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In any case, individual patrols of NAPCET are usually at least a light-hour away from the nearest command post, as the closer areas are not quite as ripe with criminal activity. As such, individual commanders in NAPCET are usually able to lead their fleets with a lot of personal freedom - to the point where the entire organization's guidelines are viewed as little more than suggestions. Relations with NAPCET depend heavily for any enterprise on the individual relations with either a fleet commander who has been assigned with patrolling the area, or one of their higher-ups. This is of course all based on bribery - anyone who is wealthy and skimps on their bribe may be labeled a "smuggler" or "pirate" in a "clerical error," which of course is usually not discovered until after they have been arrested. |
In any case, individual patrols of NAPCET are usually at least a light-hour away from the nearest command post, as the closer areas are not quite as ripe with criminal activity. As such, individual commanders in NAPCET are usually able to lead their fleets with a lot of personal freedom - to the point where the entire organization's guidelines are viewed as little more than suggestions. Relations with NAPCET depend heavily for any enterprise on the individual relations with either a fleet commander who has been assigned with patrolling the area, or one of their higher-ups. This is of course all based on bribery - anyone who is wealthy and skimps on their bribe may be labeled a "smuggler" or "pirate" in a "clerical error," which of course is usually not discovered until after they have been arrested. |
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| − | Only about forty percent of the military complement of NAPCET is ever on the actual fleet, and they still only have about half the ships many would expect them to, even considering this fact. The forty percent figure is mainly due to administrative costs - there are supply ships, bureaucratic duties, and the political scene behind any successful police force, which absorb attention from actual patrols. Still NAPCET is as efficient as it gets, being one of the least bloated and most well-managed departments in the Nivenian Empire |
+ | Only about forty percent of the military complement of NAPCET is ever on the actual fleet, and they still only have about half the ships many would expect them to, even considering this fact. The forty percent figure is mainly due to administrative costs - there are supply ships, bureaucratic duties, and the political scene behind any successful police force, which absorb attention from actual patrols. Still, NAPCET is as efficient as it gets, being one of the least bloated and most well-managed departments in the Nivenian Empire. |
==== Officer Rankings and Pay ==== |
==== Officer Rankings and Pay ==== |
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Revision as of 20:20, 19 September 2021
The military of the Nivenian Empire has, over recent years, become a quite streamlined, but nevertheless still complicated affair, consisting of a central power core, but also of multiple unreliable non-governmental organizations with similar capabilities to the empire itself (which of course turns war into a largely political struggle - if all of the factions within the Nivenian Empire were to cooperate, its military might would likely be augmented twenty-fold. However, even in its normal, reduced, state, the Nivenian military is a force to be reckoned with. This is not due to particularly advanced technology, or particularly good tactics, or even particularly effective recruitment procedures (the reality is actually quite the opposite), but just their massive numbers.
The Nivenian military is also interesting in that it is concentrated solely in the Nivenia System, with very few, if any, defense forces affiliated with the main body of the Nivenian Empire in these areas. Instead, other systems, which are partially independent, are left to their own devices in growing and maintaining a military. As the vast vast majority of the Nivenian Empire is located inside the Nivenia System, this does not pose too much of a problem in terms of either colonies explicitly revolting (they would need a comparatively massive military buildup to mount a successful revolt, which would collapse their economy afterwards), or really affecting politics in the main system in any major way.
The formal Nivenian military itself is governed by the Nivenian Department of Stability (NDS), which is named for "stability" instead of "defense" or "war," since the Nivenians have been to some degree a semi-unified race since the thermonuclear war on Nivenia Prime, and then had close to seven hundred years to develop afterwards. While there were two periods, each admittedly lasting decade, when multiple similarly-sized factions existed, there has usually been a single, more-or-less self-consistent government ruling over more than three-quarters of the Nivenian People. Thus, most of the operations of the NDS have been largely concerned with stability, with self-defense providing another important role to play in some, more desperate circumstances, such as those leading to the Nivenian-Thadian War of Annexation and the Third Nivenian War of Reunification recently. Having two wars that large in the span of two decades is rare for the Nivenian Empire, but not entirely unheard of, as the period was still less anarchic than the first two Nivenian wars of re-unification, even if the wars involved were larger, and fought with far more fearsome weapons.
The military itself also interestingly does not have a formal ground branch on the Imperial level, instead the various planets, habitats, and colonies of various types are all responsible for their own ground defense, which is usually not heavily focused-on. The reason for this has always been that orbital bombardment could usually do much more than actual planetary battles towards swinging the loyalty of a planet, as orbital bombardment does much more damage. For example, even in the early days of space exploration, a ship crashing into a planet at twenty kilometers per second, and weighing a hundred million tons, would create an explosion of almost five gigatons TNT equivalent, enough to burn anything within nearly five hundred kilometers, which could have killed millions at least during the early period of space exploration. In contrast, state-of-the-art warships such as the Hydra-class Titan have the ability to blast out nearly a quarter teraton of TNT equivalent from their engines alone, all in the form of high-energy gamma rays, with a mean energy of seventy teraelectron volts. Four of these ships, arranged in a tetrahedron around a planet, could nearly completely obliterate the biosphere by subjecting the entire planet to hundreds of greys of ionizing radiation. All of this would be entirely possible in just one second, with the insane output of these engines. As such, ground combat is rarely ever used or considered, when the threat of sterilization would work just as well.
Military Organizational Structure
Nivenian military organization structure largely consists of breaking the military into several major branches - four of them dominate the capabilities of the Nivenian Department of Stability, although their functions may surprise many. First, it should be noted that the most active part of the Nivenian military system, and what would be regarded by most in the Nivenian Empire as the most important is actually the spacial equivalent of a coast guard - the Nivenian Anti-Piracy and Contract Enforcement Team (NAPCET).
The second-most important branch of the military, for Nivenians, is the organization that governs the organization and management of the defense rings - excessively huge megastructures at about three times the radius of the ringworlds around each star, which are tasked with the destruction of particularly dangerous pirate fleets, or, in the worst-case scenario, actual invaders, from either inside of outside the Nivenian Empire, though the former is more likely by far. However, the defense rings also offer convenient ship refit and cargo storage locations, which is one of the few ways the small government in the Nivenian Empire can actually generate revenue. The organization responsible for the management of the defense rings is knows as the Defense Ring Administration (DefRA).
The last, least important (to the Nivenian Empire) branch of the military is their actual attack fleet. Although they have billions of ships in their fleet, the sheer size of the empire means that only a very tiny percentage of the population actually work in these ships, or even contribute towards their maintenance - with an empire of over a quintillion inhabitants, a billion ships is nearly nothing. This is considered by most to be the actual navy of the Nivenian Empire, but they are the equivalent of a brown-water navy[1] by most of the rest of the the first Gigaquadrant due to their inability to travel faster than light, and use almost entirely as an in-system force. This organization is termed the Imperial Navy, and is notable for its opulent and tradition-loving, yet somehow also moralistic hierarchy, along with its lack of a pleasant acronym to be called by.
However, there is another branch of the Nivenian Department of Stability, that, when observed closely, is the most influential, essential, and powerful of the entire group - the Department of Military Politics (DMP). This organization is tasked with attempting to affirm the motivations and loyalty of the massive non-governmental organizations inside the Nivenian Empire. As a large coalition could potentially take down the entire empire, such a coalition cannot be allowed to form out of organizations with coherent and anti-imperial goals, or, if such an organization forms, the current imperial goals would have to be changed as much as would be necessary to alleviate the difficulty. As such, this organization is perhaps the most important out of the four to the stability of the empire, even if it is not as well-known.
Nivenian Anti-Piracy and Contract Enforcement Team
The Nivenian Anti-Piracy and Contract Enforcement Team, while not an overtly prestigious position to be in, as part of an organization that has largely dispensed of ritual, actually offers some of the best jobs in the Nivenian Empire, at least from the perspective of career advancement, business and personal connections. NAPCET ships, typically smaller than a kilometer, but can withstand high accelerations of up to thirty meters per second squared (not that the crew would find that pleasant), and are armed with state-of-the art precision weapons and shields, leading to a low casualty rate on both sides in most engagements they are involved in. These forces, while spread very thin, tend towards informing, reporting, and courier duties more than actual fighting, and are thus more a cog in a large problem-resolution system more than an actual fighting force. If the issue is forced, their ships can certainly hold their own in a fight, but any sufficiently large operation (e.g. a criminal organization with more than a couple hundred medium-sized warships) could take down a patrol in a head-to-head battle. The genius in the system is that any criminal force that gets too large usually needs to siphon money and/or resources from the large corporations, which of course have private armies, and can amply defend and police themselves. If a problem were to get really out-of-hand, though, the duties of NAPCET would be scouting out the situation and informing the NDS to allow them to take more drastic measures. After that, in the event of a war, NAPCET would be tasked with maintaining domestic stability outside of the planets and ringworlds.
In any case, individual patrols of NAPCET are usually at least a light-hour away from the nearest command post, as the closer areas are not quite as ripe with criminal activity. As such, individual commanders in NAPCET are usually able to lead their fleets with a lot of personal freedom - to the point where the entire organization's guidelines are viewed as little more than suggestions. Relations with NAPCET depend heavily for any enterprise on the individual relations with either a fleet commander who has been assigned with patrolling the area, or one of their higher-ups. This is of course all based on bribery - anyone who is wealthy and skimps on their bribe may be labeled a "smuggler" or "pirate" in a "clerical error," which of course is usually not discovered until after they have been arrested.
Only about forty percent of the military complement of NAPCET is ever on the actual fleet, and they still only have about half the ships many would expect them to, even considering this fact. The forty percent figure is mainly due to administrative costs - there are supply ships, bureaucratic duties, and the political scene behind any successful police force, which absorb attention from actual patrols. Still, NAPCET is as efficient as it gets, being one of the least bloated and most well-managed departments in the Nivenian Empire.
Officer Rankings and Pay
| Rank | Pay | Credentials requirements | Approximate number |
|---|---|---|---|
Command Structure
| Unit Name | Symbol (if applicable) | Parent (if applicable) | Children (if applicable) | Approximate mass of ships | Approximate number of ships | Approximate required crew | Approximate number in empire | Rank of commanding officer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fleet | NAPCET Command | Divisions - ten to a hundred | 9 Trillion to 180 Trillion metric tons | 900 Thousand to 18 Million; avg. 4 Million | 45 Billion to 900 Billion; avg. 200 Billion | 500 - one per major habitat or habitat group | Fleet Admiral (★★★★★) | |
| Task Force | Fleet | |||||||
| Division | Task Force | |||||||
| Flotilla | Division | |||||||
| Squadron | Flotilla | |||||||
| Patrol | Squadron |
Defense Ring Administration
Department of Military Politics
Strategic Readiness
 | |||||
total mobilization time: 1 year |
total mobilization time: 6 months |
total mobilization time: 3 months |
total mobilization time: 1 month |
total mobilization time: 2 weeks |
total mobilization time: MOBILIZED |
recruitable population: 1,068.77709 Trillion (0.1%) |
recruitable population: 2,671.94273 Trillion (0.25%) |
recruitable population: 5,343.88547 Trillion (0.5%) |
recruitable population: 16,031.6563 Trillion (1.5%) |
recruitable population: 42,751.0837 Trillion (4.0%) |
recruitable population: 106,877.709 Trillion (10.0%) |