The Khan

Created Monday 15 August 2022

It was he who created the first MULER army. A guerilla militia that honed their skills attacking the companies in charge of building jump points.
The same companies they were also employees of. I mean, where do you think you get your supplies when you're jumpoed to a system with just enough resources to build a long-term survivable base. That can then turn to building a return jump factory. That focuses on---is designed to be built to---rapidly and steadily collect the natural resources of a system and organize them---best they can---to a pretty steady stream of in-coming matter.
So, a lot of being a MULER is:

strategic placement of intra-system raw resources
to line them up with gravity pulses
so they are a pretty steady stream of what's there.

So, that means working before a return jump for a longer time than you'd at first expect; you spend a lot of time there flying to the thickets spots of masses (tight asteroid belts, rings around planets that just had a moon explode, solar mass ejections, etc.. Then to an other that might seem unintuitive now (senseless and stupid) but is in fact designed to create a stead flow so that whatever their orbits now, they'll all degrade (or expand) at the right pace to make them all line up to be a pipe in to a massive manufactoring plant. Lots and lots of helium and iron (and often a healthy stream of organics), and enough rough matter to be compressed into jump batteries. (And, yes, of course they have jumper cables.)
A MULER usually has a lot of time on their hands. And not a little computational power. Sure, AIs who tend to think geometrically (the widest-spread is even called Pythagorus), but also who can think abstractly. MULER AI is great at long-term tactics. They aso tweaked it to be able to find novel accesses to resource streams and able to innovate in pirate-like warfare. (Some say the Khan did, but it wasn't he.

It was, though, a solo warrior who had started fighting the jump company long before militias even existed here. He started fighting when there weren't, like, extra knives laying around that he could use as weapons or ammo/energy/etc. He had to start small, and tiny holes in the pipe to divert extra resources was already a coup. That he devote them early and enduringly back into the AI was a nicve strategy. That AI was developed from Pythagorus, the AI for that system's jump company. Remember, it's not like every MULER is given their own AI. No way. Jumps are too expensive. AIs take a lot of resources to run

(you want to run your gaming system on solar pamels? yeah? so, how may solar panels did you bring with you on your jump. thought so.).

You're not going to sending more than one. It's not like you're sending a lot of anything. Not even many humans or much for them to live on. So, he tapped into the company's AI and essentially added to its growth parameters to find and collect resources to securely create, protect, and build a "backup" copy of itself. Sounds reasonable, right . . . ?
But the AI that he was creating was still in communication with its parent AI. There was cross-talk. In the longer term, this was good becuase it set the stage for an evolutionary arms race between them for resources and ways of covertly collecting or well protecting it. It led to two AIs of exceptional cunning. But set the stage for an enduring war that spread to other systems. A "warm" war that rarely broke out into set-peice battles, but that simmered until the Khan came.

(Oh, and because the AIs still talked---were communcable, not isolated---and because he never gave the AI a name (it was really just his few thousand lines of code---just enough to accurately convey a specfic growth parameter), they both referred to themselves as Pythagorus.)

The MULER who built the new Pythagous introduced the Khan to it. After seeing some of the Khan's brilliant attacks on the company. And gave the Khan permission to use the AI (ocassionally at first, entirely by the end of it) in combat and strategic objections. The Khan is brilliant. An genius of intrasolar melee. A good planner of economies and innovator of designing weaponry.

Lots of gravity shots that bring a screen of debris in with the craft. Bank-shooting enemy ships with gravity pulses off of atmospheres, turning them into "grapeshot" aimed at other enemy ships. Bouncing communications off of nearby objects to evade, confuse, or at least distract the enemy. Shooting all sorts pieces of information---propaganda even---off at very precisely-chosen targets. (Figure out intercepted Buzzkill communications and even mis-inform them.) O.K., so those are more tactics than weapons. Whatever.

The Khan also designs a defensive screen of light infantry. Really, short range cavalry that just has more stable platforms. Better able to read signals and precisely postion themselve (and know how to do that in this system) to hide their own signals.
And the heavy cavalry that beats this light infantry? Coursairs. swimming like sharks through the system, snatching up and infantry unite they find. Sure out running their sad little drives. Infantry MULEs are built for sprints and ambushes---not long chases over the savana. Not a platform with lots of endurance. It's built to not require many resources, or to have many resources devoted to it---or even available to it if the construction is going very slowly. A few Coursairs---even just one if well piloted---can erode a light infantry defense to nothing. They win every encounter. And eventually there just won't be any infantry left to encounter (outside the tales of times when a few are able to evade the Coursair for decades. Even if sometimes it's years between counter-strikes on the Buzzkill offensive. And sometimes the counter-attacks just stop. Or at least until the point when observers try to think back, but can't remember exactly when the last "defensive" coutnerstrike had been from that infantry unit. He is lost to children's fairytales. Or would, if Buzzkills read to their kids (they don't. If their kids can't learn it on their own, then they're on their own.).
And so it's good that the Human's best defense agianst Coursairs are MULEs. As a militia, they're rarely more than a jump away to reinforce. As an army, they can jump here quicker than most; they don't collecting a lot of resrouce to jump through a jump point. They can even leave a little more behind as thanks for letting them jump up in line long as no one notices that many MULEs jumping at once. (Or in all-out war just move efficiently through a system and needing much less to jump through, preserving the jump point as a long-term secure position.
And yeah, that works well for Blinkerblasters. An array of light infantry would be in good position to fight Blinkerblasters. Of course, the outcome of a visual-range fight between a stripped-down MULE and a squad of marines we can evern beat in physical combat. Really, the success rate of light infantry to Blinkerblaster duals is 0 for the Humans.

But still. Could such a light infantry still win a longer-term intra-system engagement, All distance-based attacks. Maybe sending streams of nearly random debris (asteroids, dust clouds) towards the Coursairs persistently enough to wear down their point defense systems with a high number of low-probability attacks. Low chance of succeeding, low chance of noticing in time the one that does. Enough shots that there is a lucky shot. Obviously would have to be a game of evasion. Wearing down the Blinkerblasters with chases. Knowing how to hide and throw stones from a distance. And stay hidden, and keep throwing.
And remember, it takes a lot of power to run a Blinkerblaster ~~station~~base. That's why you got to send the Cursaids in first, to protect the Buzzkill industries as they build and resource a Blinkerblaster base. Wear down the Blinkerblasters through long chases that exhaust their local resources and thus the number of Blinerblasters they can provision. Stab through that strained and thin fense to jab their industries. Strain their resource collection to no longer being able to bring in Blinkerblasters, and it's just down to your Coursairs and your handicapped industries against a persistent light infantry that's hard to find and follow.