Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Rogue Traders (section)

====Rogue Trader House Prinz====
The House of Lilith Prinz has swelled from a meager handful of ancient destroyers into a starfaring force of nature, in a mere few generations.  Unlike the meteoric rise of some of their competitors, the House of Prinz arose from origins that were neither humble nor particularly prideful.

The House Prinz began when Lilith Prinz, a Subsector Overlord of the Nauphry Subsector, was awarded a Warrant of Trade and a single Endeavour Light Cruiser as a means of getting her out of the way.  The other Subsector Overlords had been unable to convince the Sector Overlord of the necessity of her removal, thanks to the ties she had to his own office.  Thus, they were unable to legally vote her out of office.  However, they were able to persuade the Administratum Ultima to award Prinz the Warrant with the clear subtext of their own sabotage of her own ventures in the Subsector if she didn’t take what was offered.

Precisely why the Subsector Overlord was needed out of the picture, history does not record, although Inquisitorial records hint at a public ambition and ruthless disregard for the wellbeing of the Administratum that may supply the answer.  However it came about, Prinz accepted the Warrant with ill grace, and took ship to the Circuit.

After forty years of up and down fortunes, victories and losses, Trader Prinz retired and left the Warrant to her grandson, who had similar fortunes.  After two more lackluster generations, however, the Warrant fell into the hands of Capsei Prinz, the father of the current Warrant holder.  His daughter Madeline, the future Warrant holder, entered the Navy as soon as she was old enough, in preparation for her father’s plan to revitalize the House.  Meanwhile, Capsei himself took to the trade with vigor.  He spent every scrap of money he could spare on new vessels for his fleet, many of them sub-lightspeed transports and gunboats.  He and the rest of the family threw themselves into the business of buying ships and equipment for their low-gravity metallurgical factories and other legitimate businesses in the Celeste system.

Meanwhile, Madeline was rising through the ranks.  Although some of her initial postings were quite easy, thanks to her superiors being unwilling to put somebody of such a pedigree in a position of risk or danger, she still managed to climb through the pay scales of the Imperial Navy, eventually becoming a Lieutenant Commander in a squadron of Escorts.  When her father began to consolidate his increasingly large and unwieldy fleet into a single cohesive force, Madeline started unsubtly pointing her own ambitions towards command.  After a few years of carefully positioning herself in points of prominence in the flotilla, she was eventually given command over one of the Escorts.

As she did so, her father’s plan to make the Prinz fleet the pre-eminent force under arms in the region advanced.  The House Prinz fleet based from Celeste, which is not a place lacking in defenses or in orbital security.  Thus, the large flotilla of non-Warp ships the Prinz family has amassed are rarely used for anything other than simple patrols.  However, the system has come under threat by the occasional Ork or pirate in the past.  The Prinz fleet offered itself as contract security for the system, which would allow the Sector and Subsector fleets to focus their construction efforts on Warp ships to defend the rest of their territory.  Thus, the Prinz fleet was able to ingratiate itself with the Sector command.

After several years of hard work, of defending the Sector from pirates and other miscreants, Madeline Prinz was appointed to Captaincy in the Battlefleet Cloudburst to command a squadron of three Escorts.  At that point, however, whatever long-term plan she and her father had been working on collapsed, with his sudden death from overwhelming embolism.

Prinz promptly handed in her commission and returned to Celeste to command the House assets directly.  The schemes she and her family had been working on may well be in play in some form or another, but for now, the House Prinz assets are spread thin.  Although the family’s flotilla of non-Warp capable defense vessels for hire in the Celeste system are still dutifully puttering away on patrol to protect the Sector Capital and other spots in the region, the majority of House Prinz is on a war footing.

In the forty-seven years since the Prinz family Warrant passed to Madeline, she has been obsessively expanding her fleet, even in direct competition with other Rogue Traders.  To the consternation of other Houses, she has even entered into a rivalry of sorts with Lord Captain Inquisitor G. Thomas Walsh, whom she delights in stymieing at every chance she can get.  House Prinz now owns the largest fleet by helm count in the Sector not under Imperial Navy control.