A History of Space Empires Within the Orion Arm
Hello, Dave here. Jimmy is forcing me to do WorldEmber for him over December and says he'll reveal my My Little Pony Alternate Reality fanfics to my family and friends if I don't. I guess I should just do the history of the space empires, which is written down here:
The First Ones were the first space empire in the Orion Arm and actually came from outside of it, being the survivors of their sun exploding that woke up from cryosleep to find themselves very far off-course. No, very far. Judging by how well all the following worked out, it appears the species were natural pacifists.
They lived in an expanding space station for some time, using solar-powered shuttles to bring resources from a planet they orbited. They had a system of only having a few of their kind awake at a time to minimize food consumption, and it worked surprisingly well. Those who were woken up at all were always selected based on the skills needed at the time and put back to sleep. There was no reproduction for millennia, with the asexual species having to abort and recycle the younglings they naturally produced.
After building air-tight structures on the planet and living in them, more were allowed out and, over time, they colonized the entire surface of the planet, chemically converting much of the planet's material into food to feed their populace. Eventually, they were able to terraform the planet so that they could live outside of their structures, opening up much of their potential.
They colonized many more planets and encountered the 2nd, 3rd and 4th ones, who had a joint space empire.
As for the formation of that join empire: the 2nd Ones reverse engineered a First One ship that crash-landed on their planet. The cryosleepers inside were captured, learned from in technology and language, used as technicians alongside those they taught, and prevented from reproducing so that they died off naturally over time (they didn't have DNA aging like we do but things wore them down). Yikes. They then proceeded to find the 3rd and 4th ones, who were still using rocks as the ultimate tools, and added them to their empire.
The 1st Ones were not very happy when they learned about this, but were incapable of violence and so settled for pretending to have superweapons and threatening the 2nd Ones into compensating them. The compensation was actually very small and the 2nd Ones gladly obliged, having also gone through ideological changes since their days of murdering newcomers to their planet.
Over time, the 2 different empires became best buddies to the point where they were unofficially 1 empire, and a strong ideology of "make love not war" was hitting very hard. 2 more empires came to be through giving their respective races lots of technology and free stuff, borders were unofficially open, media was shared, times were good. Over time, all 810 million stars (the extra 10 million as there were actually more stars around back then) had things around them. Fusion of hydrogen collected from stars was used to get more material. Times were really good.
Then the Old Ones showed up. Nobody likes the Old Ones.
The Old Ones were first found by a mining company that was using their planet for, well, mining. The Old Ones weren't particularly organized before this but responded in accordance with the fact that the material being mined was what grew the forests they needed for food, being violently.
You see, the Old Ones have quite a few advantages. They can reproduce very rapidly and do so either sexually or asexually. The only reason age would kill them is them getting crushed by gravity when they get too big, but they grow very slowly once they reach adulthood. They have infinite perfect memories and can transfer those memories between one another.
These advantages weren't enough for the superior technology (as in the Old Ones didn't have tools of any kind) of the mining company, which nuked the entire planet and, when questioned by authorities, claimed that the planet had always been like that. They then mined all the valuable material near the surface.
The Old Ones survived underground, slowly eating up the inside of the planet and building super-cities within it. When they came to a much less iradiated surface on which life had recovered, they colonized all of that too. They all had memories of the war with the mining company and hated them with a passion.
The 1st-6th Ones noticed them and were like "oh wow hello there would you like to join us? Funny our records said this planet didn't even have life... huh. Oh well wanna join?". They were so quick to assume the Old Ones would just go along with it that they sent the Old Ones lots of technology, blueprints and resources.
The attempts at understanding the Old One language went poorly as the Old Ones communicated through the same means that they transferred memories. The many, many cases of translators being ignored and then killed were assumed as "oh they must've said something that meant something bad in their language we'll just send them more stuff to make up for it". Yep. They fed the beast.
Surprised Peekechew (I'm avoiding the copyright man okay) faces were everywhere when the Old Ones used all the ships they were given and made to show up on the planets of the other races and start killing everyone. The Old Ones weren't using weapons but the 1st-6th Ones had to use old blueprints to build up the factories and then the weapons from scratch because of how long they'd been at peace, giving the Old Ones time to capture countless planets and grow in number on them. Attempts at using simpler and makeshift weapons in the meantime were largely unsuccessful as "simpler" means swords and spears, which don't do well against the biological diamond armour of the Old Ones, and "makeshift" means turning heaters into explosives, which worked but not well enough.
When the war was finally on, the 1st-6th races were consistently losing ground as their first waves of troops were a mixture of those who barely knew how to use the out-dated weapons they were using and very small numbers of law enforcers, adventurers, etc who weren't fully able to use their equipment in a military setting.
The next set of waves did much better but still got their asses handed to them as the Old Ones were now ridiculously numerous and knew how to work with their opponents actually having weapons. The Old Ones built planet-glassing devices and started just glassing planets rather than land on them, and then it became a war that was fought in actual space where the Old Ones did better because they were able to make far more as they had so many more factory workers.
Eventually, the 1st-6th Ones were rekked. F in the chat. Rest in peace, Jeffrey Fleece.
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So the Old Ones are having a good time, purging the last remnants of the 1st-6th Ones and dabbing on their corpses. They're getting lots of cool technology and colonizing lots of worlds. Being paranoid, they're also wiping out any life they find, intelligent or not, as they expand. Earth is a miracle case of them missing a spot.
However, as they colonized these worlds and deployed ground forces against the 1st-6th races, they had to modify members of their race to survive the differences in environment. These new strains of Old Ones came to be viewed as no different from the 1st-6th Ones as memories could not be transferred between these strains and vanilla Old Ones. At the same time, Planet Loki was built as a super-habitat for vanilla Old Ones.
Things hit the boiling point, with plenty of terrorism and skirmishes leading up to it, with the announced plans of the vanilla Old Ones to use the way in which Planet Loki terraforms planets on planets that had been colonized for non-vanilla Old Ones as ones that were completely uninhabited at the same time as being potentially habitable had run out. The terraforming process would kill any non-vanilla Old Ones on these planets and, faced with potential death either way, they rose up.
There was a lot of chaos, many factions, warlords rising etc but the important thing was that there ended up being several dozen times more planet-uninhabitable-izing weapons than planet terraformers at the same time as the destroyers being much quicker at their work. Over time, the Old Ones almost completely died out. Loki was glassed. Every Old One planet was glassed. Perfect.
The only known surviving remnant of the Old One race was aboard a sexy ship. They barely managed to repair a terraforming device and use it on a planet for their use. This was a very long time after the war ended, as in millions of years, but they were convinced it might still be raging and so kept a low profile, living underground and using Time Compression/Bending to slow down the growth of their civilization. This would become The New Old One Empire
Anyhow, Earth and Loki linked up. Loki was like "huh if the Old Ones murdered everything this clearly is an Old One world let me terraform myself to be more like it and then terraform lots of other planets to also be more like it yes this is truly a perfect plan". Well, Loki isn't technically capable of thought so this was just the programming being a little broken and going through a lot of defaults but eh.
Time passed. A lot of time passed. Wow time you're really passing there why don't you pass me your number? What do you mean you're in a relationship with space already you broke up with continuum like a week ago? Well you're clearly rushing into a relationship that's just gonna make things confusing and complicated? Me, a hypocrite? I'd prove you wrong if I had any idea what that means!
Fun fact: intelligent sloths formed on Earth and went to Loki, then other planets, due to harshening weather conditions where they lived. They died out on both Earth and Loki. Those that got to the other planets would form several space empires that would be conquered by The LIR or League of Intelligent Races.
Long before humanity was the rise of Goners (3-4 foot tall lizard/velociraptor people).
The Goners were divided into many nations on their home planet, vying for economical, political and especially military dominance. Some of these nations made GMO supersoldiers who proceeded to go rogue and take over the world. Nice. They established an oppressive government and took to the stars. Double nice.
Their space empire encountered the Bulls and proceeded to VERY violently conquer them.
SIDENOTE: The Bulls are basically huge obese rabbit-like creatures averaging 10 feet tall. They were divided into many small kingdoms and clerics were very politically powerful. They didn't really have any problems with food due to their slow reproduction and thriving agriculture and didn't care that much about anything else and so most wars were for personal reasons, which is a funny way of saying that royalty often squabbled with one another and would then yeet armies at one another in wars that, when taking the amount of resources they had into account, were very small-scale. They had a natural love of the colour green and so emeralds were often a thing of the nobility and a rich culture of story-telling.
Anyhow, yes, the Goners conquered the Bulls and proceeded to use them as manual labour for how ridiculously strong they are. The majority of their adult population was killed. Oof.
The Goners would go on to conquer another race that I can't even be bothered to mention stuff about, let alone make an article for, before they encountered the Claws and the Toppers (top lads in the LIR).
The Toppers and Claws were in the midst of a cold war and arms race with one another at the same time as living in the same ring of Old One planets that had been terraformed by Loki and had many portals between them. They teamed up on the Goners.
The Goners got wrecked and the Toppers and Claws formed the LIR, which would be a rival to the Goners up until the fall of the Goner Empire. They actively searched for more races and had on-and-off wars with the Goners, during which the Goners themselves got 2 more races in their arsenal.
The Goners found Earth and its inhabitants, Mostly Hairless Monkeys Without Tails (Humans). This resulted in The Early Early Human-Goner War: the 1st Invasion. and The entirety of the human-Goner war.
The Goners sent their first invasion force, which consisted solely of 20 colonization ships and 1/2 a billion untrained volunteer fighters who were meant to serve as the colonizers immediately afterwards, so that the citizens of their empire could get a morale boost to distract them from how the LIR was winning.
Things went very wrong for these colonizers. Firstly their commander had them ram straight into Earth's lower atmosphere rather than make a slow descent as he wanted a surprise attack on the humans. This led to the deaths of most of his forces and all of his ships being severely damaged or destroyed. This was due to the fact that Earth is being orbited by a lot of artificial satellites that these Goners would've been aware of if they hadn't jumped straight onto that invasion button or the commander had at least observed before he went in.
They landed in South Africa and, after some infighting as many didn't like their commander, went about conquering the continent. General Aramis or General Aramis, since one of those articles is broken, got jazzy in this time.
They conquered Europe and the Middle East all the way until their main opponents were the UK, Nordic Union, China, India and Russia. They were, however, pushed back and the United Commonwealth was formed in West Europe and Africa. The USA and other nations in the Americas didn't directly+openly do anything as the Goners promised they only wanted Africa, followed by that they only wanted Europe and Asia.
15 years later, the Goners sent a second invasion force consisting of actual soldiers and 1 billion troops. They split their forces to simultaneously attack Northern Siberia, Indochina, Australia, Mexico, Greenland, South America and Antarctica (specifically setting up fortresses there). Those in Northern Siberia sent a portion of their forces into Alaska to prevent the USA, which had built up an even bigger military than it already had, from getting involved.
They also built a base on Mars 1 but this was destroyed by a politician's daughter getting a nuclear bomb put in her stomach, pretending she had a C-section when she was 13 when asked about the scar (she'd never been pregnant, ever) and being used as a hostage kept in the Mars base... where she proceeded to explode, killing all the other hostages but also all the Goners that had been held in reserve and the leaders of this invasion.
The invasion in Northern Siberia and Indochina sandwiched China until Japan, having just made a deal that China become Japan's puppet, dealt with both forces with the massive robotnik hordes it had built up by this point. The Japanese+Chinese merged military, alongside that of the Indian Republics, destroyed the Indochina invasion and freed the islands of Oceania. Australia was liberated by Japanese forces. Russia was very helpful (*coughs* most of the work *coughs*) in dealing with the Siberians.
The Alaskan Goners were met by the US military, who the Canadian government thought had come to conquer them as they weren't aware of the Goners and surrendered to, much to the annoyance of the military commanders who would've actually stood a decent chance against the USA's military (the odds weren't in their favour but I'm just saying Canada's pretty gangsta in HOI4), and crushed when the Canadian forces merged with them. Canada was like "okay so that capitulation was a joke haha let us go" and the USA was like "oh but humanity needs to be united we'll let you go afterwards for now let's just coordinate our resources"... Canada would become an official part of the USA after the invasion.
The Mexican Invasion broke the Mexican and Central American militaries and invaded into Texas, where they were slowed down by heavily armed US volunteer fighters and the remnants of the Mexican military before the US and Canadian militaries, having just fought in Alaska, rolled on down to deal with the Goners there. Mexico also became part of the USA.
The USA and Japan, along with all their puppets, invaded South America and then split it in equal halves between them.
The Goners in Greenland were taken out by the Nordic Union and those in Antarctica by United Commonwealth.
This was very bad for the Goners. The humans now had blueprints for all the Goner tech, lots of knowledge about the Goner empire, had humiliated the Goners twice now and provided a potential hammer to go with the LIR anvil. So they made a 15-year peace deal with the humans. And another when that one ran out.
6 years into that second peace deal, humanity, now more-or-less united into the 6 nations of United States, United Commonwealth, Russian Federation + puppets, Indian Republics, Nordic Union and The Oriental Empire (aka: Japan and its unofficial vassals), broke said peace deal by launching an invasion with Goner remover 9000 and destroying the Goner economy while its military was engaged with the LIR.
This was done by going to Goner planets and threatening to deploy the virus if the population didn't surrender, almost always with it being used if they didn't and sometimes even when they did. The Indian Republics had a policy of using it right away. The planets could then be captured by small task forces that the fleet would leave behind while it went to other planets.
This led to the defeat of the Goners and humanity getting almost all of its territory, which annoyed the LIR. The LIR offered humanity a place in its ranks which humanity turned down. The LIR, now without the enemy that had originally united it, tried to class humanity as the new enemy. However, their economy was ruined from fighting the Goners, they had pirates to deal with, it'd take ages to gather another army now that it had disintegrated due to soldiers going back to their families and there wasn't exactly any rush to conquer the humans as they were just a little over 100 billion spread across lots of Goner planets and rebuilding what they had destroyed so that they could use it themselves.
Nice.
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Okay back to the history of space empires. The human race was divided into 6 empires whose alliance more-or-less dissolved. Theater wars over individual planets occurred often and so did Humanity War 3, which was luckily not very extreme and just a case of every empire being involved in a theater war over the same planet.
The The Goner Uprising and Incursion occurred between the major wars, in which the remaining Goners went "hoes mad" and rebelled against the 6 nations, only to be put down by the Insurgents, who were a mixture of ex-military and civilians being supplied weapons by the nations, who then themselves tried to create a United Human Nation by rebelling against the 6 nations, only to lose.
Then Humanity War 4 happened. Ohhh boy:
So the Indian Republics decides it's gonna be an asshole and take a Russian planet by claiming "oh it's population is mostly Indian migrants therefore it should be Indian property" to which Russia replied "BS they chose to leave your overpopulated excuse for a nation it's mine and I KNOW you're just in it for the uranium mantle this planet has".
This spiraled out of control when the United Commonwealth and Oriental Empire decided to back up the Russian Federation through use of warcrimes committed by the Indian Republics as an excuse and the United States and Nordic Union proceeded to make their soldiers and commanders *emigrate into the Indian Republics, join the Indian Republics military and then be in their own separate units* at the same time as loaning them ships and weapons until the Indian Republics said they were gonna reap all the spoils of war for themselves and keep the ships/weapons so the United States and Nordic Union openly came out as allies of the Indian Republics, took their soldiers and weapons and ships back and attacked the United Commonwealth, Oriental Empire and Russian Federation directly. The NUUSIR beat the UCWOERF and got 15% of their territory and reparations.
This wrecked all of their economies, especially those of the losers. Quite a while, as in over a decade and in 2203, and many more theater wars later, coups were performed in the United Commonwealth and The Oriental Empire (aka: Japan and its unofficial vassals). These 2 nations then invaded the Nordic Union to form the UHN. They then went to war with the Indian Republics, United States and Russian Federation + puppets in what came to be known as The Unification War.
The UHN, over the course of 22 years, won what became a war of attrition and absorbed the remaining 3 nations, finally uniting humanity.
Meanwhile the LIR had to deal with the Sagwalli Revolt/Great Revolt (one thing led to another). They organised an invasion of humanity while it was tearing itself apart and weakened but the Sagwalli Templar, whom'st they'd left behind to guard the LIR and its citizens from pirates and outside threats, decided to attack the LIR because the majority of its citizens did not worship the Toppers (top lads in the LIR). The LIR military had to turn around to deal with this and it was just a giant mess that resulted in lots of warlords, the Avians empire getting dummy thicc, rebellions and the LIR just being in a mess for the next 150 years as it dealt with all the problems that resulted from this, during which the Sagwalli and Tartles, the majority races of the Sagwalli Templar, were heavily used as punishment for causing the problem.
During those 150 years, the CHG came to power. Yasee, the UHN was corrupt as f*ck and was bending over backwards for megacorps like NielCorp and this caused a lot of suffering for the people, who rose up in the The Great Rebellion. These rebels were crushed by the military but it then became clear that the government couldn't pay the military so the heads of it were like "'ight, Imma conquer humanity" and formed the CHG. They fought mercenary armies hired by megacorps and loyalists of the UHN military but ultimately won, seizing ownership of all the megacorps they fought and merging them into CHG Incorporated. They then established extreme militarism, high rewards for being in the military and would then proceed to be more and more lenient with time as more complex internal issues came along. They also got the help of pirates such as Zee Pirate Confederation to win this war... who they proceeded to reward with "stop being pirates and you won't be imprisoned+get military pensions, or join the military. You can't keep being pirates".
Later on, the CHG would find Planet Loki and after that would create Jeff the insanely intelligent AI who would invent Time Compression/Bending for humanity and other really advanced tech such as Matter Duplication using Exotic Matter, etc.
Jeff built the The Infinity Base and figured out how to screw with Planet Loki's computer systems to make it terraform the planets that the Infinity Base churned out. Old timezone tech found around Loki from the Old Ones, who had extremely advanced timezone gear (x10,000 at times) was used to speed up this terraforming. The surface of Loki was cleansed of non-human intelligent species while the humans were subject to kidnapping for use as record-free troops/agents, having any advanced tech they made destroyed and other general muckery.
Then The Jeff/Geff Wars happened. Jeff found out that life sucked for most CHG citizens and decided to use an army of robotniks that he took control over to rebel against the CHG by taking over the internet in an internet zone of the CHG, this particular one of which took up 1/12 of its area and was pressed against the LIR. He acquired other AIs to more efficiently use robotniks. He wanted to establish a utopia where people were happy, free, prosperous, safe and, most of all, alive.
Geff betrayed and ate him, the LIR invaded the CHG but ended up fighting Le Automatic Empire instead, the AIs were divided and everything, as always, was very messy.
End result: Geff destroyed, the LIR invasion forces destroyed, the remaining AIs had to flee into the LIR and created a death-zone there where they fight one another with robotnik hordes and destroy any ships they find, LIR or CHG, that pass through. The CHG keeps the technology Jeff gave them, as well as the existence of the Infinity Base and Planet Loki, secret so that the LIR can't get the tech itself and become too much of a threat. None of the AIs are capable of comprehending the tech and the CHG government's humans just know how to operate the machines and follow the guidelines Jeff had previously put in place.
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The LIR and CHG can't invade one another as much anymore due to that deathzone and how ridiculously well-defended they are outside of it, and so focus their efforts elsewhere.
The CHG's "Outter Worlds" at the time had a lot of autonomy because of how orders, soldiers and resources took ages to get there - or at least those assigned to manage them were allowed to do pretty much what they liked so long as they remembered to pay their tributes to the main government. This wasn't the case anymore and, now that The Jeff/Geff Wars were concluded, it was actually possible to divert resources to relinquishing those outter worlds of that pesky autonomy. Many of these Outter Worlds, having been allowed to have their own quick-response militaries and larger Defense Force units to slow down enemies before the full force of one of The Colour Armies (technically seperate but they all operate in the same manner) came along, decided to rebel against this. This motivated even more to join them.
The Outter Worlds were up against superior numbers as the core worlds had been inhabited longer and had more planets in them due to planet construction, superior equipment from Jeff's blueprints, superior soldiers as very few in the Outter Worlds had actually fought in The Jeff/Geff Wars unlike the veterans of the Core Worlds, superior tactics, superior organization and yeah you get the point they got their asses handed to them.
Having fully established control of itself, the CHG looked around beyond its borders with astonishment: there were no alien space empires on its side of the LIR, at least not that they knew of. Sure, there were human ones that had been set up by megacorps, pirate groups, adventurers etc getting away from the 6 Nations / UHN / CHG. Due to the ability to literally build planets, expansion was much more for security than resources...
The process of expansion for the CHG was quite simple:
1: Colonize anything which hasn't been colonized within reasonable reach of the CHG
2. Conquer the empires between those colonized areas, with those in charge of those empires being allowed into high-paying positions in local governments if they surrender quickly.
3. Everything beyond that can't be controlled, much like how the Outter Worlds used to be. Make the empires there into puppet states and allow the colonists there to do what they like, so long as they pay tribute.
This was pretty neat.
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Wow. That's a lot of words.