Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Hapster (section)

===Hapster Military===

The Hapster system, as a Subsector Capital for ten thousand years, has a long and storied military tradition.  For thousands of years, the Subsector wasn’t even part of the neighboring Naxos Sector thanks to distance.  The Subsector was independent from the larger Sector command structures and answered only to the Ultima Segmentum and the Throne.  That meant that Hapster shouldered the burden of defending the Subsector’s military infrastructure essentially alone for thousands of years.  Understandably, this has produced a culture of strict military construction.  The orbitals above Hapster are ancient and productive, and manufacture more warships by tonnage than any other system in Cloudburst outside direct Mechanicus control.  The yards themselves have small beams, and can build ships no more than four kilometers in any direction, but they have also rarely stopped.  Battlefleet Hapster is the largest Subsector battlefleet in Cloudburst by three capital vessels and two escorts.  The largest ship the Hapster yards regularly produce is the venerable Luna cruiser.

However, since Cognomen, Thimble, and Septiim are also now producing warships at a constant rate, the demand for more ships in the Hapster fleet has dropped significantly.  The sudden assaults of the Glasians have increased that demand once more, but for a period of several dozen centuries, Hapster’s yards turned to the manufacture of shuttles and freighters instead of combat vessels.

Hapster also manufactures the modular components for several variants of Navy void platforms, including some on Thunderhead and Clog.  The ever-growing need for more naval stations and Rogue Trader anchorages in the region ensures that the Hapster yards never grow cold.

On the ground and on the seas, defense of the Hapster worlds falls to the Hapster Shields.  Hapster’s large oceans and long coasts demand a potent navy, and the Shields deploy over three hundred warships to protect them.  These range from the Sanction-class superheavy ICBM submarines to the Mako-class stealth sub hunters, and include seven Supercarriers.  Most river mouths on Hapster are too ecologically fragile to support permanent fixed defenses, but several flotillas of Mechanicus-built hovercraft patrol the rivers and valleys that cut through the great pumice and volcanic obsidian islands.  Hapster tithes its Guard requirements directly from the Shields, and its SDF recruits on behalf of the Navy.  The Hapster Shields headquarter in a partially-submerged bunker complex built into an extinct volcano in the largest ocean of the planet, which itself is built under a sprawling complex of guns, barracks, office buildings, antennae, and armories over forty miles wide.

The Guard contingent of the entire system goes by the same name: The Bronze Legionnaires.  Nobody knows which came first: the name or the camouflage, but soldiers in the bronze liveries of the Legionnaires have been a common sight in the Hapster Subsector and Naxos Sector for over eight thousand years.  Because of the age and continual loyalty of the Hapster system, Bronze Legions have appeared on battlefields far from home.  A full seven brigades took part in the campaign to push the Khornate army of Bloodfume out of the Gothic Sector six millennia before the Gothic War, and twelve thousand Legionnaires fought alongside the Legio Congelatio against the Dark Eldar and Chaos in the war for the Corumbino Nebula.

However, Hapster regiments also differ from most Cloudburst regiments in ways other than their history.  Unlike nearly every other military force in the Astra Militarum Cloudburst, Hapster’s military bases hierarchy and tactics on neither Terra nor Septiim.  Instead, their deployments superficially resemble that of the ancient world they once were: that of the Pre–Imperial Hapster.  Bronze Legionnaires field in tight arrowhead formations, out of respect for how their ancestors fought with their personal energy shields and robot guards.  They employ artillery at the longest possible range, even though that range is continents less than the ranges that Dark Age Concatenation Shock Guns could fire.  The Bronze Legion drives their tanks down roads in staggered gap formations, as the Terran Federation Baneblade formations did long ago, even though the Hapsterites are lucky to get a single Baneblade per Brigade.

This is understandably a source of derision by other worlds’ Guardsmen and concern from the Commissariat.  To be sure, Bronze Legions are as able as any other backwater world when it comes to actually fighting and better than most, but their archaic and predictable formations and tactics do leave them somewhat less able to adapt to changing circumstances.  This is, of course, an apt complaint about Hapster itself.
Tactically, however, the Bronze Legions are able to bring war to the Emperor’s enemies with the same fervor and tireless zeal that has allowed them to stay safe and secure after ten thousand years of Imperial decay.  Armies of the Bronze Legions are among the few in the Cloudburst Sector who neither refuse to use any technologies or psionics in their tactics nor raise regiments solely by request from the Munitorum.  Soldiers chosen by the Civil Service aptitude tests report to duty without complaints, at least complaints on which they act.  When their unit gets tithed, they bid their families goodbye and board their ships, neat as you please.  Because of their lifelong impression of duty and uncomplaining traditionalism, the Bronze Legionnaires are rarely near the top of the worry list in joint action task forces with other Guard regiments.

When in battle, the Bronze Legions use a combination of unique radio codes, consisting of five words with no first or last letters in common, to relay sensitive tactical data to other soldiers.  This is derived from an ancient Terran combat signal counterintelligence technique that hundreds of other Imperial worlds use to this day.  The Bronze Legion also employs the usual array of battle cants, hand signals, and color codes that all other modern regiments use to relay information in the heat of battle, but unlike some regiments, the Regimental Master Vox Operator and Master of Signals never take to the field in Bronze Legions under any circumstances.  Only when the enemy has overwhelmed all defenses and cut off all retreat do they lift their sidearms and sell their lives for Terra and Hapster.

This stems from yet another ancient tradition, one lost to the mists of time, but it can serve Hapster regiments well in battle.  The loss of a regiment’s principal communications personnel in a fight can cripple that regiment’s logistics and transportation.

Another quirk of Hapster’s ancient military traditions is their love of long-range artillery.  Although they make use of more or less any artillery they can get, Hapster regiments adore the super long ranges of Mechanicus siege guns.  A Bronze Legion with a Leviathan or Deathstrike is a happy Legion.

Of course, those are rare and expensive, and so shell artillery rules the day in the Bronze Legion.  The Earthshaker and Basilisk are timeless classics, but the Legion finds the limited range of the Basilisk irritating at times, and prefer the Hapster local product, the AM52 Projector cannon.  The cannon comes in 165mm and 210mm variants.  Although twice as costly as the Earthshaker and unable to mount on a mobile chassis smaller than a Stormblade, the Projector uses a rocket motor-assisted projectile to strike targets up to forty kilometers away with the 165, and seventy five-kilometers away with the 210mm cannon.  There is a third variant used for airburst anti-infantry duty and smoke dispersal, but its unconventional barrel caliber of 181mm allows it to be used for nothing else and renders its parts incompatible.  The Projector can carry a Hunter-Killer missile, but only supports a six-millimeter machine gun for close-in defense.

However, there are problems with the gun that prevent it from travelling to other worlds.  Hapster does not have Terran-standard gravity, and the targeting computer of the gun is primitive compared to the cogitators of STC cannons.  Whenever the gun ships offworld to a battlefield with different gravity levels, the weapon has to have extensive recalibrations and retargeting that wastes time and ammunition.  The Mechanicus could easily fix that, but they find it vaguely offensive that the Hapsterites would so eagerly deploy a non-hallowed weapon.

Hapster infantry prefer the use of autoguns to lasweapons, though they issue both when given them by the Mechanicus.  The default Hapster infantry rifle is the Cognomen Razor, which was originally derived from the few surviving examples of Mars’s own Age of Strife-era hunting weapons.  The Razor complements the Hapster infantry tactical mindset well.  The typical Hapster infantry unit deploys in units of seven and platoons of fifty-six plus an officer, and can thus spread through a battlefield of uneven terrain without worrying about formations breaking up.  Hapster rifle teams often add light and medium machine guns to their units on a company basis, and make common use of combi-grenade attachments to augment their firepower.  This is not to say that all Hapster infantry eschew energy weapons.  Hapster Stormtrooper and Scion units use them exclusively, for their greater accuracy and stopping power, and some Bronze Legionnaires prefer them for their lightness and ease of reload.

The vehicle fleets of Hapster regiments tend towards artillery and heavy transports, usually those with integrated turrets like the Chimaera and Gorgon.  While these units do tend to have large profiles and can be mistaken for tanks at a distance, the extra firepower helps to make up for the relative paucity of tanks in Hapster formations.  The tanks they do have tend to be larger models, mostly Malcadors, both because of their age and because the delicate Hapster environment doesn’t allow for much room to train with large fleets of smaller vehicles, but can support small fleets of individually big vehicles.  Hapster regiments stationed on other worlds with more robust vehicle manufacturing sometimes acquire Leman Russ and Salamander vehicles, which they eagerly add to their fleets.