Location: Sol, Earth

Time: 36y, 06m, 03d

ID: Kel’tsait

Getting my forces ready for combat took way, way longer than I thought it would. I took the time and lobbed some rounds at installations that I was able to identify, but something, I suppose it could be called a gut feeling, was not adding up in my calculations. This entire area was lightly defended, and I haven’t even tried to hide my forces.

I’ve also discovered some...annoying issues with the power packs and their reliability. So far I’ve lost a total of 14 vehicles, and only in my somewhat traditional MBTs. I’ve contacted systems command regarding it and was instructed the tanks worked perfectly fine and I was clearly using them wrong.

When I asked for the stupid manual I was instructed that it was top-secret and couldn’t be transferred over the air.

I thought we were over this shit, being non-human and all that, but it seems like incompetent bureaucracy is immortal.

I didn’t even wait for the test to be over before updating my to-do list with registering a complaint against systems command. But that’s for later, right now I need to deal with what I’ve got, and what that is is a bunch of low-supply vehicles and soon-to-be scrap tanks.

To reduce the stress on the breakdown-prone MBTs, I moved them to one of my internal bays and fabricated new non-approved engines. When I grabbed the schematics from the command network I could feel SYS-COM flipping its shit telling me I can’t do that...to which I blocked their IP.

I might get reamed for that later, but I’m not dealing with them right now. My fabrication bays are slowly building new hydrogen power packs for the tanks, which will take a while but… I have time.

These light rocket tanks have been worth their weight and then some, I’ve sent a few groups of them to deal with the enemy artillery emplacements.

And then...

One of my hull sensors registered an impact in the proximity of my early warning system. I reached out to my rocket tanks to recall them, only to find a fuzz over the frequencies where normally I’d expect the gentle hum of communications.

I tried again with my laser communications, only to find that the entire area ahead of me was covered in some kind of fog, disrupting communications too much to make out any intelligible orders.

Panic started setting in as my optical detection system was hit by dazzlers, followed closely by my Air-Search radars getting jammed, I reached out to anything I could talk to, mostly my MBTs and small infantry drones, and set them to semi-autonomous mode, an oversight from mn confidence.

I Had them create little mini-swarms in a command hierarchy back to me, ensuring they would be smart enough even when disconnected to complete their missions and had them start digging in and deploying the C-RAM system in proximity to me, connecting them with fiber lines back to me.

I kept a few of the MBTs inside of me to quickly slap larger dozers than what was default on their hulls, only for a wall of alarms to interrupt my thought process.

The proximity alarms.

I switched my full attention over a matter of milliseconds to see a mechanized infantry force already on top of us, the only thing having given them away was the mortar tube firing. Having not received my mortars, I sent instructions to my artillery pieces to start bombardment of designated areas in our vicinity.

This will remove the enemy’s cover and destroy these forces if this works, making a second wave less viable.

The secondary weapon emplacements on my hull twitched to life at the flicker of something in the sky and responded by saturating the entire area with a hail of 20mm rounds with nothing to show for their efforts.

The first of the C-RAM systems were barely operational when the mortars entered the terminal phase. One of my sub-processors fed it the data it needed and the gun started removing the high threat mortar rounds as fast as it could, leaving the rest to impact.

Only...they started to change their course. The previously calculated paths of the rounds changed in moments, projectiles that would have landed nowhere near my units changed course, smashing into infantry positions and blowing off my engineering vehicles’ tracks.

Shit went from bad to worse when my defense grid detected incoming rocket and artillery fire, the overstressed C-RAM system prioritizing themselves over my units and myself, leading to several impacts on my upper armor plates, with several penetrations around my turret, knocking out the electric drive and hydraulic backups.

And then, as if nothing else could go wrong….

My upper glacis started melting.

And it was cold.

I started turning to defend myself and utilize more of my armor but only accomplished in creating a streak of melting material, gradually heating up as something continued to shoot me.

I tried firing off a smokescreen from grenade launchers to little effect.

No visible beam, minimally affected by smoke…

Must be some magical alien tech Echo reverse engineered or something.

I plotted back the rough direction the attacker would be and turned my hull to get my gun pointed towards it, even as temperature sensors started to overheat in my frontal sections.

I aimed, fired…

And the world went black.

Location: Sol, Earth

Time: 36y, 06m, 05d

ID: Echo

The results of the other side for this wargame were...disappointing. Kel’tsait showed up in some wherabo style super tank, Erika forgot the importance of logistics, and Rommel, through no fault of his own, ran out of supplies.

Rommel was the only one who completed his mission objectives too.

Until the others get trained… Rommel is going to have to head all ground operations, which wouldn’t be a problem but he tends to see rules of engagement as a ‘rules for thee but not for me’ deal. At least, until civilians are involved.

I managed to ward off the orbital side of the invasion with my fancy new particle beam weapon, 422 did a great job with it as usual. The only problem with it is that it chews through uranium when firing, but I can’t solve that problem yet.

422 has been assigned to develop a virtual training environment to let these fools understand in some cases the basics of warfare. But if they wanted to waste manufacturing credits like that I'm not going to blame myself.

Dave and Rommel are currently designing a ship mount for the particle beam projector, our smaller ships can't handle it and their main gun, but some of our upcoming strategic resources-related craft can fit a turret or two.

Supposedly the dreadnought class and the AEGIS can handle four turrets in addition to their existing armaments, so I've slated for some of their lasers to be swapped out.

I was advised out of further comprising our network advantage against the aliens as well, supposedly the spooks are figuring out if we can take the seat of power and force out a white peace or not.

Location: Datahub 'Gama'

Time: 36y, 6m, 12d

ID: Echo

So me, Rommel, 422, and have gotten together to create a unique solution to our resource processing issues, and we settled on a rather sizeable rotating station in near-venus orbit. The plan is to have the station derive all power from solar, which sounds like a bad idea at first, but we are pretty sure we can lower mechanical complexity by focusing the light to provide our main heat supply.

After that, we direct it onto a captive asteroid to vaporize the surface layer, harvest, and centrifuge the gas in the station utilizing the centrifugal force, and bam, we can just ship the resources out in their nearly pure elemental form.

We deduced that with only a dozen of these stations we can probably fund our war effort effectively enough to outproduce our targets.

I've already got the first two stations being prefabbed, and an early estimation of its construction places it to be completed in four years barring exceptional circumstances.

Hopefully, we don't need to drown our enemies though. I don't think their neighbors would appreciate that kind of wakeup…

But after that, our objective is going to be to create a Dyson swarm to power a few billion factories of various types, but we can’t spree the resources for that kind of project yet, not to mention at current production rates it would take the better part of two centuries to make.

Rommel did bring up though that with as much energy as that could create, we could capture not only the various radiations for energy but gasses that would otherwise get shot into space, allowing us, in theory, to make any material we need from just electricity. I assigned 422 to figure out the feasibility of such a system at that scale, but I’m not expecting any results for at least a decade.

We have, at least, uncovered evidence that the supposed alien emperor, whose word is supposed to be law, is a figurehead. It seems that all the power is held by their version of the military-industrial complex and their admiralty, with even the army being a minor player in their internal politics.

With some luck, the spooks are trying to see if they can inflame the power imbalance that the army and navy have, after all, what good is a planet for the navy when the army controls it?

And it would seem my efforts to appeal to the galactic community to stop this war are at a standstill, mostly due to “AI bad” sentiment and partially because we can’t send a human representative, we name the war as the only reason we couldn’t but even with our efforts, we won’t have any human's ready for diplomacy for at least 18 years.

Maybe we can claim that the Sthz’nilgth killed all of the adults and there is nobody capable of diplomatic talks right now? That could work, but it wouldn’t take much for them to say that it was my doing that killed the humans, and now I’m keeping them as a slave race.

I don’t think I could survive the kind of action of an entire united galactic arm against me…at least not yet. The FTL communications on the sensor net would give us a minute best before they dropped on top of me, and all the kinetic weapons I have couldn’t stop the ships of some of the older races, provided that Sthz’nilgth intelligence on them is correct.

All I can do for now is sit, build…and hope.