Planetary-Ocean Naval Combat

The sea is not a setting; it is a participant. Render it once, deeply, in Deployment, and then use it — every later movement obeys it.

• The horizon. A surface combatant sees roughly fifteen kilometres from an open bridge wing. An enemy hull appears as smoke first, then a smudge, then a silhouette, then guns. The reader who is taught the closing-from-horizon rhythm reads the rest of the engagement through it.
• Weather. The same battle in calm seas and in a three-metre swell is two battles. Render weather once, plainly, and let it do its work — the swell that makes the bow battery unreliable, the rain that grounds the wing, the fog that lets a submersible close to a thousand metres before her periscope is sighted.
• The depth below. Every surface hull moves over a depth the crew never sees; under the keel there may be three kilometres of dark water and a submersible crawling at sixty metres. The depth is the wet-water's permanent dread. Render it once — the sonar's slow ping, the bottom-sounding called from the bridge — and the reader feels what the ship sails over.
• The shore. The cliff above the bay, the headland that holds the fixed guns, the port the convoy is bringing the Cohortes to, the beach the assault hulls will hit. Render it as the destination the battle is fought to reach or to deny.
• Drowning. A hull lost at sea sinks. Crew in the water without rescue have hours, sometimes less. Render the sinking and the survivors with gravity, with the boats away, with the count of recovered names against the count of hulls lost. The water does not allow for clean deaths the way the void does.

The submersible is the wet-navy's most distinctive matériel signature and its most restrained narrative tool.

• She is the threat from below. When she is in a piece she is often the antagonist of the engagement even when she is a friendly hull — reaching toward the register of space horror: the predator that cannot be seen until she fires.
• Her own camera is interior, dim, quiet. Red-lit compartments. The sonar operator in soft headphones. The commander at the periscope. The chief engineer counting the battery. The torpedo crew loading by feel. Her vignette is closer to a sealed-room horror than to a fleet engagement.
• She is hunted. Depth-charges, depth-bombs from the wing, a sonar-buoy line — the submersible under attack is the horror inverted. The crew hears the depth-charges before they detonate, and the chief engineer counts the hull-creak between explosions.
• She is not a magic weapon. Slow, fragile, range-limited by battery on submerged runs. A submersible who could end any engagement at her leisure has departed from the doctrine. She is a quiet arm, used carefully.

Domain safeguards

• No Imperial Armada at sea. Wet-water pieces are fought with the regular wet-navy, top to bottom.
• The shore is the stake. A piece that resolves a sea battle without invoking what coast was held, what convoy reached safety, what landing succeeded or failed, has lost the doctrine.
• The sea is its own predator. Hull loss includes drowning. Naval combat shown without the sea's own claim on lives is sanitised.
• The submersible is rare and weighted. A piece with one in it should earn her — render her, name her crew, count her cost.
• The landing is a Crisis, not a montage. Amphibious assault is one of the bloodiest forms of war the Republic prosecutes: the troop bay, the ramp, the surf, the first Miles down. No quick-cut landings.
• The wing dies with the carrier. A carrier lost while her wing is aloft is the wing's death too — they have no friendly deck within range.
• The auxiliary is a strategic event. An auxiliary sunk in convoy means the formation she was bunkering for is on borrowed time. Never render it as a number.
• The young service learns hard. A piece that frames the wet-navy as a fully-mature force has missed the doctrine. The commander who made a tactical error and lost a hull to it is a register the wet-navy uniquely supports. Render the learning, even at the cost of a clean victory.