Düsseldorf Drive Yards (the heart of the Union-in-Exile)

[The Syndicate Leagues]

Düsseldorf Drive Yards.

Location Düsseldorf Arcology, Pacifica Planetesimal, low Wesphalia Solar Orbit, The Tannerfeld.
Purpose: Active unlawful shipyard and massive industrial conurbation. Largest unlawful shipyard in Sirius.
Cell Affiliation: Pacifica Cell, Chort's Forge Brigade, Union-in-Exile.

---

Synopsis

The Düsseldorf driveyards aboard Pacifica shipyard represent to the unlawful world what Livaeda does to the denizens of the edge systems. The product of three hundred years of intensive exploitation of the Tanner Feld by one of the most single-minded cessionist groups within the core worlds, the Düsseldorf shipyard stretches throughout the entirety of the Pacifica planitestimal - a gargantuan wet dock notorious for the construction of the initial vessels that enabled Rheinland’s unlawful groups to load themselves with enough ordinance to drive the police outside of the depleted fields of Hamburg, Neu Berlin, and Frankfurt - a blessing for the Unioner’s which has paid off with no small amount of Promethean self-regret with the Hessian modification of the Unioner native Hel pirate cruiser into the better armed and better defended Vidar strike vessel. Düsseldorf has remained in permanent operation since its construction - although ‘construction’ is perhaps not a choice term for a structure that has grown nearly entirely organically - a winding system of pressurised cave tunnels and modular space station components - like a giant body, the shipyard spends as many of its man hours crafting new extensions to graft to itself as it does producing ships. Without Pacifica, it is unlikely that the Union would have expanded to its present prominence within the Rheinland underworld - it is even more improbable that the the Reichsarbeitgeselshaft would have preserved the consummate engineering proficiency that every Unioner is breast-fed from the cradle, to death.

Slave Labour.

Whilst the Union remains notorious for its role in the slave trade for every use from personal servitude to munitions manufacture to population augmentation, Düsseldorf retains a more-or-less direct free labour system for the production of tactically significant products. This position is pragmatic, rather than ideological; slaves, no matter how steep the penalty for failure, have a tendency to sabotage quality-of-control. This direct firm-hand-on-the-tiller approach has biased the Pacifica cell against slavery dependent Unioner weapons manufactories; the primacy of Pacifica’s political influence can be directly traced to the fact that their munitions tend to be considerably more functional than their alternatives in the underworld. This is often erroneously sited as the reason for Pacifica’s moniker as “Solomon’s Rock” - a title that originally came to be as an insult - for its tendency to hog the creme of Unioner engineering talent through its selectiveness of not making use of slaves, an attitude often seen as rather holier-than-thou. Despite stereotypes, Pacifica makes use of more slaves than nearly the rest of off-world Unioner assets combined.

Purpose.

The Düsseldorf Yards are responsible for the maintenance, refit and rolling modernisation program of hulls and materials that stretch from the present, right back to the eighty years war and even the centuries of expansion long before. Equally, they construct many of the massive trade vessels the Die Jacquerie der Hanse-Welten make use of frequently, from Cruz materials transports, artefact shuttles, to more aggressively portentous Rangers and Pilgrim Liners - all the spacefaring necessities to carve a grand trade out of smuggling and crime. The majority of Pacifica’s activities are based around the maintenance, modification and update of pre-existing hulls. Since modern laminate space frames tend to be heavily resistive to materials stress under non-combat conditions, the Unioners rarely abandon a hull, extending service lives by replacing worn components and hull strengtheners with domestically manufactured elements wherever possible. Unlike the Junkers, Unioners rarely bodge unrelated hull aspects against each other, valuing structural functionality and modularity over artisanal tailoring, with the ethos that a ship may not be assembled out of anything, but must be repairable with nearly everything, be it a heat exchanger with parts robbed of a refrigeration crate, or the remains of an old Libertonian fighter, according to situational requirements. Pacifica frequently strips out many of the more bizarre field retrofits Unioner cells produce, reclaiming them as materials salvage to be retuned into more standardised iterations. As every Unioner receives considerable engineering experience as a pragmatic scholastic experience that begins in childhood and ends in death, maintaining operational consistency remains one of the most thankless ordeals of the Pacifica cell - especially in light of the stringent operational requirements the controversial guerrilla war with the Red Hessians and SCRA has thrust the Union under.


However, Düsseldorf remains extremely underproductive - the size of the shipyard greatly exceeding its operational use, entirely deliberately. The Union very deliberately constructs an excess of ships for any one unitary requirement, selling the surplus to neighbouring freelance, Junker and criminal independent groups, maintaining a constancy of trade with their ancestry. Unique amongst black market organisations, the Union is frequently flippant with permitting (non hostile) foreign entities paid use of its technology, believing that the investment gained from selling Union products leads to a faster rate of engineering refinement, well outweighing the need for protectionism. Due to its technical status as a dubiously independent zone, caught between Liberty and Rheinlandic space, the Unioners consider the Düsseldorf (and the wider Westphalia system at large) to be a de jure element of Rheinland space, under the rigid control of mercantile-minded independent Rheinland civilians (the Hansa), and many of Düsseldorf’s products find itself directly in the hands of the Hansa for further brokerage to the Unioner cells.

Habitation.

The living and labour conditions aboard Düsseldorf are inconsistent and largely based upon one’s individual social status. Whilst conditions on Pacifica tend towards the squalid by default, areas excluded from the asteroid tend towards higher maintenance conditions due to the higher associated risk. The shipyards themselves range from pristine to organised chaos - however, there is never the rambling dysfunction that remains a hallmark of unlawful shipyards elsewhere, as evidenced by the Liberty Rogues’s own Nonsense Factory in the Cassini system. Conditions are ameliorated by the fact that Düsseldorf is as much smelter, forging area, hyperplastics factory, foundry, arcology and fortress as it is a working shipyard, which tends towards a result far removed from the blue collar idyll the Union (at least in theory) aspires to. Regardless, labour in the Düsseldorf shipyard is considered something of a status symbol for Unioner operatives, due to the fat share of Hanseatic lucre Westphalians find themselves entitled to.

Service of the Angestammte Flotte.

Whilst the Union-in-exile at the dawn of its history relied primarily on sequestered military-grade craft stolen from the cradles of Alster and the Ring, maintaining vessels optimised around the logistics chain of an entire house became rapidly unobtainable on the far side of the law, with many of the vessels being cannibalised for parts and replaced with easier to maintain analogous spacecraft. In part, the need to find a substitute to theft and inferior retrofits galvanised the construction of Pacifica from a mere planetoid habitat to a functional imitation of an Alster-in-exile; a synthetic homeland carved into the concealing shroud of the Tanner feld. As the Republic systematically criminalised and replaced Union-affiliated shipbuilding families over the generations, the gradual bleed of Alster’s produce into the Tanner feld started to break apart, increasing the need for domestic ship production. The Arbiter and Solidaritat mass production strike craft key are examples of vessels that contained, in their first generations, cannibalised and refactored components mated from the ARKM Valkyrie and “liberated” designs from the Libertonian and Kusarian ship markets, most notably the eagle, crafting a design that exceeded the requirements of both designs for the purposes of the Union, replacing heavier structural alloy with lightened polymer laminate sheets, replacing H-fuel based GMG-dependent drives with domestic, low-weight thorium fission drives, gradually draining the Union’s supply of Valks into obsolescence. However, the same does not remain true of the Union’s native heavy assets, sequestered away amidst the strip-mined, empty belts of Rheinland’s most remote regions. With the Tanner Feld providing considerable security, it has become common practice for the Union to abandon it’s largest assets - Donau heavy cruisers and Oder gunboats, the very same vessels that the Union’s Arbeiters, under the guise of Imperial Shipping, once produced in vast numbers for the Imperial Navy. Whilst the Union claims to still have the schematics for every ship in service during the Eighty Years War, it remains incredibly inefficient for the Union to produce such byzantine vessels without the benefit of Rheinland’s manufacturing heartland, instead focusing on the production of domestic modular cruisers such as the Hel. It remained Union policy for centuries to keep the Union’s present stockpile of Prähistorischeschiffes as a fleet-in-being by whichever local warlord keeps - an implied threat to the influence and power of Unioner cells, employed primarily in the arbitration of domestic matters, enjoying frequent upgrades at the bequest of their controlling cells. Each cruiser has therefore gained a level of distinction unique within the Union - no two warships carrying the exact same internals. Dockspace at Pacifica is therefore invaluable to large, warship-owing cells eager to polish their finest assets, giving the Union the capacity to strip the vessel apart, then rebuild, from nothing up. Mounting equipment rarely seen on the unlawful side of Sirian industry, the prize of the Union’s shipbuilding exertions is its vast tanks of industrial nano-repair batteries, capable of rebuilding entire fighters at the molecular within minutes.

---

"Though the past is scarred and the future untold"
" Be the boot heavy, the vacuum cold."
"I of the Liga,  do not fold"
"For suits or saints or beggar's gold.
Information - Recruitment - Message Dump - Feedback