs to take it not with 5 habitable planets in it atleast.
Finding out that we were surrounded was definitely not great but I figured we had a solid chance of keeping the insect beings away and from what observations we could get I knew the bugs used a ionized gas propulsion system its generally slower but more fuel efficient than the plasma drives we used granted they seemed to have a significant speed advantage over the human version of the Ion drive as much as 25 times the best thrust humans had ever achieved which is for comparison about 3kg of thrust per 1kg of drive in comparison plasma drives run around 5000 times that or 15000kg per kg of drive so our alien neighbors had managed 75kg per kg of drive weight a remarkable feat.
Mass or weight in space is honestly the largest limiting factor for starship acceleration and my ships wre all pretty massive for their size while the insectoid ships seemed to be the opposite with low mass to weight and their powerful Ion drives honestly acceleration wise we would be nearly matched but my fleet would likely shred the bugs in a battle due to the shear durability and toughness of my ships though it was best not to underestimate them either. I ordered a significant increase in the number of ships to be produced as I now had to defend 2 systems from these bugs and I focused on my semi-automated ships as they would be easier to source crew for if nothing else.
It was a year later that I got my first experience with bug weapons and then I understood why their ships were as light as they were their shield technology was astounding for each corvette sized foe they took a beating equivalent to a cruiser damage wise. The bugs came in and attacked immediately after determining that I owned the system and while their weapons were all energy based they were effective VS our shields however our hulls held up easily to their energy weapons and we soon had taken down the 28 corvette class ships they had brought. After defeating the first group of bugs I ordered the wreckage examined and put my research teams on the task as the highest priority and first technology they had for me was the insectoids Ion drive system which actually gave them ideas for improving our own plasma drives and that lead to a 19% increase in our drive efficiency however it didn't really increase the thrust to mass ratio it only increased the t to m ratio by a entire kg not allot but the improvement in fuel economy would allow me to send my ships further before they had to refuel.
After the first attack I decided that it was time to beat down the insectoids and see what they did my first stops were the planets to my flanks and my plan was simple vaporize every last bug. My plan went off without a hitch and I'd glassed 4 bug worlds before I turned my attention towards the other systems in an effort to create a bug no fly zone and for the first few systems we were utterly successful and then they brought in a fleet of over 2,000 ships and that proved to be an epic fight indeed. The bugs brought everything they had to the fight from corvette size ships to battleship sized ones and were slowly whittled them down and by the time my first frigate died the bugs were down to just 218 battleship sized vessel's and they were quite tough but eventually we took them down granted they took out 3 cruisers 8 frigates and all of the fighters I'd brought all total maybe 15% of my fleet but I wasn't done yet we pushed deeper into bug territory and all total we glassed 16 bug worlds before losses and fuel forced us to retreat.
The offensive proved effective but I had a distinct feeling that we had only touched the proverbial tip of the iceberg so once my fleet was resupplied and ready to go we went farther afield and in the end we had glassed a total of 100 worlds and still hadn't found their shipyards which made me incredibly nervous because I was feeling like I'd poked a massive bear and it was getting ready to maul me. It was our 4th run out to glass bug planets when we found a shipyard but also a fleet of a million ships and that battle was bloody in the end only my dreadnought survived the battle facing off against the last bug ship we had lost all forward weapons and had to resort to broadside combat and even then we hadn't hit their shipyard yet so I ordered the shipyard targeted with all remaining guns and laid it to waste by then we had recovered all of the survivors and had to return base fuel was running low and we were above maximum crew capacity to the point I was glad the fighters had already been destroyed as it gave us extra space for the crew.