The Humans speak of their 'high noon' showdowns. It appears the sun is peaking.

28 Aug 06

The end of the Tarka came even more unexpectedly. The Humans were being cagey leaving large fleets around my new colonies. That kept me moving fleets around like chess pieces to guard against sudden treachery. My second cleansing fleet was still quickly launched against the Tarka planet of Ke'Kiralta. The Humans sent a shadow fleet to take advantage of my presumed failure. They no doubt hoped to grab the planet, but they could have just been making sure I didn't leave a wounded but not defeated anyway. Regardless, they showed up after the main battle.

The Tarka defense was mostly high speed destroyers with beam weapons, but they had the planetary defenses and two rings of satellites to fall back on. However, the fleet was lead by the a heavy beam dreadnought. The dread took up it's position near the satellites with its rear to the planet. That left no choice but to charge into the teeth of its beams. I had to count on the fact that my combined dreadnought firepower from three ships should overcome his advantage in armor and directed weapons. The plan worked. The Tarka dread's hull was soon ringing with constant impacts. Beams and torpedoes cut into its sides. However, whenever all those beams fired, it put a hurt on whichever dread was in its sights. It couldn't withstand the beating for long and detonated in an impressive explosion.

Without the dread, there wasn't much left that could hurt our fleet so they charged into weapons range of the planet and opened up. The armored dread picked off the remaining destroyers while the planetary barrage dread took out the satellites. Most weapons still fired at the planet. The surface went dark surprisingly quickly. The Human shadow fleet actually helped clean up a few remaining satellites and stragglers in the ensuing battle. I quickly followed up with colonists just before the Humans arrived with theirs.

Once another colony was well defended, the first cleansing fleet moved on to assault Kao'Tuno. It had only a light cruiser defense and more of the beam destroyers. They were no match for the dreadnought assault. The fleet and the planet were quickly wiped out. The Tarka could see where this was going. They no longer had an industrial base to produce dreadnoughts. Without dreadnoughts they could not survive. Apparently they chose mass ritual suicide over defeat. That created a sudden land grab as the Human raced us to claim those abandoned planets. We won and snatched up two more colonies including the former Tarka home world.

Now the Humans eyed us warily with no enemies between us. We both scrambled to complete the new weapons we hoped would enable us to win this new war. We both worked to quickly build up our new colonies.

Though this will be our greatest challenge, we are far from panic. We have a few different strategies we're working on to cripple the Human war effort. We also have some significant ship upgrades we're working on. Fleets and defenses are under construction. Some of the pieces are in place. Now time has run out. The Humans have declared an end to our agreement and the peace we have enjoyed. It is time for the final war.

Jason