5356 The Guns of Armageddon
When it came to warships, the Red Fleet usually fielded the strongest ones.
Unlike the mechers who liked to turn many warships into part-time mech carriers, the fleeters sincerely believed in the power of pure warships.
From the perspective of the people who controlled all of these impressive vessels, practically every problem could be solved with an excess application of firepower!
The bigger the guns, the better!
The greater the quantity of guns, the better!
It was not without reason why the Common Fleet Alliance back in the Milky Way built over a hundred thousand battleships over the course of many generations. Each additional battleship that measured over 1 kilometer long represented another security guarantee.
Warships tended to last for a long time as long as they were properly maintained. Periodic upgrades to their systems could easily keep them relevant for at least two centuries.
The Common Fleet Alliance therefore pursued a strategy of quantity accumulation back in the Milky Way.
Even though god mechs were so individually superior that it was difficult for the CFA to defeat them, they would probably get exhausted to death if they had to hunt down every single warship that the fleeters had ever built!
Combined with policy of keeping as much of their assets and infrastructure as mobile and temporal as possible, it was impossible for the MTA to rely on its god mechs to wipe out all of the warfleets of the CFA in any reasonable capacity!
Every decision had consequences, however.
The CFA's pursuit of quantity caused them to direct much of their research & development towards reducing the cost of all of these large and unwieldy vessels.
While the fleeters still allocated a lot of R&D towards innovating more powerful weapons and other ship systems, the lack of priority in this direction had caused the overall state of warships to stagnate over the centuries.
It was no surprise that the CFA never invested too much resources in the development of dreadnoughts.
The admirals who originally pushed for this initiative had lost their bet and got pushed out of power.
The remaining leaders within the CFA were all adherents to the quantity doctrine, so dreadnoughts had long been dismissed as extravagant wastes of resources.
If not for the fact that the fleeters had already expended an extravagant amount of top-quality resources to construct the ones that were still in existence, they would have been dismantled already so that the recycled materials could be used in more rational ways!
At this point, few people knew how many dreadnoughts the CFA had built, and even fewer people knew how many of them had been transferred to the Red Ocean.
This was critical information as the power shown by these amazing dreadnoughts were not that much worse from god mechs! The integration of hyper technology seemed to give every RF warship wings, but this was especially the case for dreadnoughts in particular!
This caused a lot of people to become reassured. They gained greater confidence in the Red Fleet's ability to hold the native aliens back and protect red humanity from extinction.
The critical question now was how many dreadnoughts the Red Fleet had at its disposal.
Clever minds who watched the astonishing live feeds already started to infer a lot of clues.
"This shouldn't be all of them. All of our god pilots have left human space, which means that they have fewer scruples about leaving their people behind. This can only be the case if the Red Fleet has stationed at least a handful of dreadnoughts in human-occupied space. There should be one for each major alliance, which means that there are at least three dreadnoughts that have yet to be unveiled."
No matter how many dreadnoughts the RF had inherited from its mother organization, each one presented red humanity the hope that ordinary humans could approximate the immense combat power of a god mech through mass production.
How easy was it for the fleeters to produce more dreadnoughts?
Could the RF produce another one of these amazing warships without the resources and infrastructure of its mother organization?
The answers to these questions had massive implications to red humanity!
Those who witnessed the unfolding of Operation Night Jazz watched the dreadnoughts more closely as they demonstrated their superiority.
Of all of the eight dreadnoughts deployed so far, the Guns of Armageddon that was assigned to the First Armada made the most astonishing impression!
The other seven dreadnoughts displayed all kinds of unique and unprecedented effects, but the Guns of Armageddon eschewed all of this in favor of maximum firepower!
All along her 18-kilometer long hull, huge gun batteries opened fire on the largest and toughest defensive installations.
Each of these powerful enemy assets had managed to withstand a lot of damage so far with the help of their powerful transphasic energy shields. Their larger sizes and more powerful generators enabled them to last long enough to serve as defensive anchors of the outer defensive sphere.
Each of them had to be destroyed in order for the First Armada to reach the Tenth Tide Station!
Unless a large formation of invading human warships concentrated all of their firepower onto these defensive strongholds, the powerful generators ensured their defenses remained in top shape.
Yet once the Guns of Armageddon began to unleash the power accumulated in her primary energy cannons, the tough segmented transphasic energy shields in the way exploded in an instant!
For whatever reason, whenever the crimson beams came into contact with the transphasic energy shields, the latter did not just get overwhelmed.
They exploded with great violence, causing all of the other nearby segmented energy shields to sustain severe damage as well!
This caused a lot of devastation to the alien strongholds as the damage inflicted by a single energy beam was already powerful enough to overwhelm multiple layers of energy shields at once!
"Fire!"
What amazed both humans and aliens was that the Guns of Armageddon only took a brief amount of time to fire her primary gun batteries yet again.
This firing rate exceeded that of every other RF battleship in the First Armada!
The targeted alien strongholds could do nothing aside from allowing the stupendously powerful crimson energy beams to strike at their weakened energy shields.
More segments blew up, causing much of the surviving layers to sustain a large amount of follow-up damage!
Each salvo from the 18-kilometer long dreadnought hammered the defensive strongholds without giving them sufficient time to recover their defenses.
The strongest advantage of energy shields was that they could regain their integrity during a battle, but there was always a limit.
The Guns of Armageddon did not care for this and continued to pound the stressed shields with contemptuous ease!
Each dazzling crimson energy beam rained down explosive fire onto the alien defenses.
The power of fire enhanced each of these hot and radiant attacks. It reacted explosively whenever it came into contact with a transphasic energy shield.
Each majestic strike caused observers to have the illusion that the crimson energy beam had the power to boil an ocean!
How could the aliens possibly resist this kind of firepower?
The entire outer defensive sphere seemed to bend and wilt in the face of the endless crimson energy beams!
Soon enough, a defensive stronghold that had previously managed to resist a lot of firepower crumbled as the large quantity of weakened energy shields exploded all at once!
The Guns of Armageddon unexpectedly focused several of her massive primary cannons onto the same stronghold, thereby causing it to lose its most important defensive barrier far too quickly!
Escape pods and vehicles already started to launch from the fortified floating structure. Many different orvens and puelmers had completely lost their courage. None of them had any faith that their defenses could last against the might of the heretical human superwarship!
As soon as the crimson energy beams struck the solid transphasic alloy structure of the exposed strongholds, the explosions grew even more violent than before!
The resilient and expensive alloys became subjected to so much fire energy that they failed to resist the incoming attacks.
Instead, they combusted and exploded as if they were warheads!
The damage to the fortification was catastrophic! A single energy beam was enough to wipe out a substantial chunk of the massive structure.
Soon enough, half-a-dozen of these strategically important defensive strongholds exploded into so many different pieces that hardly anything recognizable was left intact!
The aliens assigned to the outer defensive sphere instantly lost a lot of confidence. Their morale plummeted so quickly that the rest of the First Armada was able to cut into them with substantially greater ease than before!
Amazingly enough, the Guns of Armageddon was just getting started.
Other battleships who tried to discharge so many powerful attacks in quick succession would have reached their limits a long time ago! Their energy transmission systems would have gotten overloaded while all of their heatsinks would have gotten hot enough to melt at this time!
Even now, the Guns of Armageddon fired her powerful energy cannons so many times that their muzzles radiated a huge amount of heat!
What was strange was that this did not slow down the dreadnought in the slightest.
In fact, the opposite was happening. The more the Guns of Armageddon stripped the energy shields of hapless alien warships and caused their transphasic hulls to combust, the more fire E energy got released in her immediate environment.
This seemed to cause the space around the 18-kilometer hull to turn into a form of purgatory.
Anyone caught outside would have combusted and melted when exposed to so much fire energy!
The Guns of Armageddon on the other hand behaved as if she was in her element. The fire energy she unleashed began to change the environment in a way that allowed her cannons to fire even faster than before!
Her firing rate increased by 20 percent since she had begun to fire her volleys! This caused the alien commanders to gain a greater sense of urgency.
The other human warships were stronger than usual, but their performance still fell within a reasonable range.
These dreadnoughts on the other hand completely broke the previously upper technological limits of the human race!
Even though the Throne of Lies that attacked the outer defensive sphere from another direction caused a lot of disruption to affected alien troops, the Red Cabal did not consider her to be an overwhelming threat.
The Guns of Armageddon was different! Her damage output had the potential to pose a serious threat against the gods of the native aliens!
For this reason, more and more alien warships and defensive installations directed their firepower towards the larger of the two dreadnoughts.
At this time, one of her few weaknesses became exposed.
The abundance of fire E energy in the environment boosted her offensive power but also weakened her defensive power by a similar margin.
Though the azure energy shields still managed to resist all incoming attacks without letting anything get through, their integrity recovered a lot slower than normal, causing them to slowly become frailer and frailer.
Unfortunately for the aliens, the unrelenting damage inflicted by the Guns of Armagaddon along with the much less hindered advance of the other human warships caused the alien defenders to suffer too many losses in a short amount of time!
The quantity of intact alien warships and defensive installations dwindled so quickly that their remaining firepower could no longer overcome the azure energy shields of the formidable dreadnought any longer!
The surviving alien commanders made the correct decision and directed all of their remaining firepower towards destroying the lesser warships of the First Armada!
While the active shield links enabled numerous alien warships to share their defensive capacity with each other, this tech did not make them invincible.
The aliens already knew that as long as they applied enough total damage to the shield linked warships, they could overwhelm the connected energy shields all at once!
Dozens of RA and RF warships crumbled in quick succession as the desperate aliens sought to take down as many human lives and assets as possible!
Despite the mounting losses, the First Armada quickly wiped out the remaining alien opposition within range!
Under the threat of the dreadnoughts and other assets of the First Armada, the remaining elements of the outer defensive sphere no longer dared to approach anymore.
Instead, they regrouped and retreated to the middle defensive sphere which happened to be significantly more prepared!
