The Nine Star League

The Nine Star League

Concept: Remmnant of the losing side of a horrible, genocidal war yanked out literally from under the guns of the victorious fleets of the enemy.

Stats

Population: 3 (5 points)
The worlds constituting the present League are essentially the surviving core systems, shorn of their extensive network of daughter colonies and more remote outlying worlds. Originally, they represented roughly a quarter of the League's total population.

Transumanism: 0
The unfailingly hostile actions of the Arar essentially killed off the League's growing transhumanist movement.

Infrastructure: 6 (5 points +1)
Greatly reduced in scale though it is, the planets still under human control represent the industrial heartland of the League, and though the war was clearly in it's final stages, the Arar simply hadn't gotten around to attacking the majority of the League's remaining worlds.

Growth Potential: 1 (1 points)
The League is densely populated as a result of long settlement, combined with two centuries of refugee influx from the dead outworlds.

Military Support: 5 (5 points)
A network of supply bases and military anchorages exists throughout the League. Deliberately located in deep space and uninhabited star systems as well as around inhabited planets to hamper Arar efforts to destroy Starfleet logistics efforts, the network is still essentially intact, although the loss of key industrial nodes and large quantities of shipping have significantly reduced the size of the fleet it is able to support.

Space Fleet: 7 (6 points +1)
Barely a fraction of the size it was at the hight of human strength in the war, the League Starfleet remains a powerful force. The complete collapse of the human ability to resist the Arar advance shortly before the League was pulled into the Nexus reflected more on the power of the Arar than the weakness of the League.

Diplomacy: 1 (1 point)
Although the League forged a pan-species alliance against the Arar, there has been no other polity than the League to talk to within living memory, and thus League diplomats are rather out of practice.

Espionage: 1 (1 point)
Being horrible cyborg death machines, Arar are generally incapable of infiltration. There was therefore little need for an extensive intelligence network.

General Advancement: 2 (8 points)
The League is an advanced technological society...

Unique Technology: 2 (3 points)
... but the Arar were more advanced. Although much of their technology remains inscrutable, League scientists did succeed in back-engineering the Arar inertialess drive and a handful of related technologies.

Emergent Technologies: 0
Magic: 0

Fleet

Fleet Points: 940
Support Limit: 1200

History

The League

When the first human ships left Sol on their voyages to other worlds, they were the start of a diaspora that exceeded any expectations. What started as a trickle soon became a flood, as ethnic and cultural groups, pioneers, nationalists and others fled an Earth increasingly blending into a single generic sameness. With the crude technology available at the time, it was clear that trying to exert control from Earth was an impossibility, and nobody even thought to try. The Nine Star League has it's roots in this era: Earth, and her eight closest colonies, collectively the largest human polity in a sea of hundreds or possibly even thousands of single system colonial nations.

Then the stutterdrive was developed, and everything changed. With stutterdrive equipped ships, orders of magnitude faster than the old style FTL craft which took years to travel between all but the closest systems, the League extended it's power over system after system. They brought with them good governance, civil rights, laws and investment. Not all golden ages last, however; in 2523, the League had it's first contact with another alien species. What resulted was a short, sharp war that shocked humanity out of it's complacent daze, and a wave of paranoia about what else might be lurking in the stars. In the century after, more starfaring races were discovered, and such paranoia seemed misplaced. There were a handful of limited wars, but the League was massively superior in size, wealth and technology to most of it's neighbours. It was a second golden age.

Until the Arar found them.

The Final War

The Arar possessed a massive fleet, technical superiority and a single mission; to kill or assimilate any sentient life they found. Who created them or where they came from was never discovered; the first evidence of their existence was a warfleet dropping out of stutterwarp in the Sentinel system. Shortly afterwards, all communication ceased. The League Starfleet task force sent to investigate likewise dropped out of contact. The Arar began moving across known space, a slow but inevitable tide of flesh and metal devouring world after world. The League and their allies fought, and fought hard, but the Arar always seemed to have more and better ships; for every battleship burned from space, two more would take it's place, for every brigade routed, a division would move to the attack.

It took nearly two hundred years of conflict for the invaders to grind their way to the industrial heart of the League, the Old Colonies settled by the first generation colony ships. Despite desperate actions from the remaining League Starfleet and those alien ships that had escaped their own species destruction, the Arar moved where they would. There was nothing left to stop them. Then, they vanished, and the stars changed.