Jan 3, 2024 1:37 am
Harrison Armory -- colloquially, "The Armory" or "The Purview" -- is the galaxy’s largest non-Union supplier of arms, armor, heavy machinery, and rugged consumer goods. Next to Union’s baseline-tier pan-industrial manufacturer, General Massive Systems (GMS), no other corpo-state holds as much command over the manna market.
Harrison Armory commands a massive swath of populated territory, citizenry, and colonial holdings. While Union holds hegemonic sway over the populated galaxy, Harrison Armory is the largest direct administrator of territory in the galaxy, followed closely by the Karrakin Trade Barons. Where Union now emphasizes a soft power diplomatic approach to managing its client states, the Armory has proven a refuge for many of the old Anthrochauvinist, Second Committee party members and their ideological adherents. The Armory is a present and direct ruler, and its subjects — core or colony — know who rules them.
The Armory’s capital worlds radiate out from their homeworld, Ras Shamra. The most developed Armory worlds, their capitals, are built around the Ras Shamran Blink Cluster, a group of blink gates in close proximity to a clutch of Gaia worlds owned and developed by the Armory.
Owing to the proximity of the Armory’s capital worlds to the Ras Shamran Blink Cluster, the Armory has rapid (relatively speaking), stable access to the whole of the galaxy. Transit between capital worlds is common among capitol Armory subjects, as is limited-biway transfer to and from their colonial reach; goods and materiel can easily be shipped in to the Armory capital, and Armory ordinance/deployments can be easily shipped out to the reach. The totality of Armory space is called the Armory Purview or simply the Purview. To an Armory logistician or colonial missionary, accessing the colonial reach from the capital is a simple process; to a colonial subject, the gate can be seen, but accessing it might as well be impossible.
The Purview, In Brief
With little more than 400 years of history to its name, what is the Armory? Why would someone be happy being a citizen of the Armory? Why would people seek them out and pledge to them? To put it simply, the Armory champions itself as the standard-bearer for Humanity’s raw galactic ambition. All citizens and colonial subjects under their Purview are theirs. To be a citizen of the Armory is to be an acknowledged member of an easy hierarchy, with clear and attainable ranks — some through great effort, but attainable nonetheless — and a singular mission: ensure the perpetuation of the human race in its most mighty form. Bend the galaxy to their will, and claim the stars as their birthright.
To be an Armory citizen is to enjoy rafts of privilege over colonial subjects and non-citizens. A guarantee of protection by the Armory Legion. Free travel on and between all armory worlds. A guarantee of work, wherever it may be needed. Protection from outside threats under Armory law. A guarantee of local cultural perpetuation, so long as you pledge your percent manna — the Armory will never dictate who you may worship, so long as you venerate the Temperate Throne in addition, and pay your taxes besides.
Propaganda highlights countless rags-to-riches stories that motivate new and old citizens alike: the colonial subject, once a starving and beaten peon under a brutal war-tyrant, now a hale and eager local volunteer for in an Armory Legion, fighting to liberate his world from that same war-tyrant. The citizen, loyal subject, who worked diligently for a decade to ensure the product her line shipped was of perfect quality, rewarded with a land grant and minor title, and lifting her whole family from the citizenry to the nobility in perpetuity. The noble, whose power and purview allows them to hear distant cries for help on an oppressed world, who organizes an expedition to the planet and liberates it, blessing all who live upon it with the chance to begin their own story.
Second only to Union itself, the Armory is a massive galactic administration, and its works encompass every interpretation of empire that can be imagined. For every story of successful worldbuilding, of infrastructure creation and climate maintenance, of a colonial subject rising from the backwaters of their homeworld to the monolithic halls of Ras Shamra, there is another story — often suppressed, little-known, or unreported — written in the blood of those who resisted the Armory’s inexorable advance.
Seen from Cradle, Harrison is a tiger held by the tail.
Home to the ideological descendants -- and literal descendants -- of the Second Committee’s party leadership, Harrison Armory remains a bastion of anthrochauvanist thought and praxis for those who seek a more aggressive path to ensure humanity populates the stars. While their more overt anthrochauv policies have become more restrained, their rhetoric has not moderated. The only check on the Armory’s expansion is Union, whose position is more precarious than they let on.