Primary Zone of Influence: Munich, Frankfurt, Sigma-15, Omicron Xi Secondary Zone: Sigmas, Rheinland & Her Borders
Overview
Rheinland Kameraden is a paramilitary organization formed from Federal Republic loyalists, primarily members of the 3rd Sigma Fleet of the Rheinwehr, during the Rheinland Civil War. Their pre-war expertise in navigating the remote northern regions of Rheinland allowed their organization to survive and thrive during the war despite their numerical and logistical disadvantage. Their skulking behavior eventually led them to settle into the Munich system, transforming it into the center of their patrol paths and even into their organizational identity.
Entrenched as the de facto authority in Munich, the Kameraden fill the political void left by the retreating corporations and the warring governments as their means to continue an essence of their former country. The system’s vacant depots and aluminium refineries being reanimated into an imitation of their former industrial heyday to fund their fleets and reconstruction efforts in the region.
Warped, outmoded, tarnished and shabby; are all words that can be used to describe the makeup and look of the Kameraden fleet. An assembly of military vessels that have been dredged into service from the past, long overdue for scrapping or simply converted to this newer purpose half-hazardily. The organization’s overworked shipyards do the bare minimum to keep the ships flying, all of this because of their critical supply and manpower limitations.
The Kameraden are a recent sight to the Sirius sector with the roots of the organization originating from the naval personnel of the Rheinwehr 3rd Sigma Fleet, a support fleet formed to fill in defensive gaps of the Battleship Schwerin task force during the Sigma conflicts. The 3rd Sigma Fleet revolved around mobile cruiser command centers with a flexible scouting force to increase their presence and area of operations.
At the dawn of the Rheinland civil war the majority of the fleet by then was brought back under the Battleship Schwerin’s command or transfered to other task forces across Rheinland with the remaining vessels deployed across the Sigmas to intercept Gas Miner operations. The ships and crew that went on to form the Kameraden being stationed out of the Reichenau Forward Patrol Station, an installation formerly located in Frankfurt, where the RNC. Kelheim and RNC. Tauber were moored. The station’s crew learned of the civil war from a patrol squad who gave an order for all vessels to remain docked and await a battlecruiser detachment’s arrival.
Not long afterwards a disagreement occurred between the units questioning if they should follow the order resulting in the station turning into a battle between ideologies with both sides making their way towards occupying the hangars and the mooring point with the cruisers. The Federalist-aligned force eventually took control over the cruisers and the vessels in the forward two hangars before breaking out into the Taunusfeld to regroup.
The breakaway fleet spent the early parts of the civil war roaming around the Sigmas and the northern areas of Rheinland picking up vessels and crews who supported the Federal government before settling in the Munich system as a center to their insurgency. Using their knowledge of the region they attacked merchant convoys and pirated any vessel they could catch to help supply and support the war effort away from the primary Federalist bubble. Over time the fleet, now the Kameraden, gained influence over the vessels and detachments left in the Munich bubble and organized itself as a separate force and front in the Rheinland Civil War, using their isolation as a way to keep a form of the Federal government alive if the wars results were not in their sides favor.
As each month passed and the civil war dragged on the entire Rheinland house was desperately seeking an conclusion which became the Siege of Thuringia, an attempt by the Imperials and the Federalists as a way to end the war and the primary successor governments. The Rheinland United Republic and the Kameraden worked together to push both fronts to combine in Frankfurt, allowing the siege to stalemate rather than a Federalist loss. With the siege ending in a crush of morale on all sides the Kameraden sat down with the Imperial and Federalist governments to sign the Holstein Accords on 828.02.22 AS.