Jornath: Unit Spotlight [Kula Conservator Cohort]

This will be an in depth exploration about the men and women of the Kula Conservator Cohort, for more information about Kula Hive, click HERE

Notes on Nomenclature

  The Kula Conservator Cohort, (hereby abbreviated to simply "KCC")  is a bit of an enigma, in terms of its categorization and designation in Imperial Guard records for Jornath. This is of course not a particularly rare occurrence given the sometimes maddeningly eclectic manner in which Jornathii military units, especially those comprising the Planetary Defense Force were formed out of historical feudal warbands. As Such the KCC is referred to by the Regional Munitorum (which does not recognize local/planetary designations only those issued by Sub-Sector Command) as Jornath PDF Regiment 78 through 88, this designation follows the short-sighted assumption that Jornath's PDF commanders organize their units strictly in adherence to the Cadian standard of Shocktroops; this being infantry and armored units combined together in well-drilled and disciplined formations.  

  

 Of course in the Sub-sector's Tactica Command Headquarters on Casa Ureint, the records are more open-minded and flexible towards the eccentricities of each planet's ancient military traditions, with the mindset that attempting to record these variances, would save valuable time during briefing, should an emergency arise. However,  even these records are flawed,  here they refer to the KCC, as the "Kula Conservator Regiment" mistakenly assuming a Jornathii "cohort" as equivalent to that of a single standard infantry regiment (an issue that occurs many times in this particular record) a mistake that would exclude over 200,000 men and several hundred fighting vehicles from the order of battle.  Fortunately, for Kula this would be a clerical error that would very likely save the city, as Tactica Command's plan of defense for the region, appointed vast reserves to flood the area to make up for what it perceived as a lack of strength. Therefore, when the Orks first landed in the opening days of the Battle for Jornath, the KCC brought an effective strength of 230,000 guardsmen, and was supported by nearly as many mustermen, and Oakenzid cohorts appointed to the defense of the vital tidal flats. meaning the initial Ork landing zone was quickly surrounded and suppressed by a half million soldiers. 

  Indeed in reality, the KCC, is a grouping of eleven separate regiments; ten infantry, and one mechanized infantry collected under the title of "Cohort" a holdout from the pre-imperial history of the planet. There is no standard size for a Cohort, nor does it reference all the forces of a particular area, city or nobleman.  A Cohort simply put is a group, bearing forward a particular enscroll of military traditions, practices, and most important to Jornathii history, an honor roll of victories and noble defeats. As a result a cohort's size and capabilities are wrapped within the histories, legends, and complicated familial social structure of Jornath's aristocracy. An off-world commander would look at the massive tome containing the deeds, actions, strategies, size and battlefield cant of a particular cohort, and chaff at the sizeable task of weaning all the data into useable and helpful bytes for theatre command. Whereas a local Jornathii commander would know intrinsically the capabilities, history, and size of any given cohort. The issue of course becomes family bias, and heated disputes over territory, trade agreements, and dozens of other petty arguments between nobles skewing the account of a Cohorts ability, this occurred many times during the first three years of the Battle for Jornath, when local PDF commanders would provide inaccurate accounts of local forces to Tactica Command groups or Astartes, not through pettiness in all cases,  despite their ancestral feuding, all Jornathii hated the Ork and wanted to contribute to its eradication from their planet, in the vast majority of these cases the social dialogue of discussing a rival's cohort had become so ingrained in Jornathii low gothic that they simply had difficulty accurately communicating the information to off-world commanders accurately. 

Equipment and Payment

   Cohorts are raised from volunteers, each has its own stipulations as to whom is eligible to apply for admittance into a Cohort's ranks,  the more well known and successful, the more difficult it is to gain entry. For the KCC, the applicant must be at least nineteen years of age, have no less than one year of prior military experience in a Huscarl, Mustermen, or Militia unit, be in healthy physical condition, and must be a citizen of Kula Hive, Bolasku, or any of the villages or towns in the Kula Province.   

   The KCC is supplied and funded by the citizens of Kula Hive primarily, as Cohorts are required by Jornathii planetary law, to draw funds only from the population in which the unit recruits. However, the KCC act as an interesting exception, in that they are also given funding from the entire nation of Manfredi-At-Prima, of which Kula is the capital. This is due to the prestige of the city globally, and the high regard afforded to the Cohort as professionals, and particularly loyal troops. 

   As a result the KCC is spoilt for options when they look to create their wargear, while the exact equipment and its sourcing is stated elsewhere, it will be restated here for continuity's sake. The basic equipment is fashioned in the Cadian style, but with a bent towards the finery and circumstance consistent in traditional Jornathii Battledress.  The Cadian Flakhelment Mk XI, is an expensive and highly technical piece of equipment, which can be difficult for less disciplined or less technically inclined personnel to maintain effectively, the Jornathi Defense Forces meeting both of these criteria, the optionable alternative chosen by many cities on Jornath, is the Alar-Median, Slatthelm K1,  which, offers a similar weight and protective capability to that of the Cadian Mk XI, but does not include the Vox interface or advanced user HUD, or sensory deadening suite. In terms of Body Armor, Jornath sources  from Antax, Alar-Median and Tolkhan. Kula chooses to take from the Tolkhan Dura-Curiass 023, which takes the Cadian style flakvest, removes the shoulder plating, and alters the sensory and trauma response systems to maintain operation at peak efficiency under water, or in highly damp conditions, but it suffers from decreased performance in high-dust situations, it offers similar impact resistance.  The Kula Conservator Cohort, use the M36-C Kantrael Pattern Lasgun, for the carbines obvious benefits in naval, urban, and mechanized operations.  The Cohort uses the Chimera Armored Personnel Carrier as its chief combat transport, the Helstannon "Intrepid" carrier, for both hauling equipment and most terrestrial troop conveyance. The Chief combat vehicle for the KCC units, is the Leman Russ Battle Tank.  

   The Specialized nature of the  Tolkhan Dura-Curiass 023, sets the KCC a cut above its peers in the Jornathii PDF, who are generally lucky to have Lasguns rather than autoguns. What the KCC lacks, is solid communication on an infantry level, while it makes use of the backpack mounted Vox kit, this flies in the face of the streamlined and fast moving kit that the KCC quartermasters worked so hard to create. The workaround to this,  which is being partially introduced, as funding arises, is the retrofitting of Helstannon carriers into Vox boosting relay's, using the same antennae system most hab-blocks use for picking up entertainment frequencies, obviously in these machines are dialed to receive transmissions specifically from KCC Vox's and the Indigo Sparrow Command Center.  The Helstannon "Vox Carriages" then allow for Microbeads, purchased from Alar-Median in small batches, to be used over longer distances effectively streamlining the basic wargear of the average KCC armsman or NCO.  The KCC has 3 patterns of fatigue, a dress fatigue, in grey with red trim, reminiscent to the one the unit had in the 31st millenium.  A camouflage speckled woodland pattern, produced in Kula province, and finally an arid/tan speckled camouflage pattern, which is produced by Altheri Hive for its Aeroscant crew, and Drop Infantry, but is sometimes used by the KCC for operations in the northern mountains

Hierarchy and Order of Battle

    The KCC as previously stated consists of 225,000 men and women, which comprises 5% of the population of Kula Hive.  These guardsmen, are broken into 10 infantry regiments of 22,000 apiece, and a single 5,000 men mechanized unit. These numerical accounts may seem particularly inflated, as most Imperial Guard Regiments comprise around half this number in a standard Infantry regiment, this is because all of the logistical, administrative and support personnel for each regiment are included in the regiments fighting strength, as the suggestion of not being considered a "fighter" in a cohort you are a member of would be deeply insulting to a Jornathii. When we subtract these personnel from the total fighting strength, we find that the total frontline personnel of each unit to be around 10-12,000, much more in-line with the munitorum standard.

Regiment 1 -  Commanded by Regent Col. Hugh Enniol [OiC]

Regiment 2 - Commanded by Col. Janyce Nemes [Mistress/Master of Quartermasters]

Regiment 3 - Commanded by Col. Petyr Kendisoplis [Mistress/Master of Euclidian Loyalty]

Regiment 4 - Commanded by Col. Dand Ceellis 

Regiment 5 - Commanded by Maj.Chri Wenwyl 

Regiment 6 - Commanded by Maj. Zacc Olliem -Unit Destroyed in Defense of Bolasku 

Regiment 7 - Commanded by Maj. Tenta Eckrad 

Regiment 8 - Commanded by 1st. Capt. Lueff Sentagato - Unit suffered 78% Casualties.

Regiment 9 - Commanded by Maj. Kenlo "Crash" Ean. 

Regiment 10 - Commanded by Maj. Ashwyn Honon.

Regiment 11 - Commanded by Knight Regent. Isabella Jan. [Mechanized Inf.]

The Cohort commander, also doubles as the field commander of the 1st Regiment, and also attains the honorific of "Regent Colonel",  it is the duty of the Regent Colonel, to authorize officer commissions,  and to receive direct orders from Jornath Planetary Command.  During the Battle for Jornath, the Regent Colonel, also acted as the emergency theatre commander of the central Kula province for a short time, as planetary defenses were martialled to properly meet the Greenskins. 

The commander of 2nd Regiment is also the head of the quartermasters, and must approve any wargear deviations for the Cohort, they are also second in rank to the Regent Colonel, and will act as his/her replacement should the commander be slain. 

The commander of 3rd Regiment is the head of the Cohort's spiritual and moral needs, while in no way a member of the Ecclesiarchy, the Mistress/Master of Euclidian Loyalty, informs new recruits of the legendary 1st commander of the cohort, Euclid Kinnell, and reminds all others of what it means to be an armsmen of the KCC. 

Battle Honors

March of Saint Euclid the Loyal - The seminal battle of the KCC during the breakout of the Horus Heresy. The cohort marched en mass, to counter Mustermen and Huscarls of House Genntim, who had massacred Kula's civic leaders, in a bid to effect a coup d'etat in the name of the Warmaster. After a lengthy urban battle, the Cohort was successful in forcing the Traitors to surrender. 

The 1st Battle of Rotthresh Creek - Around 450 years before the Battle for Jornath, The Regiments 3, 5, and 11 as part of a large scale search for a group of missing youthful hive nobles, and local citizens, stumbled upon a heavily disguised Traitor, Sslyth, and Eldar, raider encampment. The Xenos and Pirates fought fiercely to break out of the situation, but were eventually surrounded and obliterated, leading the Cohort to the missing civilians, thankfully before they were spirited away to slavery. 

The Firestorm of Kula- When the orks landed on Kula, they did not do it with subtlety,  the Ork Kroozer, was shot out of orbit by Suetonius Station, as it descended it broke in two, one half crashing in the tidal flats, 20km to the East of Kula Hive,   and the other 475km to the North. The KCC martialled quickly and met the aliens in the burning forests and grasslands of the tidal flats,  they were horrendously outnumbered, by the Orks,  but fortunately the crash had confused and muddled the xenos enough, that the KCC managed to maintain an effective exclusion zone long enough for reserves to arrive. 

Last Stand of 6 Regiment- During the 1st Year of the War, following the botched Operation Remits Maw, Orks on both the Northern and Kula fronts counter assaulted en masse and with good leadership, catching Tactica command off guard. The KCC and other PDF forces had the Ork crash site fully surrounded, with the bulk of forces in the south and west,  where the Orks had attacked the entrenched Imperials everyday since the first day of the war. During the Ork counter assault, in midsummer,  the greenskins struck out with all their forces to the East, into the port city of Bolasku, in a bid to build a ramshackle fleet and breakout to the south along the coast.   The city was held by the 1st Royal Neohuscarl, Militia and the 6th KCC. The militia tried all they could to harass the Orks, but were brutally swept aside,  the Ship building factories, and docks themselves were held by the 1st Royal Neohuscarl and the 6th,  which were able to hold while outnumbered nearly 100 : 1 for 12 full hours before being slain to a man. Major Olliem, is said to have died leading Gamma Company in a bayonet charge to clear the Regiments' mortar pit of aliens, after the company had fully run through its ammo stores.