(Asking for monthly tickets in the middle of the month should be fine too, right... Though it's neither here nor there, this date does seem rather distinctive.)
The plan was as follows:
When the enemy's Space Fortresses released their next batch of drones, the Empire Fleet would continue to maintain the appearance of a standoff. That would cause their drones to switch into attack mode and take the initiative to ram and weaken the Empire Army's Combined Shield. At that point, our anti-aircraft guns and various space-faring turrets would clear out those drones at maximum efficiency, aiming to wipe them out within ten minutes—though that was only an ideal target. The drone swarm was simply too massive, and the Space Fortresses always kept roughly one-third of their drones nearby to reinforce their defenses. The best possible outcome would be eliminating two-thirds of the enemy's aircraft within ten minutes.
Our assault force would set out during the final three minutes. If the previous step went smoothly, the enemy drone swarm would already have been drastically reduced, giving the assault force a high chance of breaking through the drone blockade. Since those special Space Fortresses had no gun emplacements and relied entirely on drone waves produced every ten minutes for defense, as long as we exploited that timing gap and did everything possible to weaken their close-range defenses within those ten minutes, the odds of this assault succeeding would be quite high.
Once the assault succeeded, the Sixth Fleet's "expert team" would attempt to crack the Space Fortresses' core protocols. Using the keys they had possessed back when they were Fallen Apostles, they could force every Space Fortress offline. After that, it would be time for the satisfying harvest.
The Empire Army already held the numerical advantage. The enemy fleet had only