It is the dream of many insystemers to go to the starships, and they often become the volunteer troopers of the fleet, lacking the skills of FTL technicians. Many trooper officers were born on insystemers.
Insystemers are, by the by, another kind of navigation hazard to a starship: but they (as the name implies) cannot leave the solar system, and always operate in the plane of the planets and asteroids, where few starships come: they are reasonably predictable in course too, even if they can turn or even reverse direction; it takes so long for them to move that, relative to a starship, they might as well be standing still. The system bouy knows pretty well where they are.
Mazian's Fleet once consisted of fifty carriers; it is now far smaller. They have no dartships, no cruisers, nothing but the carriers and riderships and the occasional help of a merchanter.
They are officered by the officers smart enought to have survived against the odds, to have gotten supply where supply did not exist, to have eluded the ambushes of Union's more advanced ships, and to have raided and harassed Union territory (some merchanter harassment comes under this heading) to such an extent that is has hurt Union's commerce; further they have come several times within a hair's breadth of actually defeating the massed Union Fleet. If they could knock the Union Fleet out in one pitched battle, the merchanters would instantly fall in line, and the Earth Company would rule human space again.
Further, Earth is secretly building ships again, and will launch a new fleet if it can buy enough time. The Fleet does not know this. At least -- it is not likely the Fleet knows. Earth just needs a few more years. Then it will take back the Hinder Stars, whose starstation still exist, mothballed and waiting; and it will launch out in a new period of FTL trade.
Mazian has one edge: skill. His captains can jump together and avoid hitting one another, a trick those shiny new Union ships have been known to fail at, and Union pilots are scared to do it. Consequently, Mazian operates in two ways -- in hit and run tactics, using his carriers like massively powerful dartships at Union shipyards and mines and strategic jumppoints which Union would like to hold for itself. And he can group them in pairs and larger groups, arriving all at once or even from opposite sides of the system simultaneously to make hash of Union defenses.
Union pilots regard Mazian's captains with mingled hate and awe because of their uncanny ability to put their ships where they want when they want, especially when those ships are old and patched. Union ships just cannot match their precision, and Union Pilots lack the nerve and the recklessness of Mazian's lot. Mazian's troops are also legendary, for their ruthlessness and their fierceness: where Union troops are cool and efficient and follow orders, Mazian's Fleet troopers are loyal only to their own commanders and their own ships fight like maniacs and have a disturbing tendency to seize the initiative if deprived of officers: their chain-of- command runs right to the bottom, and if a trooper officer drops, the unit never pauses: it knows who's next in command.
They have on the average more experience, are older than the average Union trooper, and are career soldiers, where many Union draftees hope to live to see the end of the war. Company troopers have no such plans ... not even those impressed from merchanter ships, who have survived their induction. They will loot, but their own officers can control them ... if they want to.
Radar and radio, lasers, any means of communication or longdistance examination or communication thinkable -- has to operate under the speed of light.
FTL ships go faster. So the fastest way to get a message to another star is to have a ship carry it.
This also means that an attack can get there FTL before any broadcast warning. It takes eight years for a communication to get to Cyteen from Mariner, except by FTL ship, which arrives in a month or so.
This lag means that tactics have to be planned without the ability to radio ahead and tell your friends you're coming.
Ships have to physically meet and talk: that's quickest.
Ships have two kinds of radar: the ordinary sort which operates sublight; and longscan, which is part guess and part radar.
The way it works is this:
It takes the original information of the jump range buoy and identifies every ship and object in a system, how fast they're going and what direction. It calculates a likely track and shows it on a screen as a four coloured line. Red is what track the ships will take if they keep on as they bear. Yellow is what they will do if they veer as much as convienent: this is a cone-shaped projection. Blue is their position if they decided to stop.
Human operators rapidly intervene and as the computer priorities them the fastest-moving ship data, they decide, on the basis of emotional human knowledge, what those ships are likely to do when the informational wave they have just made entering the system hits them. If a warship, for instance, it may turn toward them as fast as it can. An operator is assigned for each ship under consideration while the computer handles the slow craft and the other which for various reasons do not need constant monitoring.
In the meantime two things have happened: Their ship has changed course and speed either following or not following the buoy lane assignment; and the other ships one by one pick up their presence in the system and react accordingly. But this radar image changes constantly, so when the action begins to conform to one of the projections, the computer changes the colorcodes, assigning red to most probable and so on down to blue as the least, so it is part radar, part computer, and part human guesswork.
The data in the bank is the best information about the mass and engine capacity and turning ability and hostility or friendliness of each ship whose computer number is on that chart; and all ships known to be in space are in that computer memory.
Now, military craft (particularly Earth Company warships) are always making adjustments and honing their turning abilities if only by the smallest degree; this fouls up the enemy's longscan guesswork and can provide surprises. Mallory's Norway for instance, has not recently tested her adjustments to the extreme, and therefore the captain herself does not know just what Norway might do if she had to. And those refinements are only tested to the fullest, of course, when it comes to a situation where a ship either turns tighter than it is supposed to, or breaks apart -- or dies in impact.
All FTLs and starstations have longscan. Station central traffic control has longscan as its main function and it generates the image which the buoy broadcasts to incoming ships.
All communications of FTLs naturally have to have doppler adjustments because of the relative difference in velocities involved in their operations in starsystems.
There is no communication in hyperspace.
The object is to destroy the enemy ships. Station buoys are off limits as starstations are, since their destruction would endanger neutrals aboard ships which would suddenly pop into a system blind and not have land assignments or longscan information.