@Arawak Considering the length of time its been since then the Dominion may not even think of them at all in any serious capacity. Also considering the nature of the Silent Imperium they may not even realize who it is that is doing things against them. If ships go missing, politicians die under mysterious circumstances, or anything short of a full on invasion happen it may just be chalked up to standard guild squabbles. That being said there probably are still standing orders to wipe out any large concentrations of Tikali that are found throughout space, though its doubtful the average Chelonian knows about such things. There may even be a neglected and underfunded Ministry of Tikali Pacification whose mission it is to pursue the Silent Imperium but are hamstrung by the Dominion's inherent slowness and inefficiency. Even then the ministry likely wouldn't have the tools to enact a grand campaign of extermination, more likely it would be small strike teams with limited fleet support.
Internet is currently down across the board where I'm staying but in the meantime I am working on a quick introductory post though that will go out whenever my internet returns.
@ArawakAh, understood. I think it could be an interesting parallel that despite being nearly wiped out by the Dominion in the past the Tikali have gone on to overtake them technologically. That being said, I am in the process of fluffing out more specifics about the Dominion technologically(and virtually every way for that matter) because I realized my details were a little scant in a number of areas. The Dominion may be more advanced than initially let on but I suspect their general level of technology will still be below your own in a number of areas.
@MissingAxis I wrote in my sheet that the Dominion has over forty systems under their belt(the initial figure was eighty but I cut that down after observing others) with the intent of them being one of the larger nations out there balanced out by just how inefficient and slow they are when it comes to reacting to things. I would be fine with us being annoying neighbors with each other in some capacity.
The same goes for @TheSovereignGrave we can work something out as to how our nations interact. The Dominion is generally prudent enough to not jump stupidly into a war unless there is something they really want out of it, so the Dominion would probably be on decent terms with your nation if we wanted to be neighbors.
Anyone want to have a pre-existing relationship with the Dominion? Friends, allies, ancient enemies, or other such fun things? One idea which comes to mind is that within the last few decades there was a conflict between our two races which culminated in the destruction of a Dominion antimatter world and the Dominion's subsequent surrender(Plus the execution and replacement of the Vaata-Kreg which allowed such a disaster). Now an uneasy peace exists as the Dominion has spent the years since rebuilding their infrastructure and licking their wounds. But I'm open to anything anyone wants to suggest.
Species: Chelonians are vaguely humanoid beings hailing from a high gravity world. Chelonians have three sets of limbs: a primary pair of arms, legs, and a smaller set of 'social arms.' The primary arms and legs are very thick to support their bodies while the social arms which jut from the middle of their torso are comparatively small and thin. Social arms are normally kept hidden by clothing, the revelation of the social arms is normally used as a sign of trust or as a symbolic sign of coming to an agreement. All Chelonian extremities have 4 digits. The most notable aspect of the Chelonian is the large leathery shell like growth which covers their back and shoulders as well as provides their namesake. Unlike the terran creatures to which they bear a cursory resemblance, the shell is not a defense mechanism. Current Chelonian evolutionary theory states that the shell was used by their ancestors in much the same way as a camel's hump: to store nutrients for times of food scarcity. Chelonians have leathery skin which come in various dark shades such as of browns, purples, greens, and blacks. Several areas around the Chelonian body are UV reflective, these patches forming elaborate and beautiful patterns around their body in a spectrum invisible to many races. Their eyesight is heavily slanted towards the ultraviolet to the point where they cannot properly make out several shades of the color red. Because of this Chelonian art is oft considered drab and boring as much of the color cannot be seen by non-Chelonians. Chelonians also display a natural resistance to radiation which is likely responsible for their ascension to the spot of top dog on Chelona. Chelonians range from 1.4 to 2.5m in height.
Bureaucracy. The Chelonian dominion has gone through so many regime changes in its three thousand year history that "Who rules the Dominion?" is an utterly irrelevant question. The head of the Dominion changes so often that the accepted title for those who rule the Dominion is "Vaata-Kreg" which literally translates to "the rulers" in order to minimize the amount of official documentation that needs to change with the new government. The current Vaata-Kreg is some form of council, though how they were elevated to the position is a mystery to the average Chelonian citizen. The one constant truth in the life of the Dominion is the Bureaucracy which serves as the true ruling body of the nation. The bureaucratic apparatus which keeps the Dominion running has been in place since the foundation of the Dominion many thousands of years ago and has only grown since its introduction. The Bureaucracy is a mindbogglingly inefficient system as every action that has the potential to effect the Dominion as a whole must pass through the Home Office on the Homeworld. This includes everything from the authorization for clearing arable land to movements of fleets and armies. Were the Dominion a small empire this would not be an issue, but with over forty systems to administer the task is a truly herculean one. Even with FTL communication it can take months for requests to even reach the Home office, let alone get approval or rejection. The homeworld, Chelona, has entire cities dedicated to massive megastructures which house nothing but offices, server banks, and the homes of bureaucrats in order to keep the entire Dominion from collapsing in on itself. To its credit the massively bloated government of the Dominion has proven itself capable of doing its job, though only in a heavy handed and rather tyrannical manner.
Because of its massive size the Bureaucracy is not a singular entity. It is instead broken up into hundreds of smaller ministries which all cover individual areas. Some examples include the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Propaganda, the Ministry of Space Transit, the Ministry of Paper Stamping, or the Ministry of Paper Stamping Oversight. To ensure a lack of corruption a full half of all government ministries are Oversight ministries whose goal is to ensure the proper running of other ministries. There is also another layer of division among Ministries as all are further divided into Planetary, Sectorial, and Dominion branches with respectively broader scope.
While Vaata-Kreg may change the rest of the government largely remains the same. Whether styling themselves an emperor, president, or god king the first thing a new ruler attempts to do to the Dominion is fix the bureaucracy and string up the bureaucrats as they are the ones who likely created the situation that led to the change of power. However even cursory examination would reveal that the system is simply too complex and too entrenched to remove. Even killing off the various directors and secretaries of the ministries would prove more disastrous than simply letting them keep their positions as it is virtually impossible to train someone to take their place. In other words the true leader of the Dominion is not the Vatta-Kreg, but the Vaata-Kreg's Chief Undersecretary of the Home Office of the Ministry of the State: Dominion Branch as they are the ones who are tasked with bringing things to the Vaata-Kreg's attention as well as getting the Vaata-Kreg's orders out to the various ministries. They wield all of this power without any fear of losing their heads if things turn south because they are the only ones capable of doing their job.
Description of military: A great chelonian thinker once said "those who revel in war are fools, but those who cannot wage it are extinct." The Dominion is not a particularly warlike nation, but it is a paranoid and expansionistic one. If they can avoid entering into a full scale war they will gladly do so, but they will not back down if threatened. The military is easily the most efficient part of the Dominion though it is still constrained by the all pervasive red tape.
The Planetary Forces of the Dominion are built around combined arms tactics and high-mobility. Having never developed caterpillar tracks Chelonian tanks are exclusively of the hover variety. Chelonian hover tanks are built to also have limited ability to serve as personnel carriers and can carry a squad of troopers into battle. Dedicated APCs are still used with the largest capable of moving entire platoons of troops around the battlefield and serve as mobile field bases. Power armored troops are not uncommon and serve as fast attack units and flankers. The primary weapon used by Planetary Forces are C/EM weaponry. C/EM weapons are a hybrid of a conventional chemical projectile weapon and a coilgun. This hybridization allows for greater versatility when compared to purely Electromagnetic weapons as the lower velocity of the chemical projectile allows for a greater variety of ammunition types to be used. The use of a chemical propellant also gives the weapon a comparable velocity to pure EM weapons with a lower total energy expenditure and ability to function after EMP attack though with an admitted drop in performance. Lasers are common for anti-air and ordinance use. The Dominion also makes extensive use of semi-organic drone forces known as "War-Golems." War Golems are a controversial weapon system deployed by the Dominion as shocktroops in desperate scenarios. To overcome the limitations of artificial intelligence in both creativity and simple portability, War Golems use cloned nervous tissue as an alternative primary processor slaved to conventional computer systems. As there is a simple circulatory and digestive system to keep these biological CPUs running, War Golems are technically living beings thrown into battle with little care for their survival. War Golems do in fact bleed, and are capable of feeling pain yet have priority programming which keeps them fighting until they are no longer able. The intelligence of an average War Golem is only enough to provide basic battlefield improvisation, their commands come from handlers somewhere behind the front line, however they are still at a marked advantage over standard mechanical drones. Some handlers attest that War Golems are capable of learning Chelonian patterns and older Golems begin to show signs of a personality and attachment to their handlers should they survive long enough. There is an entire PR Ministry dedicated to whitewashing the images of War Golems and keeping these stories hidden, but word spreads. For this reason the 4 meter tall juggernauts of steel are just as nightmarish an ally as they are an enemy.
The Space Forces of the Dominion are built around being robust. Chelonian warships are highly compartmentalized and designed to take as much damage as possible before succumbing. Chelonian ships lack any form of artificial gravity. Instead all decks are oriented perpendicular to the main drives to give gravity while the drives are running, and most ships have a spin section to give the crew quarters some semblance of gravity while idle. Primary ship based weapons are laser and graser cannons of truly monstrous proportions (The primary batteries on the mightiest warships have power in the realm of Petawatts) as well as copious amounts of missile weapons. Chelonian anti-ship missiles are almost exclusively gigaton yield bomb-pumped lasers whereas ground support ordinance is typically delivered in the form of kinetic kill vehicles or antimatter triggered fusion bombs.
The Chelonians have, like many space-faring races, attributed the names of wet naval classifications to their starships despite there being little to no similarity between the two branches of war machine. For ease of explanation the classes of starship are listed below in ascending order.
Chelonian military doctrine heavily favors the space forces who receive the best equipment and most funding. Chelonians generally only engage in ground combat over Garden worlds, worlds that are highly similar to Chelona, protocol dictates that the biosphere of such worlds are to remain as intact as possible. This limits Space to surface support from orbital elements to targeted strikes with heavy-grasers, and tactical kinetic and nuclear bombardment. A ground war normally lasts until whatever parts of a world Dominion forces wish to keep intact are captured and orbital control has been secured. After such a point the opportunity for any holdout resistance to surrender is given. If they continue to resist, all populations and forces that remain outside of Dominion control will be subject to indiscriminate kinetic bombardment until all holdouts are exterminated. Ground Combat is unheard of over non-garden worlds even if they have a population. anything not worth conquering is simply annihilated in a holocaust of spaceborne weapons fire. Garden Worlds where invasion forces have been repulsed and/or the orbital situation is dire are simply evacuated and destroyed upon retreat.
Technological Overview: The Chelonians are a relatively advanced species, likely being on par with the galaxy at large, if one were to pick out something 'special' about Chelonian development it would have to be antimatter. Virtually all high technology in the Dominion is run on matter-antimatter annihilation from starship drives to FTL Comms, rift gates, and even some war machines. However it is worth noting that antimatter is not used in any direct role in weapons technology, the only example contrary to this is the small amounts of antimatter used to trigger much cheaper and reliable fusion weapons. Chelonian scientists found that antimatter beams tended to not have any major advantage over regular particle beams which themselves are not very common weapons in the Chelonian arsenel. To produce the massive amounts of antimatter needed to keep a star fairing empire running the Dominion rely on antimatter worlds. Antimatter worlds are planets close to their local star that lack valuable resources for mining or have already been exhausted that are then seeded with self-replicating machines. The machines begin to cover the planet pole to pole in solar panels which are then linked to massive equatorial particle accelerators which convert the star's rays into the precious lifeblood of the Dominion. Antimatter worlds produce massive amounts of antimatter per year, often in the kilotons, but this is quickly broken up among the hundreds of worlds, colony clusters, stations, and space ships which desperately need them throughout the Dominion. It is worth noting that there are only a handful of antimatter worlds in the entire dominion, the destruction or disruption of operations of even a single world would have catastrophic consequences on the Dominion's infrastructure. The loss of two antimatter worlds would likely be enough to create chaos so massive even the bureaucrats would have trouble surviving its effects.
FTL travel is achieved through "rift drives" which open tunnels into a dimension known as 'No-Space.' To ease transit between worlds of the Dominion the Chelonians have erected massive rift gates which create stable no-space rifts between the many worlds of the Dominion. Only military vessels have their own rift drives, all other vessels (owned by major trading houses on government contract or other ministries as civilian ownership of space craft is highly controlled when not banned outright) must rely on the gates to move about.
-FTL is not instantaneous -There is an upper speed limit to FTL, it just hasn’t been found yet for reasons below -To increase FTL velocities linearly, energy expenditures must increase exponentially -Energy expenditures scale linearly with mass, so that’s nice. -Velocity is not conserved upon entrance or exit of No Space -Instead, ships leave No Space at an arbitrary 27.882m/s. The science is still out on that one -Large celestial bodies have an effect on No Space, their mass or gravity creates a “rift shelf” inside of which ships cannot enter No Space and bodies in No Space are forced out into real space at the edge of the shelf. -Rifts collapse when the object keeping them open is no longer supplying energy in real-space (eg. once a ship enters no-space, the rift collapses behind it) -Upon collapse, properly formed rifts generate large spikes of radiation creating an easily detectable “rift signature” -”stable” rifts require precise measurements down to the femtocoulomb of a ship and its surrounding space, nobody is going to be travelling through no-space without some incredible computational power. Exabytes of data go into jump plotting, it is not something you eyeball lest you want your crew to be atomized -Miscalculations in rift generation result in unstable links between real and no-space -Unstable rifts last for only nanoseconds before they collapse in on themselves incredibly violently releasing energy orders of magnitude greater than matter-antimatter annihilation
Cultural Overview: Chelonian culture is on the surface highly regimented and honor based with great emphasis placed on one's station. For example, Chelonian names do not reflect family ties but instead reflect past and current employment. Due to this Chelonians can be expected to have their names grow over time to reflect their job history which is a double edged sword. Those with few names can, depending on the occupation, either be construed as shiftless and stuck in a dead-end loop or can be considered to be trustworthy and honest. Contrasting this those with many names either show great ambition and intelligence provided the work gets better as the name goes on, or they show that the individual cannot hold down a job and is likely riddled with vice or other deficiencies. Respect for one's superiors is considered universal but they are still a pragmatic people and tend not to abide by idiocy even if it is committed by an immediate superior.
On the flip side of this, Chelonians are a very clannish people and tend to form groups based on occupation, social standing, or family ties. The more affluent guilds who control entire world's worth of industry do battle in the shadows in an endless war of assassins as they jockey for political and financial power. Many a Vaata-Kreg has ascended to the spot thanks to being relatives or guild mates of an important undersecretary. Getting a guildmate into an important Ministry position is often all that is needed to give a guild an edge on its adversaries.
Chelonians have hit a relative peak in terms of prosperity and have been living in a warped kind of golden age for the past millennium. The average Chelonian lives comfortably and can afford quite a few luxuries and a large amount of personal freedom despite living in what even the most idiotic would call a police state. Police do not require such niceties as warrants or probable cause to arrest individuals suspected of breaking the law. Denouncements are a regular part of guild squabbles. Repeat offenders are mind-wiped and used as manual labor in jobs other races might use robots for. To remind the entire galaxy that the Dominion is not a totally swell place, by order of the 88th Vaata-Kreg the Dominion undergoes a bicentennial culling of its population wherein all 'undesirable' genotypes are removed from the breeding population to stop degradation of the Chelonian genome, foster worthwhile mutations, and eradicate dead end mutations.
History: The Dominion's history stretches back several millenia. The Dominion has been around since before the invention of the internal combustion engine and has remained more or less constant ever since. The most notable event in Chelonian history is also the event that gave rise to the Dominion. Thousands of years before the Dominion's founding, Chelona was assaulted by an uncharacteristically high amount of solar radiation. While the causes of this remain unknown to this day, a respected theory is that it was a gamma ray burst from the death of a distant star, far enough away to not sterilize the world but also close enough to cause incredible harm. The radiation bombarded Chelona's surface and ripped away much of the planet's ozone layer immediately. During this radiation storm, Auroras filled the night sky of Chelona. The Chelonians, being naturally radiation resistant like much of Chelona's fauna, were initially unharmed by this event and some writings from the time even refer to "The day of Lights" as an omen of hope for the future. Unfortunately for them it was to be far from a hopeful omen.
The radiation and subsequent erosion of the planet's radiation defenses kicked off a massive population explosion in several species of pseudo-plankton around the world. Before long there was a worldwide case of red tide, the effects of which were various and universally devastating. the pseudo-plankton, themselves toxic, ended up choking out species who served as common prey for larger creatures. This led to an oceanic domino effect, leaving entire coastal areas barren and lifeless. The dominoes continued to fall from there. The mass extinction event is thought to have led to the extinction of over half of all ocean life on Chelona.
The Chelonian people of the time were generally akin to early iron age civilizations, not advanced enough to stand up to such massive devastation. The great states of the era were wiped out in the unrest brought on by massive ecological destruction. The global Chelonian population shrank by two-thirds during this period and would not reach pre-downfall levels again until well beyond the founding of the Dominion. Scholars have traced the origins of the Dominion to this dark age. The first Vaata-Kreg was a powerful warlord who was able to rally much of the surviving Chelonian population together through his efficient system of management and iron will. The system outline by the first Vaata-Kreg would later evolve into the bureaucratic hellscape that is the modern Dominion. At the time however, its organization allowed order to overcome chaos and reestablished the rule of law around the world. The first Vaata-Kreg then made his way across the world, conquering all who would kneel before him and exterminating those who would not. After nearly two centuries and a dozen Vaata-Kregs, all of Chelona was united under one banner and the Age of Dominion began in earnest. Other: Space turtle dystopia. What's not to love? They're meant to be a comparatively massive empire that is so insanely inefficient that they can be incredibly easily out-maneuvered(strategically, tactically is another story) and out-foxed.
