The bugs immediately spotted my ship but soon enough they were floating vapor as my ships weapons spat death and destruction on them like the incarnation of death itself. 400k bug ships destroyed before any kind of damage breached our shields and only then because a dreadnought attempted to ram us and tge resulting explosion of their power core scorched the hull plating then we hit the shipyards turning them all into floating scrap metal before we headed out to look for more. In a month we hit over 200 shipyards and obliterated nearly 1.5 million bug ships of all sorts before we ran low of ammunition and fuel for our rampage and returned to base. With the bugs at most a severely weakened threat I decided that I'd stop the slaughter for the time being and after creating a 200ly no fly zone for the bugs they were going to have difficulties getting ship's to my colonies in the first place let alone attacking them using hyper drive technology even my best hyper drive equipped ship could only manage 220ly fully fueled and if they tried it would be a long distance suicide attack at best.
We refueled and rearmed my planetoid and I set out again in tge direction I suspected the bug homeworld lay and the bugs gave it their all when I finally found it but even their 2.6 million strong fleet was insufficient to take my planetoid out though I did end the battle with 80% armor loss and several breached compartments they lost another 200 shipyards and a solid chunk of their fleet if not the majority of it. Returning to base victorious I found myself dropping into a fight the ancient ones had come again only this time they were coming to kill granted they panicked when they say my massive battle scarred planetoid drop in unexpectedly and begin raining haymakers left and right .
The ancient ones were on par with us technology wise though they still had better lasers we had more guns spitting fire and the battle had been a stalemate until my planetoid had arrived behind the ancient ones fleet and quickly started cleaning house. I had lost about 60% of my fleet before I had arrived in the planetoid the only ships left were dreadnoughts and a few stubborn cruisers clinging to life by a thread the ancient ones however had lost just as much however and my planetoid arriving was the death knell for the remaining ships as even damaged my planetoid was too much for their already compromised defenses. In a stroke of inspiration I ordered the skip drive strobed on and off this prevented the ancient ones fleet from escaping as it threw off navigation and would cause them no end of issues but it was only a temporary measure as the second they were out of ots influence they would be free to fleet and my ship was not quick in real space.
The ancient ones fleet fled or were destroyed fighting my fleet and I salvaged quite a few more working examples of ancient ones tech though before the last ship of theirs fled the system I sent them a message "try me one more time and I'll do more than smash your fleet" the last ship capable of ftl gone we salvaged everything from the wreckage and gave everyone a proper space burial even the fallen of our enemy and from the wreckage we recovered enough working tech that we had completely figured out how their lasers were operating and could make our own now though they were strong merry than ours they required more energy and cooling than ours did now and if we pushed a laser to the same range they had we would end up with a setup very similar to their own though they had us beat when it came to focusing optics not by much but maybe 4% greater range and that doesn't sound like much until you realize that pre ftl earth's lasers only had a range of 100km now modern lasers have managed to get 100k km due to new technologies and ways to manipulate the focusing system though you can get more range the larger the bore of your lasers however you run into other problems then such as cooling and power consumption but in general lasers can target and hit anything inside their range which is typically 1 ls or light second or about 300k meters however as you get above a 8cm laser you start getting longer ranges my current lasers have a range of 3ls granted that is fairly long ranges though as a ship can move allot in 3 seconds granted lasers are infinitely more useful than cannons which have a relatively limited velocity where as railguns can achieve higher velocities they still cannot quite compete with lasers in speed however in destructive capacity railguns are king while missiles are slow they are guided so are less effected by enemy maneuvering and other weapon types have still not truly been realized.
The salvaged ships were reprocessed and in a bit of inspiration I designed and commissioned a second planetoid ship this time it was double the size of the first which had taken the name HMS Avenger this second planetoid would be the HMS Phoenix would have a hangar capacity large enough to store a fleet of lesser ships up to 20 dreadnoughts and assorted escort craft. The salvaged materials were reprocessed and the massive ships began to take shape slowly though it would take 10 years to be completed it would be the single greatest ship in the fleet and since it was designed from the ground up to be skip drive powered with a backup hyper drive system it would be even faster than the Avenger and with 4 times the weapons and the capacity to launch an entire fleet it would be unstoppable and I didn't skimp on anything honestly while Avenger had lots of interior space the Phoenix would not I'd compressed down the size of the interior compartments to fit even more things and instead of having a clear front end rear the ship was nearly a perfect sphere the only exceptions were the hanger bays that housed 100 ships each or 40 with 5 dreadnoughts in each bay with 4 bays equally spaced around the ship and it was as the outer shell was completed 2 years into the project that a new weapon came out of my research labs the hypervelocity particule beam emitter cannon a new weapon combining the power of a railgun and speed of a laser into a single weapon with the added plus of a massive energy discharge at the point of impact that caused a localized emp effect so I replaced every railgun on the new ship with these newly dubbed PPC cannons.
I was starting to get old for a human 43 and I was not immortal and I figured I'd have another 20 to 40 years before I'd have to give up the life of a captain and retire but it was at this point our fine friends the Wawenog submitted something that would change everything. The Wawenog had come up with a life extension serum that effectively stopped aging and even reversed it to an extent that could make even a dog live 1000 years let along something longer lived so once tge initial trials were done on human test subjects I took the chance at practical immortality and received the treatment. Painful is the only word I can describe for the experience as my body underwent changes on a genetic level so comprehensive that I would be an entirely new person once they completed infact I'd need to resubmit my DNA for our crew tracking systems as it would be utterly different from before.
I spent 9 months in a hospital room receiving daily injections of the Wawenog life extension serum the pain was so much that I spent most of that time in a pain induced delirium it took everything I had to remain sane but once it was over I found myself in the body of a 20 year old and with strength approximately 4 times what I'd ever had to begin with and apparently a new diet to go with it I'd never be able to eat just a salad anymore as my nutritional requirements had utterly changed. I had my science crews work on reformulating a new diet for the newly modified people of our empire as the change to our bodies had made a number of foods taste odd while others were practically mandatory and I wanted our people to live comfortably without the chance of starving to death due to improper diet.
The ancient ones came again and in greater numbers but once again they were defeated by my fleet led by the planetoid ship Avenger with shells flying in every single direction missiles unleashing their hellish destruction upon our foes the ancient ones fleet was annihilated and after the battle we had lost 20k ships but they had lost 300k and salvage crews were already cleaning up the wreckage adding the scrap to be reprocessed into new ships and in a fit of inspiration I converted one of the hanger bays of the still in construction Phoenix to a salvage and construction bay and added a fuel extraction system granted only a planet like jupiter would be usable for fuel extraction but with that installed the ship no longer had a range essentially becoming utterly independent of anything unless the on board farming and supplies were lost somehow.