Lore:Cliques
 Sol Federation |
Other Names: SolFed |
Cliques
The Sol Federation consists of tens of thousands of individual member nations, with tens of thousands of individual votes happening yearly. It is both impossible for an individual member to keep track of all the possible proposals that might affect them, and for any particular proposal's interested parties to pander to each SolFed member with a vote. Thus, cliques.
Cliques are, on paper, simply a collection of individuals with narrow special interests, who track and make relevant proposals to the SolFed Council, and inform their interested members of relevant concerns. In practice, Cliques are loosely political parties, representing their people's fixation on a specific interest and commanding their votes where irrelevant. To have a significant voice in the Council, you need a significant amount of leverage: votes.
Formally, Cliques hold no presence on the SolFed L3 Federal Assembly station. They are issued no chamber, no allotted headcount for staff, no voice or power to call votes. In practice, member nations offer their own Council resources to further the clique; replacing their nation's secretary with a Clique Steward, filling half their chamber with Clique business, calling votes on the Clique's behalf... Hell, several nations are courted into cliques on the sole basis that their office is adjacent to other members, so them giving consent to deconstruct the walls between them means the clique has a better office.
If you ask your automated Navigator the way to the Plasma Clique's office, it will point you nowhere, but if you ask aloud, you'll get directed to obvious wall signs conveniently embedded in a nearby nation's Extended Livery. Bet you didn't know that the proud Blue and Gold flag of the Cheren Path is only the abridged Naval Flag, and their full flag also has a big purple arrow to the right labeled "Trade C. Office 6 aisles clockwise 2 hallways coreward -->".
How Voting Works
Each member state in SolFed nominally gets one vote in any particular vote. However, the size and location of a nation's office in the Federal Assembly are dictated by their population/wealth, so that larger nations can keep more staff on-site and have better insight on active votes. The minimum threshold for a nation's ability to qualify for a vote isn't one of concrete numbers, but practicality: a tiny nation has an office so far from the voting hall that they are physically incapable of sprinting from their office to the voting box in time. At current projections, an on-site office of 100 workers is the bare minimum to keep tabs on all the concurrent debates and votes and submit an informed decision on each.
The first cliques were literally just coworkers from nearby offices that you trusted to carry your ballot, so you could sit in your office and watch the debates about another pressing matter to learn how to vote in your own interest. In time, this escalated to allowing these ballot runners to vote on your behalf, and to freely signing whatever vote your trusted ballot runner stops by your desk with. Gradually, these informal voting blocs grew structure, ideals, and congealed into the modern Cliques seen today. They hold grander ideas and networks of sprinters, but are still fundamentally just an orchestrated means of getting more votes into a box than can be carefully considered by individuals alone. This comes about as new waves of nations literally have to bolt new rooms onto the Federal Assembly, which they can do because it's a space station. Even if it's not an office thing, a new nation means at bare minimum a new chair in a debate hall, which still gets bad as nations are added gradually and up to the 10,000some nations theoretically possible.
Votes
Each nation is assigned one vote power per person in its population. This gives a lot of power to the big member states while small ones have to band together to get any impact.
Each vote is a physical ballot, congealed into denominations of 1 10 50 100 1,000 50,000 1m 25m Larger denominations have historically existed, but through the push of the Unity Clique toward One Nation One Vote, larger denominations were deemed "too great a security risk" and "atrocious for accountability", and that individual citizens had the right to track their specific vote (they do not) which would be made infeasible by including them in a conglomerate ballot. Ulteriorly, which is a real word, this stifles the ability of large nations to effectively vote at full strength, as having to sign each ballot to validate them imposes a strong time investment. Autopens were briefly banned in fear of fraud, until the first Synth Senator stepped aboard the Federal Assembly and everyone got a little too uncomfortable to bring it up again.
The largest nations' embassies in the Federal Assembly look more like a print shop than a place of legal asylum, rushing to leverage their full constituency and often losing sight of lesser votes. Paradoxically, this means that tiny measures can easily pass with only smaller nations' approval, as they have only a few ballots to certify, leaving spare time to address numerous votes at once.
Physical Ballots
Ballots coming in physical denominations means that political alliance and vote trading is also a physical act, a literal trade of signed blank ballots for specific issues. For a short time, ballots were used as the currency of corruption, votes for personal favors to the senators. This, combined with the ramshackle assemblage of the Assembly, promoted certain business opportunities that, of all groups, the Monarchists were keen to capitalize on. Eschewing the standard political office, these royal representatives gained power through small vote donations in exchange for ready, well-cooked food, saving serious senators hours of off-site restauranting or valuable office space for personal cooking appliances. None grew as pervasive as the Burger KingYou may boo, now..
Eventually this would be cracked down upon, as this detracts from biological societies disproportionately more than non-consumptive species, as well as the deep fryer stench being recognized as an act of war against neighboring offices.
Casting Ballots
A typical vote goes as such:
The Proposal
A nation has an idea for a measure to pass. For this example, we'll follow the failed "Vote C3-196: Is Daylight Lighting A Hatecrime Against Shadekin?"
The nation presses a button in Federal Assembly Vote Calling office and is assigned a unique Proposal NumberEach nation can press this button once a day, barring other conflicts, but are under no obligation to use the proposal number., in this case C3-196Each proposal number is derived from the nation's charter number, times they've proposed thus far, and date of pressing, but is hashed securely for anonymity and to prevent blind bias. Yes, nations do auction off notable proposal numbers for favors. Proposal 69-420 was allegedly sold for twenty billion votes and has yet to be filed.
The nation writes a petition for this proposal and acquires signatures from approx. 5% of all SolFed nations. The major Cliques easily have the numbers to do this without "outside" discussion. This proposal is ratified by an automatic scanner in the main Council Chamber, which initiates an immediate Vote.
It is expected that by this point, the proposing interests have already gathered support, informed all nations of the proposal, and are reasonably confident it will pass. Motions still in this pre-vote phase of canvassing and informing are called "Proposed," as in "Proposals" or "proposed amendments."
The Ballot
For every nation in SolFed, their Embassy prints off blank ballots with a specific issue pre-written on them, e.g. a batch of ballots for "C3-196 Shadekin Hate Crime", one ballot per "district" in the above denominations. This is anywhere from a thousand to several thousand paper ballots.
Each Embassy has unique letterhead, tying a ballot to the nation. Each ballot has identifying marks for each citizen represented, e.g. "this 1000 Vote ballot represents the Intent of the persons with Social Security Numbers 122-134-552-XXX". These ballots need not be printed at the time of the vote, and are often pre-printed with known, inconsequential proposal numbersProposals the nation knows it has no opinion on. There are no protections against a nation declaring a proposal number will be about one subject, but changing it to a different matter just before the Vote is called, (but it is a "Dick Move") so pre-printing ballots holds some risk., to be used as currencywant to each burger.
The Vote
The ballots are marked with the specific Yea or Nay marking unique to the specific VoteNot guaranteed Unique, but cryptographically the chance of collision is low., via stamp or pen or whatnot. This means that each ballot must be touched during the 6 hour voting window in order to properly cast it, even if pre-printed and pre-signed. This ensures liveliness of interested parties.
The nation's team sticks these physical ballots through an autopen to register a specific vote. Varying security measures are applied at this stage, depending on the era and the nation. The signature is unique to the office, fictionally altered slightly to be unique to the vote; e.g. "distort the second letter turnwise for every vowel" etc. The ink can be chemically unique, etc.
The signed ballots are inserted into a central ballot box held in the core of the Federal Assembly, and the physical ballots are kept "secure" for like a year. They will be auto-counted by computerized systems, but the physical ballots are retained as physical proof of a physical voteIn the event of two identical ballots being cast, e.g. selling one ballot but reprinting it to cast yourself, the first submitted ballot is counted. The identities of the contradictory ballot-submitters are recorded and disclosed during an audit, so fraud can be detected, but there are no innate protections against voting fraud in this manner. There are also no innate protections against the kneecaps of those who would double-cross their sold votes, and no protections against said nation being heavily tariffed by majority vote.
----
The Anti-Dick-Move Clique does not often have to take action, but when they do, it is conclusive..
After a short time, around 6 Earth hours, the ballot box closes, accounting for folk rushing to a box, etc. The votes are counted and tallied in a narratively satisfying amount of time, often a day. In theory a Recount can be called, and by all means someone always calls for it, but Real, Serious recounts where they actually have to break out the physical ballots are rare.
Center Clique
Center Clique, which represents the "default" to a degree. They're made up primarily of large and powerful nations in the center of SolFed, and believe in centralizing SolFed alongside supporting corporate interests, and their own interests. You could consider them a bit akin to the Federalists in the early US.
When folk from other codebases think of SolFed, this is what they think of. An imperialist, expansionist democracy, often bullying, bribing or coercing smaller nations or independent systems into joining them. They have a very close relationship with corporations, and while they posture as a Federation, the Center Clique pushes for the central government to have a lot of control and micro-manage individual systems. They struggle with secessionist movements and were one of the big people to suffer revolutions after the first migration, losing a good bit of territory.
Strongly epitomized by the Libraen thosefucks. Independently, each major player in the Center Clique is their own brand of disgusting, and together they're reprehensible. A mixture of the worst of a Landlord Coalition and a Homeowner's Association.
Unity Clique
All cultures are to become part of the Sol Federation. SolFed might not be the best system, SolFed might not be the wisest government, but it is unified and within SolFed, there are no wars. Neighbors are just those who have not had their price for peace met; whether that price is consideration or blood, only time will tell.
Out of the ashes of the Sagittarius-Tiziran War rose those who would will that to be the end of war, the final conclusion. After losing millions of SolFed lives, just at the cusp of total victory, the distant, unaffected coreworlds surrendered their advantage and forced a shitty semblance of peace. The Unity Clique sees this as abandoning those who fought bravely to defend SolFed, as cowardice getting in the way of progress. The bureaucrats downright betrayed the Federation, letting our scaly enemies regroup and redouble their position, and it is with this fiery hatred that the Unity Clique fights for everlasting peace.
The Unity Clique is SolFed's main expansionist drive, seeking to make all into SolFed, so that none need declare war for politicks or land. The sheer ideological threat of the Tiziran Menace bearing down upon the fringes of SolFed, and the absolute horrors of the resulting war, steeled the heart of the Sagittarian peoples into those who would see war at that scale finished.
They do want to centralize SolFed, but want it to be done in a way that has a more equal distribution of power, which upsets both the Frontier and Center Clique. This means limiting the power of massive voting blocs, but also lessening the protections afforded to micronations.
They're also responsible for SolFed having a standing military, as that is a bill they proposed and got other people to agree to. Having seen what happened when SolFed was reluctant to raise arms to defend its own, the Unity Clique vowed to never let complacency or bureaucracy interfere with safety again.
Where the votes are irrelevant, they hold strong to their past loyalties. Center Clique? Never ever supporting anything they want ever, as they fucked them during the war and betrayed SolFed. Progress Clique? Sure, at least one of their members provided a good deal of support, so they'll help them out if needed.
Far from traditional xenophobes, their hatred lies with alien governments, not the aliens themselves. In their eyes they're righteous liberators, and it would make sense for that approach to begin during the Tiziran war, even if in practice it wasn't always followed due to the realities of the conflict. The Sagittarians were in it to remove a distinct and dangerous threat on their front doorstep. Get the lizards off the board and make sure they can't pose a threat to us anymore. Peace through unity or peace through eradication.
The standards for a new nation joining SolFed are lax, almost exclusively because of Unity meddling. Joining SolFed can be taken for granted. The vast majority of nations give no darn either way, and will either Abstain from vote or sell the vote cheaply. Only the peoples basically adjacent to the impending member have any reason to have an opinion. Yeses would be for liking new trade routes that open up, for ending hostilities, for under the table boons. Noes would be for those intent on conquering the zone themselves, or for those pissed at a neighbor who might vote yes above. With the vast majority of SolFed apathetic to these votes, the Unity Clique needs to exert only a minimum of influence to ensure the new member is accepted.
Frontier Clique
Of the thousands of nations in SolFed, a good 40% are within 50 light years from Sol Federation's declared borders. TODO: remove those numbers, never give the readers concrete numbers. These are the smaller members who can't turn their back to external politics, to SolFed's relations with neighbors, to the looming threats of galactic wars and the realities of living closer to a potential enemy than a SFAF patrol.
The Frontier Clique is made up primarily of smaller members who were often former colonies of other members. They generally try and represent the interests of "The Little Guy" and have tons of tiny members. They're pretty anti-corporate, and are pretty opposed to centralizing SolFed. They're also really lacking in unity due to how many members they have.
One would expect the Nova Sector to be involved with the Frontier Clique, but Nanotrasen's holdings are more coreward and NT's position of power is mostly disconnected from their frontier holdings.
Trade Clique
Trade requires two things: an imbalance of supply and demand, and the freedom to ride that gradient to profit.
Basically mostly made up of Sovereign Corporations with the Corporate Territories acting as their leader and unified voice. The nations in the Trade Clique are generally those with strong corporate influence that didn't join the Center Clique. As you would expect they are entirely devoted to Corporate interests and freedom of trade.
The Trade Clique operates as a self-policing union of sorts, ensuring quality standards and sanctioned trade through force. For producers, this means they'll only stock ... it's teamsters. it's a teamsters union. they do mafia shit to keep the monopoly but they want standards.
~~Trade Clique: A generally pro-corporate clique, the exact specifics are rather TBD as work on SolFed corporations is generally very vague, but they look out for corporate interests and generally push a free-trade agenda, trying to prevent any member state from enacting tarrifs, or from restricting the activities of outside corporations.~~
Production Clique
The antithesis of the Trade Clique, the Production Clique champions self-sufficiency, to the point trade is irrelevant. They abhor exclusivity agreements, including copyrights, and would see everyone have an autolathe and a dream to fulfill.
All about technological progress at the expense of everything else, unless it's something immoral. So both pro and anti tech folk'll hate them. Cybersun's probably had more than a few products forced out of the marketplace by their lobbying.
Unsurprisingly Syndicate-sympathetic at times.
Plasma Clique
Thou shalt not harvest Plasma in the dark, thou shalt only brave extraction in our light.
The only thing more dangerous than a monopoly is one that can't be controlled by profit.
The Plasma Clique exists to control the production and distribution of Plasma. The Plasma Clique does not exist to control SolFed, render ungodly profit, to conquer or liberate.
They are a collection of member states who own the main plasma producing systems in SolFed. These go to systems that are anomalous, so they may produce other things too, but plasma is the most important of their exports. They work together to set industry standards for plasma production, and production quotas. They're made up of various democratic member states and in addition to looking out for their financial interests try to push democracy within SolFed.
The Plasma Clique own the main plasma producing systems in SolFed, including several Anomalous Zones.
Why?
The purpose of a system is what it does: The Plasma Clique maintains a monopoly on plasma in order to maintain their monopoly on Plasma. Likewise, the purpose of the answer to "Why?" is not to convey objective truth, but to convince the listener that the Plasma Clique should remain in control of the Plasma trade. Depending on who asks, the answer will be different, tailored to the asker's sensibilities.
None of these are false, but none capture the full scope of the Plasma Clique's motives:
- To fight monopolies: SolFed has been wrecked with the Trade Clique's enforcement of byzantine copyrights. Folk have had their identities stripped from them because some pharmaceutical company trademarked a strand of genes that happens to be in their blood. The Plasma Clique sees the danger that a malevolent monopoly could pose, but also sees that there will always be a throne of Plasma to sit upon, so it takes the throne so that no one worse could.
- To regulate the dangers: With something as flammable and dangerous as Plasma, letting it go unregulated and freely sold also poses dangers. Plasma, to the Clique, needs accounting and regulation and safety, all things the Clique provides and the free market would not. Someone must be in charge of Plasma, and so it shall be the Clique.
- To retain power: The Plasma Clique holds power over Plasma. To retain that power, it needs to use that power. The Plasma Clique needs to exert political influence to choke out independent plasma dealers, lest they rise up and become unhealthy, unsafe competition.
- Plasma is limited: Theoretically, there's a finite amount of Plasma in the universe. Pedantically, there's a finite number of atoms in the universe, so it's a little hypocritical to only obsess over Plasma. Regardless, shortages happen, logistics and transport need to happen, and for many folk Plasma is their sole source of power, so letting the free market give Plasma to the "highest bidder" is frankly immoral.
- Plasma is unlimited: Where Bluespace and Realspace clash and the veil between the two is torn open, the damages congeal into Bluespace crystals, metaphysical scabs. By that metric, where the veil does not tear, it bruises, and those bruises manifest as Plasma. Through wide-scale abuse of the fabric of reality, Plasma could theoretically be farmed infinitely, whalloping the metaphysical to feast off her tears. The Plasma Clique stands not as a guardian of Plasma, but the noble knighthood defending reality herself.
- To help people: The Plasma Clique is notoriously charitous. Customers are not extorted beyond their means, and excess is taxed heavily. The Three-State-Aid Program, sponsored by the Clique, ensures that generators and plasma are widely available to small ventures and needy settlements, asking nothing but an attempt to transition to renewable energy.
- * Empower everyone: The Plasma Clique owns the copyrights on modern Modular Solar Panel arrays, especially their upgradable glass compatibility layer, and in their charity offers the designs freely, with only reprimands that the printer breaks no SolFed law nor does no Evil with them.
- Keep it out of Evil's hands: The Plasma Clique does try to enforce its morals upon those dependent on them. The Plasma Clique unilaterally supports democracy; they'll deliver to monarchists, charging premiums that the upper class can afford to afford, and while it would be Illegal and Immoral to declare war against a fellow SolFed Member State, incidental democratic coups against these states suspiciously never have to worry about keeping their lights on.
- Ensure basic morality: Besides Democracy, the Plasma Clique pushes to help your fellow man, to abhor excess and to treat thy neighbor as your own. They won't shun you for owning a suburban house and living within your means, but that vacation home isn't a timeshare? It just sits idle for most of the year? Good luck powering that with their disapproval. The Plasma Clique is a collection of nations, so specific moral judgements might vary a little, but they keep each other in check just as much as they keep their dependent customers (most of the galaxy) in line.
- Be smug sons of bitches about the whole fucking thing: Yeah, they'll give you food for free, as long as you attend a lecture about how their morals are just, how their championing plasma is for the Greater Good, how all these charity programs that you're totally eligible for are the correct way to run a society, how you should be a part of that society. Y'wanna learn slurs for corporations? They've got whole songbooks they'll print out for you. They'll feed and clothe the homeless, but y'know what they won't do? Make more homes. (Note: they will make more homes actually). But okay they'll make homes but the only jobs allowed are to further their charities. Like yippee, you're out of the soup kitchen earning your own paycheck, but nope you're still in the soup kitchen on the other side of the counter. What the fuck happens when everyone gets theirs, and everyone's on the serving side of the soup kitchen? Nobody left to feed then, so you're out of a job, so you go to a soup kitchen, you get a job at a soup kitchen, there's nobody left to feed, ..? Think about it. These Plasma purists are fuckin' shit-heels. It's fuckin' moral to stick it to these chodes, ride your hog around their checkpoints and smuggle this plasma to the people, for the people, AROOOOO!!
- The Prophecy: When no rational argument will make things seem right, the Plasma Clique isn't above pretending to dabble in mysticism. Deep in the Time Before, the Forces created Plasma, a wild and voracious pet, and set it loose upon the galaxy, to guide it to greatness. But Plasma, volatile as she is, knew not the depravity of man, and let them abuse her, to suckle at her teat without wean, to bite and cry freely. The Forces wept, and in their tears came destruction: wild limbswapping explosions, and wild regular explosions, and the like. The Forces cried out for a shepherd to take Plasma into their flock and protect her, and lo, Tsogyal arose. With the stillness of the grave and the grace of life eternal, Tsogyal took Plasma under her wing and stood between her and ruin. There, Tsogyal still stands, staving off the end of times for both Plasma and Man through careful moderation and generosity. ... This isn't entirely a lie, as this was indeed prophesized... in the Plasma Clique's focus groups, in the Time Before, a clock-themed conference hall.
The Plasma Clique handles plasma production and distribution, and for what means of production it does not directly control, it regulates, establishing industry standards and production quotas. Excessive production incurs their wrath, and their economic vengeance. Sure, mine twice the Plasma, but the Clique will buy none of it from you and now you're storing a volatile explosive for free.
Naive morons would consider them affiliated with the Trade Clique.
TODO: talk about their capital, the stasis star thing.
Monarchist Clique
Name TBD.
A Boys Club of dictators, warlords, anyone unequivocally charge of a nation and interested in staying as such. Individuals might have the best interests of their people at heart, as they're not necessarily evil, but it takes power to hold power, and when you've got that much power, there's few folk beneath you worthy of your trust. Best to seek it with others in an equally fragile state, your fellow kings and deities. Known for swapping their armies around, lest any one army get too emotionally attached to any one nation and decide to liberate it from the sovereign, or worse, "liberate" it.
As far as voting goes, anything that lets them keep power is good, anything that's pro-competition or pro-equality is bad. The Plasma Clique hates them because they love democracy, but so long as they pay using their peasants' labor, they'll still receive as much Plasma as they need.
More than a few Theocratic nations vote with them, but their heads, their gods rarely show up to the barbeques.
Work in Progress: Footer subject to change at a moment's notice. Do not take a red link's presence, struck-through or otherwise, as confirmation (or denial) of their canonicity.
