Spacers

The radical opposite of Frontier life, The Confederate Trade Fleets are often city-states unto themselves, carrying vast technological and economic resources across the stars. They regularly park in orbit of various worlds to carry out manufacturing and refinement jobs, buying and selling as they go. Made up of supersized XL Freight vessels and flanked by privately owned or chartered combat ships, life aboard these crafts is a lot like living in a warehouse crossed with a factory floor.

Spacers were likely born in space, their mothers giving birth in microgravity or through artificial android surrogate wombs. They grew up playing on the decks of civilian trade vessels, hearing stories of pirates and visiting hundreds of planets by the time they are teenagers. They’ve seen more diversity of life and culture than any other ConFed, and as such they are the most likely to have adopted a more relaxed and liberal interpretation of society than their terrestrially locked kin.

The downside to living on a fleet of starships is the tedium. Journeys don’t appear to last that long under Acceleration Coma, so a child born 50 years ago may only actually be 18 years of age now, simply because most of their lives they have spent frozen in time while these giant ships accelerate and decelerate across star systems. They’ve spent countless days wandering corridors, looking out at the vast black expanse of space through simulated windows, and countless more in Lucid Dream Simulators.

Tending to be more physically frail due to a lack of manual labour and gravity, Spacers are generally better mentally adjusted to life in space, often viewed as more intelligent than the average terrestrial folk, and better suited to becoming crew aboard military craft. They speak a unique blend of languages, borrowing from Serin and Torlan speech, as they sometimes mix races on their journeys. They are the most likely to have been born a product of mixed race unions of any ConFed pairing, which itself is common on every world, giving them a unique edge in dealing with other nations.

Lastly, it is also common for Spacers to have witnessed more than their fair share of tragedy, having seen ships being destroyed in accidents or through piracy or war. While piracy isn’t common, it has been known to occur, and the more ships venture into Serin contested systems, the more likely it is for a spacer to have seen a ship being shot up and boarded, never to be heard from again. This makes them slightly paranoid and more than a little trigger happy around Serin.