Sambrenth Confederation

To start with, referring to the "Sambrenth Confederation" as a "Confederation" is a grave insult to the accurate use of the term. There are those who have tried to compare Sabrenth to confederations from history, a common example being Switzerland, but also the European and African Unions being used occasionally. These are flawed examples, because they connote some form of real unity as a [i]nation[/i]. Sambrenth's unity is instead the unity of desperation, of the necessity of convenient alliance to prevent foreign domination. There is very little love lost between the nations that make up the Confederation, and it has little formal centralized structure. While iti s a military accord, in many ways it also simply functions as a military cease fire, preventing Sambrenth from self-igniting and destroying each other once again in its merry round of wars.

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2. [i]History[/i]
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4. The cluster that would come to compose Sambrenth was founded in the 26th century, with a group of disparate colonial FTL ships - launched in the later 24th century and some of the first of their class, it took quite a period of time to manage to get FTL to the appropriate degree of safety for such vessels to use them - settling the cluster at multiple different locations. The project to found Sambrenth was actually a consortium, and was particularily well funded and organized, and as a result the landings were quite succesful, with six different colonial worlds established at various points. After of course, the normal initial marginal regression, all of the worlds were able to quite quickly develop planet spanning civilizations and begin their own exploration at into the stars, with the normal way of then settling their own colonies - the only difference in Sambrenth's case being that it happened much more quickly, thanks to the efficient nature of the colonies themselves.
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6. It was at this point however, that things went rather bizarre. Due to a variety of early brushes and badly gone first contact scenarios which left the nations starting off on a bad relationship with each other, the normal amicable nature of colonization quite rapidly changed instead to bitter struggles between two of the worlds - Vamberth and Jeraixa. This escalated to raids, strikes, and ultimately to an all out war between the two worlds, although due to the strongly developed defenses of their home worlds they were both unable to wipe each other out. Things themselves would have rapidly resolved themselves from that point, with both planets being left behind in the race for colonization, if not for the fact that they also made contact with the other developing planets, and managed to convince them to join up with them on respective sides. As a reseult of a rather extrordinarily unlikely and unprecedented series of events, the six originally quite normal albet fast developing worlds in the cluster ultimately managed to muddle themselves into a full up interstellar war.
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8. At this stage one would, with an exasperated tone of voice, simply shrug it off; if they were fighting like that, then surely there would be no capability to colonize? And for the first few years that was quite correct, as all of the planets fought their own bitter little wars of shifting alliances, without any single planet or alliance managing to cause fatal harm to another. It became quite apparent to all of them that they were simply going to get nowhere, but instead of leaving asides their differences, they developed a quite complicated system of rules and limited warfare, most akin to the Cabinet Warfare of Old Earth - the fierce battle between them switching from a conflict that was nearing the genocidal stage to a limited war, fought with battles and planetary invasions to take resources, tribute, technology, and in the case of the most impressive victories, ownership to newly discovered worlds.
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10. As a result of this, the six states of Sambrenth were able to reconcile their vicious feuding and interstellar exploration and colonization. Certainly, there has been much interest in regards to how they would have developed if there was not the same degree of internal infighting among the states which made up Sambrenth - some estimates ranging very high as far as potential progress, with some projections concerning their colonization progress otherwise ranging into the many hundreds of planets. But while doubtless less efficient than cooperation for pure colonization, the system as developed was ultimately sufficient for the matter as to enable Sambrenth to grow quite rapidly.
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12. This continued until the early parts of the 30th century, 2937, when they established contact with the UDI. The appearance of a major rival which couldn't be intimidated or conquered, as some of the more primitive nations around Sambrenth had had the fate befall them, was a jolt to the various star nations, but it wouldn't necessarily have led to significant changes if not for an overly eagre UDI commander on the frontier attempting to incorporate a stretch of border worlds into the UDI. One of the political appointees somewhat common in the early UDI navy and still occasionally present, he managed to simultaneously attack no fewer than four different Sambrenth major nations, whoch promptly set aside their differences in a coalition, brokered a temporary ceasefire with their rivals, and drove the UDI out, as well as conducting some raids on the UDI's own border worlds. It took the intervention of the local UDI sector fleet, under more competent leadership, which inflicted quite crippling damage onto the raiding groups, to prevent an escalation of the situation, and ultimately diplomatic mediation on behalf of the rather embarassed UDI(while today such a situation would probably have led to a full out conquest of the region, at the time the UDI's focus was more on the insubordination by the frontier admiral and wasn't interested in a war) to restore the situation pre-war.
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14. The ending stage of the war though, with the destructive firepower applied by the UDI, led to a sudden realization of the extreme vulnerability of the Sambrenth nations. While the UDI in this war had not been interested in their conquest, it was shown that it was within its capability to quickly defeat them. The result of this was a surprisingly quick move to set asides differences and reconcilate, to preserve their independence. Whatever centuries of Cabinet Wars had done, they had instilled a quick willingness to make changes and be pragmatic.
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16. As a result, in a flurry of diplomatic re-alignment, the now eight major nations of Sambrenth (two more had arisen from independent colony worlds and restructuring) agreed to a peace in 2941, and in 2946 this was extended to a full military alliance, eventually evolving into a political alliance - the Confederation - in two more years, 2948. There was a mutual agreement over how colonization would proceed, and structuring diplomatic strategies vis a vis the UDI. Despite the vast size difference between the UDI and Sambrenth, the extremely militarized Sambrenth forces, combined with other preocupations on the UDI part, has enabled Sambrenth to keep itself out of the UDI sphere of influence. Its territory grew from some 81 star systems, the core worlds, that still are the only official worlds that are part of Sambrenth(other ones are colonies and aren't represented poltically due to the disagreements over changing political influence, one of the key flash points), to some 194 star systems in the present day.