From what I see, defence won't be much of a problem: as Skimmer said, it's offence that matters for raiding. Except in ship-to-ship combat, since you need to get to your raiding spot without dying before you can unleash nuclear hell on those fuckers.
Yup. As I said, that's a plot point.
I personally don't find much trouble with them running absurdly fast: for fuck's sake, they get their calories magicked into their bodies
Just say they wear advanced armor and are routinely enhanced by cybernetics if you really want to keep their speed, though it's probably not that important to the story.
No, it's not, which is why I wasn't stressing too much over it other than to handwave it by saying "its (actual) magic!" The Kracksen are meant to provide the background conflict to the story - it's the relationships between the characters (that develops over about 55 years) that I'm mainly concerned with. However, that doesn't mean that the Kracksen shouldn't make sense within the context of the story. Even if they are absurdly powerful in some ways, they still have some glaring weaknesses which mainly come to the fore when faced with an enemy with rough technological parity. Hence my original (mistaken) idea to post this in SF rather than Fantasy - I was interested in what technological means could/would be used to overcome such a foe.
Also, I'm not sure you considered this, but humans should, first and foremost, kill the queens. One bullet to the head = enemy force starves to death. Hell, what about jamming their food-beamers? Specialized anti-food missiles/guided artillery shells with nuclear tips?
The Queens are probably emitting some serious radiation. We could exploit that to locate them and then saturate the general area with nukes.
Yes, I did consider this and it's a part of the concept that I'm still ironing out. This is my
current thinking:
The magical energy the Queens channel is not native to this universe. Sometime in the distant past, the Kracksen somehow acquired the ability to tap and channel it. It became their race's greatest strength - almost unlimited energy and no need to worry about sustenance ever again - but they became absolutely dependent on it, as noted above. Possibly because it's not native to this universe, this exotic energy, which humans call 'magic', is difficult to detect. That's not to say its impossible, and your idea of a food-beam homing missile is great.
The Kracksen are well aware that their weakness is their dependence on their Queens, so the Queens are extremely well-protected. The Queens
never take the field in ground combat or even leave their ships. However, in order to support ground troops, a Queen cannot travel farther away than low orbit - doing so means condemning the troops to death via starvation, as well as the loss of power to weapons and such. As such, it is a priority for humans to locate and destroy Kracksen warships in the vicinity of a battle zone.
Each frigate is itself a self-contained Kracksen colony, with a Queen, warriors, engineers, servitors and so forth. However, the amount of energy one Queen can handle, while large, is limited and so ship-based colonies are limited in size. Larger warships will contain several colonies and thus several Queens, of which one will be preeminent. Ground-based colonies will be much larger because their Queens don't have to handle the energy requirements of interstellar travel and combat.
Of course, the Queens don't channel this much energy all the time; because the amount they can channel is limited by their own capacity to do so, they can store energy in capacitor analogues. However, the Queen must maintain control of the capacitors; if she dies, the energy is catastrophically released. This is because of its extrauniversal nature - the magical energy she channels requires a living mind to control it and transform it into applications, which, apart from the food-beam and a few other specialised applciations, are largely conventional.
Ships have a limited magical AI to assist the Queen, but Queens have become masters of multitasking because of the requirements placed upon them by their role. Distract them enough, with multiple threats for example, and their control starts to break down. Conversely, a Queen with few distractions is very dangerous indeed because she can channel all her attention and most of her discretionary energy into attack or defence or both.
"An elegant weapon, for a more civilised age".
- Obi-Wan Kenobi
