Ranisch Fleet Alliance

The **Ranisch Fleet Alliance** (RC: "Symmakhia Stoley Ranisch") is the oldest human institution in the known universe that is still operational today: a de-centralized network of fervently religious Ranisch space admirals whose stated purpose is the advancement of all space-faring civilizations. For security reasons, fleets are not allowed to contact or even keep records of another fleet beyond the scope of their journey, making their numbers & strength within the known universe impossible to estimate.

The practical goal of each admiral is of course the growth of her own fleet: the Ranisch are widely known for their fanatic devotion to space flight & their polite but nonetheless absolute lack of trust in anybody who is not passionately enthusiastic about it.

They move their massive fleets by trading energy with spinning black holes using lasers fired from billions of miles away to let the rays slingshot back along the event horizon: the speed vector of each laser particle is slightly changed by the spinning of the gravitational field. The lasers can be lensed by automated accelerator stations orbiting the black holes also known as dark cities.

An interstellar port can be any mechanical system able to somehow conserve the kinetic energy of an incoming fleet. By far the most efficient of them are their fabulous little stars: white dwarves with supermassive cores of exotic negative matter that repel all regular matter away. They accelerate outbound vessels & slow inbound ships down. They are unfortunately much less common than black holes, grouping into tight little clusters instead of being more evenly spread out.

Time flows around these negative stars much slower, which makes port facilities work much faster from an outside perspective. This is the opposite of relativistic speeds making an interstellar travel feel much shorter to the crew. On Ranisch fleets equipped with the negative mass hyperdrive, voyages take centuries from the perspective of passengers & crew, which is spent mostly asleep, but they take only a few weeks from an outside perspective.

The Ranisch spend considerable resources on spreading the gospel of space exploration, sometimes going as far as to abduct curious children to teach them about the wonders of space-bound life. Unless sent down for a specific purpose that benefits the fleet, all personnel are discouraged from visiting planets down below. Unless on a diplomatic mission of high urgency, a senior officer is not even allowed to enter the atmosphere of a planet unless instructed to leave the fleet with all her daughters & servants to colonize or conquer.

The question is obviously whether an officer has enough resources & manpower to colonize a world or conquer its inhabitants to develop locally sustainable space industry activities within the star system. They all line up in ground troop formations if she does, with the spearwives tightly embracing their ceremonial servants in order to board large atmospheric airplanes also known as Frigates.

The frigates are dropped & also picked up from the atmosphere by RotoLift wheels otherwise known as the wheels of fortune! Geo-synchronous elevators are often also used in large non-combat operations, but the RotoLift is usually preferred for being much more flexible. If the conquest succeeds, the officer becomes a fleet admiral with a hundred personal concubines to collect.

If it doesn't go well, she might nonetheless decide to dump some of her dated equipment with training modules installed for a sufficiently advanced civilization to discover someday. Those modules are of course designed to seduce (or force) their operators into joining a Ranisch fleet so the officer in charge of the stuff can contact & recruit them.