Space Opera: History/Setting

Over a thousand years ago, five races on the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy experienced a set of scientific breakthroughs that allowed for large scale manned interstellar travel coincidentally within a few decades of each other. After a brief period to understand what they had learned, all five races- the avian Joppans, the ammonia-breathing Kebrie, the bleach-swimming Neechappa, Terrans, and the hunting pack animal Tesserrem made first contact with each other and began a halfhearted and extremely confused multipolar war for a few years, before the Joppans finally helped all sides negotiate the Peace of Sirius (human name) which ended the fighting, and a few years later the Tau Ceti accords (named after a fertile colony world nearly equidistant from all five homeworlds) that bounds the Founding Races, as they are popularly known, into a Stellar Confederation for the common defense and direction of colonization efforts. Thus united, the Founding Races began expanding outwards, finding star system after star system and, later, species after species, many of whom were absorbed into the structure of the Confederation.

At present, the Confederation contains several trillion sentients, split among perhaps thousands of star systems and worlds and over 250 species at last census. The Confederation policy is dominated by a small oligarchy of individuals from the Founding Races, as despite its apparently democratic structures the bureaucracy has hardened into a self sustaining and entirely separate government in all but name. Not interfering in many internal affairs, the Confederate Navy tends to border security and exploration as well as a separate branch dedicate to eradicating 'terrorists' and pirates within the Confederation's borders. More recently, the Confederation has bumped up against a separate and multi-world political entity for the first time in its history, the ferocious Mantispid Empire, and after a bit of brief jockeying for strategic or fertile worlds in the border zone, both sides settled down to a protracted low level generational war which continues today.