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The scale of the Royal Navy prior to first contact with Sirius is, by all accounts, difficult to comprehend. An industrial machine fed and fuelled at every level of Gallic society, from the very beginnings of education under the Royalist regime to the countless asteroid belts stripped of minerals to forge yet more engines of war. At the beginning of the Second Gallic War, the Royalist advance blitzed its way through Tau space towards Bretonia proper with frightening speed, sweeping the Kusari Imperialists aside with contemptuous ease.

Victory seemed inevitable, with the weakened Kingdom of Bretonia already war-weary and battered from years of warfare against its Imperial neighbour -- but after nine slow, gruelling, vicious years of warfare between Royalist forces and the Liberty and Bretonian-led coalition against them, cracks that had begun to show many months ago finally started to break open in earnest. A series of minor defeats spiralled out of control, and as each of the Royal Navy's many fronts began to buckle at once, the disastrous Battle for New London served as a climactic turning point for their campaign.

The Glassing of Leeds came hot on the heels of the final push for Bretonia's crown jewel -- an event which historians almost unanimously condemn for the sheer rapidity and chaos of Royalist forces' fracturing in the days and weeks thereafter. The use of so-called "planet killers" -- in truth, a crust-boring laser designed to cut through to the mantle and superheat the atmosphere -- was the final straw for many of the Crown's exhausted military personnel, and within days an unstoppable wave of defections, mutinies, and total insubordination had begun to wrack the Royalist forces in earnest. With the Gallic Crown's death throes already echoing across the Sector's news networks, entire worlds all across the House erupted in revolution or outright surrender of their own initiative -- in the end, the so-called Battle of New Paris was more a formality than a decisive blow.

With the core of their Kingdom collapsing further by the day, if not the hour, loyalist elements were forced to act fast to coordinate any sort of safe haven. Royal cartographers hastily concluded that the Hebrides Cluster -- a small group of systems sandwiched between Bretonia, Gallia proper, and the Taus -- seemed the most feasible path of retreat. There, they could at least survive, avoiding trial and execution at the hands of revolutionary forces or revanchist Bretonians alike.

The Gallic Kingdom was, at last, defeated. In the span of a single decade, the biggest political entity the galaxy had ever seen had crumbled to a tiny fraction of its former glory -- a disorganised, battered collection of hardliners and holdouts, pushed into the stellar equivalent of no-man's-land to die a slow, ignominious death. The Gallic Confederacy turned its attention inwards almost immediately, the nascent union of smaller states beset at once by a vast array of internal politicking and power struggles that promised to test the newly-formed Gendarmerie and Defence Forces to their limits.

While many of the remaining Royalist forces seem content to focus on a doctrine of defence, fortification, and preservation of their current holdings, recent events back home have alarmed many hardliners among the Kingdom's remaining personnel. The Kusari Empire -- elements of which formed a portion of the anti-Gallic coalition -- has consolidated its strength and launched an assault on Gallia proper, marking the first breach of Gallic space by a foreign power in the House's history. The new front lies a stone's throw away from the Kingdom's holdings in Orkney, and it is this latest development in particular that has sparked a new wave of aggressive, revanchist sentiment among these same hardliners.

Drawing inspiration from the same traditions that guided them for centuries past, and rejecting a defensive doctrine they see as no longer relevant, this resurgent force styles itself as the Royal Navy reborn. With the home front more or less secured by the Kingdom's more cautious elements, they seek an approach of aggressive interventionism in current affairs, clinging to a sense of traditionalism, nationalism, and almost fanatical royalist sentiment to fuel their cause. Though they lack the logistics, numbers, and power base of the fighting force that once threatened to darken half of Sirius before being ground to a halt, the same core values that almost toppled a Kingdom are as proudly on display as ever.