The Fury Wars

Military action

As the Commonwealth spread out Rimward, they ran headlong into the spacefaring race named the Furies, so named for their appearance looking like the mythological creatures. First Contact did not go well and the Furies destroyed the exploration squadron that found them, leading to retaliation by the Commonwealth, which lead to 90 years of on and off war as the Commonwealth and Furies traded colony systems.

The 1^st War of Retaliation was a purely Commonwealth affair, fought from 2751 to 2758, when they declared war after the botched first contact lead to the destruction of Squadron 48.3. This ended with the full retreat from the border colonies, to leave a demilitarised zone. In this time, emergency measures were taken to equip frontline forces with cold steel in the form of the 2754 Pattern Infantry Sword, due to the fact that KM-X series lacked the capability hurt the furies, and firearms were a nearly lost technology.   This peace lasted for 5 years, until the Furies mounted their own generalised assault on humanity. This was the War of the 1^st Coalition, fought as a combined operation between the Commonwealth and the European Republican Coalition. The initial assault lasted for 3 and a half years from 2763 to 2766, with a full 1000 light years of space taken from the Commonwealth and Coalition. Peace was sued for again, when the Il de France Subsector was besieged by the Furies. As part of the Peace treaty the Furies fell back by 500 light years, again leaving a DMZ.   The 2^nd War of Retaliation started in 2780, when MoD finished fitting out the Army with its new EM-5 rifles. This introduction meant that the Army had weapons other than 19th century equipment, aka swords to hurt the Furies. This war lasted 15 years until 2795, when the peace treaty fixed the borders at the point they were in 2751, However the Furies were still 500 light years into ERC controlled space. This lead to an uneasy tension between the ERC and the Commonwealth. Most of this war was fought on a few key sector planets, ones with extremely good high anchorages, with Field Marshal Lord Ansolem fielding the 1^st, 2^nd and 4^th CAAs with extreme prejudice.   The War of the 2^nd Coalition, 2803-2822; was started by a border dispute between the Commonwealth and the European Republican Coalition. The initial actions of this war lead to the total destruction of the ERC expeditionary fleet in 2805. This pushed the ERC into the arms of the Fury High Council. The Furies, still not fully over the destruction wrought against them, barely 10 years earlier, initially denied their request for aid, until the Commonwealth started stomping through the Furies ERC territories. This caused a salient 300 light years wide, into both terrorites. The Commonwealth forces, under Admiral of the Fleet, Lady Olivia Smith, previously the victor of the Battle of Cape 4781 and a veteran of the 1^st War of Retaliation, made an encircling move into Fury space, meeting up with the fleet commanded by Admiral Little-Foot Gershon. This maneuver wrong-footed the ERC/Fury fleet, whom had assumed that the assault was aiming for ERC Space to take Paris or even beyond.   The real target was in fact the clearance of the Furies from ERC space, and maybe even get a chance at the undefended heartlands of the Furies, to which the ERC was closer. The initial clearance was incredibly effective, with Vice-Admiral Katie Ranger ensuring the flank was protected by her effective use of fast heavy cruisers and their destroyer escorts, as Lady Smith and Admiral Gershon pincered Fury fleet after Fury fleet between them. The problems started in 2808 with the blunting of the main attack through the Fury centre. The major cause of this was the replacement of Admiral of the Fleet Lady Smith, who had unfortunately died. This occured when her flagship, the HMS Furious, lost engine power suddenly and this caused the VASMIR engines to turn off mid-accerlation and this caused an uncontrolled loss of gravity, whilst in a running battle with a Fury fleet carrier group. The loss of gravity attached to the loss of attitude control caused by the reaction control thrusters also being cut off from power, and the incoming gunfire from the fleet carriers fighters, lead the deckplating of Admiral's Space Warfare Centre to collapse, and the resultant fall, when the engines reengaged, lead to her death because of her extreme age for a fighting admiral of 125. Her replacement in the field, Third Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Frederick Studebaker, was not as good a field commander, being used to driving the desk of Royal Navy procurement rather than an actual fleet, and this lack of recent field experience caused the fleet to lose three major fleet actions in 4 months. By 2811, the Navy found itself retreating through space it had just captured, with Admirals Gershon and Ranger finding themselves increasingly isolated as the flanking fleets. In four years the Navy had been pushed back to the border of the ERC, when in 2815 Studebaker was sent back to Whitehall as the new First Sea Lord, and Ranger, Lady Smith's chosen successor, was finally given full command over the fleet. Gershon was also promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, and appointed Second Sea Lord. Admiral Ranger proceeded to smash the enemy forces with tactics similar to when she was Vice-Admiral of Cruisers. Ranger had by 2818, 10 years after the death of Admiral Lady Smith, gotten the fleet to the Furies' last High Anchorage before their Home Sector. The Furies sued for peace, the ERC having capitulated in 2813, as losses had mounted and conceding control over the sector in which the 1^st War of Retaliation had kicked off. These peace talks took two years, with the War finally ending in 2820.   The Fury border stayed quiet until 2840, when a large Fury fleet tried to destroy the High Anchorage around Iota¹ Scorpii, one of the Anchorages in the colonies taken in 2820. By this time, Admiral of the Fleet, Lady Ranger had been appointed as First Sea Lord, after some time as Third Sea lord, and was replaced as 4^th Fleet Commander by Admiral Sir Paula Vento. The attack failed, when the Deep Space Network detected the FTL wake of the Fury fleet, three days out from the anchorage. This gave Admiral Vento a chance to leave the anchorage with their Battleships and Carriers, 6 of each, and set a trap. This trap was mostly successful, with most of the friendly losses coming from the in-for-refit HMS Alamo and HMS Pearl Harbour. This offensive was the opening salvo of the third, and final, War of Retaliation. Unlike previous Wars, the Commonwealth did not push into the Furies' territory, preferring to simply reinforce the fleets in the sector, to allow the Furies' to break upon them. The war dragged on for 8 years before the decisive Battle of Wyvern 2486, in 2848.   This represented the last gasp of the Fury military machine, and for the last 100 years, the border has been stable and trade good.