Both fleets advanced at tremendous speed, but the fighters they launched were even faster.
When the warships on both sides were one light-minute apart, countless fighters had already become entangled in a deadly melee!
Only then did the Republic Pilots clearly see what kind of enemy they were facing!
It was a dark cloud that blotted out the sky!
Countless small drones surged forward like a swarm of bees, densely packed with barely any gaps between them! Yet whenever anti-air fire swept toward them, the drones immediately evaded it, as though hollow gaps suddenly opened within that dark cloud along the trajectory of the fire.
At the sight, Republic commanders at every level, Gideon Tarkin included, were struck dumb. Such maneuvers demonstrated the drones' extraordinarily advanced Flight Control System!
These drones could evade anti-air fire because their mothership provided them with turret rotation data from the Republic fleet.
This was an enormously complex undertaking. The entire Republic fleet had thousands of turrets, all constantly rotating while the warships themselves were continually moving. To evade incoming fire, it was necessary to determine which turret's firing angle threatened a particular drone, relay that information to the drones along the turret's line of fire, and then begin evasive maneuvers.
Simply evading was not enough, either. With such a vast number of drones and such dense anti-air barrages, choosing the wrong direction meant certain destruction.
Thus, before this, almost all drones had relied on artificial intelligence to handle such problems themselves. Put simply, drones had been turned into robots, which was how machines like Vulture droid fighters came about.
However, fighters had limited carrying capacity, and the onboard artificial intelligence often could not handle such complicated calculations. As a result, these robotic fighters performed very rigidly on the battlefield. By comparison, the Galactic Republic's