it’s a solid read, but boy was I confused.

Great world building. I just think the word count really hampered this.

I would suggest making another draft or two next time.

Still, I had a good time.

I spent a lot of this read confused, thinking one character was another when it turned out to be the XO? But not Bodkin? And the scene changes were quite abrupt and a little jarring. All that aside, cool idea to pursue further.

I like what you were going for here - the last thoughts of a doomed man, noble sacrifice and all that - but the way the story was structured made it read very disjointed. I was continually unclear whether I was reading "present" events, flashbacks, reminiscences, reminiscences of flashbacks, flashbacks within reminiscences, or some other configuration. Not helping this was the way you introduced the technical slang - e.g., the fact that navy crews would call their EV suited technicians 'tangerines' is a great bit of very true-to-life worldbuilding, but the way it was first used, with no context given until two scenes later, I found very confusing. Again, I like what you were trying to do, and there's definitely a lot of promise here - I appreciated the succinct and effective characterization of the background characters, for example - but this could have used a second set of eyes, and another draft or two, for clarity and readability.

excellent work; my big piece of advice is that you use things like "seemed" or "appeared" a lot. I think that your descriptions would be punchier and more clear if you cut them out: "the beam voraciously flung itself", etc. It also saves a few words, which in this format of writing is vital. Looking forward to seeing your next entries!

This is a good example of how word limits really hamper a story like this, so much to add detail and explore more to help hit the points home in such a narrow space. LOT of good development opportunity for future expansions so looking forward to reading more.

This is nice. We get to see some of the people level stuff going on during the big ship battles instead of 'oh look at my awesome starfighter skills!'. Awesome. Tangerine detail helped make it your own thing, which I love to see in these stories.

Interesting story. I think the scope was a bit large for the wordcount, but otherwise intriguing. Ultimately the flow was hampered by the jumping from scene to scene and that impacted the read, but once you got to the end and could fill in the blanks it was pretty engaging as a tale. I'd love to read this with a 5000 word count.