Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Rampart (section)

===Oglith Military===

For most of its history, Oglith exported soldiers to the Astra Militarum.  Its armored companies were never more than a token force, but its Warrior Guard and Defender PDF were competent and numerous.  Oglith regiments fought in the Gothic War, as well as some of the Wars of Faith that the Ecclesiarchy Ultima waged against heretics in nearby Sectors.

The Oglith Defenders are a capable if uninspired PDF.  As with many Frontier Worlds, it benefits from its members being fairly skilled with guns and self-preservation even before joining, though given Oglith’s lack of predators and other threats, most of that skill comes from self-granted self-defense training or scholastic Ork Preparedness drills.  Its members garrison in their own hometowns whenever possible, both to allow them to keep families intact and to ensure that they are properly motivated if the Orks ever breach the surface.  Members are encouraged to quarter with their own families.  If that is not an option, apartments and barracks are provided.  Weapon lockers and armory vaults dot several towns so that local Defenders can arm up and fight in no time, without leaving the confines of the city they are supposed to protect.  Vehicles usually cache in garages and tarmacs outside town airfields or VTOL ports, just in case.  Tanks and other valuable vehicles may park underground where possible, though these garages usually have thick metal braces on the floors to prevent Orks from burrowing up and stealing the vehicles from below.

The planet has severe shortcomings in one crucial field: surface-to-space weapons.  Some of the older cities have them, but newer ones universally do not.  The Astra Militarum realized that if the Orks ever took the surface, the last thing the Imperium wanted to worry about was being fired on by intact surface-to-space weaponry.  Normally, Ork invasions come from space, where their slow, ramshackle ships are vulnerable to surface Defense Lasers and Defense Silos, and if they capture said weapons, they usually dismantle them.  However, if Orks invading from below were to capture such weapons, they would surely salvage them to mount on ships.  The Navy and Mechanicus cannot stomach the idea of their own heavy weapons turning on them as such.  They instead have mounted many of the world’s defense weapons in space, either on void platforms drifting in far orbit around Oglith or on its Navy stations in medium orbit.  As a Subsector Capital, Oglith benefits from a Subsector Fortress, a modified Xerxes III that houses the Subsector Overlord when he isn’t in his mansion on the surface.  The modifications include larger administrative and life support areas, as well as a small shipbuilding cradle that can handle hulls up to Falchion size.  The Navy plans to manufacture far larger yards once the Ork problem resolves.  The very name of the system bespeaks the intent of the Navy to defend it more heavily in the future.

Other orbital defenses include the system’s SDF and Battlefleet Rampart.  The Battlefleet assigned to Oglith comes from its own small yards and Cognomen, but it also has several small ships taken from pirates over the years.  As a Subsector with two Frontier Worlds and as the outer border of the entire Imperium, the Rampart Subsector has had more than its fair share of pirates and raiders.

In fact and unbeknownst to the general populace, the Oglith fleet includes these pirate ships thanks to an unforeseen drop in Chaotic activity.  Prior to the arrival of the Glasians, the various Chaos pirate groups of the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit, and even those of the Oldlight Exo-zone, identified Oglith as a prime target for raids and theft.  The Cloudburst and Mechanicus fleets fielded against many such pirates, but the criminals were so numerous and so widespread that the local defenses strained trying to hold them back.  Then, roughly one century before the arrival of the First Glasian Migration, the Chaotic pirates simply vanished.  Investigations by the Inquisition and Arbites revealed that the ships had disappeared to other Sectors or wiped each other out, and had done so in an eerily coordinated way.

Of course, now the Inquisition knows that this happened because Tzeentch willed it to be so, and turned his own forces against those of his evil brethren, but at the time, all the Navy knew was that its job had just become far easier.  Battlefleet Rampart immediately sortied against the pirates that had remained behind, those untainted or unaware of Chaos.  They were able to steal several ships from the pirates as prizes, and kept them all for the Subsector Flotilla.  These successes delighted Battlefleet Cloudburst; they have authorized Battlefleet Rampart to repeat this tactic whenever it is viable.

Oglith’s PDF have few of their spaceborne brethren’s advantages beyond gumption and loyalty, however.  Their tank forces are a bit of a joke, given how underfunded they are, and their planetary Killteams are murderously effective, but the rank and file Defenders are hardly Guard grade, or even Septiim Defender quality.

However, the Oglith Warriors are another story.  Paid for by Oglith gasses and ore, the Warriors field the full array of Imperial Guard tanks and light vehicles, including a variety of Leman Russ tanks second only to Celeste’s.  The wide, sprawling, untamed fields of Oglith provide the perfect place for Rough Rider and artillery practice, and their snowmobile rapid cavalry teams are unquestionably the best in the Cloudburst Sector, surpassing even Lorelei’s and Clegran’s.  Oglith does not field a particularly large number of regiments, preferring instead to retire depleted ones and recycle their numbers, which at least allows them to ensure that most regiments remain near their optimal strength.  Oglith Paratroopers are unimpressive in most regards, even compared to Septiim’s, but they have successfully fielded regiments with full Venator and Sentinel support against aliens on campaigns under Segmentum authority before and can do so again.

The ultimate in Oglith force, however, is not its well-equipped Guard or gutsy Navy.  It is, instead, its cold-blooded and lauded Scion unit.  The Oglith Jaegers are a Scion force trained in the capital’s sprawling Schola Progenum, raised from the offspring of slain Adepts and veterans.  Like most Scions, they have few ties to their homeworld beyond having trained there, but the Jaegers are exceptional even among the ranks of the human race’s elite.  The Jaegers are field specialists without compare in Cloudburst, far surpassing even the Celeste and Septiim Scions.  Their standards of physical athleticism and marksmanship are high enough that the unaware might mistake them as Scout Marines.

The Jaegers field in forces of no more than a few hundred at a time, usually as special operations support for Space Marine or Inquisitorial forces.  However, they have also served as the precision point of larger Guard invasions of Circuit worlds, in the retinues of Rogue Traders, or even as advance units for Imperial Crusades in other Segmentum Ultima Sectors.  Jaegers do not field tanks, relying instead on air units and the variable power of the Taurox.  The most successful Jaeger units have fought alongside forces as disparate as Lord Solar Macharius and the Ultramarines, and fought in the Imperial contingent for the Badab War on behalf of the Inquisition.

Jaegers also serve as part of the Cloudburst-unique ECAFs that dart across the Sector in modified Fast Clippers to provide leadership and reinforcement where needed, sometimes filling the entire infantry quotient.  Such is their reputation that they have served by invitation beside Blue Dagger and Deathwatch units in the field, against Glasians and Heretics alike.  The Jaegers personalize their equipment to a limited extent, usually including a feather tucked into the belt of their armor or the tightening strap of their Omni-helms.  Like many Scion units, they focus on laser weaponry, but augment it with a variety of other energetic weapons like plasma, meltas, and flamers.

Unlike many other worlds in the Cloudburst Sector, the Oglith military does not field any unique weapons.  However, Oglith does field some of its units out of the standard Imperial proportions, such as including armed Field Medics in units that traditionally not get them, or get fewer if they did.  This extends to the Jaegers, who frequently enjoy Field Medics or even Battlefield Surgeons attached as low as squad level.  This is thanks to the Oglith Medical College structure attached to one of its orbitals, where prospective medics train under Guard professionals and civilian doctors to administrate care to wounded soldiers.  Many systems in the Imperium have one of these, but they are expensive, and few Cloudburst systems construct them unless needed.  For a Frontier World to have one is rare in the extreme, not that anybody’s complaining.

The Oglith Medical College is yet another sign of how the Imperial Navy intends to expand beyond the borders of Oglith, towards the Galactic North and its limiting Terminus Shock.  The original plan for the College was that it would accelerate and enable the training and dispatch of extra medical personnel to the crews of Imperial Navy exploration and patrol ships as their jurisdictions expanded beyond the previous Imperial borders.  Although oft-interrupted by war, stellar phenomena, and the shrinking of the Astronomican’s projection range, the plan continues.  The Imperial Naval command elements of the Cloudburst Sector have even gone so far as to attach a small Schola Progenum and Imperial Exchequer facility to the orbiting medical school, to raise the profile of their efforts.  Cynical observers have noted that this is more likely an effort to counteract negativity over the growing and embarrassing public spectacle of Port Maxient’s jurisdictional battles, rather than an actual strengthening of the Imperial border.