Event · M41
Nimbosa Annexation
The Nimbosa Annexation is a conflict of the 41st millennium in which the T’au Empire is recorded as bringing the world of Nimbosa under its authority. Orrery places the event at Nimbosa on the galactic map and connects it, through the T’au timeline hook, to the wider expansion of the T’au Empire along the eastern frontier of the Imperium. Its dating is given only as the 41st millennium, and the record does not fix a year or a duration. The surviving account is sparse. Annexation, in the T’au sense, describes the incorporation of a world into the Empire by a combination of diplomacy, economic inducement and, where these fail, military action under the direction of the Ethereal caste and the Fire caste. The record for Nimbosa does not state which of these methods predominated, which T’au commanders or Fire caste formations took part, or what forces, if any, defended the world. Accounts differ or are silent on these points, and Orrery does not supply names, engagements or casualties that the established material does not support. The event is most usefully read alongside the Nimbosa Crusade, the Imperial campaign that Orrery associates with the same world and the same period. Together the two entries indicate a contested frontier in which T’au expansion and the Imperial response overlapped at Nimbosa, though the precise relationship between the annexation and the crusade, including which came first and whether one provoked the other, is not firmly recorded. Readers should treat any more detailed sequence found elsewhere with caution. The outcome and its consequences are likewise understated. The event is significant chiefly as an instance of the pattern by which the T’au Empire enlarged its holdings at the expense of Imperial claims in the later 41st millennium, and for the friction that pattern produced. On the timeline it sits among the frontier conflicts of that era; on the map, the Nimbosa anchor ties it to a specific location, from which the graph links to the T’au Empire and to neighbouring Imperial–T’au events.
See where Nimbosa Annexation occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.