I'm interested. Fair warning, though, I'll probably have to drop by the end of summer (like, September). Here's what I have so far:

My intent is to make a race of [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Tropes]trope-fueled[/url] spaceship builders. I want their interspecies contacts (at least, until they get in wildly over their heads) to eventually result in contracts to build starships for other races. Their Startrek "hat" would be a race that lives its TV shows. Their comparative advantage would, of course, be ship-building. Or stardrive-making. Whichever.

[hider=Rough Nation Sheet - very much WIP][b]|Name of nation: [/b] The Democracy of Kaankind

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Species: [/b][/color] Kaan

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Description of government: [/b][/color]Democratic republic. Their government (currently in it's 187th season) is a fine-tuned balance of exposition, speeches, dramatic reveals, and last-second saves. The president, Penelope Kate, is a serious figure, commanding authority, yet still maintaining a supernatural attractiveness. Their judiciary is particularly entertaining, with big, flashy court cases and heavily-gavelled decisions. 

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Description of military: [/b][/color]Their weapons are colorful, flashy, terrifying, and rather expensive as a result. They spent some time inventing explosive devices that created a nice planar shockwave upon detonation, rather than the standard spherical expanding cloud of gas. Their military ships are either elegant spiderwebs of struts that could only exist in space; large, chunky rectangles reminiscient of rifles; or something like navy ships in space.

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Technological Overview: [/b][/color]Although their engineer-artists enthusiastically create drives that exploit strange niches of physics, most of their ships use a flashy point-to-point jump drive. Even so, there are the mega-artworks, like the DKS Merkano, a leviathan that moves around by exploiting macrofissures in subspace, slipping into one and coming out the other side in the space of minutes. Or the DKS Oglethrope, a corvette-sized ship that pulls itself along via magnetic discharge, flinging particulate retrograde at incredible speeds. The Oglethrope is particularly flashy, looking like lightning is pulling the ship along.

Weaponry, although very pretty, tends to be expensive. That means there's much less weaponry on their ships than if they'd just use something cost-efficient. Furthermore, a lot of the Kaanite weapons aren't as powerful as they could be. All of that energy poring into the lightshows has to come from somewhere, after all. Every round that fires is a tracer.

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Cultural Overview: [/b][/color]The Kaanites never invented plays. Instead, they took what was in their imagination and made it real. One of their most celebrated operas, a masterpiece called "Yanhallow", actually started a war. They love making spaceships. The less practical, the more artistically meaningful. Spaceship and space drive making are one of the more glamorous forms of art.

[color=#EE00AA][b]|History: [/b][/color] At some point, they decided that plays were dumb, and instead went out and performed them in the real world.

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Other:  [/b][/color] [/hider]

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[b][color=gray][i]Edit:[/i][/color][/b] [hider=Updated Rough Draft][color=#EE00AA][b]|Name of nation: [/b][/color] Eastwing

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Species: [/b][/color] Khasi

The Khasi are green-skinned humanoids. Well, mostly green-skinned. The color ranges from a subtly translucent aqua to a pale sort of gold, but the majority are a delightfully leafy green. Females are the only ones with hair, and both hair dye and skin-paint are wildly popular.

Other than their rather exciting skin color and bald males, the Khasi are a distressingly standard humanoid species. They've got two sexes, are about 2.5 meters tall, and don't have any particularly egregious manifestations of physical or mental strength.

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Description of government: [/b][/color]The current government, known colloquially as [i]Eastwing[/i] after the building housing the office of the President, has unobtrusive microdrone cameras buzzing about everywhere, recording and broadcasting the President's every speech and aria especially. Their government (currently in it's 187th season) is a democratic republic with a refined balance of exposition, speeches, dramatic reveals, and last-second saves. The president, Penelope Kate, is a serious figure, commanding authority, yet still maintaining a supernatural attractiveness. Their judiciary is particularly entertaining, with big, flashy court cases and heavily-gavelled decisions. 

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Description of military: [/b][/color]Their weapons are colorful, flashy, terrifying, and rather expensive as a result. For example, they spent some time inventing explosive devices that created a nice planar shockwave upon detonation, rather than the standard spherical expanding cloud of gas. The resulting complicated series of magnetic and gravitational bottling increased the size of their torpedoes by 300%, but also resulted in pinpoint-accurate plasma weaponry. Unfortunately, that same plasma weaponry was rapidly overdesigned so that the length, duration, and color of the pulses could be modified. The extra machinery practically nullified the newfound accuracy and decreased the amount of practical space for plasma cannons. Military enlistment, however, has never been higher. 

Their military ships themselves are either elegant spiderwebs of struts that could only exist in space; large, chunky rectangles reminiscient of rifles; or something suspiciously similar in shape to ocean-going ships.

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Technological Overview: [/b][/color]Although their engineer-artists enthusiastically create drives that exploit strange niches of physics, most of their ships use a flashy point-to-point jump drive. Even so, there are the mega-artworks, like the ES Merkano, a leviathan that moves around by exploiting macrofissures in subspace, slipping into one and coming out the other side in the space of minutes. Or the ES Oglethrope, a corvette-sized ship that pulls itself along via magnetic discharge, flinging particulate retrograde at incredible speeds. The Oglethrope is particularly flashy, looking like lightning is pulling the ship along.

Weaponry, although very pretty, tends to be expensive. That means there's much less weaponry on their ships than if they'd just use something cost-efficient. Furthermore, a lot of the Kaanite weapons aren't as powerful as they could be. All of that energy poring into the lightshows has to come from somewhere, after all. In short, Every round that fires is a tracer.

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Cultural Overview: [/b][/color] The Khasi have developed a fundamental belief in doing your heart's fondest desire. As a consequence, they value art, especially performance art, more highly than other cultures. One of their most celebrated operas, a masterpiece called [i]Yanhallow[/i], actually started a war. Furthermore, while the various fields of engineering exist, most pursue it as a form of art. While some prominent engineers are praised for their brilliant efficiency and utilitarianess, the more prestigious ones are known for their intricate, highly-complex masterpieces. To that end, they love making spaceships. Their ships function as massive installations and testaments to the emotional and species progress as a whole. Completely impractical solutions to long-solved have been carefully engineered, launched, tested, and used. A kilometers-long lattice of crystalline film was launched as a celebration of the life-giving sun; that particular ship was commissioned as a communications relay. In general, the less practical or more experimental the drive system, the more artistically meaningful, and the more unique, the more glamorous.

Though they pursue art to the highest degree, most consider staged plays "boring", preferring to either do the deeds in the play themselves or watch the events unfold in real life via holovision. To that end, the Khasi have taken reality TV to a privacy-stripping extreme; microdrone cameras flit about everywhere. It's not unusual to find yourself relaxing in your home while being pursued by some camera or another from Drhmi-knows-where. It's only fair, as most Khasi return the favor.

Though not universal, the predominant Khasi religion is a polytheistic. It consists of a small pantheon of Gods and Godesses and a lower tier of Heroes and Heroines. Kes numbers amongst the latter. Included in the former are Drhmi, the godess of spacetime; Tr-tza the godess of electromagnetism; Arcon and Elcore, the dueling brother-gods of the weak and strong nuclear forces; Raheel, the godess of gravity; and Kron, the god of probability. This is by no means an exhaustive list; some popular alternate deities include Drol, god of matter, and Rho, godess of fundamental constants.

While they have created many spaceships of varying types of FTL and sublight capability, the Khasi don't have much interest in expansion. Sure, you get have the [i]Exploration Squad[/i], a set of brave adventurers roughing it from planet to planet, and there's many "dashing rogue" types, and there's even a few deep-space refueling, mining, and manufacturing operations, but the Khasi impulse is for adventure and exploration, not expansion. 

[color=#EE00AA][b]|History: [/b][/color] True Khasi culture can be traced back to one woman who, in their early industrial (think early 1800's Earth) period, started an alarmingly effective cult. Her name was Kes. Her cult spread a simple message: stop fantasizing and, instead, start living your fantasies. The key to the cults success and survival was their performance art that came about as a result. Khasi found it far more entertaining to live their fantasies than to watch others live them, and soon fiction began to fall to the wayside. All this came to a head with the debut of Kes' masterpiece, [i]Yanhallow[/i]. In it, she staged a coup d'etat and steered her government to an all out war of ideological conquest. It was, to quote newspapers of the time, "The most magnificent opera in the history of Khasikind."

The cult became a way of life for the Khasi. This was partially influenced by the rather draconian rule of Kes' empire. She was soon worshiped as a great heroine, if not an outright godess. Her empire would have lasted a good deal longer had an inevitable rebellion cropped up. Eventually, after several more tumultuous wars between individual nations, a relatively democratic world government formed.

In the intervening period, however, Kes' message was gradually distorted. Far from the liberating cry to actually follow your dreams, people now turned toward performance art for the ultimate in entertainment and thrills - who'd want to hear about a war when you can fight in one? And any painting is paltry compared to the thrill of completing a decades-long engineering project. Even so, some dreams fell to the wayside (if only to pursue greater ones), and these waylaid dreams were pursued via holovision microdrones. Though there are a few large holovision companies offering professionally-edited footage, there are many more private microdrones eavesdropping on whatever catches the user's fancy. Privacy has long since become a thing of the past.

It's gotten to the point where entire organizations can drift apart from a lack of interest, and people just quietly move on to other projects. There's a guiding "invisible hand" at work, a form of emergent behavior wherein the essential requirements of a small interstellar empire is maintained in the most manner deemed most exciting or interesting. In fact, that very hand was responsible for the dissolution of the previous government, an esoteric system of Houses, Fuedalities, minor Duchies, and a tangled web of intrigue and backstabbing. At a certain point, nobody really cared who betrayed whom anymore, and the great houses gradually sublimated.

One holdout from that period, though not universal, is their polytheistic religion. 


[color=#EE00AA][b]|Other:  [/b][/color][/hider]