"It was the Cartels first battle since flinging themselves into the vast unknown of space, the first fleet had been tasked with clearing Uzun system of some ancient mining drones. The leftovers of some former civilisation which seemed intent on carrying out their tasks despite their creators long since turning to dust. They were definitely hostile, the engineering division theorising that the materials of their ships just registered as more resources to harvest to them so they had to be removed. However there were more of them than anticipated, as the fleet arrived they were set upon almost immediately. Laser fire and mass driver rounds tore through the void with agonising silence as the fleet simply fought to survive long enough to perform an emergency jump. A bloody nose for the Cartel's first foray into interstellar combat but they would learn the lesson well and return ever stronger."
Stardate: 28-03-2236
Here we are again, continuing our journey toward galactic domination with the Fox Cartel crime syndicate. Things get immediately more interesting as another empire contacts us, the Yeon Progenitors, another fallen empire which is less than good for a few different reasons. Firstly it heavily limits our expansion options both in terms of territory but also branch offices and secondly we have no idea if they are going to be as quirky as the Homolog Continuum. Only time will tell but we are slowly being penned in with only hyper-lane routes to the North and North-West being open for us to continue exploring so long as we can clear our the hostiles in them.
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| The Yeon Progenitors, yet another fallen empire within a handful of jumps of Cartel space.. Potentially all kinds of not good. |
The remains of the first fleet finally limp back into the home system meaning the survivors can repair and I can start replenishing the ships. However rather than simply going back to Uzun with corvettes I'll be getting destroyers at some point so perhaps that will prove to be the better option. Bigger guns. Maybe even a bigger fleet, let's see what our scientists give us to play with though it seems the society research division is first into the oligarchs office today giving us two new buildings to play with. The planetary capital and the hall of judgement, the next project we finally are starting to get some interesting options to play with. Extra food and a food boosting building, not so useful right now. Extra star-bases is interesting but I barely have enough alloys to get my navy back up to scratch much less build more star-bases. An increase in the admin cap however now that is useful, so that's what we'll do. I also make sure to upgrade the planetary admin building on Vulpinus with the far superior planetary capital building.
The admin cap basically means if you go over it that the costs of technologies, traditions, leaders and such gets more expensive and it's worse for a Mega-corp like the Fox Cartel but that new tech should take the edge off. I claim a few more systems before they get gobbled up by the rapidly expanding Uriy Suns to our east, we are going to have to deal with them at some point before they get any allies to help them preferably. However for now we can't even handle a bunch of old mining robots so perhaps it's best to wait given they are actually more powerful than we are.
Our science ship finds evidence of a shrine to some old gods from the Cartels ancient past. To say this is all very weird and a little worrying would be understating it but let's see how far this goes before I need to apply explosive ordinance to it. Hopefully it's just some elaborate hoax or cosmic coincidence rather than anything sinister. Meanwhile our other science ship finds a capsule ticking down to a date 42 years and 3 days from now. It could be a bomb but it could just be someones alarm clock, so I opt to keep an eye on it. The shrine contained a vast amount of initially hard to read text but as to what it all means we'll have to wait and see what our science ships discover.
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| It's hard to figure out where this trail is going to lead in regard to our 'old gods' but our scientists will figure it out, it's what we pay them for after-all. |
The physics division finishes researching the extra research alternatives which will be a big help in the long-term so let's see what goodies they have for us to research next. Improved reactor boosters, plasma throwers, improved hyper drives, more energy credits and more research from orbital stations. Now that's a lot of useful options with the possible exception of hyper-drives for now, however sticking to my goal of improving my military I opt to research plasma throwers to give us some much needed firepower. Much the the glee of the admiral who practically skipped out of the oligarchs office.
I now start building up our new planet, Hades by adding a generator district not sure yet if I want to specialise the planet or just keep it balanced yet though I am leaning toward balanced. Mainly as for now it doesn't look like we are going to be getting a lot of planets anytime soon. Then our engineering division finally finishes researching, an entire new ship class, destroyers!
Before I get ahead of myself with ship design let's choose our next project from the available options. Unlocking fighters, star-holds which are basically the next step up of star-base, coil-guns (I can already see the admiral grinning again), extra housing and more minerals from mining. There are genuinely no bad options in that however I am sticking to my guns literally and I set the coil-guns to research. I see war in our near future and I intend for the Cartel to win it.
Now for something more fun, designing our first destroyer class ship now typically I design my destroyers as picket ships. They will have flak and point defences to screen the larger ships from fighters and missiles, however I feel at present I have more need of something that can destroy lots of smaller ships as quickly as possible. So I opt for the gunship bow to get the most weapons possible, the artillery bow was tempting but I feel the gunship suits better what we are designing right now. For the stern however, sticking with the more is better approach, I choose the interceptor section for it's two weapon hard-points. I give it an even balance of shields and armour in the six utility slots and slap a reactor booster in for good measure. Weapons wise I give it a blue laser in it's medium hard-point and four mass drivers in the smalls. This shall be dubbed the Heuntzelman-class destroyer named after a hero from the Cartels ancient past.
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| Our newest and largest space faring military vessel to date the Heuntzelman class destroyer. |
Now to add them to the 1st fleet and begin construction, they may be retrofitted in future before we take them into battle but I figure it's best to build them now. I add five of them to the reinforcement queue along with six more Cunning class corvettes which entirely depletes my alloy stockpile. This is as big a fleet as any single admiral of mine can currently command so let's hope it's going to be enough. I am still considering waiting for one or two more weapon techs to boost firepower let's see how much our scientists want a bonus in their wages.
It's at this point something very strange happens, a wreck we discovered some months ago leads to a strange encounter with a worryingly similar ship though this one is crewed. It seems at least as if they are from the past or that ship was from the future (time travel, oof.) We have a choice do we avoid potentially contaminating the timeline and close the channel or tell them?
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| Time travel.. What could possibly go wrong? |
The Cartel opts to tell them to avoid the pulsar that killed their future selves, however rather than replying to us after a brief exchange among themselves they simply power up their engines and leave. Well, your welcome I guess, don't let that pulsar hit your tail on the way out, the Fox Cartel may be criminals by they are good mannered.
To finish off this part we hit our next election however as before I lack the influence to favour a candidate so it comes down to essentially chance, let's see where the dice of fate land. Our current Oligarch Faustus Volcatius remains in power even at the age of 72, a venerable fox indeed. It's both a good and bad thing though, we keep the research bonus but it won't be long before he pops his clogs and we have to elect someone new anyway.
As always thank you very much for taking the time to read this, keep your eyes peeled for the next part soon! All feedback, constructive criticism and comments are greatly appreciated too!
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