The victory in the second battle of Terra had been hard fought. Of the 42 ships the UE had fielded at the beginning of the battle, only ten remained.

Still, it was a success, and the UE had managed to add several enemy warships to its fleet. Considering the fact that they had been built with a different biology in mind, as well as the battle damage some of them had taken, it was doubtful that any would be taken into active service. However, they would be invaluable for the ship designers, because of how long the Kyreikon had designed ships.

Even though the human ships had fought well, it was obvious that only superior technology prevented the battle from becoming a disaster. And it still might have been without a copious amount of luck. And it was already clear that a total redesign would be necessary. And if that was the case, why not simply take inspiration from the centuries of design experience that went into the making of the those captured ships.

While, thanks to captured data, the UE had figured out how faster than light travel behaved in Terra’s universe, the UE currently was incapable of building a drive. There might be something in the captured data that would help the process of reverse engineering along, but if it was, it had not been found yet.

One of the six captured transports was currently being ripped apart, mainly to figure out that specific technology, but also to see if there was anything else interesting being used by the enemy. It was unlikely that they would find something superior to technology already in possession of the UE, but unlikely was not the same as guaranteed.

And the UE’s technological development had, admittedly, a gigantic blindspot in regards to the technology necessary for a space traveling society. But the main benefit was figuring out what dangers were considered likely or dangerous enough to specifically protect against. Because that was knowledge only experience would be capable of attaining. And to make matters worse, from the perspective of the United Earths, that experience might differ from universe to universe.

While the UE was trying to decipher the make up and the production method for a FTL-drive that worked in Terra’s universe, it was also planning for the possibility that it would not be possible to build more than a few ships with that drive, or even any at all.

Thanks to the ability of traveling to other universes and thus using different FTL, the UE had options for that scenario. The issue was, those options were not great. The massive Gates necessary to transport entire starships into different universes needed truly massive amounts of infrastructure and resources to be built. While it was not entirely unlikely that the infrastructure requirement could be solved, it was currently considered impossible to move a Gate through FTL. Which in turn meant that every single one of those expenditures would need to happen if they wanted to attack other worlds without having access to FTL. Or wait a very long time. Which was not impossible per se, but it was also not optimal and had political issues standing behind it.

The main problem was that the cost of a Gate was exponentially proportional to its size. Well, that was not entirely true, there was a point when the amount of resources necessary would slow down until they where linearly proportional, at a relatively slow rate even, but that point was reached at Gates with a diameter measured in astronomical units, so not all that useful. This meant that a Gate only intended to transfer destroyers was a lot cheaper than a Gate intended to transport Battleships. By several orders of magnitude, even.

While the UE routinely built Gates with a diameter of 50 meters, that was also around the limit it did built. And those were massively expensive complexes, of which most worlds had at most one.

There are two things governing the cost of Gates. One of them is purely linear. The amount of power necessary to activate one as well as keeping it open. Activation costing roughly a hundred times the sustained cost, for 20 milliseconds. The other being the strange exotic matter, which was no element, nothing really explainable, even with modern physics to which somehow the name Handwavium had stuck, which was needed in exponential quantities until that theoretical limit was reached, when it was needed in linear quantities. It was one of its less weird characteristics. It also merely needed energy in its production, which meant that all big costs, beyond the actual physical construction which was merely there to provide stability, were energy based.

But even modern fusion technology could not actually provide unlimited energy. Close to it? Yes. Actually unlimited? No. The fact that fusion reactors are not all that easy to be built was the main reason why a large infrastructure was needed. The Gate that was used for the second battle of Terra had taken 12 years to be built. It also had required so much Handwavium that construction of new Gates had been cut by over 60% in the entire UE. For those entire 12 years. Which was not entirely sustainable. Admittedly, that particular Gate was beyond gigantic, at the outer limit of what the UE could currently create, but it calculations showed that the production of months would still be necessary for every singe Gate. And the more hardships the population faced, the more its usual activities were constrained, the louder the calls to stop the war and simply retreat from Terra would be. And that was not something the UE wanted.

Which in turn meant that the UE would either manage to find a way to mass produce the FTL-drive of Terra’s universe, or it would need to find a universe in which you could send Gates over FTL. Because giving up was also not an option for the UE leadership, considering that they would be voted out of office, because of cowardice.

Which in turn meant that an overhaul of the education system was likely long overdue.