"By the word Chitong has reported: in the interstellar air-battle between the enemy and ourselves, our side has already grasped the initiative and the advantage. Winning the interstellar air-battle outright is only a matter of time," Secretary Lilith reported.
"Are our interstellar warships in position?" Zhao Chen looked toward Charlotte.
Charlotte pointed at the positions those interstellar warships held upon the interstellar holo-table.
"The interstellar warships have sailed into combat position; one minute from now, they can open fire upon the enemy ships!"
Zhao Chen looked at the positions those Owl Dragon interstellar warships held upon the interstellar holo-table.
2,000 T3 Triceratops-class Interstellar Heavy Assault Frigates had formed an all-around encircling ring, and were compressing it without cease.
Another 500 T3 Triceratops-class Interstellar Heavy Assault Frigates guarded the safety of the interstellar missile ships, interstellar carriers, and auxiliary ship-classes at the rear.
And within the encircling ring the T3 Triceratops formed, the T3 Imperial-class Heavy Interstellar Battleships were advancing slowly, catching their targets!
Once a ship was locked on by one of their bow cannons, that as good as pronounced its death.
And what could be locked on by a T3 Imperial-class Heavy Interstellar Battleship, moreover, had to be a T3-grade interstellar warship, and one of the main-force ship-classes at that!
Beyond this, one further new role, too, had joined this encirclement-and-extermination.
The T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer.
This was a ship-class Zhao Chen had, three months before, only just exchanged out from the system.
At the time, in consideration of the large-scale expansion of the fleet's size, he'd needed to fill out the ship-class series complete.
Though Zhao Chen had in hand the T3 Flame-Dragon-class Medium Interstellar Destroyer — the one whose technology he'd once licensed to the Chu family — this class of interstellar destroyer could not meet Zhao Chen's needs.
And so, in the end, Zhao Chen had exchanged for yet another T3-grade interstellar destroyer.
Which was to say, this T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer!
With it, the jigsaw of the Owl Dragon Legion's T3-series interstellar-warship combat system was, at last, fitted complete.
As for this T3 Wolverine — its performance was, naturally, no trifling thing.
Zhao Chen tapped open the window of its lead ship; to the right there was a very small box, within which was the basic introduction to this class of interstellar warship.
Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer
Ship-class: Interstellar Destroyer
Technology grade: T3
Hull-armor strength: 6,200–7,800 units
Star-shield energy: none
Cruising speed: 160 star-knots
Warp drive: Grade-6 warp drive
Length: 1,088 meters
Mass: 380,000 tons
Crew complement: 100
Ship weapons: 100 T3 Wolverine-class heavy twelve-barrel particle-energy rapid cannons; 10 T3 heavy electromagnetic-jamming cannons
This T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer — from its very name one could tell it was unlike the ordinary interstellar destroyer.
It was fitted with heavy armor of an astonishing defensiveness, and was, at the same time, a heavy interstellar warship.
Its defensive grade, among the T3-grade interstellar warships, was second only to the two classes of the T3 Imperial-class Heavy Interstellar Battleship and the T3 Triceratops-class Interstellar Heavy Assault Frigate.
More special still: this T3 Wolverine had very much of the Warhammer Interstellar Commonwealth's design style about it.
What it set store by was the hull's physical defense; apart from the hull armor itself being very strong, it employed, besides, an exceedingly advanced physical-defense technology, which raised the hull armor's defensive power by close to 30%.
For the sake of this boost, the T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer was the one and only T3-grade interstellar warship in Zhao Chen's Owl Dragon fleet that was of the T3 grade yet not fitted with a star-shield defense system.
The resources that would originally have been assigned to the star-shield defense system had all been poured into the hull armor.
And it was thus that this T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer came to be!
Though it had no star shield, by virtue of its formidable armor defense, even the strongest bow cannon of a T3 Imperial-class Heavy Interstellar Battleship could not blast open its hull armor in a single shot.
Chief Engineer Annie had once run an experiment: using a T3 Imperial-class Heavy Interstellar Battleship to attack a T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer, with the T3 Imperial's every weapon system at full fire, it needed upward of a minute's time to destroy a single T3 Wolverine — and in actual combat conditions, this time might well exceed three minutes!
Apart from the strongest of "shields," the T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer, though not fitted with the strongest of "spears," had a manner of attack quite enough to leave any T3-grade interstellar warship harried to its wits' end.
The hundred T3 Wolverine-class heavy 12-barrel particle-energy rapid cannons meant the very fiercest of attacks at short range.
And the 10 T3 heavy electromagnetic-jamming cannons — this weapon's performance was such that, once it struck an enemy interstellar warship, it could paralyze that enemy ship's engine, causing the enemy ship's speed to fall drastically, and thereby leaving it no choice but to face a head-on engagement with the T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer.
One further thing worth mentioning was its ship engine and energy system: though it was a heavy, heavily armored interstellar destroyer, the ship engine it used was, of all things, the most advanced!
This ensured that its speed could keep its teeth locked onto the overwhelming majority of T3-grade interstellar warships.
And the combat style of the T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer was rather like its name.
The wolf and the badger.[1]
The wolf: a pack animal, that as a rule hunts chiefly in a body.
The badger: a small creature — small in build, yet possessed of an exceedingly pugnacious nature, that will dare, even in the face of the fiercest wild beasts of the natural world, to go up and bite and duel it out!
And this was much like the T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer's positioning: even faced with certain main-battle ship-classes, the T3 Wolverine would dare swarm up all at once, and, relying on its dense firepower and its advantage in numbers, attack and annihilate the enemy ships!
And now, Charlotte had devised, expressly for this class of T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer, a tactical strategy: it could work in concert with the T3 Triceratops-class Interstellar Heavy Assault Frigate.
In battles past, the T3 Triceratops-class Interstellar Heavy Assault Frigate had all along taken on the combat tasks of charging and breaking the lines, and of throwing the enemy's formation into disorder.
Though, by virtue of the T3 Triceratops's ramming horns and hull armor, it carried all before it, its efficiency was, all the same, somewhat slow.
But paired with the T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyer, it was another matter.
First dispatch the T3 Triceratops-class Interstellar Heavy Assault Frigates to form an encircling ring, and then set the T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyers within it.
And the drama that then played out… needed no further words.
The encircling ring shrank bit by bit, and the T3 Wolverine-class Heavy Interstellar Armored Destroyers could hunt the enemy within it without the least scruple — never mind whether it was a T3 interstellar battleship or a T3 interstellar battlecruiser!
Of course, faced with these main-force interstellar warships, the finest means was still to leave the annihilation to a main-force interstellar warship of the T3 Imperial-class Heavy Interstellar Battleship's sort — that was the swiftest in efficiency.
Perhaps someone might ask: and what of the T3 Blizzard-class Light Interstellar Battlecruiser and the T3 Wind-Eagle-class Medium Interstellar Cruiser?
Naturally, when the need arose, they'd thread through and cleave apart the enemy formation, and encircle and exterminate the enemy ships that tried to break out and flee.
Under such a division of labor, the Owl Dragon Legion fleet's combat system was greatly enhanced.
The more so since there was, besides, the existence of that sovereign, the T4 Vermilion Bird-class Medium Interstellar Cruiser.