Iijima's Pride

Iijima's Pride
Vessel Profile
TypeDropShip
ClassOkinawa

History

The DCS Iijima's Pride was one of three Okinawa-class DropShips assigned to the Inazuma-class corvette DCS Amber Lotus during the Second Combine-Dominion War. The Iijima's Pride was serving alongside two sister ships, the DCS Comforting Silence and DCS Heated Sword while the Amber Lotus was providing protection to two converted mobile factories in service with the Draconis Combine. The two factories were conversions of two failed WarShip construction projects, the Yamato-class battleship DCS Yamato and Kaga-class carrier DCS Ryū (itself the renamed Mount Niitaka).[1]

The two factory ships and their escort vessels were located in a system codenamed Bikini Atoll when the Second Combine-Dominion War erupted, a location believed by the Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery to be secure partly because it was an uninhabited system and partly because the location of the system was a closely-guarded secret. Through an intelligence windfall Clan Ghost Bear became aware that the two factory ships were in the Bikini Atoll system, intelligence that the Ghost Bears were able to utilize because of records from the Star League era relating to the testing of Mass Drivers in the Bikini Atoll system from 2720 onwards by the Star League Defense Force. Khan Aletha Kabrinski decided to launch a preemptive strike against the ships in the Bikini Atoll system as a deliberate blow against the Draconis Combine Admiralty black water WarShip fleet, which she fully expected the Admiralty to deploy in the near future as an escalation of the conflict between the Combine and the Rasalhague Dominion.[1]

Kabrinski dispatched the Leviathan-class battleship Rasalhague to attack the ships in the Bikini Atoll system; dispatched alongside the Rasalhague via a flotilla of attendant JumpShips were six Stars of Pocket WarShips and fighter carriers. The Rasalhague and her accompanying task force arrived in the Bikini Atoll system on the 18th of December 3099, prompting the two factory ships to split up and attempt to escape. The Ghost Bears divided their forces and hunted down both factory ships, destroying them, the Amber Lotus, the Iijima's Pride and her sister ships and all of the aerospace fighters carried by the three Okinawas. The Ghost Bears totally destroyed all of the ships, going so far as to destroy all of the escape pods that managed to launch and deliberately accelerating the hulks of the two factory vessels into the corona of the system primary. The Combine remained unaware of the damage inflicted by the Ghost Bears until the lack of communication from the system prompted the dispatch of the Kyushu-class frigate DCS Draconis Rift some time later to investigate.[1]

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 Historical: Wars of the Republic Era, pp. 32–33: "Bikini Atoll"

Bibliography