Alshain

Adhara
System Info
World Name: Messier Map ID: White 25 Surface Gravity: 11.2 m/s2 Climate: Desert Atmosphere: Neon-CO2, 121 kPa
Population:  16.8 million Population Breakdown: 99.9% augmented Capital: Landing One Type of Power: Independent Enclave
Infrastructure
Wealth: 105 + 84 Industry: 419 Domestic He3: 200 + 346 (deliveries) Strategic Resources: 100 Delta Dust 50 Condensates 35 Hyperglions 35 Computronium Military:

National Overview

As Of January 2195

Genre: Creepy Cyborgs :|

Head of State: 

Head of Government: Not Applicable

Government: Networked Intellect

Political Affiliation

• Pac-Am: Allied
• EU: Neutral
• Sino-Russian Arm: Neutral
• Rim Powers: Neutral
• ZOCU: Cold

Advantages

Medium Shipyards (Free)
Obermensch (15 SP): Being merely human is a death sentence on Adhara. Everyone has been enhanced to a massive degree to merely survive on the planet.
Mecha Factories (10 SP)
Impractical Engineering (20 SP): Although the incredible machines built by these processes are inefficient, the low population of Adhara makes any qualitative advantage necessary to offset their quantitative disadvantage.
Environmental Adaptation (10 SP): The Adharans have made the requisite adaptations to survive extremely hostile environments to their bodies, giving them a sizable edge in many ways over the unaugmented and less-augmented.
Cyberize (10 SP): The original founders of the colony included several leading Russian cybernetics experts, as well as many with transhuman tendencies, including those of Force XXI. The harsh environment has further nurtured them, to the point where the lightly augmented ( > 50% of birth body remaining) make up less than ten percent of the colony's population.
Compuphile (15 SP): Low population and a significant amount of AI research have made AI-controlled drones a common staple of Adharan military, industrial, and civilian life.
Advanced Technology (75 SP): The Collective has stepped closer and closer to the edge of singularity than many other powers have, and their technological base has been very thankful for it. Cognitive enhancement technologies have begotten generations of genius researchers.
Deep Core Mining (15 SP): Adhara is, although hostile, incredibly rich in strategically useful resources. The white dwarf in the binary star system is an excellent source of exotic matter usable in computer systems and also a different form usable for reactionless drives.
Crossing the Line: USA (Free): A significant portion of Adhara's original administration were members of the United States military Task Force 21, originally created in the 1990s to evaluate and integrate electronics into warfare. The most extremely augmented members of the US military, the growing anti-transhuman swell led them to leave as soon as it was feasible, and a significant portion ended up on the last wormholes, many of them ending up on Adhara. After contact was reestablished, it was only natural that they would still feel something for their birth country.

Disadvantages

Access To Information Act (+10 SP): Given the networking and lack of respect for privacy of any sort that the Adhara Collective has, it is impossible to keep anything truly secret here.
Helium Disconnect (+35 SP): A very significant portion of Adhara's helium-3 supply is being fed into the posthuman automated terraforming systems that have rendered Adhara semi-livable. If this was to be cut off, it would be a matter of weeks, months at most, before the planet regressed to a state where even the highly augmented Adharans would be incapable of living on it.
Active Terraforming (+15 SP): 173 He3/month used
Untrust Funds (+20 SP): The Adharan collective is, by default, unequipped to generate a flow of wealth or expand businesses-it is more akin to an insect hive than a society. Although there is still some degree of credit flow, the communistic nature of the Collective greatly hampers normal economic growth.
Environmental Trainwreck (+10 SP): The planet they live on has average temperatures in the 90 degree celcius range at daytime, no naturally occuring water whatsoever, a very oxygen-poor atmosphere, gravity 20% higher than Earth's norm... and this is after a century of work. Fairly wishful estimates say that the atmosphere should be breathable within 25 years.

Background

The Adharan collective are descended from three disparate groups: American geneticists and military units, Russian cybernetics researchers, and Middle Eastern refugees, who due to some alliances of convenience were sent through a longshot wormhole to their destination. They wanted a paradise of their own, like many colonists. What they got was not it. On the other hand, natural resources were abundant, the cornucopias worked, and with some hard work and grit they might just be able to make something livable out of it. Genetic splicing created hardy lichens that could live in the toxic atmosphere and produce oxygen and food, cyberneticists worked day and night to design augmentations for the citizenry to survive the planet surface, and everyone generally worked as hard as they possibly could to survive. The moment they stepped onto the surface of the planet and left the staging colonies in orbit was a day of celebration-and the only holiday celebrated by the Adharans now.

It was a harsh existence, but it meant that the disparate groups had little chance to grow apart, and that they had to wholeheartedly embrace transhuman philosophy for anything more than a mean existence beneath the surface in airtight caverns. Even today there are debates on whether or not this was intentional, or if their placement was a mistake that the posthumans merely didn't feel necessary to correct. But as years trundled along, bodies were enhanced for greater and greater environmental resistance. Less and less of them remained human-many started giving up their ability to reproduce with baseline humanity to gain access to more of the world as well as to better survive in the event of an accident. Even the few who still kept semi-human bodies started requiring massive genetic hacks to reproduce with normal mankind-in many biological definitions, they were no longer the same species that they had been when they first set foot on the planet's soil. Adharans started thinking of their new state as a permanent change rather than a temporary inconvenience, and as attitudes changed, the Adhara Republic died and the Adhara Collective was born. The name was officially changed in 2120, and at that point there were even more drastic changes made.

Adharans, at birth, now are implanted with wireless interfacing and additional communications equipment. Neurological augmentation is a given for every Adharan nowadays, and although they still have individuality, it is not uncommon for a citizen of the Collective to talk about another one in the first person, or for "dead" personalities to be resurrected, reconstructed by the memories of everyone he, she, or it has touched. There are no longer any who could be considered homo sapiens sapiens in the collective, but every Adharan still considers him or herself human. The Core Worlds would disagree, though, and the war between the UN and the ZOCU gave incentive for the Adharan Collective to take the voices calling for their dissolution seriously, modernizing the few defensive units they possessed into a fully functional military force. It also gave them something to do in the meantime with industry instead of futilely trying to terraform their hellhole-build arms to fight wars by proxy. Although it sold to both sides in the war, the majority of sales were to Independents or ZOCU states.

Currently, the Adharans are one of the members of the Progressive Transhuman Coalition, for obvious reasons. They are, strangely enough, at least in part the voice of moderation, due to their semi-close association with the Core in the ZOCU-Core war. Their policies and actions are mostly political. Although the Adharans deny any use of military force to assist the PTC and its goals, there have been some evidence of Special Warfare Arm interventions in anti-transhuman Rim Worlds and against the terrorist group December 23. This evidence tends to be limited enough and spotty enough, though, that the Adharans have never acknowledged one of these operations, and so far most nations have found it quite convenient to ignore these "interventions", never investigating them in earnest.

Politics

Adhara, being a networked groupmind, generally tends to have few subjects there is critical disagreement on. The last subject there was significant internal disagreement on was the 2187 ZOCU-Core war, where a significant minority of the population supported throwing their lot in with ZOCU. This minority has shrunken and gotten significantly quieter as the years have gone by, though, at least in part because of ZOCU coming off as the losers of the war.

Military

Strategic Resource Stockpile

• B-Titanium: 100
• Computronium: 105
• Condensates: 20
• Delta Dust: 200
• Hepatizon: 90
• Hyperglions: 165
• Iotimiline: 90
• Metamaterials: 160
• Monopoles: 730
• Rhenium: 100
• Sakuradite: 30
• Xenomorphs: 18

Level 2 and 3 Strategic Resource Stockpile

• Drexlers: 110
• Stable Monopoles: 175
• Theta Dust: 80 Back