Untitled Tallgoose Game
You
You are the combat pilots of the Trinity Revolutionary Army ship Hasan-i Sabbah (falsely flagged as the Star of Joliette, the Bushu Maru, the Mister Bushido and the Harry Gyan, among others). Due to certain circumstances the Hassan is rather undermanned with the pilots forming most of the command echelon.
Put a short character description on the talk page, along with what WWII or interwar tank is the spirit animal for your mobile suit. The setting will adjust (within reason) to enable your character concept.
The Universal Federation
The dominant government of human space, the grandiosely-named Universal Federation has existed in its current form for roughly a century; over this period it has ensured overall peace and good governance. Unfortunately this has came at a price; social pressures both official and unofficial have muted the natural human tendencies towards free action. And while the peace is undeniable, underneath the topline of good governance, the Universal Federation has long been captured by special interests and - relative to its population of billions - a handful of influential families.
The capital of the Universal Federation is built on the surface of Enki, the innermost planet of the Solar system. This cloud-shrouded orb of dense iron, nicknamed the Great Comet, is constantly surrounded by Blavatsky rifts; in the time of rebuilding after the end of the Heroic Age of Cosmic Exploration the cities erected to support rift travel became natural centers of commerce and then of governance.
Beyond the boundaries of the Universal Federation (or simply the Unifed) lie dozens of lesser states, mostly the grown-up descendants colonies established during the Heroic Age. Between and around these lie a myriad of statelets, islands in the sky, many of them being little more than city-states of a few hundred thousand souls. The Unifed does not lay claim to these - officially. Unofficially it has tied most of them into the web of hegemony and informal empire and only a few are truly outside of its ambit.
The Nadean War
Nadia was one of the worlds settled during the Heroic Age, millions of frontierists sleeping through the long trip thanks to chemically-induced hibernation and waking up on the water-covered world. And like most others the Crash brought this to an end, the ships slowing to a trickle until finally a solar system unified under the Unifed rebuilt the threadbare lines of rift navigation. Relatively advanced as exocolonies went, Nadia had a bit of a golden age after the arrival of the Unifed but over time this soured; almost a century of good relations collapsing into bitter political disputes and then war.
The Nadean War (or sometimes the Interstellar War) was the greatest war in the Unifed's history, shorter than the various unification conflicts of the previous century but of far higher intensity. Despite the on-paper disparity between Nadia and its ragged coalition of allies and the Unifed, for almost the entire war the latter fought with essentially one hand behind its back while Nadia eventually fought with the desperation of the condemned. In the end, Nadia surrendered and the Unifed's carefully-balanced house of cards wavered but did not fall.
This was three decades ago.
Neo-Nadia
The swift collapse of military resistance at Nadia that closed out the four-year Nadean War left significant elements of the Nadean military and the greater Atlantean Alliance at dispersed posts and many of these refused recall orders and vanished. Some were eventually run down as they fell into piracy but most of them retained military organization and set up resistance groups in the hazy edges of the charted skies.
For a decade, the Unifed fooled itself into thinking that these dead-enders had simply crashed their ships into some distant island and drunk themselves to death. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Nadia and its allies had established a number of supply dumps and assembly sites in the deep hinterlands, entirely unbeknownst to the Unifed. These were ransacked, their semi-automated factories disassembled and moved. And while the Unifed was busy with a series of minor crises that were in many cases the aftershocks of the war, bouncing off the far corners of the Unifed, the Neo-Nadians reorganized.
Ramblings
Unifed Fleet
For most of the past century, the Unifed's military was mostly a constabulary organization; the various warships that fought during the unification wars were never terribly suited to this and progressively phased out. The Unifed's deep sky fleet soon became populated by two main types of ships. These were system control ships and interface combat ships. The former were very large, combining the roles of mobile command posts and amphibious warfare ships while the latter were small ships designed for violet-sky operations. Only a relative handful of traditional 'warships' existed as of the Nadean War. It was this gap that allowed the Atlantean Alliance to fight the much larger Unifed on equal terms for much of the war.
Genetic Engineering
The Heroic Age of Cosmic Exploration saw many inspiring discoveries but one of the most impactful was the discovery of the Proteus Flower (which is not a flower at all but a pseudo-fungus). The Proteus Flower could be processed to generate a genetic modification tool far more powerful and reliable than the then-recently invented CRISPR/Cas-9 technique. It was in fact so powerful that it is generally viewed as a relic of the ancient Mulian civilization. In practice it ushered in a half-century of increasingly wild genetic tinkering; first in crops, then animals, and finally people. While none of the absolute worst case scenarios of armies of clone super-soldiers ruling over humanity came to pass, enough instances of going a bit too far happened to seriously tarnish the entire field and lead to the Unifed's long-standing control of the technology and techniques. Of course for the well-connected of the solar system this was a navigable inconvenience and many exocolonies also used the technologies outside the ambit of the Unifed.