Blood on the Stars, Book 1 & 2 & 3
1.5 Stars
5-15-2021

Some extremely thin gruel, and yet this is all that I actually require from a mil-sci-fi-series on audio book. It is not good. But it is just barely sufficient to listen to while doing yard work, as opposed to it's failure of a younger brother, 2034. I haven't forgotten you 2034. The author of this series understands the low bar that he has to clear, and he churns out reams of just-barely above GPT3 writing for an endless series of novels.

Minor note 1: "duty" sounds progressively more funny the more times it is said out loud.
Minor note 2: the book is bad-middle-manager focused, with an endlessly repeated beat where the engineers say that it will take 6T amount of time, and the ship-manager demands that they get it done in 2T or 3T amount of time. You can only assume that the first several months of engineering training is how to instinctively and immediately pad your estimates by 300% in order to deal with this bullshit. There's another bad-management beat where officers are always saying "I can feel my tactical attention slipping! Doctor, inject me with more vials of meth, stat!"
Minor note 3: There is another similar, terrible series, and in that series the author uses the phrase "a chink in the armor" precisely once per book. This author does the same thing? I'm not sure if this is because of similar upbringing, a sort of convergent evolution of bad-mil-sci-fi authors, or if the phrase is an intentional nod of the head, or if (more likely) there is a demon successively possessing these authors and forcing them to write these novels and in each novel the demon leaves its characteristic spoor.
Minor note 4: ok, I will say one good thing. The author chose to make this a legacy game, with the events taking place amongst the ruins and dead planets of a much larger and more advanced previous empire. This is a good choice, since whenever you need a new tech or McGuffin or whatever, it can just come out from the ruins.