You are saying computers are quite advanced…So what is the situation with robots?
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To be honest I’ve never really done much re robots - the kind we use today to build cars etc have been replaced with forcefield generators and the like. If a robot’s inhabited by an AI (or a downloaded personality, etc) then it’s basically considered a person; if it’s inhabited by an RAI then it’s just a piece of machinery. As to what they look like, well I’m sure they can look perfectly human (or whatever) if you want them to.
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I was just wondering if they had any special backstory or the like, Maybe a rebellion or the banned use of them or maybe they were slaves and then freed or something
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Not really. To be honest, the chassis matters less than the intelligence inside it: people don’t really care if you’re a human downloaded into a robot body, an AI living in a synthetic flesh-and-blood body, or indeed a person who’s been uploaded into a virtual environment - you’re still a person, equal before the law and all that.
The nearest thing to robot slaves are the RAIs - but (maybe because of all the “created race turns on creator race” cliché stories 
) they’re very carefully designed to be incapable of rebellion (not to mention designed to not pamper us too much ). An RAI is quite capable of simulating emotions so as to encourage a particular response or to avoid the uncanny valley, but it cannot actually feel emotions etc in the same way a regular AI can. Now, plenty of people will project their own feelings onto an RAI, in the same way you might project emotions onto your car or your computer, or get attached to your favourite teddy bear… but the car, computer or soft toy is no more capable of reciprocating that feeling than a rock is.
What else… hmm. There are definitely some nasty spots in the galaxy though: the Union (see map) is a sort of half-way house between modern communist China and Stalin’s good old gulag-loving USSR, so I’m sure there’s plenty of exploitation of people (ie, including AIs and the like) there. There’s also Wilderness Space…
“Wilderness Space” is the name given to the large swathes of the galaxy not claimed by a major power - perhaps the nearest equivalent would be the Roman Empire labelling everything beyond its borders as barbarian lands, or the 19th Century European empires looking at a map of Africa and chauvinistically saying “here be savages”.
What the explorer will tend to find in Wilderness Space is a vast patchwork of hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of tiny polities too small to appear on most galactic maps. Whether founded by refugees, pirates, rebels or colonists seeking to live beyond their former homeland (eg there are LOTS of tiny independent human nations out there), they come in all shapes and sizes.
Whilst the United Commonwealth, UFS and other “nicer” powers often send regular patrols out into Wilderness Space to try and ensure a modicum of law and order (or stability and safe trade routes for the more cynical), most such powers are left to fend for themselves with whatever technology they have at hand. On the one hand you have the Union of Rho - a human-dominated empire of some 155 star systems in the Rho Cluster, a strong supporter of the Terran Independent League of Systems and a committed protector of the many profitable nearby trade routes… on the other hand you have Hammond’s Landing, a blasted post-industrial (if not post-apocalyptic) wasteland brimming with every kind of ne’er-do-well and vagabond.
Given the ease with which a major power can swat these tiny nations, many of them choose to band together for mutual defence and protection. The Terran Independent League of Systems (TILS) is perhaps the most well known of these groups - a small secretariat co-ordinates the actions of the seventeen thousand member worlds and represents them in any dealings with the big nations.
Scattered throughout Wilderness Space are the United Commonwealth’s five Deep Space Trade Stations: Athens, Carthage, Minoa, Phoenicia and Sumeria. These heavily defended trading posts act as safe havens and islands of stability in their respective regions, given the many missile bombers and fighters they have, and their modern, super-capital grade shields and weapons.
No mention of Wilderness Space would be complete without mentioning the aptly (if unimaginatively) named Crisis Zone. Bordered by no fewer than ten major powers, it is less a matter of whether there will be a political or economic crisis this year in the region than when said crisis will occur. Whilst this does mean it’s the most travelled (and patrolled) region of Wilderness Space, it’s also home to the worst (or at least best organised) of the raiders - the Hyrpol Independent Republic.
Essentially, Wilderness Space is the RPG region 
. Life in the UFS etc is much like life in a modern Western country - you’re safe and sound in their borders most of the time. Out in Wilderness Space - ah, who knows what adventures you might get up to…
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My future generations must have founded here!
Anyway, It seems that you have only really talked about humans (You might have mentioned aliens at some point but I am not reading through the walls of text to find out) but what about other life? Have we discovered any? Exterminated any? Enslaved, allied with or made fierce and everlasting war with any of these other species?
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Yeah, mostly I’ve been talking about humans. Still, look at the map again - only bright red nations are human-dominated - the rest are run by other species. As to how many intelligent species are out there… hmm. Certainly tens of thousands, all rubbing shoulders - think of many of the scenes in Star Wars - the Mos Eisley cantina, Coruscant, etc.
It’s a bit hard to name particular species we’ve made enemies / friends out of though - for example, the Core Empire is dominated by the Dren (read: space dwarves), but there are trillions of Dren living happily under United Commonwealth rule, and many more living in the UFS, the Bolachi Republic, the two Kadanros nations, etc. Heck, humans may be mostly concentrated in the United Commonwealth, but head elsewhere and you’ll no doubt find fierce Schaol Empire patriots that happen to be human. Even the United Commonwealth is, by population, nearly 50% non-human for example.
Basically, I’ve tried to avoid the “one nation per race” thing, and go for more a multi-species feel.
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I prefer the idea that everyone hates humans and we hate them back. Bit racist but I like my galaxies in turmoil and my armies marching to war instead of peace…
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this is beautiful
get writing
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I prefer my armies marching on themselves. A little internal conflict always makes the story more interesting.
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This is damn impressive. Good job! 
Also, SketchUp is also a good tool. I really like this model for example. 
http://www.sketchup.com/sites/sketchup/files/HBanners2600x500_stripmall.jpg
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Yeah I like it a lot. From what I understand it’s not as powerful as Blender or 3D Studio Max etc (on the other hand, 3DSM costs £3,100…), and it has a few buggy bits & pieces (the one I find annoying is duplicate lines, eg from copying & pasting things). Anyway, enjoy a Spiderman Spiderpig Spidership Siege Cruiser from the United Commonwealth (or not, it really is an ugly one IMHO. Not changing it though 
).
Sirius class Siege Cruiser
I’m going to be honest, this isn’t the prettiest warship out there. In place of most of its ball turrets, this variety of cruiser mounts eighteen siege cannons on long, flexible armatures (note the multiple ball-and-socket joints, and the long central portion of the armature, which is capable of flexing). Once an enemy world has had any orbital fortresses and warships cleared away, the siege cruiser can arrive, point all its 3m diameter barrels at the planet, and drop a terrific amount of ordnance. Each siege cannon is basically a giant coilgun (or railgun), capable - thanks to its powerful inertial dampeners - of accelerating its mammoth 500-tonne shells to practically the speed of light. Needless to say, having twice the kinetic energy of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs enter your upper atmosphere eighteen times a second is going to be… unpleasant. That said, it is rare for siege cannons to be used to sterilise a world in this way - they are normally used to overwhelm a planet’s meteorite shields momentarily, allowing dropships and the like to slip under the shields and commence an invasion. For wholesale planetary destruction, it is usually easier to just use a regular warship’s main guns.
Badass Humans (Okay, and aliens too !)
One of the themes I’ve used in this setting is that of humans as soldiers (see third bullet point). Most intelligent species are naturally more risk- and conflict- averse than we are, but are also more co-operative and compromising. Then these crazy individual-rights-loving humans come along, fighting and squabbling all the damn time. Until there’s a war, at which point it’s time to rally round the flag and all that. More, humans are almost unique in their approach to warfare, in that they approach it as a massive, industrial undertaking. Put simply, nobody else has anything like the concept of total war that humans developed in the 20th Century - indeed most species would simply have been unable to fight in the trenches of the First World War because of their psychology.
That said, humans are not the best individual warriors. The Schaolians are generally considered the best individual combatants, and one-on-one in a fair fight they’ll beat most humans. Indeed, prior to humanity arriving on the galactic stage, they were also generally considered the best soldiers. Humans tend to work better in groups though, which gives them the edge - think soldiers vs warriors or soldiers vs gladiators. Beyond this though, humans aren’t particularly special* - they have average intelligence etc and don’t have any special knack for anything else. Certainly some others look down on (and/or fear) humans as primitives with only a veneer of civilisation - although those selfsame people quickly changed their tune in the Conglomerate War, when the violence-averse species found they needed those humans to fight for them.
It gets better. On the one hand, you have possibly the finest soldiers in history. On the other, you have a combination of FTL communications, inhumanly good computers, and brain-scanning technology that makes an MRI scan look positively neanderthal. So, why let death be permanent? All United Commonwealth military & naval personnel must be psychologically fine with the idea of being downloaded into a new body in event of death. The result is a soldier, marine or spacer who can keep on accruing experience - for whom death is merely a learning experience. Most nations also offer this to their civilian populations as well, and although majorities in most nations make use of this, it is by no means universal - many people have a religious or innate psychological objection to the concept, and of course still others who have to use it find they weren’t as comfortable with the idea as they thought they were when they agreed to cheat death in this manner. This technology would prove crucial to the Conglomerate War - without it, both sides would have quite literally run out of people in the early years of the war, as the initial Conglomerate victories turned into a grinding, bloody stalemate.
*That is, special compared to other species in the setting. Compared to us “baseline” humans, a human in the United Commonwealth is physically and mentally a superhuman, owing to the kind of RAI-guided genetic engineering that we can only dream about today. They still look human (well, unless they want to look different ), and still act and feel human… but the similarities end there. Put it this way: faced with post-human intelligences and the technological singularity, humans (and everyone else, really) decided to upgrade rather than become obsolescent. Most species focused mainly on improvements to intelligence and the like, but a few (humans included) tended to go for the whole package - bones and muscles that make the Hulk jealous, fibre-optic based neurones (with muscle response times to match), lungs that can handle both vacuum and the ocean floor, and a digestive tract that thinks the arsenic in your planet’s native biology is harmless seasoning. For most inhabitants of the major nations, if it doesn’t kill you immediately, you’ll likely live and eventually recover.
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Love the Lore and the ships, Keep it up!
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nice, I like the models.
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Something a bit different from the usual 3D stuff (actually, I’m running out of models to show as well )…
Tau Ceti
Tau Ceti II (more commonly, just Tau Ceti) is one of a handful of so-called Fortress Worlds within the United Commonwealth. These colonies are run under special laws, and are essentially a combination of barracks and industrial centre. Practically the entire population of a Fortress World is either in the offensive branches of the armed forces, or are retired or reserve members of them, and although they are few, they provide a disproportionate number of guardsmen, marines and spacers to the three services. The most famous of the Fortress Worlds, Tau Ceti is best known for the millions of Commonwealth Guard regiments its raised over the centuries. Existing in a (deliberately-maintained) cultural bubble, every aspect of life on a world like Tau Ceti is militarised - they even have mandatory schooling for children, complete with uniforms, salutes and all the rest.
The capital, Aurora, is located on in the left-middle of the large V-shaped bay (technically two bays - Albert to the west, Victoria to the east), and is a part of the continent of Windsor. The landmass west of Albert Bay is the continent of Bayer, and is dominated by the Santarem desert, which fills most of the interior. The large island continent to west of Bayer is the Elysium continent, whilst the small landmass southwest of Bayer that’s cut off by just 2 miles of sea is the continent of Richter. The ice caps in the imaginatively named North Sea and South Sea, whilst the Azure Ocean runs from Richter and southern Bayer eastwards to Windsor, (the large gulf far to the west of Victoria Bay is the Hohenzollern Gulf). Between Bayer and Elysium is the Middle Sea, and between Elysium and Windsor (far left side of the map) is the Rhadamanthys Sea. The large bay in the middle of Elysium is the Bay of Tears, and the lake east of it is Titan Lake. The tiny inland sea at the very south of Bayer is the Golden Sea. The lakes and seas in Windsor are, from left to right (starting just above Albert Bay & the capital): Lake Majestic, Lake Illustrious, Habsburg Lake (in the far north), and Lake Pontus on the far right side of the map.
As the names might indicate, Tau Ceti was settled primarily by rather patriotic Britons, along with a smattering of German aristocrats and quite a few fans of Roman history and mythology. Initially a pretty ordinary colony, it was occupied by the Bray in 2592 for two years, but the colonists proved so tenacious and bloody-minded that they not only pushed the invaders off, but were a major factor in the Bray deciding to join the United Commonwealth. Tau Ceti promptly became the first Fortress World, and the Bray soon adapted to life in the Commonwealth. Today, some 18 billion people live on Tau Ceti II, with another hundred million in orbit, though the rest of the system is basically uninhabited.
Solar system classification: Tau Ceti-G8V-2αa-6αb-83γan-61γau
Planetary classification: Tau Ceti II-C-NBC-G-EF-G-B-BB-D
(Note: this system really does work )
United Commonwealth
Officially created on 1st January 2500, the United Commonwealth is a parliamentary democracy based on Terra. Formed following the Westernisation of practically the entire globe over the preceding centuries, the UC rapidly expanded into the galaxy, fortunately appearing in an area surprisingly lacking in spacefaring civilisations. Although initially just a human nation, the UC proved more than willing to incorporate any aliens (not to mention AIs etc) it found as it expanded, most prominently the extremely human-like Tayans (a remarkable case of parallel evolution, but genetically incompatible and totally unrelated, early theories notwithstanding).
From the very first, the United Commonwealth has had a serious case of Manifest Destiny, taking on and defeating first the Alien Confederacy (a distributed hive mind that at the time controlled much of the Galactic East) at the head of a coalition of interested powers, followed by its infamous claim of the entire Galactic East - and the stunning naval victories by its elite Legions against the Core Empire required to enforce that claim. Between this and humanity’s natural aptitude for warfare (at least compared to most other species), and backed by the enormous Commonwealth Navy, the UC has established itself as the galaxy’s foremost military power. Having never gone through anything approximating the First World War, Vietnam or similar it is remarkably self-confident as a society.
Culturally, the UC resembles in many ways the UK or USA from the mid- to late- 19th Century - it has married a libertarian economy to jingoistic patriotism. As well as a very decentralised government, it has next to no welfare state, relying instead on the free market, private charity and high technology: when it’s all-but-impossible to get sick, you’re born with functional immortality, and a .50cal bullet to the spine just leaves a light bruise… well suffice to say that healthcare provision virtually disappears as an expense. Additionally, the UC also lacks a police force - almost uniquely, it uses RAI-controlled forcefields to prevent any attempted crime (although by law nothing can be done until the attempt is actually made) - every RAI in UC space is required to contribute any spare capacity in its forcefield generators towards this policing (not to mention sweeping the streets, cleaning up health issues that do occur, etc). Although potentially very dangerous, so far this use of RAIs and forcefields to prevent crime hasn’t spilled over into any other aspects of a police state. In a lot of ways, the UC uses its RAIs and forcefields to get the bits and pieces of the welfare state it needs for free - be it matching unemployed workers up with new jobs (or indeed, with charitable sources of money) or fixing injuries in the time it would take an ambulance call centre worker to hear the ring and act upon it.
Similarly, the UC has been able to dispense with another pillar of the welfare state: schooling. Instead, information is dumped directly into a child’s brain via RAIs - including things like muscle memory, for activities that require it. Instead, children are encouraged to pursue a wide variety of social hobbies - everything from exploring a planet’s wilderness to virtual reality MMOs. With the ever-present RAIs watching over them - not to mention physical attributes that make most apex predators about as dangerous as their cuddly toy equivalents - being a child is very different to what it is today. Whilst some do go to university to study something in detail, most children go straight into work upon reaching adulthood - assuming they can’t live off one or more of their hobbies, which is more common than you might think.
Politically, there’s Parliament, made up of the House of Commons & Lords. The Commons is filled with ~600 MPs elected in enormous, multi-star-system constituencies, whilst the Lords is consists largely of appointed life peers and a few hereditary ones, and essentially exists as a source of expert opinion for the Commons, and to review and delay bad legislation. Instead of a prime minister, there is a president - a combination of head of state and head of government but selected in the same way as a prime minister. Despite its republican government, the UC has a small aristocracy - in part, this makes it easier to integrate local monarchies, but it also provides a relatively harmless outlet for political corruption: safer for people to buy titles than to buy policy changes after all (compare the UK’s “cash for honours” to the USA’s “cash for favours / campaign funding”). Noble titles are awarded by one of the various monarchs in the UC, and the duty is usually rotated between them every year (eg British this year, Tayans the next, Dutch the year after…). A tiny professional Civil Service serves Parliament and oversees local government civil services as well. Meanwhile, the President of the United Commonwealth runs a small cabinet, which acts as the executive branch. There is no Supreme Court per se, although the House of Lords (and if necessary, the full Parliament) is the court of last resort.
Local politics varies tremendously, and there’s a veritable patchwork of colonial groupings under the aegis of the United Commonwealth. The old Tayan Empire still formally exists under its Emperor, and various monarchies from Earth still exist: there are some five hundred members of the British Star Empire and almost nine hundred worlds in the United Inter-Stellar States of America, whilst the Indian Colonial Union is four hundred strong, to give but three examples. In the main, the national government doesn’t much care what the local government is like so long as it’s reasonably representative and democratic. Privately-owned and company worlds are common, and usually operate on some kind of shareholder basis to allow for representative government.
Voting in elections (held no later than a decade after the last one) is somewhat more restricted than it is in most democracies today. Government employees (including contractors) cannot vote (though they pay no tax), nor can you vote if you’ve received more in benefits than you’ve paid in taxes (although “nothing in, nothing out” means you can vote). On the other hand, there are so few government employees (outside the armed forces), and the pool of people willing to give up the vote in exchange for all the perquisites of a civil service job that it’s not a real issue. A first-past-the-post system is used, and has resulted in two major parties (Liberals & Democrats) and a host of smaller parties vying for attention. The Liberals are best understood as classical liberals - today’s libertarians - with a hefty dose of jingoism, whilst the Democrats are further to the left, and prefer avoiding unnecessary foreign adventures.
Whilst all citizens enjoy equal rights in almost all respects, there is one area in which humans have the advantage - only they can join the offensive branches of the Commonwealth’s armed forces: the Commonwealth Guard (“Guard” in spite of the fact that it’s an army of conquest and occupation ), Marines and Navy. In the main, this simply a practical measure: humans have proven themselves the best soldiers in the galaxy, and anyway designing tanks and ships for only one species is much easier than designing them for a thousand wildly differing shapes. However, all star systems - regardless of species - must maintain a small local defence force called the Solar Guard, to assist in case of foreign attacks or a major insurrection. In practice Solar Guard units only ever see combat if they’re close to the border with the Core Empire or Allider (see map, earlier), and are usually derided as “weekend warriors” and the like as a result.
As might be expected in a society which has no welfare state to speak of and in which so much manufacturing (eg of Commonwealth Navy starships) is entirely automated, taxes are extremely low, and most of the workforce doesn’t in fact pay any. Most tax revenues are channelled into the Department of Intelligence for espionage work (paying informants and bribing officials being expensive work on a galactic scale), with the next largest expense being salaries - Commonwealth soldiers & spacers are pretty well paid. In addition to taxes though, the government has a quasi-monopoly on the sale of accumulator cells, which supplements tax revenues to a fair degree.
Life in the UC is pretty good overall. Work hours tend to be long (think USA rather than EU), and unemployment tends to be in single figures (and with very few long-term unemployed to boot - see above). Most people have next to no contact with government outside of elections and simply get on with their own lives with minimal interference from anybody else. The major exceptions are when a colony becomes caught up in the war with the Allider or Core Empire, but such events are more or less wholly confined to the respective frontiers.
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WALL OF TEXT!!! Run for your lives!!!
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I like the concept, but what about blue collar workers? Maintenance, janitors, chefs, etc. Are they at a point technologically that they just use robots for everything?
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Is that really a thing or did you get it from here (so adorable 
)?
I don’t find the Sirius class Siege Cruiser ugly, by the way. I can just see it now in some of the older, classic computer games I’ve played.
I’m still catching up on the reading for this topic, but I just wanted to ask and say this already
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I got it from the Simpsons in fact. Never seen the full thing, but I know of it, and to my mind it does look a bit like arachnid-like (well, multi-legged anyway) .
Yeah, the economy is very automated (albeit with some hand-waving in there, because you could automate everything yet that hasn’t happened, because reasons ). Still, in terms of fortress world populations, there’s nothing to stop retired (or reserve) servicemen and women from doing other jobs.
One reason why I think there’s been so much genetic engineering in the setting - particularly of intelligence - is that low skilled jobs really don’t exist any more, except as a luxury thing (eg hiring people as domestic servants because you’re so rich you can afford to hire people to do that). There’s probably a lot of small-scale cottage and/or bespoke industries though - a Savile Row suit is more than just a suit, a handmade desk is not the same as a factory-fresh one, and of course organic beef is just the thing for the better off, even if it’s inferior to factory-fresh beef in terms of taste, texture and nutrition (“Buy our products - guaranteed no natural content at all!” 
…).
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