Gallihop

Gallihop is another major space port facility owned by the Gudersnipe Foundation, considered on par with Utopia Gregaria and Naupactus in importance. While Gallihop was used to build some capitol-class starships at various points during the Kamian Succession Wars, it is not officially regaurded as a shipyard. Its primary function is as a maintenance and wrecking facility. Together with Gregaria and Naupactus, the three facilities make up the three main points along the Steel Road.

Location

The facility is outside the Utops Cluster but just barely. With Gregaria and Naupactus inside the region, it is the only such major spaceport that is publicly accessible.

History

Gallihop was built some time during the Mage Wars, probably originally by the M'KHara or some now-lost space-fairing civilization. It was fought over, abandoned, destroyed, and rebuilt several times before the Golden Age, with few, if any accurate records kept.

Early in the Golden Age it was purchased by the then-new Gudersnipe Foundation. The facility was in ruins at the time and was extensively build-out and expanded. Though ship construction did take place at this time, the goal was never to use Gallihop as a main shipyard.

There was little change at Gallihop during the Ages of the Alliance. The facility was repeatedly expanded and new capabilities added. Gallihop's primary function was refitting and repairing damaged vessels. Its proximatey to the infamous Colony Lun made it a prime destination for retired ships. By the Second Age, Gallihop was the Foundation's primary shipwrecking facility.

During much of the Success Wars, the facility was used to build battleships off and on. Primarily it focused on re-fitting old vessels, but they did build several from scratch. Intense pressures on manpower and materials made ship construction at Gallihop impractical, but not impossible.

Succession Wars

The Fall of Gallihop in A.Y. 6800, just six months before the battle of the Don't Pass Line, was considered the darkest moment. A massive Kamian Fleet staged a lightning-fast sneak-attack. At the time, the Crimson Blade new the Kamians were close, but hopped they would bypass Gallihop in favor of finally penetrating the Utops CLuster.

They were wrong.

The attack came so suddenly that the only combat-ready assetts at Gallihop were it's meager home guard, and a few scattered pieces of battle groups left behind when the main First Fleet launched a massive counter-offensive a week earlier. The workers at Gallihop consripted every able-bodied hand they could find, and pressed every starship even remotely capable of space flight into service.

Called "The Scrapyard Fleet", they fought a desperate, grueling three-day battle against the Kamians. Armaments were in extraordinarily short supply, the most effective weapon they had were the ship hulls themselves. Any ship with a working sublight system and not a lot else going for it was rigged for remote guidance and used a weapon. Many ships made suicide runs.

Combat was particularly tumultuous for the scrapyard fleet; they knew from the beginning that they had no hop whatsoever of victory, and most that served were not millitary personnel - just common laborers and construction personnel, piloting hastily constructed ships in makeshift battle groups. They fought with everything they had, gave their lives, knowing that at the very best, they might hold back the Kamians long enough for the First Fleet to arrive and, maybe, route the Kamians.

The main Gallihop facility was razed on the first day, with most of the larger subsidiaries following on the second. By the third day the battlefield was a barely-navicable hell of rebris and crippled starcraft. It was only in this environment that the Kamians deployed their most dreaded of all weapons: the God-type mobile suits.

Gallihop's scrapyard fleet had mostly construction mecha, but there was a small handful of space-worthy battle mechs. The seventeen-hour skirmish on the third day of combat was the bloddiest of all. The scrapyard fleet lost every single mech they threw at the Kamians, every strategic position they had in the astroid belt, and could do little but watch as five different Kamian bomber goups penetrated the lines and made attacks on the populated planets in the inner solar system.

By the end of the third day, the whole of Gallihop was in ruins, the defenders were reduced to only a small handful of barely functioning, none-FTL-capable starships, one working warship, and not a single missile or torpedo to their name. The survivors were ready to fight back in hand-to-hand combat, but the Kamians preffered to destroy their few remaining installations at range.

With few survivors and nothing left of the defenses, the First Fleet was still forty hours away. Gallihop's space-fairing population had suffered over 90% loses, and the death toll in the inner solar system was in the billions. The Kamians had won, but rather than persist and raise the inhabited planets, they withdrew. Records recovered after the war indicated the withdrawal was strategic: the attack force had successfully wrecked Gallihop's ability to contribute to the war effort, and left behind enough survivors to make it clear who the victors were.

Gallihop remained a dark stain on the Crimson Blade's honor, until it was paid back in full, six months later at the battle of the Don't Pass Line.