Spacer Guilds
Conventional Long Form: Intrasolar Republic of Spacer Guilds
Conventional short form: The Guilds
Abbreviation: SG
Motto: "Gravity is Overrated"
Political Freedoms: Few Civil Rights: Some Economy: All-Consuming
Geography / Territorial Holdings
The Guilds possess a wide array of Main Belt and Earth-crossing, and Jupiter Trojan asteroids, the Jovian moons of Sinope, Anake, Adrastea, Amalthea, and several small unnamed rocks, and several thousand ships in interplanetary space, Jovian Orbit, Martian Orbit, Earth Orbit, Venusian Orbit, and Circa-Mercurian Solar Orbit. Their planetary holdings include half-ownership of the Kajali Space Elevator on The Planet Mars and Lebedinskiy Crater, Dante Crater, Korolev, and Lacus Luxuriae, and Mare Moscoviens on Selene. The Guilds may or may not have structures on the surface of Mercury.
People
Population: 3.725 billion
Age Structure: 0-14 years: 15% 14-64 years: 55% 65 years and over: 30%
Life Expectancy at birth: total population: 123 female: 121 male: 124
Nationality: noun: Spacer adjective: Spacer
Ethnic Groups: Homo sapiens sapiens- 5% Homo sapiens astra- 95% [32% Phoenician, 28% Mykenaen, 26% Minoan, 7% Phaikian, 2% Miscellaneous]
Languages: Mondlango, Interlingua, Russian, English, Nahuatl, Koine
Literacy Rate: total population: 99% male: 99% female: 99%
Government
Government Type: Federal Republic
Capital: Tripolis
Administrative Divisions: 3 major Guilds- Phoenicia, Mykenae, Knossos- as well as several minor Guilds.
Independence: Hard to pin down.
Consitution: 2130
Suffrage: 14 years of age; universal where applicable.
Central Branch: The Tripolian Council consists of three members, one from each major Guild. This Council hears criminal and civil cases that apply to multiple Guilds, mediates trade, negotiates inter-Guild laws and treaties, etc.
Guild Governments: Each Guild's individual governmental system varies slightly. The basic structure, however, is the same throughout. Each Guild is led by a publically-elected Council headed by a Peisenor, whose duty it is to report to and from Tripolis and handle inter-Guild governmental affairs. For each Port or Cityship, a Governor is appointed, either by public election or appointment by the Guild Council. The Governor is tasked with reporting to and from the Guild Council and handling the day-to-day affairs of his vessel. All major policy decisions, however, are subject to a voluntary public referendum of the entire voting populace in the affected district, be it on a Vessel, Guild, or Federal level.
Political Parties: Independent, Isolationist, Outreachers, Traders.
History
Technology and medicine played the largest role in the creation of Spacers. With artificial gravity technology being somewhere between non-existant, highly dangerous, or prohibitively expensive, thousands of early colonists and spacefarers discovered that they could not return to Earth, nor could their children. The combination of physiological necessity and dislike of their parent governments led to the creation of Guilds- loose organizations of gravity-intolerant spacefarers. The citizens of the Guilds, therefore come from every concievable background among the then-spacefaring nations of Earth and were scattered among all of the Inner System. In the beginning, each Guild was an amorphous, anarchic entity, with no clear leader. Each was more like a political party or a business cooperative than a complete community, composed of groups of privately-owned ships and small stations whose people held similar views. This was changed in the Earth-year 2130, although no one seems to be able to agree on the exact Earth date, with the signing of the Treaty of Tripolis, in which the three major Guilds of the time (Phoenicia, Mykenae, and Knossos) agreed to establish a central government, based in the city-station of Tripolis. The founder's intentions never truly came about, however, as the huge distances and communications lags involved made a strong central government horribly inefficient, and it was soon reduced in importance to a simple mediating entity to go between the different Guilds for purposes of economic and scientific exchange. Despite the apparent failure of the Treaty, it served as a base on which to construct the governments of the individual Guilds, which soon organized themselves into semi-socialist democratic states. The three major Guilds quickly assimilated most others, and by 2142, the Guilds as we know them now had developed. There is some disagreement about whether to place the founding of the nation in 2130, or 2142, although most historians use 2130, as it is a more concrete date.
The same three Guilds are the major players today, and each has taken on complementary roles- Phoenicia, always the most well-funded, is the leader in information technology and spacefaring construction, although they generally keep to themselves. Knossos is more open to the outside, although their remote location means that they get few visitors as well, and they oversee most large-scale mining operations, providing the bulk of raw materials, and there more outgoing attitude allowed them to work out a deal with Angelus which lead to a significant drop in infant mortality and accelerated autoevolution. Mykenae is a Guild of scientists- it was they who invented the HPD system, the Ion Accelerator Engine, and oversees the Glassmith project.
In recent years, with the Guilds continuing economic growth, a new political party has emerged calling themselves simply "The Traders", dedicated to maximizing interaction with the outside world for the sole purpose of continuing economic gain and exploitation. Somewhat ironically, they have actually helped to solidify the dominant position of the Outreachers, their main politicial oponents, who believe in contacting less advanced nations and helping them to bootstrap their technology to create new economic partners, as many of their foriegn policy ideas are quite similar, and the two parties now share an uneasy truce throughout the Guilds. In Guild Phaiakia, the Isolationists and Traders seem to have been getting along surprisingly well, with the Trader's promises that if one Guild can handle most of the interactions with the outside world and mediate trade between other nations and the rest of the Guilds, the Isolationists will be able to remain with much the same lifestyle they have always had while still gaining the benefits of trade outside, rather than simply between, the Guilds. Over this background, it has been speculated that the traditionally Isolationist Skherians [citizens of the Phaikian capital] may in fact help spawn a new minor Guild solely to serve the Traders' purposes.
