Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Nauphry (section)

==Nauphry Military==

The war colleges of the Nauphry System serve as the training grounds for many of the officer recruits taken from other worlds of the Cloudburst Sector.  Coriolis and Thimble provide most such recruits, while Septiim and Maskos generally keep their officer candidates for their own fleets.  Nauphry enjoys extensive support from the Navy in this effort, and officer colleges in Nauphry have produced most of the Lords Admiral Cloudburst.

However, their record is not spotless.  The leader of the FCC, Admiral Reith, is a graduate of the Nauphry war colleges, and so are dozens of other pirates from the sector’s history.  The Nauphry college administrators consider it a stain on their honor that so many of their students have turned their guns on the Imperium.  Of course, all Sectors have had piracy problems, including the Sol Sector itself, and the war colleges have produced hundreds of thousands of other officers who have never lost their way.

The Nauphry Guard are the Guard of the Nauphry system, creatively enough, and their regiments always strive to reach the highest standards of military conduct and performance.  Although their forces are based on the regimental structures of the Septiim system, their individual tithings are quite different.  Unlike Septiim’s year-round recruitment drives, the Nauphry Guard recruit solely in year-end tithings of manpower to the Munitorum, and draw their forces at random through lottery from the higher skilled-end of the general Nauphry Bastions.  Nauphry Guard have made a name for themselves in fighting in the opposite direction of the majority of Cloudburst Astra Militarum regiments.  Most Cloudburst Guards troops either fight their way out to the Circuit and Exo-zone or defend the worlds on which they were raised from Glasians or Orks, but the Nauphry Guard have sortied over one hundred regiments in Crusades that staged in the Drumnos and Naxos Sectors, usually fighting corewards, against enemies within the Imperium’s borders.

This is not a conscious decision on the Munitorum’s part, but a fluke of random chance.  The Crusades and other campaigns in those older Sectors are generally retributive actions by the Munitorum against raiders or Chaotic forces, which assault the Imperium whenever they think they can get away with it.  The fact that Nauphry always has ships and men to spare thanks to their lottery just means that they are the planet most likely to have small numbers of unengaged Guard forces to send at any given time.

The Nauphry Ironclads, however, are unique.  Nauphry IV fields a massive surface naval fleet, larger than any other in Cloudburst or the Circuit.  The planet’s history of being attacked by pirates seeking new space vessels, or Glasians doing whatever it is that they do, means that the world’s two nations often find themselves scrambling their navies to defend their shores from attackers.  Technically, the local countries’ large navies are not a part of the planet’s PDF, although only because of a creative reading of Imperial law.  The planet’s Administratum knows that the two competing superpowers could use their navies to attack each other, and has forbidden it.  The world’s Adeptus Terra refer to both fleets interchangeably as the Ironclads, despite their distinct names and designations, to drive home the point that they could seize the fleets for their own use any time they wish it.  Both fleets can sortie over two dozen fixed-wing and VTOL aircraft supercarriers, and of the fifty carriers on the planet, three can launch surface-to-space missiles to aid in the defense of the orbitals from pirates or aliens.

Some of these Ironclads sortie as self-contained surface navy regiments for the [[Officio Munitorum]], providing the colossal firepower of modern wet warships to trans-stellar military campaigns for the Imperium.  Given the Imperial military’s reliance on VTOL aircraft, infantry, and heavy tanks to do their fighting, the sudden presence of warships on a planet’s surface can shatter the defenses of rebels and aliens who have become used to the more predictable Imperial strategies.  Some of the Ironclad Sea Regiments even sortie nuclear assault submarines, capable of launching torpedoes that can burrow through seabed rock and detonate nuclear mines beneath coastal rebel cities, then slip away in the confusion as if they were never there.  There is little in the Imperial arsenal capable of more morale damage than this combination of warships and secrecy, and they know it well.  Sea Colonels of these regiments – never Captains – sometimes also sortie huge platforms called Megafloats to serve as modular command structures on planetary oceans, wherefrom they can command the dispatch of warships assigned to their regiments to aid Imperial Navy aerospace forces in protracted surface warfare.