Monomachiarum is a multifandom experiece that takes the characters into the chaotic future of the 30th century in the great expanse of space. Our lore is a combination of worlds brought in from other franchises, lore created by the site founder, and user-submitted information in order to make a vast and diverse setting. Add your pages to our grand story no matter who your characters might be or where they came from before. This is a place meant to explore possibilities and open new doors. Canons and OCs are welcome, just so long as they can fit into the setting with a little bit of reasonable modification here and there if necessary. So what are you waiting for? Join us today! If you'd like to get to know our community more, feel free to check out our Discord channel.
May 2023 It's been hectic this last year, but we are alive and celebrating our fifth year of adventure and tales. A lot has been worked on to help make the Monoverse one that everyone can enjoy and explore their story while becoming a part of the greater cosmos. All of you, new and long time players, stay safe, and see you in the Sea of Stars!
Department of Advanced Warfare (DAW) – Functional Successor to the UNSC era Office of Naval Intelligence and the post-Kilrathi War era Strategic Readiness Agency. DAW is the force behind military projects such as the ÆSIR corps and the development of the Newtype AI known as Cora, with a directive to plan for and prevent the destruction of the Confederation, the human species, and humanity’s closest allies.
Advanced Mechanics and Defense Concepts (AMDC) – A Confederation defense contractor that specializes in infantry weapons and armor development. They are most noted for their development of the ÆSIR augmentations and powered combat armor made famous in the Kromus war, designed by project leader Theodora Stark, as well as the Æ-MR-1 ÆSIR Magnum and the X-71 Pulse Rifle, the standard sidearm and assault arm of the ÆSIR troopers.
The Coalition for Organized Galactic Stability (COGS) – An elite bounty hunting guild with a particular emphasis on expanding Federation oversight. Despite an obvious common interest, the COGS often interfere and compete with the Federation Star Hunters, despite the latter being directly empowered and employed by the Galactic Congress.
Big Shot Network – The largest channel for independent Bounty Hunters in the Federation. New open bounties and regional information is broadcast via the popular self-named info-show, as well as tips and introductory programs for new and inexperienced hunters.
Daiban Galactic Media Network – The centralized and federally controlled official media network of the Galactic Federation. News releases are heavily regulated and overseen by a government office to control information.
Afloraltite – A highly energized crystalline material that, when processed into a fuel source, allows for energy outputs necessary to open the rifts into Slipspace and allow rapid travels without draining the primary power sectors of the traveling starship. The refined fuel-gel processed from Afloraltite is used as the primary energy catalyst for Fornax Translight Stellar Entanglement Engines, requiring little fuel in exchange for the energy surge required for slipspace entry. However, pure unprocessed Afloraltite is volatile, and while physically stable enough for mining and even careful fragmentation, any significant energy charge can and will spark an incendiary reaction capable of immense explosive power. Mere kilograms are capable of generating multi-ton explosions if a chain reaction were to occur, which has led to smaller mining operations typically managed by workers with experience with highly volatile materials in remote areas outside the main region of Federation territory.
Translight Slipdrive – A Faster than Light engine that was initially developed, in Terran reckoning, by Wallace Fujikawa and Tobias Shaw based on data of the legendary Dimensional Wave Motion Engine technology following the first Machine War of the late 2280s. Instead of accessing the higher levels of slipspace in a spatial-folding warp jump via the field stabilizing generating Iskandarian crystals used to attune a Wave Motion Engine, the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight drive brute forces entry into the slipspace and can be powered via more conventional fusion reactors. The early UNSC drives typically allowed speed of 2.5 light-years a day travel, reaching upward of 4 light-years a day prior to the Covenant War, while the Forerunner derived pattern borer drives used by the Covenant were capable of speeds reaching up to 912 light-years a day travel. Following the recovery in the aftermath of the second Machine War, a new variant of slipdrive was developed from Mantu technologies, known as the Translight Stellar Entanglement Engine, or as it quickly became known, the Fornax Drive, after the Fornax Stellar Reach corporation that developed them, with models able to reach speeds exceeding 1000 light-years a day. The later development of the Reclaimer-class Slipdrive in 2956, during the Kromus War, brought Confederation military grade slipdrives to capability of speeds over 13,000 light-years a day travel.
Akwende Jump Drive – A variant of the Slipdrive that focuses on stimulation of specific gravitonic particles, known now as Akwende Particles, to open compressed folds in space time known as Jump Points. Short distance slipspace “hops" are also possible to better facilitate travel between Jump Points so that a transition through a system doesn’t take the course of months to years, maxing out conventional slipspace travel at no more than a dozen light years a day speeds. The Jump Drive was developed by Shari Akwende in 2586 after she discovered gravitational intersections that allow access to natural compressed space-time corridors when using specific functions of a Shaw-Fujikawa slipdrive. Her newly developed jump drive came in the end of the 2580s as the fledgling Confederation was forced to downsize asset sizes in terms of ships and mobile stations, though use of the more powerful traditional slipdrive was kept for the larger vessels as they were constructed and war efforts demanded further use of the higher slipspace speeds. In the two hundred year relative peace between the end of the Machine War and the start of the Kromus War, Jump Drive became a staple of the Federation for civilian and police vessels and more economical for the Confederation military’s smaller ships and fighters.
Quantum Wave Engine –Derived from salvaged Machine Empire vessels, the secrets of the Wave Motion Engine combined with Confederation understanding of Forerunner technologies gave way to something that may potentially have surpassed both. Developed in secret over the course of twenty years, the Quantum Wave Drive is sublight, FTL, and weapons power combined into one, enabling a sublight velocity far greater than a ship of the Concordia's size and mass would be capable of, thrusting the vessel into a hyper-folded rift through space-time that can cross thousands of parsecs in a day, and channeling the immense energies generated by the engine into intense electro-charges to charge the devastating S-MAC array of the TCS Concordia that are capable of almost fifty gigatons of kinetic power a round with a 500 ton shell. The prototype engine array currently installed on the Concordia is capable of translight speeds exceeding 750 light-years an hour, though even this is not the highest velocity it is theoretically capable of reaching.
Powered Armor/Suit – Artificial, self-powered exoskeletons designed to protect and/or augment the natural physical abilities of the wearer. Typically these are the purview of military units or highly specialized mercenaries and bounty hunters, with unique equipment and weapons being a staple for the latter. Powered suits come in many shapes and sizes from fully enveloping suits of armor to minimalist joints and connectors worn on only a few portions of body.
Parsecs and Lights – Measurements of interstellar distances are commonly rated in parsecs, which are a ratio of 3.26 light years per unit, and include magnitude ratios such as kiloparsec(per thousand) and megaparsecs(per million). Lights is a short form terminology of distance traveled to time elapsed ratio in relation to faster than light travel. Common units include decalights, hectolights, and kilolights for denominations of ten, hundred and thousand rates of light years. Less commonly used is megalights, as this unit of distance to time velocity would apply for millions of light years per unit of time, a speed ratio not yet attained by any known civilization within the Sol-Daiban Galaxy.
Daiban – Capitol of the Galactic Federation, settled and established by the Mantu preceding the Machine War, located in the Al’kya System of the Cygnus sector. Daiban is primarily a planet wide city, with districts divided by political, residential, and industrial regions. The Galactic Federation Police are headquartered in the capitol district, as is the Grand Hall of the Federation Congressional Assembly and the offices of the High Chairman. The legally registered Bounty Hunting guilds also have offices in the lower levels of the industrial district, and the general quarter, the collective primary residential districts of the planet, is home to one trillion residents. Few areas of the planet remain natural and undeveloped after almost three hundred years as the center of the Federation
Terra – Also known as Sol-III, and simply “Earth" in the past, Terra is the homeworld and origin of the human species, located in the Gould Belt of the Orion Spur. At some point in the very distant past, over one hundred thousand years before the common era, the ancient Terrans were among the most advanced races in the galaxy, rivaling the now mythic Forerunners until a war erupted as a result of Forerunner arrogance and wounded pride following Terran efforts to stop the spread of a hyper-virulent parasite known as the Flood, resulting in a narrow defeat of the Terrans and forced ‘devolution' to a primitive stone age state of development. In modern times, Terra is the center of the Terran Confederation, and despite still recovering from multiple planetary bombardments, still remains the symbol of human home and determination. The current capitol resides in Tokyo-II for the duration of the Iwata Administration.
North American Republic – Consisting of the remaining areas of the former United States, and the provincial territories of Canada, the North American Republic is one of the nations of Terra that has endure much devastation and yet still has preserved much of the culture considered that of the region. Following the first Machine War in the late 2200s, about a fourth of the territory of the United States was decimated and the government capitol lost. By the second Machine War in the 2700s, due to bombardments in the Covenant and Kilrathi Wars, about half the territory of the former United States was considered unusable for habitation, but previously had united with the remains of the Canadian providences and Mexico in the late 2400s to form the United Republic of North America. Notable surviving region-states are Wyoming, home of the Mountain Point Confederation Officer Academy, Iowa, the Newfoundland region, the Dakota Range, the Greater Chicago Industrial Sector, British Columbia, and the Unified Eastern Coast. The regional capitol of the NAR is Niagara Falls, shared between New York and Ontario.
Zebes – Second orbital planet in the FS176 star system, located just at the edge of the Outer Core Belt, about 5000 light-years from the IR271 system, well beyond the edge of Federation space, Zebes is the one time capitol of the Ancient Chozo Empire that spanned millions of years across at least two primary galaxies billions of light-years apart. Its far removal from the territories of the Galactic Federation within the Orion Spur means that its existence and significance remains largely a secret, but Zebes remains home to a good portion of the remaining modern Chozo, as well as functional capitol of what Nest Colonies remain, and is the single largest cache of Ancient Chozo technologies in the Sol-Daiban galaxy. Notable landmarks include the Zebesian Nest located within Qro’mal Mountain, and the ancient capitol city of Chozodia, home of the Halls of I'ya'dn. Less than thirty kilometers from the ancient capitol is the crash site of an ancient ship wreck, with a blackened stretch that runs between it and Chozodia City known as the Dead Scar.
Calliope-IX – One of many small mining colonies that was considered technically part of the Confederation, but in practice answers more to Federation affiliated corporations. Calliope-IX is a small formerly habitable moon orbiting the gas giant Calliope in the Dakona system, and often was referred to as a backwater mud ball better serving to send someone there when you want to be rid of them. In the early 2800s, it was more frequented and considered of more value when the mining focus had been on the titanium veins found on the moon, but ever since the Kromus War, when the Federation expedited the mining and took possession of the remaining titanium ore, the only thing that had sustained the colony was the various precious gems and metals that still peppered the moon. It was also the site of a low security labor prison until the planet was bombarded with muon plasma bombs in October of 2976, igniting the moon's atmosphere and burning everything to the ground.
K-2L – Located in IR271 system within the Archite Span, located inside the area between the Orion-Sagittarius Transit and the Centaurus Arm, K-2L was, and still is, perhaps the farthest reaching coreward Federation territory, a small outpost of a few hundred that mined and processed Afloraltite. It’s importance was ironically greater than its meager size as a planet let on, as Afloraltite is a rare high-energy crystalline mineral within the explored regions of the Orion Spur that can be processed as a hyperfuel medium for Fornax translight drives. In 2961, it was the site of the K-2L Massacre; a Kromus legion sieged the colony and slaughtered the entire population, including ÆSIR veterans John and Virginia Aran. Only three-year-old Samus Aran survived the massacre to be rescued by the Chozo tiercel Maru. No one has been back to the planet since then.
IV. Known Species of the Orion Spur and Nearby Regions [This Section is under construction. Please contact staff for any questions on playable species.]
Alphinian Xenotype: Amphibious Anthropoid Average height: 6'7" - 7'6" Average Weight: 135 lbs – 160 lbs Natural Skin Color: Typically a blue-touched gray Natural Eye Color: Black Natural Hair: None Special Notes: A former vassal race of the Covenant, part of the “fringe" species that contributed in fashions other than combat service, the Alphinians consider themselves “above" violence as a method of resolution to conflicts, an ethos that has brought them at philosophical odds with species who have been forced to fight viciously at times for their very continued existence, such as the Terrans and the Sangheili. As one of the founding species of the original Coalition of Freed Worlds, the Alphinians regard themselves as politically and mentally more endowed than many others, and often swing in favor of any measure that keeps power consolidated with the inner worlds and the elites of the Federation.
Avia-ra - Mawkin Tribe Xenotype: Avian Anthropoid Average height: 8'1" - 9'3" Average Weight: 468 lbs – 637 lbs Natural Skin Color: Typically between dull gray to mottled black splotches Natural Eye Color: Normal range is shades of red or orange. The Mawkin are a specific tribe of Avia-ra, who in turn are descendants of the Chozo who remained in the Ym'k'ru dwarf galaxy. Natural Feather Coats: Feathers tend to be black, akin to crows or ravens. Special Notes: Forthcoming
Bryyo'mak(Reptilicus) Xenotype: Saurian Anthropoid Average height: 7'4” - 8'6" Average Weight: 470 lbs – 680 lbs Natural Skin Color: Varied tones of green, yellow, brown, and red Natural Eye Color: Typically black Natural Hair: None Special Notes: The Bryyo'mak are currently in a state of regression following what seems to have been a civil war of ideologies on their home planet Bryyo. Those few that take part in the Galactic Federation are those who migrated to other systems and were left out of the conflict, for better or ill.
Chozo Xenotype: Avian Anthropoid Average height: 6'8" - 7'9" Average Weight: 368 lbs – 537 lbs Natural Skin Color: Typically between paled cream to mottled with dark splotches Natural Eye Color: Normal range is between browns and grays. Occasionally green or golden amber have developed. Natural Feather Coats: Feathers tend to be dull grays and subdued browns, though this is likely due to no Chozo remaining who are not in advanced age stages. Special Notes: The Chozo are a nearly extinct precursor category remnant species. While not public information, the Chozo as a species are sterile except for one remaining virile male, and few Nest colonies are known to still exist in the aftermath of the second Invasion of Zebes. As a result, the Chozo have little living influence in the galaxy beyond historical significance and the influence they had previously in the formation of the Galactic Federation.
Divolu Xenotype: Reptilian Anthropoid Average height: 6'4” - 7'6" Average Weight: 270 lbs – 380 lbs Natural Skin Color: Varied tones of green, blue, and red Natural Eye Color: Typically black Natural Hair: None; Divolu have spired horn growth from their foreheads Special Notes: As a race which was once counted among the Covenant Fridge, the Divolu are, by large, a species opposed to violence. Despite their appearance, the Divolu are believed to have evolved from a herbivore ancestor and not a predator as many apex species have, which may have contributed to their apparent anti-militarization stance as a whole.
Firekka Xenotype: Avian Anthropoid Average height: 6'6” – 7'6" Average Weight: 160 lbs – 200 lbs Natural Skin Color: Varied Natural Eye Color: Typically black Natural Feather Coats: Feather patterns tend to be based in shades of reds, oranges, and yellows Special Notes: Firekkan - Wing Commander Information Center Fandom Wiki
H'vk'r Xenotype: Quadmorphic Amoeboid Average height: 3'3 -3'9 Average Weight: 75 lbs – 90 lbs Natural Skin Color: Varied tones of blue Natural Eye Color: Translucent blue-white Natural Hair: None Special Notes: One of the stranger lifeforms to rise to sapience in the Orion Spur region, the H'vk'r may possibly be extra-galactic in their ancestral origin. They are an amoeboid species with quasi-shapeshifting physical abilities, but are only able to approximate the physical forms of other species while retaining the racial appearances of their own kind. This more is an aid in communication, as in their natural forms, H'vk'r are unable to vocalize spoken language, while their physical approximations do enable them to mimic the required vocal organs.
Jiralhanae Xenotype: Ursine Simian Average height: 7’6” - 9’2” Average Weight: 1125 lbs – 1500 lbs Natural Skin Color: Natural Eye Color: Natural Hair: Special Notes: Jiralhanae - Halopedia
Jovian Biomorph Xenotype: Polymorphic Anthropoid Average height: Average Weight: Natural Skin Color: Natural Eye Color: Natural Hair: Special Notes:
Kig-yar Xenotype: Avian Anthropoid Average height: 4'6” - 5'6" Average Weight: 248 lbs – 260 lbs Natural Skin Color: Varied Natural Eye Color: Typically black Natural Hair: None, Feather patterns tend to be highly variable Special Notes: Kig-Yar - Halopedia
Kilrathi Xenotype: Feline Anthropoid Average height: 8'3" - 9'6" Average Weight: 520 lbs – 760 lbs Natural Skin Color: Usually a pale white with some dark patches under their fur pelts Natural Eye Color: Typically eye colors range between yellows and browns Natural Hair: Fur colors tend to be white, yellows, and oranges, similar to terrestrial lions and tigers. Special Notes: Kilrathi - Wing Commander Information Center Fandom Wiki
Luminoth Xenotype: Arthropod Anthropoid Average height: 9'6' - 10'3" Average Weight: 443 lbs –600 lbs Natural Skin Color: Natural Eye Color: Natural Hair: Special Notes: Luminoth - Wikitroid
Mantu Xenotype: Amphibious Anthropoid Average height: 3'4" - 4'4” Average Weight: 75 lbs – 90 lbs Natural Skin Color: Ranging from deep forest green to bluish-green turquoise Natural Eye Color: Most commonly red, also orange and yellow Natural Hair: Typically hair is the same shade and color as a Mantu's skin, as “hair" for the Mantu actually is tendrils of skin, though skin extensions that have not grown nerve endings, thus allowing for some styling and upkeep of the strands. Special Notes:
Mazon Xenotype: Floranoid Anthropoid Average height: 5'6' - 6'3" Average Weight: 143 lbs –200 lbs Natural Skin Color: Skin tones are those similar to those of Terrans, though with a green or bluish tinge Natural Eye Color: Typically bright and almost flowery colors Natural Hair: Shades of blues and green Special Notes: Mazon are a plant based species, and are capable of limited shapeshifting, as well as self-reproduction.
Ok’th-lhu Xenotype: Arthopodial Anthropoid Average height: 6'9" - 7'8" Average Weight: 325 lbs – 460 lbs Natural Skin Color: Varied from pale tones of gray-cream to bluish-gray. Natural Eye Color: Common eye colors are pale blues, ruddy yellows, and burnished reds. Ok’th-lhu have two sets of eyes, a primary large pair set forward on the facial region, and a secondary pair located slightly behind the primary eyes. There is a segmenting of the pupils that appears to be an evolutionary holdover. Natural Hair: None. Ok’th-lhu have carapace crests instead of hair on their heads, with some branching growths from under the shelling to form smaller horn structures. Special Notes: The Ok’th-lhu have a odd ancestral history, with detailed accounts of their civilization having suffered multiple dark ages over the course of tens of thousands of years. Some of their historians claim that evidence of their species' descent from a precursor civilization may or may not be indicative of a connection to the long vanished Forerunners, though the Ok’th-lhu recognize that they are not genetically descended from the Forerunners themselves. Their ancient mythos speak of a “great journey across the stars" that brought them to their home planets in the Fehl’narha system, and the fact that their species had inhabited multiple planets in that system prior to current recorded stellar travel lends credit to the theories that they descend from some kind of remnant of a precursor civilization, perhaps even from outside the galaxy.
Phrygisian Xenotype: Elemental Anthropoid Average height: 6'6' - 7'9" Average Weight: 343 lbs –500 lbs Natural Skin Color: Natural Eye Color: Natural Hair: Special Notes: Phrygisian
Q’roq’us Xenotype: Reptilian Anthropoid Average height: 6'4 - 7'5 Average Weight: 450 lbs – 600 lbs Natural Skin Color: Various shades of brown, green, and red Natural Eye Color: Black Natural Hair: None Special Notes: Q'roq'us are a unique species that is biologically genderless, as a single Q'roq'us can reproduce on their own, and as a result use a neutral term of “they” and "them" when interacting with other species that processes base bio-gender separations.
Sangheili Xenotype: Saurian Anthropoid Average height: 7'4" - 8'6" Average Weight: 300 lbs – 400 lbs Natural Skin Color: Various Shades Natural Eye Color: Natural Hair: None Special Notes: Sangheili - Halopedia
Terran/Human Xenotype: Hominid Average height: 5'3" - 6'2" Average Weight: 125 lbs – 260 lbs Natural Skin Color: Varied from pale tones of peachish cream to very dark coffee tone brown. Natural Eye Color: Variable. Common eye colors are browns and blue, with greens less common Natural Hair: Highly variable Special Notes:
Tokargans Xenotype: Mammalian Hominid Average height: 6' - 6'6" Average Weight: 203 lbs – 260 lbs Natural Skin Color: Skin tones are those similar to those of Terrans, though with a yellow tinge Natural Eye Color: Typically Brown’s and reds, but occasionally blues will develop Natural Hair: Hair is as varied as the Terrans Special Notes:
Unggoy Xenotype: Amphibious Primatoid Average height: 4'6” - 5'6" Average Weight: 248 lbs – 260 lbs Natural Skin Color: Varied Natural Eye Color: Typically black Natural Hair: None Special Notes: Unggoy - Halopedia
Varni Xenotype: Reptilian Anthropoid Average height: Average Weight: Natural Skin Color: Natural Eye Color: Natural Hair: Special Notes:
Wu Xenotype: Ursine Simian Average height: 8'6' - 10'1" Average Weight: 843 lbs –1223 lbs Natural Skin Color: Natural Eye Color: Natural Hair: Special Notes:
Yan Xenotype: Average height: Average Weight: Natural Skin Color: Natural Eye Color: Natural Hair: Special Notes:
Yanme'e Xenotype: Arthropod Average height: 5’10” - 6'9" Average Weight: 170 lbs –280 lbs Natural Skin Color: Natural Eye Color: Natural Hair: None Special Notes: Yanme'e - Halopedia
Yl’fyn Xenotype: Mammalian Hominid Average height: 4'6” - 5'10" Average Weight: 120 lbs – 200 lbs Natural Skin Color: Varied Natural Eye Color: Varied Natural Hair: Varied Special Notes:
Yonhet Xenotype: Average height: Average Weight: Natural Skin Color: Natural Eye Color: Natural Hair: Special Notes: Yonhet - Halopedia
V. The Galactic Federation, Custodians of the Galaxy
Formed in the Common Era year of 2568 by former subject worlds of the now collapsed Covenant, the original form of the Galactic Federation was known as the Coalition of Freed Worlds. Initially an agreement of trade and mutual protection between the primarily non-militant races, the original ten systems began forming alliances with new species, eventually encountering the remains of the once vast Mantu Empire, now shattered and nomadic as a result of the destruction of their entire sector by the chain of supernovas that decimated their systems, and expanding their influence out from the Al’kya System in the Cygnus X-1 sector and outward through the Orion Spur. This gave the Coalition worlds some banded protection, as the Mantu were of a technological level similar to the former Covenant, but were generally more inclined to avoid conflicts when possible. Within sixty standard years, the Freed Worlds found themselves once more attempting to avoid destruction as the Kilrathi Empire began aggressively expanding out from their regions along both courses of the Spur, seemingly resuming the course of domination left by the Covenant as they had been claiming various salvage and abandoned Covenant bases with which the Kilrathi further enhanced their own technology and fleets. It was in 2629 CE that the Kilrathi encountered the Terrans, still rebuilding from the Covenant War and the reorganization of the United Earth Government into the Terran Confederation, leaving the Freed Worlds to watch as the Confederation waged a nearly forty year war with the conquest-crazed and quasi-Forerunner level armed Kilrathi, and ended the conflict with the destruction of the Kilrathi homeworld in 2669. The conflict made the Coalition wary of interacting with the Terrans, as many still remembered the Covenant War and the ferocity with which the humans fought against seemingly certain extinction. The lengths humanity was able to go to when fighting those conditions furthered paranoia about the Terrans and what they were capable of. By 2681, the Coalition was visited by representatives of the Chozo Brood, the last dying remnant of the ancient Chozo race, who helped guide the reformation of the Freed Worlds into the Galactic Federation. A little over a decade later would be when the Machine Empire returned in full force in 2701 and plunged the known galaxy into a horrifying conflict the likes of which had not been seen since the height of the Covenant War.
The newly formed Federation watched in fear for the most part as the Sangheili Nation threw themselves almost gleefully into the conflict, while a battered and bitter, yet still vengeful Confederation brought everything it had left or had built up in the span of just under four decades between the end of the Kilrathi War and the Machine Empire's invasion even as the humans continuously pushed their technologies further and further. The Machine War raged for over sixty years, during which the Federation found itself relying heavily on the aid of the humans and their allies for survival. By the time the Empire mysteriously ceased hostilities and withdrew from the galaxy, most of the Orion Spur was left with so much to rebuild, especially the Terrans, who were cut down to approximately four and a half billion remaining throughout the known Galaxy within the Confederation itself. At the continued urging of the Chozo, the Federation extended thanks and an offer of membership to the Terrans. However, being in the position of nearly having been wiped out in the conflict, humanity was unable to see at the time that many in the Galactic Congress used their acceptance and inclusion as a way to place a metaphorical leash on Terran forces for their own purposes. Even after over two centuries, the Galactic Congress still has not granted Terra and other worlds full political representation as member systems of the Federation, an unspoken policy that some, like the Mantu representative Arba'dos Kea'ton, work toward eliminating.
At present, the Federation is comprised of over twenty thousand planets, moons, and colony world stations throughout thirty-five hundred stellar systems in the Orion Spur of the Sol-Daiban Galaxy. There is, however, a great population disparity from one to another, particularly among the terrestrial colonies. A number of planets, mostly in the center of the Federation, are densely populated into the billions each, while others on the Outer Edge have no more than a few thousand inhabitants. Most planets fall between these two extremes with the average planetary population being approximately fifteen to twenty-five million residents of sentient species in cities of under fifty thousand. World stations also range from a minimum of several thousand citizens at the far edge of minor trading routes to a maximum of ten or fifteen million in the largest world stations along major trading routes. The norm for the average world station is between two to five million. Unlike planets, it eventually become more cost effective to pack as many people in to one area as possible because of the high fixed costs associated with environmental and gravitational manipulation. Beyond ten million residents, however, it becomes unsafe to maintain the number of atmospheric cyclers required to keep the environment at the proper equilibrium in the typical world station.
The population is distributed sporadically across the Federation in clusters, with centralization in the regions around the primary political centers of civilization within the Orion Spur. The "hub" of the Spur is the Inner Systems, centralized around the Al'kya system and the federal capitol of Daiban, near Cygnus X-1, and contains about one fifth of the territory of the Federation, but forty percent of the population. The middle of the Spur, or the Expansion Systems, reaches out from the outer edge of the Cygnus sector nebula and through the Confederation up to the edge of the Orion Molecular Complex, into the edges of where the Spur branches out from the Sagittarius Arm at the coreward edge, and comprises sixty percent of Federation territory and about thirty percent of the population. The rest of the area and population belong to the Outer Systems, which are mostly thinly populated trade ports, resource gathering outposts, and rural colonies primarily within the outskirts just before the Vela Ridge on the rimward end and the some of the coreward regions into the Sagittarius Arm, with a few distant outliers in exotic materials mining colonies such as K-2L that sit outside the nominal borders. Connecting the regions are the major trading routes, much more densely populated than the surrounding area. Being included in a trading hub is almost guaranteed to provide prosperity, and the opposite is true of those systems bypassed by a new route.
The Federation officially operates on a form of what Terrans recognize as a federal representation republic combined with aspects of neo-feudalism. Officials are elected as representatives and meet in the capitol on Daiban to form the Galactic Congress, made up of the Lower Assembly and the Greater Assembly, which is lead by the High Chairman of the Federation, and the Member Systems are able to function under their own governments and laws so long as there are no conflicts with those established on the galactic federal level. In theory, every Member System is supposed to be represented by their own elected Councilor or Ambassador, allowing each species to voice their concerns and views on galactic affairs and bylaws and have effect on the course of the Federation. In practice, despite the inclusion of the embassy member systems in the Lower Assembly to draft and propose laws, and allowance of observation by the Ambassadors of those systems in the Greater Assembly, they are allowed little beyond giving views and opinions while only the Councilors of the Greater Assembly have real power to vote and institute policies. This policy of elite favoring and consolidation of power to the central systems has frustrated many, including the Terran Confederation, who have still been denied a seat in the Greater Assembly after two centuries, on the grounds of “considerations to be taken" every time the matter is brought up.
Politically, there are a number of factions that center around cohesive ideologies in how the course of the Orion Spur, and in theory, the Sol-Daiban Galaxy, is to be governed. Three of the most well known and influential are the Fro'mal, the Praetareus, and the Reconcilers, and each has different views of how the Federation should be managed and the influances that should be given to the member systems outside the founder worlds, as well as the extent of restrictions to be placed on military assets of the member systems that maintain defense groups and militias.
The Fro'mal Faction takes its name from the Divolu word for "originators" or "founders", and proscribe stability in the status quo, to avoid change and the chaos thereof. Comprised primarily of members of the Divolu, Alphinians, and Yonhet species, along with some of the Ylla and Mantu in their numbers, a drive toward centralized power in the hands of the Founder elites has been motive for many of the senior members of this political faction that has lasted since the formal founding of the Federation. They ascribe resolution of conflicts by use of peace keepers and specialized agents, as opposed to an active and large scale armed military such as those maintained by the Terran Confederation and the Sangheili, and thus are the faction responsible for many of the policies that constrain armed forces growth, such as the required use of Aurora Units in capital class vessels, and the size-mass restrictions on combat vessels.
The Praetareus faction was founded in the aftermath of the earliest Kromus harassment in the 2910s, and gained some significant favor after the war was ignited with the burning of Beacon. Aggressively expansionist and ascribing to an ideology of centralized military power, the Praetareus faction is most popular with elected representatives of the Ok'th-lhu, the Q'roq'us, the Phrygisians, and has some support from a number embassy member systems, including the Tokargans, several human colonies, a large number of Jiralhanae, and many of the Firekkans. The common view of the Praetareus faction is that the Galactic Federation must be prepared to face any external aggressor with a unified force, and has called for placing all military and self-defense assets of Federation Member systems under the direct authority of a central Federation military command. This obviously puts the Praetareus at many ideological odds with the factionists of the older Fro'mal Faction, and some contention with the Reconcilers.
After the devastation left in the aftermath of the Second Machine War, and the Chozo Brood re-emerged from their sanctuaries to press once more the importance of bringing the humans of the Confederation into the fold of the Galactic Federation, the Reconcilers were formed from the ideologies of cooperation with all the worlds within and without the Orion Spur. The unique identity of each member system are what the Reconcilers consider key to the Federation, and the strengthening of each member's individual defenses to contribute to a networked web instead of centralizing military power into the hands of one singular organization is their view of how to better combat the threats they face. The Reconciler Faction first had leadership in the Mantu representative of the 2770s, and as was then, the current headrunner of the faction, as well as current Chairman of the Galactic Federation itself, is a Mantu, Arba'dos Kea'ton.
In total, there are just over twenty trillion registered citizens, though a sizable chunk of other unofficial residents also exist. These include many in the Outer Systems whose families never registered them or are part of Terran colony systems thought lost following the First Machine War in the end of the 2200s. Estimates of these two demographics range from two to fifteen billion, depending on the source. The population of the Border Worlds Union is not included in these numbers, as the colonies that border the former Kilrathi Empire sued for independence from the Terran Confederation and succeeded in being recognized as such in 2673. As such, they are not members of the Federation. The Sangheili Nation States are also excluded as they are considered a ‘non-hostile foreign power’ with trade and diplomatic rights. Accounting for unaffiliated and unregistered populations, the total throughout the Orion Spur reaches a possible twenty-one trillion.
It's important to note that despite its name, the Galactic Federation is not actually "galactic" except in the sense that the Federation considers the entire Sol-Daiban Galaxy part of its rightful territory, regardless that it has not actually surveyed and explored much of the galaxy at large. The actual territory of the Federation is primarily within the Orion Spur, with everything outside the three and a half kiloparsec span of the settled Spur being considered the Unknown Regions. This includes the Perseus Transition up to the Cygnus Arm Intersection, the neighboring regions of the Perseus Arm, and almost all areas within and past the Sagittarius Intersection. Also, despite being within the Orion Spur, some territories are not actually part of the Federation due to reluctant agreements made with the Sangheili Nation States, as well as the generally hostile nature of the Jiranhalae at large, the Banished, and of course, the scattered factions of the Kromus, who are estimated to number at least one trillion hiding out in just the Unknown Regions of the galaxy alone, and likely far more still in the Greater Magellanic Cloud and in the outer unexplored regions of dark space.
Emerging from the ashes of the Covenant Empire following the Great Schism, the Sangheili Nation States were initially a group of disparate colonies and factions pulled apart by differing ideologies - many, such as the Servants of the Abiding Truth, were followers of the late Covenant's religion. Others remained isolated while the vast majority would continue their war with the Jiralhanae for their attempted betrayal. A few, however, would attempt to reform their race and traditions in the aftermath of millennia of crippling overspecialization and military pursuit at the expense of sciences and other such necessities - the largest of which would be the Swords of Sanghelios, led by the late Arbiter Thel Vadam. Several years of conflict would keep Sanghelios and its various factions locked in civil war until the Storm (the most powerful faction claiming inheritance of the Covenant and its legacy) would finally be wiped out in 2558 during the Battle of Sunaion, effectively ending the last remnants of the Covenant. While that year would also see the beginning of the Reclamation and the start of yet another war with the last remnants of the ancient Forerunner Empire, the Sangheili as a whole would enter an age of renaissance as many of the cultural taboos formerly associated with the sciences and similar pursuits fell away. As humanity began to reclaim their lost colonies and rebuild after nearly fifty years of constant warfare, the Sangheili would do the same, making a startling degree of progress as a new order came to be.
While many of the individual nation-states and colonies remained independent of one another for several more decades thanks in part to old rivalries and grievances dating as far back as the formation of the Covenant, the Swords' defeat of the Storm had made both them and their leader a cultural icon of sorts, gaining a degree of respect from most of their species. A skilled diplomat as well as a respected warrior, this allowed Thel to utilize the Swords not merely as a military force but an intermediary as well, interceding and mediating disputes before they could erupt into full scale wars. Combined with the presence of roving Kig-Yar pirate bands, various Jiralhanae tribes that refused to participate in peace talks and the ever present threat of rogue Banished forces it allowed the Swords to eventually piece together the various Keeps into something greater - while each fiefdom would retain their individual rule it created a set of common enemies for the Sangheili to unite against as a species much as the Covenant had done for humanity decades prior. Numerous other races that had remained hidden or otherwise unknown during the Covenant's rule would begin to emerge as well, both filling the power vacuum that the empire had left behind and putting additional pressure on would be raiders and pirates. Similar to the newly formed Terran Confederation, however, the Elites would remain independent of the Galactic Federation that had risen to replace their old masters, as the Federation feared the Sangheili for all the same reasons they claimed to exclude the Terrans for.
Instead, attention would be turned inward towards self improvement and continuing to redefine their culture into something that could stand on its own as the year 2600 came and went.
The following century would see leaps and bounds for the Sangheili as a species. While they maintained the martial core of their culture as it had been ingrained far too deeply and for too long to entirely do away with even if they had wanted to, both home grown technology and collaboration with Terran companies and scientists would usher the species into a new golden age. Free of their religious shackles, many would begin to study the various Forerunner relics scattered across their world anew, once worshiped as idols and belongings of their former gods. This new focus on improving rather than simply imitating would open a number of new doors for the Sangheili as a whole, resulting in innovations that not only kept pace with that of their allies but often surpassed them. During this time the Swords of Sanghelios would likewise see a transition, shifting from a group seeking political change to something more akin to a standing military with a focus on Sangheili interests as a whole. While each Keep would maintain their own militia, it became common for their best warriors and soldiers to join the Swords instead, and many craftsmen, weaponsmiths and shipwrights would often be sent as well, an instrumental development as new defensive fleets began to be built to replace the aging pre-Covenant era ships that had been scavenged and increasingly common after 2553.
Understandably this was viewed with a degree of trepidation by the rest of the Sol-Daiban galaxy - barely a century had passed since the fall of the Covenant, and memory of their iron fisted rule was still relatively fresh in the minds of many. As the Elites had formed the backbone of their military and all but commanded complete control of their navy it wasn't too far a jump for many within the Galactic Federation to see it as a return to the ways of old - at the same time, however, lack of aggressive action from the Sangheili made it difficult for war hawks wanting to make preemptive strikes to act. The events of the 28th century would change that, however, as war broke out once again in the Sol-Daiban Galaxy.
The initial impact of the invasion from the neighboring galaxy was divisive. Once unthinkable less than 200 years before - well within a single Sangheili lifetime - the advent of the Galactic Federation and both improvements to slipspace travel along with the introduction of alternative FTL technologies had made the kinds of journeys once possible during the Forerunners' time possible once again. It had made the universe a smaller place. Where the Sangheili would have once seen an immediate and dire threat, they now saw one merely worthy of consideration, especially as the member races of the Galactic Federation certainly took notice. Even then it wasn't until their by-then long time allies in the Terran Confederation began to take action that it truly became a matter of concern, and it wasn't until the full scope of the threat was realized that the Sangheili military began to become involved. During the Covenant's era, their race would have relished such an opportunity as their society had been and still remained one of pure meritocracy, and such chances to prove oneself were few and far between during times of peace. Recent history, however, had taught their leaders caution, and in large part their hesitance stemmed from the potential to become a simple tool of the Federation as they had for the Prophets should their race pledge to any degree of direct participation in the conflict. The initial decade during which the machine threat focused on the other races, cleansing and converting colonies, however, provided ample time for the Nation States to prepare, amping up their military and fleet production as the invasion neared their more distant colonies towards the edge of Sangheili controlled space.
Direct and first contact in 2701 with the "Machine Men" as they were called was brief but telling, promising immortality and freedom from an otherwise doomed existence; things which struck a sharp and powerful chord with the Sangheili people and their leadership. Not, however, in a way that had likely been expected, striking far too close to recent history for the Sangheili to trust.
Having spent over a century rebuilding both military and infrastructure and over a decade to plan for the eventuality, the Sangheili rebuttal was swift, brutal and delivered with overwhelming force the likes of which had not been seen since the height of the Covenant's military might. Performing a series of pinpoint in system slipspace jumps, the Sangheili's local defense fleet deftly outmaneuvered and slaughtered the invaders before a proper response could be mounted. While they had not formally committed to the war before that point the similarities that the Machine Empire shared with the Covenant managed to ignite and sustain a cultural fury that cast aside most of the previous concerns, turning what would normally have been a simple fight for survival into a crusade. Still reluctant to deal directly with the Galactic Federation as a whole, the Sangheili would instead reach out to coordinate directly with their long time allies in the Terran Confederation.
Spread thin across multiple galaxies, the Machine Empire's main strength lay in the use of mobile but slow to fire super weapons, their vastly more advanced wave motion technologies, and intimidation of sheer numbers. With the latter ineffective, the Sangheili leadership instead targeted the former, relying on fleet superiority to attack isolated Machine Empire fleets in a devastating guerrilla war. Thanks in large part to their isolationist policies for the previous century, there existed no detailed star charts of Sangheili space, greatly limiting the usefulness of enemy navigation of their territory and any use of local jump points. The fleet that the Galactic Federation had feared being put to use against them was eventually dispersed across most of the Sol-Daiban and set against the Machine Empire, focused heavily on tracking enemy fleet movement, interdiction and hunter/killer operations. Where planets were taken and converted, the Sangheili once again employed the same tactics and strategies that they once had against humanity, obliterating orbital defenses before then glassing Empire controlled worlds to deny the enemy both resources and bases of operation. Possessing a significant advantage in ship to ship combat, the Sangheili fared much better than many of the Sol-Daiban's other races, able to effective build and replace ships faster than they were losing them and it allowed their military to effectively play to the Empire's weaknesses, particularly the fact that Machine fleets were spread too far and too thin to effectively reinforce each other.
Ironically, this same weakness would limit the extent to which Sangheili fleets could be deployed, resulting in a stalemate. While superior to most ships of equivalent class the Swords did not possess the thousands of vessels the Covenant once had, and the mere dozens of ships available were incapable of projecting force beyond the Sol-Daiban without leaving supply lines vulnerable and stretched dangerously thin. Unable to effectively bring the fight to the Machine Empire's doorstep and put a halt to their fleet production, it was eventually outside interference that brought the conflict to a close as the Empire's ships were recalled to the neighboring galaxy following an assassination of their leadership and following coup d'etat in 2763. Despite over sixty years of constant warfare, however, the Sangheili's aggressive stance and the hidden nature of their colonies allowed their civilization to thrive during the war. Many of their allies, however, had not been so lucky, with an exhausted economy, depleted military, and a decimated population putting pressure on the Terrans to accept the reluctantly given offer of membership in the Galactic Federation.
It was a set of circumstances fairly unique as far as Sangheili history was concerned. Most other races had suffered significant losses during the war, but the Sangheili had instead effectively traded a few ships that could be replaced with the first veteran military they'd possessed since the 2550s. It left their race in a curious position of power despite their isolationist tendencies, something which would lead to an internal push from those wishing to have a bigger stake in galactic happenings. With the Terran Confederation now part of the Federation, however, it allowed the Sangheili a way to pursue these interests, and eventually a compromise was reached; while treated as a foreign power they would be allowed an embassy within the Federation, with input on matters regarding trade and economic matters directly relating to the Nation States. Ties would still be maintained with the Terran Confederation as they always had, but it was an arrangement that allowed the Sangheili both their independence and a method to protect interests beyond their borders.
In a way the new arrangements would signal a return to the developing age of the late 2500s as new trade arrangements allowed for access to new ideas and technology, with the already existing ties to the Terran Confederation and the private companies within its borders strengthened. While many of the Sangheili's own technological advancements made in the previous 200 years would be jealously guarded to prevent potential invaders and enemies from obtaining or reverse engineering them, the Sangheili were able to offer other things in exchange such as ship escorts through dangerous regions of space and other applications of martial force where needed. While they made a point to refrain from aggressive wars due to the potential complications involving the Galactic Federation, it would allow for a resurgence of the race's warrior culture and serve to keep their military forces sharp, especially with the appearance of the Kromus within civilized space as of the 2900s.
Having provided protection to a number of corporations and governments unable to afford sizable defensive fleets of their own or otherwise prohibited from building them by Federation law, the Sangheili were among the first to encounter Kromus piracy as early as 2913, although most incursions were easily driven off by their far larger vessels. Due in large part to their own worlds remaining hidden since the end of the Covenant Schism, the Sangheili were slow to view the Kromus as a legitimate threat, with many instead seeing the marauders as an opportunity - both to strengthen their bargaining position with new clients as well as train newer warriors recently graduated from the Sangheili war colleges within their home systems. As the next handful of decades passed the status quo would largely remain unchanged save for the increasing frequency of the Kromus raids, which would be met with increasing concern as Kromus units demonstrated better coordination and eventually success with their attacks. Sangheili fleets and shipmasters would be equally quick to adapt to changing tactics, but the decimation of the Terran colony of Beacon in 2947 would officially mark the conflict’s transition from border skirmishes into a full scale war.
The sudden shift forced the Sangheili leadership to heavily reevaluate their ability to defend client worlds, as well as their current fleet deployments. As during the earlier Kilrathi incursions the Halo rings were identified to be top priorities without knowing what the Kromus knew of them or their locations. Unlike the previous conflict, however, the Sangheili still enjoyed a significant technological advantage in most Kromus engagements, something which allowed them far more flexibility in their fleet assignments - meaning that they could meet most of their prior commitments to client worlds for protection, although only by spreading their numbers thin. Orders were given to begin the construction of additional fleets at shipyards hidden across their worlds in preparation for another drawn out conflict similar to the Kilrathi and Machine Wars, although immediate action would be taken as special forces were assigned to the war and offered to assist the Terran Confederation’s own efforts.
The following decade would very much mirror the Second Machine War in many regards. While Sangheili special forces and Confed naval groups attempted to strike at Kromus forces and bases with offensive actions much of the Sangheili navy would remain on defensive deployments, albeit with additional ships beginning to trickle forth from hidden assembly forges. With covert operations finally tracing the seat of Kromus power to the Large Magellanic Cloud beyond the rim of Sol-Daiban, however, the Sangheili leadership were given a choice. While many of their ships could make the journey given enough time, it would mean utilizing their largest carriers to ensure the troops survived the voyage with enough provisions - consequently leaving both the Array and their own worlds undefended. To complicate matters, it also would mean sending fleets into unknown territory with little knowledge of their target’s capabilities.
Focus instead would shift to searching for alternatives. With no known jump points available and left in an even worse position with existing Slip Drives being of comparability to 2500’s covenant drives or even less, the Terran Confederation and Sangheili Nation States would instead begin simultaneously redeveloping Terran slipspace capabilities at Trevelyan as well as seeking to vastly improve the efficiency and range of Sangheili slipspace borer drives. The results of this research would be later collectively referred to as the Reclaimer class drives, although they would not see practical usage for another six years - time that the Kromus would use to run relatively unchecked, culminating in an assault on the world of Zebes in 2953. With newer ships having been built over the previous half decade to bolster numbers a relatively small fleet of roughly twenty ships - a third of them cruisers - would be sent to the world alongside the GFS Olympus after the current Arbiter had been informed of the world’s importance by the Terran Confederation. Among other special forces units the Silent Shadow would be deployed groundside along with Confederation AESIRs to protect key installations and technology from Kromus incursions until orbiting fleets eventually drove away invading forces. With the revelation of both the world’s Chozo population and technology cache, however, the events surrounding the invasion would remain behind closed doors and the individuals involved sworn to secrecy - largely to protect the site from potential future incursions, and in addition to the reward that the Terran ground commander was given, the Sangheili were granted a single fighter of Ancient Chozo design for study.
While the defense of Zebes had been a largely successful engagement, the following year would not follow suit. While Kromus assaults had effectively been stonewalled within Sangheili protected systems and much of Terran territory, the reverse also held true. Despite identifying a number of Kromus strongholds located within Sol-Daiban, presence of strong military leadership would prevent a number of joint strike missions from successfully removing such installations from the war front. As neither side in the conflict yet possessed the ability to again strike at protected colonies much, less homeworlds, the stalemate would continue until 2956, with the completion of the new Reclaimer series slipspace drives and their installation on a number of Confederation vessels. These would also include the newly deployed OCS class heavy cruisers from the Sangheili assembly yards - a total of 41 ships that would be committed to the campaign aimed at the heart of the Kromus Imperium within the LMC. Within three years, after a months long campaign into the heart of Imperium territory within the Dragon’s Head Nebula in 2959, Kromus forces would be routed following the destruction of both their military leadership and the planet of Krom itself.
Despite the apparent victory, however, the Arbiter and Sangheili leadership would not call an end to the conflict or declare victory. While the Cunning Death - Ridley’s flagship - was officially declared destroyed, no debris or wreckage was ever found nor concrete evidence of its destruction despite the apparent death of its commander on Krom. Following the Unggoy Rebellions of the Covenant era, the Sangheili leadership remained quite well aware of the potential for retaliation should the Kromus manage to recover from the campaign and locate capable commanders within their ranks. While maintaining a presence within the LMC was beyond the Sangheili navy’s immediate ability, the Kromus strongholds within Sol-Daiban and formerly kept out of reach by Ridley’s command were ripe for the picking. The following years after the war would largely be spent systematically dismantling Kromus military installations wherever they could be found, and otherwise mapping/tracking their supply routes to locate additional bases of operation. Such expeditions would serve both to thin Kromus numbers as well as train younger warriors during the relatively quiet years following the LMC campaign.
The final and most recent disruption to galactic peace would occur in late 2976 as Zebes once again came under attack. Unlike before, however, there was little to no warning, and the planet had been occupied by Kromus forces before a proper warning could be given to allied forces. By the time word had gotten out, nearly four months would have passed, during which the planet would be heavily fortified by the occupying Kromus force. Anticipating only light resistance in absence of a known commander, Terran forces would launch an immediate assault to take the planet back only to be met by redesigned and heavily enhanced Kromus vessels, resulting in nearly complete losses. Having already been assembling an assault fleet of their own and troubled by the development given the previous Kromus attack on the world nearly twenty years previous, the current Arbiter would approach the problem from two angles. Even as the new battlegroup was assembled from the most powerful ships in the Sangheili navy over the course of the following week and a half, a detachment from the Silent Shadow would be sent ahead as a small infiltration team alongside one of the world’s inhabitants as a guide, given specific orders to extract surviving Chozo before the assault force arrived. While successful in their mission and managing to recover the few survivors from the world, the guide would remain behind to continue her attacks on Kromus forces. Against all odds, the targeted attacks would leave remarkably little for the Sangheili fleet to do when they arrived a week later - with most of the Kromus leadership on Zebes dead the majority of ships in orbit had scattered, with the few remaining destroyed with combined fire from multiple cruisers or burned by the CAS carriers and CSO flagship.
A. Technology of the Sangheili Nation States
Sangheili technology, for the most part, is a combination of homegrown sciences and repurposed Forerunner discoveries. With designs heavily influenced by both tradition and San-Shyuum meddling during the millennia long Covenant era, the Sangheili have long preferred to rely on their own designs rather than incorporate alien technology, favoring self reliance above all else - while there are exceptions, they are few and far between. The removal of the Covenant’s oversight and tight bureaucratic and dogmatic leash resulted in a technological and artistic renaissance, allowing for the species to very quickly make up for lost time.
Power: By and large the Sangheili heavily rely on various forms of fusion power, a staple of their energy production even before their spacefaring days. Reliable and a known quantity, the introduction of human physics and Forerunner enhancements have only further improved the efficiency of such power sources, and the aid of human scientists recognized as Reclaimers have allowed the Sangheili to unlock the command codes for older and far more powerful Forerunner power sources long since used as cores for ORS cruisers and similar vessels. Powered by zero-point energy, such cores remain all but impossible to replicate, although research has slowly but steadily made process with rare breakthroughs over the course of the last four centuries.
Weaponry: Predominantly plasma based, Sangheili weaponry has managed to find a wide range of uses for the fourth state of matter. Typically employed in nearly every role from hand held infantry weapons to devastating ship to ship torpedoes and energy projectors, few modern races have mastered such weaponry to the same extent as the Sangheili. The study of the Ancient Chozo fighter obtained after the first assault on Zebes was one of the few examples of such, and the greater understanding yielded from it has managed to improve charge/fire rate, battery efficiency as well as that of the heatsinks necessary for such weapons. Beyond plasma based weaponry, the Sangheili also maintain access to rare Subanese crystal mines, a material that demonstrates a wide array of esoteric effects - in addition to piercing/ignoring most forms of energy shielding, the crystals can be made to home in on targets, and becomes highly volatile upon both impact and when stored in large quantities. Finally, in addition to the above, many Sangheili ships make heavy use of older pulse laser emplacements for point defense systems, relying on their ability to strike small, fast moving targets near instantaneously.
Material: A technology acquired by the Covenant alongside Sangheili weapon-artisans, nanolaminate armor is among the toughest materials known and used in ship construction. With ships generally utilizing over a dozen meters of the substance at the least, nanolaminate armor has proven tough enough to survive unshielded nuclear explosions, with most conventional weaponry unable to significantly damage it short of focused kiloton kinetic impacts. Highly resistant to heat, the ships using the material for armor have withstood being heated to temperatures of 1,700 degrees Celsius before showing signs of minor melting and tearing. Slightly weaker versions of the alloy allow for lighter infantry armor and building construction, effectively making it an all purpose building material based on the exact combination of metals and the processes used to prepare it. Following the end of the Covenant War Sangheili artisans would also begin using a wide array of other materials and processes in their crafts as well, many adopted from more advanced human material sciences.
Energy Shielding: Originally reverse engineered from Forerunner relics found on Sanghelios during ancient times, most ships, vehicles and infantry under the Swords are equipped with the technology. Extremely effective against kinetic impacts, energy shielding allows units that would ordinarily be destroyed by attacks to continue fighting. Enhanced over the last 400 years through cooperative ventures with Terran scientists, Sangheili engineering and better understanding of the original Forerunner technology, most shields are able to recharge to full strength after a few seconds of avoiding additional damage. Larger, more powerful shields such as those used on capitol ships can generally be fully recharged within a matter of minutes, although the recovery process can begin nearly as soon as smaller variants. Aside from Forerunner derived technologies of this nature, Sangheili scientists have begun pursuing studies of both the phase shielding employed by the Terran Confederation as well as Quantum Filament Shielding through the Chozo fighter gifted following the first assault on Zebes. While phase shielding has only proven reliable on board larger ships and thus has been employed alongside traditional energy shielding in a layered arrangement on board newer OCS cruisers, QF shielding has demonstrated the opposite problem - effective, but prohibitively high energy consumption on larger structures with energy costs increasing exponentially with surface area. As a result it has remained beyond the reach of the Sangheili navy, but seen extensive use among infantry armor systems in similar dual layered arrangements with traditional energy shielding.
Faster Than Light Travel: Having been a space faring race far longer than most of those currently among the stars, the Sangheili have long since enjoyed something of an advantage in this field. Having developed their slipspace engines as direct derivatives of recovered Forerunner drives - particularly that of a Forerunner Keyship, one of the most advanced designs towards the end of the Flood War - Covenant era slipspace drives were remarkably fast and precise, reaching speeds ofmupmton912 light-years a day and able to perform pin point transitions without the presence of pre-existing jump points or concern for material objects in their path…save for destination/exit points. This powerful technology has been adopted by a number of different species and, in the case of many, also abandoned for seemingly more convenient alternatives. The Sangheili, however, merely chose to refine it - never casting it aside, but instead improving it as their understanding of the universe grew. Unlike a great many FTL technologies, this understanding not only allows Sangheili vessels to perform jumps from within planetary atmospheres but into them, provided the advanced calculations have been made in advance. The newer versions of slipspace borers (based off of refinements of the Confed Reclaimer class) installed on board the more advanced OCS cruisers intended to testbed new technology are capable of traversing up to 16,000 light years in a solar day, with the Huragok modified drives on board older ship designs capable of up to 11,000. The most advanced version of the drives, however, have yet to see service, capable of reaching up to 18,000 light years per day and due to be installed on the newest ships currently in production before seeing fleet wide retrofit. Additionally, on a no less important note, Sangheili mastery of slipspace technology has both enhanced their ability to communicate over vast distances near instantaneously as well as develop sensors capable of both detecting objects in slipspace from realspace as well as vice versa.
Misc. Technologies: In addition to the above technologies explained in depth, the Sangheili likewise possess many other Forerunner derived technologies, including but not limited to: precise/large scale gravity manipulation, particle beam weaponry, limited hard light application, enhanced cloaking technologies (visual, electronic and otherwise), advanced medical technologies, supraluminal communications. Following the various extra-galactic conflicts with the Machine Empire and the Kromus, the Sangheili began research into gravitonic manipulation of the interaction fields which formed the natural jump points allowing instantaneous travel in order to close off any within the region of the Urs System. By the mid 2970s, they had successfully developed such a method and began closing off all jump points that lead into their home territory save one.
The history of the Terrans is long, complex, and rife with conflict. When one examines the full scope of what has been uncovered of human origin and how far humanity has risen, fallen, and risen again, many would question how a race such as humans has survived all the cataclysms they have endured and overcome. Once, humanity believed itself to be less than ten thousand years old in its modern incarnation. The truth, as it was discovered, was even further from their assumption, as ruins across the Orion Spur began to reveal humanity was far older than any had suspected.
Ten million years ago, the humans of old began reaching out into the star system that would one day become called Sol, settling first in the moons of the gas giants, then eventually discovering how to open the hyper-realms of translight space, a technology they would further refine into what is now known as the Quantum Dimensional Wave Motion Engine. From there, they made the leap to Alpha Centauri, then further and further as they refined and perfected the Wave Motion technology until they were crossing thousands of light years in a matter of hours. In the time of the great Highest Age of the Forerunners, the ancient humans were setting down the foundations of their future in the cosmos as they sent out colonial seed ships to depart their home galaxy and settle out in the vast unknown to ensure their species would never die out. Triangulum and Andromeda were the first foot holds, and from there seed ships continued on. All the time that the Forerunners were assuming to succeed the Precursors as stewards of the galaxy, the humans were expanding their minds and reach, and proving why Responsibility was theirs to inherit.
It was during this period of expansion that the humans encountered a rift into the gap between planes, a gap that would be come to be called the Void. At first the ancient humans thought nothing of the tear in reality, entering it and exploring the strange chaotic realm as their instinct of curiosity compelled them. It was once they had stepped beyond the bordermarches that they encountered a horrific entity, something that drove many to madness merely looking upon it. None from that expedition survived to return, but the door was opened, and humanity would come to be embroiled in their own cosmic war with the Void and the horrors it contained. By the end of a ten thousand year conflict, while the rift that mankind first found was closed, the entire galaxy had been damaged. The Forerunners would incite their jealous campaign of genocide against their Precursor creators, entire species driven to madness induced extinction, and humanity itself broken as a galactic power. It would be millions of years more and two more cycles of starting over before humanity was again ready to expand through the galaxy, but the secrets of the Wave Motion Drive had been lost by then, and the Slipspace pattern drives used by the Forerunners became more prevalent. As the millennia continued, humanity reverse engineered and adapted more and more of the Forerunners’ technology to catch back up to their previous levels. By 107,937 BCE, humanity nearly rivaled the Forerunner Ecumene, even developing weapons that could overpower many of the Forerunners’ own defensive technologies and almost gaining a foot hold into higher bio-engineering.
And when the Flood arrived in 107,455 BCE, all chaos broke loose. The humans went into a panic as worlds were overrun by the virulent swarm, forcing them to turn their weapons on their own planets in effort to burn the strange parasite out. In addition, much like their ancestors, a number of ships repurposed go act as seed vessels escaped into slipspace and raced away from the galaxy in order to preserved the species. The fate of this convoy was never known, however. The result, while burning out the infested worlds, brought the humans into a decisive conflict with the Forerunners that consumed a thousand years. Even when proof of the Flood came to light, the Forerunners took humanity's efforts to cull the Flood as an arrogant assumption of the Mantle of Responsibility, and punished them with forced artificial de-evolution into a hunter-gatherer state of development. When the Flood returned nearly ten thousand years later, the price of Forerunner arrogance was paid, and over centuries, were forced to initiate both of their last resort plans for the Flood returning; a preservation indexing of as many species of life as they could save, and the activation of the Halo Array to sterilize the galaxy of all life and allow a re-seeding of the saved life forms to repopulate the span. This included the evolutionarily regressed humanity, whom the surviving Forerunners left with a genetic key sequence, or “genesong", that marked them as the inheritors of the Ecumene and the Mantle of Responsibility.
Over the course of a hundred thousand years, humanity as a species struggled to reclaim what it had lost. At least twice in that span, humanity was visited and guided by the Chozo Ancients in efforts to uphold not only their own Mantle of Guidance, but also to make sure that the legacy of the Forerunners was claimed by the humans as intended. The later generation of Chozo attempted to mimic the work of their ancestors, an attempt that ended in accidentally influencing humanity into believing the Chozo to be gods, and forcing the Brood to abandon their efforts. It would be over five thousand years more before humanity reached another industrialization period and built back to a once again renewed space age. By the 1940s, during the onset of the second great World War, the first true efforts into what would be known as the super soldier were undertaken. The results of these efforts would produce two ultimate examples of the concept; Johann Schmidt, the Red Skull, and Steven Rogers, Captain America. The now mythical Erskine Super Soldier Serum was capable of increasing all traits of the augmented subjects to immense levels, including psychological traits and moral dispositions. It also resulted in many of humanity's ancestral traits being 'activated' in both Schmidt and Rogers, and despite being considered lost in its original and perfected form, the advent of this is considered to be the beginning of Earth's Age of Heroes. Over the following decades, secret marvels were created that could and would change humanity's place in the cosmos. During the Cold War, a size altering particle was discovered, enabling mass compression and expansion of immense proportions, and even access into the quantum particle realm that crisscrossed the planar layers of the universe. Incredible suits of powered armor known as the Iron Man armor were created by Anthony Stark in the later part of 2010, including a weaponized form of muon plasma thruster that would not be seen again for almost a thousand years after his death. Mages revealed themselves to the world, genetic mutations granting amazing gifts, and incredible and terrifying forces unveiled to an ignorant humanity.
The culmination of this era came to a crashing end in 2018, after a warlord from the Andromeda Galaxy named Thanos collected the six Infinity Stones in a violent campaign of universal culling. Half of all the lifeforms in the universe were blinked out of existence by what was later known as the Snap. Unlike what Thanos had expected, his desire to erase half of sapient dominant life was taken to be literally all life, leaving the universe in the exact same position he had thought he was saving it from. Making matters worse, he used the Stones to shatter themselves, seemingly destroying them. For five years, the cosmos dealt with the aftermath, and it was only when a group of of individuals from across the local galactic group took the greatest risks in traversing the time stream via the quantum realm that they were able to retrieve the Stones from different points in history from now parallel continuums, united them as Thanos had, and undid his Snap with one of their own. A cataclysmic battle between these heroes and a Thanos from one of those alternate continuums brought about a third Snap that wiped this other Thanos and all his loyal forces, as well as those of the prime continuum Thanos, from existence. The Stones were restored to their proper places in time, but it left the prime timeline damaged from the Shattering. Planar walls slammed shut tight, magical fields weakened, and the fantastic technologies of the Heroes Age slowly faded into the mundane. Humanity was not set back as it had been in the distant past, but an era of wonders was over, and would not be seen again for centuries.
Yet mankind continued to dream and reach for the stars that they long ago had journeyed. In the mid decades of the twenty-first century, the moon was transformed into a station for construction and expansion into the outer reaches. Domed cities held populations of hundred, turning the moon in the first of many steps back into the expanse. The inner planets were colonized in 2080, a study station orbiting Venus while Mars was slowly terraformed to allow human colonization. Soon into the 22nd century, the moons of the outer planets were reached and settled. Attempts to break the lightspeed limits were begun, and by the 2120s humanity had developed a Near Speed of Light Drive, allowing faster travel between Earth and its colonies in the outer Sol System. In the later part of the 2130s, a Gravity Fold drive was developed and a ship constructed under the supervision of Doctor William Weir. By 2140, this ship, the Event Horizon, was ready for its maiden voyage, set to fold space and journey to Proxima Centauri and back. The ship vanished as soon as the Fold drive was activated, only to reappear in orbit over Neptune seven years later. Weir would join the salvage operation to recover the Event Horizon, but after the crew of the Lewis and Clark boarded, unexplainable and horrific events occurred, and only three members of the crew would survive in the detached command section while the drive section was pulled back into the fold in space, never to be seen again. While no record of what really happened could be found, the claims of the survivors were enough to shut down any attempt to ever recreate Weir's Fold drive.
Decades later, using the proven NLS drives, humanity would journey past the Kuiper Belt, and breached the heliopause boundary into interstellar space, where they made first contact with the Gamilas Empire. Whatever happened between the ships of the United Nations Cosmo Navy and the Gamilas sparked a war that nearly eradicated the Earth’s biosphere and all life born of it. It was in 2185 that the United Nations received a message from an envoy of the Iskandar, claiming to bring hope and offering the designs for a Wave Motion Engine in order to journey across the dark space expanse and reach a location within the Tarantula Nebula to meet the Iskandar and obtain the device necessary to decontaminate the Earth's biosphere of the Gamilas assault. Each remaining major nation was given the designs, twelve ships to be constructed, and the first to be completed would be the ship sent to meet with the Iskandar while the rest were to be completed as a last ditch effort to save humanity. The Japanese vessel, the UNCN Yamato, was the first completed, built in the image of the famous battleship of the second World War. In 2189, the Yamato launched into a one year round trip mission to the Great Magellanic Cloud and back, successfully claiming the biosphere restoration technology from the Iskandar and returning to Sol just in time to repair the Earth's ecosystem. This was the birth of the United Nation's Solar Federation, which would further refine their Wave Motion fleet and expand beyond the Sol System to colonized hundreds of worlds over the next century, including Reach, Sera, the Tau Ceti system, and the planet that would be known as Beacon.
During this period that would become known as the Great Expansion, humanity saw the effects of deep space and the Translight realm on the human genome as a series of mutations occurred within seemingly random groups of exploration and colony fleets, and expanded into a new sub-genome of humanity. Gifted with incredible spatial sensory direction and the ability to sense ebbs and flows of gravity, this new subset of humanity would change interstellar travel for centuries to come as their skills made translight travel more precise and less dangerous to chart. The Solar Federation would control five hundred systems throughout the reach of a hundred parsecs by the time they encountered what would be later realized to be an minor faction the Machine Empire, led by the Machine King Zess Vodar and the mysterious Helmatier, and the first Machine War broke out. The Helcastle forces began cutting a path through human territory, revealed to be converting the populations into more machine men for Vodar's army and making way toward the Earth. A last stand was held at the outskirts of Epsilon Eridani, between the Helcastle and the Solar Federation’s Wave Motion Fleet, led by the SFS Karyu and the mysterious vessel known as the Arcadia. While the Wave Motion Fleet was decimated, the Karyu was successful in firing the weapon known as Saint Elmo’s Fire to destroy the Helcastle and end the first Machine War with a Terran victory, if only barely. However, the cost was the entirety of the Wave Motion Fleet, including the Karyu, leaving a battered humanity with fragments of the technology that had given them a budding empire.
Within a decade, even as humanity was struggling to recover from the first Machine War, numerous races would make their attempts to aid humanity in rebuilding, or attempt to take Earth and the humans living there for themselves. The first occupation was a faction of Machine Men led by the minor noble Count Mecha, who took over from a section of Europe and began treating the humans as livestock and hunting sport. Fortunately, his reign lasted only a matter of years before he was killed by a boy who had survived one of the earliest of his hunting raids. However, it gave way for the arrival of the Illumidas, themselves refugees from the Andromeda Galaxy, who managed to defeat what was left of the outer Sol colony fleets and occupy Earth for a period of ten years. A resistance worked to drive the Illumidas out, but it wasn’t until the intervention of the Arcadia that the tides turned, and in 2334, a mysterious golden light swept through the Orion Spur and seemingly wiped the Illumidas from existence. Humanity was given its worlds back, the fragmented United Nations reorganized into the Unified Earth Governments, with the majority of the militaries combining into the United Nation Space Command, and within another ten years, supralight travel was possible again with the development of the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight drive in 2343. Contact between the inner colonies and Sol were reestablished, but the decades since the Machine War and the destruction of the Wave Motion Fleet had rendered a number of colonies lost to communication, Sera and Noua Țara Românească among them. Many of the outer worlds would be cut off from the rest of humanity for centuries, breeding resentment from a perceived abandonment by Earth, even if the truth was the exact opposite.
The next major encounter with another race would come in 2432, when a fleet of ships, numbering in the millions, was found entering the galaxy from the direction of Andromeda; the Mazon, who had been escaping a unknown force that had been decimating their home systems. Despite this, their leader, Queen Rafflesia, made gains toward infiltration of the United Nations, with plans to eliminate human occupation of the planet and take Earth for their own. Neither her purpose nor her quarrel with humanity were ever discovered, but over the course of a year, clandestine efforts by the crew of the Arcadia to unveil the invasion would mobilize an apathetic humanity in time as the enigmatic Captain Harlock revealed Rafflesia to be a human impersonating the Mazon Queen, and forced peace talks with the refugee Mazon which ended in treaty and settlement rights to Venus being given to the flora based race. As a result, humanity gained a new and grateful ally, and the efforts of colonizing space would further boom as the population exploded and the colonies would expand again, stretching eight hundred worlds over two hundred light years by 2472.
However, tensions began to rise again between Earth and her colonies. These conflicts would come to a head in 2490, when a number of outer worlds declared intent of independence from what they claimed was an overbearing draconian shadow of what the Solar Federation had been. As a result, the UNSC and the Office of Naval Intelligence would revive the bio-augmentation experiments of the 1940s and the 2250s, resulting in the ORION program as insurgency broke out. While seemingly successful, many ORION augments either suffered long-term effects of the process, fell to insurrectionist sympathies, or went mad, and the program was shut down behind closed doors by 2506. It was in 2510 that ONI, following on a pre-war report, projected that the insurrection would only continue to escalate to incalculable level within twenty years if severe enough action on the scale of full-out militarization was not taken. At the same time, eighteen-year-old Catherine Halsey had run simulations and found the same conclusions. Even as her submission of her findings brought her to become the youngest recruit in ONI, Halsey's penchant for curiosity and pursuit of knowledge brought her across centuries old data regarding the Erskine Formula and Project REBIRTH. Within weeks, unbeknownst to anyone, Halsey not only cracked the formula, but also figured out the flaws of previous attempts to emulate it, and how to enhance the desired results further with her own process based in the advancements of technology since the 1940s.
This was the birth of what would come to known as the SPARTAN project, and her early experiments with the Erskine Formula, though set aside in favor her own developments, would prove invaluable to the Spartan-III program. When humanity encountered the forces of the Covenant and was plunged into a horrific three decade war in 2525, Halsey's efforts proved to be the hope for mankind. Over the course of the war, the Spartans proved time and again the best one to one chance humanity had as they hurried to catch up to the technological superiority of the Covenant, until late July 2552, when the Covenant found and swarmed at Reach in the Epsilon Eridani system and decimated the planet after almost a month and a half long siege. This would ironically lead to the discovery by the UNSC of the Covenant's goals to find the Halo Array, as well as the horrible revelation of the Flood, and the chain of events that would lead to the Battle of the Ark. By this point, the Covenant had cut a destructive path through Earth’s colonies, which led many to believe that most of humanity had been killed by the time the Covenant fleet reached Earth in October of 2552. Events since the destruction of Halo Installation 04, also known as Alpha Halo, eventually triggered an uprising and schism in the Covenant as the falsehoods of the religion preached by the San'Shyuum were exposed and the Sangheili began rebelling against the hegemony they had served for eight generations in the midst of what would have been a final victory, turning and allying with the humans as further truths revealing that the Forerunners that the Covenant had worshipped as gods had in fact designated humanity as their inheritors. By March 2553, the Covenant had fractured, with various warlords trying their hand at taking control, and eventually failed, while humanity had at least one major new ally to eventually call on, and a chance to rebuild from the horrors of the Covenant and the Flood.
By 2571, however, the stability of the UEG was coming undone. The aftermath of the AI Reclamation had left the political, economical, and ideological climate in turmoil, and many of ONI’s carefully hidden secrets regarding it involvement in illegal and destabilizing efforts in the former Covenant races and within the outer colonies to warrant further tightening of military oversight of the Earth sphere were starting to come to light, as rumors of the truth behind the Spartan program had already been circulating for a decade and a half. Within two years, Admiral Serin Osman executed the Hades Protocol, also known less formally as Skeletons in the Closet, initiating a full black-box archive of all ONI records and the activation of specialized worm programs to sweep the data networks and wipe all traces of any information relating to ONI, what it had been involved in, and of what it had still been planning out. Included were all files on the original SPARTAN processes, Mjolnir armor data, and the location of the Concord Special Assembly Plant, as well as the designs of the Infinity-Class Super Carrier. By 2575, having wiped almost all traces of the department's activities and hidden the “Vault” in pieces across secure warehouse locations, Osman executed the last actions of the Hades protocol and destroyed the entire database and physical publicly known complexes in demolition explosions that were engineered to look like insurrectionist attacks.
During this time, the UEG was undergoing a reformation as the process of returning government power to civilian hands became complicated by disputes with the colonial regions and conflicts with the remaining Covenant splinter factions. But by 2580, a settlement was reached, and the UEG was reorganized into a new world and space republic of regions. On August 23, 2583, the Articles of Confederation were signed by representatives of the UEG and the inner colonial regions, formally marking the end of the Unified Earth Governments, and the birth of the Terran Confederation. It was hoped that by reforming the old UEG into a new entity, a new start could give way to the hopes of a golden age, with the greatest of their struggles behind them, and a growing circle of allies beside them.
Within forty-five years, the hard and painfully earned peace was shattered. Humanity was barely starting to rebuild what they had lost when on August 17, 2629, the TCS Iason, an exploratory vessel reaching out via the recently discovered jump points into the coreward regions of the Orion Spur, encountered an unknown race in the Tyr System, later discovered to be the Kilrathi. After a twenty minute wait with weapons disarmed and broadcasting first contacting hailing frequencies, the Iason was fired on and eventually destroyed, starting a five year period of harassment from the Empire before war was declared, and the Battle of McAuliffe showed the Confederation just how much of a horrifying repeat of the Covenant they were in for. Having barely recovered to just over twice the surviving population following the Covenant War, the conflict dragged on into years, then into decades, and while humanity held their ground well enough, in late 2667, a false armistice was offered by the Kilrathi in effort to lull the Confederation into a false sense of security, and afford themselves time to complete construction of a new fleet of heavy-carrier class ships. By the end of 2668, the Confederation has disarmed itself enough that the Kilrathi fleet was able to drive its way through the outer colonies and into the Sol System itself. If not for the last minute arrival by the fleets of the Free Republic of the Landreich, and the heel-turn of Baron Jukaga nar Ki'ra, it would have been likely the Earth would have been sterilized by the attacking fleet. The bitter victory brought heavy losses in almost all fronts going into 2669, leading to several special operations projects of desperation. One of these, the Behemoth dreadnought, attempted to create a refractive resonation superlaser capable of cracking and destabilizing the crust and mantle of a planet, but was destroyed by the Kilrathi while en route to the Kilrah system after sabotage and betrayal by Lieutenant Laurel “Cobra” Buckley, a former slave who had been conditioned with personality overlays and biochemical implants as a sleeper agent. The second project was a covert infiltration of the Kilrah system to gain tectonic data on Kilrah itself for the purpose of attuning the seismic resonation frequency of the experimental Temblor Bomb, a refinement of the hyper-destructive NOVA bomb into a seismic resonation weapon that could trigger devastating tectonic ruptures and shatter a planet through apocalyptic quakes. This second weapon of terrifying power became the lynchpin that turned the course of the war into an ending. A final strike was made by a quartette of experimental fighters with stealth drives into the heart of the Kilrathi Empire. The Crown Prince Thrakkath was shot down over the planet, the Temblor unleashed on a key-fault to trigger the chain reaction that would tear the planet open, destroying everything living on the surface, and decimating the orbiting fleet. With the imperial family eradicated in the destruction of Kilrah, power fell to the prince's retainer, who had come to realize what the lust for war had cost all those involved, and agreed to peace for the sake of the Kilrathi and the rest of the galaxy.
With the treaty of Torgo came another era of recovery, and of contact with the mysterious Chozo, who pressed for the Galactic Federation to induct humanity as a member species. Refusal came, and the reasons of Terra’s destructive history as justification, but these all proved folly as in 2701, the Promethium Machine Empire arrived from across the dark space span and dragged the galaxy into an already raging second Machine War. This time, the entire Orion Spur was pulled into the conflict, and while some fared better than others, the Machine War would be the end of the Spartan legacy as the Strategic Readiness Agency database containing all information on the augmentation process was ravaged by a highly advanced AI attack, wiping more than half the defense project archives and setting the Confederation back decades. As well, the legendary TCS Infinity vanished during the war, as was also the fate of its sister ship, the TCS Eternity, though neither ship was ever confirmed destroyed. Perhaps the only thing that saved the galaxy was the unexpected and sudden withdrawal of the Empire just as they had prepared to destabilize Sol itself and destroy the Sol System in the resulting nova. Once more, Terra lay wounded, damaged, but still living and the last refuge for the surviving Terrans of the Spur, under eight hundred million estimated to remain. Once more, the Chozo spoke on humanity's behalf, and this time, with the Mantu joining that call, and the fact that they had repeatedly courted extinction on the galaxy’s behalf, the Federation extended its aid and offers of inclusion to the Terrans.
But as the next century would reveal, Sol's desperate state that had convinced the Federation of their worth and value became the crippling flaw that gave rise to a system of control over the rebuilding military forces of the Confederation. Second perhaps only to the Sangheili as a military power despite their losses, humanity none the less had more material resources than they had a population, and the nihilistic outlook many had gave way to apathy towards their inferior political power in the Galactic Federation Congress, and they would not be the last treated in this fashion. It was, perhaps poetically, the expectation of yet another interstellar conflict that in fact never came that gave humanity hope once again, and over the next two centuries, Terra experienced an explosion in optimism and population unlike any it had seen since the end of the Gamilas War, one perhaps aided by the various artificial gestation technologies and advancements in technology and science that seemed to boom into being almost overnight. By 2925, the human population within the Orion Spir had exploded to over a hundred and four billion, and Terra was able to be inhabited in approximately two-thirds of the habitable surface regions, with reconstruction efforts still on going to restore the planet.
[END RECORD. FURTHER DATA AVAILABLE IN FORTHCOMING CODEX UPDATE.]
A. Technologies of the Confederation [SECTION IN PROGRESS]
Terran technology in the modern era is a combination of self developed knowledge and insight learned from the study of other civilizations. It can also be argued that a predisposition toward the sciences of Quantum Wave Motion and Forerunner technology is in part to both the Forerunner genesongs placed within genetic memory of the species, and a racial genetic memory as well, being that Wave Motion was discovered by the far flung ancient humans in the first place. Humanity is also quite skilled at hybridizing technologies they are familiar with in order to make those they are still learning function beyond minimal needs.
Power Generation: As a whole, humanity understands the basis of fusion and fission to a degree few species do. Public sectors often use fusion energy for power grids, commercial and private civilian vessels, and the majority of the aging Confederation Fleet. However, lessons learned from the ancient Forerunner drives and power reactors on the research station Trevelyon have taught the fundamentals of Zero Point Energy, leading to the development of the experimental Quantum Axion Singularity Reactor. The limits of the Singularity Reactor is so far in not finding the right reactive material to bring the reactor from a quasi-Zero Point Energy generator to fully capable.
Weaponry: While there is an ever evolving study and development of energy based particle and plasma weaponry, the Confederation has not forgotten the fundamentals of kinetic based weaponry. Magnetically accelerated weaponry has remained a staple of the naval fleets, with advanced power efficiency allowing for higher speed yields with smaller shells for more intense impact damage. Firing velocities of up to .01c are not unheard of on the Cerberus Class Battlewagon, with some of the larger ships able to reach .03c speeds, and the .095 speeds as clocked from the S-MAC array mounted on the TCS Concordia. Point defense weapons tend to be of energy base type, such as pulse lasers and accelerated particle beams, while particle and plasma weaponry are fielded in ground operations by the Confederation military alongside traditional kinetic types. Semi-Powered Armor is a common sight in specialized units, with higher class infantry shielding reserved for ÆSIR Powered Combat Armors due to power requirements.
Material: Following the Covenant conflict, humanity began re-examining nano-lamination processes, and found a way to “compress" alloyed materials into a mass two-thirds the thickness at the same overall density as uncompressed. This lead to the development of what would be named “compressed durasteel", an alloy of titanium, tungsten, and various extraterrestrial metals that contributed to heat resistance and durability. Durasteel became a primary material in ship construction, as it was found to resist temperatures of 1500°c or higher before wear and tear began visually evident. Titanium is still a sought after mainstay for smaller civilian craft and military hardware such as aerospace superiority and ground based artillery transport, as well as the primary metallic material used in semi-powered and fully powered combat armor weapons platforms.
Energy Shielding: Current Confederation projected shielding technologies have been evolutions of the Phase Shielding development of the early 2600s. Originally able to withstand similar energy based and ballistics artillery to their 2550s Sangheili counterparts, the trade off of development for use by smaller vessels was a phase modulation frequency to help conserve energy usage. Such was later realized to be an exploitable weakness when Kilrathi anti-capital ship torpedoes were unveiled in the horrific First Battle of McAuliffe in August of 2634 that scanned and duplicated the very frequency needed to slip through the defensive grids. Further refinements and development since the war, and incorporation of technologies salvaged following the Second Machine War, have eliminated the flaw in the phase modulation, and the terminology has become a designation in regards to the functionality to phase sync with specific modulation frequencies to allow capital ship artillery emplacements to fire through the raised shielding fields while deflecting enemy firepower. Phase shielding is also very common on all military space superiority and combat craft, from fighters to gunships and assaults transports. Infantry level personal shielding and ground based shielding grids continue to use developments based on more Forerunner derived technology, being better suited for the far smaller scale.
Faster Than Light Travel: In the current era, Confed has a variety of methods for traversing interstellar space. The most common in the civilian travel and small corporate sectors is the Akwende Jump Drive, a modification of the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Slipdrive that has focus in opening and facilitating trans-stellar travel via the gravitational intersection lines of compressed Slipspace known as Jump Points. Via jump points, travel between dozens to hundreds of light years can be instantaneous, with traditional slipspace usage allowing for rapid travel between major jump lines. While not as powerful as the dedicated slipdrives used by militaries such as Confed’s naval fleet or the Sangheili, the jump drive is far more economical for cost, space, and power usage. For larger corporations and government industries, the Fornax Slipdrive is a common standard, allowing for speeds comparable to the Covenant pattern borers of the 2500s. These are a far more costly option, but larger corporations are able to weather the cost, as are government transportation lines. The Confederation fleets are primarily equipped with the upper grade Fornax Drives, capable of reaching speeds up to 1100 light years a day, with a handful of capital ships carrying the more powerful Reclaimer-class Slip Drive, allowing transit speed upwards of over 666 light years an hour, or 16,000 light years a day. The experimental Quantum Wave Drive Array that was fielded inside the TCS Concordia has been clocked up to speeds of at least 750 light years an hour, and this may possibly not even be the limit of the drive’s full capabilities.
Misc. Technologies: In addition to the above technologies explained in depth, the Terrans have made immense leaps in large scale gravity manipulation engines, advanced medical technologies such as cybernetic prosthetics and refined organ cloning, and superluminal communications, as exemplified by the communications hyperburst network now in place in the central regions of the Galactic Federation and within the Confederation itself. In addition to the Forerunner technologies that humanity has proven to hold key traits to unlocking, humanity has proven adapt at making progress with learning from the various Chozo technologies that also litter the galaxy.
B. The Confederation Fleet
TCS Concordia Confederation-Class Heavy Assault Carrier
Role: Command and Combat Operations Length: 2497 meters Height: 578 meters Width: 932 meters Support Craft: 258 fighter and support craft of various type and class Reactor type: [CLASSIFIED] Engine type: [CLASSIFED] GRD Series 57 Repulsor Engines(Secondary Sublight) Series JX 7-1 Slipspace Jump Drive(Secondary FTL) Armor: 10+ meters of Compressed Durasteel Shielding: Series GX-3FR Heavy Dual Phased Shielding Grid Field Generators Maximum Sublight Velocity: 300 k/s Maximum FTL Velocity: 750 lights an hour(18,000 ly/d)[As yet reached speeds, true top speed unknown] Crew: 10,000(3,000 minimum with unshackled AI ) + 1,000 Infantry/Marines, [CLASSIFIED] ÆSIR-II troopers, [CLASSIFIED] Spartan-Vs Armaments: 1 [CLASSIFIED] 3 Mark 7 Series 13 S-MAC Multi Fire Super-Heavy Coil(firing velocity .095c max, 500 and 1000 ton shells, 49 and 98 gigatons. Maximum attainable firing velocity unknown.) 22 Mark 2893 Hydra Head 2.5G MAC Multi Shot 34 Mk13 Accelerated Particle Beam Anti-ship Cannons 42 Variable Loadout Missile/Torpedo launch tubes 188 Mk91 Pulse Laser point defense cannon
Asgard-class Heavy Carrier
Length: 1328.7 meters Height: 358 meters Width: 653 meters Support Craft: 164 fighter craft, 8 transport shuttles, 8 troop dropships Engine type: GRD Series 42 Repulsor Engines DAW Materials Group Reclaimer-class translight slipdrive(Primary FTL) Series JX 7-1 Akwende Jump Drive(Secondary FTL) Armor: 6 meters of Compressed Durasteel Shielding: Camdell Systems MF-19 Phase Shielding Grid, 8 meter equivalent Maximum Sublight Velocity: 200 k/s Maximum FTL Velocity: 666 l/h(15,984 - 16,000 l/d) Crew: 1500 + 200 pilot crew and 400 Infantry/Marine Armaments: 8 Mark 2884 Hydra Head 2.3G MAC Multishot 12 Mark 2874 Onager 2.1G MAC Single Shot 18 Mk9 Accelerated Particle Beam Anti-ship Cannons 20 Variable Load out Missile/Torpedo launch tube 68 Mk87 Pulse Laser point defense cannons
Heimdallr-class Medium Carrier
Length: 931 meters Height: 332 meters Width: 453 meters Support Craft: 100 fighter craft, 6 transport shuttles, 4 troop dropships Engine type: GRD Series 39 Repulsor Engines Fornax T-1 SD8 Stellar Entanglement Drive(Primary FTL) Series JX 5-3 Akwende Jump Drive(Secondary FTL) Armor: 4 meters Compressed Durasteel Shielding: Camdell Systems MF-16 Phase Shielding Grid, 6 meter equivalent Maximum Sublight Velocity: 175 k/s Maximum FTL Velocity: 45.8 l/h(1100 l/d) Crew: 800 + 120 pilot crew and 250 Infantry/Marines Armaments: 10 Mark 2874 Onager 2.1G MAC Single Shot 20 Mk7 Accelerated Particle Beam Anti-ship Cannons 44 Mk87 Pulse Laser point defense cannons
Sleipnir-Class Strike Carrier
Length: 752 meters Height: 275 meters Width: 453 meters Support Craft: 60 fighter craft, 6 transport shuttles, 3 troop dropship Engine type: GRD Series 40 Repulsor Engines Fornax T-2 SD3 Stellar Entanglement Drive (Primary FTL) Series JX 3-7 Akwende Jump Drive(Secondary FTL) Armor: 3 meters Compressed Durasteel, Shielding: Misriah Armory FR-13 Phase Shielding, 6 meter equivalent Maximum Sublight Velocity: 200 k/s Maximum FTL Velocity: 31.25 l/h(750 l/d) Crew: 700 + 70 pilot crew and 200 Infantry/Marines Armaments: 6 Mark 2874 Onager 2.1G MAC Single Shot 18 Mk87 Castor Anti-Ship Coilguns 38 M k87 Pulse Laser point defense cannons
Cerberus-class Assault Battlewagon
Length: 932 meters Height: 313 meters Width: 397 meters Support Craft: 32 Armaments: 2 Mark 5 Series 13 MAC Multi Fire Heavy Coil(firing velocity .02c, 75 and 150 ton shells. 322.5 and 645 mts) 12 Mark 2874 Onager 2.1G MAC Single Shot 22 Mk7 Accelerated Particle Beam Anti-ship Cannons 32 MK87 Pulse Laser point defense cannons
Chimaera-Class Medium Battlewagon
Length: 743 meters Height: 197 meters Width: 343 meters Support Craft: 28 Armaments: 1 Mark 5 Series 11 MAC Multi Fire Medium Coil(firing velocity .0085c, 50 and 75 ton shells, 39 and 58 mts) 10 Mark 2874 Onager 2.1G MAC Single Shot 16 Mk86 Castor Anti-Ship Coilguns 24 MK81 Pulse Laser point defense cannons
Ahnk-Class Heavy Destroyer
Length: 939 meters Height: 397 meters Width: 485 meters Support Craft: 12 Armaments: 2 Mark 5 Series 13 MAC Multi Fire Heavy Coil (firing velocity .015c, 75 and 100 ton shells, 181 and 241 mts) 4 Mark 2874 Onager 2.1G MAC Single Shot 18 Mk7 Accelerated Particle Beam Anti-ship Cannons 32 MK87 Pulse Laser point defense cannons
Horus-Class Medium Destroyer
Length: 767 meters Height: 193 meters Width: 453 meters Support Craft: 7 Armaments: 1 Mark 4 Series 13 MAC Single Shot Medium Coil(firing velocity .0085c, 50 and 75 ton shells, 39 and 58 mts) 8 Mark 2874 Onager 2.1G MAC Single Shot 14 Mk85 Castor Anti-Ship Coilguns 22 mk89 Pulse Laser point defense cannons.
Griffin-Class Light Frigate
Length: 361 meters Height: 109 meters Width: 147 meters Support Craft: 10 Armaments: 1 Mark 4 Series 13 MAC Single Shot Heavy Coil(firing velocity 1000k/s, 50 and 75 ton shells, 6 to 8 Mts ) 8 Mk87 Castor Anti-Ship Coilguns 16 MK85 Pulse Laser point defense cannons
CAPITAL CLASS SHIPS Assault Carrier: 1 Heavy carriers: 5 Medium carriers: 11 Light carriers: 17 Destroyers: 68 Battlewagons: 80 Frigates: 135 Corvettes: 184
Total combat vessels: 501
First Fleet – Home Defense(Typically regulated to Sol System space) Flag of Operations: Sol Station(Jupiter orbit) Complement: 2 Medium Carriers 8 Light Carriers 23 Heavy Destroyers 27 Assault Battlewagons 15 Frigates 37 Corvettes
Second Fleet – Special Operations Commanding Officer: Vice Admiral Dyson Richards(Flag Officer) Flagship: GFS Annwn Aurora Unit: 217 Complement: 1 Heavy Carrier 3 Medium Carriers 9 Medium Battlewagons 10 Heavy Destroyers 23 Corvettes 27 Frigates
Third Exploratory Fleet Flagship: GFS Takamagahara Commanding Officer: Vice Admiral Alexandria Miles(Flag Officer) Aurora Unit: 287 Complement: 1 Heavy Carrier 3 Medium Carriers 6 Medium Battlewagons 4 Medium Destroyers 23 Frigates 31 Corvettes
A violent collective species that holds belief of their origins in a common ancestor from the tectonic nightmare that was Krom, a planet that orbits barely within the habitable range of its star in the Dragon's Head Nebula of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Theory suggests that the Kromus somehow managed to discover directed faster-than-light interstellar travel over fifteen hundred years ago, yet there is evidence for Kromus use of local jump points much further back in history due to the subgroup homeworlds laying in systems that are separated by hundreds of parsecs. It is theorized that their sudden surge in capability for interstellar technologies could have occurred as a result of a Chozo research team that they slaughtered and salvaged the ship thereof, as the Kromus have taken to favoring Chozo technologies, as well as Forerunner design seeds. This rapid jump from a tier 3 civilization barely capable of using the natural jump lines to tier 2 with directed higher-spatial travel resulted in a violent upheaval. Tribal factions began turning their new might on each other, then against the other species subgroups, and likely would led to a sectors wide genocidal holocaust if not for the arrival of the dragonoid Ridley. As the Kromus are compelled on a biological level to follow a physically and psychologically strong leader, when the regenerator dragonoid defeated and kill most of the native faction leaders, it forced the tribes to recognize Ridley as a superior leader. Under his leadership, the Kromus set out of the Dragon's Head Nebula and discovered a planet that was rife with Forerunner technologies, including design seeds that allowed the Kromus to not only upgrade and expand their own existing fleets, but also allowed the construction of a massive dreadnought vessel that Ridley would claim as his own flagship.
While unverified reports of pirates that resemble the Kromus have plagued the Galactic Federation since its formal founding in 2681, it was in 2913 that confirmed assaults from the Kromus were recorded. Even then, the Galactic Federation refused to allow a vote for declaration of war, citing that "random piracy" did not warrant such measures. It wasn’t until the Confederation colony world of Beacon was bombarded into utter lifelessness by Kromus forces that full scale war was declared by Confed in 2947. By that point, the Kromus had been building up their fleets for well over two hundred years, unified under Ridley and the High Command council under his guidance. While initially not seeming to be more powerful than the former Covenant once was, the Kromus Imperium was still a force that proved it was to be feared, and its devastating true power was revealed once the dreadnought that was Ridley's flagship unveiled itself in the devastating Battle of McAuliffe and decimated the defensive forces with the aptly named Oblivion Cannon, then proceeded to bombard the planet until the biosphere was burned out beyond any semblance of supporting life. The Cunning Death would go on in the war to be one of the most feared ships of the time, letting the Confederation fleet breathe easy only when it vanished after the Siege of Krom in 2959 and was assumed finally destroyed.
There are two main components of the upper leadership in the Kromus Imperium, though one only has true power in the event that the other is missing or unavailable to make wide scale decisions. The first is the High Command council, made up of the smarter and more ambitious examples of the Kromus factions, who handle the general command and direction of the species as an engine of war. The other component is Ridley himself, reigning over the Kromus by authority of his size and strength, his massacre of the previous tribal leaders, and his frightening intellect. While occupying Zebes, Ridley appeared to have deferred to the Mother Brain's leadership, though the fact that his flagship and a sizable portion of the Kromus fleets withdrew during the siege on Zebes into renewed hiding implicates that he did not, in fact, trust her command status, and had been preparing all along to resume his position as supreme commander of the Kromus. Since their defeat at Zebes, however, and a repeated abandonment by Ridley and his main fleet, the lesser Kromus tribes have refused to rejoin him again, fragmenting not only the unified force of their overspecies, but the High Command council as well.
The Kromus themselves are an oddly evolved collective race. They seem to be a combination of reptilian, insectoid, and crustacean racial traits and biological makeup, and are divided along developmental lines influenced by the planets claimed by the different tribal clans as ‘home worlds'. Despite the common genetic ancestor held by the various subgroups, however, each one shows evidence of a further reaching habitation of their source planets and divergence of evolution far more than a mere two to three millennia, something that baffles Federation scientists. These divergent evolutions are also accelerated by an acquired habit of artificially altering themselves with appropriated biotech to create new physical traits, which each tribe-clan claimed were the superior course for the overspecies.
The first racial genotype, known as Kromun for their formerly maintain homeworld of Krom, are built for combat and brute command, as their natural and artificially induced evolutions show. Towering over nine feet tall and broad built, the average soldier caste Kromun has upper limbs that end with an elongated pincer claw on one arm that opens up to reveal an organic biolaser node for ranged attack, and a tri-finger hand at the opposite wrist that allows for more precision based task and close quarters combat. Their heads are covered in exoskeletal plates with two sets of glowing yellow refractive eyes inside of withdrawn sockets, while a pair of large outer mandible jaws frame the inner sets of insectoid mandibles that mark their mouths. Like all Kromus species, Kromun are digitigrade bipedals, and have been observed to be capable of sustained running speeds up to sixty kilometers an hour.
The second most prolific genotype, and the most well known offshoot, is the Urtraghans, called such for the planet Urtraghus they claimed as their tribal homeworld. They possess six eyes instead of the Kromun four, with a row of three on either side of their sloping, fishlike heads. Their mouths are upturned and lined with long, needle-like teeth, as are the lower mandibles, giving the Urtraghians a superficial resemblance to the Sangheili. Unlike the Kromun genotype soldier caste, Urtraghian combat bioforms have hands and talons on both upper limbs instead of a pincer claw on one, allowing them more precise usage and manipulation of firearms and tools.
The third known genotype, the Qymor, exhibit more reptilian traits, with three-fingered claws similar to the Urtraghan Kromus, digitigrade legs and segmented feet. Their angular heads have sharp-toothed, snarling jaws, a pair of swept-back tendrils and a singular pair of yellow eyes that seemed to be perpetually ablaze. Additionally, the Qymor typically have grey-purple flesh, with green, bristle-lined plating partially covering their bodies.
Fourth of the known genotypes is the Fro’my’xin. They do show some common physical traits with the Kromun subspecies, such as crustacean claws on one arm, digitigrade leg structure, and insect-like outer mandibles, but with a more humanoid head, single set of eyes, and blade-like structures growing from their shoulders similar to the Qymor subgroup. Curiously, the exoskeleton of the Fro'my'xin do not always develop completely to cover the body, on occasion leaving back tissue exposed in several areas as well as what appears to be a beating heart at times.
The last observed tribal genotype is the Batta. Exhibiting the pincer claws of the Kromun and Fro'my'xin subspecies on both wrists, the soldier Batta are more crustacean in appearance, with digitigrade legs and heavy shell plating over their bodies. Most are a blue to blueish-black coloration, and like the Qymor and Fro'my'xin, the Batta have a single pair of glowing yellow eyes. Their mouths resemble a rostrum beak similar to cephalopods, while raised spine-quills run down their back plates. Unlike the Kromun subspecies, however, the beam emitters stored in their pincers are not organic and require external power sources due to being cybernetic implants. It is unclear as the nature of this strange divergence in offensive natural weaponry, as the Fro'my'xin also lack the organic biobeam emmiter nodes.
A common biological trait between all five tribal species is self-insemination, as there is no known biological gender separation of a male or female in the Kromus. Whether this is due to their evolution or a result of thousands of years of self-alteration is unknown, but a single birthing Kromus is capable of laying up to two dozen eggs in a single birth cycle, which tend to run every six to eight Krom based months, or about twice a Terran orbital cycle. In addition, maturation rate of the Kromus is perhaps even faster than the Unggoy, aging to physical lethal maturity within three to five standard years. As a result, it is likely such birthing rates are the results of Kromus genetic experimentation to increase their numbers once they had begun spreading out in their home galaxy. The ratio of birthing capable Kromus to those that do not bear eggs seems proportionate to local population needs, which would normally seem to keep the species from totally overwhelming the supporting local resources, but has seemed to grow to near infestation levels in the interstellar scale. At current projections, as of 2977, there is a calculated lower estimate of three to five trillion Kromus of the five primary subgroups, hiding in the Sol-Daiban Galaxy alone, and possibly far more still pillaging in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
[END RECORD. FURTHER DATA AVAILABLE IN FORTHCOMING CODEX UPDATES.]