Here's our new Fusion-powered starfleet thus far:
A single unarmed scanner ship out of Escalon is the first warp-4 starship - and for the time being, the only starship of any kind - in our empire. Thankfully, the Meklar haven't yet taken aggressive action, so we're going to take the war to them! Yes, with an unarmed scanner. If I'm going to defend against them, I need to know what's on their ships! The SkyEye 4.0 will depart for Ursa immediately to get a report on the Meklar fleet!
2510
There must have been some kind of Meklar plot: Was the old emperor kidnapped? There was certainly no reason to despair!
These guys have only class 2 ECM, and in spite of their impressive shielding on individual bases, they have no planetary shields. Galos alone could produce enough small fusion bombers to wipe out their entire empire in a matter of years. If they're going to stop us, they're going to need a really, really impressive fleet. Only a few ships here though; our scanner will have to move on to Proxima to see their real forces!
2511
I think I see the problem. The Meklar fleet is a legitimate threat.
Their designs have at least semi-decent combat speed, and Nexus cruisers in numbers would pose a serious threat to any Alkari who were fools enough to cower behind missile bases instead of taking the battle into space with combat fleets. The Nemesis dreadnoughts and Tornado cruisers could eventually (eventually!) freeze even our speedy fighters-to-be in place if we couldn't kill them soon enough, and pound away at immobilized fleets from long range. They'd pound away slowly, mind, with only two heavy beams on a Tornado and seven on each Nemesis dread, but it certainly must be taken into consideration. Between the two of them, if they played it right, they might even be able to stop a bomber group before it reached its target!
Of course, they couldn't stop two. A dedicated bomber blitz will still reduce these sorry Meklar to so much rust and slag! We'll get Galos and the whole empire pumping out two different classes of Fusion bombers, and the death machines won't even know what hit th...
Eh? What's this? You want to talk to me, M5-35? Aren't we at war though? What could you possibly want to talk about?
Huh. I guess it did know what was about to hit it! Sure, we could have won the war and wiped out the entire Meklar population over the next several years, but far be it from me to reject peace when it's offered before hostilities have even broken out! Maybe there's hope after all for a peaceful resolution to our differences!
Or maybe I'm just fooling myself.
