We had cleared a zone 60ly across of bugs and had only found a single small shipyard this was not a good sign most of our ships had a maximum range of 200ly and with the fuel economy improvements we could reach 236ly before we ran out of fuel completely and that was without combat and 60ly was almost half the distance to earth not good in my opinion that we had found bugs that far behind us I wondered why they hadn't attacked us on our way to the Artemis system. Our colonies growing nicely I decided that I'd settle down and have a family I did however commission another fleet of ships and I made something special indeed it would be my home and a warship for the remainder of my life I ordered the construction of a planetoid ship.
The planetoid ship was a new idea I'd had 8 times the size of a dreadnought and armored in hundreds of meters of our Skelter alloy it was massive enough that it required 16 of our standard hyper drives all syncing up exactly to even get it into the theta bands barely ftl by most standards but I had my techs working on the issue and beyond being a moon sized slab of armor and drives the thing had enough weapons to kill an entire fleet by itself thousands of 20mm cannons and 100mm cannons a full 22 railguns 1 for each quarter on its main axis and 1 for each arc with the remaining 12 pointing forward and capable of continuous fire from all of them until the rails melted and we ran out of ammunition for them with thousands of rounds for railguns alone any enemies would be in for a rough time indeed.
The hardest part of a planetoid ship is probably ammunition as you have to cover every angle there are enough guns that ammunition becomes a decidedly important issue and I managed to party work around this by changing half of the 100mm guns to hellbore laser cannons of 14cm size the biggest used on human ships to this point outside of the infamous 20cm laser cannon that was tested a generation ago and found to be wasteful as it could vaporize modern ships with a shot but would take an hour to fire again not nessasarily useful in battle versus multiple enemy ships. The planetoid ship design started as a shell then in it went and I created each layer of its onion like structure to serve a specific purpose and leave no arc weaker than it's neighbors and at the core of the ship sat a hollow section dedicated to its own living spaces and armored in meters of skelter alloy itself it was its own little world inside the larger vessel complete with a variant of fusion reactor that was originally designed for training purposes however my contribution changed its purpose altogether it now only produced a little more than it consumed energy wise but it now gave of enough light that it actually acted as a tiny artificial sun with a mechanically driven day night cycle.
Construction of that single planetoid ship would take years and require the resources of an entire star system to build but ot had a plan for that we had salvaged entire fleets of bug ships after all so I set my salvage crew to work scrapping the ships and processing out the valuable resources which proved to be a nightmare for us as the unfamiliar alloys used in tge bug ships took time and effort to figure out but eventually we managed to extract the materials we wanted and leave behind a substantial stockpile of metallic calcium and a few other light alloys we didn't use. The planetoid ship taking shape and the fleet at maximum capacity we were ready for anything or so we thought but then my scouts spotted a fleet so large that it was ridiculous so I decided that I'd have to commence some gorilla warfare and sent my fastest ships to commit hit and run raids on the bug fleet.
My gorilla raids proved fairly effective at first taking out several ships without casualties each run but soon enough the bugs caught on and began indiscriminately blasting everything that could remotely be a ship into tiny pieces. I'd maybe taken out 100 of the bug ships before they started blasting everything so I tried a different tactic and I ordered my ships to fire special shot from their railguns and each shot was essentially a stealth coated and radar defracting shell they don't hit as hard as normal rounds but they don't heat up they absorb or refract any radar that hits them making them a hard target to spot. I fired enough stealth rounds that it would be a mess as the bugs had gone to close formation when I had been doing gorilla raids now that same formation would prove to be a weakness and one I fully intended to exploit.
I had brought everything I had that had a railgun and then I ordered a spray of fire from every ship more intending to spray down the entire bug fleet than focus fire on any specific ship. My spray of railgun shots took its sweet time getting there almost 30 seconds of flight time from when I fired to when I could expect impacts if any but I wouldn't see the effects until 26 seconds later. the near minute of waiting was nearly killing me but then my shots began hitting and then I realized that the bugs had their shields down probably to conserve on their emitters. The damage my volleys of fire did was hard to judge but I was pretty confident that atleast 30 ships were out of action and another 15 would take time to return to full combat capabilities so far I'd knocked off 130 ships give or take at the expense of 2 corvettes so I figured I was doing OK sadly though the numbers weren't with me I'd taken out maybe a half percent of their fleet while they did the same to me granted I know my ships are better overall than the bugs I would still not be winning this easily.
The bugs despite their losses were still coming and they had more ships meanwhile I could only harass them weakening them for the inevitable conflict and I was doing a decent job to that point. We hit the bugs hard and with every trick we could use and it proved effective though by no means would it hand us a victory we were steadily improving the odds however and that is always a good thing. The bug fleet was on the move and a good many of their ships sported damage after a month of solid hit and run tactics I even dumped a fleet of stealthed lac's in the mix granted only one suicidal pilot flew into that mess but he took out a bug cruiser in the process along with 6 frigates and a handful of corvettes one of the only direct attacks I made but also fairly fruitful.
The bug fleet arrived two months after I'd begun whittling them down short 93 corvettes 37 frigates 19 cruisers and 1 dreadnought that got caught up in the explosion of a cruiser this was only a small percentage of their fleet but I'd also damaged over 100 of their ships to various degrees on top of that so they were down from the impossible 1 million ships strong armada 150 ships and had lost effectiveness of another 100 meanwhile I'd lost a pair of corvettes and about 50 lac's in comparison my fleet only consisted of a little over 150k ships. I'd planned for the bugs to come out of hyper at the edge of the system and knowing where they were going to come from I set up an ambush and let them have before they had even come out of hyper and the first 200 ships that came out were quickly annihilated by railgun rounds the next 100 received a volley of every missile we had and followed their brethren into whatever bug paradise they might be going to and they left a substantial debris field for those following to arrive in which on its own took out 8 corvettes and a dreadnought and then phase two began as the remaining lac's under my command took a pass on the newly arrived fleet taking out about 91 corvettes without a loss yet.
The remaining ships of the bug fleet quickly assumed a defensive stance and formed up but just as they did my second volley of missiles and railgun rounds arrived taking out another 200 and again causing chaos amoung the bug fleet.After unleashing chaos on the bugs I ordered a withdrawal to restock ammunition and supplies but not before a final parting gift of missiles courtesy of my special bomb pumped lasers that I'd only recently modified again to guarantee 2 laser hits out of 20 per missile not great but when you fire a thousand of them indiscriminately into a packed mass of ships they don't miss much at all.
All total between my guerilla warfare tactics and the ambush at the systems edge I'd taken out just shy of 100k bug ships granted there were still 900k left but I'd get one or two more chances to hit them at extreme range before they could close in system and I'd be forced into direct confrontation. The following 2 weeks proved hectic but my ships had been reloaded and I engaged phase 3 of my plan which was even more exciting for the bugs once again I hit them with extreme range railgun shots and then I gave them a bit of a surprise by delay firing 200k missiles every missile in my fleet timed to go off at the same time and that was pretty spectacular if I do say so myself a veritable wall of missiles and just behind them I put every lac I could get. My wall of missiles punched into the bug armada like a hammer and the lac's right behind it caused as much chaos as physically possible between the lac's railguns and missiles I took our another 100k of the bug ships before I ran back the ever shortening distance to resupply and hit them again.
The bug fleet whittled down as it was were still formidable but if I could get one last attack in then it would be in the realm of realistic for our victory and every one knew this though I had forgotten about our allies who launched their own albeit ineffective attack on the bug with 4 frigates and 48 corvettes they still piled up some damage and even took out 3 bug cruisers but it was absolutely a slaughter. I managed to get a third attack off and this time every missile was my mk 3 variant bomb pumped laser missile which proved very deadly indeed 200k missiles firing 20 lasers at once proved to be a deadly combination with 4 million lasers literally boiling space at the bugs it proved even more effective than I'd thought and with that volley of railguns missiles and lac's we had annihilated another 200k of the enemy fleet which was now down to 600k ships all of which were damaged and some were still not ready to fight as I ordered the charge.
Just as I was ordering the charge a stroke of luck came in the form of the AhGi arriving with what was probably their entire fleet and they had hot jumped out right behind the bug fleet and at this point the bugs had been subjected to my tender mercies for a month immediately began attacking them. The AhGi did not take getting shot at kindly and returned fire killing about 200 bug ships for their 200k ships but with their distraction I'd managed another full railgun Salvo and ordered the charge. The bugs with only a little less than 4 times my numbers weren't out of the fight yet but they were drastically reduced and when the AhGi had arrived I ordered the lac's to make a run through the bug fleet claiming a handful more of the bug ships and again disrupting theor formation which I used to my advantage to take out a few more of their bigger ship's.
The bug fleet in disarray I ordered a spearhead type drive right through their center and continuous fire from everything to clear the way. Cannons are not the best weapons in space but they are great for volume of fire and we were pouring it on like it was free shells and tracers lit up our screens like it was a fireworks display the constant chugging of the guns music to my ears as we cut right through the middle of the bug fleet and as the guns roared our first losses came in on the tac display a couple corvettes had taken hard hits and couldn't keep up with the fleet so I ordered the to rtb and attempt repairs hoping that they would make it and knowing that chances were they wouldn't. As armor groaned under the bug assault bug ships began disappearing in flashes of nuclear fire as fusion reactors went critical and the bug fleet kept taking damage and as we completed the first pass the toll was 200k bug ships either rendered inoperable damaged or destroyed to 14k of mine and of my losses they were mostly corvettes that had tried to extend out just a little too far and gotten gobbled up but converging fire.
The first pass completed I ordered a second pass on the bug fleet though it would take an hour for tge fleet to switch direction and resume formation however the bugs were a mess and as we turned around and resumed position another 40 ships in the bug armada succumbed to their damage and exploded in ball's of vaporized metal and flying shrapnel which actually took another 3 ships out in a chain reaction. My second pass through the bug fleet was just as violent as the first but this time I could feel the railgun rounds hitting our hull in a violent tornado of death apparently they had figured out who was in command of our fleet however I had specifically commissioned this ship with thicker armor than standard though even that was sorely tested as impacts rattled the hull. Our second pass through the bug fleet put another 100k bug ships out of action though we had lost 18k of our own mostly frigates trying to protect our larger ships but for that 18k we reduced the bugs significantly all that remained were their dreadnoughts and a handful of battered and beaten cruiser class ships so I ordered a third pass and again we went through tge fires of war taking out all but a handful of bug dreadnoughts and finally achieving numerical superiority. After the third pass we mopped up the remaining bug ships and I put every ship that remained through the dry dock for repair and resupply.