The Infocard Wrote:Commissioned in 804 AS, this Overlord class Battleship would have replaced the aging Battleship Yukon. Before the Ottawa was christened in 806 AS, a public nostalgia campaign persuaded the Navy to have the Yukon refitted, and its serviceable life extended until 825 AS. Left without a battlegroup to spearhead, the Ottawa was used to placate concerns from Ageira executives about supposed Lane Hacker incursions from the Tahoe Ice Cloud. During this time, the Ottawa saw little action on its lonely surveys of California space, but when the Ontario system was opened in 809 AS, the Ottawa was made the flagship of its own battlegroup.
The Ottawa’s service life was increasingly varied. Seeing little action in the Liberty-Rheinland War, the Ottawa combatted domestic insurgencies with a taciturn delicacy rarely seen outside outside of the LSF within the Libertonian uniformed services. Surreptitious field retrofits to the Ottawa’s sensor grids, along with the addition of highly classified spyglass rectenna cut directly off an older, failed Liberty Navy Research and Development program, made the Ottawa and her airwing uniquely suited to hunting Cardamine smugglers and trade lane inhibitors between California all the way up to Alberta. The Ottawa forged a formidable record for herself over her twenty years of service, rarely deployed to the front due to her value as a homeland security asset, and the ‘goodwill’ of Los Angeles’ senate, who politically benefited from the efficacy of her battlegroup.
When the Gallic war finally came to California, the Ottawa was valuable in halting the invasion, her advanced sensor suits allowing for fighter co-ordination through the mirrored ice of the Tahoe nebula. The Ottawa, along with her accompanying vessels, battled the superior tonnage Carcassonne to a tactical standstill, preventing a ground war from breaking out in Liberty and potentially reducing the theoretical losses of the Second Gallic War.
In the final months of the conflict, the Ottawa was rushed into Bretonian space for the final, desperate effort to lift the New London bombardment. With insufficient intelligence data as to the formation of the Gallic defences, it was hoped that the Ottawa’s extensive signal intelligence capabilities would provide the united task force of battered, demoralised, and structurally crippled Allied forces with early warning to the extremist nucleus of King Charles’ armada. Between the steel tombs of the greatest military engagement in history, the Ottawa survived, her battlegroup smashed around her.
The Ottawa’s final operation occurred only a matter of days after the New London engagement. Leading a disorganised, war weary column of battered Bretonian and Libertonian survivors of the new London siege in various states of repair to break the bombardment of Leeds in Operation Dunkirk. Any major capital asset not required for maintaining civil order that still had propulsion control followed her lead into the previously locked gate, the codes having been provided by Gallic defectors who were unable to stomach the immolation of Leeds.
Moving ahead of the allied fleet, sensor suites path-finding for rest of the invasion force, the Ottawa hoped to jam the improvised Gallic early warning systems beyond the gate. Probes deployed into Leeds had sent back telemetry on what appeared to be storage containers and little else surrounding the gate, presumably in preparation for abandonment of the New London gate site. The false negative provided by the probes heuristic algorithms proved fatal, as the ‘storage containers’ were in fact a new Gallic super-weapon – the ‘Montagne’-class beam platform.
The Ottawa’s luck had failed her, as the scarred battleship had expected to encounter only conventional weaponry within the Gallic defence grid. Instead, the Montagne platforms locked on to the advancing Ottawa and stripped her of resistance within a seconds, hot plasma searing away shield emitters, turret blisters and communication rectennas into molten, blinding slag. Before her destruction, the Ottawa was able to transit one last message to the Norfolk and her battlegroup which were directly behind her, and due to the Ottawa’s sacrifice, loss of life in Operation Dunkirk was somewhat lessened.
Blind, crippled and lame, the battleship’s wreck drifts in a wide heliocentric orbit around the Leeds star. No escape pods could have viably been deployed from the deformed hull, and any crew members who may have survived the initial blast have long since suffocated; trapped within the wreck. All members of the Ottawa’s bridge crew were posthumously decorated by President Powell, and were listed in the postwar memorial celebrations by order of the Bretonian Queen.
