Naval military reform was imperative.
As naval equipment continued to be upgraded, the Fourth Civilization Navy's existing tactics and systems were bound to undergo enormous changes. All 500,000 officers and enlisted personnel of the Fourth Civilization Navy had to be prepared for this.
The core of this reform lay in integrated fleet development.
In fact, this had always been the direction of the Fourth Civilization's naval development. Compared with the Galactic Republic, the Fourth Civilization was simply too small. It had no way to compete with the Galactic Republic in fleet size, so it needed to consider how to draw the greatest possible power from limited, smaller fleets.
That line of thinking was fleet integration.
As everyone knew, space battlefields often spanned multidimensional distances of dozens of light-seconds or even several light-minutes. In actual combat, the distances between individual warships could therefore be immense.
A common occurrence on the battlefield was for one warship to be under siege by enemy fighters while its own allied vessels were thousands or even tens of thousands of kilometers away.
The Galactic Republic, and later the Galactic Empire, addressed this problem by greatly strengthening the power of individual warships and enabling every vessel to independently carry out all combat operations.
This philosophy gave birth to a series of warships, including the Hunter Class Battlecruiser and the later Imperial-class Star Destroyer. Even if isolated from fleet formation, these warships could independently complete every combat mission. They had nothing to fear even when surrounded.
They possessed powerful armor and shields, formidable Turbolasers, and could launch large numbers of fighters for cover. It could be said that they were almost flawless warships.
Of course, strictly speaking, they did have a flaw: they were expensive. The Fourth Civilization simply could not afford warships like that.
But then again,