Earthforce Navy (IF)

The Navy of Earthforce, formally chartered by the Commons, is responsible for maintaining freedom of navigation, providing rescue and relief, and intervening against gross abuses of human rights or environmental safety. It is the most visible arm of Earthforce, and in the colonies “Earthforce” often means the Navy rather than the institution as a whole.

Origins and Charter

From the beginning there was a need for more than constables. Piracy, rogue habitats, and the collapse of climate-era shipping demanded a dedicated force. A wet-navy branch still conducts freedom-of-navigation operations on Earth’s oceans; from that tradition the space navy inherited much of its law and nomenclature. The charter empowers it to protect navigation, enforce Commons statutes, and, in extremis, board and secure habitats that pose unacceptable threats to their residents or to the wider system.

Fleet Composition

Unlike pre-Fall wet navies, Earthforce carriers do not need to be massive floating airfields. Space fighters extend a ship’s patrol reach across millions of kilometers, so a carrier can be compact — essentially a hangar, workshop, and fuel depot with drives attached. The backbone of the fleet is patrol carriers, each hosting around a dozen fighters and assorted shuttles and utility vehicles, with capacity to refuel, rearm, and maintain them on prolonged patrols.

Support craft include rescue tenders, tugs, and survey ships. Heavy warships are rare, as the Navy is intended for patrol, rescue, and deterrence rather than conquest. The force is highly distributed: small carriers operating in loose flotillas, covering vast volumes of space rather than concentrating in single armadas.

Naturally there are plans for what could be built if needed: immense carriers, neutral-particle artillery ships, and several classes of attack and intercept fighters. Scenarios for large operations exist on paper. For a naval service such planning is natural — but it worries the colonies.

Marines and Boarding Craft

The Navy maintains a marine corps specialized for operations in vacuum and spin habitats. Their core mission is boarding: to secure a station or ship whose leadership has gone rogue, or to intervene in cases of systematic abuse. Their interventions are politically fraught, but their existence is considered essential to Earthforce’s human-rights mandate.

Role in the Icarus Fall

The Navy’s defining moment was the Icarus Fall. With hardened electronics, naval craft were the first to recover after the initial murderous storms. They carried out rescue operations for stranded colonists, cleared debris from crippled orbits, restored communications relays, and performed triage on failing habitats. Many in the inner system still think of Earthforce as synonymous with survival. In those years the Navy grew enormously in size, budget, and prestige, fed by emergency levies. Entire squadrons was built and crewed by the various polities of human space, some of these are still in Earthforce, others have returned home or been demobilized.

Perceptions and Politics

The Navy is formally a Commons instrument, and therefore seen by colonies as an Earth-dominated force. Yet its crews are mostly cislunar-born, with traditions and loyalties distinct from Earth governments. Colonials may resent the Navy’s authority, but many also recognize its role in keeping space navigable and habitable. This duality — Earth’s enforcer or humanity’s guardian — remains at the core of Earthforce’s political dilemmas.

Ratings and Non-Commissioned Officers

These are not the uneducated louts of earlier ages.

Rating — Apprentice specialist; routine maintenance, watchstanding, cargo handling, EVA assistant.
Leading Rating — Leads a small team of 3–6 ratings; tool control, safety checks, shift coordination.
Petty Officer — Leads and instructs ratings; performs specialist functions; supervises a watch section.
Chief Petty Officer — Division chief for 10–30 crew; training and readiness; advises the department head.
Senior Chief Petty Officer — Senior enlisted for a department; coordinates multiple divisions; inspections and standards.
Master Chief Petty Officer — Command senior enlisted advisor; fleet certifier and instructor; crisis-response lead; may hold limited duty command of small craft or detachments.

Commissioned Officers

Some are from an influential family or have naval traditions, most are just ambitious.

Midshipman — Officer in training; bridge and engineering watches; assists department heads and boarding prep.
Lieutenant Junior — Section officer; officer of the deck underway; commands small craft such as shuttles or tugs.
Lieutenant — Department head (engineering, flight, operations, medical); boarding platoon officer; patrol detachment commander.
Commander — Executive officer of a patrol carrier; commanding officer of a tender or large patrol craft; leads task elements.
Captain — Commanding officer of a patrol carrier or station; leads a small flotilla; exercises rules-of-intervention authority on scene.
Commodore — Flotilla or sector commander; sets patrol posture; convenes triage boards; arbitrates incidents between polities.

Traditions, Symbols, and Naval Carryovers

Earthforce didn’t just borrow names from the sea; it carried forward rituals that fit space, now unified under a new roundel.

Roundel (insignia) — A circular emblem with a gold rim enclosing a light-blue field. Centered is a dark grey/black striding bear facing heraldic dexter (viewer’s left). Seven yellow stars of the Big Dipper appear in correct sky orientation “through” the bear’s semi-transparent silhouette (cup above/forward of the head, handle arcing along the spine). The roundel appears on bows, flight suits, and hull markings. From a distance it is still recognizable as a black oblong on a blue background.

A roundel azure, charged with a bear passant sable facing sinister, the figure semi-transparent to show seven mullets or in the pattern of the constellation Ursa Major, the cup above the head, the handle arched along the spine; all within a bordure or.

Mottos — Over its history the Navy has carried three official mottos, each reflecting its era. In the early age of exploration and first colonization it was “Free Lanes, Safe Returns,” a promise of safety and guidance. During the optimism of the Golden Age this gave way to “The Stars Are Open,” celebrating expansion and opportunity. In the Icarus Fall it was replaced with “Passage for People,” underscoring a new humble attitude and the Navy’s central role in rescue, relief, and rebuilding.

Ensign & jack — The space ensign is light blue with the roundel at hoist; unit pennants add a narrow gold band. Jacks: white neutrality; black-yellow quarantine; blue rescue.

Spin-coin — A minted coin seeded with regolith from the sponsoring community, welded to the primary rotation axis of the spin habitat of the ship. Crew touch the plate for luck before sailing.

Commissioning: First Light — Instead of bottle-smash: the CO orders First Light, bringing the core online; radiators pulse a brief gold-tinted glow for colors.

Bell & pipe — A real bell at the airlock; a bosun’s pipe for ceremonial calls. Watches change on Stormwatch status (bells ring at posture shifts).

Logs — Captain’s log and engineering night orders are Q-time sealed each watch; a printed rough log rides the chart table for bad days.

Crossing rites — Old shellback rites become:

*Crossing the Ecliptic* (deep-space crews)

*First EVA* (marines and ratings)

*Through the Belts* (Jovian aurora rite; Aegis-on salute)

Each ends with a safety talk and a quiet ringwalk under the roundel.

Colors & mourning — Daily colors at watch change. On loss of life the ensign is banded with a narrow black mourning strip and radiators dim one percent at station noon. Names go to the Bern Roll.

Rescue honors — A blue badge Blue Star for individual rescues. A blue radiator chevron Blue Plume for mass rescues; a gilt gasket mark Golden Gasket for saving a habitat.

Burial in the void — Ash-capsules are launched on a dusk cone; Belters favor slow drift into the Belt, Earthers a sunward shot. Marines return a folded ensign to the family.

Marines: board-ready — Honor guards wear magnet boots and a holstered breacher even in dress; cadence matches spin gravity, not parade ground.

Flag etiquette — The roundel never appears inverted; when a ship is under neutrality or quarantine jacks, the roundel remains but is shown without the gold rim on personal badges to signal non-combat status.

Operations in Space

Flags still matter, though cloth is kept for ceremonies and boarding parties. In practice, signaling is by light, heat, and transponder etiquette.

Ceremonial ensign — Carried in parades, colors, funerals, and boarding of crew spaces. A fabric roundel is kept aboard every carrier.
External ensign — An emissive or e-ink panel forward on the hull, with a painted roundel as fallback when power is scarce.
Jacks — White neutrality, black-yellow quarantine, blue rescue; displayed on signal panels and echoed in radiator markings.

Short-range visual signals include beacon stacks of navigation lights, Aldis-lasers for Morse handshakes, and electrochromic hull panels showing simple shapes. Radiator brightness is pulsed for infrared codes: three long pulses for “cold-iron,” long-short-short for “weapons safed.”

Transponders broadcast charter compliance and inspection modes; silence may be granted but visual signals must still be shown. These measures give the Navy a common language of presence, neutrality, and coercion across the system.