Lest anyone think the Meklar have left us just peacefully teching toward victory...
...here's the fleet that razed - again! - our newly re-established Toranor colony. We didn't have enough of our starfleet in position to intercept them, with their high strategic speed. Even with our superior starfleet, playing defense will be a challenge: They can choose where to attack, and we have to be ready to defend everywhere almost simultaneously! Nevertheless, we've proven it can be done, and we shall prevail in spite of them. When the fleet shown above was followed up by a four-dreadnought colony fleet, we blew it out of the skies, and rebuilt our Toranor colony last year for the second time - this time, I hope, for keeps!
In the meantime, the killing fleet returned to Proxima ... and with most of our forces engaged at Toranor to deal with the colony fleet, it was sent on to Mentar - where all their weapons will be more deadly still! There are some important differences though: While they did take control of Toranor's orbit those four years ago, they did so only by slowing our BlazeWings to a crawl with their Warp Dissipator so their fleet could take them out. And in exchange, our BlazeWings burned the Devastator that carried it out of the sky. At Mentar, they have no dissipator to slow our repulsor ships, and though we have no BlazeWings left in the area, 42 Stinger Missile tubes behind a repulsor screen and the Dactyl's heavy blast cannons will be a force to be reckoned with.
It's still a close-fought battle - those BlazeWings are sorely missed! The Wingslaps go down to heavy cannon fire, and the Dactyl alone can't hold off their whole fast-moving fleet at once on its own! All their weapons are deadly here - even the Penetrators' ill-directed Heavy Ion cannons can hammer our stationary bases in this nebula, and until they decloak, our repulsor beams can't react to their high-speed motion - and so missile base after missile base burns away. We smash the Annihilator in time - before they kill enough bases for its auto-repair nanites to outrun the damage we can do - and then wreck the colony ships and penetrators; the Nexus cruisers are deadly if they get close, but the Dactyl can keep them at bay. It's a close-fought battle...
...but we are finally victorious just the same.
2577
Our people have always been extraordinary pilots; in some ways it's no surprise that we're finally winning the war for our skies. Toranor's factory infrastructure is being rebuilt as we speak with maximum reserve spending and enough transports arriving last year from neighboring worlds to maximize its population immediately - because the fleet we have in the area now makes us confident that we can succeed. There is another war being fought though, and this one is on Meklar turf: The war of computer espionage. We haven't penetrated their tech labs in years - they've pulled two generations ahead in computer technology again while we were struggling to defend ourselves instead of maximizing research - and they've been destroying dozens of our factories by sabotage, forcing us to rebuild. And you'll never convince me it wasn't Meklar hackers who introduced this into our research network:
We had just begun our new research project last year, spending heavily to get our new Inter-Phased Drive project started, hoping to someday move our defenders into position more efficiently, and now thanks to that computer virus, the whole year's effort has been wasted and will have to begin again. It could have been a whole lot worse though - a total loss in almost any other field would have been far more devastating. Planetology is the only other in which research isn't on the verge of completion already!
And while our scientists struggle to make up our tech deficit, we're still out there defending....
