Despite the short time, Nolan still made as much preparation as possible. All the troops rushed to their posts, the combatants were fully armed, and the engineers and other civilians were placed in an emergency shelter below the Stargate control room.

That's where the armor is thickest in the entire structure.

The progress bar reached 100%. Everyone's eyes were fixed on the stargate, on the vibrating light curtain. There was still a glimmer of hope: they could pray that the massive object of unknown origin was a dead object, or at least, like the space whale Ti'kaion, non-hostile to humanity.

However, when the thick purple fog was dispersed from the inside, the purple crystal structure extending from the light curtain completely turned this glimmer of luck into nothingness.

Crystal Storm!

The angular Crystal Storm spacecraft swarmed out of the star gate, and the blue-purple light dyed the silver-gray paint of the 12th Squadron's spacecraft with a dreamy glow.

While these spaceships had just left the subspace environment and the influence of the giant boson on the sensors had not yet dissipated, the defenders launched the first round of attack.

The first to open fire were the sentry guns at the Leontops Stargate, the only arsenal of large caliber on the scene. As a vital component of the Starfield Customs, the Stargate Guns were housed in heavily armored mounts. These guns fired high-powered lasers, capable of threatening even battleship-class vessels.

However, the number of sentry guns is not large, and when facing the crystal spaceships that pass through like locusts, they seem to have excessive power but insufficient firing rate.

The next ships to open fire after the sentry guns were those of the 12th Squadron. Despite the tight timeline, they had managed to find a perfect T-angle. Like a World War II battle line, each cruiser was positioned sideways, allowing its turrets along the central axis to unleash their full firepower. This also minimized the area exposed to enemy fire.

The destroyers and frigates all became mobile, but unlike the cruisers, they did not have strong main armor belts, their own gun turrets were not distributed completely along the axis, and their positions were not as far away from the battlefield as the cruiser clusters.

Destroyers and frigates primarily engage in close combat, leveraging their high maneuverability, using their constantly changing angular velocity and small size to evade enemy fire. They maneuver at distances of 1,000 to 20,000 km from the enemy. These ships carry a device called a "jumping knife," which grants these light ships the ability to flash within a range of several hundred kilometers.

A small destroyer formation destroyed a cruiser-class Crystal Storm spacecraft in a short period of time through concentrated fire. Before the enemy's firepower arrived, the entire formation used the jumping knife device to disappear from its current position and appeared 300km away a few seconds later.

Due to the spatial incoherence of this flicker, the Crystal Storm's sensors will lose lock on the target during the flickering process. So for the Crystal Storm, the fleet before the flicker no longer exists, and it is replaced by a brand new fleet that appears out of thin air in a completely new location. They must recalibrate the fire control before they can lock on the new target.

The destroyer formation naturally would not give the enemy the opportunity to annihilate them. After several quick rounds of concentrated fire, the entire formation dispersed in all directions like flowers blooming.

During the cooling down period of the jump dagger, doing so can effectively disperse the signal of the entire fleet, preventing the signal radius of the gathered fleet from being too large, making it easy for the enemy to lock on.

There are not too many Crystal Storm spaceships on the field now, but compared to the ease of Squadron 12, the police force's battle situation is much more stalemate.

The core of their previous training has always been how to rationally use multiple arms to coordinate and minimize casualties when outnumbered.

This kind of high-intensity frontal battlefield is really not their forte.

A police destroyer just approached here, intending to use its own stasis entanglement beam to control a crystal frigate, but the next moment it was shot into a sieve by attacks from other directions.

This situation was common at the beginning of the battle. However, after sacrificing more than a dozen ships, the police finally noticed this problem. They quickly adjusted their tactics, abandoning all close-quarters combat and the use of boarding equipment. Instead, they tried to increase the distance from the Crystal Storm and harass it through their own maneuverability advantage.

But the police's weapons were generally only suitable for close-range engagements, especially the plasma cannon, which was considered a major killer and was very effective against unshielded armored targets. Every police destroyer was equipped with this weapon, and with a well-aimed shot, a single shot could reduce a destroyer-class crystal ship to rubble.

However, the range of this thing is only 2km. Once it exceeds this range, the particle clusters that make up the plasma material will quickly dissipate. At 3km, it basically poses no threat to the target.

In addition, the police's main medium- and long-range firepower is some high-energy lasers and small-caliber electromagnetic railguns. Due to their limited power, the combat effectiveness of the entire team drops rapidly after leaving the close-range fire range.

"There are currently 135 cruisers, 702 destroyers, and 1,775 escorts on the Crystal Storm scene. No larger tonnage vessels have been detected."

"The enemy's rate of destruction is equal to their rate of entry, and our casualties are under control."

After being collected and screened, each piece of intelligence was delivered to Roland. The good news was that due to the size of the stargate, even if Crystal Storm assembled a large force, the number of troops it could dispatch simultaneously was limited.

But the bad news is that the total strength of the Crystal Storm is still a mystery. After sending out troops for a quarter of an hour, the total mass on the other side of the star gate has hardly changed, which means that their real main force has not yet been dispatched.

Nolan tapped a few times on the projector, and the system immediately connected to Chief Engineer Chang.

"Old Chang, how are the preparations going?"

"It will take some time."

Chang Renfei in the picture was busy on a control panel. "The turbulence when these grandsons came out burned the rectifier. I have to replace it with a new one before I can think about closing the door."

"As soon as possible." Nolan intertwined his fingers and clasped them tightly. "We don't have much time."

"Of course I know." Chang Renfei turned into a puddle of jelly and drilled into the opened control panel. From time to time, tentacles flew out from it to get some maintenance tools.

"I'm already busy as hell, I'm going to hang up now without further ado."