Fiction:Kawin Empire

Solar System Astrography The Planet Kawinhartoow is a world 0.9 times the size of Earth located in the outer (area closest to edge of galaxy) sectors of the Outer Rim area of the N1 sector of the Milky Way Galaxy. The star system, the Judite system, consists of a medium size star, Judite (Juh-Dite), 3 rocky planets and a sole gas giant. The planets in order from closest to the star from the farthest include the barren world of Owwg (Awe-Guh), a tiny overheated world covered in a thick, methane atmosphere, giving it a blueish hue. The warm, life sustaining ringed planet of Kawinhartoow, with a moon, named Franka, which is known for its frozen, life filled oceans. The planet Ormathou (Oor-Mah-Thu), which is 1.3 times the size of Earth, has a breathable atmosphere for lifeforms that need oxygen to survive, and has one kin d life form, hardy bacteria. The planet is pocketed with supermassive craters which were once lakes, not meteor crash sites. The Gas giant, Phaedra (Fay-Drah), is roughly twice the size of Jupiter and has 13 barren, volcanic moons and a 2 rings rich in mineral deposits. The system has no asteroid belts though it's oort cloud is larger than normal, at 19.5 trillion kilometers (the average is 15 trillion kilometers).

Evolution Kawinhartoow is 80 percent tropical ocean, its climate being warmer than average, and has a distinct dry and wet seasons each lasting 7.5 months roughly of its 15 month year (each month is 22 earth rotations or 25 Kawinhartoow rotations. Each rotation lasting 1.042 Earth rotations). The planet’s few landmasses are desert like with only the occasional lush steppe emerging from the sea of sand, a green beacon of life and the site of all the planet’s major cities. When the planet was newly formed, the tectonic plates which are unusual slow moving meant the surface has not changed much in the planet’s 2.8 billion years of existence (the system is relatively new on a galactic scale). A comet strike infested the planet with many species of cellular organisms 2.3 billion years ago. These cells slowly evolved into sea creatures 2 billion years ago, and the planet’s oceans soon had tens of millions of different species, primarily aquatic arthropods and reptiles, along with a few daring amphibians who would go onto land for short periods to scavenge the beaches and eat plant life, which had been on land for a million years before them. After another hundred million years of evolution, life had evolved onto land, living on the green steppes surrounded by desert that had temperatures regularly reach 56 degrees celsius, making most life impossible. One land species, known as Kawin, developed an evolutionary advantage that gave them a huge upper hand and would eventually lead to them becoming sapient; they became warm blooded and gained the ability to fly. While cold blooded animals would die of heat in the desert, a airborne, fast moving animal that could regulate it’s own body temperature could cross the deserts with ease, while avoiding giant burrowing sandllobites (2 ton carnivorous arthropods), which would attack them whenever they landed to rest.

Early History Even though they evolved as omnivores and as a very adaptable species, the Kawin soon realized that hey could more easily dominate the planet through force of arms, and when several reptilian species were also gifted with intelligence, they were quick to wipe them out, After several thousand years of near continuous, and undocumented (the Kawin had no writing system till much later in their history) warfare, the Kawin triumphed, as the dominant species of the planet, the soon set out to advance their hunter-gatherer society, which a newfound lust for military power, planetary colonization, and the expansion of the sciences. All of this faced a major setback when a terrifying pandemic if the lethal timor virus struck the planet, causing a mass extinction that wiped out 60% of all animal life on the planet. One out of three Kawins died. It took the Kawins several thousand years to recover and the planet is still recovering as it will be for another million years. After their recovery, the Kawins slowly advanced their society. They never developed the wheel, but they created a very primitive written language known as Illud. After developing for another hundred years, the tribes turned into small farming communities. The Kawin domesticated several reptilian animals, most notably the bovine equus. Now that they could easily travel between communities, they set out to destroy one another.

Modernized Civilization By the time of the Kawin Industrial Revolution 500 years later, the planet was dominated by three huge empires, the Mare, the Matzrach, and the Vaderland. All three were militaristic and totalitarian and were engaged in an endless three way war. By then they had motorized vehicles all of which looked like robot animals with metal legs (they never thought of the wheel). These ranged from small, arthropod shaped cars to 90 ton metal leviathans shaped like dragons. Only 300 years ago, a small democratic rebellion tried to leave the Mare empire. All three empire ganged up on the rebels for they thought as any democracy a threat to their power. Halfway through the war, 16 years later, it was clear the rebellion was going to lose. Then, an unknown alien race gave weapons to the rebels that only a few novelists had dreamed of. The fateful day in which an entire Vaderland army was ambushed and destroyed by a shoulder fire tactical nuclear bomb from one rebel changed the tide of the war. With weapons the Kawins would not develop on their own for centuries, The rebels gained massive support and the Three empires splintered into smaller states, and were obliterated in a mere 2 years. A global parliamentary democracy was set up and the eyes of Kawinhartoow now looked to the stars as their future. Their democracy would be dominated by the Emor Dynasty, a family who would have one prime minister in every generation for 300 years (all democratically voted. The family were skilled politicians). The rebels high tech arsenal was studied and then destroyed, so that a non-democratic guerilla group could not obtain it. Kawin scientists used their study of Alien technology to build a spaceship, the Timor mark 1, and staged several missions to their moon. 25 years later, the symbol of Kawin engineering, their mothership the Imperatrix, and set off to colonize their own system and try to make extraterrestrial contact. Please Note that the Archetype of this empire is scientist with knight like attributes (cards blue, blue, red, red in the game).

Empire The Kawin’s own a small Empire of 130 star systems and 179 planets. Most of these planets are mining colonies on barren lifeless worlds or research or military centers on T1 planets. The heart of the empire is the wealthy Patriam area of 13 star systems, or the Patriam 13 (13 is a lucky number in Kawin culture). These systems all have T2 or T3 planets with a few cities. All of these planets have been terraformed to look like Kawinhartoow more or less (with different plant and animal life, obviously). The national currency is the Kawin Divitiae, though Sporebucks can be used in the outer mining colonies illegally. They don’t interact with alien races unless the extraterrestrials chose to contact them. They chose this policy after finding the remains of a fanatical, unknown Spode worshiping race that existed on their moon long before the Kawin. The terrifying ruins of the Believers consisted of miles of palaces designed to torture non believers. The Kawin recently blew up the region of the moon with an anti-matter bomb. Long story short, the Kawin will accept any peaceful race that doesn't think Spode is Almighty.

Politics The Kawin do not have a political stance or preference between the great superpowers that dominate the galaxy. Kawin’s have started a history of isolationism after destroying the ruins of the believers, terrified that a more powerful empire that is fanatical will be their demise. They do have an effective defensive system of asteroid based forts to prevent an attack by an enemy empire for a limited time. This fort system, known as Fawng’Yu, which is the eastern dialect of Illud for mighty. The forts normally keep out pirates who want to plunder the mining colonies of their empire.

Technology Right at tier 4 median, the Kawin are semi-advanced in a galactic scene. They have no wheeled vehicles, but they have constructed solar powered metal behemoths that rival a few more advanced civilizations in power, if not in numbers and size. There ground forces are relatively small, since they have a small population. The Interplanetary Kawin Army of Democracy (or the IKAD) has about 10 million soldiers (I avoid using men as the Kawin are not Patriarchal or Matriarchal). One the other hand, the Kawin Defence Fleet, or KDF, is much larger and well equipped. With about 4.2 million ships, it is minute in comparison to more powerful empires, but each ship has an elite veteran crew and the ships use some of the alien technology that was first given to the democratic rebels 300 hundred years ago. The technology has now been identified as similar to Grox weaponry, just it uses different forms of power to work (natural energy rather than fusion or black hole based energy). This may infer that it came from a Grox splinter group. They have the ability to travel slightly faster than light, but this tech is limited to only a few of their most prized starships, like their capital ship, the Imperatrix. There medical tech is skilled in some areas like virology (to stop another timor pandemic) but weak in areas such as surgery. They have limited terraforming tech; just enough to create more steppes on their homeworld to live on. There one military weapon that acts as an anti-invasion buffer, the Solar Refraction Laser Weapon System, or SRLWS. The SRLWS is a beam weapon about the size of a large truck that is loaded onto battleships.The weapon can only be used on planets. A plasma projectile is fired with a powerful fusion reactor laser. The projectile is normally not more powerful than an artillery shell, except that it is going tens of millions mph. The projectile is shot through the solar system’s star, creating a super-heated plasma orb with massive kinetic energy. The orb then smashes into the planet, raising the planet’s temperature to thousands of degrees celsius in a millisecond, wiping out all life on the planet and destroying the area within a hundred miles of the impact crater. The shot, having to be perfectly accurate, is aimed via supercomputer. It is much more useful than a planet buster as the planet will recover in a decade or two and can be colonized or exploited for its resources; something a planet buster cannot permit. The weapon also does not break the galactic code, rather the Kawin use a loophole in the code. The code prohibits sapient races to use weapons that permanently harm the planet. As the SRLWs does not harm the planet permanently, as life will eventually recover as after an extinction, though this life will all be bacteria.

Society The Society of the Kawin is based in tightly knit groups of multiple extended families known as Kibultar. Major cities, like their capital, Viva Let, consist of hundreds of these groups while smaller societies and smaller steppes (the location of all Kawin settlements) consist of only one Kibultar. Cities are run by small 5 member councils that are elected by the city once every five years. Some of these cities do this fairly, while other ones, most notably the metropolis of Arthhiree, have a corrupt leadership. Smaller societies are run by local leaders, usually scholars. There is a small group of Kawins called the wanderers (not the wanderer archetype in game) that live in desert crossing caravans of one or two Kibultar. These caravans are a main source of Global trade goods to get from one City to another efficiently, though some caravans have become lawless are sometimes keep what they are told to transport, fellow Kawin included. Once a gang captures a parliamentary leader and held him for ransom. The Kawin paid them, and then the gang killed the parliamentary leader. The gang was hunted down and killed by the IKAD in the days that followed.

Important Leaders and Persons Name: Hevel Archstone Age in Kawin Years: 74 Occupation: Prime Minister Why he is important: One of the Kawin Empire’s most important Prime Ministers, Archstone helped turn around a massive stock market failure one year ago. The crash literally could have ended the Kawin Empire. Name: Sukien Kofetzet Age in Kawin years: 30 Occupation: Admiral of the KDF Why is he important: Sukien is the youngest Kawin ever to reach the title of Admiral and is the best tactician in the Kawin Empire. He wiped out a terrorist pirate fleet of 50 starships with a single starfighter squadron in the famous battle of the Apex Nebula (A tiny nebula near Kawinhartoow)