Imperial Navy

The , one of the the "Three Pillars" of the Mage Imperium, was nominally subservient to the Seer Council. As the Imperium grew and became increasingly decentralized, the Navy received ever great latitude in establishing and maintaining bases, shipyards, academies, even research labs. Naturally, administrative authority over materiel production followed. During the last century of the Mage Imperium, the Navy controlled perhaps 20% of the Imperium's economic activity, and ambitious captains instigated border wars in the hopes of subjugating foreign worlds and being charged with administering them.
== Naval Organization ==
The Imperial Navy was built around the idea of "Warship Battlegroups" as its organizing principle — singular large battleships accompanied by all the escorts and transports required to conduct a campaign. The Battlegroup was the tactical and strategic building block of the Imperial Navy. The Captain in command of a warship exercised a hefty amount of personal power, often being in charge of several thousand crew and marines between the warship itself, its escorts, and its ancillary vessels.
== Imperial Naval Ranks ==
Title 	Description
Ensign 	Junior officer in training
Lieutenant 	A catch-all for junior officers. Many gradations in official nomenclature existed based on seniority and position. Senior Lieutenants placed in command of a frigate were referred to as "Lieutenant-Commanders" and often commanded two or three junior lieutenants. Conversely, the First Officer of a warship was known as a "First Lieutenant" despite the fact that many such officers actually had a Captain's pay grade, particularly on the ships of commodores and admirals.
Captain 	The captain of a warship (and therefore its attendant battlegroup).
Commodore 	The first flag rank, commodores were place in command of squadrons of 3-5 warships. Commodores often held further power in the form of personal possessions which they managed by Imperial mandate.
Governor-General	When the Navy had a need for a broader administrator within a sector, it promoted an officer (usually a commodore) to the management of that area.
Rear Admiral 	The highest rank in a sector fleet, in charge of all naval operations in their sector.
Vice Admiral 	A provisional position within the Imperial Admiralty Board. Selected by the existing Admirals and Grand Admirals, usually in a time of war.
Admiral 	A full position on the Imperial Admiralty Board, with all the voting rights and often personal power attending to it. Admirals were dispatched to take charge of local forces and had the right to co-opt both regional naval vessels and non-naval local fleets alike.
Grand Admiral 	The highest rank in the Imperial Navy, Grand Admirals managed the affairs of the entire Imperial fleet. Often too old for field work, their pen strokes could change the fate of the Imperium and its enemies.
== History ==
Around the time of the beginning of the Seer Crisis, the circumstances of the Imperial Navy also brought a threat to Imperial stability. Grand Admiral Horatio, who had been the de-facto head of the Imperial Navy for the last half century and the architect of the Episurian Genocide, died at the age of 112. As Horatio shared the title of Grand Admiral with several other appointees and governed the navy largely through informal channels, there was no official line of succession. The remaining Grand Admirals were largely men of Horatio’s generation; the youngest was 100 years old. With a hoary and decrepit elite echelon, the Imperial Navy had no clear leadership, and the Seer Council was then too weak to impose a central authority.
What remained was a large and disorganized Imperial Navy whose official command structure had been overtaken by a parallel system of obligations and hereditary loyalties. As the Imperium grew, frontier worlds increasingly supplied the ships and resources for warfare, and it became an expectation that hereditary governors would also provide captains and generals from their own families. Navy Careerists were perhaps even more tightly knit, loyal not to siblings, cousins and parents in the aristocracy but to the officer class as a distinctive social caste, one with interests that often ran counter not only to the Seer Council but to the Mage Prince elite.
Category:Navies