Free Coalition of Aligned Dra'konia

- Jafari Sky

- Ember Salatha

- Isakeii Averbak

Duscht

several others

Barrow Scale (micro-engineering): III.7-

Zubrin Scale (civilizational breadth): 2.3

### Other Important Worlds

Howler (rogue planet; mining)the seven "shards" of Shatterling (tetrahedrons; agriculture)

Jafari's World

Floridius

### Area

Core worlds and vicinity: 6 cubic parsecsFrontiers: Estimated 1400 cubic parsecs

### Currency

Officially termed the Kilo- referred to in various regions as Chits, Kers, or Mons

### Exchange Rate to Dollar

(undefined - will take the weighted average of the cost per kilogram of all stable elements produced on Earth later)

### Personell

~40,000:- 1500 infantry

- 31,000 non-combatant

- 4,500 warship crew

### Vessels

96 warships, 6 dedicated survey vessels, unknown number of civilian vessels- 4 warships in 8-10 kt mass range

- 70 warships in 4-7 kt mass range

- 10 warships in 2-3 kt mass range

- 12 warships in 1-2 kt mass range

### Stations

Can Cities: 72Outposts: (undefined, but less than 100, probably around 40 or 50 with a few systems having two)

## Citizen Sophonts

(main article: the dra'konia)

(todo)

### Society

(todo)

AXIOMS:

- Relationships are impermanent

- In hatcheries, bioparents aren’t known, and socioparents are abandoned after reaching maturity

- 1000+ year lifespans allows immense opportunity for individual change; Dra’konia will often go through distinct “phases” like Vinnindri, but without such abrupt change, instead assimilating tiny edits over their lifespan. As a result, a friend may morph into someone socially incompatible

- 1000+ year lifespans mean that for an immense portion of an individual’s lifespan, they won’t be able to even scratch the surface of another’s total life experiences

- Institutions are temporary

- Because relationships are temporary, the member base that keeps an institution's identity constant varies over time; institutions either fall apart, or change drastically over time

- 1000 year lifespans - lots of time for an institution to change

## Government

Although the Coalition may not seem like one at first glance, on closer inspection it fills this paradigm to a great degree.

The Coalition is divided into four levels of government: the Municipal level, the Region level, the Aster level, and the Alignment level, in order of increasing jurisdictional breadth. However, as jurisdictional breadth widens, authority actually lowers. Each municipal is effectively a city-state, legally required to adhere to the overall Coalition constitution; a region is a group of municipals on one celestial body, and an aster is a single celestial body. Some regions (ie large orbital habitats) do not have an aster, and some municipals (ie small orbital habitats) do not have a region. Further, no sub-government of any jurisdiction may interfere in the affairs of another sub-government, nor may any sub-government adopt a state of war against another sub-government. These meta-laws are policed by the Order of Peace, while the laws of each jurisdiction are policed by its Order of Order, or Meta-Order in common parlance. This has led to police officers being referred to as “metas” in slang terms.

The main oddity of the Coalition is the way each level of government (and each component of that level) makes decisions. Instead of having a centralized single leader (as in a monarchy) or a core circle of leaders (as in a representative democracy, technocracy, etc), the Coalition uses a *direct democracy,* which they term a "demarchy". In this system, individuals under the jurisdiction of a given sector of government participate in a large forum, putting forward and voting directly on motions which are then put into place. When things such as major engineering projects are requested, authority is handed off to an expert in the specific field, the selection of whom is voted on by the populace as well. Most of the forum's servers are housed on Drazarik, and massive infrastructure investments have been made into huge comm wormholes to handle the bandwidth needed to keep the other four main worlds fully in touch.

## Economy

The Coalition's economy is a bizarre mixture of managed economy and free market. Commodity prices are, for the most part, set by the government; but because everyone is part of the government, the majority of the influence comes from the consumers. If a producer deems that the prices being demanded by the government are unfair, they can put in a formal request to the judicial system, which takes both sides of the argument and facilitates a mutually agreeable price; however, this process is often long and arduous.

To prevent big megacorporations from dominating, the Coalition has a "kickstarting" system; the Challenge Economy, a system whereby the Coalition generates a series of "challenges" which are either directly or indirectly related to a current technological hurdle. Participating teams are limited in their personnel and resource allotment, with reasonable flexibility; they are awarded a sizeable capital for participation or completion. Most challenges are scaled for up-and-coming engineering teams, although others are minimally restricted to allow larger corporations to bring their full weight of resources to bear on an issue.

## Politics

(i will do the many bloodsucking creatures section later)

## Military

As for the Order of War, they are split into three branches; the Free Coalition Astry (FCA), the Free Coalition Espatier Corps (FCEC), and the Free Coalition Quartermaster’s Guild (FCQG).

The FCEC is by far the smallest branch of the Order of War. Like the Quartermaster’s Guild, it is subject to the authority of the FCA. A member of the FCEC is an **Espatier**, derived from a word in the old, dead Franchian language. They possess a small number of spacecraft, designed for assaulting space stations and enemy capital ships in shock actions. They also possess ground and aerial vehicles for attacking planetary surfaces, although they don’t possess the personnel numbers required to undertake such a campaign. As a result, their primary intended role is rapid exfiltration of data and other high-value objects from enemy facilities - an action that would otherwise be completely impossible without a known method of interfacing with enemy computing systems.

The FCQG is the cornerstone of all three branches, and is the only branch with a non-combat focus. The FCQG is by far the largest in terms of assets, possessing huge numbers of transport vessels, and controlling an entire shard of Sky’s Edge. Their mission statement is to provide the FCEC and FCA with the supplies and depletables needed to accomplish their missions. In practice, this means they form the supply chain for expeditionary FCA and FCEC forces. At present, the FCEC is not deployed, and the FCQG supports FCA deployments by periodically resupplying the various forward bases used to support deep-space survey operations.

If the FCQG is the cornerstone, the FCA is the entire outer wall. They are the most important branch in terms of combat, with jurisdiction over almost all the Coalition’s warship-grade space vessels. In time of war, the FCA bears the brunt of combat exposure. In time of peace, they serve as an exploratory group, using their ships to explore nearby worlds for potential habitability. Because their ships are warships first and explorers second, they aren’t as efficient at surveying star systems as dedicated exploration institutes; however, the sheer amount of resources and infrastructure they have access to makes them better than any such institution, because they can survey so many systems at once.

There is a fourth pseudo-branch, and that is the Union of Military Production Municipals, or UMPM. They are one of the few regional governments not physically connected by geography, instead having jurisdiction over every orbital shipyard whose primary product is warship-grade space vessels for the FCA and FCEC. They also have the right to take jurisdiction over any shipyard capable of producing warship-grade space vessels, but only when the Coalition itself enters a state of war.

## Technology

### Transportation

(todo - on-demand wormholes to lagrange points, but no stable wormholes; hundred-gigawatt fusion torches for civvie spacecraft and terawatt torches for warships, RTG-powered vehicles, scramjets, coilgun trains, launch loops, skyhooks, space elevators)

### Military

(todo - relatively low by standards like the Vondunke but relatively high by the standards of the Verdan Federation)

### Infrastructure

(todo - low-density dyson swarms probable, and a few experimental O'Neill Cylinders, but no megascale structures along the lines of dyson spheres or ringworlds)

(notable: the beamed-power mirrors around Velaste)

## Foreign Affairs

At this time, the Coalition has none; because they are far from any minor starfaring power, they have yet to make contact with any smaller polities. They are close to the borders of the Verdan Federation, however; at their current rate of star surveying, it is expected that the Coalition will make contact with the Federation within a standard year at the most, and possibly in as little as a month.

## Trivia

- Their dating system's acronym, API, stands for Anta Inscripta Prima - Old Versian for After First Inscription. In other words, Year Zero is the year which the earliest known written text was known to have been written.