History of Known Space

For three years, the Invasion War raged in the now newly-established Mutual Defense Coalition. Squabbling military leaders and politicians, ineffective strategies, and a simple lack of knowledge allowed the Invaders to bring the Coalition nations to the brink of collapse. The fact that this did not happen can mostly be attributed to a select few individuals in scientific, political, military, economic and even religious circles. Thanks to the work of these individuals the collapse of the Coalition could be avoided time and time again, and eventually Coalition forces would even get a chance to destroy the Invader fleet once and for all. The plan in question was largely designed by a Shakaran officer by the name of Ashrrol Tekanbash who, thanks to outstanding service in the war, had already been made head-officer of the entire Coalition war effort. The plan made use of various Invader weaknesses which had been discovered by analysing past battles, scraps of the few Invader ships which were destroyed, and information coming from other nations hit by the Invasion. In essence, the plan was to use the unique properties of the Epherakolon System. These include the rather dense asteroid belt of the system, as well that it was an unusually weak pulsar, to the point that it could still interfer heavily with force field technology but was survivable by Coalition ships using some desperate measures. It had been observed previously that Invader ships would target systems with a large amount of iterium signals emanating from them. Most likely because that indicates a large presence of a jump-age civilisation in any system, and therefore a high abundance of high-quality resources. Because of this, the system was laced with iterium beacons (many of which having to be moved there haphazardly), and the asteroid belt in particular received a high concentration of them in addition to 'skeleton buildings' meant to read like true mining outposts to sensors. In truth, these structures were filled with anti-matter bombs. Once the Invader fleet arrived, they were quickly ambushed by a small squadron of Coalition forces, meant to appear as a local defense fleet.   This caused the Invader fleet to retreat into the asteroid belt, in an attempt to collect the necessary resources to restore the damage retained in this surprise attack. This caused them to absorb the antimatter bombs, which led to the loss of a large number of their forces. The remaining forces, already weakened by years of fighting in Known Space, and by the EM-radiation from the local pulsar, were destroyed within the next few days.   The Victory marked the first time an entire Invader fleet was destroyed in the Invasion War, and similar tactics to those of the Victory would be employed by other powers to destroy the majority of the remaining fleets. In addition, the Victory marked a turning point in the relations of the Coalition nations, and the rise to power of Ashrrol Tekanbash.