The staff officers of the Roman Navy have been sent for re-education after a missile salvo flew through the defenses of the fleet and destroyed a Bireme without being engaged and without the Bireme raising its shields.
It turns out when you refit ships to a new design they obvously lose their pre-existing weapon set ups and the new shields default to off, every ship in that fleet had just finished the e2 or e2 g1 refits and so not one of them had their weapons set up to fire or their shields on.Of course pre refit that fleet had been set up properly and I did not think to revisit that

Sadly thats fairly normal. Massed AMM launchers are common around a lot of planets. You need a large fleet with good shields and lots of guns

In the 73rd year of the Steel Federation's ascendancy, there are grave questions about Terra's place in the Empire. While the undisputed birthplace of Humanity, the Sol system lies in an unenviable position in galactic space: of the three links to the galaxy at large, only one has any planets of note - Bernard's Star; once hailed as a new Terra, is even more isolated, with only links to Sol and the useless void of Luhman 16.

Ship captains complain of the ten to fifteen billion kilometers needed to drag minerals from the rich outer systems back to Sol. They point to the dual worlds of Kruger Prime and Kruger Secondus, which still team with buried minerals, as well as being a mere two billion kilometers away from the vast asteroid mines of 70 Eridani. While the old guard elites on Earth, Luna, and Mars argue against this impropriety; even now, a massive fleet of tugs and cargo vessels ready themselves for the greatest transfer of production facilities ever witnessed.

Hadn't played in a few years, and only had a couple cursory games in the C# version.

Decided it was time to dwelve deeply into it and see what magic Steve had done with it.

First game, conventional start, everything going great. .  except i forgot that i had left the # of systems until -FUN- at default. .  As i finished exploring my 22 system it dawned on me that i was woefully unprepared for any of the spoilers, and i wasn't even sure if they had changed much from the VB6 version.

Immediately recalled all explorers and hunkered down in Sol as i tried to get a semblance of a armed navy going.  It was too late thou, first SOL Aliens (not really but thats where they showed up almost immediately as my last geo survey ship docked on earth) showed up within days of exploratory fleet returning to earth.  They did not respond to any hails.  A missile cruiser was sent to escort them through the system, but they promptly shot at it damaging some armor.  A long series of skirmishes continued for the better of a year, with the result of over 15 of the alien's ships struck down across 3 different classes.  No losses for Earth's fleet.  Curiously, it was noted that the aliens left no lifepods and showed no signs of atmosphere within their ships.  They were faster than our original tech at 5500km/s, but during the course of the conflict we surpassed them.  Currently our slowest combat ships are at 6200km/s (missile escorts, cruisers and FAC tenders), while our close engagers (laser cruisers, destroyers and scouts) clock, what we thought was, a mighty 8000km/s.  In a way the Earth Federation was glad for the conflict, as it was low risk and provided a benchmark from whence the navy was optimized and improved to a functional and quite powerful state.  By the end of the conflict the navy was comprised of a 80k ton class FAC tender, 40 1k ton FACs (30 in a defense base over earth, 10 in the tender), 4 Close range Laser cruisers, 6 close range laser destroyers, 8 missile destroyers, 6 AMM Cruiser escorts, 2 Heavy missile cruisers, dedicated scout and diplomacy ships, supply ships, tankers, colliers, and the ground infrastructure to support it all. 

Just as the first aliens were dealt  with 2 more showed up in AX Micro and Iota Ursae.  The jump chain is SOL - AX Micro - Iota Ursae.  The AX Micro aliens turned out to be eager to speak to us, and with the use of a diplomacy ship we quickly started communications.  The ones in Iota on the other hand seemed to enjoy nothing but slaughter. 

We had established a colony on Planet I of Iota Ursae, the Earth Federation was heavily invested in it and had allocated more resources to it than any other colony asides from Mars.  The reason for such was the presence of a alien artifact that gave a massive boost to EW research as well as a small alien outpost.  On top of that the colony had a comparable cost to Mars at 2. 0 and after a land geo survey was conducted by an engineer corps, proved to have a diverse and rich mineral profile.  The earth federation had been shipping infrastructure, colonists and facilities for several years now.  In place were also 2 planetary defense regiments, 2 geological teams and 2 xenoarchaelogy teams.   In space, there was a fuel harvester fleet mining a nearby gas giant, and a diplomacy ship had been sent over to attempt to communicate with the aliens. 

The diplomacy ship followed the alien fleet to the second star of the system where within one of its planets its sensors picked up dozens of ships from the same species.  It was also noted that these ships were extremely fast at 13250km/s even thou their thermal signatures made them out to be fairly large ships.  Nothing in our navy could compare.  As our diplomacy ship got closer, the entirety of the alien fleet burst into action towards it.  Orders were given to withdraw, but it was too late.  The ships immense speed allowed them to catch the hapless unarmed diplomacy ship within seconds and it was quickly turned into scrap.  Orders were given to a nearby GeoSurvey ship to move into system in case it would be safe to collect the life pods.  But shortly after the whole wreck disapeared from the scanners. .  And the aliens werent done, in a few days they were spotted again.  This time right by the WH into AX Micro, a slow lumbering transport fleet were caught and completely destroyed as well as their cargo meant for the colony, a few days were allowed to pass and orders were given for the geosurvey ship on standby on the other side of the WH to transit and grab the lifepods. .  this was a mistake.  The aliens laid in ambush and the geo ship was quickly destroyed. 

Content with their destruction, they proceded to "eat" the wrecks. .  every single one of which disapeared from our scanners.  This was problematic. .  the transport ships were over 100k tons in size each. .  and they had just salvaged 5 of them plus the smaller ships they had taken out in system.  In the colony everyone was starting to panic. .  it was obvious that no more help would be coming through that WH for awhile.  And sure enough within a week the aliens themselves showed up in orbit of Iota Ursae I.  The STOs did they best to keep the enemy at bay, but they were simply too fast.  Most shots missed, those that hit did slight armor damage that didn't even phase the invaders.  In return every single STO was hit with orbital bombardment and destroyed.  What came next was completely unexpected. .  but perhaps it shouldn't had been.  The aliens made land fall, the earth Federation had about 30k tons of troops in the planet, heavily entrenched and defended but the aliens drop down almost 400k tons of their own in response.  It was at this time that we finally discovered the identity of what we were facing. .  The Swarm.  A massive army of heavily armoured and armed insects swarmed towards the colony, the marines did their best to hold ground but in the end there was just too many of them and they were too heavily armoured.  Every single colonist and marine in Iota Ursae I was slaughtered and became bug food. The colony was lost.  All travel to the system was forbidden, a picket was placed on the AX Micro side of the WH and the earth federation is taking their time to lick their wounds and figure out what they can do.  Not only is the enemy more powerful and technologically advanced, but now they have a huge amount of resources to grow from due to their complete obliteration of the earth forces in the system.  Things aren't looking good.

We've finally managed to turn a corner in our ship designs - our fleet was able to overcome the Precursor base that had been giving us problems for decades; then was able to take on another (admittedly smaller) outpost later the next year with minimal losses - without even having to run them out of ASMs by using ablative warships!

Initial ground combat was disappointing - the ~120,000 tons of troops that I had used to take out a Rakhas nest about a decade ago (and thus were rather out-of-date) were able to defeat their infantry units fairly easily, and when I saw hundreds dying every 8 hours, I was feeling good about our chances. Unfortunately, as the numbers of infantry dwindled, I was forced to accept that we weren't killing the heavier units at anything near sustainable levels - trading dozens of tanks for a single heavy mech.

Four companies were merged down to two, then merged again. The survivors were forced to retreat back to the transports.

That pushed back the timetable, but a second landing with up-to-date weapons and armor tech finally cleared the planet, revealing both a ruined city as well as a 100% sensor technology artifact site - a worthy prize for all our blood and tears.

Wrecks?

Is that "real stars" but some are renamed? or is there a name theme that has real stars?

Yes, its real stars, but I renamed some using a WH40k theme. I have a WH40k spreadsheet with c300 ship names arranged by class, c300 system names and c500 ground formation names. I shade the cells as I use them, then just remove all the shading for the next campaign