State of Affairs part 3

The British Commonwealth

The British Commonwealth was an odd faction compared to the others as the majority of its people and infrastructure were based in a very small area but most of its resources were based elsewhere. Because of this the British adopted very decentralised government[1], and there is once again encouragements for people to emigrate to Canada and Australia, though this time, from India. Technically the British were doing quite badly at the time, with comparatively little industry but they had a very large population and a huge area to expand into, though there were massive differences in population density.

Politically the British were still considered newcomers to the world scene but they controlled a sizeable portion of the world’s economy and most companies had at least a branch in the British Commonwealth for dealings with the English speaking world. Because of this they were an economic force to be reckoned with even though they were weak militarily at the time and due to their ongoing massive changes in government structure[2] they were slow to react to surprises and hence are the last to react to the Derelict’s arrival.

In Summary:

The Commonwealth controlled a sizable amount of global resources and population but had little or no control over it.
They were the centre of investment with many world banks within their borders and the government was strongly pushing industrial development.
The Commonwealth had little political clout with its recent formation and was facing large trade embargoes from the EU.
It had very little industry.
It had a very high average standard of education and a very high GDP per head.
Their armed forces were very weak and most of their space based presence was economic, surprisingly few space based companies had residence there.
The British space elevator was not built within England but India due to design limitations; this means that the AMA space elevator was used for large amounts of British cargo.

Russia

The modern Russian government formed in response to the rising amount of organised crime, falling standards of living and the many failed attempts of other nations to sort the whole situation out. A lot of focus at the time was placed on protecting the people and securing Russia’s place on the world stage and it would be fair to say that the party was socialist, though it went to extreme lengths to differentiate itself from the communist party and hence was extremely open in its policies[3]. The government was democratically elected 34 years prior and fought a long standing war on crime and poverty. While Russia was underdeveloped compared to the USA or China they still had huge amounts of land and resources available. Unsurprisingly their economy still surpassed AMA or New Inca, but not by as larger margin as they would have liked.

Russia’s military was mostly archaic, and they were the only reported users of technology made in the twentieth centaury with a fleet of repaired nuclear subs from the cold war. The rest of their military followed suit with some truly ancient technology being used thought it was still rather effective. On a global scale Russia had quite a lot of influence due to its size and resources[4], though it was generally considers suspicious due to its “Russia First” policy and only AMA had less corporate involvement though many in Russia viewed this as a good thing.

Russia did not have a particularly active space program, partly because it needed neither the resources nor the space but mostly because it had no equatorial control and so it is vastly more expensive for Russia to get into space. This did not stop the Russian satellite program, nor its exploration of other stellar bodies but prevented large scale commercialisation of space, though Russia is the only faction to have their stellar launch facilities in their industrial heartland.

In Summary:

Russia had good access to raw materials and had a reasonable economy but was undeveloped compared to its counterparts.
It was significantly more expensive for Russia to make any political move into space.
Russia’s military was outdated but still quite large and their nuclear arsenal was second only to the US[5].
Russia had less political influence than it would like due to residual fear of ‘The Red Menace’, while its modern policies were very different from the old regime there was still a great deal of exclusionism present in the country. This was not helped by the fact Russia was considered to be the only true socialist country at that point in time.
Russia controlled huge tracts of raw materials and was the number one to invade on any doomsday list[6], not surprisingly Russia was quite paranoid about this and guarded its supplies well.
Most would predict that Russia would come out of top during an economic slump.

[1] Something that helped the Commonwealth greatly when they eventually had to start managing an interstellar empire.

[2] The idea of everyone in The British Commonwealth having a vote and their being a single government running sizable tracts of four continents was having some problems with convincing people it will work, let alone instigating it. True integration is historically agreed to be many years after the derelict’s arrival.

[3] Well, to its citizens at least.

[4] Russia historically had lower export rate of raw materials than any other country in a similar situation.

[5] Whether any of the missiles they had declared actually worked is debateable.

[6] It’s suspected America has been held of so long only due the threat of New Inca.