For the Rothian captains, it was certainly an improvement that they now [i]had[/i] orders, at least. The plan that the Tindrel had did make some sense, even if it was unconventional by Rothian standards. They just needed to find a way to pressure some of the enemy ships out into the open. The Outreman ships were moving around the outside of one of the clusters, though the Rothian ships had more options than simply following them. At the very least, having so few ships meant that the Rothian cruisers could move deeper into the cluster while maintaining a somewhat close formation. 

With the Outremans moving around the outside to block escape in those directions, the Rothian cruisers could move straight forward some distance to try to force some of the hostiles in front of them out into the freight channel. The channel was directly behind the nearby enemies’ position, and the captains quickly came up with a plan to “encourage” them out into it. The cruisers’ weapons had the power to penetrate the asteroids entirely, while their enemy did not. As such, the cruisers positioned themselves in cover behind close asteroids while firing through them to the enemy position on the other side. From there, only torpedoes could maneuver around the obstacles to strike the Rothian ships, and with the Rothians positioning their fighters and support ships purely defensively to screen against them, very few could actually get through. While the asteroid field provided strong cover against the planetoid, they were nothing but a disadvantage against the Rothian ships. At close range, at least. 

For the hostile vessels, there were two courses of action. They could advance on the Rothian position to get clear shots, or retreat out into the freight channel. Should they advance, they would have to move relatively slowly in order to maneuver around the asteroids, during which time the Rothian cruisers would have free reign to barrage them from cover, taking more and more damage the closer they came. As with any energy-based projectiles, the fusion cannons were more powerful at closer ranges, since they would lose coherence the longer they traveled. Should the enemy move out into the channel, however, the opposite would be true. As powerful as they were, shooting through the asteroids did drastically reduce the effective range of the Rothian weapons. Should they fall back, the cruisers’ weapons would start to deal much less damage, and the Rothians would have to leave the asteroids in order to face them on more even “ground”. Since the Outremans were effectively blocking retreat from any other angle, the choice was obvious for them to move out into the freight channel. 

The entire time, the planetoid had been taking constant fire from other hostile groups spread across the field, but that fire began to suspiciously diminish seemingly all at once. Aside from the groups closer to the Rothians and Outremans, nearly all of the rest of the enemy fleet had moved into cover. A sensor sweep revealed that most of the enemy fleet was now powering warp drives. Charging a warp drive required substantial amounts of energy, so for vessels without dedicated FTL power systems like the Tindrel planetoid possessed, jumping beyond lightspeed imparted a substantial energy tax onto the rest of the ship’s systems. They had to remain stationary, while shields and weapons were usually hampered in their effectiveness. The same was true for their enemy, but the majority of their ships were currently at long range with hard cover behind the asteroids. They had no real way to exploit the vulnerability in time. Most of the enemy fleet was about to suddenly reposition [i]somewhere[/i] soon, so the allied battle group had to decide quickly how they were going to prepare.