Hey there, I need to kick off to work soon, but this is the bare-bones description of the nation I'm thinking of playing. I'll wrap it up later today.

Name: Congress of Bvalt

[img]http://i.imgur.com/u5Q8XfR.png[/img]

Species: The Bvalten are the only sentient species within the Congress, and are a fairly unremarkable lifeform. They are biped humanoids, thicker and shorter than humans due to the increased gravity of their homeworld Svartvist. They are nearly entirely fur-covered, and the color of this hair varies wildly between individuals, from pale white to deep red to navy blue, and can be seen kept trim or grown shaggy. Their skin is thick and leathery, their two eyes set far apart in their head and very large in comparison with their human-sized cranium. They have a flap of skin that acts as a nose, and two rows of sharp teeth in their wide mouth. They are stronger than a human on average, and their long dexterous fingers lend themselves well to clever manipulation of objects. They eat both flora and fauna. Their posture is straight, stretching their apparent height to the fullest, though they only stand on average at just over five feet.

Government: The Congress of Bvalt is a convocation of the tribal leaders of the Bvalten, forged half a millennium ago by Olaf the Young. Tribes no longer hold any true independence from the Congress, having amalgamated happily into one governing body, and simply act as the delineation method for electing regional officials. The Congress holds legislative power, and is checked by executive control from the King, who is popularly elected directly by the people. The government, a large authoritarian body barely one hundred standard years ago, has become a much smaller, less obtrusive body, with very few taxes going almost entirely to the military, which has maintained prominence simply due to the recent discovery that the Bvalt are not alone in the galaxy.

Description of Technology: There is no magic on Svartvist. The Bvalt are physicists, chemists, astronomers and myriad other denominations of science. They have only recently achieved lightspeed travel, finally perfected after years of awkward communication with the outside world. Their weapons are kinetic, their power reactors only now moving to antimatter. Their communications are sophisticated, messages travelling almost instantly across the galaxy by quantum machinations. Their medical technology, though only truly efficacious on Bvalt, is perhaps their greatest achievement, and has extended the Bvalten lifespan to nearly limitless theoretical age.
 
Description of Military: Despite almost all the paltry budget of the government flowing into military development, the Bvalt boast a small fleet of a few dozen true warships, with enough convoy defense ships to protect their own mercantile assets. Their sole inhabited system is well enough defended to ward off hostile freelance assets, and the Bvalten are capable surface combatants, but aggressive military action is largely outside their operational possibility.

Description of Culture: The Bvalten revere Heroes. 82 Heroes have been declared by the Congress, and their actions and teachings have been enshrined into the Bvalten culture, shaping it by their actions. The Bvalten value these teachings highly, and heavily pressure fellow Bvalten to follow them or be ostracized. However, the Bvalten know well that the only way Heroes are created is to break from the mold and become successful, and so permit attempts at these successes begrudgingly. The Bvalten have one immutable law, set by the First Hero: "What is good for Bvalt is good.". Their people follow this maxim religiously, and all their laws are based around this concept, with exceptions plentiful when actions benefit the good of the people, as judged by the people and their representatives. 

History: The history of the Bvalten stretches back tens of thousands of years, but their history off their homeworld is not three hundred years in length. Having achieved space flight, they hurried to colonize the moons of their icy homeworld, and slowly spread their colonies among their resource-rich asteroid belt, and onto the 4 habitable planets and their orbiting bodies. They never developed light speed travel themselves, but explored the other star systems on massive generation ships fitted with what humans would call Orion drives. One of these transports was found and destroyed by roving interstellar pirates, and following the trajectory of the nuclear ship they stumbled upon the Bvalten home system. The pirates were engaged by the hero Hgele Curnst, and were destroyed by a ramshackle Orion craft propelled towards the surviving pirate capital ship. The Bvalten reverse engineered these craft, and with the incredible leaps in technology provided they joined the galactic stage as precocious newcomers, approximately 122 standard years ago.

The Bvalten made themselves small on the diplomatic stage: they had no territorial desires, having plenty of space and resources on their large asteroid belt and Oort cloud, and as such contented themselves by becoming incredibly rich through trade and war profiteering, selling their capable industrial base to the highest bidder. They have fought desperately to gain new technology, and the only Hero in the last 122 years has been a Bvalten who managed to reverse engineer Non-Orientable Wormhole technology and provide easy access to antimatter for the Bvalt. They are expanding their standing military, realizing that their defenses are not sufficient, and are looking to make their economic presence greater on the interstellar level.