Carrier Battles Mod

[Suicide Junkie]

History of Carrier Battles #1 (part 1)
Note: Game time has been multiplied by ten to make it sound more plausible

2410 - 2420: Dawn of the Carrier Age
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In the years leading up to 2410, the Cult of SJ had colonized most of the planets within reach, and explored enough to know that there was no hope of habitable systems further out along the northeastern galactic arm. With each system less habitable than the last, the galactic core began to look more and more appealing. The subsequent push for coreward explorations would change the course of galactic history.

In 2410, an exploration fleet was commissioned and began construction on the Cult homeworld of Udix VII. The original plans called for a great number of missile-armed support gunboats and supply tugs to escort a flagship. The impracticality of this was soon apparent however, and the plans were repeatedly scaled back. By 2415, the grand exploration fleet was comprised of only a single Heathen-class anti-ship bombardment frigate and the flagship carrier, CSX Assisted Suicide. Sporting ten missile tubes with a wide range of small warheads, it would theoretically be able to destroy whatever the Heathen and its heavy missiles could not.

Command staff were under an ever increasing amount of pressure from above to locate more colonizable worlds, and late in 2415 they decided to halt construction of more ships and launch the expedition ahead of schedule. With only a single escort, and a mere third of the carrier's fighter complement loaded, the exploration fleet was quite underpowered. However the expected risk of an exploration mission is typically quite low, so the fleet was launched anyways.

In what may be the shortest exploration mission in recorded history, the Cultist explorers made their very first warp transit in 2417, and emerged right in the middle of a hostile fleet. Although the warppoint was unexplored at the time, we now know that it led directly from Udix to Narcisston. Many of you will recognize Narcisston as the homesystem of the Memnorak, and that is quite correct. Back in 2417, the Memnorak had been busy building a fleet of their own, and those ships were all positioned right where the Cultists were headed.

Now, in order to understand how the subsequent conflict played out, we must take note of early Memnorak design theory. Pre-reformation warships were completely under manual control. The bridge crew is much the same as today, however behind the scenes, tasks were done almost entirely by hand. Reactor stabilization, thrust vectoring, weapons management, they all were done by real people in the bowels of the ship. The other thing to note is the emphasis on weapons over defenses. The Memnorak Crusader, which is not to be confused with the later Cultist design of the same name, had four medium laser cannons, a depleted uranium cannon, and a cluster missile tube. Absolutely bristling with weapons for a frigate sized ship. However, in fitting all of those guns they completely neglected armor or shielding; the Memnorak battle plan relied instead on the ability to destroy their targets before the enemy could fire back.

Once the warp transit began, conflict was inevitable. The Memnorak could see the gravitational wake of the Assisted Suicide approaching, and knew that they could not afford to hold back. If any sigificant incoming object turned out to be a hostile warship, they needed to fire first or take heavy casualties. Memnorak commanders gave the only order they could; fire on sight. The Cultists on the other hand, were not under such pressure. Whatever the situation was, they needed to pull back and put room between them and the targets. The long range missiles carried by the Cultist ships would be only half as effective at point blank, so regardless of whether the sensor blips were friendly or hostile, a rapid retreat to weapon safe range was mandatory.

From surviving logs of the event, we know that the CSX Assisted Suicide emerged from the warppoint just south of the Memnorak fleet, while the escort emerged to the east. As ordered, the seven Memnorak ships immediately opened fire with their laser cannons on both ships. The Heathen was destroyed so quickly by the Memnorak ships that there are no recordings of the actual event. The Assisted Suicide, on the other hand, managed to deploy its defensive ice field in time and suffered almost no damage. The Memnorak laser cannons were refracted and diffused by the field, and what little energy did reach the hull was harmless. Since the Cultist carrier had no anti-ship weaponry, the Assisted Suicide had to launch fighters in the hopes of stopping the assault before a Memnorak ship got a lucky hit through.

This is when the design flaws of the Memnorak caught up with them. Orders are said to have come down from the Memnorak captains to target the fighters. However, the gunnery crew misunderstood, and opened fire with their cluster missiles only; the laser cannon batteries continued to target the carrier. Missiles were what the Cultist fighters were designed for, and the missiles were shot down almost before they could leave the tubes. Then, while the carrier's defenses glowed with the laser bombardment, the fighters were able to use their small anti-missile weapons to pepper the unprotected hulls of the Memnorak ships with fire. A short time later, the Memnorak fleet was debris and 90% of the fighters were back aboard the Assisted Suicide.

Although the Cultist military denies any damage to the Assisted Suicide in the first battle of the Zezzis warppoint, crew members serving on the carrier at the time say that one of the Memnorak laser beams did in fact manage to penetrate the ice field and start a fire in the port side crew quarters. Many Cultist museums have picked up on this story, and half-melted trinkets are sold by the thousands daily in gift shops across the empire.

Shortly after the warppoint battle, the CSX Assisted Suicide was attacked by four more Memnorak Crusaders which were en route to the warppoint, presumably to join the now-destroyed fleet. The incoming ships were swiftly destroyed by the Cult fighters long before they could close to anywhere near laser cannon range. This devastating loss of 80% of their standing navy over a mere two years was the driving force behind the Memnorak design reformation. By 2420, the Memnorak would be finishing the emergency construction of their first defense carrier, and with that, the Age of the Carrier had truly begun.