Shadowsun commanded a fleet composed of 50 Custodian-class battleships, 240 Protector-class cruisers, 200 Emissary-class cruisers, 24 Kroot Warspheres, and 20 Nicassar Dhows.
The rest were transport ships with insufficient combat capability and various support vessels. In the last war, civilian ships lacking in defense and firepower had been utterly unable to penetrate the defenses of the Imperium of Man's ugly, massive warships.
Custodian-class: both carrier and battleship.
Any troops that broke through aboard transport torpedoes were wiped out within seconds. It was as though terrifying monsters lurked inside the human ships.
Her fleet was the strongest of the twelve expeditionary fleets, and likewise the largest fleet the T'au Empire had ever possessed in any of its expansions.
Yet she still felt uncertain. More and more decrypted documents were revealing a mad yet powerful Imperium to her, one that had existed even longer than the T'au themselves.
Who knew what the Imperium of Man beyond the Damocles Gulf was like? Perhaps they could push close to the heart of the Imperium, only to face its fiercest counterattack and assault?
Just as they had desperately defended their homeworld, Lai-An, beneath the tide of Orks.
"Hehehe..." Governor Clark lowered his head. Rather than hurriedly answering Shadowsun's question, he said something else. "You fool, let me do the math for you."
"The Imperium's Sentauri Sector is a sphere roughly two hundred light-years across, with around ten thousand usable planets. The Imperium does not care whether a world is habitable. A single hive city can solve every problem."
"Imperial hive worlds generally have populations between one hundred and five hundred billion. Let's not exaggerate—say that among these ten thousand planets, only one hundred are hive worlds, and each has only one hundred billion people. The tithes only conscript one-tenth of the local PDF, and we