The Personal Tech Overview of Humanity

I previously said I was going to “start” with the Maradonian military, but that’s not entirely right. What I should start with is an overview, as per the general setting design principles I laid out in this post here (and here). The whole reason I started moving in this direction is that I can’t really do anything, such as run a decent playtest, until I have a good sense of what everything looks like, and there’s a few ways you can do that: you can start from the bottom up (“I want to use Starhawks and Typhoons!”) or you can start from the top and work your way down, which is generally how I prefer to work with this, because it’s easier to “start simple” and build your complexity from there. This means we should work on a quick summary of what all the military forces of Psi-Wars look like.

This will do a few things for us. First, it gives us a “minimum viable product.” If I design the Maradonian forces, but fail to build anything else, you’ve got 1/4th of a setting, but if I give you an overview and do nothing else, you’ve at least got insights into how you can flesh out the entire setting. Second, by building an overview, we can get a sense of what general elements the setting has in abundance, and what it might lack; that is, we can make sure that military forces don’t look too similar. It helps us ensure that each faction has a well-defined niche. Finally, it makes the final design process easier, because we’ve already laid out the blueprints.

I know I said “all” the military forces, but naturally, we’re focusing on humanity because they are the core “default” of the setting. A good space opera has nice contrasts between the familiar and the exotic, and humanity and its grounding in “Star Wars” is familiar. We know the Rebel Alliance vs the Empire, we have little trouble explaining it; to be sure, I’ve done some different things, but it should still feel familiar. Aliens, by contrast, should contrast with the base we build out of the “familiar” human setting elements, so that when you transition to those parts of the setting, they feel as exotic as they should. Thus, we will not worry about them yet, and will handle them in due course.

This will be a very high level perspective. We’ll briefly touch on how I see each faction approaching their military, what sorts of niches that I see them filling, and then hit on the archetypes I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, creating a table so we can see where we have “too much” of a particular element, and where we might need more.

A further note: I had intended this to cover spaceships, robot and vehicles too, but something happened: it got very long and, also, I noticed some of my readers already discussing ground doctrines and equipment, so I thought it might be better to strike while the iron was hot and just release this portion and move on to personal equipment and come back and deal with robots, vehicles and spaceships once that was done.  I'll have a general overview of space combat soon enough as well.

Also, I’m diving into corporations and I want to credit a couple of people for names: GURB, for introducing quite a few corporate names, and Alan Chambers, for suggesting Starlink Telecom.

Ground Based Military Doctrines

Military personal gear and ground vehicles are ultimately tied to soldiers and military forces. Every weapon manufactured and every tank built are designed to fit the military doctrine of the customer that purchases them. Thus, to understand what military gear we have, we need to understand how a force fights. For the purposes of this post, we want to get a sense of how a military force fights “on the ground,” with infantry, human(ish) scale combat robots, and ground vehicles, so we can get a sense of what sort of equipment they might manufacture to fit their needs.

Thoughts on Military Doctrines

Before we can discuss the details of a military technological framework, we should try to understand the logic behind why they use the weapons and vehicles that they use.  This means understanding how a particular military force fights, how it combines its various elements into a cohesive whole.  It also means understanding something about the culture behind the army, why they fight, and what their flaws are.

I did some work on Imperial military doctrines, or typical Rebel tactics, and these proved quite popular, if the views are to be believed, so I thought I'd revisit some of the thought process behind how I came up with those, and some of the thoughts that I have when creating my own military forces, both so that I can clarify my own thoughts but also, more importantly, to offer you some inspiration if you're creating your own military force.

Knightly Orders of the Alliance

The aristocracy of the Alliance have more military power than just their navies and armies, they also have one another.  Like-minded knights form together into Knightly Orders, patterned after the highly successful Knights of Communion. Many amount to little more than just social clubs for bored aristocrats, but some can prove to be major military forces within the Empire, and all become powerful political factions, able to push their agenda thanks to the wealth and prestige of their members.

I offer three knightly orders as examples of what Knightly Orders might be like.  Feel free to create your own!

I personally found it odd how isolated and unique the Jedi Order was in Star Wars.  Eventually, the expanded universe added a few new groups out there, but in reality, warrior-monks tend to rise out of joining religious and martial traditions, rather than springing up ex-nihilo.  The aristocracy of the Alliance represents the legacy of the martial tradition that gave rise to the Knights of Communion, and we'll dive into the religious/philosophical tradition that gave rise to them when we dive into philosophy.

Aristocratic Regulars and Military Forces

Celsius-13 Royal Railgun Guard
Not what regulars would
actually look like, but you get
the idea

Aristocratic power have nothing but the weight of tradition and law if they don't have the military power to back it up, and boy do they!  In fact, the primary reason I created the aristocracy and the Alliance was to give those who opposed the Empire reasonably access to military hardware.  While the ships will have to wait (it turns out designing the ships of the Alliance quickly turns into "Designing all of the combat ships of the Galaxy that don't belong to the Empire"), I can show you how their forces operate.

Alliance Militia

The Alliance believes strongly in independent sovereignty, and a key component of that sovereignty is independent military power, a feature of the Federation violated only once, a violation that caused the rise of the Empire. Each member world has the right to its own defensive force, called a Militia. In fact, the Senate sees a militia not as a right but as a duty, and typically sanctions worlds that leave their defense to the rest of the Alliance. One reason the Alliance has survived as long as it has is because a blaster lurks behind every blade of grass.