The surviving fighters Gate-jumped backed to the fleet. Aboard the damaged Crater, the commander of Venom 1 was grimly put in mind of some footage he'd seen once, sent out as a warning across the fleet. It was of a battle between the Blastarons and Manual Fighters, watching the latter's second-in-command taking on a then-thousand-strong wing of Blastaron fighters and the resounding massecre that followed. The literal thousand-to-one odds, crippled by the appalling inept formation trying to cover for what troops for which "green" was probably overstating it and being annhilated entirely, without ever even landing a single hit on an opponent which felt like it was half-a-step from being able to body-flicker [i]in a spaceship[/i]. He'd wondered what the Blastaron pilots had thought as they had pointless died, almost helplessly, sacrified in a vain and futile attempt to use numbers to buy victory.

Because now he had some idea.

Forth fleet did not, unfortunately, have any legendary Aotrs pilots of such high skill as the Azura pilot, being soundly the Aotrs average (which was, of course, quite a lot better than most). They were good, but not THAT good. This was going to be a problem.


*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*

Velinkar examined the data carefully, making particular nore of the results of the fighter's engagements, which was very costly. Thy'd simply been vastly out-matched, considering the Azura hero's presence.

The only saving grace was that as capital starship level, such individuals TENDED not to be capable of single-handedly destroying capital starships.

Though there were, concerningly, some notably exceptions. 

He did thus note that PD fire should be concentrated on any spherefighters of that silhouette where possible in preferenc to the oher fighters, at least until they figured out whether that was going to work.

It also seemed like the Azura were intent on coming at them with their ENTIRE fleet, which was insane if true. That would mean there would be nothing left to commit as reserves... Nor, even if they were to win for example, to protect themselves while they repaired and resupplied. They were organics, and it was POSSIBLE they didn't need to rest, but seemed unlikely. It showed a very single-mindedness, a power used to through itself at each other head-on, with little regard to the longer-term strategic thinking.

Well. The Azura had demonstrated they did not react terribly quickly to in-system FTL jumps, so perhaps it was time to take advantage of that.

The admiral gave orders to the 4th, splitting into the usual three operational elements (one for attack, one on rest/recovery/repair and one reserve/guard) and plotted several Gate jumps for all three groups for disparate ends of the solar system; the main supply/transport groups almost to the edge of the system. 

A small group of seven [i]Shadowfang[/i] and [i]Dark Fear[/i] destroyers had a Gate point set to near where the Azura had been mining - if left undefended as potentially the case seemed, the destroyers should have little trouble in levelling it in a hit-and-run - they could even just grab a couple of nearby asteroids and use their towing arrays to lob them at the others, when if came down to it. (He had considered doing the same to the ground base, but suspected there could be some anti-ship defences there best not tested by a light force.)

The attack element would engage the oncoming Azura fleet, primarily aiming to pick away at the edges. The targets would be initially the lighter vessels, the corvettes as he had initially planned. That was what you did when the enemy went into a big bait-ball of ships - you didn't try for a decisive blow, you settled in for the long haul and picked at the edges. He wondered, given how much stock the Azura seemed to put into personal power and capability, whether being apparently ignored would annoy them or make them assume their enemies thought them too powerful to touch...

As one final order, he communicated to all the [i]Traitors[/i] and four [i]Liche's Wraths[/i] of the fleet who all had ECM generators. The Azura didn't seem to be going in for guided missiles, so made sense to put the ECM systems to their other use - working in concert with the communications emitters to project jamming fields or jamming beams. The former could flood a sphere 180 000 kilometres in radius, disrupting communications - not vastly unlike the Azura's own electromagnetic flux, though much narrow in scope (it had no effect on sensors or tageting). In a normal fleet, if you could flood enough through your emitters to jam out the enemy (which was in many cases dependant on whether you were parity of better with your foe's communications), the most noticable effect was to disrupt the synchronisation of a squadron's weapons fire, meaning that you couldn't co-ordinate the torpedoes to all hit the fractions of a second after the coldbeams. Whether they could jam Azura tight-beams or even if they could it would make a difference was a matter for debate.

The other option, which he was holding in reserve, was to switch methods and fire a more coherent burst as a beam at a single vessel to interfer specifically with targeting systems and scanners (and hopefully whatever the Azura was using). Usually, it only meritted about a 15% decrease in enemy accuracy, but that could make a lot of difference on a point-target.

However, the [i]Liche's Wraths[/i] (two of which were in the lead element) had one more thing to try, though whether two hours was going to be enough time to get it to work was a good question. They could try using the wing rune-cones in concert with the ECM and comms emitters to essentially block the communications lasers by sheer dint of cancelling them out with localised elemental Shadow fields (like countered fir magic with ice or vice versa). The Traitors wouldn't be able to do so, and they almost certainly would have to reduce the area (maybe even down to having to do so as a coherent jamming beam), but if they could do it to one of the central command ships... That might rather upset the Azura more than the de facto jamming on the ships using the beams themselves.

At this point, Velinkar figured, anything was worth a shot.



[Success and margin thereof of jamming fields depends on a) assessed Azura communications TL verses Aotrs TL of 8 whether they can be jammed and b) what effects it has on the ships (may be small or nothing even if it DOES work). Success, timing and effectiveness of laser-jamming shadow systems feels like it should be part of a DM's friction roll as to whether they get it done in time and how widespread and effective the attempts can be.]