Design Monologue 28: The History of Warfare

In the early years after 2088, there was no warfare. Resources were rich and population was sparse; the conditions just weren't right for war.

While battles raged between tribes in the first generations on Koruun, and certainly those battles had an effect on their military tradition, the Korrunites did not learn much about space warfare during the period in which they did not have space travel.

The first war in the Homeworlds was, in fact, the Novacorp Embargo War, declared by the Neo-Terran Consortium against the Karman People's Commune. At the time, the total population of both worlds was less than 200,000, so their ability to wage war across interplanetary distance was quite limited.

Both nations had a fleet of shuttles and interplanetary transports. The Consortium had a respectable armada of heavy industrial transports, which served well enough to ferry troops to Karma.

Only one such transport ever made it to Karma, as the Karmans managed to rig up some makeshift space weapons (basically exploding dumb-fire rockets) to shoot down the poorly undefended transports in orbit.

By the end of the war, both powers were constructing dedicated space weapons, but barely used any of them, as the war ended swiftly once Karma landed an invasion at Novacorp's headquarters on Terra Nova.

Still, they'd learned a valuable lesson, and both continued arming themselves in case of future conflict.

By the time Abel made contact with Koruun, they had been alone for 108 years. In that time, they had managed to come to a sort of equilibrium. Weaker tribes were driven away from the original homeland, and when they hit the ocean, they needed vehicles. They managed to reverse engineer enough of the old technology to recreate flight; spaceflight shortly followed.

The defeated clans spread to the other planets in the system. Their bold initiative paid off, as they established technological superiority. Those same spacefaring clans returned generations later to conquer Koruun.

The ruling clans had a fair share of combat-capable spacecraft. Most of their craft were small, and all of them were armed. They favored the more simplistic technology of rockets and projectile weapons, easier to construct with their fledgling industrial machine.

Still, they had enough firepower to repel the first Abelite jumpship that came their way. The Abelites had come in peace, but the Koruunites would have none of it. They led the Abelites to believe they would receive them diplomatically, but then stormed their ship and used it to reverse engineer jump technology.

A second Abelite ship arrived a few years later, to try to make order of the situation, but it was too late. The Koruunites were ready to invade the Homeworlds.

They backtracked along the route the Abelites took to reach them. The first civilized system they landed in was Imperium territory. Their wrath was swift and terrible; they raided the Imperium settlements mercilessly, and added what little combat-worthy spacecraft they had to their own fleet.

They then arrived in Consortium space. Having heard of the attack, the Karmans had been organizing an alliance between themselves, the Consortium, and the Imperium, not to mention the Abelites. They managed to present a credible threat to the Korrunites, and the real war began.

It became a war of industrial capacity and attrition. Koruun and the Alliance had barely more than a million population each, but both had modern industrial machines churning out new ships as fast as they could be destroyed.

Koruun had surprise on their side; they'd built up an invasion fleet larger than the combined fleets of the Alliance, and had a replacement already in the factories by the time the war began. The Alliance had only their marginally superior technology; their industry was superior, but also vulnerable, as the war was being fought on their turf.

The Korrunites also had the advantage of manpower; while both sides had similar population, far more of the population of Koruun were soldiers. They literally had hundreds of thousands of replacement soldiers on Koruun, waiting for new ships to be completed.

Abel had a solution to some of these problems. They could produce highly automated ships at a rapid rate in their relatively safe home system. They had much better astrogation charts and stealth capability, making it easy to outflank the Korrunites.

The first major victory for the Alliance came when an Abelite fleet laid waste to much of Koruun's industrial capacity, devastating their replacement fleet and troops. However, in response, Koruun redirected their fleet to Abel. While the Abelites anticipated this, they did not anticipate the kamikaze mentality of their opponents; hundreds of thousands of civilians died when the Korrunites attacked their cities, eschewing their shipyards and weapons factories.

The tragedy was a blessing in disguise, as it gave the Alliance vital time to regroup. The Karman-Consortium fleet defeated the Korrunite fleet, ending the assault on Abel, and chased them all the way back beyond Imperium space. They were not equipped to assault a planet with hundreds of thousands of defenders, so they waited, guarding their borders, while they frantically built new war materiel in the factories back home.

The war dragged on for years, each side sniping at the other. Despite their setbacks, the Korrunites continued to wage a very effective war, winning most stand-up battles with superior numbers, and only losing when outmaneuvered by their canny opponents.

No planet or settlement was spared; the war costs hundreds of thousands of lives, and devastated every corner of civilization.

Things started to get truly scary in the later years, when the Abelite counterattack finally got up to speed. They brought out weapons of terrible magnitude, weapons which would open doors in warfare that could never be closed. They wiped out fleets with antimatter explosives many times more powerful than the atomic bomb.

It was a coup of diplomacy that stayed their hand when their vengeance fleet arrived at Koruun. They had meant to obliterate the entire civilization, and it took desperate pleading by their allies to downgrade themselves to a mere occupation.

The war ended with the total disarmament of Koruun, and marked the beginning of a 42-year occupation.

Everyone learned many valuable lessons in the war, most importantly the open nature of space warfare. When your opponent can jump between star systems and fly between planets, every settlement and installation is a target. There are no bridges to defend, no walls to man; everything worth defending must be defended.

On a more specific level, they learned space weapons are too deadly for any modest armor. This began an arms race, with each new ship bigger, tougher, and thicker-skinned than the last, and ultimately spawned the mammoth dreadnought ships of the second war.

The reconstruction period after the first war marked a new emphasis on size and scale across the empires. Population growth rates hit staggering numbers, as all sides used unprecedented tactics to spur their birth rate. The Karmans began a communal child-care system, and emphasized child-bearing as a civic duty, complete with rewards. The Abelites ramped up their genetic engineered clone production, churning out new Abelites at a phenomenal rate.

The Korrunites had to be more discreet. They began a cultural revolution, the brainchild of the relatively unknown House of Keras, which emphasized hedonistic pleasures and fertility rituals. Wise to the potential of such a movement, the Abelites tried to suppress it, but the peaceful overtones drew Karma to defend their rights, and even to encourage them, as it seemed a productive alternative to their old warlike ways.

Eventually, the occupation ended, as the Korrunite population became too unruly, and diplomatic pressure became too much for the Abelites. The House of Keras gained power, with the help of their new friends on Karma, and began the next phase of their plan.

The scale of the Second Korrunite War made the first war look like a barroom brawl. The total population of the Homeworlds was less than 5 million when the first war began; when the second war started, the Homeworlds was home to over 250 million souls, divided more or less evenly between the Korrunite Republic, the Union of Karma and Allied States, and the Abelite Imperium.

After the first war, there had been an arms race between the three powers, each vying for technological supremacy. Each race had their various specialties, but one rule dominated all ships: bigger is better. In the age before shields and armor hardeners, the only defense against increasingly powerful weapons was an increasingly thick hull. The ultimate expression of this doctrine were the dreadnoughts.

The dreadnoughts were not a gradual development, but a revolution; ships of previous lines were a tenth the size. They represented a fundamental shift in thinking; they were the first ships designed solely to battle other ships, rather than to effect planetary siege.

The rise of dreadnoughts corresponded with a new culture of warfare, a more chivalric warfare, guided by strict codes. Battles were decided by duels between dreadnoughts; it was unacceptable to attack civilian targets, or to base a space fleet on a planetary surface. If a dreadnought showed up in a system without one to defend it, the system was simply yielded.