Battles of the Magnate War

Azadestan Theatre

Azadestan Campaign

Result: Draw. Azadestani orbital infrastructure was damaged in the year long campaign, along with forcing the RAN to limited operations. With the lack of

Forces

League Combined Militia & Azadestan Armed Forces
Commanding Officer: President Delshad Dariush, Azadestan Armed Forces Commander in Chief

49th, 3rd, and 1st Vertical Calvary divisions using the Peltast class Mobile Suit

10 Wings of Mughal Aerospace Fighters

Entirety of the Republic of Azadestan Navy

League Combined Militia ships.

Magnate Continuum Invasion Force
Commanding Officer: Exarch Antonia Savina, Eternal Dawn Templar

Losses

League Combined Militia & Azadestani Military
Losses:

Magnate Continuum Invasion Force
Losses:

Finnegan's Folly Theatre

The Battle of Finnegan's Folly

June-July 2176
Result: Magnate pyrrhic victory. Magnates forced out of system but League fails to prevent theft of the Citadel.

Forces

Magnate Continuum Joint Operations Fleet
Commanding Officer: Fleet Arbitrator Sauer

lots

League Combined Fleet
Commanding Officer: Admiral Rakesh Zhang, Minkowski National Guard

more

Losses

Magnate Continuum Joint Operations Fleet

Significant elements of Expeditionary Force lost

League Combined Fleet

more

Aftermath

The Battle of Finnegan's Folly was the defining event of the Magnate war: very long, very slow, and ambiguous in result. League ships and fabricators began trickling into the system through the month of June and it rapidly became apparent to the quagmired Magnates that their position was untenable. They accelerated plans to activate and evacuate the Citadel and departed with it in the early days of July, mere hours before the League fleet breached their defenses and reached Near Orbit in force. The Magnates, having limited FTL capability deployed the bulk of the Fleet assets of the Expeditionary Force in the system in a desperate holding action to contain advancing League forces, while remaining fleet assets escorted the Citadel out of the system.

The battle left the Magnates with a significantly diminished Expeditionary Force, but they had achieved their strategic objectives. In the wake of the battle and the other concluding actions of the war, neither side could marshal enough force and transport to initiate a new operation before the Breakdown ended and the threat of Core support forced the Magnates to abandon their plans for conquest.

Minkowski Theatre

The Heaven's Stair Campaign

November 2172 - July 2177
Result: Minkowskan infrastructure and logistics damaged and disrupted.

Forces

Magnate Disruption Fleet
Commanding Officer: A maddened wookie or something

Several raiders

Minkowski Navy
Commanding Officer: Admiral Rakesh Zhang

Several more patrollers

Losses

Magnate Disruption Fleet

Everything

Minkowski Navy

A bunch

Aftermath

The Magnates snuck some raiders and fabricators into Minkowski and set up shop in the asteroid belt. Minkowski spends years fighting a gruelling anti-piracy campaign amid hungry hungry hybrids.

Sarreva Theatre

Background

"People of Sarreva, we have an enemy. And the enemy has a name."

It wasn't until two years after the first wave of attacks into the Sea of Solomon that any of the irregularly-conntected Rim powers began to seriously believe the idea of a large, organized invasion force pushing its way in from the Deep Beyond. Of the nations that would eventually form the League, Sarreva and Van der Teega were the deepest into the Rim and the first to recieve word of attacks on nearby worlds. The lingering echoes of the Eridanus campaigns of half a century before marhsalled fears of a resurgence of feral drone activity in the isolation of the Breakdown and built enough public will to begin defensive preparations. However it wasn't until a trickle of refugees fleeing towards the inner systems carried the first real accounts of the myterious invaders, whom they called Magnates. While the stories seemed entirely surreal, with dramatic living testament and some actual evidence, the accounts demanded to be taken seriously, although local governments were reluctant to believe they were in danger.

Early in 2162, the second Magnate push overwhelmed the defences of Miranda and Melian's Hope. While they proved doggedly resistant to pacification, efforts to defend the worlds ultimately failed. A number of limpdrive-equipped vessels were able to escape during the intial waves of attacks into the system and landed at Sarreva, where they provided the first military intelligence concerning the Magnates and the methods of their attacks. More disturbingly, it also solidified the near-mythical earlier accounts of monstrous acts performed on the captured populations by these invaders. From a vague threat, the Magnates were finally embodied as an entire civilization of extremist transhumanists, whose actions foreshadowed that their ultimate aims were beyond simple conquest or subjigation. They were out to eradicate the entire way of life of those they encountered and replace it with one that was entirely alien. The call to arms was finally sounded, and finally heeded.

Military strategists concluded that following loss of contact with Melian's Hope, that the Magnates already knew of the cluster of industrially powerful worlds that lay just beyond the Sea of Solomon, however action on Melian's Hope and Miranda would have confirmed to the invaders that at least some of these worlds were aware of their actions and were preparing to resist. A third wave of attacks was declared inevitable.

The Eve of War

Leading up to the middle of the decade, the timetable for any further Magnate actions was unknown and with negotiations for military alliance solidified between the neighboring worlds, plans were made for an eventual offensive into Magnate-held space as well as contingency plans for a pre-emptive strike by Magnate forces. The League as a whole knew, though, that they were badly unprepared for war and an attack would most likely come early. In past decades, local security was maintained by patrols from European Union. When the Breakdown struck, all able vessels withdrew back towards Earth, abandoning only a number of retired and derelect ships that had already been relegated to mothball yards. Some worlds were fortunate enough to have small local patrols that were marooned in-system, but by and large the vast majority of functional space-faring vessels were freighters and industrial ships that became stranded. But to have any chance of success against a Magnate attack, space-based forces would have to keep supply lines open to League worlds behind the lines and prevent Magnate reinforcements from isolating and eventually overpowering a besieged planet, no matter how well defended.

The crash-militarization that followed the formation of the League was the most epic project ever undertaken in Sarreva's short history, consuming all available resources and industry that had sat idle for the first years of the Breakdown. The recently formed Sarrevan high command began militarizing several asteroid, orbital and planetside locations and constructing defensive works as well as logistical infrastructure to refurbish and reactivate its mothballed Eridanus-era warships. In the interim until those ships became operational, any space-worthy freighter or industrial ship was armed. Cargo bays became missile bays, and long-obsolete technologies like electrochemical guns became the mainstay of the ad-hoc fleets for the simple fact that a ship didn't require a bigger power plant to use them.

By late 2163 news of Magnate movements in the Sea of Solomon alerted the beginnings of the invasion, and as expected the League was not yet ready to resist them. In the intervening years Sarreva had become a militarily powerful world, and although ground fortifications were largely complete its space fleet was almost entirely reliant on civilian craft. While the League General Council was reluctant to commit sizeable offworld forces to Sarreva's defence out of fear that the heavily defended world would be bypassed entirely and isolated, the Battle of Sarreva would be the first action for the Combined Fleet.

It was largely assumed that the Magnates possessed outdated and generally poor intelligence of the League worlds and most likely weren't aware of the extent of militarization, but the League Council agreed that even if the Magnates were aware, they could not afford to leave the frontier worlds with intact war industry or space forces behind their lines. This was particularly true in the case of Sarreva, where a sizeable fleet of formerly mothballed warships could be made eventually FTL-capable.

The Attack on HGO-44

The assault began in earnest in May, 2164, with a large-scale fleet engagement around a cluster of militarized mid-system asteroid bases known collectively as HGO-44. This installation protected Sarreva's mothballed warships as well as numerous construction yards, refueling stations and repair facilities constructed in the years before. Destroying or capturing it would have crippled Sarreva's defences, and possibly doomed the world to eventually fall. It was so important that the Sarrevan command had stripped planetary orbital defenses in order to boost those at HGO-44. It came as no surprise when the opening move of the war struck there.

In the close quarters of the asteroid complex, with local space transfixed by defensive fire from the fortifications and entire ship formations weaving about the massive rocks, fighting was chaotic and resistance frenzied. After little more than an hour losses began to mount, and with the possibility of a clean victory eliminated, Magnate forces disentangled themselves and exploited the chaos to withdraw before becoming completely committed. While many fleet facilities were damaged in the attack, the battle highlighted that Magnate ships weren't well suited to fight toe-to-toe with masses of overbuilt League ships. While disproportionate losses were inflicted on the Mangate forces, it's considered one of the greatest botches in the course of the war. If the defending forces had prevented the Magnates from escaping, they could have crippled the forces attacking Sarreva itself. Even in the light of retrospect though, the successful defence of HGO-44 and the mothball fleet without crippling losses marks it as a massive strategic victory in the face of a number of tactical blunders.

The First Battle of Sarreva

"You have to understand that there is no surrender to the Magnates. If we lose this, our nation is extinguished. For the sake of everything we've built, for the sake of your lives and the lives of your children I implore you to join the fight. Fight with anything. Fight with everything!"

Conventional wisdom from previous Magnate conquests suggested that once control of local space was lost, it was only a matter of time until masses of Magnate supersoliders, which had no equal in the Rim or anywhere else, eventually broke the back of conventional infantry and forced surrender. The Sarrevans had grimly acknowledged that a ground campaign would be horrific, but had made the hard decision that preserving the installations at HGO-44 was more important to the long-term campaign than preventing an initial landing.

Defensive actions over Sarreva itself in the opening day of the war were structured to deny orbital approaches over vital targets, but could not effectively blockade the planet. Unlike the attack on HGO-44, the battles over Sarreva itself became a series of isolated engagements as individual pockets of Magnate ships and landing craft attempted to punch through to objectives scattered all over the world. Space battles over Sarrevan cities were desperate and savage, but even in the face of heavy losses the Magnates were almost universally successful in punching through.

As they burned in towards their targets, assaulting Magnates came under intense fire from defensive guns and fortifications built in the militarization campaigns. Those that reached the ground near important centers were almost immediately engaged by waiting heavy armour and mechanized units. Magnate rearguard forces, support equipment, supplies and fabricators that dropped further into virgin territory landed mostly unscathed by contrast and were able to establish bases out of reach of the ground forces.

That first day sparked a decade of pitched, relentless and tenacious fighting. With masses of heavy armour and mechanized forces, the Sarrevan army was able to stem the tide of vat-grown replicants where no other had done so before. Given over fully into attrition warfare, the Battle of Sarreva became a bloody quagmire that consumed the lives of hundreds of thousands. With the League Combined Fleet still intact, the Magnates were never fully able to reinforce their assets despite constant skirmishing, nor prevent reinforcements from coming forward from the inner worlds.

The Second Battle of Sarreva

For the first three years of the war, the Sarrevan fleet had been incapable of preventing waves of Magnate reinforcements from landing. The untimely arrival of some of these surges had cost the Sarrevans dearly, culminating in the dramatic surprise attack and fall of the city of Vershire. It was not a sacrifice that was made lightly, and after entire campaigns of inconclusive skirmishes, running battles and deep space convoy raids, the modernized Sarrevan mothball fleet finally became operational. Centered around a number of lumbering Canopus class capital ships, the Sarrevan fleet was finally up to the task of taking the fight to the enemy.

With coordination efforts taking place between the League powers months beforehand, the first real offensives ran from September through October of 2167 and became known as the Second Battle of Sarreva. Well-established Magnate bases and a strong system presence proved tenacious opposition and both sides suffered heavy losses through a dozen individual engagements, however these were losses that the Magnates were unable to easily replace.

With the space corridors now hotly contested, the flow of Magnate material to Sarreva became irregular and League reinforcements increased. The Sarrevan army pressed their advantage and struck out at planetside cloning facilities and occupied cities in a massive campaign that simply became known as the '67 Push. While not as conclusive as the fleet engagements, it marked the first time since the beginning of the war that the whole of the Magnate front appreciably shrank.

While subsequent battles reversed many gains of the '67 offensives, the Second Battle of Sarreva marked a turning point in the war from that of a holding action, to a contest with the first real possibilities of Magnate defeat.

The Third Battle of Sarreva

"This is it, gentlemen. I've waited a decade to say this. We're ready. Begin the counterattack."

With Finnegan's Folley and Van der Teega refusing to break after long campaigns of their own and draining Magnate resources, it became clear by 2177 that the Magnate positions at Sarreva were vulnerable. Following the tenth League Summit in March, masses of space forces began moving forward from Minkowsky and Azadestan in preparation for the final assault to eradicate the Magnate presence at Sarreva.

By October of that year the battle was joined, and the largest combined fleet yet assembled crashed against the Magnate outer system fortresses and their defending ships in a series of battles from October 1 through October 15. Realizing they were ultimately doomed, all able Magnate forces began to withdraw towards Finnegan's Folley. In the midst of the battles on October 14, a theta-drive equipped Magnate resupply convoy made a daring run through the gauntlet of League warships to reach a besieged asteroid outpost believed to have been the last refuge of the Magnate system command group. While less than half of the attacking ships survived to escape, it's commonly believed they were able to extract the VIPs and flee before the complex and was bombarded and stormed only hours later.

Sweeps of the system for hidden outposts continued for weeks, but the end result was the total destruction of Magnate space assets that were unable to flee the system. Sarreva itself was declared liberated six months later, paving the way for a new offensive to relieve beleaguered Finnegan's Folley.

Aftermath

The numerous atrocities committed against the Sarrevan people and other League member states has forever etched in the public memory that the Magnates are a force of megalomaniacal evil. The Solomon Treaties that put an end to overt fighting were met with outrage, even though it was clear by the end of the Breakdown that the war had taken a terrible toll on the economical health of the League member-state, and they were ill-prepared to begin an offensive campaign into Magnate space. Sarrevan officials largely don't believe the peace will last, and that the Magnates will remain a threat so long as they exist.