Arktic wrote:Rodez wrote:Balorene Dominion's Polity Application
Polity Name: Balorene Dominion
Description: A constitutional dictatorship located relatively close to the galactic center, the Dominion was formerly an expansionist and warmongering state until the Balorenes overthrew their despotic monarchy about two thousand standard years ago. It its place they established the rule of the Ataman, a sort of admiral-executive who is elected to lead the Dominion for life. In the last two millennia, the Dominion has renounced its previous jingoism and has instead fought many wars against new expansionist powers. The Balorenes see it as their duty to prevent any one empire from growing so powerful that it can dominate the galaxy, and maintain a powerful navy and gifted intelligence service to this end. They are also known to send expeditionary forces to threatened states when requested.
As a people, the Balorenes are phenotypically altered from millions of years of habitation spent on their volcanic homeworld of Balor, from which the Dominion originated. Balorenes have evolved an exceptionally strong digestive system from eating a hard diet of rock-shrubs, birds and lava slugs on Balor. As a result, most ingested poisons that would kill a baseline human would simply make a Balorene mildly ill. Furthermore, their red-colored eyes mark the possession of exceptional night vision for humans; Balorenes have better perception of edges, movement, and silhouettes in dim light. This is commonly thought to be because of long habitation in the ash-choked atmosphere present on much of Balor, but geneticists have recently uncovered some evidence of genetic tampering in the distant evolutionary past. What this means, none can yet say for sure.
Despite physical differences, Balorenes continue to lay claim to the wider umbrella of humanity, and seem to be fully sexually compatible with their unaltered cousins. Immigrants from outside are generally welcome on Balorene worlds, although they may not settle on Balor itself. Though the Dominion carries out considerable commerce with the rest of the galaxy, large-scale trade is primarily in the hands of the state, with only medium-sized private enterprises permitted within Dominion space - which encompasses about 170 inhabited planets and moons, with some 650 billion inhabitants. Of these, about 600 billion are considered Dominion-born citizens. Recent immigrants are exempt from military conscription, but also forego all political rights.
Territory: Marked by squares in orange.
Megastructures: After millennia of construction efforts, the Dominion is close to completing a full Dyson sphere in the Ishukone System, and has the ambition to use it as a power source for gargantuan commercial and naval shipyards. It also has a series of 25 'blink' gates between the major star systems, in order to facilitate military and commercial transportation across Dominion space. Finally, the Balorenes boast of their ecumenopoli world of Korsiki, which possesses a world-city home to some 60 billion people.
Military: The Balorene Army contains about 5.5 billion soldiers, with the ground branch split between the elite Expeditionary Force (500 million), and the far larger semi-professional reserve forces, which rarely if ever see action outside Balorene space. However, the real strength of the Dominion lies with the Navy - at 32,000 warships of all classes and designs, it is one of the most formidable vacuum navies in the galaxy. Although it uses carrier groups and large battleships like most other states, in practice the Dominion tends to rely on the daunting stealth technologies present in some of its specialized frigate and cruiser classes to achieve infiltration of enemy-held space. These squadrons fight in "hunter-killer" groups, with the intention of wrecking havoc on the enemy's commerce, lines of supply, and isolated units.
Among the formations of the Balorene Expeditionary Force (BEF), the very best troops available are those in the 150,000-strong Ranger Corps. These elite special forces are selected from a candidate pool consisting of soldiers in the top 1% of physical fitness ability in the entire military. Trainees might arrive from the regular Army, the Marines (subordinate to the Navy), National Police, or from state-run orphanages in some cases. The training regime is long and cruel, with an emphasis on physical and mental deprivation. 9 out of 10 will wash out before completing the two-year Ranger School, with a fatality rate approaching 25%. Those that make it through, however, are subject to gene-altering procedures to enhance strength, reflexes, and cognitive ability. Once complete, the newly-minted Balorene Rangers are the most perfect warriors available to the Dominion.
Special Technologies and Magic: Balorene Cloaking Generators- Developed relatively early on in the Balorene space age, the Dominion's stealth technology has been honed and refined over thousands of years, and has acquired a reputation for being some of the most potent ship-based cloaking technology in the galaxy. Besides utilizing standard techniques to cancel out electronic signatures and disguise the physical sight of the ship itself, Balorene generators also make use of ionized plasma "shields" to absorb EM radiation. Though extremely effective on frigate and cruiser-sized ships, the power demands of the military-grade generators mean that ship movement is slowed significantly while engaged, and use of blink or warp drives is quite impossible.
Mieli-Silma- Balorene 'mind-sight,' for lack of a better translation. Sitting astride the line between martial art and meditation technique, the Mieli-Silma is an ancient practice used by Balorene wise women, and activated only in the bizarre chemical atmosphere present on the volcanic world of Balor. For reasons unknown even to the Balorenes themselves, the Mieli-Silma interacts more effectively with female biology than with male. Effective use of the Mieli-Silma is said to grant insight into motives, truthfulness - even brief visions of the future, although these are open to manipulation and interpretation. Despite the apparent power of this art, more than half the visions induced by it appear to be nothing more than mental gibberish - and it takes many decades of practice to separate the 'false' from the 'true' visions. No more than a few hundred wise woman at a time have ever sufficiently mastered the art. For the Balorenes, it is as much a religious custom as a political tool, and its intricacies are a closely-kept secret.
Other notable tech: Nanite mineral probes, terrestrial sculpting and foreign soil enrichment, zero-point power generation
Do you hereby promise that you have read and agree with the rules, or are willing to pretend like you have read and agree with the rules, and are willing to listen to and accept the judgments of Arktic and his deputies as the final word regarding combat, technology, and game fairness and fun?: I'll agree to whatever as long as I can play space Morrowind.
Provisional approval. Welcome aboard!
Your app looks mostly good, but could you elaborate a bit on the "mind-sight" thing for me? It sounds alright (otherwise I wouldn't have given you any approval at all), I just need to make sure it's not broken.
Sure thing: for starters, I mostly conceived of it as a relevant plot device more than anything, given the importance of prophecy to Balorene society. As for its practical application ICly, a Wise Woman (of whom there are only three or four hundred) would need a subject to "act" upon for it to even work, so its not as if they can just sit in their volcano monasteries on Balor and "discover" that there's an enemy fleet in such-and-such system.
I also thought about the idea of having some of the larger Balorene warships possessing meditation chambers with the appropriate atmospheric content to induce the mind-sight, but again, the power relates to individuals and not to things like fleets or armies. Prophetic visions, and visions relating to motive or truth-telling, also relate only to individual subjects. It would take even the most skilled wise woman a day or more to parse through which visions are "true" and which are bullshit, which sort of limits the immediacy of its effectiveness. Mostly I think it would be an anti-spy/counter-espionage tool more so than a military one. Very useful for rooting out moles and traitors and the like, which is incredibly important given the centrality of the intelligence services to Balorene doctrine. In short, not something that would be particularly useful in the middle of a large battle.
I should also mention, given your announcement post, that other psychics who are aware that they are being probed with the Mieli-Silma could perhaps counter it with false visions and the like, though I wonder if several wise women focused on the same subject could overcome this. I'll have to explore that further.
), but I won't make you wait that long. I at least need to fill out my own NPC apps beforehand, so progress on those will give you an idea of progress on the IC thread.
