Imperial Ministry of Production
The Imperial Ministry of Production is, in fact, a Ministry. Of course not of the Third Empire, whose equivalent of the ruling Cabinet is a rather informal Imperial Council. It is one of the two surviving ministries of the Second Empire, that continue to exist in the modern age - and unlike the Imperial Ministry of Interior Affairs it inherited more than just a name.
The current microempire of the Ministry is in a way the sole remaining bastion of the Second Empire - relatively enlightened, meritocratic, religious but in no overwhelmingly devout way, with the religion having more to do with upholding certain rituals to keep the connection between the Gods and Mortals as it should be and less with personal devotion.
It also controls almost the entirety of the imperial production (and, to a lesser degree, healthcare), with special focus on the heavy industry. The result for this is the Twilight War - when the Hexmachina began its rampage, the remnants of the Ministry were tasked with the role of restoring anything that remained of the imperial industry into working condition, a monumental task during the war of extermination and with the entire industry in the state of complete disarray.
It might have been monumental - but the result was a success, to the best of the ministry's abilities. However the de-facto nationalization of all means of industrial production has survived for way longer than anyone expected, with the Ministry's grip remaining steadfast for more than five centuries. It had to partially outsource the production, as the maintainment of war economy for centuries was simply impossible. But majority of it is still under firm control of the Ministry.
The Ministry is known for being impartial - in part because it is mentally living in the Second Empire. It respects the government (or what passes for it in the Third Empire, namely the Grand Emperors) and is genuinely doing its best to maintain the technomaturgic and production base of the Empire, dealing with all legal organizations and law-abiding citizens within its borders equally. Naturally, maintaining its neutrality is going to be a great problem in the age when the civil war looms at the horizon.
Structure
The organizational structure of the Imperial Ministry of Production is directly connected with the skill level in your particular craft. The modern Ministry incorporates elements of meritocracy, anarchosyndycalism and direct democracy into one, seamless whole - with the meritocracy part being the most important.
The members of the Ministry are divided between Apprentices, Adepts and Masters. The Apprentices are people who aren't yet considered competent enough in their trade to be 'full' members of the Ministry. They continue to learn the necessary skills for approximately five years (for some it's longer, for some it's shorter) until they prove their skills in exam (both theoretical and practical) and are accepted as Adepts.
Adepts are what passes for regular members of the Ministry. Close to 85% of the Imperial Ministry of Production's members are adepts - they are competent craftsmen of a multitude of crafts, who are (provided that they aren't contract slaves) allowed to run workshops on their own, either within the fabricae or outside of it (as part of the 'workforce outsourcing' program.
Then are the Masters. It is rare for someone to achieve that level - less than one in twenty craftsmen will reach the lowest (of ten) grades of recognized Mastery. Being recognized as one is a massive achievement, which signifies great ability on a single craft. Naturally, their works are extremely valuable - and their political power within the Ministry of Production greatly overshadows the Adepts.
Every fabricae is divided into three Sections, who are then divided into numerous subsections, depending on the local specialties and available crafts. Those three sections are Alchemy, Shaping and Techmaturgy. The subsections will include (for example) Glassmaking, Metalworking and Armorcrafting for the Shaping, Medicine and Industrial Alchemy for the Alchemy, and Networkscaping and Autofactory Operations for the Techmaturgy.
Each subsection votes on their own, with their vote value depending on membership number. When majority of for example Alchemy section votes for, the entire Alchemy section is considered to have voted yes - if two sections vote yes, the entire fabricae voted yes. When 75% of Masters of a subsection voted yes, the Adepts aren't even called to vote.
To avoid having to decide everything by voting - which isn't the most efficient way of governance - every section elects a single Fabricator, with three of them being tasked with running the Fabricae and making day-to-day decisions. They are supported by the Subfabricators (of the subsections). They do not have to be Masters - in fact, majority of them are Adepts that proved efficient when it comes to making bureaucratic decisions and ensuing steady supply of resources.
All of the Fabricators respond to the High Fabricator, elected by them from their midst to act as their representative within the Imperial Council, while also acting as the de facto head of the Ministry. Once again, they do not need to be Masters - instead they are supposed to be knowledgeable on fields of diplomacy and logistics.
The different branch of the Ministry of Production are the medicine-oriented alchemist-surgeons that are trained as a part of the Ministry but are pretty much on a semi-permanent basis 'lent' to various hospitals run by city councils of many imperial cities and towns. They are trained because alchemy is just as useful for that as it is for the industry, and the Ministry managed to devour its education entirely at some point.
History
Second Empire
The industry of the Second Empire was truly grand. With casual teleportation the logistical issue were all but gone - the factory could be on the other end of the Empire from the settlements producing the resources it needed, but it would still have them permanently at hand. This allowed the industry to reach the heights previously unimagineable - especially as the production facilities well practically fully automated.
The ownership of those autofactories was primarily private, with the Ministry of Production (known as Ministry of Industry back then) being more concerned with providing detailed statistics of the industrial growth to the government than to actually organize or own anything. Its actual power over the Industry was very limited, in fact almost non-existent. There has been a limited in size public industry (mainly concerning certain 'strategic' branches of industry), but even on that fields there were also privately owned companies to complement the public sector.
Twilight War
The first ten minutes of the Twilight War has decimated the Ministry's leadership - the Hexmachina's initial decapitation strike against the capital has eliminated almost all members of the government and majority of the headquarters of governmental organizations. The only (partial) exception were the headquarters of the Imperial Army - it was connected to the Military Subnetwork (and thus wasn't directly overtaken by the Hexmachina) and its combat robots and warforged soldiers repelled the assault after seven hours of fierce combat that saw more than a half of the complex thoroughly destroyed.
When the true scale of the disaster became apparent to the surviving members of imperial military leadership, announcement of the martial law was pretty much a given. The remnants of the governments complied. The members of the Ministry of Production (gathered from the surroundings of the Roma) were tasked with reorganizing and securing as much of the remaining industrial power of the Empire in order to allow the Army to continue waging the war against the Hexmachina.
Ministry of Industry continued their tireless work until the conclusion of the Twilight War - although to be honest it was more of a Ministry of Logistics at this point, as majority of its job was figuring out how to transfer resouces from the mines or agriculture complexes on one end of the Empire to the surviving autofactories on the other end, as the teleportation was no longer an option. This fact (the monopolization of logistics) is also the reason why moden healthcare is provided by
Third Empire
The end of the Twilight War was accompanied by two things. First was the wave of the Fallen - while they become known first during the War, they were still too busy trying to stop the Hexmachina to become a serious nuisance. Now, they had a free reign - and with the Lost Lands devouring the mutilated carcass of the Empire it wasn't hard to turn from nuisance to menace. This rather quickly buried any hopes of swift restoration of the Second Era.
The second one was the Descent. As millions of the ancient Dead descended to at least partially repopulate the world (and vanished once their children began growing up), they brought something more than manpower with them. Namely, the outdated methods of crafting - the ones more mystical, that the Empire has abandoned during the Second Era in favour of the techmaturgy. Now empowered by the Artifex, these mystical methods turned out to be surprisingly powerful.
That was the birth of Shaping, which became the best (and most likely only) complement to the remaining autofactories, the method that - however manual and occasionally far from the scientific cleanliness of the techmaturgy - has allowed to create the modern Ministry (at some point renamed to the Ministry of Production).
Territories
Majority of the Ministry of Production' activity is centralized in the so-called fabricae - self-contained industry-oriented city, typically a single one within the province. They are normally placed around the place where some pre-Twilight War autofactory was discovered, unless it was possible to move them to a more advantageous position.
The fabricae is a sprawling complex of workshops, storage areas and quarters for workers, apprentices and adepts alike. In its midst typically lies the Spire - a tall building which acts as the inner fortress, the vault for truly valuable resources and products, quarters for the masters and the fabricators (plus subfabricators), main power generation facility, and the autofabricators themselves (provided that they are contained in the separate subdimensions, like most of them).
Of course, there are also external facilities. Sometimes a resource collected somewhere has to be pre-processed before transport. Plus there are also some outsourced facilities - many contract slaves with an adept rank (or adepts ranks with need for some practice) end up 'hired out' to do maintenance work in workshops placed throughout their provinces - workshops belong to the local oligarchs who pay to be able to borrow Ministry's personnel.
Military
Combat Units
Mortals
Guardians - The wealth possessed by the fabricae is quite notable. Besides, the production techniques, autofactories and mastercrafted goods are increadibly valuable on their own. As a result, the Fallen often try to attack the fabricae, especially as its collapse is a massively blow to the imperial resistance in the province - having to import crucial military supplies from another province is a major blow to imperial logistics.
To defend them, the Ministry is allowed to field its own armed forces. The Guardians are typically former soldiers of the vassal states that were seconded to the local fabricae in exchange of the industrial goods. They are equipped with a combat equipment that's in fact based on dumbed down and offline designs of the Second Era' security and law enforcement gear (which, in turn, used to be the military equipment sometime during the mid-Second Era).
They are decently loyal, although far from showing the degree of loyalty that for example templars of the Imperial Cult or the soldiers of the Imperial Army are known for. But they are good enough to offer significant resistance to any attacks on the Fabricae, unless those are truly overwhelming in scale.
Custodians - Custodians started as a byproduct of the Second Era' ascensionist movement, famous for striving to improve the inhabitants of the Empire beyond what the Empire itself was willing to accept. The Custodians were supposed to be cutting-edge techmaturgic bodies of metal and crystal, mimicing (primarily) human body to the greatest degree possible - that were going to be inhabited by the souls and minds of the imperial inhabitants.
While the ascensionists were dismantled by the Empire before they managed to fulfill their goals, the design itself was further refined and stored in some of the numerous imperial datavaults. Since it was one of the military databases (for reasons not exactly clear), it managed to survive the Twilight War and was ressurected by the Ministry of Production when it was discovered that the remaining Hexmachina's hunter/killer program spirits seem to be ignoring the custodian using the Network unless they make some truly suspicious things (like trying to download data from the data vaults).
Today the custodians are very human-looking techmaturgy-powered robots that are capable of using the remaining Second Era techmaturgic relics, at least on the battlefield. Their construction is INCREDIBLY expensive - and the command models that are actually mostly sapient (unlike their almost psychopathic by-the-letter kins) are way costlier.
Combat Machines - While the Legiones Mechanica of the Imperial Army have kept control over the majority of the Second Era arsenal, the Ministry of Production has quite a bit of more contemporary equivalents. Some of those are civilian machines modified towards combat. Others are improvised machines made through a combination of shaping and simple techmaturgy.
The result is the vast arsenal of artillery guns and combat constructs that are often deployed by the forces of the Ministry - although mostly during the defensive operations on the walls and streets of the fabricae. The Ministry rarely sends their forces outside of them, as the risk of losing valuable (and expensive) machines and soldiers is way too high.
Type: Faction.
Allegiance: Grand Empire of Karadia
Imperial Council: Yes.
Organization Ranks:
Apprentice - Trainee, not a regular member.
Adept - "Regular" craftsmen, engineers and alchemists..
Master -Recognized master of a craft, with ten ranks to advance through.
Combat Strength
Guardian - Est. 1 000 000.
Custodian - Est. 10 000.
Combat Machines - Unknown Number.
Allegiance: Grand Empire of Karadia
Imperial Council: Yes.
Organization Ranks:
Apprentice - Trainee, not a regular member.
Adept - "Regular" craftsmen, engineers and alchemists..
Master -Recognized master of a craft, with ten ranks to advance through.
Combat Strength
Guardian - Est. 1 000 000.
Custodian - Est. 10 000.
Combat Machines - Unknown Number.
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