Umbilical Technocracy

## Astrography

### Behemoth of Nations

The Umbilical Technocracy controls the largest number of individual habitats and stations among the major powers of the Verrho Marches. From the close frontier of the Skyward Passage, its domains stretch along the Umbilical as far as the derelict fields of Bahamut and Theur.

This vast size comes at a price: No other power of the Pioneers is as fractured and thinly spread as the Technocracy. Its myriad inhabited isles are scattered across regions claimed by many, sometimes hostile minor nations. These and the innumerable dangers and strange phenomena of the Verrho Marches make a trade and even mere contact between distant members of the Technocracy a significant challenge.

A far more subtle threat is the ruined Notochord. This is a desolate ruin in its times of calm, but from time to time, the old giants of the fallen Tassalid Empire seem to stir, causing strange disappearances and interference. Would the Notochord ever fully awaken, its presence even cut the Technocracy effectively in half.

Yet for all these difficulties, the merits of the Technocracy's gargantuan size have kept it in a place of high authority throughout nearly all of its four-hundred-year long history. The myriad inhabited isles of the Technocracy provide it with one of the most numerous and diverse populations, incorporating a plethora of different cultures and human lineages, which produce a wide range of luxury goods and unique cultural achievements, which are some of the most attractive trading goods in all of the Verrho Marches.

Furthermore, the sheer number of individual habitats and their wide-spread nature award the Technocracy unprecedented industrial prowess, as each habitat is its own specialized center of research, development, and fabrication. And while the power-structures and cultures of the Technocracy are barely centralized, some industrious projects put forward by the Executor Council have managed to overcome this hurdle to truly utilize the full prowess the Technocracy has to offer.

Finally, the compartmentalized nature of the Technocracy has proven to be a notable advantage in times of war, as it has shown an unparalleled level of strategical endurance and suffers little from war-fatigue as a whole.

### Lifeline Umbilical

The detriments of the Technocracy's scale are mitigated by the Umbilical, the single greatest piece of infrastructure fully claimed by the Pioneers. Beyond providing exactly enough materials and energy to keep providing for the heartlands of the Technocracy, the Umbilical served as the framework for a mass-driver and magnetic train transit system. Running along the full length of the Technocracy, this lifeline allows for several central routes of trade as well as rapid deployments of military forces and consequently has become a foundation of the Technocracy's power. At the same time, it is nigh impervious to attack, even if any other nation should deem it worth risking the wrath of the Sapient Star by attempting to destroy part of its structure outright.

Heartlands, the Three Rings

The Technocracy's greatest centralized seats of culture and industry are located on the three Ring-Habitats Novum, Tavos, and Niriad. These three rings rotate around the Umbilical, using its ethereal glow as a stand-in for the sun. Located right next to one another near the Skyward passage, these massive structures each offer a habitable surface area equivalent to a terrestrial continent.

The first settlers of all the Verrho Marches are said to have settled on these rings, and the cities there do indeed look back on a long history that afforded them the chance to develop their own nations to prosperous hubs of trade and production. If not for the wandering capital, the rings would surely be the Technocracy's permanent seat of power, and even now act as such for various rituals and festivities.

### The Wandering Capital – Tumatauenga

Tumatauenga is the largest mobile fortress and artillery macro craft in the possession of the Technocracy. This gargantuan metropolis of military infrastructure and weaponry crawls directly on the surface of the megastructure, a wandering centerpoint for the Technocracy, where its rare centralized structures of absolute authority come together.

The main fortress is surrounded by a vast entourage of trading convoys, mobile habitats for, and secondary macro craft, each protected by escorting regiments ad Astra. In this way, the capital of the Technocracy mirrors the state of the entire power: A collection of countless pieces, each individual in their own right, yet bound by a singular purpose and ambition.

Both the civilian population and emissaries of other nations rarely get to lay their eyes on the Tumatauenga itself, even though images of it are a dominant symbol for the Technocracy's military-industrial prowess and the common purpose of all production in its domains.

## Hierarchy

### People

Every living soul, no matter what lineage or form it may claim, is considered by the Technocracy part of the People. A soul's value is judged by its merits alone, regardless of age, history, or blood. These merits are determined solely by its contribution to the Technocracy's means of production.

Administration

Consequently the functions of administration and allocation are considered the lowest tier of the technocratic hierarchy. They are necessities to be met, in order to keep the machines running but on their constitute no contribution of value. As such they are considered tasks for lesser machines and few sentient minds will commit exclusively to this role. Those that do so, then rely on personal alliances to protect their own standing within the larger system, carried as assets by the magnates and companies, but with no real agency of their own.

### Labor

The true foundation of the Technocracy is formed by Labor, which encompasses all workers who facilitate production. In the public eye they are presented as the strong arm of every nation, and many stately affairs are dedicated to them. If the pamphlets and paroles of the Technocracy are to be believed, the Labor is the only class of its entire society, and differences of privilege are based on function alone.

### Union Companies and Magnates

The Labor Force of the Technocracy is organized in Union Companies, which provide the necessary structures for the Labor's force to be channeled into productivity. To this end they make use of administrative organs. Companies may rise and fall, while the Labor never subsides. They are populated by the People and ultimately said to be in their hands.

At the top of the companies stand, however, the most productive out of their ranks. Determined by the output of production they control, these Magnates emerge as leaders atop the Labor's ranks.

### Houses Minor

From the Magnates of the Union Companies arise the Houses Minor. These are the lowest stately institutions, whose domains and responsibilities encompass certain parts of local infrastructure, and the governance of smaller cities.

In the societal hierarchy, the Houses Minor form a quasi-aristocracy, whose members are determined not by blood but through their production. Thus, their status is not held necessarily for a lifetime, and especially members of the Houses Minor rise and fall as frequently as the magnates of the Union Companies.

### Houses Major

Those, however, who excel within the Houses Minor, may rise to a new tier of authority. The Houses Major encompass often larger cities and may extend their holdings into vast swaths of land and space, where they facilitate the planning and maintenance of facilities beyond the scope of companies and minor houses. Those who rise to hold a rank in these circles will often hold it for decades at least and thus can pursue long-term interests and projects far more easily.

### High Houses

Larger in scope than the Houses Major are only the High Houses of the Umbilical Technocracy. Compared to the major houses' still temporary and sometimes even experimental ventures, the High Houses are far more static institutions, tasked with the maintenance and building of entire habitat structures. They undertake projects for centuries and have the collective production of tens of millions of souls at their disposal. Because of this, the High Houses form the most conventional aristocratic lineages of individuals chosen specifically to facilitate the continued operation of a House's enterprises.

### Executor Council

Of the High Houses, eight are determined by their scope as leading members of the Executor Council. As such, they hold the ultimate authority of this highest political organ within the Technocracy, which is critical in laying out the faction's plans for expansion and resource consolidation, as well as overarching matters of the military and embargos in external trade.

While the ultimate authority about these matters lies nominally with the High Executor, it is the council that in reality draws up these plans and sees them through.

### High Executor

The personified leader of the whole Umbilical Technocracy bears the title of High Executor. This station acts both as a figurehead to the faction as a whole, as well as an important counterweight to the council's machinations. While the actual authorities of this figure are limited, the title invokes the strength and approval of all the remainder of the Technocracy. Without the High Executor's cooperation, no plan can be put into action decidedly.

## Culture

The Technocracy is a collection of many peoples, harboring arguably the most diverse population stemming from no less than six different founding colonies of the first settlers. Its multitude is held together primarily by a shared social order, imposed by the few quasi-feudal institutions of the Technocracy as a whole. Chiefly, union companies operating between different member nations and the High Houses with their overarching projects create the most tangible sense of unity within the faction.

The success of these united efforts rests on the relative freedom ever member of the Technocracy enjoys outside of their purview. As long as the measure of productivity upheld to satisfy the status of any member nation's houses, the Technocracy cares little for the minutia of how that is achieved.

Aside from the imposed overall structure, a great deal of ceremonial traditions and nominal ideals are shared among its members across the numerous borders. First among those is the value of the worker as the foundational member of society, the nominal empowerment of the people, and a collectivist approach to the furthering of any nation's goals. All of these sentiments and norms harken back to the most pivotal moment in the factions' history when the Technocratic Revolution overthrew the old world order and put productivity at the center of the faction then reborn as the Umbilical Technocracy.

### Industry

Industrial production forms the backbone of the Technocracy not only in terms of military and economy but also in a cultural sense, as it is the one overarching constant in all its member cultures.

The importance of industry shapes most habitats in the Technocracy, which are largely constructed around manufacturing facilities and resource gathering plants, integrating population centers and scientific divisions only as secondary installations. While most necessary industrial processes have been largely automated to an extent where minimal human oversight is strictly required, the industrial theme extends into most people's lives in many regions of the Technocracy. Lives are still regularly structured around shifts in manufacturing plants where the production of cultural goods, specialized components, and machinery is still industrialized, if only in form.

Production in the Technocracy's society is generally valued more than consumption. This informs much of the daily lives of people and their interactions with each other. Appreciation of the product is usually not a matter of private indulgence, but rather collective events which are celebrated regularly various different forms between habitats.

The cultural alignment towards industrial prowess has made the Technocracy one of the most developed factions of the Verrho Marches, a fact that is most evident in the extensive amount of infrastructure that bridges the vast distances between the different habitats and stations.

The largest and arguably only true limitation to the Technocracy's industry is the scarcity of viable energy- and fusion-fuel sources within the Megastructure, which notoriously offers few direct and efficient sources of energy for any faction in the Verrho Marches.

## Military

The Umbilical Technocracy is not a heavily militarized nation, despite strong militarist imagery when promoting a united effort against rivals. In international relations, the Technocracy prefers to overcome its foes economically, stifling them via diplomatic means reinforced by grand gestures of industrial and military prowess. Blockades, parades, large-scale maneuvers, and provocative troop deployments are common methods used by the Technocracy.

In the event of a full-scale armed conflict, the Technocracy will rely on its scale, strategical resilience and superior production capabilities to exhaust their enemies and overstretch them, before performing a single, decisive counterstrike with overwhelming force. Should this fail, it would likely resort to conventional attrition warfare, trusting its ability to endure any war for longer than its enemies possibly could.

Because of this, the military of the Technocracy is often seen by other factions as a strong, yet blunt instrument, one that it is better to outmaneuver and get the upper hand by other means.

Knights and Levies

The Technocracy does not maintain an overarching standing army at all times. Instead, it resorts to levying troops as needed to man the vast arsenal of dormant craft, that is available to the members at all times.

Most habitats and stations of the Technocracy store vast quantities of military hardware, more than could be conceivably fueled and operated with the local reserves. This overhang of potential forces is the 'cold reserve' of the Technocracy, that could be strategically activated in places where it is most needed.

Active service is maintained on most habitats in the form of local custodian and garrison forces, in addition to large paramilitary and reservist groups that are active throughout many members of the Technocracy.

In sharp contrast to the Levies stand the Knights of the Technocracy, who are elite military forces attached directly to the houses. Varying in size and role as much as the houses themselves, the knight's forces of each house are effectively a separate military, built and maintained at the discretion of the magnates in power.

Typically, these forces operate specialized equipment, inherited between generations of their forces. Since the knightly forces are much smaller than even garrison forces and funded by the houses directly, they often boast far superior equipment than the regular levy forces of the Technocracy.

### Armies Ad Astra

The title 'Ad Astra' signifies all forces of the Technocracy operating in the open void. These are typically crewed spacecraft, deployed in armies and formations roughly corresponding to the conventional forms of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and command units.

Regiments Ad Astra and their attached escorts and auxiliary forces will often be the focus of military campaigns and propaganda, performing media-effective parades and maneuvers throughout the Technocracy. Even though the Technocracy does not maintain a professional army, certain individual units and their traditions are ceremoniously upheld.

By on large, forces of the Technocracy's Armies Ad Astra are deployed in greater numbers than those of other nations. Technologically, they are on the lower end of militaries in the Verrho Marches, but renown for reliability and resilience.

### Planitia Macro craft

With the industrial capacity to create them in significant numbers, the Technocracy relies heavily on Planitia Macro craft as a supporting force for its military in times of war. In peacetime, these mobile fortresses often fill a role as massive industrial transports and expeditionary units.

Planitia Macro craft are gigantic vehicles crawling directly along the surface of the inner shell 'below' the Verrho Marches. Primarily, these feats of engineering serve as superheavy weapon platforms for oversized artillery pieces. Batteries of them can obliterate entire regiments Ad Astra, making them a uniquely powerful defensive asset for any faction.

In the Technocracy, especially old and large macro craft serve regularly as the headquarters for knightly forces of both major and lesser houses, the latter usually in an inactive state. But there are also numerous Macro craft of the Technocracy acting as individual industrial nations, and a few that are owned directly by Union Companies.

### Special Units and Agencies

Conventional forces are the strong suit of the Technocracy, while special forces and agencies fall short of the standard that most other factions maintain. Especially the central intelligence services of the Technocracy are severely lacking, in part due to the strongly compartmentalized nature of the faction.

If the need for highly skilled and specialized forces arises, the Technocracy will usually resort to mercenaries rather than its own professionals.

## History

### Founding

Following the opening of the Gates toward the Living Heavens, pioneers of other systems came to the Verrho Marches via the Skyward Passage. The first of them to settle down chose the three great rings of the Umbilical. They named the ring 'Niriad' where they found the most favorable conditions for human habitation. So, the first cities were born, and a new calendar had begun with zero, year of the founding.

### The Umbilical Pact

Six colonies emerged as leaders among the many settlements founded by the Pioneers. They all belonged to different groups and lineages that had come to the Sapient Star Calax to establish themselves as new nations.

In the pioneer's race for the best settling grounds and furthest expeditions, tensions among many factions grew, and the Six decided to band together and form a coalition to protect the peace and therefore also, what they had already gained. The pact which they formed would be named after the one thing bound all of them together: The Umbilical, at the time the sole lifeline for human civilization in the Verrho Marches.

### First War and the Central Authority

The Umbilical Pact that had been established to keep the peace, had ultimately the opposite effect. The banding together of the six most influential nations raised all the more resentment from lesser nations, and as new waves of pioneers brought now powers about in the Great Game for dominance of the Verrho Marches, conflict erupted between ever-greater foes.

Out of these tensions grew the first war, a conflict the details of which are still not entirely understood. Skirmishes broke out between dozens of rivaling nations and in their effort to keep some sort of control, a few major nations sought to create a balance of alliances and dependencies. One of the most successful among these was the Pact, which took in many younger colonies also closely tied to the Umbilical.

### The collapse of the Pact

But the tides of the war turned and the rapidly growing pact staggered under its own weight. Where the council of the colonies under the leadership of its six founding members had previously been able to act effectively as an executive organ and mediator, it became overburdened and eventually collapsed under the pressure of dozens of new governments and interests. All the while, the Pact was fighting wars on all fronts.

In a last-ditch effort to channel the Pact's combined strength, four of the founding colonies signed a unification treaty and sought to establish a more centralized structure. This, however, caused even more internal upheaval and threatened a split even between the Original Six.

With enemies on all sides threatening the worlds of the pact and its central government collapsing into itself, citizens on a multitude of habitats and stations took up arms and rose with the goal to defend the sovereignty of their nations against the foes from without, and against the corrupt leaders within.

### Technocratic Revolution

This Revolution was led by a group of charismatic leaders, who emerged from one of the youngest members of the Pact. Little is known of their lives up to this point, other than they had come from Sol itself, and were allegedly fleeing from a failed revolution.

In the war-torn remnants of the Umbilical Pact, their ideas of valuing production and the worker alone, to build a nation based on merit alone, fell onto fertile ground.

Where conventional arms had failed to keep the enemy at bay, the ideology began to spread like a wildfire, overtaking defending and invading armies alike. Soldiers coming home from the frontlines of this war carried pamphlets and ideas of a technocratic world order, where authority wouldn't be determined by the lowest common denominator, bloodlines, or false ideologies.

### The Umbilical Technocracy

In the 132nd year since the first founding, the war ended at last.

Onboard the mobile fortress "Tumatauenga", where revolutionaries had defeated the last vestiges of the Pact's loyalist forces, they proclaimed the Umbilical Technocracy.

On the habitats and rings of the former Pact, and others who had joined in the revolution, the old power structures were replaced with councils of the working class, from which would evolve both the Union Companies as economic structures and the Houses Minor as political ones. Some, who had looted significant parts of military infrastructure, as well as many former officers of the Pact who had defected, went about establishing higher structures alongside the revolutionaries. This begrudging alliance was necessary to keep the knowledge and skill to operate major systems alive.

From these, the first Houses Major would be born.

### Winner of the Great Game

In the first years since the proclamation, the Technocracy entered a golden age. In rebuilding its habitats and infrastructure, the new faction found a unifying purpose and a continued effort to keep up the ambitions of the revolution. With most other powers licking their wounds in isolationism, many lesser nations flocked to the Technocracy.

Around this time, the Technocracy grew into the largest of all nations in the Verrho Marches.

### The long road

The Technocracy's golden age of the early years has ebbed away. In four centuries since its founding, the Technocracy saw multiple wars, waxing and waning numbers of its habitats, shifts in the political and literal landscape of the Verrho Marches. But, for the most part, the Technocracy itself has remained a constant, both for better or worse.

It has remained one of the more stable nations in recent history, providing safety and wealth to its members via trader and industrious might. At the same time, the Technocracy never again saw an age of expansion or popularity as it did immediately after the first war. Few new nations willingly enter into the Technocracy's fold, and several separatist movements had to be forcibly quelled.

The Revolutionaries, alongside their ideals, have faded over time. Some even say they moved on to a more promising land, seeing the Technocracy as an entirely failed utopia.

The Umbilical Technocracy remains a strong if sleeping giant. If it were to truly unite behind one cause, it could still have the potential to outperform every other faction. However, no such purpose has emerged as of yet, and even if it came to be, it is questionable from where the Technocracy would produce a leader strong enough to keep it together.