Battle of Lerma

The battle of Lerma began as a joint Alliance/Foundation training excercise. The Gudersnipe 4th, 11th, and 19th fleets joined with over 400 Alliance battle groups as well as thousands of warships from member worlds. In total, close to 50,000 ships were invovled in the excercise, the largest of it's kind.

The goal of the exercise was to practice large-scale fleet operations and test communications and organizational software that had recently been written for such purposes. Exercises involving as many as 35,000 ships had previously been carried out, and the logistics of coordinating that many vessels had proved to be next to impossible.

A task-force, headed up by the Foundation, included scientists, strategists, programmers, and captains from over 1,000 different space-navies, all working together to develop a system for coordinating so many ships.

The Lerma excercise was supposed to be the first large-scale test run. As such, the bulk of Alliance ships were not even equipped with missile and torpedo ordnance.

The Lerma System

The Lerma System was chosen for it's unique collection of stellar phenomena. Three star systems in fairly close proximity around a nebula. The nebula would provide a valuable blind spot to disrupt standard ship-to-ship communications. Lerma was also uninhabited, containing no charlie-type planets. Being largely devoid of life, the system was ideal for conduction munitions tests.

In addition to the 50,000 active-duty ships, over 2,000 deralicts, dummy ships, and other large-scale targets had been brought in for live-fire testing.

The Attack

The Lerma System consisted of three main-sequence stars with between .3 and .6 light years between them, roughly forming a scaline triangle around a thick nebula. All of the stars had planets ranging from small rocky worlds to gas giants. Ships were dispersed throughout the region, conducting running operations.

A running operation meant each ship was on high-alert, carrrying out various drills while simulating combat conditions. All ships were organized into various task forces and given different navigational objectives, the ultimate goal being to keep the ships running at maximum effiency for as long as possible.

At random, vessels would be declared "destroyed" and ordered to retreat from the combat area. There, they would re-group with other vessels and rejoin the simulated melee as part of a new task force.

This maneuver lasted for six and a half days before all ships were ordered to stand down, planning a three-day rest period before attempting the next operation.

A a joint Alliance/Gudersnipe training exercise in the Lerma System is attacked. This is the first battle of the Kamian Succession Wars.