Things often happened unexpectedly, but when you thought about them carefully, they were often just what you should have expected.
Take, for instance, the sudden ambush and counterambush between fleets on the same orbit, not far from Geonosis. The outcome of the ensuing artillery exchange between the Hero Federation's battleship formation and the Trade Federation's "warships" had never been in doubt.
In the brief span of less than five minutes after the two sides spotted each other, Nova, the Hero Federation's admiral, led her raiding fleet of five hundred massive, cutting-edge battleships and fired a third volley from their main guns at half power. Across from them, fewer than four hundred warships—most over three thousand meters in diameter, shaped like flat disks or rings with spheres—were immediately declared wiped out...
Aside from a few lucky ships whose greedy but cowardly Neimoidian commanders had seen the writing on the wall and promptly signaled their surrender, surviving capture in the process, the rest of the Trade Federation's supposedly "invincible" fleet was reduced to fearsome steel wreckage scattered all over Geonosis's orbit.
For the first time, the Hero Federation's battleships had used their mighty guns to show the Trade Federation—who had roamed the galaxy for countless years, bullying pirates and unarmed planets with armed merchant ships—what a real space battle between regular armed forces looked like!
The entire battlefield was silent. Only the navigation lights on the vast fleet blinked, while the victors and survivors enjoyed the simple pleasure of being alive and the sound of their own breathing aboard their ships. The defeated had already lost everything without a sound...
Perhaps,
someday in the future, the space junk made up of more than three hundred large Trade Federation warships would drift into another planet's orbit, or be caught by Geonosis's rings and