The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) Complete Sequel Up

Cobalt: The Armory

Cobalt is the world after which the subsector it is located in is named and it is renowned for being a near unassailable bastion of orky ingenuity.

The defences of the world were formidable, and it took the genius of Rotbart the Great to eventually batter them down. Even after this there was still several years of fighting before the orks were eradicated and colonisation could begin as planned.

Cobalt is for the most part a rather black world despite its name. Its climate has been severely polluted by thousands of years of orkish industry. The soil is however, very fertile, mostly due to the amount of ash mixed into the soil*. When combined with the climate and meteorology of the planet which allows for almost permanently blue skies (from which the planet really draws its name) plant life is actually flourishing on the planet, feeding on the large amounts of carbon dioxide.

In terms of natural resources Cobalt is a bounty, as expected of a Factory world. Massive seams of metal run deep within the planet, and the fertility of the world has produced large underground lakes of promethium ready for extraction.

A unique metal too, has been found on cobalt. Dubbed "Colarium" by the Mineralogists, the locals refer to it as Cobalt. The material has several strange properties. First it is extremely Hard. Second it conducts heat incredibly well, although its low melting point does not allow it to take advantage of this property, indeed it only takes even a very weak flame to start melting the metal, although this does make it very easy to process it. Finally, the metal is useless for weapons. In its base form it is incredibly brittle and will break almost instantly if hit with a sword.

However, that is not what its truly useful for as its true purpose lies in alloying it with other metals. Blue Steel is perhaps one of the planet's most well-known products and it is simply steel alloyed with blue metal. The end result is three times as strong as regular steel for the same weight. The metal can be alloyed with many other metals, though currently it has not bonded with either high grade adamantium or angel steel. However, a more interesting alloy has been blue gold. When alloyed together blue gold is around as durable as bronze, but it is an extremely effective psycic conductor, even more so than regular gold**. Because of this, despite its expense many psykic artisans utilise blue gold in the construction of force implements. The only problem is that despite its many useful properties the metal is infuriatingly rare, with only a handful of small veins being discovered and at the present even the best mineralogists and materials tech priests of the Trust have been unable to create the material under artificial conditions.

While the planet itself may be rich in metals, the rest of the system is as well with asteroid fields dense in valuable minerals a small fleet of mining ships extracting their bounty, several planetoids and small moons already operating small mining colonies and finally three gas giants from which additional promethium is being extracted.

The incredible speed at which the system has been converted for the Trust should be of no surprise it was directly managed by the low council itself and had a large amount of expertise and resources poured into it to facilitate its role as sub sector capital.

The planet's populace is incredibly diverse, even by the standards of the Trust's colony worlds. Being a subsector capital, it was decided that no one group should form too large a majority, save for the Midgardians of course, so there were groups pulled from all over the Trust to provide their skills.

This has payed off in impressive fashion in many sectors.

Economically the planet still sees weapons of war as its primary function and so its foundries are at work day and night creating new armaments for its growing PDF, or building new macro cannons to add to the cities defences. Of course, it still produces much material and other goods to sell and drive its economy of course.

The most dramatic way this will be seen is in the Cobalt shipyards. While there is currently only one small ship yards dedicated to producing defence monitors for the system defence fleet, there are plans in the works to expand the ship yards significantly in the next few centuries. The reason for this is that Cobalt's governor recognised a severe flaw in the Trust's long term survivability, specifically how many Soldier Destroyer class ships are destroyed. Thus the ship yards are being designed with a preference for mass producing simpler, escort class ships faster than building larger more formidable vessels.

The planet's defences are considerable, unsurprising given its importance, however they are constantly being upgraded ever higher by the fevered efforts of the populace. More importantly the military of the world are extremely determined, well trained and equipped, with a large number of power armoured troops. More importantly than that they are very experienced. The orks of Cobalt may not be as dangerous as Dead Man's rock, but they are determined none the less.

The Governor selected for this task is Bridget Rosa. An Avernite by birth she was an early recruit for the Trust Guard having risen to the rank of colonel of a 105st regiment of Helltroopers who were raised to join the Guard. A graduate of both the Avernus officer academy and the Trust academy on Midgard she worked her way steadily up the ranks with an impeccable record. The regiments under her command were always extremely well run, with incredibly low casualty counts compared to other commanders. She also became known as the Whip due to her intolerance of mediocrity, mentoring many soldiers and officers whether they showed promise or not. Despite her occasionally draconian methods she has many friends in the Trust due to her beating many a young man or woman into shape. She finally retired from active service following the end of the Expansion War and was selected as Governor of Cobalt by the low council, a task she has excelled at, balancing the needs of the people to make them one of the most content of the colonies, but also keeping the best interests of the Trust at the forefront of her mind.
*Ash from burning the ork biosphere to nothing
**Gold does have relatively minor force conducting abilities, which is why it and other precious metals see frequent use in psycic rituals.

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Exhausted going to bed now

@Durin
Any comments/things to fix?

Time and Tactics

Five hours. That was how long it was before the Abomination fleet would reach the outermost orbitals of Avernus provided they did not deviate from their planned course—an extremely low probability event in Rotbart's mind. Five hours to make what last minute preparations could be made and brace for the coming storm. Five hours before the battle in the void that would be culmination of years of careful planning and months of more concrete preparations.


Many would expect him to be using these last five hours to bring his forces to the peak of readiness, that the result years of careful planning with a ludicrous edge in information could not be meaningfully improved upon, and that it would all come down to the ability of his men and women to execute said plans. They would be wrong. True, a non-trivial amount of his time would be spent engaging in last minute preparations and doing what he could to ensure that things went smoothly, but to neglect to look over the plans themselves was folly.


Plans, quite simply, should not be static despite changing circumstances. Relevant contingencies could be polished, new information factored in, unseen opportunities ferreted out and exploited, and weaknesses removed. He was quite happy to let his enemies suffer under the delusion that one could make a plan that perfectly accounted for every variable ahead of time, or that the inevitable difficulties involved in changing plans would always outweigh the benefits, but he could never allow himself such blindness.


It was why he was currently in conference with Admiral Sarnow. Unlike the harassment portion of the fleet engagement, which had been solidly enough within Sarnow's sphere of expertise that he had been relegated mostly to checking over the preliminary drafts and making small optimizations, their plans for the fight in the orbitals was truly a joint project where both had brought the full depth of their knowledge, experience, and skill to bare.


"Looking at the strategic situation, I'm leaning towards the goal of maximizing the destruction of the fighting power of their fleet while preserving what we can of our own. Harassment tactics have proven extremely effective against them so far so we should be able to attrition down their transport fleet with our lighter elements going forward, and I'm still not too worried about what happens if they get a wave or three of troops on the ground," said Rotbart.


"It looks like we're on about the same page," replied Sarnow. "I'm leaning towards Operation Sucker Punch*, Bear Trap**, or Tar Pit***. I would say Fool's Paradise**** as well, but I doubt they'd be quite so willing to bite given the mauling they took from the counter ambush we pulled off."


"I was leaning more towards Rope a Dope***** myself. The fact that they're going to be even more wary about exploiting perceived openings should make the attritional losses much more severe," said Rotbart with a contemplative expression. "That said, I do worry that the more 'traditional' format of the fight there will play into their strengths, especially once they figure out that we have their entire playbook."


"Eh," replied Sarnow, wiggling his hand, "It's a 'traditional' goal, but the actual tactics involved are pretty unorthodox. I'd say it's a wash."


"Perhaps,"mused Rotbart. "If nothing else, I do admire the symmetry of achieving a non-traditional goal through traditional, if inspired, tactics, followed by achieving a traditional goal through non-traditional tactics." Nodding to himself, he continued. "Yes, now that I think about it that should keep them off balance going forward, which will be even more important given that it'll also be dawning on them that we got our hands on their plans."


Steepling his hands, he went on. "Good, that seems like our best bet for the outline right now, but we'll need to shift up the particulars quite a bit. Someone, I'm not naming any names, went and blew a good number of our predictions out of the water, and that's added a few opportunities as well as complications."


"Our success against the light and fast elements of the fleet have made them pull back a good deal further than we anticipated, which would greatly complicate hitting them effectively with our raiding groups. On the flip side, we've also crippled their ability to meaningfully react to rapidly shifting force concentrations. I'd like to propose reconfiguring the raiding group compositions a bit and re-tasking them to the Headhunter initiative."


"The annihilation of their voidcraft wings also opens up a large number of opportunities. While they do have contingencies in place," and here, he shared a rueful chuckle with Sarnow, as both were well aware of just how few things did not have contingencies in the enemy's plans, "those contingencies are far, far less polished than the aspects of the plan they viewed as having a higher probability of needing."


"Additionally, there is the matter of our Void Infantry. While the Crusade are at least vaguely aware of the danger they represent, their best plans for countering them depended on maintaining at least parity in attack craft and eliminating our assault shuttles prior to disembarkation or using their own shuttles to transfer elite troops to contested ships. As both of those options are, shall we say, infeasible, a lot of opportunities for offensive use of our Void Infantry have opened up."


With a quick shake of his head, Rotbart continued that train of though. "While it won't be enough to do decisive damage to the most dangerous elements of the fleet—throwing them at Daemonships would be a bad idea by anyone's estimation—their Grand Cruisers will be especially vulnerable when they're engaged in linebreaking maneuvers, where the escorts that would normally help keep light craft off of them would be quickly destroyed by the sheer weight of fire."


"I'll trust your expertise when it comes to armored battle and infantry," relied Sarnow. "Another thing we should consider would be using some of our attack craft wings to target their carriers. While their immediate combat power is significantly reduced due to the destruction of their attack craft wings, the destruction of the carriers themselves would greatly reduce the rate at which troops could be ferried to the surface, and the carriers will be especially vulnerable to our attack craft due to their traditional dependence on their own void fighters to defend them from threats of that nature."

"One thing I did notice about the limited improvisation they've done so far is that they tend to focus very much on the immediate situation rather than the longer-term consequences of it. To use a chess analogy, they see a fork and immediately sacrifice the less valuable piece without really considering much about how it will impact their position going forward—they rely entirely on the plan for that. A decent bit of my success in eliminating the bulk of their fast capital ships can be attributed to exploiting that fact. That'll probably become even more pronounced, as well as problematic for them, once they realize we have their plan and are forced to go largely without its overarching strategic focus guiding them."


"I've also got a few ideas about how to really whittle down their minefield sweeping forces with stealth and attack craft. Basically a variant on the Hide and Seek contingency prepared for if they decided to go for Demiphobe. What we do is we..."


And on they went, discussing and tweaking stratagems for the coming battle as well as insights and observations about their opponents and the overall tactical and strategic situation they found themselves in. Ideas were brought forth and discarded based on effectiveness and feasibility, their strategy and tactics worked and reworked into a greater whole while remaining similar enough to those already established that their men would still be able to execute them properly. No plan was perfect, no strategy flawless, no tactics without weakness—this they knew. But they also knew that their tireless efforts in trying to make them closer to that impossible ideal would save lives and protect everything that they valued, making the futile nature of their quest entirely worthwhile.



*Given That Rotbart and Sarnow have been working on these for a year or so, I felt that exposition would be out of character. Sucker Punch, in terms of the options to be selected, would be Low, Bluff, primary Main Fleet, secondary transports, information use blatant. Effectively setting up as a 'normal' defense, taking a really hard swing while they're preparing to go in, and then a fighting retreat.


**Bear Trap would be Medium, Bluff, primary Main Fleet, secondary Light Forces, information use Blatant. Effectively baiting the heavy fleet into fighting over Dis and once they get stuck in retreating in good order while a strike group hits the light elements.


***Tar Pit would be Major, Hold, primary Main Fleet, secondary transports, information use Blatant. Effectively forcing them into a slugging match over Dis and using their impaired mobility to also hit the transports.


****Fool's Paradise would be Major, Bluff, primary Main Fleet, secondary Light Forces, information use Blatant. Effectively 'giving' them exactly what they want tactically (forcing our fleet off of Dis while successfully protecting their transports) at a ruinous exchange ratio.


*****Rope a Dope would be between Medium and Major, Hold, primary Main Fleet, secondary Light Forces, information use Blatant. Using our armor and defenses to force them into unfavorable trades due to them needing to split their heavy units up a bit to also defend against raiding groups hitting their light forces and transports.