Imperial Fists - The Phalanx: The Imperial Fists were and are makers and breakers of fortresses, but the greatest fortresses they built were amongst the stars. The Legiones Astartes were warriors of the stars, but the Imperial Fists made the cold void their battlefield of choice.While there were great and grand fortresses on the ground both to defend and assault aplenty in the Great Crusade, the greatest sieges and defences were in fact fought in the murderous environment of space.The defence of star systems, the creation of kill zones and intersecting orbits were skills that the Imperial Fists honed to a keen edge on the grindstone of thousands of battlefields.To them the methods of defending or taking a position, whether terrestrial or void-borne, were the same in principle even if different in application. After all, what were starships but fortresses of stone and metal broken free of gravity?It was an approach which saw them become the pre-eminent masters of high-intensity void warfare among the Space Marine Legions, and peerless in the spheres of boarding assault and close quarter ship-to-ship combat.Of these war bastions of the stars, the greatest was the Phalanx. A pre-Imperial relic of vast size and unimaginable power, Rogal Dorn rebuilt the cold wreck, found orbiting Inwit, where it had drifted dead since the Dark Age of Technology, and presented it to the Emperor on their reuniting.The Emperor then returned the massive spacecraft to Dorn after he was appointed as the commander of the Imperial Fists Legion.Although ponderous and a difficult voyager in the Warp, this titanic star fortress was nevertheless a space-curried weapon whose firepower dwarfed entire attack fleets by comparison. The might of the Phalanx alone broke the back of dozens of xenos species during the Great Crusade, hammered worlds to burning cinders and served as an impregnable fortress against the horrors of the void.The Phalanx served both as the Imperial Fists' principal base of operations and a lynchpin fist of the Great Crusade and later, during the terrors of the Horus Heresy, in the defence of the Sol System and Terra.The Imperial Fists are unique among the Space Marine Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes because they have no fixed home planet and are officially based on Terra. This is because of their Terran origins, as well as their pre-Heresy role as the praetorian custodians of the Emperor, following Him wherever He went in their vast, 10,000-year-old mobile space fortress.They have transformed the Phalanx into their primary, mobile fortress-monastery, although they also maintain recruitment fortress-chapels on various worlds throughout the Imperium. It is known that the Emperor had reached the ice hives of Inwit when Rogal Dorn showed himself to the Emperor aboard the Phalanx.Officially, the homeworld of the Imperial Fists is always officially listed as Terra, but in reality, the Phalanx serves as the Imperial Fists' true base of operations.Phalanx itself is gigantic, the largest starship known to have been constructed by human hands, and something of its magnitude has not been seen since the Age of Technology. The size of a small moon or large asteroid, its foredeck can dock a dozen Imperial Navy Cruisers around its circumference.The vessel is essentially a hive city in space, with its great spires reaching towards the stars, giving it the appearance of a giant mace-head. In many ways, Phalanx is the only vessel ever built by Mankind that comes close in size and complexity to that of the Aeldari's Craftworlds.Phalanx is so large that it reflects light like the stars themselves, and it served as a symbolic representation of the Emperor Himself during the time of the Great Crusade. The vast starship is completely mobile and capable of travel through the Warp. It often follows the Imperial Fists Chapter as it moves throughout the galaxy.