Advantages and Disadvantages
The Unmanned Warship continued their blocking and dismantling efforts, while the humans were equally ruthless, directly mobilizing nearby combat formations to bombard the target location. The Lyra warship formation relentlessly poured firepower into the target location.
There is no morality on the battlefield; you have to strike while the iron is hot and seize the opportunity to turn the tide of battle.
Wave after wave of salvoes illuminated the battlefield, igniting fireballs at the target locations. Countless Unmanned Warship swarmed towards these locations, hoping to buy their flagships more time.
Since the start of the war, humanity has never enjoyed such a satisfying "target practice." Almost every salvo could destroy an enemy warship. But the more this happened, the more anxious the crew of the Lyra became, because the longer it dragged on, the more likely the enemy flagship would be able to complete the thruster repairs.
This scene also made Yue Yuan and other high-ranking officials and military personnel realize some of the shortcomings in the current configuration of the human fleet.
In the beginning, during the Tier 1 Civilization, almost all warships in the human fleet were manually controlled. At that time, there were also different types of ships, such as Unmanned Mothership, Self-Detonating Drone, and Probe Spaceship specifically used for detection.
Later, with the emergence of some new technologies, weapons such as Positron Cannon gradually faded from the scene. At the same time, the enormous size of Magnetic Propulsion led to the gigantism of warships, resulting in the massive warship fleets we see today.
It was during this period that humanity consciously stopped building other types of warships, and the original motherships disappeared, with the entire Great Fleet becoming almost entirely dominated by Sea-Class Warship.
Before this war, humanity didn't think much of it, since other ship types were no match for the Sea-Class Warship. Not to mention that small-caliber main guns couldn't penetrate the armor of the Sea-Class Warship, even the Polarization Shield couldn't be destroyed due to insufficient striking energy.
However, Yue Yuan and other high-ranking officials now realize that there seems to be room for improvement in fleet configuration, and that a fleet composed entirely of Sea-Class Warship is not a panacea. This feeling has become even stronger after experiencing the difficulties of this operation to Strike at the Yellow Dragon.
Humanity may indeed need other types of warships.
For example, a fleet of warships could be built specifically for rapid raids. Such fleets could be made lighter, carry less fuel, or even be disposable, fragile warships in order to achieve faster acceleration. Their purpose would be, as is the case with the Lyra, as a flagship to raid enemy warship fleets.
Of course, only fleets with Strong Artificial Intelligence and multi-line control will be effective.
As for the guard warships that accompany the flagship Lyra, they can be built to be more robust and have thicker armor, depending on their escort functions.
Yes, we can also add some motherships to the guard formation, but these motherships will not be responsible for offense as before, but will be for support.
Some Engineering Ship can be placed on the mothership. Lyra suffers a major malfunction during the war, or if its thrusters are damaged like those of the fleets in the current Interstellar Transaction Market, these Engineering Ship can be deployed to disassemble parts from the Unmanned Warship and install them, thereby achieving the purpose of rapid repair.
For such large-scale repairs, Nanomite Repair Robot are incapable; the fastest solution is replacement. Fortunately, humans, with their highly proficient mechanical technology, can modularize most components, making this auxiliary mothership strategy highly feasible.
As for detection modules, in addition to the detection modules on the warships themselves, human fleets have always maintained the tradition of using small spacecraft for detection. Normally, these Probe Spaceship are carried aboard the Main Battleship, and when needed, they are launched into space to conduct various explorations.
All of these things naturally serve the various tactics in the human mind. For example, in this operation to Strike at the Yellow Dragon's territory, if there had been a dedicated fleet of warships for surprise attacks, they might have already captured the enemy's flagship.
Of course, this is the so-called integrated offense and defense.
If humans can think of this, other Level 3 Civilization, as long as they are not as lacking in the art of war as the Nair Civilization, can probably think of it as well. Therefore, they also need to take precautions against the possibility of their flagship being attacked.
In fact, while this fleet configuration of Level 3 Civilization has many advantages, such as avoiding excessive casualties among its own individuals during war, it also makes it very easy to be targeted.
Once the flagship is destroyed, the army will collapse, just like in ancient wars where the commander-in-chief is killed.
You can't have your cake and eat it too; you have to choose between the two, unless you develop Strong Artificial Intelligence that can self-replicate, like the Moke Star Civilization, which is only known to humans by name.
But that form of Strong Artificial Intelligence is too dangerous. With thousands upon thousands of clones, no one can guarantee that one of them will not cause problems. Even if there is Mind Imprint, there is no guarantee that there will never be any problems during the cloning process.
There's also the kind of environment that Strong Artificial Intelligence needs to exist in, meaning the requirements for Supercomputer must be reduced. Undoubtedly, this is a type of Strong Artificial Intelligence technology different from current ones.
This technology is currently neither mastered by humans nor by the Interstellar Transaction Market. Perhaps something could be obtained from the Silver Mist Consciousness, but the Silver Mist Consciousness has now disappeared.
In the blink of an eye, just as Yue Yuan was still brainstorming, he suddenly heard an excited voice coming from the channel inside the Lyra.
"Haha! You hit it!"
"It's blown up! We've destroyed that flagship!"
Victory belongs to us!
Upon hearing these sounds, Yue Yuan immediately regained his Qingming, and his pupils refocused on the projection screen in front of him. Sure enough, he saw the information feedback on it, as well as the bright light coming from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away.
It was at this moment that, from the perspective of the probe, it could be seen that the interstellar civilization fleet, which was originally entangled with the human fleet, suddenly fell into a state of stagnation.
Their weapons ceased firing, their movements slowed, and their positioning became flawed.
Although this period of stagnation is unlikely to last long, the Unmanned Warship that have resumed operation have lost their previous agility and precision in striking targets, and their perfect coordination with each other is gone.
Seeing this, how could humans not know what had happened? The flagship must have been destroyed. Without the control of Strong Artificial Intelligence, these Unmanned Warship activated their emergency systems, and were taken over by segments of Intelligent Program.
Suddenly, the battlefield situation reversed.
Those warships, now deprived of Strong Artificial Intelligence control, were like headless flies, running around aimlessly. While they still knew to fire at human warships, their accuracy and ability to anticipate human movement had plummeted. What used to be a system of precise coordination and maneuvering to predict and fire at human targets now seemed like a joke.
As a result, these Unmanned Warships, which originally belonged to the Strong Artificial Intelligence, were destroyed one by one by the human fleet, and the starry sky once again burst into more bright fireworks than ever before.
Those Unmanned Warship that were once interspersed among human warship formations have now become lambs to the slaughter.
In the starry sky between the Lyra and North Sea warship groups, the battle showed a trend of complete collapse, with tens of thousands of Unmanned Warship being destroyed by humans in just a few hours.
In this situation, even without commands from the humans on the Lyra, the Strong Artificial Intelligence of humans knows what to do.