Humans have been slowly expanding across the universe, some roads blocked by alien vessels, all from the same, robotic race. People call them the "guardians" though what they guard is beyond us. We first met them in Kruger 60, only 2 jumps from our home. Our first military foray ended in desaster. Half our analysts commited suicide after looking at the sensor data. Back then we didn't know they don't ever leave their systems. 120 of what are probably sorium harvesters, and about the same number of combat ships, give or take a dozen. 82 of what we just found out are AMM ships with 23 AMM launchers each. Another 8 of what we know are PD ships. 3 of them destroyed an 80 missile salvo without breaking into a sweat. The former are about 16kt, the latter huge
We have left Kruger 60 in peace, for now. But we have been preparing. Most labs were devoted to developing faster engines. Our first ships went more than 2600km/sec a dazzling speed, or so we thought. We couldn't get the next generation above 5000km/sec without sacrificing too much. Decent for home defence, but too slow to take on the guardians, if only by about 100km/sec. Now the eggheads developed something called magneto plasma drives and they allow us to go 6400km/sec with basically the same layout.
New, bigger lasers and matching fire controls have been developed as well, our first fleet was hunted down by a small subfleet of beam armed ships with the three mentioned PD ships as escorts.
Missiles are going to be useless with how much defence against those they have.
We still only have 7500kt frigates, we'll wait for bigger spinal weapons before we build bigger ships.
It takes time to build ships though, so the fleet of 2nd gen ships (upgrading would have been more expensive than building, and we can still use them as system defence craft) went to another guarded system. We had been there before and wasted some missiles on their PD. But we only ever saw a few ships, and we had new missiles that were finished long before the new ships.
They waited for us at the jump point. Not the ones we had seen here earlier either. 10 ~8000kt ships and two 16kt ones that had so many brethren in Kruger 60. Here we found out that those were AMM ships when they started shooting us with their small missiles.
The ships were old, but the crews knew them in and out, and mere seconds after jumping all ten missile frigates launched their payloads. One of the PD ships exploded and by now we new that all the other ships were missiles ships as well, peppering us with size 5 missiles. Our missiles are a little smaller at size 4, but they hit just as hard. They are still slower, but that didn't matter much, here. We lost 4 beam frigates with their 5 15cm lasers and 1 18. 75cm spinal laser and one of the frigate leaders which provide most of the sensor coverage. But we took down all of their ships, and we even have about 20% of our missile stocks remaining! The damaged ships and any that reversed course to come to us were picked off by the beam ships.
So we traded 37. 5kt for more than 100kt. With obsolete ships on the wrong side of an ambush. We'll pick up the survivors and call that a win, though we know there are more enemies here.
Edit: And as soon as the victorious fleet returned to Sol the fleet commander retired.
