Tortuga Dominions

Cleanup tagged articles without a reason field The Tortuga Dominions is a Bandit Kingdom in the Periphery from which occasional raids are launched against the Federated Suns and the Taurian Concordat in search of plunder.

Location: Near the border of the Taurian Concordat and the Federated Suns

Number of Worlds: Six

Current Ruler: Dame Paula Trevaline

Military Strength: Two Companies

Technology Level: Poor

Literacy Level: Poor

Capital: Tortuga Prime

Star Type: G2IV

Position in System: 3

Time to Jump Point: 9.11 days

Recharging Station: None

Political Ruler: Dame Paula Trevaline

ComStar Facility Class: None

ComStar Representative: None

Percentage and Level of Native Life: 10%, Plant

Description:

A world of vast savannas and once-abundant raw materials, Tortuga has the dubious distinction of being the centre of the Tortuga Dominions. The ruler of Tortuga is the self-styled Dame Paula Trevaline, also known as "Lady Death" to friend and foe alike. The descendants of the original settlers, the remnants of a Federated Suns Light Cavalry regiment, have degenerated into a tight-knit band of pirates who prey on Taurians and Davions alike.

The Tortuga Dominions are a result of the Reunification War against the Taurian Concordat. During the latter stages of that conflict, the Federated Suns 237th Light Cavalry Regiment was all but destroyed in a wasteful penetration raid against the Taurian outpost of Sterope. Unable to hold their positions and unwilling to be thrown into the vicious fray somewhere else, the 237th opted to jump outward into the unknown. A generation after settling a small, pleasant world beyond the fringes of the Federated Suns, the newly formed Pirates of Tortuga began operations against their callous former comrades in the Federated Suns.

With equipment and machinery won at gun point from half a dozen Davion worlds, the Tortugans began to expand their foothold in their new world. Within a century, they were stable and self-sufficient enough to begin colonization efforts of their own. By the early 2700s, the Tortugans had settled five neighbouring star systems. Abundant radio actives and raw materials on these newly claimed worlds helped the rise of what has since become known as the Tortuga Dominions.

Of all the Bandit Kingdoms in the Periphery, the Tortuga Dominions maintain the largest space faring navy. Estimates place the size of the Tortuga Jolly Rogers at about 15, though a lack of spare parts and machinery has forced the Tortugans to cannibalize several of these.

In the last two centuries, the Tortuga raiders have struck deep into the Federated Suns and the Taurian Concordat. Already known for utter depravity and ruthlessness, it appears that the Tortugans are becoming more desperate as their planets are now finally beginning to run out of resources

Over the years, Tortuga has been stripped of almost all its ore, and it is currently nearing ecological exhaustion. An estimated sixty thousand brigands of every description inhabit Raiders Roost, the sole settlement on the planet. Most live in conditions of near destitution, as the major share of captured booty goes to Dame Trevaline's most experienced cut-throats.

Defeat

Largely prepared by Precentor Eliza Phereson, Research Team-chi, ComStar Archives

In the mid-3030s, when the AFFC briefly made the Tortuga Dominions one of its major targets, Paula Trevaline shifted her operations to the Taurian Concordat and the Mica Majority. Neither Periphery state could offer much resistance to the pirates - the Mica Majority because it lacked large-scale military resources, the Taurian Concordat because its Protector refused to recognize any threat aside from a possible Federated Commonwealth invasion. When the AFFC turned its attention to preparations for the War of 3039, Lady Death and the Tortuga Pirates returned to raid the Federated Commonwealth with impunity. From 3033 to 3040, the pirates of the Dominions seemed unstoppable.

After the Tortugans resumed raiding Federated Commonwealth worlds in 3039 and 3040, the commanders of the AFFC decided to end the pirates' reign of terror once and for all. In 3042, the AFFC High Command sent the Ninth Regimental Combat Team to the region of space where they believed the Dominions to lie. After two months of searching for the Dominions' capital world, the Ninth RCT landed on Tortuga Prime, taking Lady Death and her troops by surprise. The Ninth overcame the pirates after several pitched battles, capturing Lady Death and decimating her forces. Upon their return to the Federated Commonwealth, the Ninth RCT delivered Paula Trevaline to a maximum-security prison on New Syrtis, where she remains to this day.

Fervently glad to see the backs of their brutal pirate kings, the remaining residents of the Dominions continued to scratch out what livings they could on their resource-depleted worlds. The once-fearsome bandit kingdom exists as a leaderless collection of subsistence-level planets.

3050 Update

Current information shows that Fuchida's Fusiliers, a former Federated Commonwealth mercenary unit gone rogue, operates from the Tortuga Dominions.

Notes

Befitting a pirate kingdom, all of the planets in the Dominions are named after either locales or personalities famed from the classical age of piracy in the Caribbean, with the exceptions of Fletcher's Feast, which seems to commemorate Fletcher Christian, the leader of the mutiny aboard HMS Bounty in 1789, and New Gascony.