DARKSTAR CAMPAIGN UPDATE: DUCHESS ANNABEL’S WAR IS OVER

This is an overview of a “sandbox” environment I’ve been using for repeated test games of the newer editions of the Darkstar tactical starship combat system.

The Xi Scorpio stellar group is an actual six-system formation a little over 92 light-years from Earth, where a major war has been started by the so-called Khitan-Tunguska Free State (a breakaway faction that has rebelled from colonies of the Holy Russian Empire and the Panasian League).

In broad summary, these “Black Dragons” of the Khitan-Tunguska Free State attacked Japanese colonies in Xi Scorpio because there is a near-Earth analog planet in the Turakawa star system (Xi Scorpio D).  Because of their bloody uprising against the Panasian League and Russian Empire, the Black Dragons know they and their descendants can never return to Earth, so hope to found their new nation at the Flower of Hokkaido colony.  This is what they are calling their “Earth and Sky” mandate – an inalienable right for all men to have a place to raise their children and bury their dead.  A nation cannot exist entirely in space.

The Black Dragon invasion struck from the former Panasian and Russian colonies of Jade Dawn (Xi Scorpio C) and the binary system of Heilong-Novopromorskiy (Xi Scorpio A/B).  These former Russian and Chinese rebels bloodily wiped out the Japanese civilians on Hokkaido’s Flower “Mongol style” – which naturally prompted immediate response from the Japanese.

The problem for the Japanese is that in the world of Darkstar, 92 light-years is about a three-six month voyage.  The Japanese Navy has just one rapid-response, long-range task force where all the ships are upgraded to where they can generate 11th-magnitude Darkstar waves (cutting this time roughly in half).

In order to procure reinforcements, the Japanese Foreign Office contacts the US State Department and invokes a “military mutual assistance clause” signed in the treaty that ended the recent Japanese-American “Andromeda Arc War.”  Now, compelled by treaty, former enemies of the American and Japanese navies (some of them very personal) must sail the incredible distance of 92 light-years and fight as allies to retake these Japanese colonies.

So in game terms, we have small but elite battlegroups and task forces of Japanese and American warships (heavily upgraded, up to light cruiser in size) in a far-flung colonial conflict against local rebels with much less experience, but far greater numbers and far heavier Chinese and Russian-built warships – since these embattled star systems are right next to major Black Dragon shipyards.