The intent is to break their defences, eat their defence fleet, and then loot them for everything they have before we blow up their main shipyards (that are needed to build and maintain their battleships) and then bugger off, leaving their battleships without a functional support base and delivering a severe political chastisement to them having their main fleet component go aggressive on us instead of heading home like they should have done to make sure we couldn't do this again. Recall that Chuang Mu has a loot threshold in the multiple hundreds of Wealth. That's enough, if we invest it, to run a personal battlecruiser. It also has strategic concerns, because it leaves Chaung Mu screaming at the NASP for help after they incited us to come after them with a rogue action that could have sent the entire frontier into hot war. The NASP doesn't like us, but they're a federalist power with all the problems that go with that. Chuang Mu putting the Rana Salient at risk for nothing more than their bruised ego won't play well with NASP high command, and again, if we have the Governer make it clear to NASP factors that if they leave Chuang Mu to us, we'll accept their 'rogue action' story, then that could leave Chuang Mu in a wonderfully vulnerable place for a proper conquest a year or so down the line.
It might not go quite this well, probably won't, but the potential is there. And even if it doesn't work out, we can reduce a major economic and logistic strongpoint on the NASP side of the frontier. That matters.
