I'm doing literally just that, but with my territory marked this time. [hider=The Abyssal Domain] Name of Nation: The Abyssal Domain. Species Description: [b]The Calzonit[/b] [img]http://i.imgur.com/1g3aXYb.png?1[/img] The Calzonit are a ancient, powerful species whose origins lie on a world where the seas dried up millions of years ago. Their kind for centuries have traveled the stars as merchants and conquerors all the same. They are nearly eight feet tall on average, with bristled bodies and a distinctive head which seems to have no mouth- only thousands of tiny, square eyes. They do have a mouth, but it is a small mouth under their eyes right above their small, triangular chin. Their head has elaborate hair patterns which come in numerous fashions and arrays, often sprouting from the top of their lenses and to the sides. Their brain you see, is not in their "head", it is in their body. The Calzonit breathe through their back instead of their head, you see. Calzonit as a species are hermaphroditic, with a patterns of intercourse that far more resembles that of a worm than a human (through the back is what they prefer since than they can work while they seed). After intercourse, one or even both of the breeding Calzonit may grow a tumor-like external fetus that grows on them until it is six inches in size. After which, the fetus becomes a baby and simply falls off the parent to be nurtured by its parent to working age. The Calzonit as a species are extremely proud of their nature- and look down upon humans as a degenerative form of themselves. They mock the humans who see them as anything other than the ideal form. Yet, humans are widespread and so as a reality of life openly deal with them and other species. Even hive minds the Calzonit begrudgingly tolerate. Area in the Galaxy (Use map posted below): [img]http://i.imgur.com/aWSR92n.jpg[/img] Technological Description; The FTL drives the Domains have as their standard are noticeably faster by a factor of 1.4x to the average society, for the Domains need such drives in order to get around. These drives however have a bad habit of consuming more [insert exotic matter type here] than your typical drive. Appearance wise, imagine your typical warp drive but bigger, more robust, metallic and with an insultingly simplistic appearance. The strength of the Domains comes in their kinetic kill weaponry and particle based technologies. Their metallurgy has reached a point from millennia of forging that they have found alloys that are capable of absorbing and redirecting energy blows to their exhaust (reducing the damage from energy based weaponry) and being hard to punch through with kinetic force in general due to the plating structure allowing for intensive shock absorption from all sides. Get out the mass drivers if dealing with an Abyssal Domain ship. Or have lots of evasive traits and a good energy weapon and you may whittle down their defenses in time. Their kinetic kill weapons are literally what you may be imagining them as, spinal mount small drivers which kill the enemy with sheer kinetic force. The Calzonit for all their supposed Unitarian-ness still have engineers who insisted on chiseling with their plasma torches giant fist at the tip of each and every slug by hand (in a highly stylized form to not tax too much on the impact, of course). The Calzonit also make liberal use of power armor when concerning classes in their society that involve work impossible to carry out nude, as is how they prefer to conduct their activities. History: The Abyssal Domain is the product of disillusionment. Once, they had a world spanning society with conditions you could call utopian, free from any work, free from suffering. It was a beautiful society, one rarely seen in such a harsh galaxy. But it was one which eroded progressively as the decadence grew and grew, until one day everything just stopped functioning. Mass starvation and famine happened with no warning and the Calzonit as a species was decimated- and in the chaos that followed the monks gained power, who always had disdain for the utopia that once existed, the utopia which to them had fallen apart from the laziness of all its inhabitants and that happiness is not the meaning of life. No, the meaning of life is perpetual toil until the universe breathes its last breathe. Life's existence is to work against entropy, not encourage it. By this mindset, instilled throughout most of the population over the following centuries by monks in the lowest rungs of society the Calzonit would be reborn and purified. In the new system and order, those with power work the hardest. The lazy are killed, for laziness is a mental illness in the eyes of the Abyssals as they began calling themselves. And the monks took to this mindset dearly- they worked day and night speaking, building and servicing the whole of society without so much a second thought. They set the example and the rest followed. The “metrics of work” was developed in this time period, and would be used to define work effectiveness to this day. The Abyssal Domain’s foundations, now set begun toiling on new crafts and inventions, iterating and iterating to new technologies in a technological revolution that made the Calzonit a space faring species who now spans numerous worlds within the Domain and outside the Domain. Government Description: Technocratic Theocracy The Abyssal Domain is not completely centralized, instead it consists of multiple world states that have their own variations on the Metrics of Work, an encoded set of standards that are the closest thing the Abyssal Domain has to actual law. For the morality of the Domains is rigged such that hard workers are rarely, if ever punished if they fall into a psychotic state and murder lower level workers- yet talking shit to a hard worker is punished by death. The Abyssal domain for enforcing the metrics rely on something akin to a neighborhood watch; various members in the Abyssal Domain have monk-work as part of their duties in society and enforce the metrics with draconian precision. The second a baby calzonit can work, it is set to labor. Calzonits who have noticeable talents in fields such as warfare, artwork and so forth get moved to said positions by monks who also work in the fields of war, artwork and diplomatic duties. The most loathsome job is that of diplomat. The aliens keep making them froth about doing nothing, it is horrible. But it is a sacrifice some make to secure rights to work in other societies where there is a deficiency in work being done, as defined by a galactic metric of work which essentially evaluates other societies to see if their productivity is optimal and if it is not the Abyssal Domain will send workers to these other societies to optimize production if given the clearance to do so, if not it is assumed said society will likely collapse. Cultural/Religious Description: The Abyssal belief system is one based on the ideal worker; the worker is above all in their society. Those who work hardest and most diligent are who lead, the lazy are euthanized. Their society, despite its unitary pretenses values aesthetics with massive temples and statues painstakingly built as monuments to the labor, of which is not a means as with human society, but an end of itself. Or, the Abyssals do not work towards anything but greater profession. There is no real sense of leadership among the Abyssals, which means they are not terribly centralized. Instead it is a lose network of watchmen and planetary fiefdoms ruled by oligarchies of professionals that holds the Abyssal Domain together. Each planet ruled by the Abyssal Domain has a militia fleet for defense, with the domain as a whole having a military fleet ran by a co-culture within the Domains that act as guardians, unwavering in their endless duty to keep the workers free from disruption by slavers and other such banditry. The faith of the Domain is based in the ideal of reincarnation; for after one dies, they are born once more to continue their work. The perpetual labor has been instilled into the minds of those in the Domain by how in their long history every time they had a leader, they grew decadent and society collapsed. Every time. The faith of the Domain has no true origin; rather it is convergence of hundreds of wise individuals who fundamentally re-ordered civilization in a grand revolution that consumed their whole home world. The old ways were purged, systemically wiped out and in its place the instilled purpose of life being to wage war against entropy and chaos, to forever toil is perfection. There is no utopia, for utopia is a state of non-working, of non-living. And is doomed to disaster. There is no end to the grandest task, and no leader can be trusted to achieve these ends- it must be held true from the lowest echelons to the highest echelons of society that the meaning of existence is endless, fulfilling toil and to labor forever and ever more. Other; The Calzonit aren't suppossed to be a monoculture even if the unitary society of the Domain seems to indicate such- if someone else wants to make a calzonit culture seperate from the Domains feel free, my species is public domain. I am assuming this RP to be stylized and not the 'tryhard sci-fi opera' genre that always ends in disaster so I will not fret about scale here. I'll just assume 99.9% of all stars in the galaxy to be totally void of any resources beyond rock, iron, gas and ice. [/hider]