The Battle Of The Vega Gulf

By WRickWrites

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When the war began, the Kalu-Kamzku had the advantage of better technology and larger fleets. Their ships were faster, more powerful, and better armored.

The Humans had the advantage of being... well, Human.

What do I mean by that? I'm glad you asked because that brings us neatly to the case study for today's lecture: the Battle of the Vega Gulf. I'm sure you've all done your reading for this week, but just to refresh your memory it was an engagement in the early stages of the war between the allied Human colonies and the Kalu-Kamzku. It took place in one of the systems in the large region of uninhabited space beyond the star Vega, known to Humans as the Vega Gulf.

A small Human fleet was moving towards one of their forward outposts near Kalu-Kamzku space to link up with a larger force; there weren't enough escorts available so it was taking a more circuitous route in the expectation that this would take it around the Kalu-Kamzku fleets, which were trying to break through through the Humans defenses around Lyra Epsilon. The Humans hoped that by making a flanking attack into Kalu-Kamzku territory they could force those frontline forces to pull back and take the pressure off the front, but resources were limited and the fleet making its way through the Vega Gulf consisted of four carriers with only a light cruiser and four destroyers as their escorts.

Having done the reading and being familiar with Human ship designations, you can all see the inherent risk in such a mission. Destroyers are... yes, you at the back who for some reason thinks I won't see you if you don't make eye contact. What was that? 'Destructive'? Really? Yes, you might as well hide behind your wings in shame. Fine. Since some of us need a refresher I'll give you a quick summary of Human ship design.

Now this is a little complex so please pay attention. We Amia don't purpose-build ships for combat, and as far as we're concerned any ship with a weapon on it is a battleship. Humans are very different. They fight each other as viciously as two Gria rats in a sack, and they do it often and with relish. Therefore they have a variety of ships that are specifically designed to shoot and be shot at, and they build them to fit specific roles on the battlefield, so it's important to understand the distinctions.

Only the largest Human combat vessels are designated 'battleships'. They have the most armor and the biggest guns, but they're not very fast. They're the backbone of any fleet, and - insofar as I understand Human battle strategy - most tactical planning is built around getting them in a position to unleash their arsenals on the enemy.

The second and largest is the 'cruisers', which trade a little protection and firepower for extra maneuverability. They can support the battleships in the main battle line, but they can also fulfill scouting and escort roles; because of the range of roles cruisers fill, they come in heavy and light variants.

Then we come to the baby of the bunch: the destroyer. Corvettes and frigates are smaller, but they're too lightly armed to take on another warship and are intended for local patrol duties and screening against small fighter craft, making destroyers the smallest ship capable of being part of a main battle fleet. The destroyer lacks guns capable of posing a threat to capital ships - that is, battleships and cruisers - but it does carry missiles large enough to cause serious damage. However, it's hard for them to get close enough to use them - destroyers are designed mainly to prevent opportunistic attacks against large ships by small missile boats and to perform scouting and escort roles. The most they can usually do against larger ships is harass them in coordination with battleships and cruisers.

Humans' largest military ships in terms of pure tonnage are carriers. They are generally poorly armed and not designed to go into combat themselves, but they carry swarms of attack craft that are too small to operate on their own. Traditionally carriers held the main offensive capability of a fleet, but due to improvements in point defence carrier attack wings are of limited effectiveness against larger ships. They're still useful for harassing medium-sized ships and essential for any kind of planetary assault, so carriers usually double up as troop transports, housing the shuttles and vehicles necessary for a ground campaign.

So at Vega Gulf, the Humans had four carriers - massive and expensive ships that were nevertheless incapable of defending themselves in a straight-up fight. They were being escorted by a single light cruiser, whose main asset is being able to strike fast and run away faster if it encounters a larger ship, and four destroyers, which aren't supposed to engage larger ships at all.

You can imagine their shock when they stopped in an uninhabited system to make minor repairs and found it was very much occupied by fifteen Kalu-Kamzku battleships.

Human FTL drives are inefficient - certainly nowhere near Amia quality - and especially in this period they were poorly stabilized, causing wear and tear on their ships through gravitational distortion. The human fleet, under Admiral Hyrum Hollis, was scheduled to make a two-day stop along its route for maintenance. They decided to do this in a binary star system that according to all their charts didn't have so much as an automated science station. The carriers and the cruiser took up a low orbit around one of the inner planets, where they would be hard to spot just in case there were any enemy scouts around, and started repairs while the destroyers sat in high orbit, on guard. The carriers periodically sent out small patrol craft, and it was during the thirty-second hour of their layover that one of these reported seeing what could be engine flares nearby, which must have been hidden by the nearest sun until then.

The fighter deviated from its patrol route to investigate, and ten minutes later its teammates witnessed the blinking flashes of distant weapons fire as it was obliterated by the Kalu-Kamzku vanguard. The Battle of the Vega Gulf had begun.

I used the word 'battleship' to describe the Kalu-Kamzku force, but that isn't strictly speaking accurate. Like us the Kalu-Kamzku don't design ships with combat in mind, and when they made the frankly very poorly thought-out decision to start a war with the humans they had to retrofit a whole range of non-military vessels. In size and power, five of the Kalu-Kamzku ships present at Vega Gulf would be considered battleships by human classification - in fact, they were twice the size of the largest battleship humans had ever built, but there isn't a category above battleship. Eight of the others were of similar size but had only been outfitted with an armament more comparable to a heavy cruiser's, while the remaining two were scout ships roughly analogous to a light cruiser.

In short, calling the Humans 'outgunned' is like saying a supernova is 'quite hot'.

Admiral Hollis immediately ordered his ships to get underway and head for open space where they could jump to FTL safely. His assumption was that they were being ambushed. In fact, the Kalu-Kamzku hadn't even thought of the concept of an ambush at this point in the war; planning to take the enemy unawares requires understanding what the enemy is and isn't aware of, and the Kalu-Kamzku is terrible at conceptualizing consciousness in other species. Like the Humans, they had simply been sending more forces to the front by what they expected to be a quiet route. It was pure bad luck that the two forces ran into each other.

Well, bad luck for the Humans, good luck for the Kalu-Kamzku. The carrier fleet stood little chance in a fight against even a single Kalu-Kamzku battleship, let alone fifteen of them. Worse still, they also had almost no hope of outrunning them. The Kalu-Kamzku looked set to have the easiest victory of the war. Admiral Hollis gave the order to make a run for it knowing full well it was likely futile, and that he'd led his fleet into a disaster. But the alternative was to give up and die, so made a run for it, they did.

As the slower carriers tried to get up to speed, the destroyers swung around behind them and started firing sandbags. What are sandbags, you ask? Humans, being experienced in combat, carry munitions designed to scatter tiny particles across a wide area between themselves and any ship trying to attack them. It disrupts sensors and can absorb or deflect some weapons, particularly energy-based ones. Essentially the destroyers were throwing up a screen to cover the carriers as they tried to escape.

The Kalu-Kamzku had no way of countering this, as before they ran into humans it would never have occurred to them to do this. So the fifteen Kamzku ships did basically the only thing they knew how to do and advanced, firing.

The Kalu-Kamzku generally outfit their ships with lasers to take out space debris, but upon encountering Humans and realizing the need for more firepower, they started fitting mass drivers to their newly converted warships. Basically just big magnetic catapults capable of sending a large mass very fast in the direction of whatever they wanted to destroy. Throwing solid slugs across space was slower than a laser, but they were very powerful and had the advantage of being able to cut through any cover.

However, with the sandscreen up they couldn't target effectively. The human ships started to pull away, as projectiles whizzed by with a thousand kilometers to spare. But they knew it was only a matter of time before the Kamzku's superior engines tipped the balance and they closed to point-blank range.

Knowing this, Captain Gerry Jordan of the destroyer UCN Firewyrm decided to do something... Human.

Disobeying Admiral Hollis' orders for the destroyers to follow the carriers out of the system, Firewyrm turned around and started heading back through its own sand screen - slowly, because even a grain of sand can be deadly when you're traveling fast enough. It came out the other side and then... waited, and allowed the approaching Kamzku ships to get a little closer.

The Kalu-Kamzku didn't know quite what to make of this. They hadn't been able to scan the human fleet properly before the sand screen went up, and they didn't have a clear idea of what they were facing. The cloud of particles drifting through the system had the effect of scattering their scanning beams back at them, so although they could see Firewyrm sitting just in front of the sand screen, they were having trouble determining her size.

They had seen at least one carrier in the fleeing Human fleet, and in their experience with Humans the carriers were always heavily defended, so they therefore made the logical yet completely erroneous deductive leap and decided Firewyrm was a battleship. After all, nothing smaller than that would have a chance against them.

This didn't worry them at first - it was still only one ship - and they kept coming. Then Firewyrm fired her first missile salvo.

Having totally misjudged Firewyrm's size, the ten missiles racing towards them looked about five times larger than anything else the Kalu-Kamzku had encountered thus far; it didn't help that the missiles' engine flares were also reflected off the sand screen, making them look far more powerful. The Kalu-Kamzku had already developed a healthy aversion to missile attacks from their other encounters with human warships, and developed strategies for dealing with them. The fifteen Kamzku ships reacted in an almost textbook manner: they flipped one hundred and eighty degrees and started accelerating directly away from the missiles, giving their laser batteries time to track and eliminate the chasing missiles.

Firewyrm ducked back into the sandscreen.

All of the missiles were shot down before they got anywhere near a Kamzku ship, but they'd served their purpose: the carriers had gained some distance, and the Kamzku now had to turn around and get up to speed again. At this point, Firewyrm could have tried to re-join her fleet and hoped that the Kamzku wouldn't catch them before they jumped to FTL. But Captain Jordan was very far from done.

As the Kamzku ships approached the sand screen, Firewyrm burst through it again, and this time she came out firing. One of the Kamzku's heavy cruiser-style ships started taking hits, and the Kamzku panicked and started to return fire. However, because they still thought Firewyrm was a battleship they were firing their largest mass drivers - good for punching through armor, but intended for big, slow targets rather than small, fast ones.

Firewyrm danced through the hailstorm of projectiles, untroubled by firepower intended for a completely different class of ship, and continued pouring shots into the enemy heavy cruisers.

This disturbed the Kalu-Kamzku. It wasn't so much the damage done to their ships - Firewyrm couldn't pack much of a punch, so they had plenty of time before the damage mounted up to a real problem. It was Firewyrm's refusal to back down in the face of superior firepower.

If you're having an argument with someone and it gets to the point where things get physical, what do you do? This isn't a trick question, just tell me what normally happens - even if you're a non-confrontational person you're presumably aware of the principle. Yes - you in the second row who has her hand up because she thinks classroom participation is going to make up for her abysmal essay assignments... say something sensible and I suppose it won't hurt your chances of getting a passing grade.

What was that? Posturing? Yes, exactly. The two parties draw themselves up to their full height and spread their wings, making themselves look as large as possible. If one is significantly larger than the other, the smaller individual backs down. This isn't just how Amia reacts to violent confrontation, it's a nearly universal evolved response to intra-species disputes which minimizes the chance of serious injury to either party.

Nearly universal. Humans, as usual, throw off the curve. Captain Jordan and the crew of the Firewyrm were apparently right at the edge of that data set.

The core of the trouble the Kalu-Kamzku had throughout their conflict with the Humans is that they had never fought an actual war before. They had made aggressive moves against other spacefaring species before, but either the other species gave in before much fighting had been done, or they made a similarly aggressive display and the Kamzku backed down.

So the fifteen Kamzku ships bearing down on Firewyrm watched it stand fast in the face of their overwhelming firepower and started to wonder if maybe it was in a stronger position than they'd thought. Logically, in their eyes, the most likely reason it was acting this way was there were other ships lurking in the sand screen, which would come out as soon as the Kamzku were too close to withdraw easily.

The executive council commanding the Kamzku ships ordered a halt, and sent their two light cruisers forward - the only two ships they had that would be fast enough to get away in the event that things went badly.

Firewyrm, having stalled the enemy yet again, melted back into the sand screen to buy itself some more time. The light cruisers closed the distance, and just when they were about to reach it Captain Jordan ordered his ship out of cover again.

Finally, the Kalu-Kamzku were able to get a precise scan of Firewyrm. And we're immensely confused when they realize that the new Human super-battleship they'd been fighting was in fact just a destroyer that had no business even trying to fight them, let alone hold them off for hours. Presumably, the Humans aboard had some kind of mental defect. The light cruisers queried their superiors for instructions and were told in no uncertain terms to obliterate the destroyer as quickly as possible so that the fleet could advance.

The light cruisers accepted this task with relish, knowing the smaller ship was no match for them now they were using the appropriate weaponry. Their mass drivers sat silent as they trained their much nimbler laser batteries on the Human ship, and they would have made short work of it. However, it was at this point that the Kamzku found out that Firewyrm hadn't fired all her missiles earlier.

One light cruiser threw itself into evasive maneuvers in time to dodge the incoming salvo. The other one did not. Nuclear detonations flashed in the darkness, glittering off the drifting sand clouds as the missiles found their mark. The first hit blew a chunk off the bow, and the second struck amidships and tore a massive rent in the hull. A plume of atmosphere kilometers long started venting into space, and escape pods began streaming from the stricken ship moments later.

The surviving light cruiser shot down the last of the missiles and turned to complete its mission, only to find Firewyrm coming straight at them. Although the human ship's own mass drivers were inferior, at close range the light cruiser didn't have the protection to just shrug them off like its larger brothers. The light cruiser's lasers gave Firewyrm some nasty scars, but after just a few minutes of combat, the Kamzku ship broke off and started running back toward the protection of the Kamzku battleship, trailing debris.

The Kalu-Kamzku battleships were now finally close enough to target Firewyrm effectively despite the sensor scattering, and soon more lasers were carving large chunks of the small ship. Again, Firewyrm could have turned at this point and tried to run with the rest of her fleet.

Instead, Captain Jordan saw the perfect opportunity to use the fleeing light cruiser for cover and charged the enemy ships.

This time the Kalu-Kamzku didn't bother even trying to take evasive action, knowing that it would only be minutes before Firewyrm was reduced to fragments of scrap metal. This turned out to be both completely true and a terrible, terrible mistake.

Firewyrm continued firing her main armament as she suffered hundreds of hits, but she was immensely outclassed. The Kamzku battleships suffered damage, but nothing more than a minor nuisance, and Firewyrm quickly lost one, then two, then all four of her mass drivers.

However, now she was practically inside the enemy formation. She had no guns and she was venting atmosphere from a dozen places, but Firewyrm had the enemy right where she wanted them. With her crew already heading for the escape pods, she fired off her final missile salvo.

Then she accelerated to ramming speed.

Four of the five missiles were taken out by laser fire, but at point-blank range one managed to get through and cause crippling damage to one of the heavy cruisers. The worst of Firewyrm's wrath, however, was reserved for the largest Kamzku battleship in the formation. It's unknown if Captain Jordan deliberately chose the most valuable target or just went for the one he was most likely to hit, but his final act of the battle was to send his ship hurtling toward the Kamzku's command platform.

Firewyrm was little more than a flaming wreck by this point, but her engines were still burning as she slammed into the enemy battleship. It was a glancing blow, but it still tore off a large section from the starboard side of the enormous Kamzku command ship. Firewyrm ricocheted away, only to explode a few seconds later, the debris causing further damage to three of the battleships around her.

The Kalu-Kamzku had finally brought down the single destroyer that had challenged them, and only for the cost of one light cruiser wrecked, another light cruiser badly mauled, one heavy cruiser with serious damage, one battleship that was on the verge of being abandoned, and most of their other ships suffering from minor damage.

According to their own records, one of the senior Kalu-Kamzku planners remarked - unwittingly echoing the words of the human general Pyrrhus over two thousand years earlier - that if they had one more victory like that they would be utterly ruined.

Collectively the Kalu-Kamzku planners decided that the human fleet must be more powerful than they had first thought, and in any case, they now needed a safe harbour to repair their battle damage. Battle scars still smoldering, they turned around and limped back to friendly space.

Out of Firewyrm's crew of a hundred and ninety, one hundred and fifty-seven went down with their ship, including Captain Jordan. Nearly three and a half thousand humans in the rest of the fleet escaped with their lives thanks to their actions, not to mention all those who would have perished had the Kamzku fleet reached the frontlines.

So what can we take away from this case study? Well, first and most obviously: don't start a war with Humans. But more pertinently, when interacting with a different species consider how their mindset might prove an advantage, as well as the physical and material assets they might have. I know that's the whole idea behind taking a xenopsychology course but, having read your last term papers, I'm not sure all of you grasp the fundamentals yet.

We've all heard about the ridiculous physical durability of humans, their aggression, and their specialized weapon tech. I chose this case study specifically because it was an instance where Humans were at a heavy disadvantage and still managed to achieve their objectives. The Kalu-Kamzku had all the advantages, and a single human ship still managed to stall them long enough for their fleet to escape, destroying or crippling several much more powerful ships in the process. Your task will be to explain how this happened, and why.

Your essay title is: 'The limits of technological superiority: an analysis of the Human-Kamzku conflict'. Deadline is ten days from now, I'll see you all in the lecture tomorrow where we'll be discussing trade relations between the TokTok and the Ishoa, and how the former managed to sell insulation garments to a world that has never seen a single snowflake.

We'll pick up Humans again next week once I've graded your essays, and so help me, anyone who doesn't get at least a B- will have to go to the Earth consulate to ask the humans why they're so very, very deadly in person. In psychology, we call that 'motivation'. Now, I'm off to the cafeteria - I would say I'll see you there, but I suspect you're all heading straight for the library.

Normally I wouldn't give you too much direction, but because I'm a compassionate soul - and because I know I'm about to get two dozen papers that can be summed up as 'humans are carnivores' - I'll give you a hint: look into human kinship customs, and how the definition of 'family' and 'brotherhood' can extend beyond genetic relationship. The rest you'll have to figure out for yourself.