GblaRCS Chpt 39

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 39 -==
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"The Ironborn from the clan breeding program that Nicky K put into high gear in 2819 are going to form the backbone of the SLDF for the next thirty years, and they're arriving just in time because most of the 295th like yourselves are starting to move like they need to see a chiropractor. Accept that a lot of your people need to retire and just put our kits in a cockpit to replace them."saKhan Trish Ebon speaks an uncomfortable truth to the senior officers of the 295th Battlemech Division - 2837CE
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===Blooding of untested Troops===
Illyria III, Illyrian Palatinate – 2839
Typically the flight path of an Overlord DropShip through the atmosphere was strictly an up/down affair from surface to orbit or vice versa. If you wanted to travel in a rather more horizontal direction than normal a more streamlined aerodyne type vessel such as a Leopard or a Triumph tended to be a much better choice, mostly because they didn't have to follow a flight-path like a gigantic mortar bomb in order to make rapid transit from Point A to Point B. A spheroid DropShip was more aerodynamic than a brick if sloughing sideways through the air, but not by nearly as much as you'd want if you planned to do it for very long.
It was all very well saying that with enough thrust you didn't need to worry about what shape your craft was to make it fly, if you wanted it to fly well it was still a good idea to take account of drag because all the atmosphere between you and your destination had to be pushed out of the way and at supersonic velocities air compressibility was best not ignored.
Anyone that needed convincing on this point should be directed towards any aerospace fighter pilot that had flown both a Stingray and a Hellcat through the air at supersonic speed and low altitude and ask them their opinion on which ride was the least pleasant. 
The SLDF Overlord had blasted off from where it had originally set down at the militia base near the capital Dalmatia and had entered a ballistic trajectory which would carry it over the ocean to its destination on the southern continent. This was an even less pleasant ride than an outside observer might assume because, thanks to being in a gravity well, there was a 'down' which was not the same direction as the axis of thrust, and the angle of that down changed throughout the arc.
Naturally the worst part was when the Overlord had to flip stem to stern so it could use its main engine to deaccelerate and then set down as gently as possible. This all being left to the last possible safe moment in order to make the trip with the necessary haste that combat operations required.
Describing the journey as uncomfortable, hair-raising and tooth-rattling would be to drastically understate the reality, fortunately the SLDF trained its personnel to deal with such situations and had provided the necessary equipment.
Thanks to all the harnesses designed to hold everyone and everything in place multiple serious injuries were avoided, while mouthguards prevented several tongues being bitten off during the roller coaster ride of a trip.
It was still disconcerting as all hell of course, especially for the mechwarriors who made it strapped into the cockpits of their machines for rapid deployment on arrival.
Looking out from the cockpit of his Highlander secured within one of the mech bays within the Overlord, Major Robert D. MacArthur noted with satisfaction that the six huge external doors of the DropShip were already starting to open even before the ship set down, and soon after that the landing was surprisingly smooth given the circumstances.
Spitting out his mouthguard MacArthur took a deep breath as magnetic clamps holding his Highlander and the other machines disengaged. "GO GO GO!" he bellowed into the microphone fitted to his neurohelmet as soon as the doors had opened, the first four mechs already heading out through the doors before he had even finished the order.
The last time MacArthur had done an actual combat drop like this was on Terra while fighting against Amaris decades before, but General Romanov had sure-as-hell made sure her people practiced regularly for these kind of deployments into a potentially hostile LZ, and the lights and then medium mechs under his command tore off the DropShip to secure the area like they did this every day.
The Overlord should have touched down far enough away from where the pirates had landed that they couldn't possibly hit his forces before they fully deployed, but Major MacArthur wasn't prepared to take any risks. While his two companies of BattleMechs could be all off the ship and ready for action in minutes that was not true for his armored unit and he wanted that company of Manticore tanks crewed, down the ramps and formed up before he ordered his forces to advance. 
According to the locals the presumed pirates had a Union, two standard model Leopard mech carriers and an old Jumbo. The latter DropShip was unlikely to be carrying BattleMechs or vehicles, it was probably just mostly along to transport loot, but there might be infantry aboard it and between them the two military DropShips could be carrying some twenty mechs.
MacArthur himself had some twenty-four mechs plus twelve tanks to support them, plus whatever the local militia had of course, which would have made him a great deal happier if he didn't know that his command was light on heavies and heavy on lights, to coin the old mechwarrior joke.
As his Highlander followed the smaller BattleMechs off the ship, tank crews visibly already running to their own machines behind him in the vehicle bay, MacArthur wished he had come to Illyria to fight a war not to train militia. "Suck it up Robert" he said quietly to himself, 'If wishes were mechs we'd all be riding an Atlas II." he observed wryly as he cleared the DropShip and the only other assault BattleMech under his command, a Stalker, appeared at his side.
The Overlord had set down on a small hill on what was otherwise mostly a wide open plain, with some farmland nearby and the town where the DropShip plant was located visible on the horizon. Not too far to the north, just out of line-of-sight from here should be where the pirate DropShips were and once his tanks were ready MacArthur intended to go for the throat pin them down with his tanks and larger, slower mechs in the center with his lighter machines screening his flanks.
It was a fair assumption that if these ****** had known there was a full battalion of mechs and tanks from Niops on the planet they wouldn't have landed at all, and while they would have seen the Overlord heading their way the sight of three company's worth of heavy metal heading right at them was still unlikely to do their morale any favors.
Things were more equal in terms of aerospace fighters. An Overlord carried a full squadron of six, while their Union and pair of Leopard DropShips would have brought two apiece to the fight, so numerically they were matched.
Where they weren't matched was in terms of equipment. According to his fighter-pilots currently jockeying for position in the sky above, the other side was using standard model Sparrowhawk light and Ironsides medium fighters which weren't actually bad machines but they were no match for the souped-up Tomahawk and Rapier fighters that the SLDF had brought to the fight. Even if his pilots had 'only' been flying royals it would have been a mismatch, but as it was the SLDF had upgraded their machines still further with improved clan technology and more armor.
It would have been nice if some of his mechs, not just his Tomahawk fighters, were packing Enhanced ERPPCs but his mechwarriors had been there to act as a OpFor and the pirates they were training the Illyrians to fight wouldn't have that kind of firepower, nobody this side of Strana Mechty apart from Niops actually did. As such what he had for the ground fight was strictly 'B Team' equipment, Star League era gear or weaponry such as the Improved Large Laser that hit just like an ordinary Large Laser, it was just lighter and more compact.
From what he knew of the clans those clowns would have bid away a couple of lances to make it an even fairer fight but that just went to show how stupid and/or insane they were in MacArthur's opinion. Back during the war a good day was the one where you arrived with a whole division and found the enemy waiting for you in battalion strength or less. If they were smart enough to surrender then great, if not you ordered a whole company to engage a single mech and after the hilariously lop-sided fight you praised their bravery while simultaneously mocking their utter stupidity for not waving the white flag or running away.
Given that their JumpShips would take nearly a whole week to recharge their drives it wasn't like the pirates could just climb back in their DropShips and flee themselves, well they could but they wouldn't get any further than the Lagrange point. Given that Niops was widely known by now to possess armed JumpShips, as well as actual warships, MacArthur assumed that the opposition would prefer to make a fight of it on the ground rather than in space, even if they hadn't yet detected the Tramp at the zenith point which had transported his people here from Niops.
A Tramp class JumpShip was no warship, but compared to a couple of Invaders it was still pretty formidable and it could jump from the zenith point to where they were any time it liked, having already fully recharged its own K-F drive while MacArthur's Overlord made its way from the jump-point to Illyria III.
If the Tramp had more armor MacArthur would have considered having it make the jump, shoot the pirate JumpShips up for a while then use its Lithium-Fusion Battery to jump back to the zenith point but that would have been risking damage to the Tramp. The Invaders weren't totally unarmed, they usually carried a couple of Large lasers or PPCs, and they might also be carrying some fighters in their small craft bays as the Tramp itself happened to be.
It was unlikely any of their fighters were packing nuclear ordnance as the two Ahab aerospace fighters docked aboard the SLDF Tramp were, but MacArthur knew that while just jumping in and nuking the pirate JumpShips would be an easy win General Romanov would have his balls on a plate for doing it. Trying not to look as WMD happy as the Successor States was part of the image Niops wanted to project to its neighbors, the Association freely admitted possessing a large nuclear stockpile but publicly stated this was only maintained as a strategic deterrent.
Most of his Mechwarriors that day were from the 331st, the Amaris War veterans of the 295th tending to be found driving heavies and assaults these days where fast reaction times weren't nearly as important as experience and discipline, but many of his tank crews however were comprised of soldiers his own age hailing from his own division. Romanov had felt that instructions being given to the Illyrian militia on how to operate a Manticore would be better received coming from older more experienced tread-heads than snot-nosed kids and so she had selected tank crews primarily on that basis. 
It all showed in just how much more excited and enthusiastic the radio chatter was between the mechwarriors compared to that between the tankers as MacArthur listened in. The Manticore crews were mostly long past the stage where they yearned for glory, or promotion, they just wanted to blast the enemy with PPCs and LRMs from range and then grind under their tracks, quickly and with minimal fuss and ideally minimal losses.
That wasn't to say that the tankers were blasé or unmotivated. They clearly wanted to get at the enemy and teach them a couple of lessons, these being that the SLDF was still the finest military that had ever taken the field, and that old warhorses could still kick ass, they just much preferred not to get killed doing it. In their youth losing their lives to help rid the galaxy of Stefan Amaris had seemed a sacrifice worth making, doing so this close to retirement just to dispose of some pirate rabble not so much.
They were in the right vehicles if they wanted to stay alive while dishing out the punishment at least, MacArthur considered with satisfaction. A regular Manticore was pretty tough to start with, but if you swapped out the original PPC and LRM launcher for the lighter improved versions of both, and then devoted that spare tonnage for even more armor, well if nothing else it certainly did wonders for tanker morale.
It still looked and handled much like the regular version, and the controls were the same so they were just fine for training the locals how to operate the Manticore, it was just even better at taking a hit now and that suited MacArthur just fine because so many of his mechs weren't exactly designed to soak up a lot of incoming fire. 
With a screen of light mechs scouting a little ahead of the main force Major MacArthur ordered the advance, making sure that his recon units knew that if they made contact they shouldn't try to be heroes, they should wait for the tougher machines to catch up. Like his mother liked to say, nobody ever won a war by dying for her planet, you make the other poor, dumb bitch die for hers.
It was good advice, but she might have been invited to more social events in refined company if her language had been a little less salty when mixing with polite society he knew. 
As for the fight to come, some artillery would have nice to soften the foe up before the fight of course, as would having a Stuka squadron as air support, but MacArthur guessed that those under his command of the Wolverine persuasion in particular weren't phased too much by the idea of going in without them. During their days with him as their cult leader Kerensky Junior had apparently frowned upon proper combined-arms warfare, so they thought of arty and airstrikes as something that was nice to have, not an outright necessity on the battlefield.
Many of them were still a bit weird in his opinion, even after a decade of living on Niops with normal, albeit more than a little nerdy, people, but you certainly couldn't fault them on their ability to pilot a BattleMech. The genetically-engineered ones were still an unknown quantity as far as he was concerned however, and he didn't think his reservations were entirely due to being aggrieved that his granddaughter was involved with one, a ****** Hallis no less. By messing with their fight-or-flight reflex their creators had made them react to stressful situations in a way that the vast majority of sane humans did not, which made them potentially unpredictable and undoubtedly difficult to relate to or always understand.
This would be the first time any of them had seen combat, and MacArthur was certain how they acted and behaved would be studied in depth for quite some time afterwards but he didn't think this would really answer any of the big questions about them.
MacArthur expected to win this fight decisively, perhaps not bloodlessly but decisively nonetheless. The great unknown that would be faced at some point in the future was how the Gamma and Zeta 'sibkits', or whatever the hell it was they called themselves, would handle defeat, or even just being ordered to retreat.
They handled their machines wonderfully though, he had to give them that. Ethical considerations aside, if you started teaching your people how to fight at kindergarten age by the time they were in their late teens or early twenties they really knew their trade. MacArthur himself had been younger than any of the kits currently were when he fought his first battle, having been a mere nineteen years old when as a second lieutenant he first followed General Romanov across a battlefield on Apollo, and with only a fraction as much time spent in a mech cockpit when he got to do it for real the first time as they had, he certainly expected them to perform better than he had at least. The neurohelmet you wore used your own sense of balance and reactions to stimuli to keep your BattleMech upright when something was trying to knock it down, and to stop you falling over when moving across broken terrain at speed, and it took years of practice to be really good at it.
Watching the Locust, Wasp, Commando and Stinger lights leading the advance, each with some gene-spliced weirdo barely out of their teens at the controls effortlessly dealing with any obstacles the encountered as they kept formation and maintained spacing MacArthur hoped they could shoot as well as they drove, rightly assuming that they probably could.
They knew their jobs well enough that they didn't think scouting just meant looking out for the enemy at least. As the light mechs advanced they reported on the terrain and the state of the ground so that the units following behind took the appropriate route. This was particularly important when you had a mix of different platforms working together such as mechs and tanks. Ground that was tricky for a mech could be easy for a tracked vehicle and vice versa, wide tracks and low ground pressure per square meter meant that a sixty ton tank like a Manticore could traverse soft ground that the foot of a twenty ton mech would just sink into, while conversely a mech could step over or jump obstacles that would utterly stymie a tank.
That was just another reason why combined-arms formations were just objectively better in the majority of situations, they just weren't so stuck in the way they had to operate, stuck being the operative word in this particular example.
Was the raw skill of the kits and a careful study of their trade in the academic classroom sense a match for actual combat experience though, Major MacArthur wondered, knowing that he would be finding that out sooner rather than later?
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===More than Meets the Eye===
A few kilometres away Major Angelica Cirion was counting on experience. Judging from the Overlord Dropship's IFF It looked like she was about to be facing some kind of expeditionary force from the Niops Association, maybe there to train the Illyrians she wondered, but how good could they really be?
She had heard the stories of course, even if you weren't connected to the HPG network like Circinus both rumors and actual news tended to spread fast from the Inner Sphere to the near Periphery, and Niops was close enough to Circinus for her people to have paid attention. A self-styled Star League and Terran Hegemony remnant, Niops had apparently been a high-tech scientific research station that was technologically sophisticated enough to not only make its own HPGs but even keep a small number of warships and an unknown number of BattleMechs operational. 
It was supposedly Niops that had loaned the Palatinate the money they were using to buy the shipment of military equipment from the Magistracy that was expected to start to arrive later in the year, so the Association wanting to make sure the money wasn't being squandered made a certain amount of sense if they were conscientious, but the timing was pretty unfortunate from her perspective.
Raiding Illyria before they had the new gear and couldn't put up meaningful resistance was the whole reason why the Black Warriors had chosen to strike now, only idiots wanted a fair fight after all, but assuming that damn Overlord was fully loaded she could be facing thirty-six mechs, or perhaps a mix of mechs and combat vehicles, to her twenty.
It was best to assume the worst and plan for it, Cirion knew. The 295th Battlemech Division which had somehow ended up on Niops wasn't a royal formation, so they wouldn't have the best gear the old SLDF had boasted, but they wouldn't have worn-out junk either like most forces you encountered in the periphery.
It was a good news/bad news situation, the two actually going hand-in-hand. The good news was that it was a reasonable assumption that the opposition hadn't really fought anybody since Aleksandry Kerensky put a bullet into Stefan Amaris, so they wouldn't have anybody much under ninety with combat experience. The bad news being that because they hadn't fought anybody since then they could well be bringing factory-fresh machines to the party, ones with all the fancy bells and whistles still working. Guardian ECM systems, Beagle Active Probes and command mechs where all the electronics still worked just weren't a thing these days, particularly not way out here, and the other side having potential force multipliers like that wasn't exactly great.
At least she had a fair idea of how they were likely to fight, or at least she assumed so given that the people that would have trained the opposition were almost certainly old SLDF regulars who had served in the 295th against Amaris. Most of the actual veterans would be retired by now of course, maybe excepting the senior officers and a few grizzled non-coms, but they would have taught their kids and grandkids the way they were taught and given that SLDF doctrine had triumphed over the Rim Worlds Republic it seemed unlikely they would have tried to re-invent the wheel in the intervening years.
That could be their undoing. The Black Warriors knew Star League Defense Force battlefield doctrine as well as anyone, in fact during the Amaris War they had actually been involved in training new recruits to Kerensky's cause in how the SLDF did things, thanks to Zachariah Cirion and his mercenary regiment siding with the anti-Amaris cause and doing what they could for the Star League.
The people that trained Angelica and her generation of the Black Warriors had trained a lot of the people that went on to retake the Terran Hegemony, the SLDF units at the sharp edge needing a constant stream of replacements as they took battlefield casualties. It was in fact one of the reasons why the Black Warriors weren't your typical pirate rabble, they were professional soldiers with proper training and the instilled discipline you would expect from that. They just happened to want a better pay check and a laxer uniform code than a regiment with less flexible morals would get, and you couldn't even accuse them of being only out for number one. If somebody invaded Circinus the Black Warriors would fight for their home just as hard as any soldier anywhere in the Inner Sphere would, excepting perhaps the Dracs but those lunatics seemed to go out of their way to martyr themselves for the dragon. 
It was annoying that her aerospace fighters were too busy dancing around the sky looking for a positional advantage in the dogfight to come to do some better aerial observation but as the Niops people advanced it was obvious from altitude by the tank tracks many of them left behind that it wasn't a mech-only formation.
How Cirion handled this would depend on what tanks they were. The SLDF had relied heavily on the Manticore and the Von Luckner as their main tank strength and they needed to be dealt with in a very different way.
The Von Luckner was the heavier of the two machines, and the harder hitting thanks to its massive AC/20 that could utterly wreck a mech in one blow, but the AC/20 lacked range so as long as you weren't stupid enough to get close those things could be dealt with. The Manticore was more of a problem at longer range, it didn't have the same knock-out punch but it's PPC used in conjunction with its LRM launcher could tear the hide off you if you gave it the time to do so.
As the enemy approached her scouts made note of their composition before withdrawing back to her lines. 
Just the Manticore then, and the vast majority of their mechs were lights and mediums, Angelica Cirion considered as her scouts relayed on their findings.
They had more hardware, but the average tonnage of her mechs was considerably higher, with armor plate to spare. If she tried to fight at range then it would play into the hands of that company of PPC and LRM toting enemy tanks, but if she went right at them, concentrating fire on anything that could be knocked out fast to even the odds, and was clinical in her target selection after that, this could work.
Assault wise they did have a Highlander and a Stalker, the Gauss Rifle on the former being another particular reason not to want to shoot it out with them at long range. A lucky hit from that thing could blow the head of her Battlemaster clean off, and her ride being a command mech it would surely be gunning for her. Cirion wanted to be up close where she could put all her medium lasers and her SRM launcher to work against it, burn the thing down with weight of fire in a brawl where the Highlander didn't have the advantage.
That Stalker would have to be dealt with differently, it had a weapons load-out that meant it would hit you progressively harder the closer you got to it, but the Black Warriors could tackle that thing after thinning out the herd.
This was going to be bloody but it was winnable, Cirion decided. Bigger mechs and undoubtedly more experienced Mechwarriors should be enough to get the job done, especially if she could shake their morale by taking down a few enemy machines in the first few minutes.
There was an area of more uneven and broken terrain nearby, and Angelica Cirion immediately ordered her mechs to move into it. If they had been fighting against Von Luckner tanks instead that would have been a bad idea but in terrain like that where you could only get line-of-sight relatively close the PPC on the Manticore wouldn't get a chance to shine, at least metaphorically. Being a blindingly bright charged particle beam with lightning flashing around it a PPC always shined literally. 
Issuing her instructions over the encrypted command channel Angelica Cirion told her troops what she expected of them, how she expected the fight to go, and what they needed to do in order to win. This wasn't turning out to be the battle they had expected against poorly equipped militia, but it wasn't like they had a battalion of heavies and assaults heading their way, those Niops machines might look shiny and pristine but that was because they hadn't fought a battle since her grandfather commanded the Black Warriors.
As the opposition approached and the scout's observations were confirmed that there was indeed an awful lot of diminutive 'bug' mechs among them, Wasp, Locust and Stinger twenty-tonners, as well as a couple of the slightly heavier Commando, the Black Warriors started to feel more confident and a ripple of laughter over the comms followed Major Cirion's joke that she should have brought along a can of insecticide.
It would be folly to completely discount even the smallest of mechs of course. They might not be able to take much punishment, and they didn't mount the firepower to dish it out either, but they had a speed and manoeuvrability advantage over heavier machines and if they could flank around and shoot you in the rear where the armor on your own ride was thinner they could be a literal pain-in-the-ass. For that reason Cirion told her own lights not to fully commit to the action until theirs were, they might be needed to counter a sudden piece of tactical chicanery.
Ideally she would have moved her forces into the town for the fight, tanks with specialized long-ranged armament sucked at urban warfare, but the need to defend her Dropships, and also the risk of local militia armed with shoulder-launched SRM launchers equipped with Inferno warheads, ruled that one out.
As she formulated last-minute plans and issued final orders her comms gear flagged up an incoming radio transmission from the other side over an open channel.
<<"This is Major Robert MacArthur of the Star League Defense Force issuing the first and final warning you will receive from me.">> the transmission began. <<"Given your failure to identify yourselves it is assumed you are unlawful combatants entitled to no protections under the Ares Conventions or any of the other rules and customs of war. As such we will treat you as pirates, showing no mercy unless you immediately lay down your arms and surrender, thus preventing unnecessary bloodshed on both sides.">>
Cirion grinned. "There's no such thing as the Star League Defense Force anymore." she signaled back. "No Star League either for that matter, so I guess you're operating under a false identity. As such it is assumed that you are unlawful combatants entitled to no protections under the Ares Conventions." she retorted sarcastically, laughing.
<<"The SLDF as constituted serves the government of the Niops Association as the lawful continuation of both the Star League and the Terran Hegemony. Regardless of that we're not here to bandy words with criminals. You can surrender your arms and face a fair trial, or you can face us in battle, choose the latter and any of you that survive will then face a hangman's rope.">>
"I have a counter-offer" Cirion responded. "You all turn around, get back on your Dropship and just leave because if you don't then after I've beaten you and taken your mechs as salvage I'll leave your corpses rotting in the sun to feed the carrion eaters" she said. "In case it's not clear, that's me saying that I won't be meekly waving the white flag."
<<"Thank God. I was worried for a moment you might not want to make a fight of it. MacArthur out.">>
Well, he was certainly out of his league anyway..., Angelica Cirion thought to herself confidently as the enemy formation continued to bear down on her position.
As with most ground battles in the twenty-ninth century the festivities began with a massive storm of LRMs from both sides, missiles raining down like hail in a mostly indirect-fire engagement that made up for in fire and fury what it lacked in accuracy.
It was all so spectacular that it took Anjelica Cirion a couple of minutes to register what her aerospace fighter pilots suddenly started screaming about.
Two planes down already? How the hell did that happen?, Cirion wanted to know before the fighting on the ground took up all her available attention.
It still itched in the back of her mind however, where it was soon joined by another thought as her mechwarriors started yelling about the first enemy machines taking direct fire not reacting to solid hits like they should, and their return fire being unusually unflustered and precise, as if the man or woman at the controls was on a firing range not in a battle. 
As the world became missile salvos, streams of autocannon tracer, PPC bolts and laser beams lit up by clouds of smoke and dust Angelica Cirion wondered if there was more to these Niops people and their machines than met the eye.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : The force dispatched to Illyria to train the locals in operating the Manticore is not properly balanced and it's not ideally equipped to take on the Black Warriors (it would obliterate the average pirate battalion though). Despite numerical superiority they have smaller mechs on average and the Manticore tank specialises in long-range engagements that Cirion isn't stupid enough to given them. If the SLDF's tank company had been a mix of the Manticore and Von Luckner then the Black Warriors would have been less happy at a close-in fight but as it is they prefer to brawl rather than get shot up by PPCs.Thanks to the first 'full production run' Ironborn coming of age the SLDF is now leaning younger. particularly in terms of those sat in the cockpits of light mechs. Although the first use of the Iron Womb by the clans dates to 2816 it wasn't until 2819 that numbers were significantly ramped up as Kerensky embraced the technology fully as part of his breeding program.MacArthur would have much preferred to fight with some good artillery support, the kind that the SLDF used so effectively before against the Blood Rain on Algenib, but they don't have any Vali or Thor batteries so they're fighting with what they do have.The biggest edge they do have is in terms of aerospace fighters, and its technological. The ASFs belonging to the Black Warriors are so outclassed by upgunned Royal Tomahawk and Rapier fighters it's not funny.
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Chapter 39