Navis Imperialis - Anchorage War Fleets: Born of an Imperium for which the galaxy now had been largely conquered, rather than one in which the Emperor still led the Great Crusade, its work not yet done, the Imperium formed multiple fleet anchorages -- a handful of Imperialis Armada fleet bases situated on or near the Imperium's borders. These fleet anchorages, at least one of which was founded in each of the Segmentum Majoris, with more planned, were the largest of their kind outside of the Segmentum Solar, and in their turn were dwarfed by the vast capacity of the Sol System itself, and were founded for the specific purpose of securing the domains the Great Crusade had forged from the strife-torn galaxy.As such, their functions were in the main as ports of supply and muster, command-and-control hubs, and as home bases for a permanently stationed armada of warships with their own armies of Auxilia troops. These armadas were designed to serve both as a source of deep-range patrols and rapid-reaction forces to respond to sudden threats, be they civil disturbance, rebellion or outside attack, both from within the Imperium and from beyond its borders.In terms of the warships that physically made up these fleets -- and the Port Maw Armada was an exemplar of this -- they outnumbered and en masse likely out-gunned any single Expeditionary fleet of the Great Crusade, at least on paper. They were made up primarily of several hundred first and second rate ships of the line; various classes of cruiser and assault vessels intended to dominate "small wars" and conduct lengthy patrols, supported by frigates and destroyers meant for escort duty, to pursue and destroy marauders, and hunt lone predator craft that might disturb the Emperor's Peace.By nature they possessed fewer large capital class ships than the outward reaching forces of the Great Crusade by disposition, but those they possessed were often very powerful examples of the type, including Goliath and Legatus-class Battleships.These two in particular were still extremely strong but support-intensive designs that had been replaced in frontline service only as the Great Crusade had reached ever further from the core worlds of the Segmentum Solar and supply lines had become stretched, giving way to more independently operating Gloriana and Victory patterns, but this was a deficiency of no consequence in their current role.Unlike the ships and armies that made up the great Legiones Astartes-led Expeditionary fleets, the smaller Compliance battlegroups, and the Explorator and Rogue Trader-led formations, they were essentially defensive in nature, inward-looking and meant to be successively piecemealed down into smaller commands and sub-deployments when needed and for as long as was needed.Because of this, they were made up almost entirely of the Imperialis Auxilia, with cohorts formed in the "Solar" pattern almost exclusively. These were in turn usually drawn from the established Segmentum Excertus commands, and so were purely human in make-up and quite outside the regular command structures of the Great Crusade. Their Grand Admirals and Lords Marshal operated under authority directly proffered by the ruling Council on Terra, and were equal or perhaps greater in effective rank even than the Lords Commander who governed the individual worlds their ships protected.In practice, of course, it would be a very foolish Grand Admiral that would not defer to a Primarch when matters came to it, or an emissary of the Terran Court or Mars for that matter, but this growing distance between these two sides of the Imperium's military coin, one to defend, the other to conquer, particularly after the Emperor's return to Terra, accounts perhaps for the fact that the Traitors' cause did not have quite so much traction in the midst of these sovereign defence fleets as it did elsewhere in the Imperium's forces, a fact borne out broadly by the historical record.This observation bears true in the case of the Port Maw Armada, which despite clear efforts being made to deliberately subvert it, remained in the majority loyal, and those ships' crews and Solar Auxilia regiments which did join the Traitors' cause were seldom crewed by wholehearted converts, but more often taken over by a polluted officer cadre or an armed mutiny by a well-prepared and ruthless minority.