U.I.S.S.R.

Population as of 2190 census: 42,315,869
Capital City: Novaya Moskva, Novaya Moskva 5, Novaya Moskva

Official Language: Russian
Government: Communist

Military Strategy: Fighter Swarm
Percentage of Population in Military: 0.1%
Number of Star Systems under UISSR Control: 27

1. Novaya Moskva
2. Novaya Zheneva
3. Novaya Sankt-Peterburg
4. Novaya Novosibirsk
5. Novaya Sverdlovskoĭ
6. Novaya Nizhniĭ Novgorod
7. Novaya Samara
8. Novaya Omsk
9. Novaya Kazan
10. Novaya Chelyabinsk
11. Novaya Rostav-na-Donu
12. Novaya Ufa
13. Novaya Volograd
14. Novaya Permskiĭ
15. Novaya Kransnoyarsk
16. Novaya Voronezh
17. Novaya Saratov
18. Novaya Krasnodar
19. Novaya Tol'yatti
20. Novaya Izhevsk
21. Novaya Ul'yanovsk
22. Novaya Barnaul
23. Novaya Vladivostok
24. Novaya Yaroslavl
25. Novaya Irkutsk
26. Novaya Tyumen
27. Novaya Makhachkala

State Religion: Atheism
Average Annual Net Income: ¢937,124,058
Average Annual Gross Income: ¢9,371,245,680 
Primary Expenditures:  

1. Food Imports (37%)
2. Military (23%)
3. Education & Infrastructure (20%)

If you were to ask the average citizen the most powerful nation in the known galaxy, their answer would be either the Reich, or the U.I.S.S.R. Founded by revolutionaries in the early twentieth century off of the writings of Karl Marx, the U.I.S.S.R. remains the oldest currently standing nation known to humans. For practical reasons the modern Soviet government isn't pure communist, though those that are a part of the U.I.S.S.R. would never say so.

A Council exists to organize and direct the massive industrial juggernaut that their nation is. Each major aspect of the nation that requires government oversight or direction has a member on the Council. The Council member represents their organization that oversees a necessary aspect of the nation, some of which being larger or smaller than others and having more or fewer responsibilities. The Council members are chosen by peer vote amongst the higher echelons of their organization every ten years. The two largest organizations are the International Trade and Soviet Military.

The International Trade is in charge of not only acquiring goods from outside the U.I.S.S.R. that they cannot produce, but also evenly distributing both locally produced and imported goods as equally as possible. Certain products will of course not go to places where it isn't needed, but by and large traded and locally produced goods are spread about equally.

The Soviet Military is at the same time the largest and the smallest of the organizations that have a seat on the Council. The military has the fewest citizens within it, but when clones are counted it outnumbers the rest of the nation almost a thousandfold. The officers of the Soviet Military are all volunteer citizens trained in leadership and communications, the rest of the military are clones. The U.I.S.S.R. has twenty official cloning facilities, though the word facility is a misnomer (each "facility" is actually an entire planet devoted to creating clones for the Soviet military) and a common bar room question is how many unofficial cloning facilities exist.

Each cloning station teaches clones certain skills required to run a military ship outside of dry dock. Whether it be cooking, cleaning, maintenance, etc., almost everything done on a Soviet military ship is done by the clones. The only skills that are taught to every clone regardless of the facility that they originated from are related to fighters. Every clone is taught how to care for and pilot the Soviet fighters that form the backbone of their military.

Almost every ship in the Soviet Military that isn't a fighter is a Mantikora-Class Battle-Carrier. The Mantikora-Class Battle-Carrier has a 19,200 ft³ Officers' Quarters (which includes sleeping pods, restroom facilities, and a kitchen), one meter thick outer hull, a 38,400 ft³ bridge, and 93 conveyer belts that cross the entire ship holding fighters that hurl the fighters into combat. Each fighter is 4 meters tall, 6 meters wide, and 5 meters long at the four Point Laser Batteries. Each fighter is built in an X design with the four ends containing both a Plasma Torch Drive and a Point Laser Battery. When a fighter returns to its Battle-Carrier, it is housed on the conveyer belt before the Pilot Control Pod disconnects from the fighter's hull and transports to the Crew Deck (a roughly 10,000,000 m³ deck in the middle of the ship).

FTL: Travel & Communications

           True Faster-Than-Light travel is impossible. Scientific discoveries repeatedly and continually support Einstein's assertion that light is the fastest medium in the universe. The sheer distance between star systems means that even at light speed the nearest neighboring star system is year away if you travel from point A to point B. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. However there are ways of working around the problem of interstellar distances.

           The Von Frietag Continuum Convolution Device, and its more advanced descendants called jump drives, bypass the problem of distance by taking point A and point B and folding the space between them until the amount of space to travel becomes negligible. This allows massive distances to be crossed almost instantaneously. However there are still problems with this form of travel, some of which have been reduced, others continue to puzzle scientists and researchers.

           The first issue is the limitations on how much space is taken on a jump. While decades of research have managed to find ways to shrink the three dimensional area that is taken on a "jump", no ways studied or attempted have been able to increase it beyond the original limit. The space taken severely limits how ships with jump drives installed can be structured. First the jump drive must be placed exactly in the center of the ship due to the area jumped being centered on the drive itself. Second, the ship cannot exceed any of the dimensions that can be taken on a jump; most ship builders work around this by leaving at lease a meter of leeway, though some ship models push the limits to the very precise edge.

            The second issue is the most curious of byproducts: tachyons. Techyons are a  poorly understood particle incapable of traveling any slower than the speed of light. When a jump drive activates, large amounts of tachyons form inside of the drive. Logic dictates that the tachyons would rip apart the drive due to the sheer speed they are traveling at, however instead they become trapped in the drive and prevent the drive from engaging until all of the tachyons are purged from the drive. Tachyons will be discussed in more detail later on.

           The third problem with current engines is the heat that is generated with each jump, the further the jump the greater the heat generated. The longest recorded jump that the crew of the ship survived was in 2193 with a Reich prototype drive that managed a jump of 23.1 lightyears. The drive generated so much heat that the drive itself and everything in a ten meter radius melted to slag. Fortunately for the crew such an even was planned for and none were hurt.

           The forth major problem is rarely an issue in modern times given the requirements for it to occur. Early ship builders attempted to work around the problem of purging a drive of tachyons by installing several drives into a single ship. In every case the drive activated would interact with the others installed and cause a short-lived massive localized gravitational field, or in other words a black hole.

           Modern communications beyond a planet's surface operates in two very different ways. The first is only used for close range communications within 5 astronomical units while the second is used for distances exceeding the aforementioned distance.

           The close-range communications are essentially data packets transported in a short laser burst. This form of communication can transmit text, audio, video, and almost any other kind of data file over its distance. While there is no actual limit to the distance that this form of communication could be used for, practicality limits its effectiveness to a very small distance.

           The second form of communication utilizes tachyons developed as a byproduct of the jump drives activating. Encoding a message onto several tachyons, the tachyons are then guided out of the jump drive and sent in the direction of the intended receiver. The tachyon messages thus far are only capable of sending text or audio based messages, and research has been done in finding alternate ways of communications with little success.