Today, we continue the series on military vehicles in the Psi-Wars Galaxy. Last time, we looked at the Empire and their “Imperial Combine” manufactured military vehicles. Today, we look at their prime enemies and the default “heroic” faction of the Alliance.
I’ve been wanting to talk about them for awhile. When I wrote up the Empire back in Iteration 6, I also wrote up a series on how I saw the Empire fight their wars. With the Alliance, I began to do something similar, but I don’t think I ever released it, and I know I didn’t finish the vehicles because they proved complicated and, by this point, I had already grown disgruntled with the Spaceship design system. I needed to really build everything from scratch and think my way through their different tactics.
But I like the Alliance because it presents such a contrast to the Empire, but they also represent a fairly unique faction for the setting. The Alliance, with their focus on elegant aristocracy, space knights and a precognitive preisthood, represent an obvious deviation from the Psi-Wars inspiration of Star Wars, and I feel like their doctrines and military vehicles, despite some obvious inspirations from Star Wars (such as the Valiant by way of Starhawk by way of X-wing) represent a very different way of war.
So, as usual for these series, I’ll start by talking about how the Alliance engages in war and what their priorities are.
Military Doctrines: Constraints
The Maradon noble houses prefer to fight limited wars. They rarely see political conflict as an existential crisis; instead, they tend to see wars as an extension of diplomacy. They find it shameful that a spat between two artistocrats might result in the devastation of worlds; at the very least, this represents a tragic waste of resources, and at the worst, a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. Where possible, a Maradonian aristocrat would rather see a dispute handled via negotiation, then courts, and only when these fail, via open warfare. Once that war is declared, the purposeof the war is to shape perception, negotiation and law so that the aristocrat’s claim is recognized, both by his peers and the galaxy at large. Thus, for most Maradon noble houses, war is largely symbolic, a game of one-upmanship and saber-rattling that should ultimately result in a duel between two titanic heroes, not a million dead in the trenches of a fire-ravaged world.
For a Maradon noble, perception matters. Their culture is built upon literally centuries of breeding the perfect rulers, heroes destined to save the Galaxy from some great catastrophe. They rule because people expect them to rule. Through this, the Maradon aristocracy has learned that they must constantly project an aura of inevitability or, even better, heroism. They seek to be celebrated as heroes, to be a “natural” leader of the people they rule. War serves this end. It grants them a chance to be heroic, to show their natural prowess and psychic talents in front of the holo-camera and to build their inevitable legend. It gives them a chance to lend assistance to the suffering, to be seen among the wounded and sick, offering succor and healing medicine. It gives them a chance to grand-stand in the senate, to gain acclaim across the galaxy until the people shout out for the hero to take their rightful and traditionalplace.
Maradonian noble houses also seek detente with one another. Ultimately, who rules a planet is not nearly as important as that the planet is ruled. Two houses may be rivals, but all ultimately belong to the same collection of houses. Maradonian aristocrats honor one anthors’ claims because they want their own claims honored; they do not shatter a rival’s factories or slaughter their population because they would not want their own factories or population harmed. They know that their limited tactics might cause them to lose the war, but tomorrow, they can always play the tragically wronged party, the “True King” that will one day remove the tyrant and return to take their rightful place, and tomorrow, they may have a chance to reclaim their world, or take a new world. Total war between houses would ruin everyone involved and create, at best, a Pyrrhic victory.
In the face of weaker alien races and minor human rebellions, this worked well and the Federation flourished, but when faced with genuine existential threats, such as the Scourge or the Valorian Empire, the genteel Maradonian military power crumbled. The struggle of the Maradonian elite in the Alliance today is to find a way to combine their traditional form of war with modern realities. Some do this by invoking their distant past, when they first forged an empire; others seek the new, more fighter-oriented way of war.
Military Tactics
Alexus Rex rode to galactic power on the strength of the Space Knight and the dominion of capital ships. In those early centuries of space flight, ships traveled with large, cumbersome hyperdrives and thus they represented massive investments of capital and human resources. Enormous space battles usually involved only a handful of capital ships. Alexus Rex used a combination of the battleshipand destroyer-sized boarding ships. The former provided covering fire while the latter slipped close and forced their way onto and into enemy ships. Once latched on, the space knights would be the first to enter, his heavy armor, force buckler and psychic power providing more than enough defense against the initial onslaught of ship-board defenders. Through skill and the lethality of the force sword, space knights pushed back the defenders and granted the rest of the boarding crew the room to move in. These vast ships provided the space for pitched battles of boarders vs defenders, but the Maradonian forces usually won without causing serious damage to the ship, and Alexus Rex would add another ship to his fleet.
During the War of Houses, after the fall of the Alexian Dynasty, war changed again. As the houses fought over scraps of Empire, they often traded planets several times, and total war meant that countless millions would die. Moreover, the Houses had literally had centuries to fortify their worlds, making their own fiefdoms virtually impregnable. War turned to siege: the Maradon elite primarily focused on dominating orbit and then parking dangerous artillery above major aristocratic sites and then engaging in aggressive diplomacy. They used their position to blockade trade routes and place economic and political pressure on the world to capitulate bloodlessly, with the unstated threat of orbital bombardment as the final possible option. As a result, war became an extension of diplomacy for the Houses and then, when they formed the Federation, the practice remained.
While war become largely ceremonial for the Maradonian elite, it hadn’t for the rest of the Galaxy. The Communion Crusade introduced fighters to the galaxy and proved their effectiveness. The Maradonian elites had been slow to adopt them, but House Elegans, during the Slaver War, had seen what they could do. During the Anacridian Scourge, High Admiral Lowellin Cole, warmaster of house Elegans and veteran of the Slaver War, suggested using fighters and carriers to push back the Scourge; eventually, the Federation went with Grand Admiral Leto Daijin’s approach instead, but High Admiral Cole’s efforts resulted in many of the starfighters used by the Alliance today.
The Alliance continues to focus primarily on planetary defenseand war through diplomacy. They endeavor to make a world or star system sufficiently difficult to take that the enemy refuses to commit to total war, and then the elites begin to jockey for political position, acquiring allies and hitting one another with trade sanctions until it either becomes obvious that the attacker has no hope of breaking the defenses of the besieged system or defender realizes the attacker has both the military and political upper-hand and graciously bows out, turning the system over.
This tactic struggles against the Empire, as they have resources to spare. The Empire will simply overwhelm a system and accept the losses that the Alliance inflicts while defending a world, testing the ceremonial strength of the Maradonian noble and, more often than not, proving them to be a paper tiger.
Thus, today, the Alliance tries to reform its approach to war. Traditionalists try to bring back the very old way of war, raiding Imperial ships with space knights and boarding parties, straddling a line between military force and piratical raiding parties, but the modern space knight is a pale shadow compared to the elite and powerful companions of Alexus Rex, though every day their training grows sharper and their armor more robust. The Empire counters this tactic with beefier on-board military security and escorted logistics vessels. Progressives focus on the power of the carrier and the hit-and-run tactics of elite fighters. For them, the power of the psychic space knight can be expressed with a fighter’s blasters as easily as with the force sword; furthermore, the common man often has access to his own starfighter, so the progressives act as a support force for Alliance fighter levies. This have proven effective, as a lightning raid by strike fighters can destroy an unprepared dreadnought fairly quickly, but they struggle with resource costs, as a single Alliance fighter can easily cost as much as five to ten Imperial fighters, and the death of a single space knight shakes the Alliance far more than the death of a Javelin pilot does to the Empire. The Alliance’s warmachine costs morethan the Empire’s, and the Alliance has less resources, and so is forced to find ways to compromise.
They do not compromise their means of conquest. The gentle hand that they apply to war earns them much love from the people. The Alliance claim they come as liberators, and when they take a world, their focus on diplomacy over firepower lends a great deal of credence to their words. Their focus on keeping their aristocracy alive means they tend to have numerous medical supplies on their ships of war, which means they can afford to spread aid and support to a newly “liberated” people, earning them a lot of affection from the new populace. However, if the people fear they are unable to hold the world, they may turn against their new lords anyway, or demand neutrality, because if the Empire retakes the world, and it usually does, it may exact retribution for all of those that “betrayed” the Empire by accepting the Maradonian regime.
ARC: The Means of Production
Maradonian aristocratic power rests not only on their military might, but also monopolizing the means of production. The aristocracy controls House Foundries, vast, automated factories the size of cathedrals or planetary fortresses. These are run by the House Guild, and each house has their own unique designs and resources. Even so, over the centuries, the houses have benefited from standardizing certain elements and sharing blueprints and designs, and this has resulted in the Allied Resource Conglomerate, which is shared initiative between the houses that manages time-sharing of House industrial resources. Rather than approach a dozen houses for access to industrial resources, one need only approach ARC and they’ll manage the rest, seeing that your order is delivered.
The Alliance has several such cooperatives, but ARC handles the military aspect and thus has profound influence over the shape of the war against the Empire and the vehicles created to defeat them. ARC vehicles tend to be extravagant, baroque and beautiful. They’re also highly effective, but often a somewhat wasteful expenditure of resources as most House blueprints demand that their vehicles be worthy of the aristocracy that use them and also favor form over function. This tends to result in vehicles that assume the presence of a lordly character (excellent accommodations, beautiful heraldry, dancing halls in capital ships, etc) or a focus on serving a space knight at the expense of a common soldier, and extremely expensive vehicles, but often worth the money if one is a psychic space knight with money to spare.
Mailanka's Musing 