2395:
The world of Promised Land had only been colonized 50 years prior, but it was rapidly becoming famous throughout the Inner Sphere for its excellent vineyards. After one of their champagnes won Wine of the Year from a prestigious Terran wine magazine, Robert Marsden was heard to express a desire to try some of their wines.
Unfortunately for Marsden, one of the people who heard this was Marshal Reiner Aschenbrener, a noted hawk and opponent of Marsden's focus on peaceful economic development. Using his position as head of the General Staff, Aschenbrener drafted orders to the Lt. Gen. Freya West, commander of the local military district, and an ally in several internal Lyran factional struggles. He ordered her to implement the Archon's orders to invade and seize the planet immediately. West sprung into action quickly - suspecting Marsden's orders may have been "overstated", but eager to finally use her forces in battle, she gathered up ten LCAF regiments, commandeered a substantial number of civilian JumpShips and DropShips, and carried them to Promised Land to expand the Commonwealth.
Due to the hasty and poorly-planned preparations, the Mariks caught wind of the imminent attack. While they had no naval forces in the sector to resist the attack, they managed to rush reinforcing regiments to Promised Land ahead of the Lyran flotilla, and they prepared their defences. However, they were unprepared for the scale of the attack - Promised Land was a minor world, and despite being on the Lyran border it had a garrison of only two regiments under ordinary circumstances. The equivalent of five more were rushed in, but the defenders were still outnumbered in both aerospace and ground forces.
The battle was hard-fought and lasted for two weeks after planetfall, as the Free Worlds units fought bravely and competently. However, the Lyran troops also fought well, with West in particular belying her "social general" reputation and launching several skilled combined-operations attacks on defensive hardpoints. In the end, the Marik numbers were not sufficient, and when a regiment-sized reinforcing flotilla was forced to avoid planetfall by the Lyran aerospace forces, the remaining defenders laid down their arms.
True enough, Marsden's orders had been grossly "misunderstood", and while he publicly praised Aschenbrener and West for their successes, he was privately furious. However, his initial fury was dwarfed by the response when he found out the damage from the battle. Not only had nearly two regiments of Lyran troops been killed or crippled in the fighting, but one of the defensive hardpoints that West had reduced so ably was the Chaffins Vintners facility that had produced the infamous champagne. After three DropShips landed in their vineyard, the ensuing fight had resulted in a vat of brandy being set ablaze by Lyran shells, which destroyed the production facilities and over two years of wine that was in the process of production. When news broke of the attack, Promised Land wine had sold out of stores almost instantly, and was now virtually impossible to find.
In the end, Marsden did get his bottle, bought by Aschenbrener at auction for an extortionate price. Aschenbrener gave the bottle as a retirement gift, to celebrate his allegiance to the Archon as he left military service due to unspecified health concerns. West, who was only following orders, was given a promotion and left to the larger and better-equipped Alexandria Military District. However, her new staff was comprised almost entirely of noted Marsden loyalists, and her appeals to a commander's traditional prerogative to choose her staff fell on deaf ears as the LCAF's Bureau of Personnel had "no other qualified soldiers available for your staff at this time".
2396:
Two of the great leaders of the Inner Sphere left their offices in 2396. Franco Liao, confident that he had established the Confederacy on a strong footing, elected to resign his position as Coordinator in early 2396. As he did not have any children, he was replaced by his more aggressive brother Kurnath. Franco decided to retire to his old homeworld of Liao, but Franco was an old man. After 40 years in power, his health was failing. He only had a few months to enjoy his retirement before the reaper came to visit, and Franco died before the year was out.
Note: It seems that in canon, Franco was only 48 years old in 2396. But given that he and Kurnath both die soon, and neither dies violently, I'm going to amend them to be substantially older. It's not plausible that a 12 year old would be able to take control of the Commonwealth, after all, or even at age ~19 when he did in canon.
Nihongi Kurita had been making enemies ever since he took the throne, with his flighty and carefree approach to governance. By the early 2390s, several groups had formed to try to remove him from the Coordinator's office, whether peacefully or otherwise. Most prominent of these was a group led by Nihongi's son Robert, the heir apparent. However, none of their plans came to fruition - instead, Nihongi's love of horses was what eventually did him in. Riding down a wooded pathway on an icy day, a large branch broke under the weight of the ice near Robert. Upon hearing the loud cracking noise, his horse was spooked and galloped down the road carelessly. The icy footing got the better of the horse, and it lost its footing in a horrible crash, throwing Nihongi head-first into a tree. While he survived for some hours, he never regained consciousness. Robert assumed the role of Coordinator, and immediately set to work at rooting out he slackness and corruption that had taken hold under his father's incompetent tenure.
2397:
The new group of admirals leading the Taurian navy had several very sophisticated theories about the missile-based combat that had become common in Inner Sphere battles, and the relationship between point defence, missile launchers, and fighters. However, what they lacked was a good set of data with which to calibrate their theories. At considerable expense, they managed to launch a few live-fire tests of missile launches to see how they fared against typical point defence installations in a more realistic set of circumstances. While the pinch on the navy's repair budget was substantial, the information gleaned would hopefully help the Navy build more efficient ships going forward.
However, the bickering between different schools of thought began before the first missile was even fired. Commodore Shannon Bream(daughter of the late Vice-Admiral Eugene Bream, who had commanded the fleet in the final stages of the Battle of Taurus 27 years prior) was placed in charge of the testing. However, her choices for the design of the exercise caused several questions among other TCN brass. It was obviously impossible to have human crews aboard the target ships to serve as fire control officers in a live-fire exercise, so Bream had planned to use radio links to a control ship nearby to keep the crews out of the line of fire, but others thought that radio links being damaged in combat would ruin the results. Likewise, she wanted the launches to take place at a range close enough to result in effective concentration of fire, but others believed that long-range fire would remain the norm in most battles and wanted the launch to take place from over twice as far away, at extreme range for typical missiles, and with a more staggered release of launches that was believed to "more accurately represent the low training levels of Federated Suns fighter pilots".
In the end, the new admirals got their way. Bream was removed from command of the exercise, and under Rear Admiral Olivares new assumptions were used instead. Radio links were abandoned, and the number of point-defence guns was doubled instead to compensate for the reduced capacity of automated defences, based on the results of a series of computer simulations. Launches would be staggered over a period of 30 seconds at extreme range, and the automated systems were given full tracking information on the inbound fighters as well as the intended launch order so that they could be guaranteed to be properly functional when the fighters launched.
While the old-guard admirals complained of a whitewash, the new-guard admirals explained why they felt the assumptions to be reasonable, and argued that they were consistent with real-world battle reports from the nations who had used their point-defence installations properly with well-trained crews.
Test #1 was intended as a test of ample point defence against a small attack. Four Marathon-equivalent installations at an ideal angle to the attacking force mounted the equivalent of 240 machine guns, against a launch of 100 missiles. Of the 31 to achieve a successful targeting lock, 29 were shot down by the defending guns. Even with the flimsy construction of the test installations, no serious damage was incurred by the missiles that did hit, as the armor-piercing fuses did not trigger on the light sheet metal of the stations.
Test #2 was intended to be a more "realistic" scenario. 2 Marathon equivalents were used, and due to poorer starting alignment, only a total of 60 machine gun equivalents could be brought to bear. However, these defences were augmented by 12 Crestbreaker small craft(with human crews, as the ship-killer missiles were not expected to pose a threat to the small ships), mounting 648 additional machine guns. A launch of 500 missiles was aimed at this force. Of the 151 missiles to achieve lock, 139 were shot down - the exact kill ratio between stations and small craft was not entirely clear, as many of their guns fired at the same targets, but the official report indicated that the small craft had accounted for "roughly 70% of the total".
Test #3 was intended to be a worst-case scenario, with few defences pitted against very heavy launches. For this, the launching fighters moved to Commodore Bream's originally planned 400 kilometer proximity, to ensure a higher hit percentage (though this did lead to a dissenting report from a commodore known to be quite fond of the newest Taurian ECM systems). Only two Marathon equivalents were used, though again angles were assumed to be in favour of the stations, allowing them the equivalent of 120 machine guns. Against this, a 500 missile launch was again arranged. 384 missiles successfully achieved lock, and the defences shot down 196 of those missiles. The official report took pains to point out that the defensive guns were silenced more quickly by battle damage than they would have been on a true warship or station, and that in a true combat situation defensive fire after the first successful hits should be expected to account for "approximately 100 more missiles" in such a situation.
Test #4 was unplanned, due to the targets from test #1 escaping their expected destruction. Taurian missile stocks were running too low for another full-sized test, so less-resilient training missiles were used instead. Due to the lighter mass of training missiles, 700 missiles could be launched against the four targets(with their 240 machine gun equivalents). However, their inferior seeker heads required the ECM systems on the target to be turned off for the test, and a short-range launch was made at a range of only 100 kilometres. 597 missiles achieved lock, and the guns destroyed 423 of the light training missiles.
While the official report came down strongly in favour of the merits of point defence, reaction among the fleet was more mixed. The report was seen by many as being wildly optimistic, though an enthusiastic minority held out the claim that it actually under-stated the effect of proper defences, since the fighters had not been forced to evade defensive fire and could make their launches more easily. No major changes were made in Taurian doctrine before the turn of the century as a result of these tests, though it was expected that their results would feed into the next generation of ship designs.
2398:
The horrors of repeated invasions that the Capellan Confederation had faced in the 2350s and 2360s were in the past, and the rather ramshackle fleet that had held off the Confederation's enemies had been made strong in the intervening decades of peace. However, to Kurnath Liao, strength existed to be used - it was not enough to defend his worlds, he believed that the Capellans needed to grow. Surrounded by larger realms, the only way to ensure the Confederation could survive in the long term was to guarantee that it had the economic muscle to face those realms head-to-head. With the Free Worlds League distracted by the loss of Promised Land and their desire to recapture it, he expected that they would be the easiest target available to the Confederation.
Basing his plans off the assumption that the FWL had moved the bulk of its fleet north to the Lyran border, the attack was aimed at the south to allow time to advance with comparatively little opposition. The four Qinru Zhe-class raiders were detached for commerce raiding duties in the north, to try to sow chaos and divert forces away from the main thrust. The initial plan was to attack three worlds at a time, but due to a lack of available merchant shipping for the tremendous logistical needs of the campaign, only two could be attacked at a time. The first wave would target Kanata and Deschenes, while the second would attack Hudeiba and Antipolo. Each was covered by a fleet of WarShips, any of which was expected to be sufficient to fight any FWLN fleet that was likely to be in the area.
Kurnath Liao's judgement was correct about the Marik fleet dispositions - one full fleet of six Heracles supported by a single Phalanx was based at Oriente, four jumps from the Capellan attack, but the nearest additional support was at Irian, fully 11 jumps away. The strategic reserve, normally based eight jumps away at Atreus, was deployed to the Lyran sector and would be unable to assist. However, his efforts to distract with commerce raids were rather poorly executed - the intention (to distract, rather than to invade) was clear from the choice of ships, and the raiders were much closer to the fleet base at Irian than the invaders. Rather than advance the forces at Irian to a distant invasion zone, the decision was made to use that fleet to ambush raiders and show the Capellans the potential costs of commerce warfare. Analyzing the reports of various raids, Admiral Kozlow wagered that the planet of Marik would be the next target, and laid a trap at the zenith jump point. The Heracles was a far slower model of ship than the Qinru Zhe, but the Capellan captain had made a habit of jumping in at the standard jump point to reduce wear on his drive coil. The six Heracles spread out around the volume of space that the Capellan would likely use, and waited.
It took a week and a half, and no less than 113 reported mutiny jokes among the crew, but when the raider materialized in the middle of their formation, their patience was rewarded. The CCS Baowei's advanced sensors quickly realized what had happened, and it made for the largest gap in the formation, inwards towards the star, hoping to break from its pursuers and escape to the other side of the hyper limit. However, the fleet's positions had been well chosen, and a substantial engagement with at least one Heracles - in this case, the Bellerophon - was unavoidable. Despite the Qinru Zhe's advantages in speed and range, she was massively outgunned, and she had no fighters. But all she had to do was survive without excessive engine damage, and her efforts to do so nearly paid off. The cannons on the Bellerophon were powerful, but relatively few hit, and the armour was holding. However, the fighter wings capable of rushing to the scene of the battle in time came in from behind the Baowei, and their missiles struck true. Eight armour-piercing missiles struck the rear of the Qinru Zhe, and she lost half her engine power instantly. No longer capable of escape, and grotesquely outnumbered, her crew abandoned ship and scuttled the Baowei to avoid the ship being turned into a prize.
Unaware of the loss of their raider, the invasion began quite successfully. A few regiments had been rushed forward to assist with the defences of the threatened worlds, but it was rapidly realized that they would be unable to withstand a serious invasion without their own naval support, so they were redirected to Guangzho. One regiment was unaware of this redeployment until too late, though they managed to land on Kanata before the invaders through aggressive use of a pirate point and fought bravely in the planet's defence. Assisted by liberal use of orbital bombardment against any substantial concentrations of Marik forces, Kanata and Deschenes both fell within a week of fighting. The Capellan forces were gathered up (save for substantial occupation forces), and moved on to the second-wave targets.
Once it became clear where the Capellan forces were going, the Free Worlders moved to respond. Word had been passed to the forces at Guangzho that the fleet was coming, and that they were expected at Antipolo within a few days, so the FWLA moved to unify their eight regiments and 408 fighters with the inbound FWLN fleet. They jumped into the system four hours after the fleet was scheduled to arrive, hoping to ensure a clear area to jump into. However, one JumpShip jumped extremely close to a Heracles, and was destroyed by a panicked tactical officer before the fleet realized that they had received unexpected reinforcements. After retrieving the few survivors, the unified Marik fleet under Admiral Tomáš Mašek began heading towards the planet to catch up with the Capellans, who were already halfway there. The planetary defenders elected to go underground to avoid detection until their reinforcements arrived, and so the Capellans landed virtually unopposed. For the three days before the fleets met up, the Capellans had the run of the planet, and no major combat took place.
As the two fleets closed in, they tried to get a sense of each other. The sensor systems on the Liao ships were better, and they were not engaged in a deceleration burn, so Admiral Demetri Dish had a fairly accurate read on his opposition - six Heracles, one Phalanx, and roughly 140 DropShips. Their own fleet of six Bringer of Shots, five Wife's Wrath, and one Quzhujian supported by 53 DropShips, was significantly superior in total armour and was expected to be somewhat stronger in support craft, but it was substantially less well-armed than the Marik fleet due to the relative lack of gunships. As well, the numerous Marik DropShips meant that either they were not actually superior in aerospace assets, or that their four regiments would be badly outnumbered if the troops made planetfall. A plan was hatched to use the superior training of the Capellan fighter pilots to ideal effect. The Capellan units knew where and when the Mariks were going to be, and arranged a fighter strike some four hours ahead of their arrival. This was expected to give the fighters sufficient time to return to their carriers and re-arm before the Marik fleet entered range of the planet. The fighters were entirely equipped with Barracudas to hopefully crush the support craft of the Marik fleet before entering gun range.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the high closing speed gave the FWLN very little time to scramble their fighters before the attack landed, and only roughly half of the Marik fighters made it into space before nearly 2500 missiles flew at them. Their targeting was focused on enemy fighters, despite their relatively few numbers - standard Capellan doctrine was to cripple the enemy's fighter strength, and that was what the elite pilots set out to do. In this, they succeeded quite well despite the best efforts of the defensive firepower - almost 400 FWL fighters were obliterated in a moment, though the return fire from the fleet did account for roughly 250 Capellan fighters even with their skilled evasive maneuvering. The fighters peeled off and began returning to base instead of closing to cannon range, and the Marik fleet elected to let them go instead of splitting the fleet near a concentrated enemy force.
The Liao carriers had to struggle mightily to turn around their fighters in time, and the cramped cargo spaces of the Bringer of Shots carriers meant that there were some difficulties getting the correct anti-shipping missiles loaded, but the carrier crews managed to get all the fighters back into space with a few minutes to spare. As the Marik fleet drew closer at fairly low speeds, the lightly armoured Capellan carriers began falling back behind their comrades and the gunships cleared for battle, and on the Marik side the Phalanx and any unarmed DropShips did the same. The Capellans were surprised to see four hundred additional fighters with the Marik fleet, having assumed that they'd already defeated the bulk of the FWLN fighter strength, but the Barracuda-heavy Capellan doctrine was well equipped to handle this surprise.
As had happened a few times already in this battle, the Capellans moved first. Opening fire at extreme range with their ship-based Barracuda launchers, the Liaos probed the Marik defences - few of their missiles actually landed under those circumstances, but the nature of the defensive fire became clearer to their tactical officers, which allowed for better control of the imminent missile swarm. Conversely, the FWLN launched their fighter-based missiles first, trying to force the Capellans to use up their attack at extreme range. Their gambit worked - the Capellans closed a short distance before launching, but not enough to matter. However, the 1800 ship-killers and 500 Barracudas definitely did matter, even at long range. Almost half the remaining Marik fighters died, but the real damage was done to the three Heracles-class battlecruisers that had been targeted for destruction. The FWLS Menelaus blew up instantly, the FWLS Minos lost most of her right broadside and suffered ugly structural damage, and the FWLS Proteus was pockmarked with damage and lost her command bridge and captain, though the executive officer kept the ship mostly functional. Set against the loss of less than 100 Capellan fighters to the Marik missiles, the balance of the battle had definitely shifted.
Once the hellacious bombardment passed, the FWLN tried to turn things back their way. Their ships were still individually superior, and the broadside cannons of the Heracles fleet worked to show it. Targeting the CCS Quzhujian, since it was the only ship which could escape their pursuit, their big guns began to dismantle the old destroyer. Her armour held for a time, and her structure for even longer, but over three dozen capital guns were aimed at her, and they took their toll quickly. Within minutes, it was a burning wreck no longer capable of serious combat, and the crew was abandoning ship. In that time, however, the Capellan fighters had begun to crush what was left of the Marik support units. Between the swarming fighters and a few secondary guns on the WarShips, the fighter and DropShip support for the Marik fleet nearly evaporated, and the missile tubes on the battlecruisers had been nearly shot dry. And while they had taken many fighters with them, it wasn't nearly enough. Likewise, while the Proteus had much of her armour intact after the missile barrage, it hadn't been enough - she was targeted by the guns on the Wife's Wrath destroyers, and if they were smaller and less numerous than the guns on a Heracles, they were still sufficient to deal out a substantial amount of damage. The Proteus was abandoned by her crew less than two minutes after the Quzhujian.
The capital ships re-targeted, with the FWLN firing at the CCS Hell of an Irate Feline, and the Capellans firing at the FWLS Hermes. The badly damaged Minos was spared the targeting of capital guns - instead, with the fighters freed up to attack capital ships freely, they began to attack the Minos instead. While the Minos had rolled ship to present a fresh broadside to the Capellan destroyers, the gaping wounds on her right side were open to attack by fighters, and the fighters took advantage. The initial wave stripped the few remaining light autocannons from the right flank, and heavy cannon fire thrashed her internals - no single shell was especially damaging by itself, but there were thousands, and they shredded the Minos's guts. Within a few minutes, the supremely accurate fire from the fighters found the main fusion engine of the Minos, and she was no more. In that time the Irate Feline had been battered for what seemed like an eternity, and the Hermes had been hit repeatedly by an especially accurate set of Capellan gunners - both were seriously wounded, but both were still in action.
Admiral Mašek could tell that it was time to depart. His gunners had been underwhelming, he'd lost his best anti-fighter weapons, and his capital ships were rapidly becoming more outnumbered. Without the Quzhujian, however, there was no Capellan ship faster than his own, so he simply had his fleet turn tail and run, screened by what was left of their support forces. It was an audacious decision, with serious risk of engine damage and resulting ship losses, but he had built up some velocity relative to the Capellans, and was at relatively long range. To aid the retreat, his fire shifted to the faster units of the Capellan fleet - the DropShips. Using capital weapons on those lightly armoured(by capital standards) transports was something like using a sledgehammer to crack an egg, but it was effective, and even at long range several were destroyed in short order.
When the fleet disengaged, the various support units frantically tried to escape battle as well. The Marik regiments ran back to their JumpShips, the Capellan fighters ran back to their carriers, and the Capellan DropShips went back to support their regiments. The hidden FWLA defenders attempted to fight the invaders from ambush, but they were quickly pacified, and they surrendered within days. However, the Capellan attack had petered out from the shock of combat - with empty magazines, it would be difficult to resist another attack, and the pacification of four worlds was a heavy task for the invading regiments. While the attack was over, the triumph was not - Admiral Demetri Dish was promoted to Venerable Admiral in honor of his triumph, Andurien now had a substantial defensive cordon, and the Liaos had another victory to buoy the spirits of their populace.
Losses:
Free Worlds League(raiding): 17 fighters. Minor damage to Heracles, $200m repair cost. Civilian losses of 3x JumpShip and 5x DropShip(do not affect naval budget).
Free Worlds League(invasion): 3x Heracles, 26x DropShip, 41x small craft, 831x fighter. Damage to fleet totaling $3B.
Capellan Confederation (raiding): 1x Qinru Zhe, 2x DropShip, 2x small craft
Capellan Confederation (invasion): 9x DropShip, 13x small craft, 834x fighter. Crippling damage to Quzhujian, $5B repair cost. Damage to remainder of fleet totaling $3B.
(Note that you can choose to scrap a unit instead of repairing it if you like. I'll dis-aggregate repair costs like this when scrapping is a plausible choice)
2399:
It wasn't just the Capellan populace who had their spirits buoyed by the (remarkably poorly named) "First Andurien War". Kurnath Liao's faith in the Capellan navy had been raised to impressive heights, so he decided to move against his other natural target - the Federated Suns. Like the Free Worlds League, the Suns had a more powerful navy than the Confederation, but like the Free Worlders, the Suns had its fleet deployed across a wide area of space. Unfortunately for the Capellans, the Davion fleet had analyzed their previous attack, and formulated plans for dealing with it. Rather than contesting the invasion with a local ship detachment, any serious concentration of force would be matched by an equally serious concentration of FedSuns ships. The loss of a few planets to an invading force was unavoidable, but if the fleet needed to remain concentrated to avoid defeat in detail, then those planets could not easily be held. And if the covering fleet could be smashed, the whole invasion would quickly collapse.
The initial targets fell in short order, and the Capellans under Venerable Admiral Dish worked to secure their gains. Meanwhile, Admiral Esteban Sandoval worked to assemble the Davion fleet - much like at Kentares, the units on the Draconis border were too far away to arrive in time, but a fleet of 18 ships was assembled, and it attacked the Capellans at Novaya Zemyla. The Capellans got enough warning from scout JumpShips to consolidate their covering fleet, and their 25 ships worked to defend the invading forces.
The Capellan fleet had almost as many fighters as the entire Davion navy, though even so a few fighter berths were empty from the losses they'd taken at Antipolo. But they had less armour, less firepower, and less speed, so they were reliant upon their fighters for their chance of victory. And while the fighters performed well, they didn't perform well enough - the initial attack was successfully launched at long range, and successfully massacred most of the Davion support units just as Capellan doctrine desired, with admirably few losses. But instead of waiting for the fighters to be recovered, Admiral Sandoval spotted a mistake in their geometry - if he accelerated towards the Capellans, he could force them to choose between abandoning their fighters or accepting a high-speed closing engagement that would give him all the advantages. Unwilling to abandon the nation's whole fighter strength, and reasoning that it gave him a better chance of escape after a defeat than any other form of combat, Venerable Admiral Dish accepted the passing engagement, though he ordered his light carriers to scatter on different vectors to prevent them from being pulverized by the crash of combat.
As with all passing engagements, the fight was short and sharp. Effective range was crossed within no more than thirty second for most weapons, and the fire was dreadfully effective. The bulk of the Davion fire landed on the faster Qinru Zhes and Quzhujians, in hopes of being able to chase down the survivors, and they spread their fire masterfully. Similarly, the Liaos focused on the Galahads, but unlike their enemies, their fire was poorly allocated, and far too many guns were aimed at the FSS Bors - she died, to be sure, but nearly a quarter of the fleet's firepower was used on her debris after she had already blown up. In the end, the ugly disparity in fleet size after the engagement led to the Capellan fleet withdrawing quickly. The ensuing FedSuns counterattack retook all but one of the originally attacked planets by the end of the year, though the three recaptured worlds were badly damaged by the repeated combat.
When Kurnath Liao heard the news of the battle, he was apoplectic. Briefly. An old man, his constitution was not up to the shock of such an unexpected reverse after two months of good reports from the front line, and he suffered a stress-induced heart attack within minutes of hearing the news. Despite being rushed to hospital, he was severely injured by the experience, and passed away within months. His much more pacific daughter Aleisha took over as Chancellor in his place.
Losses:
Federated Suns: 1x Galahad, 25x DropShip, 525x fighter. Damage to Galahad, $8B. Damage to rest of fleet totaling $1B.
Capellan Confederation: 3x Qinru Zhe, 1x Quzhujian, 1x Wife's Wrath, 6x DropShip, 29x small craft, 87x fighter. Damage to fleet totaling $6B.
Research
DC: $1,529m
FS: $69m
CC: $100m
TC: $120m
TH: $3,502m
UHC: $769m
RWR: $1,238m
TOTAL: $7,327m
The winner is the Terran Hegemony, gaining long-range missiles. SRMs are now available to all nations.
Budgets
CC: $96B from conquest
DC: $116B
FS: $101B
FWL: $105B, due to the loss of five planets
LC: $107B, due mostly to post-Marsden growth
MH: $14B
TC: $13B
TH: $770B, due to turmoil from the coup
UHC: $25B
RWR: $28B
