Port Wander - Siege of Port Wander: When WAAAGH! Gulgrog attacked Port Wander in 422.M41, it struck suddenly and forcefully. With charts and observations of the Koronus Expanse even more limited than they are now, warning signs of the oncoming assault were few and largely unnoticed: those who did see the Greenskin invasion coming either fled to safety or found their predictions falling upon deaf ears as the notably lax Port Authority busied itself with matters of profit. By the time the Ork fleet had swept past the recently established port of Footfall unhindered and entered the Maw, there was little that could be done to evade the swift and reckless invaders.Moving at speeds that baffled Navigators who witnessed it, the Orks traversed the Maw in mere solar days, striking first at those vessels that rushed to depart Port Wander. Thirty-seven merchant haulers and transports were reduced to burning wreckage, and a dozen Rogue Traders found their prized vessels torn apart by swarms of raiders and frigates, while the bulkier "Kroozers" headed for the starport itself. Port Wander's own defences responded admirably to the invasion, crippling and destroying innumerable vessels as the Orks attempted to board and overwhelm it. On a hundred occasions in the first years of the war, the Orks managed to land groups of warriors within the fortress, only to have them repelled at significant cost by the mercenaries, voidsmen and Imperial Navy armsmen who defended it.The first year was, in the estimation of those who survived, the hardest of the siege. With most void ships crippled or destroyed, and the outer defences bombarded to ruin, Port Wander was essentially alone amidst the Ork fleet. Their momentum failing, the Orks slowly divided into factions, each squabbling to salvage the most intact of the hulks that littered the Rubycon II System and competing to see which would be the one to claim the defiant fortress.After two Terran years of battle, the first reinforcements arrived, as Battlefleet Calixis and the Adeptus Mechanicus rallied to form a substantial rescue fleet. A squadron of Sword-class Frigates, supported by the reconnaissance of Lathe monitor-cruisers, launched lightning raids to clear the outer reaches of the system. Then, a combined force of Imperial Navy warships and Secutor Light Cruisers from Scintilla arrived to begin the conflict in earnest, supported by the Navy warships on patrol from Passage Watch 27.The resulting war of attrition may have actually extended the war -- the Orks' initial unity quickly fractured in the face of a prolonged conflict, and while Port Wander could not hold out indefinitely, the arrival of Imperial reinforcements did not have the desired effect of routing the Orks. Quite the opposite, in fact -- faced with new enemies and new plunder, the Orks rallied together around Gulgrog's flagship (identified through unclear and poorly-translated Vox-transmissions as the infamous Da Wurldbreaka) and fought all the harder.The counterattack lasted for another standard year, as the Orks rallied to the fight, and was costly in terms of men, vessels and money. Lord Admiral Androvast Strophes is credited by many as being the hero of the war, leading fully two-thirds of Battlefleet Calixis in the final assault from his flagship, the Retribution-class Battleship Fist of Adamant, and crippling Gulgrog's flagship in a punishing broadside duel that sentenced the Fist of Adamant to spacedock for half a Terran century. After two solar days of conflict, the Orks were finally routed and, wearied from battle, the Imperial Navy moved to reclaim Port Wander instead of pursuing the Orks through the Maw.Their forces broken and slaughtered, the Ork survivors slunk back to their worlds in the Expanse. Most believed that the threat had now passed, that the remaining Greenskins were too few and too demoralised to pose more than a trivial threat. For a time, they were correct -- Ork raids upon voidships in the Expanse dropped dramatically in the following centuries.The relative peace, however, could not last, for Orks are not easily discouraged from acts of brutality and senseless violence. By the early eighth century of the 41st Millennium, the Ork menace had regained much of its strength and was as great a peril within the Expanse as they had been more than four Terran centuries before, drawing in Rogue Traders in greater numbers to combat the escalating threat with the promise of handsome reward. Yet still the threat grows, and now the Koronus Expanse stands on the brink of something terrible -- a second Greenskin invasion preparing to burst from its depths, just over half a millennium after the last.