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Sci-fi is something I've been interested in for a while now and I've read a fair amount so when I critique your work it's already with the background of understanding your subject material. I wasn't turned off by your technical jargon but I can't imagine many people who really love YA magic novels are going to randomly pick up your work and start reading it spontaneously anyway.

Did the story bite and hook you?

For sure. Your choppy sentences and quick descriptions show how engaging everything is. Dropped right into the action and ready to go. Love it.

Are you interested to know more?

I'm of mixed opinions for this question. On one hand, the high octane fights and adrenaline pumped action makes me want to read more of your entertaining writing. Unfortunately, I don't really know a lot about your story yet. Something about trainees, Mars, and the desire for them to prove themselves. This leads me to believe there's a war going on that even trainees are desperate to get into battle and help out with. However, you haven't really given enough details post-training exercise to hook me in. In fact, I would advise you to include twice as much information in this first chapter following the dismissal of the trainees to provide more context before ending the chapter. As it stands, I feel empty when I finished reading, not hungry for more. It's like, what's the deal? Why do I care? You introduced your characters mid-battle and provided some pretty adept clues to their personality which I really enjoyed (like Wisdom answering slightly nervously despite being named 'Wisdom' which means they probably feel like they either don't deserve the title or are trying really hard to live up to it) but I think you could benefit from further introduction post-exercise. Like maybe there's a scene where they walk back to barracks together talking about their training. Maybe you had that planned for a second chapter but these battle scene felt really exciting but then it suddenly cuts out and you're brought back to the "real world" and this is where you need to establish the anchor of your first chapter. Your technical writing about the battle is great and I can't really place any specific flaws but I want to know more about the world now and I want to know before I lose interest and have to be "forced" to read a second chapter just to find out.

Did you feel tension or exhilaration during the conflict?

For sure. You describe his breathing, the subtle differences between his teammates over comms, the rumble of the machinery, etc. I felt that Wisdom was nervous, that Hostess was gung-ho and a little wild, and that Traf was trying to just keep up and not die. The surprise attack after things initially calmed down caught them all off-guard and they seemed to struggle at that point and my stress went up with them, since without knowing it was a simulation at this point that it felt like the stakes were high.

Did the imagery work for you?

Absolutely. You did a great job showing everything without overwhelming me. I thought the lack of physical description of scenery was weird at first but it became obvious when it was just a simulation so that's very forgivable. I know you don't want much advice about the writing itself but I really need to point out that from page 2 to 4 you used the word "chaff" ten times. In one paragraph there were three instances of the word.

Traf watched his display, still saturated in chaff returns. A moment later the chaff was swiped away in great lines. He looked up. The chaff was flashing...

My editing strength lies in managing errors in mechanics so I couldn't help but notice this. It really took me out of the scene for a moment because there were tons of other ways you could have described that moment and you chose the laziest way. For something so action-packed I really don't need to know that the "chaff was swept away in great lines" when you already told me there was chaff everywhere. Your writing style is so strong already that I strongly encourage you to capitalize on the intelligence of your reader to understand how wind affects chaff or how despite neutering enemy missile tracking it also hinders friendly vision. I know one of your questions was for people who didn't understand the subject material so maybe you're trying to be too approachable in this particular scene but when the rest of your descriptions are quicker, smarter, and more easily digestible I felt that this one required pointing out.

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If I had to give you some final thoughts, the only one that really comes to mind is how cliche your opening scene is. How often has the "insane battle turned out to be just a training simulation" been done? I don't say that to say your writing is bad but since this is the only chunk you've posted I can't help but feel like you had a great vision for the battle scene but I'm worried that the rest of your vision is going to lack. I'm making huge assumptions right now but because you described your work as "hard sci-fi military fiction" it feels like you want to talk about battles and then include characters rather than talk about your characters who are in a battle. That's all fine and great but you're going to discover that characterization is way more important than the technical descriptions of fights.

That being said, I think your technical writing is great. Nothing too clunky, nothing too obvious. Not explaining the comms shorthand speech was awesome, describing things on the HUD without feeling the need to include sidebar explanations like "the HUD that was used to fire missiles..." etc shows that you're willing to not insult your reader. Lots of strong choices here and I'd love to read more.

Reader background:

Thanks for sharing your story. Per your question, I’m a reader with a lot of experience with classic science fiction, having both extensively read the genre and written for it. However, I’ve not read much military Sci-Fi, maybe three or four books by different authors. I would consider myself for your purposes as a Sci-Fi reader with no preexisting specific interest in the subcategory that is military Sci-Fi.

I’d also like to let you know I’m a Dyslexic reader, so my apologies in advance if my critique includes any errors. I always do my best to catch them, but it takes a lot of editing for me to catch them all.

Overall Impression:

You clearly have a good grasp of the way you wish to present your combat and military engagements to the reader. The segments of the scene that detailed aspects of their radar systems, the chaff, and the missiles on page 3 were all practically engaging and interesting.

However, the thing that struck me most was that this scene felt like a difficult launching point to begging your story from. You mention that there might be “source material” that people could be aware of, does that mean there are other parts to the story a reader might have read before this scene, or do you mean general knowledge of Military Sci-Fi? If this in fact not intended to be an opening scene for your story, it would probably benefit the context of proceeding scenes.

Could this be polished into a compelling opening scene? You could probably do it, but I think it might need so additional details to help introduce us to your world.

Are you interested to know more / does it hook you

I feel like I don’t know enough about who, where, and why this scene is happening for it to hook me. Starting in the middle of the action can be a great way to make your story more exciting but how relatable that action is to the reader makes a big difference in how effective it can be. I’m assuming going forward that this is your opening scene. In that case, I have very little in my experience to contextualize this scene.

You have several names here, but I don’t really know much about any of them. Traf seems to breathe a lot. Wisdom talks the most and is “Hadrian 1” so that makes him the squad leader, I think. And Hostess is the girl with the same last name as the brand of cupcakes. It's pretty hard to introduce that many characters all in one scene, not to mention during a battle scene. Despite Traf being the POV character I feel like I actually ended up knowing more about Hostess since she’s the one who came off as the less experience rookie and who made some mistakes (not scanning with the radar correctly for example).

Your pilots are operating the “Mk 6 Afrikaner” a type of military vehicle that “was a repurposed underground mining frame”. My impression was that these were sort of tank-like vehicle, but I’m not completely sure that was the intention from the description given in paragraph 1. The word “repurposed” sticks out to me specifically here, it’s a fine detail to include. But I don’t know what the frame of a Martian mining vehicle looks like, so this means it’s a modified version of a vehicle I don’t know anything about. I was also a little confused why, since repurposed mining equipment, there never seemed to be some sort of flaw or limitation to them. Does the military the pilots are part of only have these “Mk 6 Afrikaner”, and not something specifically built as military equipment? The fact that they have really realistic simulation equipment makes me think they wouldn’t be reliant on “repurposed” vehicles, but I could be completely wrong.

You intentionally aren’t telling us why the battle is happening so that you can reveal it as a simulation at the end. But because of that I never had a context for why the battle was happening. Where the pilots we followed out on an attack patrol looking for targets, or perhaps they're defending an area, or something else? I think most simulation scenes like this do give some sort of framework on which the test is structured. Star Trex’s well-known Kobayashi Maru test is usually portrayed as the POV ship responding to a distress call. That’s a pretty simple set up but it tells the reader why the POV ship is engaging in the scene and implies that the POV ship is trying to save people.

Tension and Exhilaration / Imagery

This aspect of your story was a mixed bag for me. Some of the moments of the battle were clear and interesting, while other moments were a little unclear.

Going in-depth on how the radar worked was interesting and combining it with the chaff interfering was a great addition. It had a very clear cause and effect and its impact on their ability to operate during the battle added intrigue. And the descriptions of the errors occurring on the display gave a good image.

The missile showed on-page there were also good. Got a really nice sense of them wising by as Traf ducks involuntarily in his cockpit.

Now I see you don’t care about suggestions related to “Trivial word Changes” but I feel there were too many spots in the scene that either distracted or made things unclear not to mention it.

A larger example is “Traf’s cockpit lit up with yet another alarm. An awkwardly placed red signal light at the top left of his HUD’s support bracket began flashing and beeping in sync.” The section about where a signal light is placed is over-detailed. I feel like almost everything in the sentence could be replayed by saying something like “A red signal light flashed in his peripheral vision” and I’d actually have a better understanding of where in the cockpit it was visually. Sometimes less detail is actually clearer.

A more minor example is on page 5 where Hostess roles over the missile. Which Traf doesn’t seem to care about at first. During this scene, I believe they're moving forward and I never notice them stop. But when “Traf looked up.” He sees the missile “Lying on the ground, smashed into pieces by Hostess’s careless tracks” the word “by” makes me think Hostess has stopped advancing otherwise she’d already been well past the piece by the time Traf starts paying attention. Also, if Hostess did stop, did Traf also stop even though he was still reading his instrument panel? Neither is mentioned to have stopped so I found this very mildly confusing.

Also, I feel some examples of word repetition got in the way. Another person mentioned repeated use of “chaff” which overall I didn’t mind but it's always nice to spice up word choice. But examples like “Master warning, master caution lit up on his HUD” feel redundant. I think both “Master warning” and “master caution” are the same thing?

Other

I think it's worth noting I didn’t feel like I understood the groups involved in the fight. Traf is part of a military, but I did think the name was mentioned. Similarly, I didn’t remember the enemy vehicles being described or named. Was the enemy also piloting a “Mk 6 Afrikaner” or do they have different vehicles?

Also, a lot of your paragraphs are very long. While I’m not sure I spot any that are technically incorrect, big blocks of text can slow down the feel of a scene. You also have a lot of paragraphs that have dialog included with a large description. This is fine occasionally and it's fine to have an action tag connect to dialog. However, I think several of the largest paragraphs with dialog would be improved by separating the dialog into its own paragraph. Example:

“Traf swung the hull of the Afrikaner around to face bearing 300, while the tracks continued trundling across the hard red dirt. His radar screen lit up. A flickering arc traced its way across the display, lighting up two small marks, about twelve thousand meters to his front. “Tally!” Traf reported into his microphone.”

And

“Traf’s cockpit lit up with lights and alarms. He flicked his gaze to the radar warning receiver, it was ablaze across his 12 o’clock with warnings of incoming radar signals. He pushed the center of the RWR’s clock face to deafen the alarm just in time for the search warning to turn into a lock warning. He punched it again. He was breathing harder than ever now, and so fast he thought the respirator wouldn’t be able to keep up. “All callsigns, prepare to fire,” Wisdom said with an audible tinge of trepidation. Traf flicked open the trigger safety on his stick, hovering his thumb over the weapon’s release button. “Fox!” Traf slammed the button. A moment later a missile dropped off his port wing and screamed forward across the desert floor in a trail of white smoke. Two more from his platoon mates followed a second behind.”

That’s a huge paragraph and it’s got two separate lines of dialog in it. I’m also not entirely sure who’s saying “Fox!” here. I normally assume there is one speaker per paragraph so I’d assume Wisdom is the speaker here. However, “Fox!” is followed by an action tag from Traf which could mean he’s saying it.

On the subject of Traf, I joke that he seems to breath a lot, but I think having more sense described would help break up that impression. On the last paragraph you say “Traf was saturated with sweat” but I kept expecting a mention of how hot it was inside the Afrikaner way before that. What does it smell like in there? Is it well light with bright reflections shinning off the instruments? Or is it dark and filled with the glow of controls and displays.