Void Warfare

4 Years Ago

I woke up to a knock at my door. I could tell from the slight amount of sunlight peering in through the window that it was way too early for patients to be beating down my door.
I stood up, walked to the door, and eased it open. My father was standing on the other side, the red lens casting light through the crack in the door.

I saw him the night before, but he seemed excited. It was as if he hadn't seen me in years. "Amber," he said the static buzzing through the speaker.
"Dad? What's wrong?" I asked, opening the door in full. I looked at his hands and saw a makeshift container filled with various tools, containers of food, and other supplies.
"I came to drop this off. You mentioned being low on a few things." He pointed to the outside wall just out of my vision. "I wasn't expecting that though."
I tilt my head and step out into the morning air. I read the words and shake my head, seething as I run through a list of names. Someone violated my home, my clinic. I only just opened up and now I have graffiti written in big red paint on the outside wall. They even left the aerosol cans in a neat little row below their masterpiece. You don't want to know what it said.
"When do you open?" He asked.
"I guess I'm not now. This could take hours to clean up."
"I'll help," he began, rolling up the sleeves of his tattered robes. "Get some water."
Even then, I was useless when it came to manual labor. Dad did most of the work. His fingers were like razors, chipping at the metal wall and shaving off the paint in flakes and dust. It took him minutes to do what would have taken me hours.
I watched him, unsure if I should help or just let him work. I had never seen under his sleeves before. The metal frame looked barren, lifeless. I'm pretty sure dad felt the same way about it.
I leaned over and picked up the cans of paint, taking note of their weight. When I found one with some left in it, I sprayed it on the ground. I dipped my fingers in, then cautiously drew a smiley face on his free arm.
He didn't notice, even as I wiped away excess paint and fine-tuned the details. I wondered if he ever will. There weren't any mirrors in the archive. It seemed right at the time. He always hated his metal frame. I loved him for it.

It's cold. I sit at my workbench, crafting my latest batch of meds to pass the time. I have about three blankets cast over me and my hands are starting to go numb. I had to shut down non-vital systems to save fuel. There's no heat, little light, and my ship drifts through the void of space without so much as a whisper from the engines.
It's almost time. It's coming, I can feel it. Gibraltar will appear and I'll finally be able to bring it down. I'm still not sure how, though.
The proximity alert chimes and I leap from my chair to check. The sensors found an anomaly, a distortion in spacetime but without excessive gravitational changes that one would see with warp travel. Finally...
I run through the halls of the ship and up a stairwell to the cockpit. I flip all the switches, frantically pressing buttons even if I have no idea what they do. The ship springs to life, the engines roaring. I smile as the first wave of glorious hot air rises from the vent near my feet.
Every screen boots up, a series of five consoles varying in size and arranged in semicircles in front of me. When all systems check out, I hit a big red button on the side of the pilot's chair.
The floor panels rotate, revealing screens on their other side. Every screen lines up perfectly and activates to display a seamless 360° feed from outside.
I hadn't realized how dark it was out there. Despite the starlight, it's still pitch black.
"Come on," I whisper. I watch the screen, the sensors checking and rechecking the area for changes. "Where are you?"
I'll be sitting here for another twenty minutes. Gibraltar prefers the scenic route. When I see it, it takes me back. I haven't thought about it in quite some time, and for good reason. I watched this thing tear through a ship several times the size of mine and then watched it cower and run.
It's grown, a vast expanse of black on black, its tendrils like inky black hair stretching for thousands of kilometers. I can only see it based on the stars, its massive body blocking their light.
I prime my weapons and prepare the ship for combat. Adrenaline flows and I haven't fired a single shot. Elation can't even begin to describe how I feel right now.
I hear the muted hum of the particle ram charging. I watch for confirmation on the screen. When fully primed, I fire...

Fighting in space is generally considered a bad idea, but that didn't stop anyone. Since the first space-faring civilizations emerged and realized each other's existence, ships were given a means of protecting themselves. Naturally, on a long enough timeline, this practice gave rise to entire fleets and military organizations dedicated to war.
Every player on the board is different. They fight and organize differently, and outfit their vessels differently. Admiral Miranda Thrace did notice some similarities, however, and wrote the only book we have on the subject of stellar warfare. It isn't much, a pamphlet of about twenty-three thousand words, but it's more than enough.
I'll start as she did. To understand and adapt to the constant change in military might out among the stars, you need to pay attention to several principle rules. At the wayfarer academy, we called them The Thracian Axioms.

The Thracian Axioms

I never met Admiral Thrace. A war hero who fought during The First War and Rhey's Rebellion, Thrace was forced to learn and adapt quickly to a form of war humanity knew nothing about. She came up with a series of rules, each centered around facts and inferences made based on those facts to build a larger, more informed military theory concerning void warfare.

• The postulate of limitations: All ships have limits and all ships have needs. This includes the generation of energy. It also includes what that energy is for such as heating and cooling. Logistics factors into this as well. Ships need cargo and the space to store it, like ammunition, supplies, and spare parts. A ship's limitations are more important than its capabilities.

• The postulate of Division: almost every military organization follows the same principle. Every ship will have personnel dedicated to three divisions: security, operation, and maintenance. While other divisions exist with their dedicated personnel, these three divisions are essential to keep a ship in operation, making them key targets.

• The postulate of illusion: In void combat, you are not fighting a ship, you're fighting its crew. A faster, more knowledgeable crew will always win if two ships are evenly matched. Identifying a concentration of personnel in one of the three divisions, and targeting it can cripple a vessel regardless of size and capability.

What did we learn?

The axioms give a foundation. We know ships have limits, so a ship without warp technology that happens to be a long way from home may not be able to fight as effectively. Seemingly irrelevant sections of a vessel may house crewmen responsible for operating the ships' weaponry or fixing the damage you cause.
I know what you're thinking: but what about you, amber. Where's your crew? That's a long story. The Solitude, my ship, was modified from the standard design of a Persephone class corvette. It only needs one person, but the axioms still hold true. I still need to know how to fix this ship, operate it, and protect it.
Ship combat is a bit of an illusion. From the outside, it looks like two behemoths are fighting one another to the death. In reality, it's just two groups of people trying to outdo one another with whatever happens to be attached to the pressurized steel container they live in. Falling for that illusion is a one-way ticket to the grave.

Modules and stations

Another shared trait of most vessels is their modular design. Ships need to be easily modified. They need to be easily put together, and easy to take apart but not in a way that endangers the structural integrity of the ship. We do this by creating modules.
Modules are anything you find on a ship. If you've ever looked at a ship's exterior, you'll notice a wide variety of features across its hull, communication arrays in the form of antennas or dishes, weaponry affixed to rotating turrets, armor plating used to cover precious electrical components, etc. These are all modular and can be removed and replaced with relative ease.
Every module is connected to a station. This station is usually operated by a member of the ship's crew. Common practice is for a station to be as close as possible to the module it operates to limit power outages due to damage and cut back on the resources needed to hook it up. For military vessels, it's just as common for stations to be isolated to the centermost part of the ship, labeled the CIC (combat information center) or the bridge.