Arclight Union of Like-minded Worlds
Origins
About a millennia ago, the lone exploration ship Indeterminate Destination crash-landed on the dark planet of Treblia IV after a serious malfunction in its main A.I. core. Not long after this colossal sign-from-the-gods was found by some tri-legged natives, who promptly set up shop and sold trinkets and water to pilgrims who had watched it slowly fall through the high-nitrogen atmosphere. After only a few weeks of selling to these holy holiday-makers, a gigantic blue beam locked onto the wreckage and pulled it up to where it came from, which almost exactly matched the advent of Judgement Day described by their holy books. Seeking to get to heaven, a massive global space-race occurred, the first man getting beyond their thick star-shrouding atmosphere just 230 years later.
Recent years
Now majorly atheist, the now-called Arclight Union has almost fully colonised their homesystem of 6 planets and 23 moons, for a grand total population of 22 billion*;
Treblia I - 2 billion
Treblia II - 1 billion
Treblia III - 3 billion
Treblia IV - 5 billion
Treblia V - <10k (Gas giant)
Treblia VI - 1 billion
Moons - 7 billion total
Stations - 2 billion total
Ships - <1 billion total
*Note this doesn't include Sentients
Technology
Arclight ships come in two main forms: Sentient and Crewed.
Crewed ships are what you generally think of when you imagine a spaceship; A biological captain, giving orders to crew who work the ship with the help of the ship's computer. These make up the bulk of the larger ships in the Arclight's military fleet and all its colony/cargo/mining ships.
Sentient ships are fully controlled by an A.I. core, though don't call them that when they can hear you. Unlike most artificial intelligence, Sentients aren't robots, they're experienced captain or admiral's Mind-states taken from a high point in their career, trained using combat and diplomacy simulators such as CosmoFite, to be transferred into a ship after said captain or admiral's death. These often make up the bulk of military and explorative ships, as they are able to identify and react to situations magnitudes faster than a crewed ship.
Mirrorshields are the standard for any Arclight ship that intends to go outside of its planet's atmosphere and into the hard glare of their white dwarf sun, Treblia. These shields, unlike most, don't drain extra power when hit by higher intensity of radiation or larger projectiles, they make an irrepairable hole in the shield generator's phase-mesh, atleast until the ship's engineer can replace it. To counteract this, the shield operator (or Sentient) can attempt to increase the angle of the shield enough to deflect it, though this often degrades the mesh after a few hits. They act as a buffer to radiation, partially reflecting Treblian-visible light and almost fully reflecting anything on the low side of a gamma ray.
Ships
Total 44 (16 Sentient, 28 crewed)
--In development, still not decided whether to design them in cosmoteer or to use paint.net.--
Interstellar Politics
N/A, no other factions have contacted.
