Originally posted by robject:
Hey Bill, this would be an ideal location to rehash and summarise them...
Robject,
Alan pretty much covered the serious answer to the Battle of Two Suns, the Zhodani were out in the Deep Dark and the Imperium beat them. It's when we begin asking things like
Why? and
How? that things get screwy.
The blurbs say something along the lines of the Imperium's victory meant the barbarians' (sic) advance could no longer continue and Efate was saved. Pretty straight forward stuff but it makes no sense when you look at the
map. You see, Yres and Menorb are
four parsecs from the nearest Consulate system.
During the
Fifth Frontier War a big chunk of the Consulate Navy is still comprised of jump3 vessels. So much of the fleet was still jump3 that seizing Louzy in the opening stages of the war was a major prerequisite for the Consulates' drive on Efate because Louzy's position allowed jump3 vessels to move between Farreach and Efate. (The Imperial SDB commander at Louzy is hailed as a hero when, instead of going down with guns blazing, he uses his assets in guerilla fashion continually harassing the Zhodani as they transit the Louzy system and thus discomforting their plans to use Louzy as a safe staging area.)
If enough of the Consulate Navy in 1107 is jump3, than a good portion of it in 1082 should be jump3 also. So, what they hell are they doing in deep space four parsecs away from their friendly nearest system? If they staged out of Foelen, they would have had make two deep space space jumps to get to the site of the battle. If they staged out of Farreach, they could either make two deep space jumps or jump via Louzy. The Zhodani are fighting at a calibration point they reached either via another calibration point of via an Imperial system! Weird, huh?
(Of course, these are the same guys who built a secret base on Fulacin 17 parsecs from their nearest border. Go figure.)
The Imperial side of the battle is just as baffling, mostly on two counts.
First, unlike the majority of naval actions we know of in canon, we actually know some of the vessels that were involved. We know that at least two
Kinunir-class 'battlecruisers' were present because we know two were lost there. We also know that the battlerider squadron detailed in
SMC was present; the 214th(?).
The presence of the
Kinunirs is troubling. Those vessels belong no where near any line of battle, they're too small and slow besides being poorly armed and armored. There's a metagame reason they were there(1), but there are precious few in-game reasons for their presence.
Second, the Imperium has interdicted the site of the battle because it is "littered with debris". When you remember that vessels fighting battles in space are moving along a wide variety of vectors and that any debris created will remain on those vectors, you realize that there is no actual 'battlefield debris' to warrant an interdiction because any debris is long gone. The Imperium doesn't want people jumping into the area where the battle was held for other reasons.
(People's suggestions regrading those other reasons generally involve the 'Lovecraftian' themes I referenced earlier.)
My 'explanations' for the battle are poor:
Realistic: Border incidents become more common and, without planning by either side, the Consulate and Imperium find themselves at war. Most of the border incidents revolved around scouting locations for and delivering supply caches to various deep space calibration points.
The Consulate's overall plan is to riddle the coreward half of the Regina subsector with caches to support a combined Zhodani/Vargr offensive in that region. (The canonical description of the battle mentions that the coreward half of the subsector would have been 'lost' if the battle hade been lost.)
The Imperium becomes aware of this plan, mostly through espionage efforts among the Vargr. Because the caches are in Imperial space, the Imperium has no compunction in dispatching forces to seize and/or destroy every cache they know about. When the Imperium launches this effort, the 'border incidents' canon refers to kick off. The Consulate, Vargr, and Imperium are tussling over deep space supply caches with the naval forces
they already have on hand.
That's an important bit. The
Kinunirs are involved because there isn't time to summon better ships for the job. The englobed
Kinunirs can also (hopefully) deliver Marine strike teams to seize the enemy personnel and records at each cache.
The Two Suns cache is the mother load of all the caches. It was placed to allow one parsec 'hops' to all four of the worlds in the Pixie cluster; Yres, Menorb, Pixie, and Boughene. The seizure of that cluster will not only threaten Efate but will also threaten the Kinorb group and the Enope trace. What supplies the Zhodani have been able to move from other caches in the region before their destruction by the Imperium have been stockpiled at the Two Suns cache, but removing that cache has been difficult due to it's distance from the border.
The rest we already know. The Imperium arrives, the battle is fought, the two
Kinunirs are lost, the Consulate gets whipped, the end. The ‘war’ sputters on for a few more months in other places before the news and new orders can arrive, but the important ‘campaign’, the seizure/destruction of the Outworld supply caches is all over. The Two Suns cache also featured a rogue interstellar body of some sort; a planet, planetoid, KBO, cometary fragment, whatever. Because it is a fuel source and because it obviously bears watching in the future, the Imperium interdicts the ‘battlefield’ to prevent anyone from snooping around. Cap’n Blackie and the crew of the
Sufferin’ Bastard won’t be able to use it to smuggle toupees between Yres and Menorb.
Silly-Conspiracy-Lovecraftian: The battle and indeed the Fourth Frontier War are a sham. The entire affair is part of some elaborate cover-up. The Consulate and the Imperium did fight a battle in deep space between Yres and Menorb. However they fought it as
allies. Something ‘Man Should Not Know’ was out there in the Deep Dark. Take your pick; Baddies from the Core a bit early, one of Grandfather’s ‘leftovers’, Cthulu 5700, an immense inflatable Liza Minelli, you can’t get too weird or too bizarre. Afterwards, the region is interdicted for ‘obvious’ reasons.
Like I said, my explanations for the battle aren’t too good.
Have fun,
Bill
1 - That reason is that the battle was described and the
Kinunirs designed before
LBB:5 High Guard was written. After the release of
HG2, the
Kinunirs are worthless in the role
A:1 presented them in.
P.S. - Sorry forgot this bit: the length of the 4th FW. It runs from 1082 to 1084, but that doesn't mean it ran from 001-1082 to 365-1084. It also doesn't mean that the Imperials and Zhodani
living in 1082 picked up a newspaper and read "War Begins Today".
Like the dates for the real world 'fall' of Rome and the OTU 'fall' of the Rule of Man, the 1082-1084 dates are those generally agreed upon by historians. They point to some date in the year 1082 and say:
"Okay, the number of border clashes have reached a certain level so the war began at this time.". They then point to a certain point in the year 1084 and say:
"Okay, the number of border clashes have fallen below this amount so the war ended at this time."
We know the Battle of Two Suns occurred in 1084, we know there was no formal declaration of war by either side, and we also know that an armistice was put in place between each side. I figure the Imperium and Consulate play 'chicken' with each other along their border all the time. Pick a week and there most likely is an incident occurring somewhere. In the case of the 4th FW, things that had been on a slow simmer suddenly came to a fast boil.