Scarlet Sands, Crimson Banners

Excerpt from a lecture presented by Group Captain C. S. Kriechbaum at the fifty-ninth Fleet Review of the League of Nations

Three centuries have passed since the defeat of the American irregulars and their Separatist co-belligerents at the Battle of Pavonis Mons by international forces of the First Coalition under the flag of the First Commodore. But the nominal end of the Great War simply marked the beginning of a bloody new chapter in the Red Planet's recent history. The hard won victory of the League of Nations must be regarded as a pyrrhic one at best. Both the military and civilian launch facilities at Utopia Planitia were razed to the ground by Separatist raiders during the Eastern Campaign, and the secondary launch sites scattered throughout the former American and Soviet administrative zones were deliberately destroyed by retreating Separatist forces during their withdrawal to the mountain outposts of Tharsis in the concluding stages of the war. The sabotage of the Phobos communications relay array by Separatist sympathizers seven years earlier was the last measure ensuring the total isolation of the nations of Mars from the rest of mankind for these past three centuries.

We can only speculate as to how the Great War unfolded on Earth and Luna by sifting through the handful of fragmentary communications transcripts received prior to the destruction of the Phobos Array. What little we know gives us scant hope. The intentional demolition and scuttling of American and Soviet orbital outposts in the second year of the war ringed the Earth with a vast orbital debris field that will undoubtedly restrict planetary launches and re-entries for centuries to come.

Encrypted American military transmissions of Lunar origin intercepted and partially decoded during the second year of the war suggest the mass mobilization of the atomic arsenals of Earth around that time. This hypothesis is supported by surviving data tapes recovered from the wreck of a defunct orbital observatory unearthed in the Hellas Basin a century ago. The fragmentary photographic stills of the Earth's Western Hemisphere depict atmospheric activity consistent with pre-war data models of the immediate aftermath of a large scale atomic exchange.

The survival of the Lunar population appears equally unlikely when considered in light of pre-war accounts of the Lunar infrastructure's lack of self-sufficiency and its dependence on regular resupply launches for even the most mundane of necessities.

Thus it is highly possible that the nations of Mars comprise the last few farflung remnants of the human race. That is not to say the peoples of Mars have survived unscathed. Excluding the military and civilian casualties directly attributed to the Great War, it is likely that hundreds of thousands across the globe have died in the immediate post-war era. The food, water, and energy shortages caused by the wartime disruption of polar resupply convoys and the destruction of the orbital photovoltaic arrays undoubtedly account for at least sixty percent of the era's death toll through exposure, asphyxiation, hypothermia, famine, and starvation alone. Scattered outbreaks of Red Lung and Chinese Flu exploded into regional epidemics that claimed another third of post-war deaths as a result of the unsanitary living conditions created by habitats and settlements overcrowded with starving refugees.

The remaining ten percent of deaths in the period can be tied to the Wars of Dissolution that marked the fragmentation of the First Coalition and the near collapse of the League of Nations. In the subsequent power vacuum, new nations were born of the scattered bases, settlements, and outposts that dotted the post-war globe, and the sands ran red with the blood of patriots and martyrs. Even as the delicate infrastructure of the old world burned and collapsed around us, empires and alliances rose from the Martian wastes to bicker and clash over the simmering, blackened ruins. After two centuries of continuous conflict, the nations, tribes, and states of the new world, exhausted by war, settled into an uneasy peace and struggled to consolidate, rebuild, and retain their hard won gains. So it was for another century, as a reforged League of Nations stood poised to stand once more at the helm of humanity.

But that age is now at an end, for we stand at a precipice. A new Great War looms on the darkened horizon. The nations of this arid globe are too many, the dwindling resources of this world too few. The most conservative predictions give half a century at best before stocks of irreplaceable pre-war materiel and resources are exhausted, condemning ninety eight percent of the Martian population to death by either asphyxiation, starvation, or exposure. Our only hope for continued survival lies in the scattered wrecks and abandoned installations buried deep in the remote desert wastes. Within their derelict hulls and shattered geodesic domes reside the treasures of the old world and the salvation of the new.

It is for this we fight. It is for this we die. To unify the scattered nations of this dying planet beneath a single banner and ensure the survival of its peoples, we shall give our all.

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This is a new project I'm working on. Basically I took a long break from the board and decided to take an indefinite hiatus from the writing-heavy story I was doing before. However, I did have some old unused ideas that I wished to turn into something that wouldn't involve too much writing, so I decided to put together this thing. Hopefully by the time I'm finished, it will be a worthy successor to the "Scarlet Sands of Mars" short stories series I wrote a long time ago, but for now, it's just going to be mostly world building as I flesh out the various nations and factions of this setting through illustrations accompanied by short descriptive passages.

Maybe some day I'll write a narrative story set in this setting, but chances are it will probably fall by the wayside, as I'd rather try to finish my Damsels and Dirigibles story if I ever get back into the writing mood.

Anyway, I've already finished the first illustration, but I'm still mucking about with the descriptive passage, so you can expect that soon.

One of the most influential factions to emerge from the chaos of post-war Mars is the League of Nations, which traces its lineage back to the international organization of the same name established in 1919.

The League of Nations is headquartered at Port Huygens in the Isidis Planitia, and it consists of only seven member nations, all descended from organizations, entities, and populations closely associated with the loyalist League forces of the Great War era. Chief among these member nations are the Armada and the Division.

The Armada
The Armada is a loosely matriarchal society descended from personnel of the League Aerospace Armada, the international military force that was tasked with peacekeeping duties in the inner solar system during the pre-war era. As a nation held together by an unyielding chain of command inherited from their military forbears, the Armada managed to survive the bitter centuries of strife that resulted from the Wars of Dissolution and carve out scattered territorial holdings for itself, stretching from Utopia Planitia in the north to the Hellas Basin in the south, all largely centered on the sites of former pre-war military outposts and installations, along with the attached civilian encampments and settlements established in the post-war era.

The present day Armada is comprised of three warrior clans: the 7th Squadron, the 26th Squadron, and the Corps. Of these, the Corps is the largest in size and influence, as it is descended from the rather sizable pre-war Armada Marine Corps garrison stationed on Mars. All three clans answer to the Grand Commodore of the Armada, who is typically a former clan head elected by a council of Armada officers and statesmen to serve a twenty year term. Famously, only about two thirds of all Grand Commodores have served a full twenty year term, with the remainder perishing in battle at the head of their formations.

The Division
The Division, on the other hand, traces its ancestry back to the personnel of the League Aerospace Armada's Science Division. These researchers, technicians, physicians, and engineers comprised almost thirty-five percent of the League Aerospace Armada's pre-war Martian contingent, the majority of them employed in the nascent terraforming projects and planetary resource surveys left incompleted in the wake of the Great War. Chafing beneath the strict discipline and military authoritarianism of the post-war Armada, the forbears of the present day Division withdrew to isolated frontier outposts and weather stations at the height of the Wars of Dissolution. They returned a century ago to join the reforged League of Nations, bringing with them a wealth of partially preserved scientific, medical, and technical knowledge that, while of priceless utility in a far less enlightened age, has made the Division a target of suspicion and distrust to the clans of the Armada. The Division possesses scattered outposts and settlements across League territory, with a large concentration of these in the Hellas Basin.

In the modern day, the Division's immediate value to the League lies in the skill of its frontier prospectors and salvagers in identifying and recovering priceless technology and materiel from the debris fields and wrecks of deorbited pre-war spacecraft and derelict scientific installations that lie buried deep in the Martian wastes. The vigilance of the Division's handful of functional observatories often gives the League advance notice of celestial activity that may herald the reentry of a new wreck and the prizes contained within its impact reinforced hull.

Though its military resources are strained by constant expeditionary campaigns against the resurgent hostile states and tribes that threaten its borders, leaving scarcer and scarcer manpower for seizure and recovery of high value wasteland derelicts, the League of Nations remains a formidable force that still possesses the potential to unite all of Mars beneath its banner, at least for the present. Drawing from the ranks of its lesser member states, the League can raise temporary war levies numbering in the tens of thousands to bolster the numbers of its permanent war host, the Aerospace Corps, which is comprised of the military-age members of the Armada's three clans and headed by the Grand Commodore of the Armada. The Aerospace Corps excels at maneuver warfare on the wide open plains of the Northern Hemisphere, using a combination of fast infantry marches and skirmisher screens to seize the strategic initiative and force hostile armies into set-piece line battles under circumstances dictated by the Aerospace Corps.



This illustration depicts a Marine Skirmisher of the Aerospace Corps. A folding photovoltaic pack provides the power required for the operation of her aging Mauser Las-89 rifle, her Zeiss binoculars, and the heating coils of her field uniform. A standard issue respirator half-mask enables her to breathe without the aid of a pressure suit in the partially terraformed Martian atmosphere. A pair of lances, sword bayonet, and saber allow the Marine Skirmisher to hold the line in pitched battle alongside Armada regulars and League levies, while her laser rifle and long range optics make her a particularly formidable threat while conducting reconnaissance out on the open wasteland that characterizes the Northern Hemisphere.

The two gold stripes on her shoulder epaulettes mark the Skirmisher as a Flight Lieutenant, while the plain aluminum crest on her field cap and blue lance pennants are particular to descendents of the 7th Squadron. Her composite armor, highly valued and impossible to replicate with the current level of technology available to the League, is stenciled with its original Armada Marine Corps markings, with the League of Nations emblem on the right upper arm and the League Aerospace Armada emblem on the left breast.

"Gone" my ass.

I'll be following this.

I'm just here to dump my stuff off, that's all.

Looks interesting, hopefully you can include some of the humor from your Damsels and Dirigibles story to go along with the rebuilding of humanity on Mars.

Subscribed!

Maybe, but not likely. This setting is going to be more of a hard science fiction one, and any narrative story will be more of an epic quest type thing that takes the protagonists all the way around the dying world, encountering all the various states and cultures along the way.

Color-Copycat said:

Maybe, but not likely. This setting is going to be more of a hard science fiction one, and any narrative story will be more of an epic quest type thing that takes the protagonists all the way around the dying world, encountering all the various states and cultures along the way.

Click to expand...

Hope they find the technology to continue the terraforming of Mars.

Is this semi-inspired by Ray Bradbury? The Humanity only surviving on Mars thing feels familiar.

Im curious to read this.

The only thing I've read of Bradbury is Fahrenheit 451. This setting is just building off of one I introduced in a previous short story of mine.

The largest faction to exist outside of the League of Nations is the Shangou State. Situated deep within the Grand Valley that girdles the Martian equator, the Shangou State was established at the height of the Wars of Dissolution by the predominantly Chinese ice miners toiling as bonded laborers at the planet's south pole. Before the collapse of interplanetary travel, Chinese geological survey and mining corporations had cornered the market on Martian ice extraction with vast imports of unpaid and underfed skilled labor, thereby undercutting the operating costs of the more sophisticated automated drilling rigs preferred by European and American corporations and establishing a permanent population of Chinese ice miners at the South Pole. Already inhumane working conditions deteriorated for the Chinese ice miners with the outbreak of war on the Red Planet, as the mining megacorps were seized by League forces and the laborers forced at gunpoint to increase work quotas in order to keep campaigning armies well stocked with water in the arid deep desert. When League garrisons at the South Pole were weakened and ravaged by the Wars of Dissolution, the Chinese ice miners seized the opportunity to revolt, fleeing the ice cap as marauding armies warred over the drilling rigs and pump stations. Undertaking a now legendary forced march across hundreds of kilometers of arid desert wasteland, the surviving miners sought refuge from the harsh winter dust storms in the labyrinth of kilometer deep canyons and ravines that comprise the Grand Valley. There they encountered and merged with the remnants of a Chinese corporate settlement that had been a test bed for algae-based atmospheric terraforming and hydroponics before the war.

In the centuries since the founding of the Shangou State, the heart of the Grand Valley has gradually borne the fruit of countless generations of patient atmospheric terraforming. Oxygen-producing algae have colonized many of the deep, sheltered ravines, where open-air settlements of Shangou farmers cultivate scrawny hydroponic fields of genetically modified grain and algae on terraced canyon walls that receive favorable year-round sunlight. Nowhere else on the surface of Mars can man survive without the aid of the ubiquitous half mask respirator and compressed air canister, making the Shangou State's territorial holdings in the Grand Valley unique among the nations of Mars.

The Shangou State has retained vestiges of its corporate ancestry, with a highly centralized hierarchy that revolves around the hereditary Chief Executive (descended from the commoner who slew the original Chief Executive Officer and led the ice miners to freedom) and a largely ceremonial Board of Directors comprised of distinguished advisers and learned men drawn from settlements and villages across the State. The Chief Executive holds his court in the central capital of Hong Xiagu, site of the original corporate settlement in the heart of the Grand Valley.

The State maintains a permanent army of 8000 men (unmatched numerically by any other nation) in the form of the Grand Brigade, and it can raise war levies of many tens of thousands from the State's agrarian workforce of laborers and farmers. However, the State's fighting strength is stretched thin in manning its lengthy borders, and the vast size of its army and minimal technological base means that only every fifth man can be equipped with functional breathing apparatus, largely restricting the army from conducting large scale offensive campaigns beyond the breathable boundaries of the Grand Valley.

This strategic limitation suits the Shangou State just fine, as it has pursued an isolationist stance since its founding. While the other factions of Mars clash and struggle over the blasted remains of military installations and deorbited spacecraft in the deep desert in search of valuable technological artifacts of a more enlightened age, the Shangou State is content limit its contact with the outside world to short, bitter wars to defend its territories from the League of Nations, its traditional enemy ever since the time of the Wars of Dissolution. It is no secret that all the nations of Mars covet the fertile atmospheric and agricultural miracle of the Grand Valley, but only the League Aerospace Corps is strong enough to regularly challenge the Grand Brigade on the latter's home territory. Nevertheless, most League expeditions into the labyrinthine Grand Valley are hampered by poor maps and unfamiliar terrain, ending with the victorious Chief Executive parading captured Marines and Armadiennes of the defeated Aerospace Corps through the dusty streets of Hong Xiagu on their way to the slave markets. In retaliation for the League's mistreatment of their ancestors, the Shangou State refuses to accept ransom for League prisoners, and subsequently a now permanent underclass of League-descended slaves has toiled alongside the Shangou peasants in the algae fields for the past two centuries, much to the chagrin of the proud nations of the League.

However, the most recent series of campaigns against the League have highlighted the growing weaknesses of the Shangou State's diminished technological capabilities relative to the League and other factions, and increasingly bolder voices from the current Board of Directors are calling for the Chief Executive to abandon the traditional isolationist policy and join the other rising powers of the Red Planet in the growing struggle for the lost technological artifacts that may be key to the nation's continued survival on a dying world. The Shangou State has become a victim of its own success over the past few centuries, with unsustainable population growth forcing the Chief Executive to confront the reality of annual famines even in the heartland of the Grand Valley. While previous Executives were content to implement draconian food distribution policies that condemned hundreds of peasants and slaves to death by starvation, each successive famine has brought the State one step closer to a total collapse of social order, giving the Chief Executive additional incentive to set his nation on a new course.



Depicted above is a warrior of the Grand Brigade. Armed with a lightweight carbon fiber fighting spear and a short sword, his armaments are well suited to brief skirmishes and melees within the narrow passes and ravines of the Grand Valley's many tributary canyons. His plate armor and helmet are hammered out of steel scrap salvaged from the desert debris fields and are designed to protect his head, shoulders, and arms from bladed blows, while his torso is protected by a vest of repurposed ceramic plates that offer additional protection against the handful of aging Mauser lasers still fielded by the League Aerospace Corps. Tinted quartz goggles, chronically in short supply, shield the warrior's eyes from the abrasive desert dust, and a bedroll and carrying pack provide him with all the necessary kit for protracted campaigning far away from his home settlement.

Although the Grand Brigade lacks ranged weaponry beyond that which it can commandeer from fallen foes, the warriors of the Shangou State compensate for that deficiency by avoiding set-piece pitched battles on open terrain, instead preferring to lure unsuspecting League columns deep into dead-end tributary canyons, cutting off all avenues of retreat, then mauling surrounded units in the flanks and rear with ambushes and night attacks until the enemy loses formation cohesion and can be totally enveloped and crushed by overwhelming numbers of fearless warriors.

Good update, C-C!

thanks

i will try to make another entry soon.

Update, Part 1

A Brief History of the Orbitaalers

The most recent arrivals on the Red Planet are the Orbitaalers, a fiercely independent culture of hardy frontiersmen who descended from the cold vacuum of space a century ago to seize their place among the nations of Mars by right of bloody conquest. The history of the Orbitaalers predates the Wars of Dissolution, properly beginning even before the Great War itself. In that golden age of human expansion across the inner solar system, the powerful Zuid-Afrikaanse Mynbou Konsortium, or ZAMK megacorp, enjoyed a total monopoly over all ore extraction operations on the Martian moons and the Asteroid Belt beyond. Several thousand predominantly South African mining engineers, prospectors, and technicians were permanently employed aboard the scattered mining stations and outposts in Martian orbit and beyond, annually extracting and processing millions of tons of raw ore to sate the voracious appetites of humanity’s interplanetary industries.

Abruptly finding themselves cut off from all terrestrial communication and resupply by the outbreak of the Great War, the isolated asteroid mining crews were thrown into chaos as the rigid ZAMK corporate hierarchy struggled to keep the scattered mining stations under its thumb. The overnight collapse of electronic currency fatally weakened the corporate grip and thus leadership of the disparate mining crews spontaneously devolved to the headstrong and independent-minded foremen and overseers who had taken charge of each individual mining station on Phobos, Deimos, and in the Asteroid Belt. With each outpost equipped with hydroponic greenhouses, water recycling systems, and solar arrays designed to indefinitely sustain adequate levels of life support during long haul contract rotations, the self-sufficient miners were content to completely withdraw from planetbound civilization as the atomic fires of the Great War consumed the League of Nations and their Separatist foes on Earth, Luna, and Mars. Halfhearted attempts by the League’s Martian garrisons to forcibly press the asteroid miners into military service met with violent resistance, and League security forces were reluctantly withdrawn from the Asteroid Belt and Mars orbit to participate in the fighting on the Red Planet’s surface. And when the dying embers of the Great War kindled the roaring conflagration that was to become the Wars of Dissolution, the miners vigilantly maintained their self-imposed orbital exile while civilization collapsed into barbarous savagery on the Red Planet below. The Orbitaalers, as the aloof exiles came to call themselves, raised generation after generation in the cold vacuum of space, among the various independent Asteroid Belt fiefdoms and orbital mining stations on the Martian moons. But after nearly two centuries in space, the burdens of a growing population— coupled with deteriorating habitat facilities and interminably decreasing stocks of irreplaceable resources and technologies— forced the Orbitaalers to break their long exile and look down the gravity well to war-ravaged Mars for the means to sustain their continued existence. The Red Planet, with its cities burnt and its peoples broken by centuries of war, famine, and disease, was ripe for conquest.

Although harboring an immense suspicion for central authority, the majority of Orbitaaler clans gradually coalesced into two major states as the scattered outposts and stations began pooling together their dwindling resources and coordinating raiding parties to the planet below, while a handful of stubbornly independent clans constitute up to twenty minor breakaway tribes and pirate bands. Chief among these Orbitaaler states were the Transorbitaal Republiek and the Phobos Vrystaat, as they are called in the debased Zuid-Afrikaner dialect of the Orbitaalers— or the Transorbital Republic and the Phobos Free State as they are known to Anglic-speaking nations of Mars. Both were established during the self-imposed exile of the Orbitaalers as the decades-long culmination of various clan alliances and together they planned an ambitious expeditionary campaign of joint conquest.

With satellite imagery and topographic scans in hand, the Republic and the Free State landed scouting and surveying parties on the surface of the Red Planet, the first spaceborne arrivals in two centuries. Their eyes were firmly set on the Great Southern Ice Fields, with their promise of a vast supply of frozen water. Cautiously skirting past the blackened ruins of shattered geodesic domes and the squalid refugee camps clinging to their fringes, the Orbitaalers of the expeditionary vanguard trekked across the desolate highland wastes of the Southern Hemisphere guided by their navigational satellites, orbital weather data, and realtime terrain scans. Pressing south in convoys of ramshackle solar vehicles constructed from the cannibalized hulks of their landing capsules, the Orbitaalers fought off the disorganized barbarian raiders and starving beggars that blighted the lawless southern wastes until finally their boots trod upon the frozen ground of the Polar Plain. Though mere dwarfs compared to their gigantic counterparts at the northern pole, the glaciers of the Great Southern Ice Fields are free from the lethal levels of radioactive contamination that have poisoned their northern cousins since the Great War, thus making them the crown jewels of the Southern Hemisphere.

Here, at the threshold of such priceless riches, the Orbitaalers found their way barred by a great host of warriors marching beneath the banner of the League of Nations, the first civilized folk encountered by the Orbitaaler vanguard. The thousand-strong army of peasant levies, Marine regulars, and aristocratic Armadienne officers that stood in their path constituted the garrison force of the League Aerospace Corps that for centuries had ensured the League’s hydroponic cultivators possessed unrestricted access to the uncontaminated water of the Ice Fields. Under a drizzle of grey snow, the polar garrison sallied forth from its encampment with swords and spearheads glinting in the pale polar sun, viewing the Orbitaaler expedition as simply the latest in a succession of barbarian war hosts come south in a foolhardy attempt to take the riches of the pole for their own and easily dispatched by the time-tested maxim of “hot light and cold steel”. However, the customary laser volley followed by a double envelopment and massed footlancer charge down the center failed to break the cohesion of the Orbitaalers’ defensive square. To the shock of the League’s warriors, the exoskeleton mining suits of the vastly outnumbered Orbitaalers endowed their frail spaceborne bodies with seemingly superhuman strength and afforded them levels of protection exceeded only by the ancient composite armor inherited by the most highborn of the League’s Armadiennes and Marines. In individual combat, the Orbitaalers’ improvised arsenal of sharpened entrenching tools, serrated mining pickaxes, and carbon fiber long pikes proved more than a match for the steel sabres and aluminum battle lances of the League’s Marines. But it was the Orbitaalers’ time-fused blasting charges– pressed into service as improvised hand grenades—that finally tipped the balance in their favor. The jury-rigged mining explosives blasted huge gaps in the League’s closely packed lines, shattering the cohesion of their charging ranks and routing stunned peasant levies and Aerospace Corps regulars who had never before witnessed such destructive power manifested outside of ancient film archives and historical texts.

Victorious on the field of battle, the Orbitaalers marched their downtrodden League prisoners into captivity and proudly planted the banners of the Republic and Free State upon the blood-streaked ice of McMurdo Crater, claiming the entire Polar Plain and the Great Ice Fields for their own. As the Free Staters and Transorbitaalers divided the territorial conquests and spoils of war between their two states, the bulk of their population still in orbit was rapidly ferried down to the planet’s surface to reinforce and consolidate the defenses of the recent conquests. The enslaved Armadiennes and Marines of the defeated League garrison were put to work alongside exosuit-clad Orbitaaler mining foremen and construction engineers, restoring the ancient ice-drilling rigs to working order and erecting habitats, solar arrays, and hydroponic greenhouses to feed and shelter the new spaceborne arrivals. The widespread employment of their native captives proved to be a fatal mistake, as outbreaks of Chinese Flu and Red Lung– endemic among the Martian natives since the Wars of Dissolution—claimed the lives of many hundreds of Orbitaalers whose centuries long exile in the sterile vacuum of space had denied them contact with the gruesome diseases that their Martian cousins had developed immune resistance against many generations ago. As their numbers fell from crippling sickness and death, the Orbitaalers’ reliance on native slave labor steadily increased, and a brisk trade of water for slaves quickly developed between the sedentary agrarian cultures of the Southern Hemisphere and the two Orbitaaler states.

Even after the native Martian diseases had run their course among the Orbitaalers, culling the population of all those who lacked immune resistance, the Free State and Republic were never able to recover to pre-contact population levels. Even ignoring the deaths suffered in periodic skirmishes against barbarian raiders, the strain of planetary gravity on the frail spaceborne bodies of the first generation settlers proved too much for many, and besides the genetic damage of generations of inadequately shielded exposure to cosmic ray bombardment had rendered many Orbitaalers barren. Though initially reluctant to fraternize with their conquered subjects and slaves, all of whom they considered savage barbarians and primitive aliens beneath their contempt, many Orbitaalers took concubines and wives from among the civilized Anglic-speaking Armadiennes and Marines in the slave camps in order to sire viable heirs. From these mixed pairings, the Orbitaaler states were revitalized, and the subsequent generations—hardened by their inherited immune resistances and harsh upbringing under the rigors of Martian gravity—formed the staunch foundations of the modern Orbitaaler culture.

Update, Part 2

The Orbitaaler States

Since their landfall on the Red Planet a century ago, the Transorbital Republic and the Phobos Free State have remained loosely aligned with one another, though the uneasy peace is occasionally broken by border disputes escalating into raids and skirmishes undertaken on the initiative of individual militia units in defiance of orders from the authorities above. Both states are overwhelmingly composed of subsistence hydroponic cultivators who inhabit widely scattered clan and family farmsteads across the Polar Plain and the far southern latitudes of the hemisphere. The vast slave-driven ice mining operations of both states at the Great Southern Ice Fields provide their citizen farmers with enormously subsidized water shipments in exchange for mandatory military service with each state’s national militia when the need arises. In times of war, both states operate on the same call-up system, in which each Orbitaaler district is expected to raise a specified quota of citizen-soldiers, or burghers, from the district’s farmsteads and settlements. Typically each farmstead is required to send all but one of its military-age members to serve as burghers. The burghers of each district elect a field officer, or veld-cornet, to lead their unit into battle, and the veld-cornets of the assembled district units elect a general, or commandant, to lead the entire militia brigade, or commando. The various commandants operate under the leadership of a commandant-general, or commander-in-chief, appointed by the citizenry-elected President of their respective Orbitaaler state. Presidential elections in both states are held every decade and all free burghers have the right to vote.

The free burghers of the Republic and Free State are vastly outnumbered by the large slave population employed primarily in the polar ice mining operations but also as domestic servants and agricultural laborers on the Orbitaaler farmsteads and hydroponics stations. Whereas the slaves on the ice fields are brutally worked to death and replaced annually by the long caravans of war captives and convict-prisoners sent south by other Martian nations in exchange for precious shipments of Orbitaaler ice, the domestic servants and agrarian laborers of the hydroponic farmsteads are exclusively of Anglic-speaking League stock, an entire hereditary slave class descended from the Marine and Armadienne prisoners taken by the Orbitaaler settlers shortly after their arrival on Mars and kept in bondage under successive generations of Orbitaaler rule, working and living in close proximity to their less populous Orbitaaler masters. Each Orbitaaler clan is closely associated by historical and often familial ties to its slaves, with many slaves sharing the same League and Orbitaaler ancestors as their masters. These unquestioningly loyal hereditary slaves, equipped and armed in the Orbitaaler fashion, accompany their masters on campaign as skirmishers, stretcher-bearers, and camp followers, often bolstering each commando’s ranks with twice or even thrice its number in slave auxiliaries.

In the field, the Orbitaaler commandoes of the Free State and Republic are typically augmented by mercenary levies sent by allied nations in lieu of tribute for their Orbitaaler ice. These mercenary levies vary greatly in morale and overall fighting quality, though on the balance their worth in pitched battle is minor and they are best employed in feints, rearguard harassing actions, or simply as cannon fodder.

The Transorbitaal Republiek

Of the two Orbitaaler states, the Transorbital Republic is the larger in terms of population and territorial distribution of settlements, with its capital at Maritzburg, a vast ice-mining camp built upon the historical site of the old League garrison’s barracks on the eastern rim of McMurdo Crater. In addition to its half of the Polar Plain and the Great Southern Ice Fields situated within, the Republic claims sovereignty over the entirety of the Argyre Basin, which has been extensively settled by Transorbitaaler hydroponic farmers and prospectors over the last half century. In times of war, the Republic can raise two commandos, each consisting of one thousand Transorbitaaler burghers in addition to three thousand slave auxiliaries. In peacetime, the Republic only fields three companies of border guards for light policing duties, with the rest of its heavy armaments and munitions stored at its various district level arsenals.

The Phobos Vrystaat

The Phobos Free State has its capital at Witysfontein, a former mining outpost turned bustling trading town at the glacial foothills on the northwestern edge of the Great Southern Ice Fields. The Free State has no territorial claims beyond its half of the Polar Plain, where almost all of its citizens are settled. In wartime, the Free State can raise one commando of one thousand burghers plus two thousand in slave auxiliaries. In peacetime it relies on a frontier gendarmerie to patrol its borders. In contrast to their stolidly agrarian Transorbitaaler cousins, a large and steadily growing minority of Free Staters have abandoned the subsistence hydroponics of their forbears and instead earn their keep as freelance ice prospectors at the Pole and government-contracted water merchants on the fringes of Free State territory.

Equally matched and bristling with fierce pride in their independence, neither Republic nor Free State is strong enough to annex the other without risking a prohibitively costly war, and they ultimately rely on a mutual strategic and economic partnership to ensure their security. Fortunately for the Orbitaalers, the exhaustion of most easily accessible permafrost ice reserves in the inhabited regions of Mars during the Wars of Dissolution has rendered the Great Southern Ice Fields the only economically viable source of water for the agrarian nations of the planet. By way of their joint monopoly on polar ice, both states conduct a brisk trade with all civilized nations of Mars in spite of historical antagonism towards most of their trading partners, many of whom have fought at least one war with the Orbitaaler states in an attempt to bring down the eternally sky high price of ice. Ever since exhausting its glacial reserves in the Northern Hemisphere’s mid-latitudes at the turn of the last century, the League of Nations has been particularly persistent in trying to curb the independence of the Orbitaalers, launching no less than three full-scale expeditionary invasions into Orbitaaler lands during the past century (resulting in two narrow defeats and one Pyrrhic victory for the League) that culminated in the sack of the Free State capital of Witysfontein during the last war, which ended with the granting of substantial trading concessions to the League. Less militarily successful nations like the Shangou State and the various nomadic cultures of the Southern Hemisphere must acquiesce to meeting painfully high Orbitaaler quotas on agricultural produce, chemical fertilizer, human tribute, artisanal crafts, and technological salvage in order to ensure the continued flow of polar ice to their realms.

However, the depletion of once abundant chemical fertilizers in recent decades has reduced the agricultural productivity of the Orbitaaler hydroponic farmsteads to alarming levels, and attempts by the Republic and Free State to make up the shortfalls with increased quotas on their trading partners has raised the ire of many hitherto acquiescent and allied states. Furthermore, the recent population booms among the more populous agrarian nations and the subsequent resurgence of intensive agricultural practices has simultaneously increased global demand for Orbitaaler ice, even from those nations who have never traditionally shared trade links with the Orbitaalers. On top of these troubles, technological stagnation and indeed regression among the Orbitaalers is just as acute, if not as severe, as that which has rotted away at the older nations of Mars since the Wars of Dissolution. While they remain by far the most technologically advanced and technically adept faction on present day Mars, retaining a vestigial foothold in space consisting of numerous automatic navigational satellites, orbital comms relays, and unmanned weather platforms, each successive generation of Orbitaalers raised on Martian soil has spent less effort than their forbears in preserving their decisive technological edge, simply taking it for granted while spending proportionally more effort in simply surviving against the rigors of a hostile world long enough to sire the next generation. The legendary exosuits and advanced logic processors of the first Orbitaalers have long since fallen into disrepair, and only enough reaction mass remains for their descendants to climb back up the gravity well once every generation to correct the decaying orbits of their satellites and scanners. And whereas the savant-scholars and scientist-clerics of the League are steeped in a culture that centers on recovering, preserving, understanding, and applying knowledge of the fundamental principles of ancient technologies to innovative purposes, the pragmatic and unimaginative tech-mechanics and engineers of the Orbitaaler states are concerned only with the routine upkeep and occasional improvement of their most essential mining rigs, hydroponic stations, solar arrays, and machines of war, whose basic designs have remained virtually unchanged since the glory days of the Orbitaaler conquests. While their inherited technological superiority has given the Orbitaalers a comfortable head start, awareness of their complacent culture of stagnation has prompted the Presidents of the Free State and Republic to take a keener interest in the race to uncover the lost technologies that lie buried in the ancient military spacewrecks and ruins of the deep desert. Though the Orbitaalers may lack the manpower to send their own full scale archaeological expeditions and excavating parties to scour the farthest reaches of the Martian wastes for the next great technological breakthrough, their considerable economic clout might allow them to simply bargain for it.

Good updates, C-C!
Long term, the League has good chances of surpassing the Orbitaalers.

Update, Part 3

The Orbitaalers at War

Alone among the nations of Mars, the Orbitaalers have managed to reinvent and preserve the long lost art of the firearm, fielding chemical propellant-based small arms on a scale unmatched by any of their adversaries. Whereas the combined arsenals of the other Martian nations contain at best a pitiful handful of ceremonial service pistols and a precious few ancient automatics, the Orbitaalers are able to arm every one of their burghers and most of their slave auxiliaries with the deadly Orbitaaler Long Rifle and a hundred rounds of ammunition apiece. The undisputed cornerstone of the Orbitaaler commandoes’ modern day arsenals, the Long Rifles are individually custom machined from the steel wrecks of heavy caliber guns and autocannons excavated from the sands of ancient battlefields dating back to the Great War and the Wars of Dissolution. Refurbished, reconfigured, and rechambered to fire bespoke Orbitaaler rounds— which consist of lead slugs soldered to percussion-fused blasting caps that have been delicately recovered from abundant stockpiles of asteroid mining charges— the reconstructed barrels and receivers are housed in modern day furniture painstakingly crafted from lightweight laminated bamboo grown in Orbitaaler hydroponics farms. The resulting Long Rifle is a sturdy and reliable bolt-action, shoulder-fired weapon that can effectively engage individual targets with accurate fire at ranges of up to four to five hundred meters and engage massed or area targets at ranges of up to two kilometers. In comparison, the ancient but still largely functional Mauser laser rifles of the League Aerospace Corps can only engage individual targets at ranges of up to two hundred meters under ideal conditions and are incapable of effectively engaging massed targets. And whereas the intensity of a direct laser burn can be substantially dissipated to nonlethal levels by diffraction through the dense dust clouds of airborne particles kicked up by marching armies and atmospheric storms, the lead slugs of the Orbitaaler Long Rifle are mercilessly dangerous within their effective range without regard to atmospheric conditions. Even a glancing hit to the head or torso by a Long Rifle slug will punch straight through the scrap steel and ceramic plate armor worn by most Martian warriors and cause fatal injury, though the sophisticated ancient ballistic-composite armor sported by elite Marine regulars and ranking Armada officers of the League allows wearers to survive a Long Rifle slug beyond pointblank range with little more than a nasty bruise. In rate of fire, the Mauser laser and Long Rifle are more or less equals, with the Long Rifle constrained by the skill of its operator in working the sometimes tricky bolt and the Mauser laser limited by the variable recharge rate of its fickle capacitor unit. But whereas the Mauser laser can fire only five or six full intensity blasts before exhausting the reserves of its integral power cell, the Long Rifle has unparalleled staying power limited only by the number of rounds carried by its user. However, the unwieldy length, deafening report, brutal recoil, and distinctive muzzle blast of the Long Rifle make it challenging to accurately fire from a standing position and almost impossible to fire while on the move. On the balance, though, the Orbitaaler Long Rifle is the undisputed champion of the long ranged engagement and the lynchpin of the Orbitaaler arsenal.

It is little surprise, then, that the foundations of Orbitaaler military doctrine are built upon the hard-hitting, accurate long range fire of the Long Rifle. All Orbitaaler citizens are issued a Long Rifle upon reaching military age and are frequently drilled in the essentials of marksmanship and field craft during peacetime militia exercises, with munitions supplied by the state arsenals on a heavily subsidized basis. While many Orbitaaler burghers unashamedly supplement their state-issued Long Rifles with privately purchased optical enhancements, the Orbitaaler reputation as a culture of natural-born expert marksmen is not entirely unfounded; over the past century, Orbitaaler Long Rifles have claimed the lives of two Grand Commodores of the League and a Chief Executive of the Shangou State among numerous other barbarian chiefs and warlord generals whose war hosts have attempted incursions into Orbitaaler territory.

Masters of the mobile defense on the mountainous terrain of their southern homelands, the Orbitaalers fortify themselves on commanding terrain features that overlook the battlefield and offer broad overlapping fields of fire on likely axes of approach. Before the arrival of the main enemy force, Orbitaaler burghers and slave auxiliaries break out their entrenching tools and dig slit trenches and fighting holes on the various reverse slopes, ridges, and hilltops that dominate the highland terrain. From these entrenched fighting positions situated on the high ground, burghers and slave auxiliaries pick off the lead ranks of advancing armies, who lose unit cohesion as they try to cross the broken ground exposed to the deadly crossfire of multiple interlocking Orbitaaler positions. Priority is assigned to enemy officers and war chiefs in order to sow chaos and weaken morale among the enemy ranks as they gradually close the distance to the first line of Orbitaaler defenses. When any frontline fighting position threatens to be overwhelmed or encircled by the enemy vanguard, the burghers occupying it quickly force a breakout and withdraw to pre-prepared second-line positions under the cover of supporting fire from neighboring entrenchments. Such tactical withdrawals are often used to lure enemy formations into even deadlier crossfires until mounting casualties break the enemy’s morale and rout his army. Indeed, this fluid defensive doctrine has frustrated many a Martian general unaccustomed to the idea of a defensive line being able to flex so easily without losing all cohesion and formation integrity. However, this fixation on a doctrine of fluid defense often leads to panicked or inexperienced Orbitaaler burghers and slave auxiliaries abandoning perfectly tenable first-line defenses in the face of vigorous enemy assault, knowing full well that they can simply retire to second-line positions rather than risk danger to life and limb. Indeed, entire battles have been lost by unmotivated Orbitaaler commandoes simply abandoning the field rather than absorbing minor casualties to hold the line.

This often obsessive mentality of self-preservation is one of the most exploitable weaknesses of the Orbitaaler race on the field of battle. Never a particularly numerous or fecund people, the Orbitaalers are loathe to put their lives at any more risk than that which is absolutely necessary to fulfill their legal obligation to the state. The death of every burgher is keenly felt on the scattered hydroponic farmsteads back in the Orbitaaler heartlands, where every hand is sorely needed to share in the burden of subsistence agriculture. Furthermore the Orbitaalers’ complete lack of a martial tradition prior to their landfall on Mars has discouraged the glorification of heroism or death in battle in sharp contrast to the many Martian cultures which laud the sacrifices of their fallen warriors. This cultural aversion to self-sacrifice is exacerbated by the extremely egalitarian nature of the Orbitaaler chain-of-command, in which every order issued by an Orbitaaler commandant is subject to a vote from the veld-cornets and burghers of the commando. Unpalatable but often necessary military measures issued by unpopular commandants are regularly rejected by the burghers. In the event of a crisis of confidence, the commandant himself can be deposed his veld-cornets and a replacement elected from among their ranks, and the same holds true of the relationship between the veld-cornets and their burghers. During the early stages of an Orbitaaler campaign, this system favors the appointment of charismatic and popular officers, sometimes at the expense of more competent leaders and skilled strategists, though often by campaign’s end experienced officers who have gained the trust and confidence of their burghers end up in command. Under the right circumstances, a charismatic and militarily competent commandant can foster an esprit de corps that is strong enough for the burghers under his command to loyally carry out otherwise unthinkable orders, though such successful leaders are few and far between.

These cultural and organizational weaknesses severely hinder the Orbitaaler commandoes on offensive campaigns and punitive expeditions into the foreign lands north of the Polar Plain. A lack of motivation to fight a war far from home combined with the absence of an imminent threat to their farmsteads and families deals an immediate and severe blow to the morale of any Orbitaaler commando on campaign in the upper latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. Most enemy war hosts on the defense— rightfully wary of attacking carefully entrenched Orbitaaler bivouacs— simply withdraw to mountain and cliffside strongholds well stocked with food and water to await the Orbitaaler attack. Unwilling to risk Orbitaaler lives in costly frontal assaults, Orbitaaler commandants besiege such strongholds, sending waves of allied native levies into the breach while Orbitaaler burghers and slave auxiliaries dig in and snipe at exposed defenders. Once the allied levies are invariably routed, the remaining Orbitaalers have no strategy beyond attempting to outlast their besieged opponents. More often than not, the campaigning Orbitaaler commando—far from home and resupply—exhausts its stores of supplies first, and after a last half-hearted assault, marches south in retreat, looting and burning the undefended enemy farmsteads and settlements that lie in their path. Although unable to deal decisive blows to the military strength of their enemy in such punitive campaigns, the indiscriminate economic destruction inflicted by withdrawing Orbitaaler commandoes is often enough to bring their opponents to the negotiating table.

In contrast to such fruitless but ultimately low-intensity punitive raids against the barbarian tribes and nomad cultures of the Southern Hemisphere, the handful of Orbitaaler military expeditions that have ventured onto the wide open plains of the Northern Hemisphere to challenge the armies of the League Aerospace Corps on their home territory have met with utter disaster. Without any ridges, mountains, or hills upon which to anchor their lines and constrict the advance of enemy forces, Orbitaaler burghers on the open desert are vulnerable to being outflanked, encircled, and overwhelmed by numerically superior enemy formations.

Cognizant of their limitations and weaknesses, the Orbitaalers thus prefer to wage war on the familiar highlands of the Southern Hemisphere, where the mountainous terrain offers natural chokepoints and kill-zones that can be maximally exploited by well-emplaced Orbitaaler firepower.

This is awesome.

Definitely subscribed.

Update, Part 4

A Burgher of the Transorbitaal Republiek



This illustration depicts a burgher, or citizen-soldier, of the Transorbitaal Republiek on campaign. Both men and women of military age are called up to serve as burghers during wartime, as the Republic cannot afford the luxury of robbing its commando units of half their potential manpower. Allegiance to the Transorbital Republic is indicated by the Vieurkleur (or Four Color) national flag insignia on the chest panel of the burgher’s utility vest and the national cockade worn on the brim of her slouch hat, which is the preferred outdoor head covering of the Orbitaaler in both military and civilian life. The burgher’s familial clan affiliations are indicated by her circular shoulder patch and partially obscured chest patch, each sporting the stylized corporate emblem of a different ancestral asteroid-mining crew.

The burgher’s outerwear consists of a combat utility vest worn over a typical Orbitaaler EVA suit, heavily modified for full time atmospheric use under Martian gravity. In contrast to the rare armoured and servo-boosted exosuits of legend, protective spacesuits of the ordinary variety were ubiquitous among the Orbitaalers’ spaceborne ancestors, and since landfall the ancient suits have been customized and altered by successive generations of military and civilian wearers for maximum comfort and protection against the environmental hazards of the Red Planet. Despite its physically bulky appearance, the EVA suit offers unrestricted freedom of movement due to its lightweight construction from ancient synthetic materials, which warmly insulate the wearer against the bitterly cold Martian atmosphere without impeding comfortable movement during marching and combat. While the EVA suit’s synthetic fabrics ward off windborne particle abrasion and the climatic extremes with ease, they are not particularly effective in protecting against the thrusts, cuts, and hard blows of melee combat. At range, the EVA suit is only somewhat impenetrable to thrown spears and missiles, and its ability to defend against full intensity laser blasts is approximately comparable to that of heavier scrap-steel plate armor. The burgher’s oxygen supply is provided by the half-mask respirator at her neck linked to the compressed air canister at her waist, though Orbitaalers pride themselves on their frugality with air, requiring only one breath a minute to remain conscious during sedentary sentry duty. A pair of wraparound pilot goggles shield the burgher’s eyes from abrasive windborne dust particles and the piercing rays of the polar sun while providing dynamic readouts of environmental and respirator oxygen levels, external ambient temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure among other vital data. While not as sophisticated as the ancient military-grade Zeiss binoculars of highborn League Armadienne officers, Orbitaaler pilot goggles can superimpose several levels of enhanced optical magnification over a user’s standard field of view and auto-lock on moving targets in real time, improving long range and nighttime vision. Though originally designed to help pilots of mining tugs track micrometeorite and asteroid debris in their flight paths, these useful goggles function just as well in their modern day task of scanning distant terrain features and tracking moving targets in their wearer’s field of view, thereby serving as a valuable reconnaissance tool and marksmanship aid. Such goggles are ubiquitous among the veld-cornets and commandants of the Orbitaaler commandoes, though they are far from universal among the poorer burghers, many of whom cannot afford or simply spurn such luxurious accessories.

The burgher is armed in standard commando fashion with the legendary Orbitaaler Long Rifle, a bolt-action shoulder-fired weapon that is individually handcrafted in the workshops of the Transorbital Republic’s state arsenal. The addition of an integral bipod, muzzle brake, and extended ten-round nondetachable box magazine are common modifications undertaken at personal cost. The burgher carries two additional five-round stripper clips for her rifle in each of the ammo pouches at the waistline of her utility vest for a total of one hundred bespoke Orbitaaler rounds, each consisting of a lead slug soldered to a percussion-fused blasting cap. In addition to the Orbitaaler Long Rifle, the burgher is armed with a single hand grenade clipped to her utility belt. Improvised explosives such as these are crafted from ancient asteroid blasting charges mated with time-fused mining detonators and are intended as defensive weapons of last resort should any enemies close to within pointblank range of a burgher’s firing position. Lastly the burgher is equipped with a sharpened steel entrenching tool and carbon fiber pick-axe for use in digging slit trenches and fighting positions in preparation for combat. While the entrenching tool can be pressed into service as a bladed club of sorts, the asteroid mining pick-axe in particular has doubled as the melee weapon of choice for the Orbitaaler burghers since their landfall on Mars, as the serrated cutting edge and sharpened steel point of its reverse arm make the lightweight pick-axe a deadly hacking weapon in close quarters combat. Nevertheless, present day Orbitaaler burghers are still hindered by the vestigial effects of generations of muscle atrophy from their ancestors’ centuries’ long exile in the freefall of space, so melee combat is far from their forte. Wherever possible, they prefer to fight from a distance by means of deadly accurate fire from their trademark Orbitaaler Long Rifles, resorting only to the savagery of pick-axe and entrenching tool when all ammunition has been exhausted and all avenues of retreat and withdrawal have been severed.

Archangel said:

Good updates, C-C!
Long term, the League has good chances of surpassing the Orbitaalers.

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Zek Sora said:

This is awesome.

Definitely subscribed.

Click to expand...

Thanks. Maybe if I get the chance to make a few more new factions, there will be enough to make a map of Mars in this setting, since so far this project only has graphics and no maps.