This article is basically a junk room for stuff that isn't worth giving its own article.

I'm almost at the limit of articles I can have and so am oh-so-cruelly forced to make this article for all the things that can be summed up quickly or just aren't worth using up my limited article count for. Feel free to ask anything about the world in the comments and I will answer it both in reply and within the article itself, even if there's another article answering the Q as I'm aware of how *ahem* undesirable searching through all my articles to find out a specific thing would be... questions about me will just be answered in reply.

RFisher asks: how advanced is human augmentation?

Well I guess it's humour-dropping time because we're about to delve into some stuff that even I, the person who came up with it, find kinda disturbing.

Somewhere between Halo and WH40K. The CHG keeps a lot of tech secret from the general public so that outside empires don't learn how to use it as well and so that megacorps can't use it against the government and this includes much of the stuff regarding human augmentation.

GMO: if you have unnatural genes (someone with cystic fibrosis can get themselves cured, but not get night vision at the same time) you're automatically a slave. Someone that gets modified in their life will usually see the loss of all rights and themselves becoming government property, most likely to be "sold" (the CHG retains the right to snatch them back at any time without compensation) to a megacorp, and have their fertility removed - possibly with additional genetic modification to make their gametes useless so that even if certain bodyparts grow back they can't "taint" the genes of the general population. The CHG has banned anyone other than itself from giving out genetic modifications to or artificial production of humans, both of which it uses to produce infertile GMO slaves that it "sells" to megacorps so that they don't just secretly make their own GMO slaves and to make them reliant on the CHG not to suddenly withdraw their slaves. Nobody aside from the CHG is allowed to sell GMOs, with exception to GMOs being sold to the CHG, so that megacorps don't just foster reliance on one another rather than the CHG. The CHG also puts rules in place on how GMO slaves can be used, basically summarized as "no letting them talk to anyone outside the company (no customer services, prostitution, working at tills, etc) or have positions of power (managing a factory or piloting a ship, for example)", with those areas of working being filled by people in the cases where dumb AIs (ones without, for example, the capacity to cause a robot rebellion) won't do the trick. GMO slaves aren't allowed to enter anything legally classed as a settlement. Of course, whoever owns a slave can do what they like with it, assuming it doesn't violate the regulations, with GMO slaves often being beaten, drugged, killed and raped. An owner may let the GMO have something, like a toy or some food, but it's the owner's property.

GMO slaves are made by genetically modifying gametes using artificial viruses, slamming the sperm and eggs together and sticking the embryos in artificial wombs so that the babies, which grow very fast in there, can be removed. They're then taught the basics of language, some basic maths, loyalty to the CHG, and then sold to their megacorps.

Cyborgification and medicine: Medical is okay, but nothing that gives a distinct advantage. This means your robot arm that you got yourself into massive debt for after that shrapnel from a space ship collision removed the normal one isn't allowed to be stronger than a human arm can naturally be. This especially applies to anything that might help in a fight. Organs can be grown using stem cells in labs that no body's immune system will reject but these are expensive, even if they are unlikely to need replacement like the mechanical ones, are far more comfortable than the mechanical ones, and are allowed to be made gangsta af unlike the mechanical ones. VR headsets can be used for placebo purposes, like making someone ripped af in mere weeks, and there are *coughs* other non-genetic non-cyborgish augmentations available (this includes making it so that your pp size matches your big pp energy). That said: it's all expensive af and getting literally any one of these would put most people into debts so deep their great grand-kids will be trying to pay it off.

Nanobotniks: whether they induce certain hormones, strengthen bodyparts, or something else these bois can be pretty useful in human augmentation - often without anyone knowing their bodies are full of the things. The Population Program and some of its consequences delves pretty deep there, but the hint is that nanobotniks can make people ultra fertile without the need to genetically modify them... or for them to be aware of it. On top of that the nanobotniks can be remotely controlled under certain circumstances which means all sorts of fun... like inducing heart attacks.

Military: In order to genetically modify soldiers (who are infertile during their service, even if that doesn't stop them from *coughs* stress-relieving activities), viruses are used that genetically modify every cell in the body. At the end of their service, they get hit with a different, specially made for them virus that undoes the genetic modifications. This is because viruses are actually awesome when you use them right, as the way viruses kill people is genetically modifying their cells to produce tonnes more of the virus that then go out, often through the cells exploding from how full of virus they are, and then infecting other cells, with the damage they do to the cells in the process, as well as any weird stuff the cells do because of the modifications, being what harms people. One merely has to swap out the DNA they're inserting for DNA that's useful, rather than that which makes more viruses, get tonnes of the new modified virus, and fun times are ahead. The military also has all sorts of other fun things like clones with memories uploaded onto them, cyborgifications that DO give advantages, GMOs made specifically for the military, and so on.

But what does this amount to? Well, the average The Colour Armies (technically seperate but they all operate in the same manner) soldier is about equal to a Gen 4 spartan without extra gear, but would be able to have a fair fight with the Master Chief when the fact that their combat suits are even cooler than Halo's combat suits (which, credit to Fries, Jones, Bakken, Pottinger, Pfeiffer, Miller and anyone else involved in them, are totally awesome) is taken into consideration. Crikey.

Dave, who's very grateful for the article Helpful peeps for your own stuff cos some dude called Dave asked me about it on the bus for his alternate reality My Little Pony fanfics:, asks: What's the layout of the CHG?

At the core of the CHG and home to around 90% of Mostly Hairless Monkeys Without Tails (Humans) are the Core Worlds. Yeah, real inventive naming but to be fair most cool and inventive place names you know of weren't cool or inventive back when they were first in use. This is more or less Solar Terra, which is a funny way of saying our solar system, and initially 6, having gone up to 42, solar systems. The main factors for the high population are that these areas have been inhabited the longest and, as a result, have the most history at the same time as almost all of the artificial planets being built here - hint: if it's named after a mythical deity followed by a number more than 1, it's probably located here. Additionally, this is where The Population Program and some of its consequences has been enacted fairly heavily.

The CHG used to have a very tight grip on everything here but the rate of growth is out-stripping what the CHG can keep track of, which is both amazing and awful for the CHG as megacorps, planetary governments and individual colonies are starting to get away with bad things WITHOUT making sure to bribe a healthy number of CHG officials first but at the same time the CHG's pool of resources to call upon in any situation is so much larger - like if you had an exponentially growing supply of food that you could make tonnes of money off of that then proceeded to be infested with rats and it becomes a question of whether your food grows fast enough for you to get enough weapons to crush the growing number of rats but then some of the rats help you sell the food so you don't know which ones to kill and not to and it becomes a huge rat-political mess.

Why do this? Security. The Core Worlds are nice and relatively safe from outside attacks due to those blankets of Outter Worlds so it makes sense to build up there - where the costs of said building up are less likely to be rewarded with the planet being snatched by an outside entity like the LIR or a breakaway movement do to the formation of a different culture having any chance of success.

Speaking of which we've got the Defensive Worlds at the CHG-LIR border, as well as at the CHG's borders with any other especially feisty empires (just kidding there aren't any the LIR is the only empire that can touch the CHG in terms of both range and toughness), which have higher Defense Force memberships and are home to The Shield Tribes but are deliberately kept low-value to reduce the incentive for outsiders to snatch them up, at the same time as high-security to make it harder for anyone to take up on what little incentive is there. Most of these worlds were actually conquered off of the LIR, who regularly tries, and sometimes succeeds, to take them back.

The Outter Worlds are a little bit of a Wild West due to how the CHG can't enforce any rules other than "give us X amount of this and Y amount of that or we send a massive invasion force that'll take months or years to show up". This leaves megacorps, semi-autonomous governing bodies and so on able to get away with a lot more so long as they remember to pay their tributes.

The Frontier Worlds are the Outter Worlds but on crack. Tonnes of Old Ones Version 2 tech to scavenge, lots of robotnik Old One ships going around and destroying any space ships they find being perfect for preventing the rise of interstellar civilizations* without said ships posing a real threat to CHG megacorp fleets, the military forces the CHG sends in such as The Orange or Exploration Army being more concerned with tech-grabbing, conquest of the single-planet civilizations and so on than actual law enforcement beyond "if we tell you to get out of our way or give us something we've got the guns to make you do it". A good way beyond this is The New Old One Empire which is just waiting to notice this CHG expansionism and reveal exactly why it was they were on top of the galaxy not to long ago.

*Most of these civilizations contain the same species as the LIR, including humans, as they're mostly there due to seeding ships (the inhabitants take hundreds or thousands of years in stasis to reach their destinations, or there are no inhabitants and the inhabitants are grown in robotnik labs to colonize the place) and portal-waltzing on Planet Loki. There are like 20 different intelligent races within the Orion Arm, tops.

Fast version: core worlds include Earth, have 90+% of population, where all artificial planets are made using The Infinity Base and Planet Loki go, CHG used to control real good but growth is outstripping what CHG can control. Defensive Worlds are crapholes where everyone is in the military and there are guns everywhere. Outter Worlds are basically their own nations that pay tribute to the CHG. Frontier worlds are a front of exploration, tech scavenging, easy conquest, in general just a sci-fi wild west and a ticking time bomb as the Old Ones aren't too far beyond them. There are worlds between the Outter and Core worlds, as well as Outter worlds that are well-connected to the Core, which are considered a grey area in that the CHG has perfectly good control over them but still doesn't do much for them, meaning they get the worst of both worlds.

If you want to know more about anything else from what the average guy eats to whether or not everyone is canonically descended from you (maybe? The cloning, genetic modifications and whatnot throws it into a lot of grey areas even if there were so much as a 10% chance of you ever adding to humanity's forces you nervous train-wreck of a terrible flirter) just lemmeknow and I'll add it here or give it its own article, which will require it to be a real jazzy thing as I'm having to delete articles to make room for more articles (F in the chat for all the articles I made solely for jokes rather than for a mixture of interesting worldbuilding and jokes, some of them might be summarized here so they're not lost to the potential of being viewed by your tainted eyes). The newest things will always be at the top of the article for ease of reading so that you don't have to learn about how well the lemon trade is doing, potentially for the billionth time, to learn how well the orange trade is doing.