Faction Designation: Conjoining of Retribution
Number of planets: 11
Weaponry, which generally consists of the Hound, the Roarer, Gun Runner's Mail, the Mauler, and the Hunger.
Hound: An ambiguous phrase or term primarily attributed to the pinnacle of vul’kruun high-performance self-guiding anti-ship missile technology. Advancements in relevant sensory, propulsion and warhead technical fields have resulted in vul’kruun 'MIRVs' to be driven by an inexpensive and utilitarian type of mass-produced digital intelligence that utilizes standard gravitational, electromagnetic, thermal, and radar sensor apparatuses to seek out predetermined targets. Vul’kruun hounds are furnished with single-use superposition-based FTL drives, nuclear salt-water rocket engines and RCS points that shape them into a workable analog of the customary vacuum-based fighter craft used by other factions. Hounds lack integrated weaponry, but alternatively make do with electronic countermeasure pods, evasive maneuvers, plasma windows, and passable amounts of ablative shielding to evade and weather enemy interception attempts. Hounds are transported and distributed by a diverse range of vul’kruun star crawler types, and are ordinarily launched in the thousands by vul'kruun assault squadrons. Depending on its size, one hound can play host to hundreds of self-guiding anti-ship missiles, with each missile capped with a high-yield dial-able thermonuclear warhead. Other hound types may have a sub-munition bundle consisting of missiles that are tipped with nuclear-pumped x-ray lasers or explosively-formed nuclear penetrators.
Hunger: Hunger guns are vul'kruun smoothbore firearms that are chambered for a guided gyrojet munition; the rocket-propelled bullet is shrouded by a jacket of superformance monopropellant and primer. Using caseless ammunition and an electronic ignition system, hunger guns have a cyclic rate of several thousand rounds per minute, and can accept box magazines, twin-drum magazines or ammunition belts. Hypervelocity bullet impacts usually kills enemies through cavitation and kinetic energy alone.
Mauler: Mauler guns, also known as 'mass accelerator weapons' or 'storm drums', are vul'kruun ballistic weapons that do not employ solid propellants or miniature rocket engines to propel projectiles, but instead harness centripetal force generated by a miniature cyclotron positioned near the rear of the weapon to launch charged particles at a distant enemy. Unlike most directed energy weapons, mauler guns use disposable box-shaped cartridges that bear a single firing charge, with each charge consisting of an explosively-pumped flux compression generator, capacitor and charged particle package. Compared to hunger weapons, mauler armaments suffer from increased spread, pronounced acoustic and flash profiles, and a heightened thermal signature, but are otherwise relatively reliable, incredibly powerful, fairly useful in medium-range combat, reasonably accurate, and impact targets instantaneously. Typically when the particles strike armored or unarmored soldiers (or vehicles), explosively-violent results are displayed.
Roarer: An evolution of fundamental gun technology, roarer is a moniker jointly shared between vul'krunn-made combustion light-gas and electrothermal-chemical automatic and select-fire cannon and recoil-less gun pieces. They are similar in power to electromagnetic weapons such as railguns or coil guns, but are still [hazily] similar to modern solid-propellant guns in that chemical reactions (and not powerful electromagnets) are used to propel a projectile. Roarer weapons are universally employed by vul’kruun Rage mobile gun platforms, starcraft and self-propelled artillery platforms, which use them alongside simple automatic loading mechanisms to fling nuclear or inert shells at unfortunate xeno enemies.
Gun Runner's Mail: A full-body powered exoskeleton harness donned by vul'kruun soldiers. Fed from a lithium-air cell, the suit's hydraulic rotary and linear actuators gift the wearer with super-vul'kruun physical strength and endurance. Wears can hoist and take heavier loads, wield heftier weapons and engage in strenuous physical activity without incurring increased levels of bodily fatigue and physical stress. The right and left forearms of gun runner's mail offer dedicated hard-points for infantry arms (such as hunger or mauler weaponry) to be fixed to, while the rear chassis features four semi-autonomous mechanical 'gun limbs' (or servo arms) that each play host to an individual supplementary weapon system that is designed to provide support to the war fighter during combat operations. Several gun limb weapon systems can be attributed to each servo arm, like a single hypervelocity recoil-less gun chambered for a rocket-assisted shell of intermediate caliber, a rotary grenade launcher, mauler or hunger weapon systems, or a missile cell array designed to house and fire powerful superposed-loaded ordinance. With back and thorax ammunition feed hoppers and heavier suits of soft and hard composite body armor, vul'kruun infantry equipped with gun runner's mail do not become tanks in a literal or figurative sense, but rather morph into less-armored analogs to the modern tankettes or infantry fighting vehicles of our own world.
Military Technologies Not Invented
Main battle tanks, troop carriers or infantry fighting vehicles: Vru's thick jungles and forests coupled with the vul'kruun's lack of trench warfare prevented armored fighting vehicles from rising to prominence on Vru. Experiments with AFVs resulted in the accumulation of numerous technical issues concerning vehicle weight and mechanical unreliability. In the AFV's stead, the Rage mobile gun platform was conceived, which is an armored, open-top tracked propulsion vehicle that a single vul'kruun soldier can crew and direct. Rage can offer substantial levels of direct fire support in the form of automatic cannons, multiple repeating recoil-less guns, grenade launchers, mortars, or stacked missile cells. Self-propelled guns, on the other hand, were created.
Aircraft carriers and fighter craft: Never even thought of, as vul'kruun siege gunships have operational ranges measured in the thousands of miles due to their high-capacity fuel tanks and later on-board fission reactors. Early vul'kruun air craft drew closer to the 'flying fortress' or 'air battleship' concepts talked about in speculative military technologies, and therefore completely skipped the era of the atmospheric fighter altogether. Vul'kruun siege gunships and strategic bombers are known for their heavy composite armor, weaponry and overlapping point defense systems.
Space fighters: Rendered obsolete with the creation of Hound weapons and siege gunships.
Transportation, which generally consists of the infamous Star Crawler.
Star crawlers are vul’kruun starcraft. They come in an ample assortment of classes, sizes and roles. They are fairly uniform in appearance; most star crawlers are nothing more than enormous cylinders haphazardly machined together using rudimentary ship-building procedures and archaic power tools, diminutive amounts of preliminary construction planning, and substandard building materials scavenged from past kills and other vul’kruun starcraft. Regardless of tonnage and purpose, all star crawlers are propelled using simple, effective and extremely efficient fission pulse drives, which brutally propels the craft forward through space by casually detonating high-yield ‘shaped’ thermonuclear bombs against a heavy uranium pusher plate suspended by a series of shock absorbers. Because of the forces this propulsion method enacts on a star crawler, the vul’kruun have been forced to design their vessels to be exceptionally robust, wrapping them in meters upon meters of hardened and treated composite armor plating, and turning them into an unembellished space version of a conventional, heavily-armored 'battleship' of sorts. Though bearing heavy armor, star crawlers have excellent acceleration.
Because their creators incorporated high levels of battlefield endurance, efficiency, flexibility, and inhuman brutality in their original designs, military-grade star crawlers are usually created with a lot of redundancy in mind, and are accordingly separated into independent armored and armed automated modules called Fangs. Each Fang possess its own digital intelligence construct, emergency power generation systems (usually in the form of several pre-charged power cells, which can be activated in the event that spare power cannot be siphoned from other fighting compartment), target acquisition systems, and armament and automatic loading systems and machinery, affording individual vul’kruun starcraft the capacity to prolong combat engagements even after having suffered severe external and internal damage.
For defensive systems, star crawlers are equipped with electronic countermeasure pods, polarized plate armor, ablative shielding, plasma barriers, and kinetic/missile point defense systems. Offensive equipment consists of hound cells and roarer turret emplacements. Gravity control is sustained by spinning a star crawler’s habitat module, which simulates artificial gravity through centrifugal force. RCS points positioned along the ship's hull provide thrust for spin, while bulkier, retractable nuclear thermal rockets handle planetary orbital maneuvers and course-correctional adjustments during intergalactic transit or combat. The command information center, fission reactor, crew compartments, and the ship’s FTL drive are nestled deeply within the innards of the vessel, and are further sheltered by additional alloy shielding and the sheer bulk of the Fangs that engulf them.
Average height: Varies
Average weight: Varies
Their mantis-like forms are supported by a protective endoskeleton, while the sturdy, cornified skin of the neck, head, trunk, and most of the lower body is encompassed by a natural armor matrix comprised of scutes and boney plates; the rest of a vul’kruun’s mass is covered in a spiked, chitin-like textile, with the entire defensive package capable of affording vul’kruun faint bodily resistance to low-velocity pistol cartridges. They possess six functional limbs: four powerful arthropodic legs for swift and nimble locomotion over most terrain types and a pair of arms and two clawed hands optimized for the precise manipulation of objects.
The upper torso and lower insect-like trunk displays notable evidence of robustness; the vul’kruun’s hostile indigenous surroundings and their unvarying, antagonistic confrontations with the destructive predators of their atrocious world drove them to progressively develop denser and elevated amounts of muscular tissue and greater muscle cross-sectional area along their rigid bulks, gifting them with an enormous quantity of upper and lower body strength. Vru, being a hefty planet with a high gravitational pull, makes vul’kruun bodily motions on worlds with lower gravity disabling, outstandingly uncoordinated and, quite frankly, hilarious to observe. Their monumental vigor, however, is heavily-augmented in environments such as these—but it is debatable whether or not this boost in material potency is any match for an enemy species that is well-conditioned for a planet of this type.
The vul’kruun are simultaneous hermaphrodites, but are capable of self-induced fertilization if appropriate mates are presently unavailable. During copulation, both members may agree to impregnate one another for a greater combined egg yield. Vul’kruun instinctively indulge in numerous cycles of reproductive sex throughout their lives--an evolutionary side-effect of their planet’s uncongenial ecology--with one parent capable of fabricating (or fathering) approximately fifteen to twenty eggs. The gestation period is two months. The parent (or the seeder) does not actively stay with the young, but instead forcibly discharges them from its presence so that they may fend for themselves. The survivors fully mature at age five, with vul’kruun typically dying from natural causes by age forty.
Vul’kruun do not consume plant matter. They are hypercarnivorous ‘bulk eaters’ with intense opportunistic feeding habits, dining on any meat or dead animal biomass that they come across without a second though, and their high metabolic rates making them out as frantic consumers of most organic and synthetic dietary material. For this reason, vul’kruun do not leave behind corpses that they have claimed, and naturally become overly-aggressive towards non-vul’kruun if they draw too close to them during food consumption.
Optical vision is decent, but is underdeveloped when compared to human vision, and lacks the ability to register certain color types. Vul'kruun do not have visible ears, but vibrations instead pass through two holes positioned on the opposite sides of the head and make contact with the inner ear. Smell is offered by powerful scent glands positioned atop the skull.
Designed mostly for ripping and pulling, the mandibles of a vul'kruun are unable to chew food. Vul'kruun instead swallow their food whole down a long, fleshy dark canal that leads to their throat, while the lack of a tongue is remedied by the presence of weak taste receptors stationed along the surface of the inner mandibles.
Predominately tribalistic, with the creation of the nation state having never come to position. Vul'kruun live in tight-knit groups of several dozen persons, with a single leader (which is normally the largest and oldest vul'kruun specimen of the crop ) acting as the formal director of the tribe. Ingrained psychological limitations that pertain to their 'groupthink' primal behaviors and thought processes withhold vul'kruun tribes from exceeding (or falling below) a precise number of members, with the maximum number of vul'kruun in a tribe ensuring that collective intelligence can be kept at a maximum level of efficiency (which prevents the tribe from being afflicted with impairing pangs of simplemindedness). Because of the Treaty of the Conjoining, tribes are fully-autonomous sovereign entities and are rightfully permitted to lay claim to the area where they are first established; this can be a space station, a moon, a ship, or a defined section of land on a planet.
While human tribal societies are historically associated with frequent bouts of small-scale warfare and raiding, vul'kruun instinctively indulge in this type of aggressive behavior exclusively against administrative bodies or states comprised of a different intelligent species, and persistently avoid confronting other members of their own biological ilk with violence, coups, one-sided ultimatums, or any other action that would negatively impact the longevity or continued advancement of the vul'kruun species. Ergo, this has resulted in a shockingly minimum measure of crime within their society and an evident sense of 'species-wide' self-preservation to course through the teeming vul'kruun masses, and makes full-scale intergalactic skirmishes with other sapient organisms have almost nothing to do with political, spiritual, or economical agendas or woes, but more about the vul'kruun naturally registering nearby foreign powers as competing xeno tribes that must be kept at gunpoint and disposed of if the threat of territorial encroachment or invasion is sufficiently daunting.
Currency was never coined, but bartering and gift-giving were mainstream up until interstellar mining operations became viable and widespread enough to usher in an era of post-scarcity economics, where vul'kruun tribes that control refineries, mining rigs and manufacturing plants circulate and funnel raw materials and finished goods into and throughout vul'kruun populated space. Planets and evolved asteroids rich in uranium deposits are strongly sought after for the creation of nuclear weapons, fission pulse drive propellant and fission reactors.
Critical to the sustainment of the Conjoining is a type of exotic matter called Mes, which when refined, fused with existing elements and then synthesized yields Nor, a type of fuel used to power vul'kruun FTL drives. Mes is profoundly rare in the universe and takes truly gargantuan amounts of power and far too much time to produce, which discourages vul'kruun tech-savvy community groups from morphing it into a usable weapon of massive interstellar destruction. Mes fuel stations, which also carry fission pulse drive propellant, repair gantries for starcraft, provisions, and other commodities essential to life amongst the stars, are
Vul'kruun space warfare doctrine focuses on shock-and-awe strategies with an additional focus being applied to hit-and-run maneuvers. Vul'kruun avoid decisive battles and massive engagements with enemy starships—even going as far as to flee in all directions at the slightest sight of an enemy response group or reconnaissance force--and instead direct their rage and hatred and extreme prejudice at the common people whenever they are found, which eventually urges the leaders of hostile nations to make an ethical and strategic choice: protect the people, or bolster the defenses of the factories and shipyards? Doing both is indeed possible, but now division and discord has been plunged deep into the space forces of the foe, with weakened worlds being slated for further molestation and aggression.
The land forces, which are very small, usually choose to hammer everything into oblivion with artillery fire, nuclear weapons or a combination of the two. They aren't usually deployed however.
