Culture Profile: Interstellar Coalition

Astrography

The Interstellar Coalition (“Coalition”) is a medium-sized galactic power contained entirely in Xeno Alley and sharing borders with both the Citizens’ Alliance and United Galactic Federation. It is just shy of having a quarter of a million systems under its control, though recent wars have put its exact borders in flux and contention.

Natural Physical Appearance

The Coalition is dominated by baseline humanity. Compared to most other powers the Coalition has a greater range of ethnic and racial diversity, with the Caderi, Halgan, and Xenia identities being treated as unique cultural groups that are distinct the common Galactic ethnicity. Xeno species and shortmen polities exist in the Coalition, but they only make up a small fraction of its total population and have little influence within it due to their voluntary isolation from the rest of the alliance. Instead, these non-human groups exist as distant, but respected, trading partners and war-time allies.

Appearance Traditions

Given the cultural diversity of the Coalition, there is no uniform appearance tradition. Historically, the different major ethnic groups that made up the Coalition would wear the traditional garb of their cultures, but millennia of cross-cultural exchange, the rise of ubiquitous corporate advertising, and most recently, a disproportionately massive youth population, has a created a fashion that has gained traction throughout the Coalition.

Flamboyant neon purples, pinks, blues, and yellows clothes are worn to contrast against the muted grey, silver and beige landscape of impoverished Coalition hive cities. Voluminous hair is painstakingly styled and chemically treated by both men and woman, and excessive makeup is donned by both as well. Wearing flight jackets, combat pants and badges emulating the ones worn by the Coalition Starfighter Corps has become a common part of this new fashion as well, being seen as a way of showing respect to the Coalition’s most revered military branch. Older generations either maintain their ethnicity’s traditional dress or wear casual suits and flared trousers. The latter being a style popular almost a century ago that at the time seemed likely to continue on and become the Coalition’s citizenry’s collective fashion choice in the future.

Language

There are over a dozen officially recognized languages in the Coalition, with over a thousand obscure dialects scattered across them. While all these disparate languages can be traced back to Traditional Standard Imperial, millennia of isolation from the rest of the galaxy has made them incredibly divergent and difficult to translate for outsiders. Because of the Coalition’s historic embrace of multiculturalism, there is an educational and societal expectation that a citizen be multilingual or at the very least be able to speak Coalition Polyform, a relatively new language dating back to the First Contact War. Created to cut down on communication issues whenever power gloves broke down, Coalition Polyform is a mishmash of the most widespread languages in the Coalition, taking phrases, slang and vernacular from all of them and blending in a way that makes it easier for speakers of those languages to pick it up.

Government, Law, and Politics

The Interstellar Coalition was created in the wake of generations of ethnic conflicts and outright genocides that were rampant on Halgan Prime, now the homeworld of the Coalition, and many other planets before the Coalition’s founding. As a result, it has always put a high priority on maintaining positive relations between its various system constituents and ethnic groups and has been fast to put down “problematic” elements that threaten to reopen old conflicts.

As a representative democracy, the Coalition uses a parliamentary system to elect its executive head of government. Its legislative branch is an assembly dominated by almost a hundred different political parties. Because of the breadth of the Coalition, no one party has a chance of electing the Coalition’s head of government single-handily, thus forcing them to routinely form coalitions with one another to achieve their political aims. This was a deliberate design choice for the Coalition’s political structure, as its founders and conceptual philosophers wished to ensure that cooperation between parties would always necessary. Many of these parties are ethno-nationalist in nature, with no real political ideology outside of promoting the interests and concerns of the ethnic groups they represent.

As with the Federation, the ruling classes take advantage of the Coalition's size to keep power. With so many constituent systems, nationwide popular votes are logistically impossible. Constituent systems are organized into sectors, which can vary wildly in size, and sectors in turn send representatives to the Coalition High Assembly. Representatives in the High Assembly vote on everything on a nationwide level, which is the problem: expecting a representative of several thousand star systems to care about the concerns of all of them in equal measure is ludicrous. These representatives are often well-funded toadies of plutocrats, as they need the resources to be able to campaign across thousands of systems. This means that every Coalition representative is more aligned with the elite of Coalition society than his constituents.

In the last century, with hostilities once again flaring up in Xeno Alley, a semi-permanent grand coalition involving almost all of the parties in the Coalition High Assembly has been formed to more effectively deal with war-time concerns in a more expedited manner. This grand coalition has been rapidly gaining more influence and is on track towards completely co-opting the power of local system governments by routinely passing new laws that grant the High Assembly more emergency powers. Many Coalition citizens see this as the logical next step in the Coalition’s trend towards greater centralization and influence in the affairs of its member systems. Most people either patriotically welcome this change or meekly denounce it as a necessary evil, while local system governments likewise can do nothing but resent their marginalization or suck up to the new order.

The Coalition itself, and all its constituent systems are bound by the Coalition Charter, a fundamental constitution and bill of universal rights and freedoms that serves as the highest law of the land. The formal Charter itself is actually rather short, with several sweeping declarations on human, and later sapient, dignity. However, it has little to say in regard to less weighty political concerns, which historically has been left to the governments of constituent systems to figure out. Any constituent system that is proven to be in disobedience with the Charter can face anything from economic censure to military action depending on the severity of the violation, with accusations of genocide always resulting in an immediate military occupation by the Coalition military and the removal of the local government. The Charter is a living document and the over millennia new amendments and additions have been made to it. The most recent, and divisive, addition being Article 66, which states that all other Charter articles can be temporarily suspended in the face of an existential threat to the entire Interstellar Coalition.

Economy

Originally the Coalition allowed individual systems to set their economic policies, with the Coalition itself being a neutral platform for which different systems could sort out squabbles in a peaceful manner. The First and Second Contact Wars forced the Coalition to take a bigger role in directing the economy. The Coalition still operates under a mixed economy that leans towards the free market, with regulation on private industry being scant. Some political outsiders have started to call these policies an act of crony capitalism, pointing to armament manufacturers, tech companies and even advertising agencies being granted lucrative government contracts and tax breaks. Coalition representatives have argued back that these actions are needed to not only keep the Coalition financially afloat but also stimulate the growth of its lackluster military-industrial complex. In the same vein, while the Coalition has redistributed most its tax revenue away from once cherished welfare programs, urban renewal projects and interstellar exploratory missions, it has greatly expanded funding for all segments of its military, with the Coalition Starfighter Corps, the Special Operations Division and the Department of Innovative Peacekeeping being the biggest winners in terms of increased funds and greater operational agency.

Trade

Despite becoming an increasingly isolationist and paranoid power, the Coalition still trades with other stellar powers. The Citizens’ Alliance being the Coalition’s biggest partner and in many ways, its savior, having not only assisted them militarily during the Second Contact War against the Universal Collective but also selling them tide turning Alliance military technology in the form of carrier and battleship designs. Unfortunately, the Alliance’s dedication to xenocide and human supremacy has put the Coalition in a difficult political situation as its xeno constituents have threatened secession over the economic and military pact, with additional opposition from idealists and traditionalists in the grand coalition. The current President of the Coalition High Assembly has attempted to somewhat relieve the stress of these issues by diversifying the Coalition’s trading partners by opening its borders to several Consortium corporations, which has caused many native Coalition corporations to complain about being unable to compete with the Consortium’s prices and products.

Currency

The Coalition once had an almost untraceable amount of different currencies, as each of its individual system constituents, and sometimes even individual worlds and orbitals possessed their own. The restructuring of the Coalition after the First Contact War and the creation of both the Coalition Central Bank and Coalition dollar have reduced the influence of these local currencies, becoming either planetary or discontinued.

Sex, Romance, and Family Structure

While the Coalition has been slowly getting its hands involved with many facts of civilian life, the bedroom has not been one of them. The traditions and sexual mores of different ethnic groups and species are respected so as long as they do not conflict with the universal rights and protections outlined in the Coalition Charter. In practice, this means that any form of unreasonable discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation or gender identity is criminalized, similar to the criminalization of discrimination based on ethnicity or species.

Courting is seen as young person’s game, with the expectation being that youth will experiment until they find “the one,” after which they will settle down and start a family. This early period of promiscuity has been subtlety encouraged by the Coalition government, which has been working together with trusted advertising and film studios to create all manner of media depicting such sexual behavior as “radical” and “tubular,” the idea being that given its perilous military situation the Coalition needs to increase its birth rate. Incentives such as financial assistance for families that have more than three children and families just starting out have also been deployed as well to meet this objective.

There is variation between cultures, but the common structure of most Coalition families has traditionally been two primary caregivers raising their children until they become young adults and enter the job market. This norm has been compromised in recent centuries due to the frequent wars that the Coalition has been involved with, causing entire generations of children to lose their parents. Most of these children end up living with close relatives or sent to state-run orphanages. However, those unlucky enough to come from overpopulated hive cities or planets on the front lines usually wind up in powerful gangs. This has slowly become a major domestic problem for the Coalition as some of these gangs have evolved into powerful warlord clans and crime syndicates.

Religious Beliefs and Traditions

Although the Coalition government is a secular institution that claims to favor no faith, doctrine, or belief system, Coalition society is highly religious, with numerous longstanding religious and philosophical beliefs co-existing with each other. The largest and most widespread faith is Stellarism, which is popular among the Coalition’s Caderian populations, whose cultural homeworld of Caderi IV houses the headquarters of the Church of the Lightbringer. The second largest is Universalism, which began as a radical denomination of Stellarism that gained popularity in the early days of the Coalition. Unlike Stellarism, which posits that while there may be many other faiths, and perhaps even deities, that the Lightbringer is the most worthy of devotion, Universalism instead holds that all Coalition faiths are equal and are simply different paths to enlightenment and spiritual well being, with the faithful only needing to abide by simple altruistic virtues. Along with these established religions, there are fad cults, which constantly pop up to capture people’s interest only to disappear just as quickly once a more interesting one shows up. Most of these religious fads have been vapid and harmless, but some like the Faith of the God-Machine and Logicism have turned out to be recruitment fronts for Conclave and Federation infiltration cells respectively.

Philosophy and Disposition

The Coalition had been an optimistic polity that believed that its successful existence as a multi-ethnic, and later multi-species, alliance was proof that its ideals of diplomacy, free trade, and technological innovation would inevitability lead them towards a utopian future with it as the ultimate power in the galaxy. That all changed during the First Contact War, when the Coalition was invaded by the Federation. While the Coalition had encountered unfriendly and even outright hostile powers before, the Federation was absolutely unrestrained and unyielding in its war of conquest, refusing to accept any negotiations that didn’t involve the Coalition’s immediate unconditional surrender to Federal authority and the Enlightened Revolution. Unable to defeat them military due to the Federation’s vastly superior numbers and technology, the Coalition would have likely been assimilated into the Federation if not for the one-two punch of winning a decisive victory against the Federation at the Battle of Caderi with the aid of their zadrovzh, starman and shortman allies, and the Third Federation-Imperial War forcing the Federation to halt their invasion.

Encountering the Federation and the galaxy's other great powers has made the Coalition government and its citizens paranoid and isolationist, believing themselves the only sane power in a galaxy seemingly dominated by fanatics, tyrants, and monsters. As a consequence, much of the Coalition’s old idealism and exploratory spirit has faded and been replaced by fervent patriotism, a fear of the unknown and a vapid consumerism culture that does it best to distract citizens from their society’s slow decline. That said, the Coalition still stands by its non-human allies, despite grumblings from the Alliance, and has even tried to create stronger relations with once only superficially aligned xeno and shortman constituent systems. While much of this outreach is simple pragmatism, there are idealists who see it as a way of staying true to Coalition principles even in the worst of times.

The Coalition Charter, as the founding document of the entire polity, is still held in high regard by even the most cynical of citizens, being seen as the defining feature of their society that makes them distinct and immune from the ideological insanity that seems to have gripped the rest of the galaxy. The Interstellar Coalition’s distrust and fear does not end with active belligerents like the Federation and Universal Collective. Even allies like the Alliance and the Consortium are seen as potentially dangerous interlopers at best, and a gross bastardization of Coalition ideals at worst. As a result, both of these polities are kept at arm’s length with many in the Coalition dreaming of the day when their economic and military assistance will no longer be needed.

Military

Views on War

To the Interstellar Coalition, war is hell, regardless of how necessary it can be at times. Even before its harsh exposure to the cold, unfeeling realities of the wider universe, the Coalition was averse to using warfare to settle political situations, much preferring measured diplomacy to resolve sporadic internal conflicts and violent first contacts. That being said, a common saying in Coalition political thought is the idea that even a peaceful power must always be ready to use force to defend the ideals of the Coalition Charter. Unfortunately, the realization that the Coalition is far weaker than its neighbors has made this axiom difficult to stand by, forcing the Coalition to use unorthodox, and arguably unethical, means to achieve victory and survival. Older generations lament this corruption of beloved Coalition ideals, and at best see it as a necessary evil in the face of dangerous external threats. Younger generations, on the other hand, are much more fervently pro-military having grown up with the omnipresence of war and the Coalition propaganda machine, which influences almost everything they consume, from fashion trends and music to children’s cartoons, video games and toys.

Command Structure

The Interstellar Coalition Peacekeeping Force is headed by the Board of Interstellar Defense, which in turn takes orders from the President of the High Assembly, who is the supreme commander of all Coalition forces. The Peacekeepers are divided into several corps, sub-corps, divisions and departments all of which in theory are beholden to the proper chain of command and the scrutiny of the Board of Interstellar Defense and other civilian authorities. In practice though they have been given huge amounts of leeway in how they conduct their operations, with Article 66 being unofficially in place. The Special Operations Division and the Department of Innovative Peacekeeping, in particular, have been granted unprecedented autonomy from oversight, allowing them to perform their clandestine missions and experiments in total secrecy respectively.

Broadly speaking, the Peacekeepers are divided into three main “Over Corps,” with the largest of these three having once been the Unified Coalition Navy, which oversees the command, deployment, and construction of almost all military-grade Coalition spacecraft, from corvettes to battleships. The Coalition Starfighter Corps is unique in the galaxy in that instead of being a subdivision of the navy, it is its own massive corps with a separate chain of command. This development was a direct consequence of the Federal Star Fleet destroying the less advanced capital ships of the Unified Coalition Navy during the First Contact War, resulting in starfighters gaining a much bigger role in stellar naval warfare as their size and mobility made them difficult targets for the Federation’s targeting systems. The last Over Corps is the Integrated Coalition Army, which prides itself for not only having the oldest regiments in the entire Coalition military, with some even dating as far back as before the Coalition’s inception, having once been independent system armies, but for also having the greatest commitment to the Coalition’s ideals of pluralism with famous regiments like the Halgan Shocktroopers, Shortmen Auxiliary Guard, Xenian Beast Riders, and others being allowed to keep their native culture’s unique military traditions and rites.

Soldier Types and Equipment

The Coalition peacekeeper soldier is the basic military unit of the entire Interstellar Coalition Peacekeeping Force. Sometimes called “silver helms” because of their shiny silver half helmets, these troops make up the backbone of the Coalition’s military, serving some role or duty in all three Over Corps. While all parts of the Coalition military, including even senior command positions, have strikingly young men and women serving due to the high attrition rate the Interstellar Coalition has faced in its wars against much more powerful opponents, peacekeeper soldiers are younger still, with fifteen being the average age of a peacekeeper. While many powers have underestimated the peacekeepers because of this, they have time and time again proven their worth on a thousand battlefields with their resourcefulness and youthful zealotry. Many peacekeepers are war orphans who joined the Interstellar Coalition Peacekeeping Force as soon as they were able to legally enlist at fourteen. Others are former gang members who choose conscription over imprisonment.

Another noteworthy soldier type in the Interstellar Coalition arsenal is the Special Operations Division commando. A relatively new unit created during the First Contact War, these commandos are used as a wetwork black operations force that is sent behind enemy lines to commit all kinds of asymmetrical warfare. With the Coalition Charter being wavered in regard to these convert activities, the commandos of the Special Operations Division are trained to perform acts of guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and terrorism. The biggest target of these operations is the Federation, whose crumpling influence in Xeno Alley is partially the fault of these commandos' strategic infiltration of key Federation worlds. While the commandos are trained to be ruthless in the pursuit of their missions they are also taught to at least superficially mimic the charm and rugged nobility of Coalition entertainment action heroes. This training has worked wonders in allowing them to gain the trust of dimwitted redshirts who make for great expandable agents for their operations.

The Department of Innovative Peacekeeping concurrently has been experimenting in several different avenues of military technology development in an attempt to find miracle weapons capable of turning the tide against the Coalition’s enemies. The study of esoteric weapons, void technology and genetic modification being of particular interest to them. While the department has made little headway in recreating the weapons of the Second Empire, their other two projects have seen some success. Even though there were some horrifying hiccups that left many scientists and test pilots homicidally mad, they’ve managed to create a reliable void engine prototype. Designed to be equipped to starfighters, the department hopes that these engines can one day be mass-produced, as it would free Coalition starfighters from their need for vulnerable carriers, essentially allowing them to strike at targets deep within enemy territory and immediately return to the safety of Coalition space. Lastly, the department has found a way to modify baseline humans to create architects in utero. Called scanners, these children are used sparingly in the field as currently there are only a dozen of them in existence. When they have been deployed they’ve been highly effective. For whatever reason that the department cannot yet determine only female embryos accept Lot 97, the chemical drug used to create scanners.

The standard kit for a Coalition Peacekeeper soldier is a half-face shield helmet, a flak vest made of para-aramid derived synthetic fibers, and the Coalition Starlyte, a laser rifle akin in firepower to the blasters of the Galactic Empire. In addition to these assets every Coalition soldier, from basic peacekeepers to the elite commandos of the Special Operations Division, is equipped with a power glove, a forearm-mounted utility tool originally created for commercial use as an experimental gaming accessory. The power glove serves a variety of purposes: a personal digital assistant, secure communicator, vitals monitor, translator, timepiece, planetary positioning system, cassette player, among other things. More advanced power gloves can be used in combat, with commandos having access to wrist-mounted electrostatic dischargers, flamethrowers, and sonic screamers.

The Coalition also makes use of foreign arms in the form of kinetic slugthrowers bought from the Consortium and Alliance. It still prefers its own expansive catalog of laser weaponry due to their ability to be mass produced economically, and the High Assembly is anxious about being too reliant on foreign arms to defend the Coalition. In a similar vein, while the Coalition military does have limited access to Consortium’s vast array of cybernetic technology, such augmentation is rarely if ever used despite their obvious utility. The Coalition military looks down on cybernetic enhancements because the addictive properties of neurozine are seen as too much of a risk to the health of soldiers, and because Coalition culture favors easily detachable technology such as turbo armor, jet-packs, and the power glove. The followers of Stellarism believe that heavy cybernetic enhancement can lead to a loss of identity and connection to the Lightbringer.

Formations and Tactics

The sobering effect of just barely surviving both Contact Wars has made the Coalition as a whole reassess much of its old tactics when it comes to conducting warfare. While before the Coalition simply blockaded an opponent, this would not work on a power with a more powerful space force. Since then the Coalition has adapted to the fact that can no longer rely on superior numbers and equipment to pacify an enemy. The Coalition only engages in small set-piece fights, where the odds are in their favor. Hit-and-run attacks, guerrilla warfare, and poison pill sabotage have also become favorite tactics in a new military stratagem that strives to exhaust the time, patience and numbers of a numerically superior enemy while ensuring that only a fraction of Coalition fighting men and women are used in return

Navy and Spacecraft

The relatively small interstellar navy of the Interstellar Coalition Peacekeeping Force is comprised of the Unified Coalition Navy and the Coalition Starfighter Corps. The Unified Coalition Navy was once the most effective branch of the entire Coalition military, being used as the strong right hand of Coalition authority for countless centuries. That distinction has largely now gone to the Coalition Starfighter Corps which was instrumental in the historic victory in the Caderi system that prevented dealt the Federal Star Fleet a shocking blow. The Unified Coalition Navy is now mostly used to carry and protect the attack craft of the Coalition Starfighter Corps. As a result, much of the Unified Coalition Navy is made of heavily armored carriers, with more powerful vessels being used only when the added firepower is absolutely necessary since constructing new capital ships is particularly costly for the Coalition.

As a whole, Coalition spacecraft are stark vessels that are designed to be economical and efficient rather than eye-catching. Similarly to most Coalition cities, most Coalition capital ships are grey, silver and beige, and resemble coffins in the eyes of more morbid service personnel. Starfighters tend to be the same, though some are chrome-plated to evoke the aircraft of the pre-spaceflight Halgan. Many starfighter pilots are allowed by their commanding officers to personalize their vessels with a personal coat of arms, a symbol from their native culture, or with a scandalous image. While the Interstellar Coalition wishes to one day equip all their spacecraft with void engines, they currently rely on jump drives for faster-than-light travel.