Interview Subject: Throzii Rexann/Guudang Nogarke Oandep
I'd like to note that I am specifically a heavy artillery ship. Light artillery ships like the Gungōn class are still quite potent, but they sacrifice specialized capabilities and sheer firepower in order to be deployed in larger quantity.
Even aside from a Guudang class such as myself having four superluminal cannons to a Gungōn’s two, mine are much more capable of complicated warp trajectories, on account of having an elongated warp torus. I am also capable of considerably higher rates of fire per gun, being able to run more than twice the electrical power through each, while having much faster autoloaders. I also have a considerably longer maximum range, though that really only becomes relevant for checking warp trajectories.
Boasting aside, I was utterly unsurprised to be assigned to the equatorial front once it crossed the threshold from “probing attack” to “fleet engagement”. It’s exactly the sort of operation I was built for, so off I went.
As I prepared to skip from the Shoal to the combat theater, one of the local carriers – Xegong Hagosi Theanido as I recall – immediately contacted me over the comms hole network. Apparently she’d assumed local command over the battle, which made sense.
“Good to have you Nogarke, join battery fifteen at sixty milliseconds pastwards.”
“Yes ma’am.”
So I adjusted my momentum vector slightly, waited a little bit for all the skimmers in between my present location and my destination to get out of the way, and off I went slightly into the past. I nullified my momentum relative to the fleet as soon as I arrived, and got myself oriented into a proper firing position.
At present, the three million or so carriers the UDAF had deployed here were doing a decently competent job at keeping Temporal Control up, so there weren’t any enemy voidskippers that I actually could shoot at the moment. That said, my bombs were cheaper than skimmers and in more ample supply, so I got to firing off a few shots per second in the effort to degrade enemy TCS.
Right, standard ammo for all nastellan artillery is a twenty meter sphere of steel, annihilated with an equal mass of antimatter; that’s stored as matter of course, and only converted to amat by a quick trip through a NOW once it’s been crunched up into a space pocket. Explosive yield of 14.4 Petatons TNT equivalent. In my particular case, water is used for the amat on account of being cheap. It also simplifies my ammunition feed a bit, increasing my rate of fire.
It was worth doing, but honestly beamships were just better at this particular sort of work. No, I was here to exploit gaps in enemy TCS coverage, or punish enemy ships for overextending.
After a few minutes of swatting at skimmers, I noticed an incredibly fleeting opportunity: one of the enemy battleships darting forwards in an effort to kill some beam-armed skimmers. Meanwhile the enemy’s TCS nodes had needed to evade a warp torpedo going off, and therefore were out of position.
I quickly adjusted the differential equations of the warp bubble forming in cannon number three to change the shot trajectory in its terminal phase. I added a thirty degree turn to go a little bit off to the side, a right angle in the opposite facing to slip through the gap forced open by that torpedo, then another jink back towards my position to hit that Implacable-class from behind without violating causality from the perspective of the ships spotting for me.
I didn’t quite score a direct hit, but it was close enough. The thirty five kilometer battleship immediately came to a blasting halt as my shot caved in the side of its hull, while also completely demolishing all five of its redundant warp drive toroids.
The beamship who’d wound up spotting for me – Quesan Nagato Okianis – sent me an immediate message in response:
“Nice shot! Thanks for getting that goon out of the way!”
“You’re welcome.”
It was nice to have my efforts appreciated, even if I was just one ship among millions in this engagement alone. Trillions, if you counted the skimmers too.
Barely twenty seconds after that sniping, Hagosi called:
“Thirty millisecond breach in enemy TCS identified, friendly skimmers are clear! All artillery batteries, pick targets and fire!”
I immediately adjusted my aim by the half a degree needed to follow the order, and in the microsecond before firing I carefully analyzed the situation.
The enemy skimmers had overextended, resulting in a thin front of skimmers stretching out without much behind for nine Megameters. Not much except a good ten thousand enemy battleships and destroyers that had pushed forwards to try and exploit that bulge – and which were now exposed thanks to those skimmers getting utterly shredded by beamfire, with their comms holes being forcibly closed shortly after.
I managed to paint three destroyers and a battleship as my targets – one for each of my cannons – and swiftly deleted them from existence. I’d scored four direct hits. Adding to the destruction, the torpedo magazines on two of the destroyers promptly exploded, while the third had apparently fired its entire load beforehand.
That apparently spooked the UDAF fleet something fierce, since suddenly the enemy voidskippers started being a lot more reluctant to come too close to the contact front between temporal control systems. Even the battleships, which really needed to be up close to do their job. As a direct result, we started pushing back – without torpedo and beamship support, UDAF skimmers were dying fast, eroding the enemy’s TCS.
Roughly a kilosecond after that opening I helped exploit, someone or other apparently beat some discipline back into the UDAF fleet. Either that or enough time had passed for the voidskippers to get some bravado back. Shortly after that, I managed to nail another battleship that poked a tiny bit too far forwards, easing things up for Rushina a bit.
Still, there really weren’t all that many targets available for me to shoot, aside from applying massive overkill to skimmers. After that lapse of discipline had been resolved, the UDAF had apparently pushed a lot of skimmers to the front in an effort to protect their voidskippers. Also to make up for the skimmer losses they’d already suffered.
Still, I kept a good chunk of my attention to monitoring the combat telemetry of the battle. You never knew when an opportunity for a shot would come up.
Still, not every perceived shot opportunity was actually viable. Case in point, I spotted what seemed like an opportunity to slip a shot into the enemy rear and destroy one of their carriers. I took the shot, only for said carrier to remain stubbornly unexploded; apparently the shot had violated causality and gotten branched.
Things went on like this for a solid sixty kiloseconds, the TCS boundaries shifting back and forth as both sides brought in skimmer reinforcements. Meanwhile, we were inflicting considerably more attrition on the enemy’s voidskippers than they were to us. The main reason here were artillery ships like myself; we had a lot more of them than the UDAF, and did rather obsessive training in how to effectively contribute to chaotic space combat environments.
I only learned this towards the end of the war, but it turns out there was a reason the UDAF was so short on artillery. Because their shipminds were all various aristocrats, they were far more focused on individual glory than on victory as a team. So everyone wanted to be a beamship, and artillery ships were viewed as kill-stealers. So the UDAF only grudgingly had any artillery ships at all, and the ones they did have were both poorly trained and demoralized.
Anyway, sixty kiloseconds into the fight is when the UDAF set off that massive bomb of theirs. As far as we can tell, it was jury-rigged on very short notice in an effort to disrupt our defenses. Still, it was very high yield; they basically took two four kilometer balls of solid iron, flipped one of them to antimatter, and slammed them together. Released enough energy to mass-scatter some smaller planets, and even Megalights away it would noticeably warm things it illuminated.
While it would be pretty straightforward for even a skimmer to simply outrun the blast front until it was down to a survivable intensity, that would knock a hole multiple light seconds across in our defensive lines – and if the UDAF knew such a tactic would work, they would definitely try it again.
Xegong Hagosi Theanido apparently figured that out too, and gave the following order to all artillery ships a few microseconds later.
“All artillery, start shooting blanks into the blast front! We need to make openings for our forces to pass through, and empty warp bubbles are the very definition of expendable.”
So I immediately paused my autoloaders and began firing, all four of my superluminal cannons blazing away with hundreds of shots per second. Oh sure all these shots were definitely getting branched when they reached the other side of the blast zone, but we honestly didn’t need to care about that very much.
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By the time the blast front reached a light second across – just about half a second, naturally – it was already so full of holes that our skimmers and beamships could easily get themselves lined up with a gap in the blast, slip through, and keep fighting with barely a pause. Meanwhile, the UDAF’s artillery deficit meant they’d had a much harder time slipping through their own blast front, so we’d actually managed to push forwards into more space than we’d controlled before the bomb went off.
A few seconds passed, before I noticed Quesan Rakana Akgaod on the combat telemetry, basically dueling an enemy battleship.
I offered to take said battleship out of the picture, obviously, but Rakana’s reply forestalled that;
“Don’t bother. The UDAF jettisoned hundreds of dilated comms holes in this sector, so it’s a causal minefield. Anything you shot in here would just get branched.”
Ah. That made sense. I passed that bit of information to Hagosi, who responded that she had already tasked a wormhole demolitions team to get rid of the microscopic annoyances in spacetime. Though given that they weren’t in an obvious location courtesy of a lack of wreckage, finding them was going to take some time.
So I got back to shooting other targets, though I did keep my eye on Rakana’s duel. I mentally winced in sympathy when she took that big hit, but I had a job to do.
Anyway, another two kiloseconds and I was down to one percent of my magazine capacity in terms of ammunition. I notified Hagosi, and she promptly rotated me back to the Shoal for resupply and maintenance.
Shoal 9906 simultaneously felt much emptier than it had been, and a lot busier. The maintenance and repair crews were scrambling all over the place to keep everyone up to fighting condition, but there were a lot fewer ships here than normal, and there wasn’t any time for the niceties of peacetime.
Rushina wouldn’t be getting her hull polished again any time soon, sadly. There just wouldn’t be time for it, with all the other demands of being at war.
Anyway, the Shoal personnel got me re-armed and checked over my systems in just over a hundred kiloseconds, then I was promptly sent back into the fray. Well, as much as that saying makes sense for artillery anyway.
As I prepared to return to combat, I did a quick overview of how things had developed at the equatorial front. As it turned out, the battle had considerably escalated; the UDAF had sent in just about six billion additional warskippers, somewhere between one and two percent of their total fleet. So the front had widened to about eight light hours. Evidently, the groups assigned to deep space logistical warfare hadn’t managed to cut the attack’s supply lines yet.
All that aside, I was assigned to a new battery twenty milliseconds pastwards of the main fleet, towards the northern edge of the battle. At this point the numbering system really wasn’t all that important compared to location and temporal offset, seeing as there were tens of millions of artillery batteries in play for this battle alone. I mean yes each battery technically had a number for identification and coordinating shot corridors, but the numbers would just blur together for anyone without a seriously uptuned brain.
If I told you I was in battery 56,238 – which I was – would you really be able to tell that apart from battery 59,430? Without taking the time to look it up? No? I’ve made my point.
I spent the next two kiloseconds taking potshots, sometimes nailing skimmers, damaging a few warskippers, getting a kill or two, but not really doing much aside from contributing to the constant thundering beat of war. The UDAF had really cracked down on their discipline since that TCS breach early in the battle, and were in no way eager for a repeat performance.
Still, that didn’t mean a breach couldn’t be forced. Hagosi was still in overall command for the part of the battle I was involved in, and she’d started concentrating front-surface combatants on a section a light second across. After a few moments of this, those combatants were ordered forwards, the sudden increase in beamfire hitting the enemy’s TCS assets extremely hard.
Just like that, millions of enemy voidskippers were abruptly exposed to artillery fire, a situation that we artillery ships made absolutely brutal use of. I managed to get twenty shots off before the enemy adjusted their TCS to cover their front again, with twelve of the shots I took killing or immobilizing their targets; even the ones that weren’t immobilizing often did severe damage, forcing the ships I’d targeted to retreat for repairs.
Well yes, of course artillery isn’t fair. That’s the whole point of artillery; we’re the punishment for failure at temporal control, and our ability to shoot at targets pastwards of our spotters means evasive maneuvers don’t really help. Meanwhile, our position far behind the front means that we ourselves seldom take much of the casualties in a given conflict.
Anyway, the UDAF’s deficiency in artillery meant that they had a much harder time exploiting what TCS breaches they did manage to cause. Like seriously, if the twenty millisecond gap you manage to force in the enemy’s TCS only lets you kill a hundred thousand warships, there really wasn’t much point to it.
Meanwhile on our side, Hagosi moving beamships and torpedo vessels around to force breaches gave us artillery ships plenty of work to do, and made casualties among the UDAF’s battleships and destroyers really start piling up. In fact, Hagosi basically ordered us to save our ammo for TCS breaches and overextended enemy ships, instead of wasting it on potshots.
Twenty more kiloseconds on, and it was clear that the UDAF fleet at the equator was getting far worse than we were; about a billion of the voidskippers they’d sent had been mission-killed or outright destroyed. By contrast, we’d only suffered about three hundred million casualties, not counting Skimmers. Far, far more Skimmers had died on both sides. It was sad, but such is war, and everyone aboard had an active selfstream going, so they would almost certainly be revived anyway.
That said, the UDAF’s commanders weren’t stupid, they’d noticed that the battle wasn’t going their way, and the same for the other battle at the pole. So it really wasn’t all that surprising when the enemy artillery fire started significantly intensifying; they must have plundered countless other units for their token artillery to make up for their deficit here, but at the very least it was working.
Anyway, that prompted Nastellan command to send even more ships to the extant front in order to maintain our advantage, and things just kept intensifying.
I stayed deployed for about half a Megasecond before I ran low on ammunition again, and was sent back to Shoal 9906. Another hundred kiloseconds to re-arm and receive maintenance, then it was back to the front.
Not the same front though; evidently someone in the UDAF’s command structure had a clever idea, slamming thirty billion warskippers into Nastellan’s defenses at a seemingly random point, approximately two kiloseconds before my checks were done. No probing attacks, no warning, just suddenly everything was exploding.
Yeah, they managed to advance about a light minute before enough forces could be deployed to seriously arrest their momentum. And that abrupt attack was the reason I was assigned to the third prong, as it was already starting to be called. I suppose they wanted to send a few ships with real combat experience, instead of just training?
Speculation aside, I was assigned to a battery only five milliseconds pastwards by the local ship in command. His name was Xegong Kavnati Ajetof, and like most command ships, he was a carrier.
Anyway, Kavnati quickly started trying to do what had worked at the other two fronts, trying to force TCS breaches in order to exploit our artillery superiority. This even almost worked, except for the sheer withering quantity of beamfire that all the enemy battleships here were putting out.
Yes that meant they were quite low on Skimmers and Artillery, but it also made it very hard for our beamships to get close enough to strip the enemy TCS coverage.
That’s why Kaynati quickly altered his orders to artillery, tossing out the ammunition conservation order, and directing us to open fire whenever we had a clear shot. The instant I received that order, I promptly deleted an enemy battleship from existence with a shot to the warp drives.
Now things started getting a lot more troublesome for the UDAF forces here; their battleships were damn close to overextending all the time, meaning they were constantly at risk of artillery fire. But they couldn’t fall back to the safety of their own surface, because those beamships were the only thing preventing us from completely shredding their TCS.
After a few minutes of the casualty rate we were inflicting, some bright spark in the UDAF command structure ordered a retreat. Though apparently some of the battleships either didn’t get the memo, or thought they could get glory by staying behind to fight more? Either way, it was quite memorable realizing that approximately one in 16,000 enemy battleships got straight-up abandoned by their TCS.
I highly doubt that said battleships appreciated getting nailed with artillery immediately afterwards, but if they didn’t want to risk dying a whole lot, they shouldn’t have tried to invade Nastellan.
Anyway, the retreat continued until it reached the edge of Nastellan’s TCS coverage. Kaynati denied permission to pursue on the grounds of not wanting to risk getting baited into an ambush, and so we simply waited.
Twenty kiloseconds passed, before the offensive abruptly resumed at a different location, and Kaynati’s force was redirected to meet it. This time the UDAF had a lot more Skimmers than before, along with a whole lot of Destroyers. They were still pretty short on artillery, though, which made it relatively easy for us to maintain a local advantage in Voidskipper casualty rates.
I spent the next thirty kiloseconds nailing enemy Voidskippers with Kaynati’s fleet, with rather a lot of ammunition left to fire off it if came to that. That’s when we got the news that the UDAF had committed to a fourth front, even bigger than all the rest combined. The hundred billion warskippers they’d sent were a massive chunk of their starforce, and they’d committed them all to a single attack approaching Nastellan from the south pole.
I was still with Kaynati’s group though; stopping the UDAF here wasn’t any less important just because another much bigger attack was going on elsewhere.
That said, with the adjusted balance of enemy ships here, Kaynati put an ammunition conservation order into effect, and got to forcing TCS breaches. It was honest work, opening fire on briefly exposed enemy warskippers, but the rate of casualties we were inflicting was definitely dropping off as time went by. The UDAF forces were learning, and they were being much more proactive about routing extra Skimmers where they were needed, along with briefly withdrawing their warskippers if necessary.
This kind of turned things into a bluffing fight, our beamships and command constantly shuffling things around and trying to mislead the UDAF about where we were trying to breach. This kind of worked, in that it at least prevented us from taking quite so many Beamship casualties. That said, it also had an unexpected benefit in the form of massively overtaxing the enemy’s carriers.
Skimmers need carriers to get anywhere faster than light, and with all the shuffling around our beamships were doing, the enemy carriers simply didn’t have time to pick up and drop off all the Skimmers they needed to.
Even aside from carriers occasionally being exposed to artillery fire in the event of a TCS breach, they clearly hadn’t trained for stutter retrieval on anything like the scale they’d need to for it to be reliable in combat, meaning they had to sit in place for Skimmers to get taken aboard. Couldn’t do that in a combat zone without getting instantly vaporized by beamfire though, meaning Skimmers had to be retrieved an entire light minute behind enemy lines. In space combat, that sort of time mattered, and it mattered a whole lot.
So pretty soon we’d managed to completely scramble the enemy’s Skimmer density in a way they couldn’t quickly respond to. That meant the TCS breaches we managed to inflict quickly started getting a lot more severe, though mostly in the sense of volume taken rather than casualties inflicted. Still, things really weren’t going as the UDAF had planned here; their nobles considering artillery dishonorable had definitely backfired.
Speaking of artillery, I actually got an opportunity that very few artillery ships get: counter-battery fire. You see, when artillery fires, all the friendly Skimmers between them and the target need to get out of the way for a moment. It’s less severe for us due to the complex warp trajectories we can give our shots, but UDAF artillery was straight-shooting. That meant that when a whiffed shot blew up pretty darn close to one of our Flankers – but not close enough to cause significant damage – and the trajectory was backtraced, I was perfectly lined up in both space and time to send a bomb right back through that UDAF ship’s shot corridor.
I guessed a few ranges, quickly fired a salvo of four shots, and got back to breach exploitation. 134 seconds later, the light from those shots I’d fired got back to friendly observers, and it became clear that I’d managed to directly nail the enemy artillery ship with one of my shots, even though I’d grossly overestimated the range. The warp bubble had come to an abrupt halt as a result of slamming into something so dense, the bomb inside went off, and that artillery ship was reduced to mere debris.
Kaynati grumbled at me for taking such an unsure shot, but the fact that I’d actually hit one of the enemy artillery ships meant they were grudgingly approving.
I didn’t get another opportunity for counter-battery fire for the entire rest of that deployment, though a few other Guudangs certainly did. It’s just really rare for the trajectories to line up like that.
Anyway, another few customary days later I ran low on ammo and got rotated back to Shoal 9906 for re-arming. Once I was reloaded and maintenance checks were complete, I queried command as to where I would be deployed next. As it turned out, I would be headed for the fourth front; the third front was cooling down a bit, while the UDAF had just been committing more and more forces to the south pole.
And so, off I went.