Misscomunication
or rather, lack thereof
RDM's first fleet's second division, a squadron of elite ship commanders and diplomats, exits FTL within Lupidiran borders.
Almost immidiately, the ships are shadowed by three vessels.
Two lupidiran destroyers, and one Lupidiran heavy cruiser.
Captain Charl of the RNS Pik , a RDM heavy cruiser, decides to turn his forces to face the vessels.
He considers contacting the ships, however this would break their operations radio silence, and risk his ships.
The captain of the LC destroyer Unbound Abyss sees the formation turning and proceeds to order his ship to engage combat maneuvers, powering fowards to the top of the turning vessels.
The overall LC stance up until now has been to observe, however the RDM ships are clearly well armed, and as such are too big a threat to leave up to chance as to whether or not they are hostile.
Both sides launch torpedoes at the exact same time, however unfortunately for the collective, theirs miss their target...
The RDM ones however, do not miss.
Shredding the two destroyers, the projectiles completely nullify the enemy torpedo threat, however in doing so use up all their munitions before any true damage can be done to the heavy LC cruiser.
The cruiser turns, and proceeds to kite the enemy into attacking with long range fire...
This, unsuprisingly, works and the two RDM ships attacking it are destroyed in short order by its heavy main guns.
However, the rest of the RDM fleet is strife with misscomunication due to radio silence, it takes the fleet a long time to establish that they should attack at once instead of defending their heavy cruiser.
However, unlike the RDM, the collective without sending a single radio call or transmission, are able to get assistance.
A small force of three ships, a battlecruiser and two outdated cruisers exit FTL on top of their heavy cruiser and proceed to open fire on the remains of the two ships sent forth to attack it.
Many of the RDM ships proceed to wait with their flagship, making their attack scattered once again.
After a rather long fight, all but three RDM ships remain, one having retreated already, and the other two having turned to rendezvous at an exit point.
Having finally broken their radio silence, the ships finally are able to communcate.
The LC cruisers begin to box in the RDM flagship, however the small destroyer slips past.
After a long retreating fight, the two RDM ships's bridges are destroyed, however the secondary bridge of the destroyer remains active, and it reaches the exit point without their flagship in tow.
The two RDM ships charge their Eho drives, and jump out.
Both are crushed by the forces exerted on them during Eho-jump due to their damage.
They are never seen again.
The LC ships finish off the RNS Pik, and proceed to exit the area via FTL.
Only their two destroyers where losses, the heavy cruiser's crew was later rescued and its hull scheduled for repairs...
Thankfully for intergalactic diplomacy, due to there being no survivors, the events are unlikeley to spiral into a war of any sort.
However for years to come, the scars left will be visible due to the floating wreckages of the ships lost to the battle.