Oooooh! So happy! :D

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Do you ever wonder how everyone else saw the Kushans?

I'm betting that they looked upon the Kushans with terror. Pure, unadulterated terror.

You are the Taiidan. You have usurped the galactic throne and exiled your forebears to a backwater desert planet. If they ever manage to leave the planet's gravity well, you've got a contingency plan in place to set the atmosphere on fire and hire mercenaries to mop up whatever is in orbit.

Karak was destroyed. The Kushan nascent space force was left without any groundside support. They should have withered and died on the vine.

But they didn't.

You hire more Turanic raiders and send them to the Great Wastelands, then you turn your attention to the handful of rebellions that cropped up when your propagandicists released footage of the Atmospheric Deprivation Device. But then a few of those raiders limp back and demand to know what hellish horror you set them after. These Kushans are not only able to make hyperspace jumps, but they can fight. And they're paving a six-lane highway of destruction through the best the Turanic warlords have to offer.

And, ancestors preserve us, the Kushan have made contact with a Bentusi trader.

But before you can get too worried, your scouts tell you that the Kushan fleet has jumped into the Great Nebula of Kadesh. You breathe a sigh of relief. Nothing leaves the Great Nebula of Kadesh. It's an enigma that stretches 10,000 light years across the galaxy, a tempting treasure for pirates and prospectors alike, a graveyard for a hundred million lost souls. Surely, the Kushan will fare no better.

And then they appear. With a new class of frigate that nobody has ever seen before. Given how fast its multiple ion beams eat through other frigates, it's probably because everyone who saw it died. Except the Kushans.

Now you're fighting them, and realizing what a nightmare they are. When you burned Karak, you woke something with the bloody-minded determination of a Terminator and the Borg's approach to war. Your commanders learn true fear when they see swarms of fighters and bombers single Taiidan capital ships out from the formation, making them easy prey for the salvage corvettes. One by one, the salvage corvettes clamp onto the capital ship. It struggles, it turns in place as it tries to escape the powerful tractor fields. But, slowly, the gun turrets quit firing. The engines wink out. The ship is dragged back to the Kushan mothership, and soon an invigorated Kushan fleet is crushing the depleted remains of your own fleets.

Fighter pilots and sensor station operators drink themselves senseless in seedy bars and spread rumors and horror stories. They claim that, after destroyers and carriers are dragged helplessly into the Kushan mothership, the bodies of the former crew are evicted via the airlocks. They say that, after the Kushan capture a warship, no bodies leave the mothership. They say they have searched the wreckage of captured Taiidan warships, and found the imperial crew slaved to their stations with pipes and wires shoved in every orfice. They say that there are no bodies to be found in the wreckage of any Kushan warship, captured or domestic.

You empty your inventory of hyperspace inhibitors in a desperate attempt to slow them down. The first attempt would have worked, if it weren't for that honorless defector. The second inhibitor was guarded by a fleet of ion frigates, hundreds strong. That fleet should have been a rock upon which the Kushans broke, but they destroyed the hyperspace inhibitor and captured a sizable portion of the fleet guarding it. The third time, you hold their mothership in place with an inhibitor and throw a great big rock at it. By all accounts, it should have worked... if the asteroid in question hadn't been diced by sixty ion beams. The fleet escorting it was, of course, captured or destroyed.

Now the Kushan are here. They're on your doorstep. They're here to reclaim the throne. Every challenge you have thrown their way has only made them stronger. Their fleet is a motley assortment of strike craft and capital ships from all across the galaxy, a testament to the enemies they've fought and subverted. There are so many of them, it will take them longer to get into formation than it will to crush your remaining defenses. And those salvage corvettes are still there, hungry for more.

Now you may panic.