[b]Decline and Rot[/b]

The Azura as a society once operated as a single, coherent polity. Their civilization was highly networked into a vast interstellar internet. The central leadership was able to set planetary production policy, direct fleets, manage diplomacy and drive the endless expansion, uplift and integration of alien species into the Endless Azure Skies. This success was sustained for an extremely long time. The Azura are an ancient race and they saw entire sectors burned before other species finished evolving.

The proliferation of the ELectromagnetic Flux bought an end to this state of affairs. The technologies of communication and control that allowed an immense empire to be run centrally were jammed and destroyed. Robotic legions were burned in curse-lightning. Implanted cybernetic kill-switches were incinerated by the driving force of the Curse. The Endless Azure Skies collapsed, but it was too immense a thing to die. Instead it managed to limp on in its new and broken context, old hierarchies remade as religion and ritual. 

Many technologies were lost. Supercomputers the size of planets went dark and took all their ancient knowledge with them. Mechanisms for control and influence over servitor species were forgotten. Of the infrastructure that remained, only the most common and robust technologies survived in the popular consciousness - the grav-rail and associated graviton weaponry chief amongst them. Biomancy as a discipline endured due to its prescient focus on encoding critical information on the perfect memories of its magi rather than stored in data vaults. But many other industries, such as shell procurement, collapsed in the absence of computerized oversight. This is how a species can develop a weapon as horrifying as the Eater strain and manage a seventy percent dud rate when firing them. 

The key technologies of the Azura are the most crudely direct forms of their masterworks. The plasma vent takes advantage of their miraculous fusion reactors; their direct impact weapons are forged of miracle-matter that can crush a tank while weighing less than a kilo. It is the best that they can do, and to a degree the best that can be done. Ancient Azura technology was so advanced and esoteric that no species that got ahold of it would be able to produce a better crude approximation than the Azura themselves. There are some sciences that it takes the wisdom of stars to crack.

In place of subtlety and complexity, Azura technology has the robust strength of gear that has survived the apocalypse. It is impossible to hack and difficult to undermine. There are certainly more technologically advanced species in the galaxy than the Azura in their fallen state but none of them can entirely discount the Azura as a danger. They have a mishmash of gear that at least [i]scrapes [/i]the upper bound in certain places, and they have a combat doctrine and society that is prepared to accept immense casualties for victory. What this means is that even when utterly outperformed, an Azura fleet is never rendered [i]harmless[/i], even by the most dangerous powers. 

What true relics of the golden age still exist pass relentlessly up the chain of society. As gifts, bribes, taxes or tributes relics accumulate relentlessly towards the centre and the Imperial Core. Not every relic of a former age is irreplaceable, but the cost for replacement is immense compared to previous eras. Where once ships might have been spun out of cosmic light now they are manufactured in vast dockyards by swarms of laboring servitors with hammers. It is possible to artisanally craft even a quantum microchip if you're prepared to put the hours in, and it is on the back of this bleak industry that new wonders enter the Skies.