Western Reaches Campaign: Battle for Tarastra (Part 2)
Eriadu system, Talastra Planet.
The Fourth Civilization fleet had begun to gain a considerable advantage on this battlefield. Governor Wilhuff Tarkin of the Republic 18th Army had discovered that even when the two fleets were evenly matched in strength, they still found it difficult to shake Sefrans Tann's formation.
What was more, although the Republic fleet was numerous, it could not form a balanced composition.
By comparison, the Fourth Civilization fleet had largely been built in the same era. Their designs had accounted for tactical coordination from the very beginning, allowing them to achieve results where one plus one was greater than two.
Yet many Galactic Republic warships came from designs separated by hundreds or even thousands of years. They had been built for entirely different purposes. The Invincible-class battleship, for instance, had served as a mainline warship during the Sith Wars. Its battlefield role overlapped with that of the Hunter Class Battlecruiser, yet its slow speed made it difficult for it to keep pace with modern warships.
The Inquisitor-class battleship was another example. It had been built after the Rusan Reforms, under treaty restrictions, primarily for military deterrence or for garrison duty near important planets.
Then there were CR-70 corvettes for protecting trade routes, DP-20 gunships for eliminating pirates, and so on... Their functions were diverse and overlapping, so in a battle of this scale, they could only be thrown into the fray all at once.
Not only was there no proper coordination, but the bewildering array of ship classes also placed enormous strain on logistics.
The Republic Supreme Strategic Command no longer had enough logistical fleets to meet the front line's needs, and had no choice but to require the major warship manufacturers to support the ships they had produced