Hneggbrún Coastal Battery
The largest man-made artillery emplacement in all the world, now a gilded relic of a bygone age left to live out its last days looking out over the sea
"They don't make 'em like they used to, Dalton." "Lord Hayward...?" "These beauts' right here...they was the last of the megaprojects, they was. The crowning pinnacle of the Race to Melkov...damned shame we'll never get to hear these ladies sing again. Not like they used to, anyway...these days, they got the ol' gals singin' falsetto to a bum tune." "I thought the Hneggbrún battery was a scientific research station, Sir? I thought the Technis Brotherhood built it to push the limits of their blackpowder refineries." "Is that what they teach in schools nowadays? God-Emperor save us all...no, ya daft pillock! Listen when I speak! These gals were the last of the megaprojects - Superweapons, in other words." "Super...weapons?" "Aye, that's right. 500 years ago, before the Rattlers changed things, they were all the rage. People loved 'em...loved the idea of makin' something so bloody powerful that it could end the war with The Throne overnight. Hence the Iron Tyrant. Hence the Atmospheric Incineration Lance. Hence these beautiful ladies here...the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery. Five of the biggest artillery cannons in the entire bloody world - each of 'em over five hundred feet long in the barrel alone. Only reason the project got off the ground is because word got out at the time that The Throne was building a navy in Melkov - freaked people out so bad that even The Iron Emperor stepped in; gave the Empire an ultimatum to "Destroy the Fledgling Fleet in Melkov within 10 years' time". Ended up kicking off The Race to Melkov...basically, who could design a way to destroy the fleet before the Throne could finish it. "Wow...I didn't know the Throne ever had a fleet. I thought most of the Undead hated water!" "They do, you numpty. We didn't found out until years later that the fleet was mostly propaganda - just a trick to try and scare us into submission. Which backfired spectacularly, I might add - only took a year for the Technis Brotherhood to settle on the designs for the Coastal Battery. Took the metal muppets less than 4 more to get the damned thing online - only took as long as it did because they had to invent an entirely new metallic alloy for the superstructure, new blackpowder refining methods to achieve the right force in the blast, and a dozen other innovations that never got out. Ended up naming it after the spear used to skewer the Traitor-Prince - the spear that could slay gods. Bit bloody pretentious, ya ask me." "Wait! But Melkov's hundreds of miles away from Cindergarde - it was built to fire all that way?" "You bloody well bet it was, Dalton my boy. What I wouldn't give to hear 'em fire at full bore...to hear the ol' gals sing one last time...story goes the first salvo leveled half of Cindergarde with the shockwaves alone. Melkov faired a far touch worse, though! Blew half the damn thing off the map, we did! Hah! A hundred thousand pounds of weapons-grade Ironite justice, straight from these beauts' to the city of Melkov. They haven't fired a full Salvo since." "Incredible...what happened, then? Why hasn't the battery been fired at full power in so long, then?" "Well, for starters, everyone realized it was a damned stupid idea in the first place! Ol' gals only got a few more shots off before the Government realized that they could outfit an entire battle cluster for the same price it took to let the Battery unleash one salvo. Bloody idiots...so they mothballed the battery. These gals were so expensive that they're probably one of the main reasons the Empire called it quits on Megaprojects in general. They called it a publicity stunt, spun it as a 'great patriotic victory', and retired the gals to the Brotherhood...they still fire, mind you - just normal thumper shells now and then. Well...'normal'...they still have to custom-order the Thumper-Shells to fit her barrel, I hear. I don't even know if they still have any of the old hundred-thousand pounders the gals used to sing to layin' around anywhere. Damned things cost a fortune to make. Normal Thumper Shells just can't withstand the force of bein' fired - so they use weaker blackpowder mixtures nowadays. Nowadays, the Brotherhood uses the gals here for their experiments. Test-firings against old navy ships, testing new blackpowder blends, testing new building materials...you get the idea." "...they're so beautiful, though. Feels like a shame to let 'em rust away here...bein' used for little stuff like that." "...aint they just? Damned well almost five hundred years old - and still the most gorgeous gals in town."
Purpose / Function
Built ever for the sake of one specific and finely tuned purpose, the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery is a megastructure whose sole purpose was and ever shall be destruction - of a scale and complexity so vast and sprawling that the very ability to imagine and comprehend it very nearly defies mortal imagination. Easily the largest artillery emplacement in the entire world at the moment of its construction - a title the Coastal Battery still holds over half a millennia later - the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery was constructed by the Technis Brotherhood over a grueling half-decade for several reasons: Firstly, and most ostensibly, the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery was built to allow The Iron Empire to threaten the Coastal Cities of The Vrýkus Throne that lined(And still line) the southern coast of The Blasting Sea which occupies much of the center of the Numiastran Continent.
Though this purpose may at first glance seem odd to canny readers versed in the histories of The Iron Empire, that such a mighty and invincible Naval Empire would resort to such wildly impractical megaprojects to threaten its enemies' coastal cities rather than wielding its Navy to do(Which even then, at the height of The Spire Wars so many centuries ago, was still nearly invincible), one must first understand the unique nature of The Blasting Sea itself. Occupying an odd position as an inland sea with no easy method of accessing the outer oceans(As canals and waterlocks simply cannot be constructed across or through The Black Desert for numerous reasons), the Blasting Sea is an inland sea whose geography and especially volatile nature makes it not only difficult to field a navy within its waters(As massive Blackpowder Geysers and Thunderous Detonations of natural Blackpowder Pockets beneath the waves can easily capsize ships and blow holes in the hulls of the finest Numiastran Destroyers), but almost paradoxically seems especially designed to stymie the efforts of larger and heavier ships to cross its waters - allowing for difficult but regular transit from smaller and more lightweight fishing vessels and wooden sailing ships while making the construction and sailing of more traditional Ironite Metal Battleships all but impractical. Finally, all these reasons speak little to The Iron Empire's own hesitancy to squander resources building a fleet to patrol what they view as a useless area to begin with - meaning that their one port city on the Sea, the Hive City of Umbergarde, has relatively underdeveloped shipbuilding industries.
As such, one can perhaps begin to understand why the idea of the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery appealed so strongly to The Iron Empire - providing an invincible spear by which they could enforce their will upon not only the surrounding waters, but the entire Blasting Sea - allowing them to strike at coastal settlements across the sea with impunity.
Secondly, however, and perhaps most famously, the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery was built with the sole purpose of crushing the city of Mḝlkov - an ancient city of The Vrýkus Throne whose docks and sprawling libraries have always stood as the foremost center of twisted innovation, necromancy, and other foul research across the Nation of the Dead. More accurately, however, the Coastal Battery was built in response to rumors of the day that told tale of a massive Warfleet of The Vrýkus Throne being constructed within the rotting dockyards of Mḝlkov; a rumor that, if proven true, could spell utter disaster for The Iron Empire's interests in and around The Blasting Sea. With the construction of the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery, The Iron Empire hoped to smash the fledgling warfleet before it could launch - and provide itself with the means to protect what meager interests in the area it possessed. Of course, these rumors proved little more than propaganda years later - but at the time, the idea of a Warfleet of the Dead very nearly gripped the entire country with such a terrified fervor that the expense involved in the Battery's constructed seemed almost inconsequential by comparison.
Lastly, and perhaps most insidiously, The Iron Empire hoped to use the construction of the Coastal Battery as a terror weapon of mind-boggling proportions - for while The Iron Empire of today is a highly unified and fervently patriotic behemoth, the Empire of 500 years hence was not so united a collective; Having just emerged from the century of strife and anarchy that followed the apparent death of Tavross, The Iron Emperor with their God-Emperor's return and resurrection, the empire had yet to fully purge itself of rebel elements - many of whom were sympathetic to the cause of The Vrýkus Throne or were otherwise fiercely opposed to the idea of a return to such an intensely autocratic government. As such, the construction of the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery was meant to be a warning to the Empire's warring internal factions - bend the knee and capitulate, or face destruction at the hands of the Battery.
Alterations
Though the Coastal Battery's heyday passed a comically brief handful of months after its completion and initial firings and subsequent mothballing, it has continued to undergo retrofits and repairs in the intervening centuries - thanks primarily to the efforts of its creators and custodians, The Technis Brotherhood. Though the Battery was originally constructed to fire staggeringly massive Hundred Thousand Pound Artillery Shells each said to be capable of levelling small towns and villages single-handedly, it underwent extensive retrofitting after it was mothballed to allow for the firing of smaller and somewhat more "conventional" Ironite Thumper Shells - primarily by allowing the Battery's five barrels to "adjust" internally to mold to the size of the projectile loaded, thus dramatically reducing the cost of custom-building shells for the battery to instead simply requiring existing Thumper-Shells to be retrofitted in a relatively cheap procedure to allow them to interface with the Battery's loading and firing mechanisms.
Additionally, the Coastal Battery has undergone hundreds or even thousands of minor alterations over its centuries of operation - each largely related to minor technical issues or quality-of-life updates to allow for the Battery's mechanics to better service the behemoth, to make the Battery's Five Individual Barrels more durable and less prone to cracking, and so on. Perhaps the most significant update came nearly a century and a half after the Battery Itself was mothballed - when the entire Battery and each of its five component guns were taken offline for the better part of a decade to allow for the Installation of the cutting-edge SKYFIRE Recoil Countermeasure System, which was at the time and is by many metrics still the most highly advanced recoilless firing system on the planet. This alteration, largely pioneered by the Technis Brotherhood in response to repeated complaints from the city of Cindergarde that the recoil generated from the test firings of the Battery was disrupting the city's power generation plants and other essential systems, allowed for the Coastal Battery to almost entirely negate the ferocious recoil and city-leveling shockwaves involved in its typical test firings by utilizing a complex series of counterweights and adjustable "vents" installed near the base of each of the Battery's five artillery cannons to allow for the propellant gasses to escape backwards rather than directly down the front of the barrel, where a series of counterweights catch the propellents and other gaseous discharges and funnel them into the city of Cindergarde's power generation plants to power various turbines and assist in other minor tasks. While ingenious, the drawback of the SKYFIRE System is a severe limiting of the Battery's operational range - though since the Battery's days of active combat are long behind it, this is seldom seen as an issue, as the System can be "disabled" for the Battery to fire its typical complement if need be.
Architecture
All in all, the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery's Architecture is that of The Iron Empire at its most fearsome and mind-boggling immense - a monolithic construction involving five titanic artillery guns linked together in sequence constructed entirely out of the highest grade metals blended together in a proprietary alloy designed and constructed specifically for the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery, the Battery's architecture is towering, imposing, and impressive all wrapped up into one destructive package. Standing hundreds of feet high and constructed almost entirely of a unique metallic alloy designed for its strength, durability, and resistance to the immense forces generated by the detonations within the Battery's Five Barrels, the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery was constructed atop the scorching cliffs outside the Hive-City of Cindergarde near the Blackpowder Falls that overlook the Blasting Sea - a massive, boxy structure built into the clifftop and cliffside atop which sits the five monolithic barrels of the Battery Itself.
In truth, the Coastal Battery is so immense as to very nearly be a city all its own - with interiors built of an identical metallic alloy and designed with a composition and internal layout surprisingly similar to the interiors of Ironite Warships, the Battery's architecture is so enormous as to possess entirely separate and unique districts each capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of defenders, research staff, civilians, and more, and each with its own shops and facilities including greenhouses, habitation areas, laboratories, and more - each linked together by tram lines to allow for ease of transit, elevators to allow for munitions and creatures to traverse the highs and lows of the Battery's exterior and interior areas with ease, and even a massive cargo elevator built into the Cliffside that connects the lower levels of the Coastal Battery to the Shipyards and water's edge hundreds of feet below the clifftop where it is built - a lift designed to allow for ships to be moved down or up from or to the Battery for refits, repairs, and more(The First such 'Ship-Lift' of its kind), though this was an alteration later installed by the Technis Brotherhood to help facilitate the live-fire tests they often run against varying warships for various scientific and technical reasons.
Now, however, though it was once designed as a gleaming metal monument to the glory of the The Iron Empire capable of supporting hundeds or even thousands of staff, engineers, and even civilians, the Battery has now been relegated largely to a research center used by the Technis Brotherhood and a Tourist Destination to the Ironite Public - while its once-glorious sterling facade of silvery metal has long since been corroded into a beautiful but somber patchwork of rusted metal pockmarked with impact craters, scratches, and even home to hundreds of oceanic and avian creatures who have made the lower and higher reaches of the Battery's architecture their home.
Overall, the style of the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery is one of sheer brutalism - sharp corners, boxy designs, and jutting metallic edifices are hallmarks of its sheer enormity which stands at such odds with the oddly picturesque scenery of the Clifftop it was built on, with the beautiful blue and grey paintjob that was said to have once given the Battery a beautiful rhinestone sparkle in the morning coastal air having been largely worn away by time and the salty seaside air, leaving behind only the faintest sparkles on its vaguely blue-grey frame after five hundred years of service; only the numbers which mark the five Barrels of the Battery yet legible on the Battery's boxy exterior.
Defenses
Perhaps most obviously, the greatest defensive system of the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery is the Battery itself - the Five Artillery Cannons linked in sequence that make up the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery as a whole. Capable of delivering five hundred thousand pound artillery shells in an apocalyptic Five-Gun Volley to any location within eight hundred miles with a firing error of less than one hundred feet, the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery is a weapon of devastating and nation-ending proportions - even a single salvo from the Battery at full-bore is enough to completely level almost any city or metropolis on the entire planet of Ea with almost no exceptions; indeed, so massive are the shells fired by the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery that during its initial test firings(The only time the weapon's full might has ever been brought to bear), the Five-Gun Volley from the Battery was enough to not only level nearly the entire city of Mḝlkov nearly eight hundred miles away, but enough to generate an earthquake centered on the Volley's impact point that could be felt for dozens or even hundreds of miles away - the force of the detonations rattling the ground with such an intensity that the tremors produced could flatten buildings a hundred miles away. And perhaps even more, the recoil of the Battery itself after this test firing was so ferocious that not only were many of the Battery's critical systems damaged and knocked offline during the firing, but the Hive-City of Cindergarde was nearly leveled by the shockwaves produced by the firing of the Battery - shattering windows and causing localized hurricane-force winds around the Hive-City for hours afterwards as the mere firing of the weapon was enough to alter the very geography and weather of the landscape surrounding the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery. For all the thunder and fury the Battery's main guns are capable of producing, however, they are eternally pointed south - capable of rotating only minorly, the Battery's tremendous might is unfortunately doomed to stand vigil over the Blasting Sea and southern Numiastra alone.
Besides its main guns, however, the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery was constructed with durability and longevity in mind - and built to withstand a protracted siege. Built of hardened steel and with enough internal districts to support hundreds or thousands of defenders, the Coastal Battery was built with a massive host of defenses - beginning at the Battery's outer defensive walls standing fifty feet high and constructed of the highest grade blast-resistant reinforced steel, the Battery is equipped with a slew of automated defensive cannons along these walls, entire legions of automated combat droids to support its more humanoid defenders, choke points designed to funnel invaders into overlapping fields of fire from a series of pillbox bunkers constructed on the paths leading into the battery proper, razor wire, landmines, and even an entire Smogger Crawler - mightiest superheavy support mech in the Ironite arsenal - dedicated entirely to the defense of the Battery Proper.
However, the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery's defenses do not end there - equipped with its own power generation systems built deep into the rock of the cliff beneath it that are each capable of syncing up with the reactors of nearby Cindergarde for power support in both directions, hydroponics facilities for food growth, and even an entire factory for the production of both ammunition, combat droids, and other arms and armor as well as a host of internal districts designed to allow for the Battery to weather an assault effectively indefinitely without running out of supplies. All this and more means that the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery is a veritable unconquerable bastion that resides just outside the Hive-City of Cindergarde - effectively a sub-city all its own with enough defenses, arms, munitions, and manpower to wage a small war all its own.
Tourism
As its heyday has long since passed centuries ago(Almost immediately after its construction and initial firing, even), the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery is an incredibly popular Tourist spot not just to the citizens of The Iron Empire, but to all across the lands of Numiastra and beyond - as many of its facilities have been converted into a tourist center to allow for tours of the Battery and its mechanisms as a way to supplement the funding of the Battery and its research laboratories now overseen by The Technis Brotherhood, the Tourism Industry around the Hneggbrún Coastal Battery is a thing nearly as monolithic as the Battery itself; a booming industry that has drawn visitors from as far away as the Suzerainty of Ruatiwanga to come and behold the once-mighty weapon of a bygone age. Here at the Battery, visitors can take tours of the old facilities where the Battery's defenders may have once slept, the shops they may have once ate at, of the factories beneath the Battery, the outer walls and automated turrets, see one of the Battery's many gift shops, and even venture into the Barrel of the one of the Battery's Five Guns and see for themselves just how truly enormous the Battery truly is.
Founding Date
1550 ASK
Alternative Names
The Hneggbrún Battery, The Six Cindergals, The Oldtown Queens
Type
Military base / complex
Owning Organization
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