Another thing I want to run

Actually I want someone else to run this

Background

In the waning years of the 21st century, Earth detected a large fleet of objects appearing around Jupiter's orbit and moving rapidly towards earth. Communication attempts produced nothing, and the fleet vastly outnumbered earth's space based military. Evidently far more technologically potent than earth, the aliens where allowed to enter earth's orbit. They scanned the planet for a while, and deployed several objects into the atmosphere, then left as mysteriously as they'd arrived.

It was not for another two centuries that Earth discovered the alien's motivation. With FTL drive proven to be possible by the alien visitation, earth's nations had begun a scramble for the stars. The first expedition was startled to discover human colonies already existing on its target world. Somehow the aliens had blocked radio transmissions from these colonies that might have reached earth before hand, so it was only when ships arrived that they where discovered.

It was apparently not the aliens, dubbed the Mimic Weavers had somehow copied large numbers of humans and seeded them onto alien worlds. Even stranger it seemed this was not their first visit. Colonies dating back to much earlier time periods were discovered, including people plucked from the Earth thousands of years ago and left in isolation to develop.

Many of the colonies seemed to be social experiments, with unusual planetary conditions or make ups, or their citizens subject to genetic engineering of various kinds. Not all of them where even human in the first place, but rather representatives of other sapient species who the movers had plucked up.

In this SD you represent one of the nations created by these events.

States & Colonies

As well as social experiments, it seems that the Mimic Weavers where intent on stopping any one planet being owned by a single group. On most worlds they seeded several enclaves, usually from widely different times, cultures or even species. These enclaves where geographically separated by great distances, thus allowing them to develop into separate states. Often less technologically advanced groups were deployed nearer sites that would help their development, such as precursor ruins natural resource sites.

Most worlds now have as many as four major nations and a host of minor ones on them.

With space on their home planets restricted most states have established outposts on other worlds. Reasons vary, anything from a desire for security from their planetary neighbours to exploiting local resources.

Most States have 3-4 smaller colonies on other planets. Even rootless nomadic fleets tend to have a similar number of smaller sub fleets separate from the main body.

Common Technologies

Fusion Reactors The ubiqtuous fusion powerplant is the standard across known space, coming in all shapes and sizes. Superconducting coils are often used to store excess power.

Plasma Drives The standard sublight propulsion system in known space, uses high-temperature plasma (often fusion exhaust) to accelerate ships according to newtonian laws.

Energy Shields: Energy shields both redirect and absorb kinetic and focussed electromagnetic energy, converting it into broad-spectrum EM. Shields can be battered down through repeated strikes or, with a sufficiently powerful and focussed weapon, penetrated. Low-power shields are commonly used to block out high-frequency photons to provide effective radiation shielding.

Spin Gravity: Most ships don't have artificial gravity but rather rely on spin sections or just acceleration to keep their boots on the deck.

Directed Energy Weapons: A variety of DEWs are in common use; lasers and particle accelerators offer accurate, long-range beam weapons while plasma cannons fire magnetically bottled plasma against nearby targets.

Kinetic Weapons: Electromagnetic weapons - railguns and coilguns - are also commonly used. While not being as effective against shields they are much better at penetrating physical armor and can often achieve much higher rates of fire.

Missiles: Guided missiles offer some of the best ways to strike an enemy outside his ability to effectively respond. They can also pack a serious punch with low-yield nuclear warheads. However they are fairly bulky and are vulnerable to defensive fire. They are the third leg in the weapons triad.

Armor & Structure: Most warships use multilayer composites for armor, alternating military-grade metallic alloys with inorganic fullerenes and/or ceramics. Civilian ships and installations will typically be built from common high-yield steel with additional radiation shielding on the outside.

Communications: Most communication is still electromagnetic. High bandwidth, FTL communication exists mostly between large fixed stations, though some powers have miniaturized these devices enough to put them in ships.

Sensors: Most sensors are fairly conventional electromagnetic detectors, though more esoteric wake-disturbance and gravity-wave technologies do exist.

Nanotechnology: Nanotechnology is used by most reasonably tech-savvy polities, however the delicate nature of any worthwhile fabricator and the immense processing power required ensures that for most it is only used for high-precision high-complexity objects. Independent 'nanobots' are also manufactured by some companies or governments but tend to require fairly specific environments to function - most commonly blood or other vascular fluids.

Biotechology: With many hundreds of worlds known to host (or having once hosted) life, it proved to be a massive if not terribly difficult task to assemble immense databases on the life sciences. with many biospheres having fairly similar basic building blocks such as RNA and DNA - though details will differ - the techniques of biotechnology proved to be surprisingly easy to transfer between species. Limited genetic engineering is common and most terraforming efforts rely on vast numbers of genetically modified species.

Cybernetics: Artificial augmentation of physical and mental attributes is relatively common in the more martial set. While few willingly undergo extensive cyborgization for the thrill of it, proper parts can improve on almosy anything natural. Cyborgization in the more civilized polities tends to be difficult to spot whereas in the more rough-and-tumble regions of space are generally in to functionality and power above all else.

Advanced Technologies

Most advanced technology is gleaned from alien ruins or constructed as new, untested prototypes (often based on alien technology.) It is often unreliable, costly and fragile, but can never the less produce good results if these flaws can somehow be mitigated.

Gravity-Wave Weapons: With a wave of compressed space, one can penetrate standard shielding. Size, complexity and cost ensures that these weapons are rarely seen, but many larger Consensus warships were equipped with these weapons.

Reactionless Motors: Solid-state energy-to-motion converters, reactionless motors let the equipped ship accelerate without the need for reaction mass or obvious thruster flares. However they are no more inherently stealthy if one knows what to look for.

Artificial Gravity: A few advanced artificial gravity, generated by polarized gravity generators.

Leap Drive: A modified and downscaled fold drive, leap drives allow the equipped vehicle to make a linear 'leap' between two points by folding space between the start and end points.

PSI Lens: With better understanding of psionic abilities it eventually became possible to construct amplifiers for said abilities. These allowed mental abilities to be massively upscaled.

Cloaking Devices: Varying degrees of stealth are commonly built into most warships, but true cloaking devices are much less common. Fairly delicate and temperamental :they need to be properly integrated into whater is meant to be cloaked, adding to cost significantly.

Advanced Biotechnology: Some polities have taken the sciences of life to its endpoints and gained the ability to breed living structures and starships. While not as efficient as more conventional ships they do have their advantages.

Traits

All nations are defined in part by their Traits, aspects of the nation that make them unique. Some have direct materiel benefits, others are less tangible aspects of a nation. They are intentionally written broadly as they can take many forms when put into practice and it will be up to you to define them in context of your nation. Traits are intended to be applied broadly and the IC reasoning behind them is eminently flexible so long as it is adequately explained. Traits are intended to be applied as core aspects of your nation but they are not exclusive. Thus a nation without the Newtypes trait may still have a handful of psycops working in its intelligence agency whereas a nation with Newtypes might have entire squadrons of newtype pilots or legions of ubermensch. Also note that traits can be stacked or taken multiple times in different permutations, subject to GM fiat. As a final note, trait synergies are acceptable (within reason) and in fact preferable to a hodge-podge taken 'cuz they were cool.'

Each nation may choose one trait from each category. In addition, each nation has four bonus traits that may be from any category(s). Each National Flaw allows for an additional bonus trait to be taken. Of course some traits and flaws are incompatible - it should not be difficult to figure these out.

National Traits

GETTING HUGE!: Your nation has a serious skyscraper, monument and battleship fetish and likes to build big. BIG. BIG.

Spacenoid: Your soul is not held down by gravity and the void of space is your home.

Rootless: The spiritual successors of the gypsies of old. This of course applies to Spacenoids only.

Big Fish In a Small Pond: You're the undisputed most powerful state on your home world. Nobody will mess with you.

The Mossad: What you know, I know.

Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti: We have not managed to gather any information on this trait.

Implausibly Efficient Government: Your bureaucrats cut through red tape with machetes.

Fair Dinkum: Your state has a rep as a straight shooter (metaphorically) and an honest dealer (literally).

The only Party in town: The government controls everything. Including you. Especially you.

Free Market Boomtown: The nice thing about a corporate state is there's profits for everyone. The not so nice thing is that you have to go back to your cubicle now.

Industrial Heartland: Tank factories stretch to the horizon and shipyards fill the night sky with waste light.

New Hollywood: A cultural center of the galaxy. Everyone who's anyone has made their fame here.

Cargo Cultist: If freighters were warships, you'd blot out the stars with your fleet. You still do, but there's less gunfire involved.

Load-Bearing State: You remember all those times you beat up a boss and suddenly the castle collapsed? Well, you're kind of like that to the galactic economy.

Who Cares About Uzbekistan: Your polity is simply not on the galactic radar and thus avoids a lot of the Bad Shit that can go down. . .

Party Plz: Your diplomats are just so good-natured or know so many skeleton-filled closets that they can get into strategically useful alliances much easier than others. Of course, then you need to live up to what you signed . . .

Harem-States: You happen to be the patron for several smaller states, or maybe you just have really well developed colonies.

Home Alone: You're the only one on your home world and don't have to deal with your neighbour's schemes.

Manifest Destiny: You have more colonies than most, up to eight.

Population Traits

Man-Machine Interface: Thought the looking glass of circuitry and neurons into the uncharted territories of bioelectronic convergence.

Newtypes: The next stage in human evolution; with strange more than human powers

Mentat: Your people are much smarter than most.

SPACE MARINES!: Your people are physically superior specimens, with buff bodies and quick hands.

Cyberize!: Physical cybernetic modifications are rampant in your population. Not limited by mere biology like SPACE MARINES! but likewise not inherent just by being born. Sucks to be a copper.

Pod People: Nature has its place but you find it more efficient to make people to order.

Heroic Age: Your people see themselves as Spartan Heroes, not Persian Generals. Shame the Spartans made poor civilians . . .

Flag-Wavers: It doesn't matter what you do, you'll always win the elections. You must choose something particularly dear to your population that they wave flags about.

One Child Policy: I hope you have one, because population is booming beyond your control! In practice this means you have several billion people.

Eureka!: The desire to take things apart and figure out how they work runs deep in your people's blood.

Hard Workers: Your people really roll up their sleeves and work.

Stupid Brave: Nobody would think of calling your people cowards.

Not One Step Back!: No Surrender. No Retreat. Requires Stupid Brave.

Tough as a Coffin Nail: Your people are just ridiculously tough and can survive true environmental extremes. Requires SPACE MARINES!, Cyberize or Xenomorph.

Plain Jane: You get one additional National trait, but cannot choose any other Population Trait.

Melting Pot: There is no majority population in your state, it's instead made up of at least three different species. Xenomorph is not required to take this Trait.

Xenomorph: GAME OVER MAN, GAME OVER.

Military Traits

High Speed, Low Drag: Jackie Fisher is back and he's mad as hell.

Tortoise and the Hare: Slow, steady and durable wins the race.

Network-Paradigm Processor: Communism in warfare? Unheard of!

Battleships!: You've got a lot more battleships than most people. Also comes in Carriers! Cruisers! and Destroyers! variants.

Armament DeRegulation: Who puts 16" guns on freighters? You do!

Army General Staff: Your focus is mostly on taking and holding ground with troops, be that planets, space stations or hostile warships.

Awesome Training: This trait is only worth one, but costs two because people are munchkins.

Death Spiraller: Why buy ten fighters when you can buy one five times as good?

First Team: Your Attack Craft pilots are the best of the best.

Knife in the Back: You prefer the silence of a SPF strike to the brutishness of a battleline bombardment.

Stracular Weapons: You put the Strategic Air Command to shame.

Ninja Spacepirate: Arr matey! You'll never escape our pirate U-Boats!

Dispersed Operations: All spaceships can go quite a while without resupply and operate without fleets. Yours are optimized for this.

Space Trenches: If it was possible to dig holes in space-time to provide cover for your battleships, you'd do so.

A Penny Saved: Just because a cruiser is two generations behind the state of the art doesn't mean its useless!

Main Guns!: The age of the battleship is back with a vengeance, this time with spinally-mounted cannons for all.

Line in the Sand: You really love fortresses and other static defenses.

Technical Traits

Mechanical Monstrosities: Who needs fighters when you can have giant robots!

Biowanker: Instead of heavy metal, your engineers have gone down the path of biotechnology.

Nanowanker: You have access to economically useful amounts of nanotechnology.

On The Run!: Most people don't strap engines to factories and cram them into carriers. Most people.

Stealth Obsessed: Most people engineer a bit of stealth cladding into their warships. You use it for internal decking.

Flash: Your stuff just has that extra polish that makes it look cooler than everyone else's inferior-looking, blockily-functional equipment.

Physics Bender: To you, certain laws of physics are just suggestions. It may be interesting to find out where this knowledge came from, however. . .

Plug'n'Play: Modularity is a virtue, so your engineers claim.

Ghost in the Machine: People are a hinderance, so you use machinery as much as possible.

Nazi Superscience: A role for every machine and a machine for every role.

Better Than Your {Keyword}: Don't apply this too broadly or I'll smack you, otherwise it's exactly what it implies.

Hangerize!: Fighters and Mecha are cool (or just an overly important part of your doctrines) so you stick them in everything you can. This provides strike/superiority ability in addition to the usual utility-craft hangars.

Symbiotic Deployment: You like to deploy parasite ships off your larger. Bigger than fighters but smaller than most true starships.

Off-The-Shelf Technology: You get one additional Bonus trait, but cannot choose any other Technical Trait.

National Flaws

Honorable to a fault: Your strategies will never rely on surprise or deception, your ships are painted bright shiny silver and your admirals will always give a speech to the enemy before battle.

Creaky Military: The military is underbudgeted, underequipped and underfed. Kind of like the Russian fleet circa 1995. You simply don't have much in the way of a military. This flaw hits hard enough to provide two (2) bonus traits.

There Is No Internet: Your computers and electronics are like 2000s vintage. This sucks.

Third World: Even in the future, the third world is not known for technological superiority. While not as horrible as There Is No Internet, it's far more broad-based. :Kiss your shields and artificial gravity good-bye for everything but the flagship.

Soylent Green Is People!: You have a giant elephant-sized skeleton in your closet.

Government Red Tape: This request cannot be processed at this time. Please take a number.

Cult Of {Keyword}: All Hail Xenu!

Inside Context Problem: You're one of the weaker powers of your home world, subject to potential invasion or coercion.

Hillariously FPAIL: Someone - a lot of someones - doesn't have much going on upstairs. Unfortunately they're disproportionately represented in your government and military.

International Commitments: You have a bunch of inconvenient ongoing operations to deal with.

Public Outcry: Your people have deep and strong opinions on some issues you'd really rather they didn't.

Wimpy: Maybe they're a low-gravity race or just didn't drink milk when growing up. No matter the cause, your people are short, skinny and weak. This is a bigger disadvantage than it sounds, as your fighter pilots will not be able to handle nearly as many Gs and your ships will likewise be relatively sluggish.

Paranoia!: In a universe full of planet-destroying aliens, a healthy dose of paranoia is only natural. It might make diplomacy difficult but at least they won't sneak up on you!

No Child Policy: The corolary to One Child Policy except in this case you have mid-low double-digit millions of people (or less!).

Trade Dependent: Exactly what it says. A good example is a Marslike world that must import significant food to feed its populace.

Twisted Patronage: Your nation is a satellite state of some greater power that doesn't have your best interests at heart and probably treats you like dirt. Suck it up, sunshine.

Psychic Nulls: Something in the (recent?) past has eliminated any trace of psychic ability from your population, probably botched genetic tinkering. While this doesn't affect their quality of life, it does mean that you're an open book to any telepath and probably find neural interfaces difficult to use.

Held Down by Gravity: You have only your home world, no other colonies. For Rootless this means you have only one main fleet and no sub fleets.

Foreclosed: Somehow you don't have a home power, only a set of colonies. Your eggs aren't all in one basket, but instead they're spread out all over the road waiting to get broken.

Where's Westphalia? Various internal power groups within your state have a way of getting independent in ways you might not approve of.

Militaries: Fleets

Not surprisingly, fleets are the dominant way of enforcing one's will on another - or avoiding having another's will enforced on oneself. While ultimately warships cannot take or hold ground and thus rely on the armies to do so, they can still dominate the spaceways and render an unprepared planet helpless. In addition, most ships in the present era carry considerable ground forces aboard.

Building a Fleet

Ships are rated by fleet points. There is no set naval organization, but in general usage ships are split between three types; Superships, Capital Ships and Escorts. Superships take at least half a million points, Capital Ships 100,000 to 500,000 and escorts up to 100,000 points. Additionally, most non-superships do tend to fall into the bottom half of each size category; 95,000 point escorts are fairly uncommon and straddle the line between undersized battleships and supercruisers.

The typical point values are listed below. Numbers in brackets are the norm.

Superships: 500k more (1,000k)

Battleship: 100-250k (175k)

Carrier: 100-175k (140k)

Heavy Cruiser: 35-60k (50k)

Light Cruiser: 20-30k (25k)

Destroyer: 7-15k (10k)

Heavy aerospace craft (bombers or gunboats): 2k

Medium aerospace craft (multirole/strike fighters): 0.5k

Light aerospace craft (single role fighters): 0.3k

Drones: 0.1k

Note that capital carriers generally carry approximately 50 fighters at 100k points, 75 at 140k points and 100 at 175k points, typically with a few additional craft for support roles.

As a baseline, each polity's fleet has 10 MILLION registered points. Registered points do not necessarily equal base points and are affected by a number of different traits. To properly assign this out ('Register' it) there are a few rules to be followed: - Fleets may not start with more than one Supership, unless they are GETTING HUGE in which case they have no limits on number of Supership hulls beyond that imposed by the rule below.
- In no case may a fleet register more than 50% of its points to capital + super ships, as escort ships are too useful and too in demand to be neglected.
- Combat aerospace craft count against the registered point limits for capital ships if they are embarked on a capital/super ship; in effect they add to the actual tonnage of the carrier. The exception to this is Hangerize!, which makes all combat aerospace craft count against escort, not capital points.
- Apply flat increases/decreases first, them apply any percentage modifiers. All divisors are added to a base of 1, thus a divisor of 0.5 actually means 'divide by 1.5'. - GETTING HUGE, Symbiotic Deploymentm Battleships!, Cruisers! Carriers! or Destroyers! apply a 0.5/level divisor to the appropriate ship type's Registered points. Thus a power with Battleships! would pay 2 Registered points for every 3 units of battleships in its fleet, while one with Battleships! II would pay 1 Registered point for -Powers with Symbiotic Development may buy parasites of up to 8K at 0.5 divisor, but must attach them to a vessel at least double their size. - Death Spiralled militaries multiply the RP cost of all units by 4 but all units are Category X quality. Yes, this means that they only start with an effective 2.5 million points of warships.
- Biowanker get a 0.5 divisor/level to all Registered points, to represent their ships being individually less effective by weight but overall easier to manufacture (or, to be more accurate, grow).
- Polities that engage in Knives In The Back and Ninja Spacepiracy are less fond of using large warships and thus may only start with 33% of their fleet as capital/superships.
- Implausibly Efficient Governments and Free Market Boomtowns add 1 million Registered points per level to the fleet registry due to more efficient use of resources and/or more resources available overall.
- Nanowankers add 0.5 million Registered points to the fleet registry or 2 million if you are also Death Spirallers thanks to the ease of manufacturing precision components with nanotechnology.
- Hard Workers and Industrial Heartlands add 1 million Registered points per level to the fleet registry due to economic overproductivity and also get a bonus to productivity.
- Third World fleets get 50% extra Registered points in Surplus Cast-Offs (lol Category C)
- Militaries who have A Penny Saved get an extra 50% Registered points in Category B units.
- Creaky Militaries eliminate half of your final tonnage (ouch!).
- Militaries that suffer from a No Child Policy cut their Registered points by 50% due to a lack of crewmembers but gain 25% back for Man-Machine Interface and Ghost in the Machine. Biowankers or Pod People nullify this effect entirely by the expedient of cloning as many bioroids as required to fill crew berths.

Advanced and Reserve units

Not all weapons are created equal. This is particularly acute during times of rapid technological innovation or rapid military build-up. Within a couple decades what was cutting-edge becomes yesterday's castoffs. However, just because something is no longer the latest and greatest doesn't mean that it is no longer useful. Many militaries will hold onto expensive equipment such as armored vehicles, aerospace craft and starships for many years. Training, spares, second-line roles . . . to do all this with continually refreshing equipment would be impossible for even the largest economies.

Category A: Most mainline troops and vessels are Category A. Well-trained and equipped they are the backbone of any nation's military.
Category B: Typically seen as reservists or low-priority formations, Category B troops typically have older equipment. However, it can still be effective in the right situations and can free up more expensive equipment for priority missions.
Category C: There is no argument about the age of this equipment or the skill of the crews. However for less well-off states this is sometimes all that can be fielded in any quantity.
Category S: Few militaries can afford Category S equipment; its effects scale while its cost scale even more rapidly. For most nations this is limited to the most elite formations.
Category SS: The airy heights where cost is no concern, category SS represents the pinnacle of unit power. Few polities have the ability to even construct such superlative equipment; most times they are unique one-offs of unprecedented power.

Production In Game

Production continues in game, as causalities need to be replaced and new fleets can be built. Each quarter, a power produces a baseline half million registered points of new ships. All usual trait restrictions apply to fleets built in game. You still need to keep a balanced fleet.

Various traits boost this amount. - Apply flat increases/decreases first, then apply any percentage modifiers. All divisors are added to a base of 1, thus a divisor of 0.5 actually means 'divide by 1.5'. - GETTING HUGE, Symbiotic Development, Battleships!, Carriers! or Destroyers! apply a 0.5/level divisor to the appropriate ship type's Registered points. Thus a power with Battleships! would pay 2 Registered points for every 3 units of battleships in its fleet, while one with Battleships! II would pay 1 Registered point for every 2 units of battleships. Note that Destroyers! applies to all escorts that do not carry combat aerospace craft.
- Death Spiralled militaries multiply the RP cost of all units by 4 but all units are Category X quality. So effectively you get 25,000 RP per quarter.
- Biowanker get a 0.5 divisor/level to all Registered points, to represent their ships being individually less effective by weight but overall easier to manufacture (or, to be more accurate, grow).
- Implausibly Efficient Governments and Free Market Boomtowns add 100,000 Registered points per level to each quarters production. due to more efficient use of resources and/or more resources available overall.
- Nanowankers add 50 thousand registered points per quarter or 200,000 if you are also Death Spirallers thanks to the ease of manufacturing precision components with nanotechnology. Remember that Death Spiral units cost 4 times as much!
- Hard Workers and Industrial Heartlands add 100,000 Registered points per level to the fleet registry due to economic overproductivity and also get a bonus to productivity.
-One Child Policy adds 200,000 Registered points per quarter representing the increased mobilization of people over time.