Nation Name: The Chelonian Dominion
Flag:
Government Type: Totalitarian bureaucratic oligarchy
Capital System/World: Chelona, a verdant world of roughly 1.7 times Earth gravity which also boasts a higher degree of ambient background radiation. Suffered a mass extinction event in recent (geological) memory.
Dominant Species: Chelonians are vaguely humanoid beings hailing from a high gravity world. Chelonians have three sets of limbs: a primary pair of arms, legs, and a smaller set of 'social arms.' The primary arms and legs are very thick to support their bodies while the social arms which jut from the middle of their torso are comparatively small and thin. Social arms are normally kept hidden by clothing, the revelation of the social arms is normally used as a sign of trust or as a symbolic sign of coming to an agreement. All Chelonian extremities have 4 digits. The most notable aspect of the Chelonian is the large leathery shell like growth which covers their back and shoulders as well as provides their namesake. Unlike the Terran creatures to which they bear a cursory resemblance, the shell is not a defense mechanism. Current Chelonian evolutionary theory states that the shell was used by their ancestors in much the same way as a camel's hump: to store nutrients for times of food scarcity. Chelonians have leathery skin which come in various dark shades such as of browns, purples, greens, and blacks. Several areas around the Chelonian body are UV reflective, these patches forming elaborate and beautiful patterns around their body in a spectrum invisible to many races. Their eyesight is heavily slanted towards the ultraviolet to the point where they cannot properly make out several shades of the color red. Because of this Chelonian art is oft considered drab and boring as much of the color cannot be seen by non-Chelonians. Chelonians also display a natural resistance to radiation which is likely responsible for their ascension to the spot of top dog on Chelona. Chelonians range from 1.4 to 2.3m in height.
Other Species: Currently there are no non-Chelonian sapient races residing in the Dominion in any large number. Chelonian policy for such things is such; should a sapient population surrender to the Dominion with minimal resistance then they shall be integrated into the Dominion as vassals. If heavy resistance is met then ground forces are deployed to pacify/exterminate all local sophonts. Vassal races may exist peacefully in the Dominion until their presence interferes with the actions of the transplanted Chelonian population of the world. When this occurs the locals are relocated to more remote regions until those regions are themselves colonized which results in another forced relocation. When there is nowhere left to push the native life of a world the solution is always the same, the natives are wiped out to make room for more Chelonians.
Persons of Importance:
The Vaata-Kreg (Their identities are not important, the current Vaata-Kreg are built around this anonymity, no members of the council know the identities of the others)
Chief Undersecretary of the Home Office of the Ministry of the State: Dominion Branch, Vlick-Broog
Dominator Brosh-Vataga
Technology
Technological Overview: The Chelonians are a relatively advanced species, likely being on par with the galaxy at large, if one were to pick out something 'special' about Chelonian development it would have to be antimatter. Virtually all high technology in the Dominion is run on matter-antimatter annihilation from starship drives to FTL Comms, rift gates, and even some war machines. However it is worth noting that antimatter is not used in any direct role in weapons technology, the only example contrary to this is the small amounts of antimatter used to trigger much cheaper and reliable fusion weapons. Chelonian scientists found that antimatter beams tended to not have any major advantage over regular particle beams which themselves are not very common weapons in the Chelonian arsenal. To produce the massive amounts of antimatter needed to keep a star faring empire running the Dominion rely on antimatter worlds. Antimatter worlds are planets close to their local star that lack valuable resources for mining or have already been exhausted that are then seeded with self-replicating machines. The machines begin to cover the planet pole to pole in solar panels which are then linked to massive equatorial particle accelerators which convert the star's rays into the precious lifeblood of the Dominion. Antimatter worlds produce massive amounts of antimatter per year, often in the kilotons, but this is quickly broken up among the hundreds of worlds, colony clusters, stations, and space ships which desperately need them throughout the Dominion. It is worth noting that there are only a handful of antimatter worlds in the entire dominion, the destruction or disruption of operations of even a single world would have catastrophic consequences on the Dominion's infrastructure. The loss of two antimatter worlds would likely be enough to create chaos so massive even the bureaucrats would have trouble surviving its effects.
FTL travel is achieved through "rift drives" which open tunnels into a dimension known as 'No-Space.' To ease transit between worlds of the Dominion the Chelonians have erected massive rift gates which create stable no-space rifts between the many worlds of the Dominion. Only military vessels have their own rift drives, all other vessels (owned by major trading houses on government contract or other ministries as civilian ownership of space craft is highly controlled when not banned outright) must rely on the gates to move about.
Military:
A great chelonian thinker once said "those who revel in war are fools, but those who cannot wage it are extinct." The Dominion is not a particularly warlike nation, but it is a paranoid and expansionist one. If they can avoid entering into a full scale war they will gladly do so, but they will not back down if threatened. The military is easily the most efficient part of the Dominion though it is still constrained by the all pervasive red tape.
The Planetary Forces of the Dominion are built around combined arms tactics and high-mobility. Having never developed caterpillar tracks Chelonian tanks are exclusively of the hover variety. Chelonian hover tanks are built to also have limited ability to serve as personnel carriers and can carry a squad of troopers into battle. Dedicated APCs are still used with the largest capable of moving entire platoons of troops around the battlefield and serve as mobile field bases. Power armored troops are not uncommon and serve as fast attack units and flankers. The primary weapon used by Planetary Forces are C/EM weaponry. C/EM weapons are a hybrid of a conventional chemical projectile weapon and a coilgun. This hybridization allows for greater versatility when compared to purely Electromagnetic weapons as the lower velocity of the chemical projectile allows for a greater variety of ammunition types to be used. The use of a chemical propellant also gives the weapon a comparable velocity to pure EM weapons with a lower total energy expenditure and ability to function after EMP attack though with an admitted drop in performance. Lasers are common for anti-air and ordinance use.
The Space Forces of the Dominion are built around being robust. Chelonian warships are highly compartmentalized and designed to take as much damage as possible before succumbing. Chelonian ships lack any form of artificial gravity. Instead all decks are oriented perpendicular to the main drives to give gravity while the drives are running, and most ships have a spin section to give the crew quarters some semblance of gravity while idle. Primary ship based weapons are laser and graser cannons as well as copious amounts of missile weapons. Chelonian anti-ship missiles are almost exclusively bomb-pumped lasers whereas ground support ordinance is typically delivered in the form of kinetic kill vehicles or antimatter triggered fusion bombs.
History:
The Dominion's history stretches back several millenia. The Dominion has been around since before the invention of the internal combustion engine and has remained more or less constant ever since. The most notable event in Chelonian history is also the event that gave rise to the Dominion. Thousands of years before the Dominion's founding, Chelona was assaulted by an uncharacteristically high amount of solar radiation. While the causes of this remain unknown to this day, a respected theory is that it was a gamma ray burst from the death of a distant star, far enough away to not sterilize the world but also close enough to cause incredible harm. The radiation bombarded Chelona's surface and ripped away much of the planet's ozone layer immediately. During this radiation storm, Auroras filled the night sky of Chelona. The Chelonians, being naturally radiation resistant like much of Chelona's fauna, were initially unharmed by this event and some writings from the time even refer to "The day of Lights" as an omen of hope for the future. Unfortunately for them it was to be far from a hopeful omen.
The radiation and subsequent erosion of the planet's radiation defenses kicked off a massive population explosion in several species of pseudo-plankton around the world. Before long there was a worldwide case of red tide, the effects of which were various and universally devastating. the pseudo-plankton, themselves toxic, ended up choking out species who served as common prey for larger creatures. This led to an oceanic domino effect, leaving entire coastal areas barren and lifeless. The dominoes continued to fall from there. The mass extinction event is thought to have led to the extinction of over half of all ocean life on Chelona.
The Chelonian people of the time were generally akin to early iron age civilizations, not advanced enough to stand up to such massive devastation. The great states of the era were wiped out in the unrest brought on by massive ecological destruction. The global Chelonian population shrank by two-thirds during this period and would not reach pre-downfall levels again until well beyond the founding of the Dominion. Scholars have traced the origins of the Dominion to this dark age. The first Vaata-Kreg was a powerful warlord who was able to rally much of the surviving Chelonian population together through his efficient system of management and iron will. The system outline by the first Vaata-Kreg would later evolve into the bureaucratic hellscape that is the modern Dominion. At the time however, its organization allowed order to overcome chaos and reestablished the rule of law around the world. The first Vaata-Kreg then made his way across the world, conquering all who would kneel before him and exterminating those who would not. After nearly two centuries and a dozen Vaata-Kregs, all of Chelona was united under one banner and the Age of Dominion began in earnest.
Other:
Space turtle dystopia. What's not to love? They're meant to be a comparatively massive empire(tentative estimate of 80 stars but this is subject to change depending on game scale) that is so insanely inefficient that they can be incredibly easily out-maneuvered(strategically, tactically is another story) and out-foxed.
Flag:
Government Type: Totalitarian bureaucratic oligarchy
The Chelonian dominion has gone through so many regime changes in its three thousand year history that "Who rules the Dominion?" is an utterly irrelevant question. The head of the Dominion changes so often that the accepted title for those who rule the Dominion is "Vaata-Kreg" which literally translates to "the rulers" in order to minimize the amount of official documentation that needs to change with the new government. The current Vaata-Kreg is some form of council, though how they were elevated to the position is a mystery to the average Chelonian citizen. The one constant truth in the life of the Dominion is the Bureaucracy which serves as the true ruling body of the nation. The bureaucratic apparatus which keeps the Dominion running has been in place since the foundation of the Dominion many thousands of years ago and has only grown since its introduction. The Bureaucracy is a mindbogglingly inefficient system as every action that has the potential to affect the Dominion as a whole must pass through the Home Office on the Homeworld. This includes everything from the authorization for clearing arable land to movements of fleets and armies. Were the Dominion a small empire this would not be an issue, but with over eighty systems to administer the task is a truly herculean one. Even with FTL communication it can take months for requests to even reach the Home office, let alone get approval or rejection. The homeworld, Chelona, has entire cities dedicated to massive megastructures which house nothing but offices, server banks, and the homes of bureaucrats in order to keep the entire Dominion from collapsing in on itself. To its credit the massively bloated government of the Dominion has proven itself capable of doing its job, though only in a heavy handed and rather tyrannical manner.
Because of its massive size the Bureaucracy is not a singular entity. It is instead broken up into hundreds of smaller ministries which all cover individual areas. Some examples include the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Propaganda, the Ministry of Space Transit, the Ministry of Paper Stamping, or the Ministry of Paper Stamping Oversight. To ensure a minimum of corruption a full half of all government ministries are Oversight ministries whose goal is to ensure the proper running of other ministries. There is also another layer of division among Ministries as all are further divided into Planetary, Sectorial, and Dominion branches with respectively broader scope.
While Vaata-Kreg may change the rest of the government largely remains the same. Whether styling themselves an emperor, president, or god king the first thing a new ruler attempts to do to the Dominion is fix the bureaucracy and string up the bureaucrats as they are the ones who likely created the situation that led to the change of power. However even cursory examination tends to reveal that the system is simply too complex and too entrenched to remove wholesale. Attempts at bureaucratic reform often only have the lasting effect of bloating the system even more. Even killing off the various directors and secretaries of the ministries would prove more disastrous than simply letting them keep their positions as it is virtually impossible to train someone to take their place. In other words the true leader of the Dominion is not the Vatta-Kreg, but the Vaata-Kreg's Chief Undersecretary of the Home Office of the Ministry of the State: Dominion Branch as they are the ones who are tasked with bringing things to the Vaata-Kreg's attention as well as getting the Vaata-Kreg's orders out to the various ministries. They wield all of this power without any fear of losing their heads for the only ones capable of replacing them are the ones they themselves have handpicked and mentored for the role.
Because of its massive size the Bureaucracy is not a singular entity. It is instead broken up into hundreds of smaller ministries which all cover individual areas. Some examples include the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Propaganda, the Ministry of Space Transit, the Ministry of Paper Stamping, or the Ministry of Paper Stamping Oversight. To ensure a minimum of corruption a full half of all government ministries are Oversight ministries whose goal is to ensure the proper running of other ministries. There is also another layer of division among Ministries as all are further divided into Planetary, Sectorial, and Dominion branches with respectively broader scope.
While Vaata-Kreg may change the rest of the government largely remains the same. Whether styling themselves an emperor, president, or god king the first thing a new ruler attempts to do to the Dominion is fix the bureaucracy and string up the bureaucrats as they are the ones who likely created the situation that led to the change of power. However even cursory examination tends to reveal that the system is simply too complex and too entrenched to remove wholesale. Attempts at bureaucratic reform often only have the lasting effect of bloating the system even more. Even killing off the various directors and secretaries of the ministries would prove more disastrous than simply letting them keep their positions as it is virtually impossible to train someone to take their place. In other words the true leader of the Dominion is not the Vatta-Kreg, but the Vaata-Kreg's Chief Undersecretary of the Home Office of the Ministry of the State: Dominion Branch as they are the ones who are tasked with bringing things to the Vaata-Kreg's attention as well as getting the Vaata-Kreg's orders out to the various ministries. They wield all of this power without any fear of losing their heads for the only ones capable of replacing them are the ones they themselves have handpicked and mentored for the role.
Capital System/World: Chelona, a verdant world of roughly 1.7 times Earth gravity which also boasts a higher degree of ambient background radiation. Suffered a mass extinction event in recent (geological) memory.
Dominant Species: Chelonians are vaguely humanoid beings hailing from a high gravity world. Chelonians have three sets of limbs: a primary pair of arms, legs, and a smaller set of 'social arms.' The primary arms and legs are very thick to support their bodies while the social arms which jut from the middle of their torso are comparatively small and thin. Social arms are normally kept hidden by clothing, the revelation of the social arms is normally used as a sign of trust or as a symbolic sign of coming to an agreement. All Chelonian extremities have 4 digits. The most notable aspect of the Chelonian is the large leathery shell like growth which covers their back and shoulders as well as provides their namesake. Unlike the Terran creatures to which they bear a cursory resemblance, the shell is not a defense mechanism. Current Chelonian evolutionary theory states that the shell was used by their ancestors in much the same way as a camel's hump: to store nutrients for times of food scarcity. Chelonians have leathery skin which come in various dark shades such as of browns, purples, greens, and blacks. Several areas around the Chelonian body are UV reflective, these patches forming elaborate and beautiful patterns around their body in a spectrum invisible to many races. Their eyesight is heavily slanted towards the ultraviolet to the point where they cannot properly make out several shades of the color red. Because of this Chelonian art is oft considered drab and boring as much of the color cannot be seen by non-Chelonians. Chelonians also display a natural resistance to radiation which is likely responsible for their ascension to the spot of top dog on Chelona. Chelonians range from 1.4 to 2.3m in height.
Other Species: Currently there are no non-Chelonian sapient races residing in the Dominion in any large number. Chelonian policy for such things is such; should a sapient population surrender to the Dominion with minimal resistance then they shall be integrated into the Dominion as vassals. If heavy resistance is met then ground forces are deployed to pacify/exterminate all local sophonts. Vassal races may exist peacefully in the Dominion until their presence interferes with the actions of the transplanted Chelonian population of the world. When this occurs the locals are relocated to more remote regions until those regions are themselves colonized which results in another forced relocation. When there is nowhere left to push the native life of a world the solution is always the same, the natives are wiped out to make room for more Chelonians.
Persons of Importance:
The Vaata-Kreg (Their identities are not important, the current Vaata-Kreg are built around this anonymity, no members of the council know the identities of the others)
Chief Undersecretary of the Home Office of the Ministry of the State: Dominion Branch, Vlick-Broog
Dominator Brosh-Vataga
Technology
Technological Overview: The Chelonians are a relatively advanced species, likely being on par with the galaxy at large, if one were to pick out something 'special' about Chelonian development it would have to be antimatter. Virtually all high technology in the Dominion is run on matter-antimatter annihilation from starship drives to FTL Comms, rift gates, and even some war machines. However it is worth noting that antimatter is not used in any direct role in weapons technology, the only example contrary to this is the small amounts of antimatter used to trigger much cheaper and reliable fusion weapons. Chelonian scientists found that antimatter beams tended to not have any major advantage over regular particle beams which themselves are not very common weapons in the Chelonian arsenal. To produce the massive amounts of antimatter needed to keep a star faring empire running the Dominion rely on antimatter worlds. Antimatter worlds are planets close to their local star that lack valuable resources for mining or have already been exhausted that are then seeded with self-replicating machines. The machines begin to cover the planet pole to pole in solar panels which are then linked to massive equatorial particle accelerators which convert the star's rays into the precious lifeblood of the Dominion. Antimatter worlds produce massive amounts of antimatter per year, often in the kilotons, but this is quickly broken up among the hundreds of worlds, colony clusters, stations, and space ships which desperately need them throughout the Dominion. It is worth noting that there are only a handful of antimatter worlds in the entire dominion, the destruction or disruption of operations of even a single world would have catastrophic consequences on the Dominion's infrastructure. The loss of two antimatter worlds would likely be enough to create chaos so massive even the bureaucrats would have trouble surviving its effects.
FTL travel is achieved through "rift drives" which open tunnels into a dimension known as 'No-Space.' To ease transit between worlds of the Dominion the Chelonians have erected massive rift gates which create stable no-space rifts between the many worlds of the Dominion. Only military vessels have their own rift drives, all other vessels (owned by major trading houses on government contract or other ministries as civilian ownership of space craft is highly controlled when not banned outright) must rely on the gates to move about.
-FTL is not instantaneous
-There is an upper speed limit to FTL, it just hasn’t been found yet for reasons below
-To increase FTL velocities linearly, energy expenditures must increase exponentially
-Energy expenditures scale linearly with mass, so that’s nice.
-Velocity is not conserved upon entrance or exit of No Space
-Instead, ships leave No Space at an arbitrary 27.882m/s. The science is still out on that one
-Large celestial bodies have an effect on No Space, their mass or gravity creates a “rift shelf” inside of which ships cannot enter No Space and bodies in No Space are forced out into real space at the edge of the shelf.
-Rifts collapse when the object keeping them open is no longer supplying energy in real-space (eg. once a ship enters no-space, the rift collapses behind it)
-Upon collapse, properly formed rifts generate large spikes of radiation creating an easily detectable “rift signature”
-”stable” rifts require precise measurements down to the femtocoulomb of a ship and its surrounding space, nobody is going to be travelling through no-space without some incredible computational power. Exabytes of data go into jump plotting, it is not something you eyeball lest you want your crew to be atomized
-Miscalculations in rift generation result in unstable links between real and no-space
-Unstable rifts last for only nanoseconds before they collapse in on themselves incredibly violently releasing energy orders of magnitude greater than matter-antimatter annihilation
-There is an upper speed limit to FTL, it just hasn’t been found yet for reasons below
-To increase FTL velocities linearly, energy expenditures must increase exponentially
-Energy expenditures scale linearly with mass, so that’s nice.
-Velocity is not conserved upon entrance or exit of No Space
-Instead, ships leave No Space at an arbitrary 27.882m/s. The science is still out on that one
-Large celestial bodies have an effect on No Space, their mass or gravity creates a “rift shelf” inside of which ships cannot enter No Space and bodies in No Space are forced out into real space at the edge of the shelf.
-Rifts collapse when the object keeping them open is no longer supplying energy in real-space (eg. once a ship enters no-space, the rift collapses behind it)
-Upon collapse, properly formed rifts generate large spikes of radiation creating an easily detectable “rift signature”
-”stable” rifts require precise measurements down to the femtocoulomb of a ship and its surrounding space, nobody is going to be travelling through no-space without some incredible computational power. Exabytes of data go into jump plotting, it is not something you eyeball lest you want your crew to be atomized
-Miscalculations in rift generation result in unstable links between real and no-space
-Unstable rifts last for only nanoseconds before they collapse in on themselves incredibly violently releasing energy orders of magnitude greater than matter-antimatter annihilation
Military:
A great chelonian thinker once said "those who revel in war are fools, but those who cannot wage it are extinct." The Dominion is not a particularly warlike nation, but it is a paranoid and expansionist one. If they can avoid entering into a full scale war they will gladly do so, but they will not back down if threatened. The military is easily the most efficient part of the Dominion though it is still constrained by the all pervasive red tape.
The Planetary Forces of the Dominion are built around combined arms tactics and high-mobility. Having never developed caterpillar tracks Chelonian tanks are exclusively of the hover variety. Chelonian hover tanks are built to also have limited ability to serve as personnel carriers and can carry a squad of troopers into battle. Dedicated APCs are still used with the largest capable of moving entire platoons of troops around the battlefield and serve as mobile field bases. Power armored troops are not uncommon and serve as fast attack units and flankers. The primary weapon used by Planetary Forces are C/EM weaponry. C/EM weapons are a hybrid of a conventional chemical projectile weapon and a coilgun. This hybridization allows for greater versatility when compared to purely Electromagnetic weapons as the lower velocity of the chemical projectile allows for a greater variety of ammunition types to be used. The use of a chemical propellant also gives the weapon a comparable velocity to pure EM weapons with a lower total energy expenditure and ability to function after EMP attack though with an admitted drop in performance. Lasers are common for anti-air and ordinance use.
The Space Forces of the Dominion are built around being robust. Chelonian warships are highly compartmentalized and designed to take as much damage as possible before succumbing. Chelonian ships lack any form of artificial gravity. Instead all decks are oriented perpendicular to the main drives to give gravity while the drives are running, and most ships have a spin section to give the crew quarters some semblance of gravity while idle. Primary ship based weapons are laser and graser cannons as well as copious amounts of missile weapons. Chelonian anti-ship missiles are almost exclusively bomb-pumped lasers whereas ground support ordinance is typically delivered in the form of kinetic kill vehicles or antimatter triggered fusion bombs.
History:
The Dominion's history stretches back several millenia. The Dominion has been around since before the invention of the internal combustion engine and has remained more or less constant ever since. The most notable event in Chelonian history is also the event that gave rise to the Dominion. Thousands of years before the Dominion's founding, Chelona was assaulted by an uncharacteristically high amount of solar radiation. While the causes of this remain unknown to this day, a respected theory is that it was a gamma ray burst from the death of a distant star, far enough away to not sterilize the world but also close enough to cause incredible harm. The radiation bombarded Chelona's surface and ripped away much of the planet's ozone layer immediately. During this radiation storm, Auroras filled the night sky of Chelona. The Chelonians, being naturally radiation resistant like much of Chelona's fauna, were initially unharmed by this event and some writings from the time even refer to "The day of Lights" as an omen of hope for the future. Unfortunately for them it was to be far from a hopeful omen.
The radiation and subsequent erosion of the planet's radiation defenses kicked off a massive population explosion in several species of pseudo-plankton around the world. Before long there was a worldwide case of red tide, the effects of which were various and universally devastating. the pseudo-plankton, themselves toxic, ended up choking out species who served as common prey for larger creatures. This led to an oceanic domino effect, leaving entire coastal areas barren and lifeless. The dominoes continued to fall from there. The mass extinction event is thought to have led to the extinction of over half of all ocean life on Chelona.
The Chelonian people of the time were generally akin to early iron age civilizations, not advanced enough to stand up to such massive devastation. The great states of the era were wiped out in the unrest brought on by massive ecological destruction. The global Chelonian population shrank by two-thirds during this period and would not reach pre-downfall levels again until well beyond the founding of the Dominion. Scholars have traced the origins of the Dominion to this dark age. The first Vaata-Kreg was a powerful warlord who was able to rally much of the surviving Chelonian population together through his efficient system of management and iron will. The system outline by the first Vaata-Kreg would later evolve into the bureaucratic hellscape that is the modern Dominion. At the time however, its organization allowed order to overcome chaos and reestablished the rule of law around the world. The first Vaata-Kreg then made his way across the world, conquering all who would kneel before him and exterminating those who would not. After nearly two centuries and a dozen Vaata-Kregs, all of Chelona was united under one banner and the Age of Dominion began in earnest.
Other:
Space turtle dystopia. What's not to love? They're meant to be a comparatively massive empire(tentative estimate of 80 stars but this is subject to change depending on game scale) that is so insanely inefficient that they can be incredibly easily out-maneuvered(strategically, tactically is another story) and out-foxed.
The science is hard-soft, like a good cheese. Don't question the physics of FTL drives because you will find there is none just some rules to not make it virtually un-weaponizable, everything else though I try to keep realistic-ish.