From [url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/2639605]Stellvia[/url]
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[color=#EE00AA][b]|Name of nation: [/b][/color] [i]Eastwing[/i]

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Species: [/b][/color] Khasi
[hider=Expand][hider=Female][img]https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/61/2b/41/612b410a58b4de2be3c1b4ca338dc4d6.jpg[/img][/hider][hider=Male][img]http://static4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20060925112416/memoryalpha/en/images/a/a4/Harrad-Sar_aboard_his_ship.jpg[/img][/hider]
The Khasi are typical green-skinned humanoids. Their actual skin 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. 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. The males generally appear more muscular than the females, though that doesn't mean that the males [i]are[/i] more muscular than the females.[/hider]

[color=#EE00AA][b]|System: [/b][/color] The Khasi system consists of one yellow star and five planets.
[hider=Expand]
Arcon - the star

Moiti - a desolate, heat-ablated rock orbiting close to Arcon

Ezon - a hot planet with a thick, overbearing atmosphere
|Gob - a tiny captured asteroid, Ezon's only moon

Khas - a verdant world, fairly earthlike, teeming with life; the Khasi homeworld
|Muon - a large gray moon, fairly unremarkable
|Meson - a captured asteroid of a suspiciously green color

Desera - a rusty-colored planet with a light atmosphere and large ice caps
|Igenvalue - Desera's impressively-sized moon, atmosphereless, dark gray, and once volcanic.

Drol - an airless planetoid in a highly eccentric orbit amongst a small asteroid belt

Julian - a large gas giant with many moons
|Layla - an oceanic moon, the largest of the system. it's heated by proximity to Juliani radiation; capable of sustaining life, the only other one in the Khasi system to do so; here lies a substantial (if somewhat cold) Khasi settlement.
|Viz - an icy moon, the third largest of the Juliani system
|Tyke - a massive rocky moon with a surprising lack of atmosphere despite its high gravity. worshippers of Raheel have an elaborate temple in competition with a neighboring temple for the worshippers of Kron.
|Blip - a small captured asteroid, named for what the Khasi originally thought it was - a stray blip
|Punt - a tiny captured asteroid with an unusually yellow surface coloration.

Etzi - a distant ice ball[/hider]

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Description of government: [/b][/color]
[hider=Expand]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. 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. Finally, they have a senate, which makes up for its lack of flashiness with its quiet negotiations and backroom politics.[/hider]

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Description of military: [/b][/color]
[hider=Expand]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.

The Khasi military is broken into a few branches. There's the Space Fleet, which handles spaceborne assets; Commandoes Elite, an all-terrain special ops unit; Unit 13, a black ops and espionage organization; STRATCOMM, in charge of war games and potential threats; and Planetary Forces, each of which are separated into separate commands and branches for each planet and planetoid.[/hider]

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Technological Overview: [/b][/color]
[hider=Expand]Overall, [i]Eastwing[/i] technology is advanced but not more effective, with the singular exception of their various stardrives. They spend so much time making a technology look, feel, and sound good that they neglect obvious improvements. While they have compact and powerful computational chips controlling most equipment, well over half the chips' capability is taken up maintaining intricate user interfaces and special effects. In general, if something powerful is switched on, the Khasi take the time to make sure that it glows. Particularly frightening power sources, for example, make arm-hairs stand upright and a sense of unease settle on nearby lifeforms through a well-researched combination of subsonics and magnetic fields. [i]And[/i] they glow. The leftover processing power is used for the dull, necessary functions of things.

Although their engineer-artists enthusiastically create drives that exploit strange niches of physics, most of their ships use a flashy point-to-point bluespace crystal 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.

Particularly unique techs:
|Bluespace Crystals
[img]http://i01.i.aliimg.com/wsphoto/v0/1221948247_1/6-Pcs-12-sided-VOGEL-Style-font-b-Synthetic-b-font-Blue-font-b-QUARTZ-b.jpg[/img]
Bluespace crystals are actually carefully-manufactured containment bottles. The manufacturing process involves manipulating an alternate dimension that mirrors our own in a similar manner to subspace from realspace. The laws of physics in bluespace are radically different from our own, however, and any normal matter that enters Bluespace gets summarily ejected from Bluespace instantaneously. Bluespace crystals act function as anchors to Bluespace. With the application of an appropriately modulated electric field, the crystals become highly sensitive to pressure. If done appropriately, the resulting resonance patterns within a bluespace crystal yanks the user into Bluespace. The more crystals you have, the farther you can go, to an approachable limit of around one lightyear. Similarly, the more precision with which you apply pressure to points along the containment surface, the more exacting of a location that you can jump to. However, the farther and more accurate you want to be, the longer it takes to jump. Teleporting a foot to your left might take half a second. Teleporting an entire lightyear might take a few days of warming up.

They're also notoriously brittle things, and the collapsing containment bottle will teleport the user who broke it several dozen meters in a random direction. That can present problems when you're on a starship, with space only a few dozen meters away. 

[/hider]

[color=#EE00AA][b]|Cultural Overview: [/b][/color] 
[hider=Expand]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. [/hider]

[color=#EE00AA][b]|History: [/b][/color] 
[hider=Expand]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. [/hider]