Upon My Shield Rests the Heavens
Upon My Shield Rests the Heavens
LORE: The Federated Minervan Republics Navy and Admiral Hughes' Grand Orchestra (Pt. 1)
내 방패 윗 온 천당 1
Origins
The Federated Minervan Republics Navy (FMRN, founded 2349) is one of the component services of the Federated Minervan Armed Forces, founded in the nascence of the Minervan state in the aftermath of the 2337-2343 Minervan War of Independence. (Many Minervan sources, including the Navy itself, point to the establishment of loosely-coordinated pirate raiding parties such as Shepard’s Raiders aboard retrofitted civilian vessels which harassed UN-affiliated naval and commercial vessels to little success in 2327 as the date of the service’s establishment. Few serious scholars earnestly believe the two organizations hold any sort of continuity at all.) It is the primary spacefaring arm of the Minervan military and the outstretched right hand of New Ruacnoc, under whose aegis the Minervan ideals of unity, equality, and democracy have spread under the light of distant stars.
In late April 2343, in the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Seongnam, a day now known as Martyr’s Day to Minervans and Ash Wednesday to the rest of inhabited space, the situation on the ground for United Nations MERIDCOL forces was dire. Minervan fighters had— thanks to local ingenuity and defections on account of horrified UN personnel— assembled a proper anti-orbital defense that could successfully prosecute and hold at threat any transatmospheric attempt at landing; and they were now behaving a lot more like a proper military than a scattered insurrection. Pushed into a corner, an already desparate and increasingly paranoid General Havelock ordered his men to descend the space elevators, the orbital components of which were one of the few areas of operations in Minerva’s orbit that the MERIDCOL still had continuous access to. The result was a bloodbath, as the troops were slaughtered when the climber cars reached the terminal, and this bloodbath shook MERIDCOL forces to their core. Increasing numbers of their brethren were deserting and defecting, many of which were taking their equipment. Fighting for a paranoid butcher of a General, who almost every country on Earth, the Moon, and Mars, was calling for the removal of, became an increasingly untenable prospect. Independence Forces representatives successfully negotiated for the ROKS SANGJU (EFK-35), a Korean INCHEON-Class Corvette, to pledge not to obey any order that would involve attacking Minerva. Similar agreements began to spring up with several other ships, and this pledge eventually led to the SANGJU, her Captain Rhim Joonho, and much of her crew defecting to the Minervan Independence Forces just before the signing of the Treaty of Bradbury on August 11, 2343. While Minerva would not properly have an organized Navy for another six years, it is generally regarded that SANGJU was the first proper warship of the Minervan Navy, though in truth SANGJU was used more for technical exploitation than as a warship in her own right.
Beginning as a small fleet under the command of Admiral Rhim of domestically produced ships commonly decried by UN navalists as ‘ripoffs’ of the INCHEON-Class Corvettes, and growing over the ages into the the overwhelming armada and logistical behemoth of the present, the Federated Minervan Republics Navy was born in fire and has been tasked with upholding the rights, freedoms, and protection of the citizens of Minerva and her Republics. It is an awe-inspiring task, and she is more than up to it.
A Word on Doctrine
The doctrine of the Federated Minervan Republics Navy (FMRN) may best be summarized by the term tempo. Organizing their forces into echelons, the FMRN had in mind a strategy of sustained, constantly advancing operations to prevent the "Great War To Come" from ever spilling into Minervan space, lest the bloody lessons of their War For Independence repeat. These echelons, subdivisions of a Minervan fleet, would each have different roles to play in a carefully-timed and meticulously-planned series of attacks against an opposing UN-UNC force, each designed to strip away another layer of their defenses or to lead them into a more unfavorable position, and timed to arrive at just the right moment. In order to coordinate this, as well, the Minervan military has thrown a great deal of resources into precision slipstream mapping and infrastructure, and enjoys an asymmetrical advantage in communication and transit speed due to these closely-guarded military secrets.
In order to keep up this "Unrelenting Offensive", as dubbed by Admiral of the Navy Keo 'Maestro' Hughes, Minervan ships are designed to be easily resupplied, serviced, repaired, and maintained in the field, without returning to specialized stations— and to facilitate this, the FMRN's Fleet Logistics Office has become a powerful force within the organization, managing and maintaining an equally impressive fleet of Forward Repair and Resupply Vessels. Most Minervan capital ships are armored with a series of modular, paneled applique armor around a central core hull, and this enables the field-deployed replacement of damaged armor by a Forward Repair and Resupply Vessel, allowing a Minervan ship that has taken considerable amounts of armor damage that may otherwise result in a mission kill of the warship to be rapidly repaired and returned to a high level of combat effectiveness in at most a couple of days, with the core hulls typically similarly modular to a lesser degree. In the early days of the Fools' War, UN-UNC sailors came to refer to the Minervan fleet as an 'armada of the undead' due to some sailors realizing they were once again fighting the same ships they'd mission-killed not three days earlier.
The introduction of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) guns, a Minervan invention, to the main battery of the MYEONGNYANG-Class Fast Battleship in 2502 led to a revolution in Minervan naval technology. Capable of both functioning as a regular coilgun and with a shorter-ranged mode which melts the slug before shooting a magnetically-confined bolt of hypervelocity molten tungsten, MHD guns are capable of tearing through modern armor with relative ease due to their combination of thermal and kinetic energy and are thus sometimes also known as thermokinetic energy weapons. Their installation in the main battery of the MYEONGNYANG-Class resulted in the legal reclassification of the Fast Battleship to a Battlecruiser, as the armor of the vessel could not withstand its main battery (a requirement to be legally considered a Battleship under the 2465 Treaty of Newport). In a similar fashion, the now ubiquitous technology has led many modern Minervan ships in an already Cruiser heavy navy to be reclassified as Battlecruisers, much to the protest of the United Nations. As such, it was widely considered (and later proven) that the FMRN possessed a greater degree of firepower than the UN-UNC, though less accurate in its delivery methods.
By focusing on heavily specialized Strike Craft and warships capable of rapid repair and rearmament, the FMRN hoped to keep war away from its territory; a tactic that largely worked for the first year of the War but began to suffer as the losses mounted and the tempo, ultimately, broke, leading to the pre-Reclaimancy War stalemate. In this Guide, we hope to familiarize you, the reader, with the vessels that fought the Fools' War as part of 'Admiral Hughes' Grand Orchestra', in a neutral and unbiased manner; both in memory of the people who fought and perished aboard them for the independence and sovereignty of their country, and in hopes that such bloodshed shall be avoided among humanity in the generations to come.
—Kane’s Fighting Ships of the Fools' War, pg. 5 (2539)
Admiral Hughes’ Grand Orchestra
Admiral of the Navy (Wonsu) Keo ‘Maestro’ Hughes (January 22, 2372-December 31, 2499), father of the FMRN Fleet Logistics Office and the Forward Repair and Resupply Vessel, was an unlikely candidate to be a transformative leader in the Minervan Navy. Graduating from the Naval Academy as the Anchorman of the Class of 2393— the graduating Midshipman with the lowest grade point average— Hughes was never a particularly good student, and lacked the luxury of high priority in selection for posting. He found limited success in the fleet as an engineering officer aboard the ISTWITH-Class destroyer MFRS LAODICEA (D301), noted for his hardworking tenacity, a down-to-earth nature, and willingness to listen that created a good working relationship with the enlisted Sailors in his department. He was, however, abrasive towards superior officers, and would frequently find himself in conflict with his Destroyer Squadron’s commanding officer, then-Captain Jacob Kneale.
Destroyer Squadron SEVEN FIVE was forward-deployed to patrol Serendin, a somewhat remote habitable planet in Wolf 25, then one of the furthest reaches of Minervan power into the Frontier. The ISTWITH-Class DDGs of the Squadron were frequently subject to long maintenance availabilities in the shipyards at Naval Station Wakefield over the planet Yukon (Chara II), an inhabited, fairly well populated world on the edge of legally Minervan space. Destroyers in the yards at Yukon would often be fighting for authorization to strip components off of another squadron’s ships in order to return them to operational status, with new-built Destroyers often arriving at Yukon and being plucked for parts within the first week of their stay. For decades, this had been the way of the world— and then-Lieutenant Hughes could not stand it. He lamented the lack of spare parts, the ill-managed and overworked supply chain that simply dumped a given number of spares a year at the feet of the Sailors there and expected them to sort it out for itself, and while no one was happy with the arrangement, some were better at navigating it than others. Captain Jacob Kneale could navigate it exceptionally well, giving Squadron SEVEN FIVE one of the shortest turnaround times of any DESRON due to his exceptional navigation of office politics and his willingness to dabble in favors to grease any particularly squeaky wheels. Hughes (at the time) could stand this least of all— and got into a particularly nasty series of arguments with Captain Kneale that would lead to his reassignment to the Fleet Logistics Office— then a small, perpetually overworked, and frequently ignored group in the central command structure back on Minerva.
Kneale had given Hughes one last order as his commanding officer— “do something about it.” Hughes wasted little time. For a group used to being ignored, Hughes was anything but soft-spoken. He would work his way up the ranks while remaining entirely within the Logistics Office— with then-CO RADL Sasha Boyajian remarking that Hughes “…[was] the only one who wanted to be here.” By 2411, Hughes and Kneale’s paths would cross again, with Kneale having ascended to the position of Chief of Naval Operations. Then-Commander Hughes had devised a radical plan to revolutionize the Minervan military logistical chain, to transition away from the simpler ‘push’ system that had long been in place to a new ‘pull’ system, where units would see their logistical needs met on their own terms, rather than a rigid system simply throwing a fixed quota of supplies at them and telling them to make it work. In tandem, he had envisioned a new way of naval warfighting and an enabling asset to make it so. Having grown up in the ash-charred shadow of General Havelock’s devastation, Hughes had long feared the return of the United Nations, and long feared what he had dubbed ‘The Great War to Come.’ He had envisioned a well-provisioned, nimble, agile, and most of all, persistent force to be the only thing that could successfully fend off the then-greater naval might of the UN— if they could not win on the UN’s terms, they would simply set the terms themselves, constantly pressing Sol’s forces on the backfoot and siezing the initiative to batter them with it. The backbone of this “Unrelenting Offensive” would be the Forward Repair and Resupply Vessel, or the FRRV. Intended as a mobile spacedock capable of replacing the applique armor that was then coming into vogue for Minervan ships in the field, the FRRV would also be a mobile supply and repair station carrying spare parts, supplies, ammunition, and best of all, capable of depot-level repairs; Minervan ships under Hughes’ vision would transition to a more modular design in order to fully take advantage of this. This joint force support ship would form the backbone of what onlookers quickly came to call Hughes’ ‘Grand Orchestra’, a hundred instruments each playing their own part; production, logistics, maintenance, and battle— each in tune with the other and each supporting the rest. Bringing his vision before his old CO, Kneale nearly ran Hughes out of his office upon seeing the price tag. Soon, however, the UN’s bloodless siezure of 61 Cygni in October 2411 from the Minervan miners who were ostensibly under the protection of a Minervan DESRON— which was then spread thin due to many of its ships being in a maintenance availability— forced Kneale’s hand. He promptly promoted Hughes to Captain, handed him a blank check, and put the backing of his office— and his myriad political connections— behind him.
Logistics, Hughes said, began with the defense-industrial workforce. He set out expanding and transforming the sector with jobs and training programs intended to produce a new generation of skilled Minervan machinists, welders, fabricator technicians, and all sorts of tradesmen for every industry, not just in defense. With a new wave of state-owned arsenals and defense production plants opening under his plan, including the famed Kennedy Arsenal and the El Morro Naval Yard, the Minervan supply chain would finally start to see the increase in production necessary to alleviate stock issues— and the increased investment into transport and spacelift vessels would ensure that stock would find its way downchain. The first VEGETIUS-Class Forward Repair and Resupply Vessels would come online in 2419— the year when Captain Hughes would finally pin on his first star. The freshly minted, young Rear Admiral (Lower Half) would find himself in constant struggle with almost all of his fellow flag officers, with many of them seeing the Fleet Logistics Office under Hughes as a threat to their authority, with many calling the Hughes Plan’s restructuring of the military a ‘palace coup’. In fairness, they were not far off. With the backing of a still-influential former CNO, Consensus ties that shielded him from almost any internal backlash, and having so thoroughly convinced Admiral Herman Croall— the present CNO— to buy into the vision himself, he had effectively placed one hand on the levers of power and the other on the tiller of the institution. In no uncertain terms, Keo Hughes had become the most powerful man in the Minervan Navy. This was his Orchestra. Everyone under him called him the Maestro, but never once to his face.
As the Hughes Plan came to fruition, the Minervan Navy began to hit operational tempos that few had ever considered possible. The Minervan Navy was always considered a second-rate fleet, one that existed largely for the purpose of gumming up the works of the UN war machine with viscera, bone, and prayerful hope. Few, if any, had forseen the transformation that would send shivers down the spine of every Sailor under the powder-blue standard of Sol— the creation of a modern, ferocious, ready Minervan Navy, armed with a shark’s grin of teeth— razor sharp, with an inexhaustible set of spares ready to shift into place and tear in for the kill.
Keo Hughes would never serve as Chief of Naval Operations himself, nor would he leave the Rear Admiral billet of the Director of the Fleet Logistics Office. He did not need to. His name carried its own rank, and the shadow he cast was long. When he retired, he was intending to retire a Rear Admiral. Out of gratitude for the service he had done his nation, the Consensus would not let him. Promoted to Admiral of the Navy, a rank created for the express purpose of paying him a larger pension, he retired one day later, on June 7th, 2448. He would die in a vehicular accident on a mountainside road at the age of 127 on December 31, 2499, driving into the city of Seongnam from his villa in the outlying country to meet his grandchildren for the New Year’s Day celebrations. No one else was harmed. His driver’s license, found at the scene of the crash, was expired.
He is remembered as a patriot, a hero, and ‘…an insufferable hardass of unimpeachable character’ by many who worked with him. Few can argue with his results. Many critics, however, highlight the danger that was presented by one military leader holding so much sway over the democratically elected Consensus by sheer politicking alone, with many contending he broke several military-civil affairs laws in the process that have since been repealed in the Gray Wave brought on by President Amelie Nwajiobi in the 2470s.
“Do whatever you need to get them whatever they need.”
—RADL Keo Hughes’ First Rule of Logistics
The FMRN Today (2523)
In the wake of Hughes’ transformation of the service and the subsequent modernizations thereof, the FMRN stands at 5,808 ships, with a non-insignificant portion of these being orbital defense cutters, as Minerva does not separate its cutters into a Coast Guard like the UN does. Were one to remove those ships from the equation, the true size of the Minervan Navy becomes evident as 4,883 ships, of which still a non-insignificant portion are corvettes and fast attack boats. The subcapital ships of the FMRN are dominated by the D555 FALL RIVER-Class Destroyer, a multimission guided missile destroyer introduced in the 2450s but kept relevant by a dizzying series of updates, and complemented by the D770 BAJACALIFORNIA-Class Destroyer and the Q250 IFRIT-Class Interdictors introduced in the early 2500s. The majority of the capital ships are cruisers of some form— with a particular concentration in the aviation cruiser such as the C2092 NANSHAN-Class Aviation Cruiser and her newer successor the C308 FAIRFIELD-Class Aviation Cruiser. Line cruisers also include the C181 PROMACHUS-Class Cruiser and the C290 HUASCARAN-Class Cruiser, both fielded in large numbers. Many of their modern battlecruisers, additionally, are in fact fast battleships, such as the feared C272 MYEONGNYANG-Class Battlecruiser, the replacement to the B075 MARIANAS (or MARIANAS TRENCH)-Class Battleship3. The average composition of the FMRN and its Space Action Groups tend to skew towards newer platforms, such as the ones introduced in the partial fleet modernization of the early 2500s. However, while the Minervan Navy was for decades projected to surpass the fleet size of the UN-UNC— and did, for a short time— the building spree brought on by FLTDES 2500 has once again made the UNC the larger of the two services.
The Federated Minervan Republics Navy was born out of desparate necessity and has transformed into a logistical and warfighting behemoth the likes of which the worlds have never seen. Capable of fighting anywhere, anytime, and on their own terms, they are determined not to let the precious independence their forebears hoped, fought, and died for, wrought in nuclear fire and quenched in martyrs’ blood, from fading from the light of the many suns it now prospers under. Unrelenting, meticulous, and always prepared, upon its shield rests the heavens, and the many wonders and horrors contained within and beyond these distant stars, a protective aegis between the people of Minerva and anything that may come between them and their hard-won liberty.
Motto of the Federated Minervan Republics Navy. Translated loosely, means “UPON MY SHIELD RESTS THE HEAVENS”. Originally the motto of ROKS SANGJU (EFK-35).
CGV in UN parlance. Minervan pennant numbers do not, however, distinguish between aviation cruisers and other forms of cruisers, including battlecruisers.
While the class is named MARIANAS, a naming conflict due to the service life extension of MFRN MARIANAS (C268), a NANSHAN-Class Aviation Cruiser, forced the lead ship, MFRS MARIANAS TRENCH (B075) to be renamed before her launch to satisfy the rule that the Navy cannot have two ships with the same name. She is named in honor of the early 21st Century naval battles of the Marianas Trench, where C268 is named in honor of Marianas Republic.
Also, when’s the next ship lore?
Know your on break but I got three questions
1. What’s the standard tank for Minerva
2. What’s the capital city of earth?
3. Do arsenal ships become a thing