From cannon fodder to sweeping across thousands of stars.

Chapter 380: Rebuilding the Glory of Torpedoes
"The first round of heavy particle cannon fire is over. The planned fire target is 15, 13 have been sunk, and 2 have lost combat capability. The tactical goal has been achieved, and we can move on to the next stage!"

Inside the cockpit of the MA-01 heavy armored combat boat, the combat support AI Aurora was reporting the results of the first round of attacks to Jacob in a sweet voice.

Although she is just a combat auxiliary AI and does not have an emotional module, in Jacob's eyes, 'Aurora' is like his soulmate and partner.

So after hearing Aurora's report, Jacob even nodded as if he was in any other conversation, and then opened the formation's tactical communication.

"The first phase goal is accomplished! The battle continues!
The Deep Sea Fish Squadron and the Sea King Squadron begin to attack. The heavy particle cannons can fire freely, but the plasma torpedoes mainly target the enemy's battleships!

Run after the fight, don't linger in the battle!"

"Received!"×2
The heavily armored combat boats emerged from the darkness, looking like hunters with bared fangs. They lit up the large propulsion arrays behind them one after another, and their relative speed, which had been not low to begin with, increased sharply.

Their sudden appearance from the back hemisphere of the fleet's combat alert circle caused the 13th Fleet of the Federal Navy to fall into a momentary panic.

In particular, the escort formation responsible for air defense operations on the periphery fell into chaos after the air defense command ship was sunk by concentrated fire.

The captains of the warships didn't know whether they should continue to charge with the main force and clear the anti-ship missiles and plasma torpedoes in front of the fleet, or turn their ships around to deal with these suddenly appearing enemies.
Originally, these tasks should have been coordinated by a destroyer in the escort formation that was designated as the "air defense command ship."

But as this destroyer was 'lucky' enough to be chosen as the target of the first round of attacks, and was 'lucky' enough to have its fusion reactor destroyed by a salvo of five twin-mounted heavy particle cannons, the allocation of these tasks came to a standstill for a while.

Jacob, who had fought against the Imperial guerrilla fleet many times on the route of Pella IV, was now an experienced commander of a heavy armored combat boat.

As the person in the world who is most familiar with the combat of this type of unit, he keenly sensed this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attack.

The speed of the two squadrons' heavy armored combat boats suddenly increased, and they quickly dispersed in groups of three.

They were "flying all over the sky" and flexibly shuttling under the anti-aircraft firepower of the escort formation. Even if they were occasionally hit by lasers or charged particle beams, it would not be a big deal for the heavily armored high-speed predators.

The acceleration track of the twin-mounted heavy particle cannon quickly cools down during forced cooling. Although this will reduce the service life of the acceleration track, it does not affect the tactical advantages brought by rapid firing in battle.

Soon, a total of 20 combat teams under the two attack squadrons, as well as Jacob's independent command team, launched a second round of salvos.

When it came to selecting targets for the heavy particle cannons, all teams chose the destroyers and frigates with weak defenses without hesitation.

Although almost all the ships of the 13th Fleet have now exposed their large sides to Jacob and his men, these pilots all know that the heavy particle cannons equipped on the heavy armored combat boats are at most as powerful as frigates.

It is fine to use it to attack destroyer formations, but if it is used to attack heavy cruisers and battleships with thicker armor, it may be a bit stretched.

Heavy metal particle jets can indeed tear open their armor, but the complex cabin structures and higher-level damage control inside these warships give them a fairly high degree of damage redundancy when facing attacks from low-power heavy particle cannons.

At the same time, the attack of the heavy armored combat boats at this moment was never intended to damage, but to sink. Jacob and his men needed to sink as many enemy ships as possible to reduce the pressure on the main fleet to meet the enemy.

As the light of the heavy particle cannon shot up again, a series of fireballs exploded on the periphery of the federal fleet, and the fleet command module once again marked a group of destroyers and frigates with red crosses representing "sunk".

The most vulnerable "soft underbelly" of modern naval ships, the sides of the ships, can be said to be fully exposed at this moment.

Since the human space battleships abandoned the traditional rotating turrets and replaced the main guns with "axial guns" arranged on the axis of the battleship, the battles of human naval units have become a "head-to-head" form. The design ideas of all battleship designers have become to install enough firepower projection points and protection on the front projection as much as possible under the limited budget.

This is why in a fleet battle, the two warring fleets will be entangled and fight head-to-head, because both sides want to bite the other side's "six points" while protecting their own "six points".
As the heavy particle cannon salvo ended, the heavy armored combat boats also rushed into the formation of the federal fleet under the anti-aircraft firepower.

At this point, the air defense operations of the escort formation became more difficult, because they had to prevent friendly fire while attacking.
The ship-borne HCPs carried by each warship have basically been ejected at this time and began to assist in air defense and interception, but for the heavy armored combat boats, they are also targets of attack.

Just like that, when one attack team after another approached the battleship of the 13th Fleet and fired the plasma torpedoes mounted in the magazine under the hull, a scene that the fleet commander, Vice Admiral Guterres, had never imagined, appeared.

Heavy cruisers or battleships were constantly hit by plasma torpedoes, and they were hit on the most fatal sides. Nearly a hundred huge plasma fireballs appeared inside the fleet formation.

Since they did not slow down during the attack and even accelerated occasionally, the two squadrons of heavy armored combat boats commanded by Jacob quickly penetrated the federal fleet and sailed away.

The price of three battleboats being shot down was the result of sinking 3 heavy cruisers, two battleships, and severely damaging another four battleships.

Judging from the cost and exchange ratio alone, this can no longer be described as a huge profit.

But this is just the beginning.

Before Lieutenant General Guterres and others could recover from this round of attack, the voice of the tactical information coordinator rang out again like a death sentence.

This time, there was a hint of fear in his voice.

"Report, a large number of unidentified units have been detected in the fleet's rear hemisphere. The optical and infrared characteristics are similar to plasma torpedoes. The distance is 2700 kilometers, the relative speed is 82 kilometers per second, and the number is 1642!"

When he heard this, Guterres was completely stunned.

He had never thought that such a situation would occur. This was completely different from all the battles he had experienced before. It could be said that it was full of weirdness.

The tactics of the Atlas fleet can only be said to be unprecedented. As a fleet commander, Guterres had never expected that such a large number of plasma torpedoes would appear in such a deadly position.

But the current battle did not allow him time to think carefully about these issues. He could only give orders based on instinct, asking the fleet to disperse urgently and the fleet at the rear to adjust its axis 180° in order to shoot down as many torpedoes as possible.

But such an order was still a step too late.

The estimated hit time of more than 30 seconds was not enough time for the rear fleet to complete the turning and air attack.

After the seeker detected the extremely obvious infrared signal of the warship's propulsion array, these new plasma torpedoes with stealth configuration and coated with radar-absorbing materials also turned on their thrusters for a second time, and while continuing to accelerate, they rushed towards their respective locked targets.

After the plasma warhead hit the plasma propulsion array, the high-temperature plasma that lost its restraint instantly turned into a huge plasma fireball, instantly engulfing the rear section of the battleship.

The "combination punch" formed by high temperature + electromagnetic thermal effect + electromagnetic eddy current unreasonably tore apart the battleship's titanium alloy frame and melted all meltable substances.

Such an attack obviously exceeded the limit of what any warship's damage control system could cope with, so the simultaneous attack of more than 1,600 plasma torpedoes directly set off extremely spectacular "cosmic fireworks" within the formation of the 13th Fleet.

(End of this chapter)