From the Afterword to Pillars of Hell_ The Birth of the Republic of Terra Navy, 2030-2080
Don’t know where to take this from here, to be honest.
From the Afterword to Pillars of Hell: The Birth of the Republic of Terra Navy, 2030-2080.
The Terran Navy was born in a hundred desperate orbital battles, fought by a handful of national wet navies that had been hastily converted into spacefaring (barely) vessels. The first crews took to Earth orbit and fought using clumsy copies of captured, half-understood technologies; and they mostly died. The ships that did survive were the ones whose captains were mad enough and lucky enough to get their ships within visual range of the enemy, using reckless speed and ignoring all thoughts of safety as a matter of course.
This tactic worked. Not ‘worked better than anyone could have expected it to:’ it simply worked. Nobody in the Galaxy voluntarily fought ship battles at that range, and the swarming planetary looters who were Humanity’s first spacefaring enemy were swept from control of Earth orbit (at terrible cost) before the invaders could change their tactics. And once Earth controlled its own high ground again, the end was inevitable. The nascent Terran Navy had the resources of a planet backing it up, and in that campaign their enemy did not.