<em>Civilizations have been attempting to eke out an existence in the endless void for millennia. Traditionally, once a civilization is no longer at the mercy of the forces that guide the universe it can start to mature properly. This happened more than once. Inevitably multiple empires began to intersect. Contact was made for the first time between multiple sentient species. An era of war and slaughter prevailed for centuries until the costliness of endless war threatened to destroy dozens of cultures. <br/><br/>An agreement was made. A hesitant treaty between a sad few races to form a council. An interspecies government has never before been attempted. Cultural and biological barriers were a limiting thing. However the council has been formed not twenty years passed. <br/><br/>You are representing your species to the galactic community. You are contacted because you are either your people's sole leader or you are a representative diplomat for them. How you represent them is entirely up to you. What kind of tone will you establish for us to judge you by? <br/><br/>Below is a query. Your species is unknown and therefore an anamoly. Please brief the local keepers on a few key traits of your species so that we may better facilitate your induction into the council, should you choose to join. A basic file has been prepared for you. We trust your judgment when filling the basics out. It's fairly self-explanatory. </em><br/><br/><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;">credit to: TatersAndTots<br/><br/><strong>Race name:</strong><br/><strong>Race appearance:</strong><br/><strong>Number of Systems:</strong> Somewhere between 1-50 is okay. Any nation over 25 is... creaky, and suffers regional problems, which must be included in the Weaknesses (terrorist groups, revolts, slow reaction to threats, corruption, etc...)<br/><strong>Government Type:</strong><br/><strong>Religion(s):</strong><br/><strong>History:</strong><br/><strong>Values of your nation:</strong> hardwork, truth, war, discovery, peace, etc...<br/>National Traits: (For all of the traits, give a short statement on how each is related to your race)<br/><br/>Population Traits: ----------------^<br/><br/>Military Traits: -------------------^<br/><br/>Technical Traits: -----------------^<br/><br/>Historical Traits: -----------------^<br/><br/>Faults/Weaknesses: -------------^<br/><br/>Hyper-Tech: ---------------------^<br/><br/><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 0.7em;"><strong>TRAIT SYSTEM:</strong><br/>Each Nation gets a single trait from each category below. Plus seven extra traits to spend on any category except for Hyper-Technology and History. For each flaw you take you can take an extra trait. (one each  =6, + 7 anywhere-points = 13 traits total + 1 per flaw)<br/><br/>Some Traits can stack, making them more pronounced, those that cannot will have an * at the start of the name.<br/><br/><strong>National Traits:</strong><br/><strong>GETTING HUGE!:</strong> Your nation has a serious skyscraper, monument and battleship fetish and likes to build big. BIG. BIG.<br/><strong>The Mossad:</strong> What you know, I know.<br/><strong>Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti:</strong> We have not managed to gather any information on this trait. (KGB)<br/>*Implausibly Efficient Government: Your bureaucrats cut through red tape with machetes.<br/><strong>Fair Dinkum:</strong> Your state has a rep as a straight shooter (metaphorically) and an honest dealer (literally).<br/><strong>The only Party in town:</strong> The government controls everything. Including you. Especially you.<br/><strong>Free Market Boomtown:</strong> The nice thing about a corporate state is there's profits for everyone. The not so nice thing is that you have to go back to your cubicle now.<br/><strong>Industrial Heartland:</strong> Tank factories stretch to the horizon and shipyards fill the night sky with waste light.<br/><strong>*New Hollywood:</strong> A cultural centre of the galaxy. Everyone who's anyone has made their fame here.<br/><strong>Who Cares About Uzbekistan:</strong> Your polity is simply not on the galactic radar and thus avoids a lot of the Bad Shit that can go down. . .<br/><strong>Party Please:</strong> Your diplomats are just so good-natured or know so many skeleton-filled closets that they can get into strategically useful alliances much easier than others. Of course, then you need to live up to what you signed . . .<br/><strong>*Cargo Cultist:</strong> If freighters were warships, you'd blot out the stars with your fleet. You still do, but there's less gunfire involved.<br/><strong>Load-Bearing State:</strong> You remember all those times you beat up a boss and suddenly the castle collapsed? Well, you're kind of like that to the galactic economy.<br/><br/><strong>Population Traits:</strong><br/><strong>*Loyalty:</strong> A populace that through some reason or another is loyal to its government, through fear or "cookie day" it doesn't matter, these people are loyal.<br/><strong>*Hive:</strong> Through technological, psionic or even natural means these people share a hive-mind. (A hive automatically has this Trait) This makes infiltration almost impossible.<br/><strong>Man-Machine Interface:</strong> Thought the looking glass of circuitry and neurons into the uncharted territories of bioelectronic convergence.<br/><strong>SPACE MARINES!:</strong> Your people are physically superior specimens, with buff bodies and quick hands.<br/><strong>Cyberize!:</strong> Physical cybernetic modifications are rampant in your population. Not limited by mere biology like SPACE MARINES! but likewise not inherent just by being born. Sucks to be a copper.<br/><strong>Heroic Age:</strong> Your people see themselves as Spartan Heroes, not Persian Generals. Shame the Spartans made poor civilians . . .<br/><strong>Flag-Wavers:</strong> It doesn't matter what you do, you'll always win the elections. You must choose something particularly dear to your population that they wave flags about.<br/><strong>Eureka!:</strong> The desire to take things apart and figure out how they work runs deep in your people's blood.<br/><strong>Hard Workers:</strong> Your people really roll up their sleeves and work.<br/><strong>Stupidly Brave:</strong> Nobody would think of calling your people cowards.<br/><strong>Tough as a Coffin Nail:</strong> Your people are just ridiculously tough and can survive true environmental extremes. Requires SPACE MARINES!, Cyberize<br/><strong>Plain Jane:</strong> You get one additional National trait, but cannot choose any other Population Trait.<br/><br/><strong>Military Traits:</strong><br/><strong>High Speed, Low Drag:</strong> Hit and Run. Really quickly.<br/><strong>Tortoise and the Hare:</strong> Slow, steady and durable wins the race.<br/><strong>Network-Paradigm Processor:</strong> Communism in warfare? Unheard of!<br/><strong>Battleships!:</strong> You've got a lot more battleships than most people. Also comes in other variants. (You could take is "Carriers!" or "Destroyers!" or "Super-Capitals!" potentially)<br/><strong>*Armament De-Regulation:</strong> Who puts 16" guns on freighters? You do!<br/><strong>Army General Staff:</strong> Your focus is mostly on taking and holding ground with troops, be that planets, space stations or hostile warships.<br/><strong>*Awesome Training:</strong> This trait is only worth one, but costs two because people are munchkins.<br/><strong>Death Spiraller:</strong> Why buy ten fighters when you can buy one five times as good?<br/><strong>Knife in the Back:</strong> You prefer the silence of a SPF strike to the brutishness of a battle line bombardment.<br/><strong>*Strategic Weapons Stockpiler:</strong> You put the Strategic Air Command to shame.<br/><strong>Ninja Space pirate:</strong> Arr matey! You'll never escape our pirate U-Boats!<br/><strong>Dispersed Operations:</strong> All spaceships can go quite a while without resupply and operate without fleets. Yours are optimized for this.<br/><strong>Space Trenches:</strong> If it was possible to dig holes in space-time to provide cover for your battleships, you'd do so.<br/><strong>A Penny Saved:</strong> Just because a cruiser is two generations behind the state of the art doesn't mean its useless!<br/><strong>Main Guns!:</strong> The age of the battleship is back with a vengeance, this time with spinally-mounted cannons for all.<br/><br/><strong>Technical Traits:</strong><br/><strong>*Mechanical Monstrosities:</strong> Who needs fighters when you can have giant robots!<br/><strong>Biowanker:</strong> Instead of heavy metal, your engineers have gone down the path of biotechnology.<br/><strong>On The Run!:</strong> Most people don't strap engines to factories and cram them into carriers. Most people.<br/><strong>Stealth Obsessed:</strong> Most people engineer a bit of stealth cladding into their warships. You use it for internal decking.<br/><strong>Flash:</strong> Your stuff just has that extra polish that makes it look cooler than everyone else's inferior-looking, blockily-functional equipment.<br/><strong>Plug'n'Play:</strong> Modularity is a virtue, so your engineers claim.<br/><strong>Ghost in the Machine:</strong> People are a hindrance, so you use machinery as much as possible.<br/><strong>Nazi Superscience:</strong> A role for every machine and a machine for every role.<br/><strong>Better Than Your {Keyword}:</strong> Don't apply this too broadly or I'll smack you, otherwise it's exactly what it implies.<br/><strong>Hangerize!:</strong> Fighters and Mecha are cool (or just an overly important part of your doctrines) so you stick them in everything you can. This provides strike/superiority ability in addition to the usual utility-craft hangars.<br/><strong>Off-The-Shelf Technology:</strong> You get one additional Bonus trait, but cannot choose any other Technical Trait.<br/><br/><strong>Historical Traits: (MUST take ONE ONLY)</strong><br/><strong>Warlike:</strong> Your History is filled with bloodshed, violence and the genocide of millions, at your own hands or against you. The point is you won’t back down if you don’t have to.<br/><strong>Diplomatic:</strong> You have more skill with diplomacy than most species and consider war to be a final option after all others have been exhausted. Fortunately you’ve kept your records better than others and suffer no diplomatic penalties with different species.<br/><strong>Commercial:</strong> A long history of commercial profit and trade fills your peoples lessons as children. Your people don’t learn how Aravais defeated the Chonomeri in a great battle but how Elan robbed Geddas of every last coin in exchange for a drink of water in the desert to survive.<br/><strong>In Armour Clad:</strong> Your people value defence, shields and armour above diplomacy, strategic weapons and other minor concerns. After all what good are their weapons if they cannot harm you?<br/><br/><strong>Hyper-technology: (Must take ONE)</strong><br/><strong>Advanced Biotechnology:</strong> Some polities have taken the sciences of life to its endpoints and gained the ability to breed living structures and starships. While not as efficient as more conventional ships they do have their advantages.<br/><strong>Jump Drive:</strong> Jump drives allow the equipped vehicle to make a linear (read, straight, unobstructed, line) “space-folding jump” between two points by folding space between the start and end points. (not usable by anything smaller than a battleship)<br/><strong>Plasma Tech:</strong> You are able to utilize crude plasma weapons. Although wasteful, the globs of plasma you can shoot rip through armor and shields like paper.<br/><strong>Cloaking Devices:</strong> I see what you did there... or not. Cloaking hides all emissions from the ships using the device, hiding it from whatever is looking for it. Firing plasma drives or firing weapons will expose the ship. The best bet is to fly towards the place you wanna go from rally far away, then just coast all the way in.<br/><strong>Relativistic Weapons:</strong> Projectile weaponry fired past 20% of lightspeed. Incredible levels of damage and destruction are capable.<br/><strong>Antimatter Tech:</strong> Better containment means more antimatter, which means bigger boom, 'nuff said. Antimatter can also be used in reactors and engines to make ships much faster than ships with fusion reactors.<br/><strong>Field Control:</strong> You that whole "gravity weapons are useless" thing? If you have Field Control, you can ignore that bit. Your race can use gravity much more than other races. You get things like tractor beams, which repel as well as attract, gravity elevators, and really big vehicles can use hover (hovering fortresses anyone?). You largest ships can use a bigger version of a tractor beam to rip enemy apart. Gravity ignores shielding.<br/><br/><strong>Faults/Weaknesses: </strong> (Each Fault, Weakness or Flaw allows you to take one more trait EXCEPT for Historical or Hyper-Advanced.)<br/><strong>Honourable to a fault:</strong> Your strategies will never rely on surprise or deception, your ships are painted bright shiny silver and your admirals will always give a speech to the enemy before battle.<br/><strong>Creaky Military:</strong> The military is under-budgeted, under-equipped and underfed. Kind of like the Russian fleet circa 1995. You simply don't have much in the way of a military. This flaw hits hard enough to provide two (2) bonus traits.<br/><strong>There Is No Internet:</strong> Your computers and electronics are like 2000s vintage. This sucks.<br/><strong>Third World:</strong> Even in the future, the third world is not known for technological superiority. While not as horrible as There Is No Internet, it's far more broad-based. Kiss your shields and artificial gravity good-bye for everything but the flagship.<br/><strong>Soylent Green Is People!:</strong> You have a giant elephant-sized skeleton in your closet. (You must describe this big nasty secret. Though only your nation knows it and even the best spies would have difficulty finding it.<br/><strong>Government Red Tape:</strong> This request cannot be processed at this time. Please take a number.<br/><strong>*Cult Of {Keyword}:</strong> All Hail Xenu!<br/><strong>*Hilariously Fail:</strong> Someone - a lot of someones - doesn't have much going on upstairs. Unfortunately they're disproportionately represented in your government and military.<br/><strong>Public Outcry:</strong> Your people have deep and strong opinions on some issues you'd really rather they didn't.<br/><strong>Wimpy:</strong> Maybe they're a low-gravity race or just didn't drink milk when growing up. No matter the cause, your people are short, skinny and weak. This is a bigger disadvantage than it sounds, as your fighter pilots will not be able to handle nearly as many Gs and your ships will likewise be relatively sluggish.<br/><strong>Paranoia!:</strong> In a universe full of planet-destroying aliens, a healthy dose of paranoia is only natural. It might make diplomacy difficult but at least they won't sneak up on you!<br/><strong>Trade Dependent:</strong> Exactly what it says. A good example is a Mars-like world that must import significant food to feed its populace.</span><br/><br/>---------------<br/><strong>Military:</strong><br/><strong>Infantry:</strong><br/>meat-shields, snipers, shock troopers... give me a short sentence or two on all the types, as well as each groups equipment.<br/><strong>Vehicles:</strong><br/>same as above. List em, describe em, and describe their equipment/armament. Anything on wheels/tracks/hover/legs is included, so artillery and support vehicles are included.<br/><strong>Aircraft:</strong><br/>If it flies, but can't travel off of a planet without help, it goes here. NOT PART OF THE NAVY. List and describe.<br/><strong>Buildings:</strong><br/>Mostly stationary turrets and fortresses and the like. Included planetary shields (Ray and particle are separate, but can be included in the same unit). List and describe.<br/><br/><br/><strong>Navy:</strong><br/>Ship classes are by weight. Remember, more powerful ships are expensive, so they are less of them, and bigger ships are slower. Weight is in kilotons (Ktons or K))<br/><br/><strong>Super Capitals:</strong> 45-55k (50k) (Typically referred to as Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts)<br/><strong>Battleship:</strong> 30-40k (35k)<br/><strong>Carrier:</strong> 25-35k (30k)<br/><strong>Heavy Cruiser:</strong> 10-20k (15k)<br/><strong>Light Cruiser:</strong> 3-5k (4k)<br/><strong>Destroyer:</strong> 2-4k (3k)<br/><strong>Gunships:</strong> 1-2k (2k)<br/><strong>Heavy aerospace Squadron (bombers or gunboats):</strong> 0.5k<br/><strong>Medium aerospace Squadron (multi-role/strike fighters):</strong> 0.2k<br/><strong>Light aerospace Squadron (single role fighters):</strong> 0.1k<br/><br/>Each ship has its own class to describe how state-of-the-art, or how powerful it is.<br/>Category A: Most mainline troops and vessels are Category A. Well-trained and equipped they are the backbone of any nation's military.<br/>Category B: Typically seen as reservists or low-priority formations, Category B troops typically have older equipment. However, it can still be effective in the right situations and can free up more expensive equipment for priority missions.<br/>Category C: There is no argument about the age of this equipment or the skill of the crews. However for less well-off states this is sometimes all that can be fielded in any quantity.<br/>Category X: Few militaries can afford Category X equipment; its effects scale while its cost scale even more rapidly. For most nations this is limited to the most elite formations.<br/>NOTE: Class B or C doesn't have to mean crappy ships. It can mean crappy crews as well. The class is just to describe the ship's fighting potential. A ship with advanced tech can still be a Class C if the crew is really crappy.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Each class has its own template, which is as follows. The templates will be using a 1-10 system to describe speed, firepower, and defense compared to the other ships in your navy.<br/><br/>Ship Hull: Capital, Carrier, Destroyer, etc.<br/>Ship Class:<br/>Weapons: List em and the number of each. Put the 1-10 number in parenthesis at the end.<br/>Engines: List and put the number at the end.<br/>FTL?: y/n Nations can save a lot of money by having no FTL drives on their smaller ships. These ships can be used for local defense and can simply use Gates to travel. Every system should have at least one Gate.<br/>Armor: List and number.<br/>Shielding: Both ray and particle. List and number.<br/>Other: fighter complement and any other equipment worth mentioning.<br/><br/>Number of ships really isn't important. For scale, an average fleet has about 15-20 battleships, 0-5 super capitals, 150 escorts (anything below battelship), and a couple hundred to two thousand fighters if your races uses them.</span><br/><br/><br/><em>Thank you for your cooperation, and good luck. We look forward to cooperating with you. Any additional information that you may want advertised about your species may be posted here as well. <br/><br/>Message Over. </em>