Battle of New Ukraine

From Acw

Prelude

In the early days of Faster-Than-Light travel, no FTL ships went armed. In fact, even conventional ships went unarmed, because of the massive expense of construction and the uselessness of armour on a vessel that only needed one weak seal to burst to kill the crew. It was not until the Soviets fit specially-modified ex-naval cannon and a particle accelerator in a turret to a small FTL ship, the Alexander Nevsky that the age of space warfare began.

When the German colony ship Seevogel emerged from a wormhole within striking distance of the Chimera System in 2149, it was surprised to learn of the existence of the Nevsky. While the Nevsky fired only warning shots, the Seevogel withdrew, wanting to preserve its precious terraforming cargo and settlers' lives. The Seevogel retired to the second planet in the system, and commenced colonising operations.

Military Buildup

The entire galaxy was set talking at the revelation of the Nevsky's existence. The significance of the slow rate of Soviet colony ship construction was now obvious; and all the other extrasolar powers began construction of their own armed spacecraft. The SS and regular Raumswaffe immediately began a prolific construction program, assembling a fleet in record time, and tunnelling it into the Chimera System in 2152, almost before it had been fuelled and crewed.

The Soviets had prepared their own fleet in secret, in bases in the Asteroid Belt, and the two fleets emerged within an hours' flight of each other on the outskirts of the system. Battle was joined almost immediately.

Battle

The Soviet fleet was the larger, even though the German fleet was far better armed and more tenacaious. The true turning point of the battle, however, came when the German fleet began to withdraw. Their FTL mothership, the Kaiser Wilhelm II fitted with a massive auxiliary reactor specifically to allow for retreat in the worst case, had remained back from the battle. When it appeared that the Soviet forces had the upper hand, it began to charge its Krasnikov generator for an emergency retreat. It took only moments for the operators to realise something was terribly wrong, as the tube did not open.

It emerged later that the sheer mass of the two fleets had changed the local gravity fields, and thus made them too strong for even the massively powerful generator that the Germans had outfitted the Kaiser Wilhelm II with. This caused a massive rethink of FTL military deployment in the aftermath of the battle, though it was far too late to save the now destroyed German First Raumkampfgruppe.

Resolution

In the wake of the German defeat, the extrasolar powers began to worry about the high costs of space combat, both in terms of materials, ordnance and human lives. The Treaty of Io can this be seen as a direct result of the Battle of New Ukraine.