Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Navy (section)

=== Disposition ===
As with so many sectors of the Imperium’s edges, the Imperial Navy in Cloudburst bears a heavy burden.  Pirates, aliens, heretics, and Space Hulks lurk everywhere outside the naval patrol routes, and sometimes on the patrol routes.  The Navy of Cloudburst has to be aggressive to fend off its many threats, but it also has to be careful not to stray too far from its perimeters.  The Cloudburst Sector’s habitable worlds tend to bunch together near each other, with great spans of empty space between clusters that have never been explored or are otherwise empty.  Enemies of Mankind can and do hide in these dark spaces, waiting for a chance to assault worlds left unguarded by layabout or overaggressive Naval officers.  The huge freight convoys that pass between the planets of the Sector band together for protection, even when the Navy is present to protect them.  Often, Rogue Trader and Free Captain ships and even Explorators join up in these convoys, turning them from potential targets to impromptu warfleets.
The Navy has responsibility for neutralizing slaver and raider ships that threaten the Imperium’s citizens and military, and for ensuring the safety of the systems that can’t protect themselves.  The Navy also maintains a number of deep space anchorages and sensor platforms that collect information and supplies for naval deployments.  Some Imperial Sectors, including Cloudburst, operate Naval Intelligence as its own sub-department of the Munitorum command elements for their jurisdiction.  This responsibility usually falls to a junior flag officer who has shown more of a knack for desk work than field command.

In the case of the Battlefleet Cloudburst, both it and Battlefleet Celeste headquarter with the Cloudburst Departmento Synopticon, the general military intelligence branch of the Imperium, alongside the Templars Psykologis and Logis Strategos.  Their command structure, in which jurisdictional battles fought with impeccable handwriting and polite requisitions are as bloody as a Waaagh!, resides in the sprawling Stormwell Station, a monstrous space station that hangs high in orbit above the capital moon.  The Imperial Navy Intelligence office specifically stages nearby, which causes their own jurisdictional squabbles.  With the anchorages of the system scattered broadly to allow the Guard staging areas for long deployments, the Celeste system itself is quite secure, and so the Navy is free to range broadly across the Subsector.  Other Subsectors enjoy noticeably less protection, save Delving Subsector, which the Blue Daggers help patrol, and Subsector Cognomen, which the Basilikon Astra Cognomen patrols.

As the sole provider of non-transhuman aerospace forces for the defense of Cloudburst, the Imperial Navy in Cloudburst often deploys transports and carriers packed with gunships and bombers, fighters and shuttles for the use of accompanying ground troops, in accordance with the strictures of Roboute Guilliman.  Eleven thousand years of war have passed since the end of the Heresy, but that law the Navy still obeys.