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Description
The Confederacy of Poitur (“Poitur”) is a small galactic power in the Neutral Zone. It has worlds near the Duzhonev Imperium and the Republic of Yrrakis, and spans only a hundred thousand charted systems.

Natural Physical Appearance

Baseline humans of the Poituran ethnicity are the single largest demographic in the polity, having been the ones to found it after their system successfully seceded from the Empire in the wake of the Federal Revolution. Compared to Galactics and Kzmiks, Poiturans are very pale-skinned and slightly short. Due to its liberal border policies, Poitur has a number of different human ethnicities (mostly Galactic and Kzmik) and species residing in it, along with various nonhuman species. Despite this, Poitur is pointedly only a multi-species nation and not a multicultural one. Immigrants and expatriates are expected to abandon their native cultures once they become citizens.

Appearance Traditions

Depending on their social class a Poituran's appearance and attire can vary. Those lucky enough to be born to Poituran high society, or able work their way to it, dress to impress, wearing either the newest trend or attempting to create one. This is especially true for women’s fashion, which constantly changes but nevertheless has maintained the iconic Poituran chin-length bob cut and the culture’s libertine sensibilities. Men’s attire is slightly more conservative, but even so, eccentric tuxedos are not uncommon. Like the bob cut, the fedora has become an iconic item in men's apparel, seen as a symbol of rugged individualism. This is especially true for Poitur’s notorious gangsters. For both men and women, tastefully showing off one’s physique is common, as doing so is a way of visually presenting one's hard work and labor.

While Poitur’s ruling class has gone out its way to distance themselves from the totalitarian dress codes of the Empire, its working class has not had the same luxury. Brown, black or grey jumpsuits are issued out to all low-level laborers. While unlike in Duzhonev or Avelov these laborers are not legally required to wear these uniforms once their shift is over, few workers can afford to buy anything else and thus stick to wearing them even at home.

Language

Although each city-state in the Confederacy has its own unique language, the linguistic differences between them are minor due to millennia of melting pot conformity and routine migrations by workers looking for work in other city-states. Thus, it is relatively easy for a fellow Poituran to make out what someone from a neighboring system is saying. While all these city-languages are descended from Traditional Standard Imperial, they have been deliberately reworked so thoroughly since Poiturian Revolution that they bear only a superficial resemblance to any form of TSI.

Government, Law, and Politics

The Poitur Confederacy is technically a voluntary confederation of sovereign city-states bound together by a legislative body called the Poituran Commission, which is supposed to promote and represent the interests of all its member city-states. On paper, it is a minarchist body, designed to only provide basic administrative services in the form of the military, police and court system. In reality, the Commission rarely does even that, being in practice a toothless, and thoroughly corrupt, rubber stamp government with tenuous authority over its member states.

Instead, much of the political power in Poitur is in the hands of its powerful city-states, massive ecumenopolises that rival ones in the Consortium and galactic superpowers. These city-states are almost all controlled by a Municipal Council, a small board comprised of that city-state’s most powerful and influential oligarchs. The process to be being elected to a Municipal Council is both simple and complex, requiring only that someone already on the council vouch for a candidate and for a majority vote by the rest of the council to accept them in. In practice, a candidate will likely have to bribe, blackmail and threaten their way to such a position, all the while having to compete with several other candidates. It almost goes without saying that while anyone can legally join a council, only incredibly wealthy industrialists, crime lords and union heads ever do. Furthermore, while Poitur proudly proclaims itself to be a land of opportunity, where anyone can make it to the top if they work hard enough, these councils rarely have nonhumans, abhumans or even baseline humans of non-Poituran ancestry as members.

A Municipal Council has almost unlimited power in how it can manage its city-state and associated colonies, the confederal government being constitutionally forbidden from overruling any of its municipal policies. Councils not only have the right to draft their own standing military forces, regulate their own economics and form their own immigration policies, but they also have the right to secede from the state if it feels it’s not being appropriately represented in the Commission. Few city-states have ever gone through with such a threat though as it would likely mean occupation by either the Duzhonev Imperium or Solarian Community, and most only put on the pretense of doing so for political leverage against the Commission and rival city-states.

Few things are actually illegal in Poitur, with various activities that would be illicit in other powers being perfectly legitimate businesses there. That said, since a municipal council is the only institution capable of legally issuing out business licenses only entrepreneurs who have their favor ever get one, causing nepotism and bribery to be commonplace. Those not in the good graces of a municipal council, or unable to afford the necessary bribes, are forced to conduct their business illegally in back-alleys and the undercity. This is especially true for immigrants and xenos, who typically band together and form criminal syndicates to survive in Poitur and get rich in its massive black market. Given the nativist attitudes of most municipal councils, these gangs are brutally suppressed by municipal police forces, with violent raids on immigrant hab-blocks being routine. Conversely, gangs run by native Poiturans are usually left alone so long as they pay their “dues” to the police.

Economy

Proudly a free market economy, Poitur has absolutely no social welfare across its many city-states, the very idea being seen as parasitic and collectivist. Instead, the closest thing it has to a social safety net are charities sponsored by Poitur’s philanthropists. These charities are almost always fronts for illegal genetic or cybernetic experiments that require a steady stream of fresh test subjects.

City-states fund the Poituran Commission through fees, which Poiturans make a point about differentiating from taxes by the fact that city-states have the right to select the specific services they want from the government. Given that the Commission has lost much of its services and authority over the millennia, most city-states only bother to pay for the right to representation on the Commission, leaving the government highly underfunded.

Poitur, of course, also has an extensive shadow economy run by unlicensed crime lords who sell their illicit products to the poor and desperate. Spice, neurozine and back-alley bodymods are common products to be sold on the black market since municipal councils are particularly strict about issuing licenses for these products; after all, board members fear competition in their most profitable markets. Besides those products, the Poituran underworld is infamous in the Neutral Zone for making spice cola, a carbonated soft drink laced with spice that is so addictive that the confederal government has outright outlawed it with the blessing of the city-states. Despite that, spice cola is sold and drunk across Poitur and beyond in underground speakeasies and high-class parties.

Trade

Trade is the life blood of Poitur, and without it, the power would likely suffer mass starvation due to its propensity to make almost of all its charted worlds ecumenopolises. With that being the case, it regularly engages in free trade with the Consortium and Empire, and does the same clandestinely with Duzhonev and the Solarians. Foodstuffs therein are its biggest import, while refined spice from Yrrakis is its single largest export.

Currency

Each individual city-state has its own currency, resulting in there being literally tens of thousands of them across Poituran space. There is also no central banking system in Poitur and determining currency exchange rates between city-states is usually a haphazard affair that requires the aid of weak artificial intelligence to properly calculate. Most of these currencies are still physical due to many municipal councils being hesitant to convert to a digital one because of their fear of Consortium hackers.

Sex, Romance and Family Structure

Like much of the rest of Poitur’s legal system there are few laws that prohibit how individuals can use their bodies. Abortion is perfectly legal and homosexuality and transgenderism are a mundane and accepted part of life. Culturally, Poituran society sees any form of sexism as a collectivist crutch used by uncompetitive parasites to unfairly get ahead of the other sex. To that end, it views the gender separatist politics of the Crazed Core as utterly absurd and has been quick to eradicate any such movements in its own city-states.

Like in the Consortium, marriage is seen as nothing more than a contract by the Poituran elite, and usually only occurs because the two parties involved wish to form a mutually beneficially power couple. Most of these marriages either end in divorce or with one of the parties dying under mysterious circumstances, leaving the survivor with their considerable fortune. Monogamy is not an assumed quality of these marriages and sticking to one partner is actually quite rare due to Poitur’s libertine attitudes to sex which sees nothing wrong with extramarital martial affairs, polygamy or even orgies. In fact, the latter is a common activity at high-class parties. Due to the risks involved with socialite marriage, and their tendency to end poorly, some wealthy Poiturans marry an android as a trophy partner, or not marry at all and instead create a designer clone to serve as their heir. Any children born from these arrangements are almost always raised by servants and robots rather than their own parents.

Conversely, the working class tends to be more monogamous in their relationships and typically see marriage as a lifelong commitment. Given the cramped living quarters of most city-states, several generations of a single family can be forced to live together in the same apartment. This is actually rather advantageous since low-level laborers work long hours which prevents them monitoring their children, thus it usually falls to grandparents and other extended family to take care of younger family members. It is not uncommon for an entire hab-block to band together and pools its resources to provide basic utilities for its children, like daycare, education or warm clothing.

Religious Beliefs and Traditions

Poitur is overwhelmingly atheist, with only its Kzmik minority population having any level of religiosity. This is because the nation’s revolutionary founder, Yon Poitur, was notoriously atheistic and considered any form of religion to be inherently irrational and collectivist. As a result, religion is seen as a mark of intellectual inferiority and primitivism. Ironically though, despite their claim to be above idiot superstition, Yon Poitur himself is revered as an almost-divine hero who achieved the height of human success and accomplishment. While this is strictly a cult of personality, with no actual church or priesthood, his philosophical musings and essays are treated like scripture in Poituran society, with there being harsh penalties to anyone who criticizes them in public. Those who bring up how this deification of Yon Poitur not only runs counter to his atheist beliefs but also bears a close resemblance to Duzhonev’s worship of their God-Emperor, something that Yon Poitur detested, will typically be arrested for rabble-rousing.

Philosophy and Disposition

Poituran philosophy is entirely the creation of the polity’s founder, Yon Poitur, a former Imperial noble who fought Imperial and Federal troops during the Federal Revolution, who successfully maintained his nation’s independence and went on to create the first Poituran city-state. His name not only became the name of the ecumenopolis but also the name of his newly liberated people and eventually the entire city-state alliance.

Yon Poitur believed that the totalitarian dogma of both the Empire and the Federation was rooted in a toxic collectivism that only made the strong weak and allowed societal parasites to survive undeservingly so. To him, this status quo of state control only breed mediocrity and prevented those with talent and genius to achieve their full potential, instead being sacrificed for the sake of the collective, which to Poitur was a greater tragedy than the deaths of a billion individuals of only middling ability. Accordingly, Poitur believed that no one was entitled to any kind of welfare, seeing it as a form of parasitism that involuntary took the labor of individuals, which was ethnically there’s and there’s alone.

Even after several millennia, Poitur still abides by much of their founder’s ethos. Inventors, capitalists, and even gangsters and vigilantes are respected and idolized for their ability to make their own way in the world, seemingly without leeching off the success of others. As a whole, Poiturans gravitate towards these “Great Individuals,” either wishing they were them or trying to emulate them. Every Poituran believes that if they just work hard enough or manage to come up with a revolutionary and lucrative idea that they too can revel in the all grandeur associated with Poituran financial success. This is especially true for the worker class, who work in miserable conditions but do so ever hopeful of one day getting noticed for their quality labor and getting an opportunity that can let them achieve the Poituran Dream.

As to be expected, Poiturans take a dim view of the collectivist philosophies of other powers. The Federation and its revolutionary ideals of equality are ridiculed as hopelessly naïve and deconstructed by Poituran philosophers and economists. Similarly, Solarian social justice (and fashion) is openly mocked by all. Any activist or labor movements that smacks of either polity’s ideology is violently put down by city-state police or co-opted by trade unions.

While hard work is seen as a fundamental requirement for success, it is culturally expected for a Poituran to enjoy the fruits of their labor to the fullest. Spice cola, drugs, gambling, music, dance, sex and revelry in general are celebrated in Poituran society, with their being a massive entertainment industry in every city-state. In essence, Poiturans like to work hard and play hard.

Military

Views on War

Poitur prefers to make profit than war, but even with that being the case, it pursues warfare with the same work ethic as its business pursuits. When war is inevitable, or aligns with profit, Poiturans treat it as an opportunity to show their worth and talent. Indeed, generals sometimes broadcasting a conflict live for the entertainment and veneration of Poiturans back home. Most of these wars are internal, one city-state feuding with another over newly discovered worlds or the result of infighting in a municipal council escalating into a planet-wide civil war. The winner of these conflicts are seen as the moral victor regardless of the circumstances behind the dispute. Winning is all that matters.

Poiturans view conflict in much the same way as their Duzhonevian cousins, as an environment where only the strong can survive and stand out as superior to their opponents and contemporaries. Thus, not much stock is put in openly mourning the dead, or entire city-states, lost to war. It is believed that doing so only encourages sentimentality towards weakness and failure, something that is antithetical to Poituran morality.

Command Structure

The individual city-states that make up the Poitur Confederacy each have their own standing army that takes its orders from its municipal council. The captain-generals that lead these armies are usually retired mercenaries, gangsters or city-state police chiefs who gained the position after a lifetime violence and literal cutthroat intrigue, rather than nepotism. As a result, many captain-generals organize their armies meritocratically, with officers who show competence being promoted over ones who come from money or have connections.

Defense is one of the few areas where the Poituran Commission still has any authority, its Department of War having the power to organize the city-state armies into a cohesive military force under its control should the entire confederation come under threat from a foreign power. When this happens each city-state can bid for the opportunity to have its captain-general lead the ad hoc army. Usually, the winner of the bid is the city-state able to bribe the most delegates in the Commission.

Like the Consortium, Poitur has its own PMCs, albeit theirs are much smaller outfits compared to their Consortium counterparts. While these soldiers of fortune do occasionally hire themselves out to foreign powers, they mostly operate in Poituran space, acting as security for moguls who wish to protect their property and colonies from competitors that wish to violently appropriate them for themselves. When they do work outside of Poitur it is usually to act as bodyguards for spice caravans coming out of Yrrakis.

Soldier Types and Equipment

City-state guardsmen make up the bulk of Poituran soldiery. These grunts are usually enlistees who joined their municipal city guard as a way of escaping poverty and the undercity. Others were gang-pressed into service, as while most city-states have laws against conscription, municipal councils nevertheless circumvent their own rules so they can increase the numbers of their armies. Since guardsmen are usually only used to put down worker revolts they equipped with minimal arms and gear: a standard slugthrower rifle and a steel plate draped over their uniforms.

Besides standard guardsmen, Poitur makes use of supersoldiers. They are created by baseline humans going through an extensive process of genetic modification which, if they survive it, grants them the zenith of human physicality. While nowhere near as capable as the Immortals of the Citizens’ Alliance, Poituran supersoldiers are much easier to mass produce and require less conditioning. These supersoldiers are equipped with the best Poitur can offer: rocketpacks, force shields, an array of aetheric weapons and other amenities. Capable of working effectively as a unit or alone, they are typically used as either elite troopers or solo operatives.

Along with these more common soldiers types, rocket-infantry, mecha and drones are used. The latter is used sparingly, despite their effectiveness, and only in Poituran space, as the onboard AI of these combat drones arguably push past the constraints of the UMC when it comes to their independent decision making. Organic minders are used to supervise these drones and make sure that “erratic” behavior routines are immediately taken care of and corrected.

Formations and Tactics

Since many Poituran strategists see war as an opportunity to showcase their skills they tend to use overly elaborate strategies in their campaigns, even when it is entirely unnecessary and counterproductive. Complex combined arms warfare utilizing all segments of the Poituran war machine is the norm. Preferring terrestrial combat to space battles, engagements usually began with artillery divisions raining down on an enemy position before infantry is sent in. City Guard infantry, used as cannon fodder as their armor and weapons are largely worthless against enemies with more advanced equipment, are sent in waves to capture territory or destroy fortifications. If they should fail, supersoldiers or drones supported by tank-carriers and mecha are sent in as a mechanized infantry unit. Rocket-infantry and air divisions are a significant part of this strategy, using their rockets, warplanes and flying fortresses to protect ground forces from aerial attacks and bombardment. Given the importance of their role, and the extensive training they go through to breed out the mediocre, these flying aces are infamous for being braggarts.

Navy and Spacecraft

Besides the tiny underfunded patrol fleet used by the Poituran Commission, Poitur does not have a standing navy comparable to the one massive ones found in other states. That said, when the Department of War does call the city-states to arms, Poitur’s combined municipal fleets are impressive relative to the polity’s size.

Still retaining some of the design principles of their Duzhonevian forefathers, Poituran ships are much larger than they need to be and usually dwarf their opponents. Powered by potent aetheric reactors, these warships are capable of supporting numerous energy-intensive armaments and multiple engines for fast sub-light propulsion. Owning to Poituran pride in their craftsmanship, warships are made to look striking. Most are elongated in design with astrodynamic fins attached to their port and starboard and sleek curved hulls that are usually copper or brass plated.

Description
The Confederacy of Poitur (“Poitur”) is a small galactic power in the Neutral Zone. It has worlds near the Duzhonev Imperium and the Republic of Yrrakis, and spans only a hundred thousand charted systems.

Natural Physical Appearance

Baseline humans of the Poituran ethnicity are the single largest demographic in the polity, having been the ones to found it after their system successfully seceded from the Empire in the wake of the Federal Revolution. Compared to Galactics and Kzmiks, Poiturans are very pale-skinned and slightly short. Due to its liberal border policies, Poitur has a number of different human ethnicities (mostly Galactic and Kzmik) and species residing in it, along with various nonhuman species. Despite this, Poitur is pointedly only a multi-species nation and not a multicultural one. Immigrants and expatriates are expected to abandon their native cultures once they become citizens.

Appearance Traditions

Depending on their social class a Poituran's appearance and attire can vary. Those lucky enough to be born to Poituran high society, or able work their way to it, dress to impress, wearing either the newest trend or attempting to create one. This is especially true for women’s fashion, which constantly changes but nevertheless has maintained the iconic Poituran chin-length bob cut and the culture’s libertine sensibilities. Men’s attire is slightly more conservative, but even so, eccentric tuxedos are not uncommon. Like the bob cut, the fedora has become an iconic item in men's apparel, seen as a symbol of rugged individualism. This is especially true for Poitur’s notorious gangsters. For both men and women, tastefully showing off one’s physique is common, as doing so is a way of visually presenting one's hard work and labor.

While Poitur’s ruling class has gone out its way to distance themselves from the totalitarian dress codes of the Empire, its working class has not had the same luxury. Brown, black or grey jumpsuits are issued out to all low-level laborers. While unlike in Duzhonev or Avelov these laborers are not legally required to wear these uniforms once their shift is over, few workers can afford to buy anything else and thus stick to wearing them even at home.

Language

Although each city-state in the Confederacy has its own unique language, the linguistic differences between them are minor due to millennia of melting pot conformity and routine migrations by workers looking for work in other city-states. Thus, it is relatively easy for a fellow Poituran to make out what someone from a neighboring system is saying. While all these city-languages are descended from Traditional Standard Imperial, they have been deliberately reworked so thoroughly since Poiturian Revolution that they bear only a superficial resemblance to any form of TSI.

Government, Law, and Politics

The Poitur Confederacy is technically a voluntary confederation of sovereign city-states bound together by a legislative body called the Poituran Commission, which is supposed to promote and represent the interests of all its member city-states. On paper, it is a minarchist body, designed to only provide basic administrative services in the form of the military, police and court system. In reality, the Commission rarely does even that, being in practice a toothless, and thoroughly corrupt, rubber stamp government with tenuous authority over its member states.

Instead, much of the political power in Poitur is in the hands of its powerful city-states, massive ecumenopolises that rival ones in the Consortium and galactic superpowers. These city-states are almost all controlled by a Municipal Council, a small board comprised of that city-state’s most powerful and influential oligarchs. The process to be being elected to a Municipal Council is both simple and complex, requiring only that someone already on the council vouch for a candidate and for a majority vote by the rest of the council to accept them in. In practice, a candidate will likely have to bribe, blackmail and threaten their way to such a position, all the while having to compete with several other candidates. It almost goes without saying that while anyone can legally join a council, only incredibly wealthy industrialists, crime lords and union heads ever do. Furthermore, while Poitur proudly proclaims itself to be a land of opportunity, where anyone can make it to the top if they work hard enough, these councils rarely have nonhumans, abhumans or even baseline humans of non-Poituran ancestry as members.

A Municipal Council has almost unlimited power in how it can manage its city-state and associated colonies, the confederal government being constitutionally forbidden from overruling any of its municipal policies. Councils not only have the right to draft their own standing military forces, regulate their own economics and form their own immigration policies, but they also have the right to secede from the state if it feels it’s not being appropriately represented in the Commission. Few city-states have ever gone through with such a threat though as it would likely mean occupation by either the Duzhonev Imperium or Solarian Community, and most only put on the pretense of doing so for political leverage against the Commission and rival city-states.

Few things are actually illegal in Poitur, with various activities that would be illicit in other powers being perfectly legitimate businesses there. That said, since a municipal council is the only institution capable of legally issuing out business licenses only entrepreneurs who have their favor ever get one, causing nepotism and bribery to be commonplace. Those not in the good graces of a municipal council, or unable to afford the necessary bribes, are forced to conduct their business illegally in back-alleys and the undercity. This is especially true for immigrants and xenos, who typically band together and form criminal syndicates to survive in Poitur and get rich in its massive black market. Given the nativist attitudes of most municipal councils, these gangs are brutally suppressed by municipal police forces, with violent raids on immigrant hab-blocks being routine. Conversely, gangs run by native Poiturans are usually left alone so long as they pay their “dues” to the police.

Economy

Proudly a free market economy, Poitur has absolutely no social welfare across its many city-states, the very idea being seen as parasitic and collectivist. Instead, the closest thing it has to a social safety net are charities sponsored by Poitur’s philanthropists. These charities are almost always fronts for illegal genetic or cybernetic experiments that require a steady stream of fresh test subjects.

City-states fund the Poituran Commission through fees, which Poiturans make a point about differentiating from taxes by the fact that city-states have the right to select the specific services they want from the government. Given that the Commission has lost much of its services and authority over the millennia, most city-states only bother to pay for the right to representation on the Commission, leaving the government highly underfunded.

Poitur, of course, also has an extensive shadow economy run by unlicensed crime lords who sell their illicit products to the poor and desperate. Spice, neurozine and back-alley bodymods are common products to be sold on the black market since municipal councils are particularly strict about issuing licenses for these products; after all, board members fear competition in their most profitable markets. Besides those products, the Poituran underworld is infamous in the Neutral Zone for making spice cola, a carbonated soft drink laced with spice that is so addictive that the confederal government has outright outlawed it with the blessing of the city-states. Despite that, spice cola is sold and drunk across Poitur and beyond in underground speakeasies and high-class parties.

Trade

Trade is the life blood of Poitur, and without it, the power would likely suffer mass starvation due to its propensity to make almost of all its charted worlds ecumenopolises. With that being the case, it regularly engages in free trade with the Consortium and Empire, and does the same clandestinely with Duzhonev and the Solarians. Foodstuffs therein are its biggest import, while refined spice from Yrrakis is its single largest export.

Currency

Each individual city-state has its own currency, resulting in there being literally tens of thousands of them across Poituran space. There is also no central banking system in Poitur and determining currency exchange rates between city-states is usually a haphazard affair that requires the aid of weak artificial intelligence to properly calculate. Most of these currencies are still physical due to many municipal councils being hesitant to convert to a digital one because of their fear of Consortium hackers.

Sex, Romance and Family Structure

Like much of the rest of Poitur’s legal system there are few laws that prohibit how individuals can use their bodies. Abortion is perfectly legal and homosexuality and transgenderism are a mundane and accepted part of life. Culturally, Poituran society sees any form of sexism as a collectivist crutch used by uncompetitive parasites to unfairly get ahead of the other sex. To that end, it views the gender separatist politics of the Crazed Core as utterly absurd and has been quick to eradicate any such movements in its own city-states.

Like in the Consortium, marriage is seen as nothing more than a contract by the Poituran elite, and usually only occurs because the two parties involved wish to form a mutually beneficially power couple. Most of these marriages either end in divorce or with one of the parties dying under mysterious circumstances, leaving the survivor with their considerable fortune. Monogamy is not an assumed quality of these marriages and sticking to one partner is actually quite rare due to Poitur’s libertine attitudes to sex which sees nothing wrong with extramarital martial affairs, polygamy or even orgies. In fact, the latter is a common activity at high-class parties. Due to the risks involved with socialite marriage, and their tendency to end poorly, some wealthy Poiturans marry an android as a trophy partner, or not marry at all and instead create a designer clone to serve as their heir. Any children born from these arrangements are almost always raised by servants and robots rather than their own parents.

Conversely, the working class tends to be more monogamous in their relationships and typically see marriage as a lifelong commitment. Given the cramped living quarters of most city-states, several generations of a single family can be forced to live together in the same apartment. This is actually rather advantageous since low-level laborers work long hours which prevents them monitoring their children, thus it usually falls to grandparents and other extended family to take care of younger family members. It is not uncommon for an entire hab-block to band together and pools its resources to provide basic utilities for its children, like daycare, education or warm clothing.

Religious Beliefs and Traditions

Poitur is overwhelmingly atheist, with only its Kzmik minority population having any level of religiosity. This is because the nation’s revolutionary founder, Yon Poitur, was notoriously atheistic and considered any form of religion to be inherently irrational and collectivist. As a result, religion is seen as a mark of intellectual inferiority and primitivism. Ironically though, despite their claim to be above idiot superstition, Yon Poitur himself is revered as an almost-divine hero who achieved the height of human success and accomplishment. While this is strictly a cult of personality, with no actual church or priesthood, his philosophical musings and essays are treated like scripture in Poituran society, with there being harsh penalties to anyone who criticizes them in public. Those who bring up how this deification of Yon Poitur not only runs counter to his atheist beliefs but also bears a close resemblance to Duzhonev’s worship of their God-Emperor, something that Yon Poitur detested, will typically be arrested for rabble-rousing.

Philosophy and Disposition

Poituran philosophy is entirely the creation of the polity’s founder, Yon Poitur, a former Imperial noble who fought Imperial and Federal troops during the Federal Revolution, who successfully maintained his nation’s independence and went on to create the first Poituran city-state. His name not only became the name of the ecumenopolis but also the name of his newly liberated people and eventually the entire city-state alliance.

Yon Poitur believed that the totalitarian dogma of both the Empire and the Federation was rooted in a toxic collectivism that only made the strong weak and allowed societal parasites to survive undeservingly so. To him, this status quo of state control only breed mediocrity and prevented those with talent and genius to achieve their full potential, instead being sacrificed for the sake of the collective, which to Poitur was a greater tragedy than the deaths of a billion individuals of only middling ability. Accordingly, Poitur believed that no one was entitled to any kind of welfare, seeing it as a form of parasitism that involuntary took the labor of individuals, which was ethnically there’s and there’s alone.

Even after several millennia, Poitur still abides by much of their founder’s ethos. Inventors, capitalists, and even gangsters and vigilantes are respected and idolized for their ability to make their own way in the world, seemingly without leeching off the success of others. As a whole, Poiturans gravitate towards these “Great Individuals,” either wishing they were them or trying to emulate them. Every Poituran believes that if they just work hard enough or manage to come up with a revolutionary and lucrative idea that they too can revel in the all grandeur associated with Poituran financial success. This is especially true for the worker class, who work in miserable conditions but do so ever hopeful of one day getting noticed for their quality labor and getting an opportunity that can let them achieve the Poituran Dream.

As to be expected, Poiturans take a dim view of the collectivist philosophies of other powers. The Federation and its revolutionary ideals of equality are ridiculed as hopelessly naïve and deconstructed by Poituran philosophers and economists. Similarly, Solarian social justice (and fashion) is openly mocked by all. Any activist or labor movements that smacks of either polity’s ideology is violently put down by city-state police or co-opted by trade unions.

While hard work is seen as a fundamental requirement for success, it is culturally expected for a Poituran to enjoy the fruits of their labor to the fullest. Spice cola, drugs, gambling, music, dance, sex and revelry in general are celebrated in Poituran society, with their being a massive entertainment industry in every city-state. In essence, Poiturans like to work hard and play hard.

Military

Views on War

Poitur prefers to make profit than war, but even with that being the case, it pursues warfare with the same work ethic as its business pursuits. When war is inevitable, or aligns with profit, Poiturans treat it as an opportunity to show their worth and talent. Indeed, generals sometimes broadcasting a conflict live for the entertainment and veneration of Poiturans back home. Most of these wars are internal, one city-state feuding with another over newly discovered worlds or the result of infighting in a municipal council escalating into a planet-wide civil war. The winner of these conflicts are seen as the moral victor regardless of the circumstances behind the dispute. Winning is all that matters.

Poiturans view conflict in much the same way as their Duzhonevian cousins, as an environment where only the strong can survive and stand out as superior to their opponents and contemporaries. Thus, not much stock is put in openly mourning the dead, or entire city-states, lost to war. It is believed that doing so only encourages sentimentality towards weakness and failure, something that is antithetical to Poituran morality.

Command Structure

The individual city-states that make up the Poitur Confederacy each have their own standing army that takes its orders from its municipal council. The captain-generals that lead these armies are usually retired mercenaries, gangsters or city-state police chiefs who gained the position after a lifetime violence and literal cutthroat intrigue, rather than nepotism. As a result, many captain-generals organize their armies meritocratically, with officers who show competence being promoted over ones who come from money or have connections.

Defense is one of the few areas where the Poituran Commission still has any authority, its Department of War having the power to organize the city-state armies into a cohesive military force under its control should the entire confederation come under threat from a foreign power. When this happens each city-state can bid for the opportunity to have its captain-general lead the ad hoc army. Usually, the winner of the bid is the city-state able to bribe the most delegates in the Commission.

Like the Consortium, Poitur has its own PMCs, albeit theirs are much smaller outfits compared to their Consortium counterparts. While these soldiers of fortune do occasionally hire themselves out to foreign powers, they mostly operate in Poituran space, acting as security for moguls who wish to protect their property and colonies from competitors that wish to violently appropriate them for themselves. When they do work outside of Poitur it is usually to act as bodyguards for spice caravans coming out of Yrrakis.

Soldier Types and Equipment

City-state guardsmen make up the bulk of Poituran soldiery. These grunts are usually enlistees who joined their municipal city guard as a way of escaping poverty and the undercity. Others were gang-pressed into service, as while most city-states have laws against conscription, municipal councils nevertheless circumvent their own rules so they can increase the numbers of their armies. Since guardsmen are usually only used to put down worker revolts they equipped with minimal arms and gear: a standard slugthrower rifle and a steel plate draped over their uniforms.

Besides standard guardsmen, Poitur makes use of supersoldiers. They are created by baseline humans going through an extensive process of genetic modification which, if they survive it, grants them the zenith of human physicality. While nowhere near as capable as the Immortals of the Citizens’ Alliance, Poituran supersoldiers are much easier to mass produce and require less conditioning. These supersoldiers are equipped with the best Poitur can offer: rocketpacks, force shields, an array of aetheric weapons and other amenities. Capable of working effectively as a unit or alone, they are typically used as either elite troopers or solo operatives.

Along with these more common soldiers types, rocket-infantry, mecha and drones are used. The latter is used sparingly, despite their effectiveness, and only in Poituran space, as the onboard AI of these combat drones arguably push past the constraints of the UMC when it comes to their independent decision making. Organic minders are used to supervise these drones and make sure that “erratic” behavior routines are immediately taken care of and corrected.

Formations and Tactics

Since many Poituran strategists see war as an opportunity to showcase their skills they tend to use overly elaborate strategies in their campaigns, even when it is entirely unnecessary and counterproductive. Complex combined arms warfare utilizing all segments of the Poituran war machine is the norm. Preferring terrestrial combat to space battles, engagements usually began with artillery divisions raining down on an enemy position before infantry is sent in. City Guard infantry, used as cannon fodder as their armor and weapons are largely worthless against enemies with more advanced equipment, are sent in waves to capture territory or destroy fortifications. If they should fail, supersoldiers or drones supported by tank-carriers and mecha are sent in as a mechanized infantry unit. Rocket-infantry and air divisions are a significant part of this strategy, using their rockets, warplanes and flying fortresses to protect ground forces from aerial attacks and bombardment. Given the importance of their role, and the extensive training they go through to breed out the mediocre, these flying aces are infamous for being braggarts.

Navy and Spacecraft

Besides the tiny underfunded patrol fleet used by the Poituran Commission, Poitur does not have a standing navy comparable to the one massive ones found in other states. That said, when the Department of War does call the city-states to arms, Poitur’s combined municipal fleets are impressive relative to the polity’s size.

Still retaining some of the design principles of their Duzhonevian forefathers, Poituran ships are much larger than they need to be and usually dwarf their opponents. Powered by potent aetheric reactors, these warships are capable of supporting numerous energy-intensive armaments and multiple engines for fast sub-light propulsion. Owning to Poituran pride in their craftsmanship, warships are made to look striking. Most are elongated in design with astrodynamic fins attached to their port and starboard and sleek curved hulls that are usually copper or brass plated.