I'm glad it was enjoyable. Looking back over it, there's apparent formatting problems that ought to have been ironed out, but I was working too quick and giving no mind to proofreading then or after. Sloppy. And 'Celestian' used instead of 'Celestial,' don't know how I garbled that, maybe poor memory plus its sounding sufficiently space-y. I technically cannot use the sheet, since the slots are full, but I suppose I can talk theoreticals. Or theoreticals of theoreticals, since a timeframe would have to be worked out; the OP post mentions that the civilized have ruled 'for centuries,' but that seems to be more comparing the ARG to past rulers than a statement of the length of the shared-FTL period, which seems quite recent. Armor vignette mentions two years of relief work, but this is all working concept stuff, I can't say when there was a war or even if there was a war unless the Claw were cleared, again technically impossible under the current limit, and it were approved that they had unsuccessfully engaged in preventative decapitation strikes before suffering retaliation by a coalition. It's essentially a pilot sheet.

On the Fourth Staff, the window for them to enter is a bit narrow, yeah. Closed society with a strict ordering of things, not quite a command economy, but staunchly protectionist. Jingoist, xenophobic, although at the moment full post-Black Ship Japan in terms of rapidity of westernization, while on the level of 30's Japan in terms of military oversight, which is to say a fair bit. There's embassies, well-policed interstate research bases and relief/galactic integration headquarters, but while it's certainly not on the level of full on Sakoku, there's probably only so many spaceports that accept foreign traffic. Christoffel is written, more for sake of drama than any practical/gamey desire to go full bore with security, as an exception to the general rule of true espionage agents being rooted out. Especially ones trying to escape with ultra-rare exotic elements. So the infiltrators are likely to be pretty badly stuck on the level of physical listeners and informants. Hard to break into places guarded by four-meter tall lizards with chunky green-beam photon guns. Easy to get bugs on things in a place running on '50s-'60s sci-fi tech and therefore '50s-'60s' electronic security, hard to keep it from frying in the radioactive environs. What you'll probably end up with is a very large network of smugglers moving relatively few items in, more for sake of establishing presence than anything else. Recall that section from Tales of a Road Junky where the author ends up selling counterfeit garbage and dollar store items as a street peddler for the mafia, just like that, but in irritating and constantly dispersed bazaars full of weird aliens who occasionally manage to smuggle an item of some note out in bits and pieces.

In regards to gaser/graser pinching, the problem with pinching it is that it really is a rather hazardous technology to softer life, and as stupidly simple as written. Bomb-pumped xasers and nuclear shaped charges for gaser projection & tungsten-plasma propulsion, with a reuseable construction from exotic matter breech & barrel assembly. There's really nothing to easily purloin for direct snatching from the weapons project for other things, rather something to copy for further weaponizing, and more pointfully various other supporting gadgets that CAN be eventually lifted. The design could be refined, made more exacting, and more shielded, but you'd still need either the element or a synthetic replacement, and bomb fired lasers aren't at all constant enough for efficient power transfer even if one has very exacting standards as to each rounds' construction. But there's still potential aid the Claw can provide, willing or otherwise, in the Consortium's own fusion beamer project. 

The main application and manifestation of gaser nonsense is simplistic and to some degree dead-ended by its miracle material dependence, but otherwise the science is sound in-game. The Claw've got a serious understanding of the atomic and of the exotic matter(s) endemic to their system, so what really would prevent them from moving forward from this design and developing anything more wieldy is that they don't have the computers and haven't had the time to conceive of such a thing as the Consortium's own project fully, only a rough space-60's tech equivalent. You could pinch various doohickeys, they've already got unsubtly industrially directed singularities & microstars for making cast homogenous steel out of the otherwise sillily unmeltable and unbreakable, plus I was thinking they'd use mostly inertial confinement fusion-type nuclear pulse propulsion & energy generation as I said, but another source might be in the Claw themselves. Put one behind a solid-state or better computer and he might have a less jury-rigged answer to the problems of the fusion beamer, if he's amicable. Or he might not, because one might have problems going straight from mechanical & early electronic computers to solid-state or quantum nonsense as far as practical application of untested theory, and adjustment to the new computational capacity might take a while.

In short, yes, the Claw could probably have a hand in assisting that project, if the Fourth Staff could keep at it for a very long time, if the Claw were willing or if they could somehow be duped. Considering they're likely to start chafing at some point under the present order, written explicitly for it, and also long for the sublight colonies lost within their own system, there might be common ground as allies of convenience once they start getting disgruntled. Although, I am not really certain how openly the Consortium and CE are at odds and how deep the enmity is. I believe Cale mentioned them being viewed essentially as insurgents and therefore treated as enemies of the state, and reflected that in the Shields vignette, but I might be misremembering. Definitely not a status-quo faction with terms like New Hegemony, though. I don't think I got it wrong, but correct me if I did.

[@Silvan Haven] Had the thought myself. The only difference between majors/minors is that, barring player subsidiary organizations, even the majors are in single systems, just with pre-colonized worlds. Galactic scale or any significant fraction of it just seems inconsistent with the rest.

[@Cale Tucker] I posted my work-in-progress sheet for others to peruse, in spite of the lack of an available slot. Didn't want the writing to go to waste, severely unpolished though it is, so I wanted there to be some kind of entertainment value for others to derive from it simply by having it in the open while I mull over whether to make a corp of privateers.