Originally published at: Steenkin’ Badges | The Eldraeverse
One of the better known traditions in the Legions is the collection of fort badges. When you successfully pass training at one of the Legions’ many specialized facilities, you are awarded a small ceramic badge to display with that fort’s crest. Officially, this is so that legionaries with particular skill-sets under their belts are readily identifiable; unofficially, it lets veterans of particular courses make those who haven’t attended them pay for the next round of drinks. The one everyone’s familiar with, of course, is the falcon-over-anvil badge of Fort Petrae, where every new legionary-apprentice goes for basic training. Stay in…
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The legions, of course, also have innumerable slightly-specialized variants on these basic themes, along with outright specialist legions: guards/peacekeepers, communications specialists, combat engineers, super-heavies, military police, siege specialists, logistics specialists, undersea legions, first-strike specialists, reconnaissance specialists, saboteurs, experimental technology legions, battle theater prep specialists, automaton legions, hunter legions, special weapons legions, medical specialists, underground specialists, even terror legions.
Which training facilities for each of these?
I’m especially fascinated by the terror legion skillset, but almost as much by the prospect of the eldrae equivalent of Jack Reacher.
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Not to mention sanitation specialists, culinary specialists (not including dietetical specialists, nor nutritional specialists), commissary specialists (and closely related retail specialists), software delivery specialists, postal specialists, laundry specialists, …
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Now, this is all fascinating and I can even understand the need for Fort Petare and operating in an environment where nothing is reliable except maybe the few things in their skulls. But, I can also see the existence of Fort Marathon, where Legion solders are dropped into the nastiest, most random training missions that are possible with AIs, bio-shells, and bots. Like the near-psychotic homicidal humanoid soldiers in heavy powered armor that only seem tactically inept…at first. Or the ever classic “Precursor alien bioweapons” that are even more dangerous because what is leading them can read minds and has no problem with using stupid-seeming tactics initially to sound out a foe. And, we can’t forget one of the favorites-dealing with a local insurgency that has hired very competent mercenaries to press their case to the fullest.
There’s probably game designers that have cut their teeth building interesting campaigns for Fort Marathon, and there are some that are (in)famous for being absolute terrors.
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Oh my, a sun is a really hot, gravity-y and sensor-hostile environment, why would you wanna fight or station yourself there?
You, as a fact, don’t. But if you aren’t prepared to fight on the Sun, what would you do when opposition decided that using sun’s surface is sufficiently out-of-the-box location for a base or a fight or something?
Then it’s submarine time!
Because being able to fight inside a star probably helps with more artificial extreme environments?
Lots of useful things in suns that you don’t want the other side to have control of.
The big one, obviously, is the stellar husbandry array that’s responsible for taking care of the star, mixing envelope material down into the core to prolong hydrogen burning, lifting off waste material for industrial uses, smoothing out the solar wind and CMEs, that sort of thing. And that’s located down in the chromosphere.
Then you’ve got helioseismic monitoring satellites, solar/antimatter generation plants, minimum-distance opposition relay stations, coronal habitats for clades like sunwhales which actually live in the upper layers of the sun, the couple of sophont species which are actually native to stars, like the arixox!a and seb!nt!at…
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It is, as you may recall, canon that the intent of legionary training is that virtually anything they should encounter in the rest of their careers will be a walk in a particularly restful park by comparison…
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Oh, I’ve got to read the microfic about the Legion equivalent of Jack Reacher now.
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Seconded. Of course, I also want to see what the Legion equivalent of quite a few people and units are, so there you go.