Pangalactic Alliance

Symbol of a most widespread species of the Alliance - Raharrs

Pangalactic Alliance is a sci-fi project, trying to incorporate physically-accurate hard science fiction with more liberal space opera stylistic. This is a worlbuilding project, that originated as an concept for a videogame, and later evolved into a Leaving the Cradle webcomic.

Disclaimer: While this project tries to use real physics as much as possible, it is by no means an attempt at Hard Sci-Fi genre. It have aliens, FTL, and ships without huge radiators, after all. More like, this setting is in a gray zone, between dry, realistic, hard sci-fi and your typical space opera with "Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale" syndrome. It Is a space opera that tries to use real life physics as much as possible, but does not avoid use of Artistic License in some cases.

Description

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Setting is stationed in the MilkyWay galaxy, with most of species achieving mundane interstellar flight capabilities. Interstellar communication is developed to the level of regular commercial flights. Most of the galaxy has not been explored, and the Alliance occupies a relatively small volume. Nevertheless, in this relatively small volume there are billions of stars, of which only a small percentage has been studied in detail and even fewer have any settlements or bases in their systems.

Note: most units of measurement and concepts are defined by human values and names (meters, AU, seconds, Dyson Sphere, etc.), unless noted otherwise. This is done to ease the reading of materials and to preserve the author’s sanity.

Notable things

• There is no FTL communications. As a result Alliance is not monolithic organization, but more segmented and its members have certain freedom of action.
• Spaceships in general try to avoid standard "space is an ocean" designs with decks arranged orthogonality to the thrust vector, with clearly defined "top" and "bottom".
• FTL technology provides only means of shortening the distance between solar systems, it is not increases velocity of the vehicle itself.
• Propulsion technology allows engines that can achieve high thrust values with very little propellant demands (think ion engines on steroids)

Civilizations of the setting

Alliance members

• Raharrs
• Sashli
• ktak
• Ziort
• Laymaran
• Insectoids
• Iss

Others

• Smi'Tar
• Ancients
• Humans
• Lesser species

Alliance as organization

Map with areas of influences of the most notable structures*

Alliance covers about 1/20th of the Galaxy volume. Alliance is made from one single territory, divided between several civilizations, of which Raharrs are the most numerous ones. Yet "territory" is fairly abstract term, because not all stars are surveyed and even less systems actually have any sort of protective forces to enforce the border. The territory of the Alliance is more of an area that can be reached by the Alliance's ships without assembling expedition fleet. It is estimated that Alliance territory covers roughly one billion stars, of which no more than several thousands are surveyed.

Alliance is the largest government body in the Galaxy besides the Smi'Tar Empire. Alliance is a conglomerate of different civilizations, though they still remain highly autonomic in everything regarding internal matters. But any significant interaction with other civilization, that cannot be settled in peace is going through Alliance Assembly, which gathers ambassadors from every Alliance species, and runs discussion Session about matter at hand. Most often Sessions are gathered on the "Shining" Station, which is political and informational heart of the Alliance, and besides that is the safest neutral territory in the Galaxy - station is independent and harbors it's own defense fleet, which constantly patrols local space to ensure safety of any vessel within its borders.

Notes

• Displayed borders of the Alliance and the Empire are quite a lot arbitrary. Real zones of influences of the forces would mean to basically just dot the map with colored pixels, and even that would be a gross overestimation due to involved scales. Instead it, in case of the Alliance, marks every zone in which Alliance ship has been at least once, or can reach within a FTL jump from nearest colony or star base. There is also no real borders between species within the Alliance, due to the insignificant amount of settled systems compared to the whole volume. Generally, species homeworlds get 300 light years of buffer zone, in which only they can establish colonies and mining outposts.

Spaceships

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Interstellar Communications

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Since radio and laser beams are unable to travel through wormholes, generated by Hypergenerator, there is no way for planets to talk to each other in real time. Instead, a web-like system of automatic shuttles were established, each one making regular routes between two or more hub stations in each settled system, carrying mail and download queries from local Internet with them. It is still not real-time, but better than waiting thousands of years just to receive a reply. Important and urgent messages get carried by special courier ships, that have very high acceleration and can beeline right to the destination, bypassing complicated, slow and not always very direct G-net, where message can travel even months, in some cases.