Cruxians

The Cruxians are the human name for the dominant life form, as well as one of the most numerous, inhabiting the Crux arm of the Milky Way galaxy. They're a short, but hardy species. Quick to fight, quick to breed and quick to die. So long as the end is glorious, or at least amusing, the life was worth living.

Overview
The Cruxians, as they're commonly known, are the dominant life form of the galactic Northern Crux Arm. They have a lithe, petite stature, only about 4 and a half feet at the tallest. They are however much stronger than their stature would have you believe, though not typically any stronger than your average human. They are also not a particularly intelligent species; Cruxians didn't even discover the bow until about 500 years before they reached the stars. How did such a small, unintelligent species grow to dominate so thuroughly? Through their neighbor species, the Hakeome. The Cruxians themselves waged a long, bloody war against the Hakeome, ultimately leading to their enslavement while they were forced to work and develop technology for their warlike neighbors. This was mainly accompished through two things the Cruxians do very well. Eat and reproduce. Their metabolic system is amazingly efficient, requiring them to eat very little to maintain the energy needed to fight, and their reproductive cycle was a short and also efficient process; many eggs being layed while the young was well taken care of until their time of release. One cruxian female could birth as many as 30 or 40 in her life time easily, while, after the enslavement of the Hakeome, the mortality rate of infants dropped to the single-digits of percent.

Home System
Hailing from the Olther system within the Nagvip nebula situated at the base of the crux arm, the Cruxians are from the planet Delvon, a rather gorgeous planet with a lovely, purplish hue. It is a super-earth sized planet with an area of just over a flat billion km2, and an estimated mass of 10.6 x 1024 kg. A Cruxian day lasts 33 earth hours and is broken up into three distinct sections. Each section itself is broken up into 5, with the middle block typically being broken in half again by many for convenience sake. One cruxian year takes approximately 1.3 earth years, but is broken into 7 seasons due to chaotic axial tilt caused by dual moons.

The surface has a purple tint to it, thanks to increased iodine in the ground, seas and atomsphere. The planet is almost a flat 50/50 mix of land and water in regards to surface area. The landscape is sweeping and typically flat. Few mountain ranges account for lackluster tectonic plates and throughout the planet, earthquakes and volcanoes are rare. However tornados and thunderstorms are very common throughout most of the planet, most buildings within these areas being built into the ground instead of into the sky to compensate, especially since the advent of advance Hakeome building techniques.

Physiology
Short and scaly, Cruxians are hunched, but powerfully built creatures, the high gravity of their homeworld giving them a naturally muscular build, with digitigrade legs and short, stubby tails. They have a somewhat horse-like snout, topped by deep-set eyes. Some have reptilian frills, some have vestigial feathers or even patches of thick, coarse hair; they have never cared enough to look into why this was.

Males and females vary on incredibly small levels, in fact while wearing even basic armor, one cruxian can't tell another's gender without hearing them speak. They don't care much for personal expression, save for a few key examples, focusing more on their nuclear family and it's legacy; no two families having the same family name within 100 light years of one another, or so they believe.

Thanks to the large quantities of Iodine in their system, their thyroid glands have been supercharged to regulate their metabolism to very efficient effect. A small, nutrient rich meal is enough to sustain even their high amount of activity for a day or two comfortably, and most don't generally eat more often than that, and frequently less often.

Social and Political Behaviors
Cruxians are first and foremost obsessed with the ideals of the family legacy, and of meaningful death. Since there's always been a large amount of them being born and dying in obscurity, the only meaningful moment they feel in their lives are in death. A quiet, peaceful death is frowned upon in their culture, much more in favor of loud, humorous, or glorious death. It is expected that at least half of their population will die in combat, their crusade to pull more into their fold never ending. The rest try their best to be remembered through some other means. Humorous deaths are the second most common type, typically accidents. Safety precautions are nigh unheard of in Cruxian society; so thankfully most of their architecture is built with this in mind by the Hakeome. This doesn't mean they're completely careless, however. They realize they have important things to do in life as well; their lives promoting the wellbeing of the species while their deaths bring glory to the family, most of which are quite large.

They are first and foremost a Kratocracy; the strongest hold power within their political system. It is a delicate system, from the outside observer. The system is layered in many teirs, from the Emperor to the community block commander. Any one Cruxian can challenge their immediate superior to a duel, the only ones being immune being security and emergency response forces. The lowest teirs of government are slogged in duels, many upstarts attempting to take the positions to bring glory to their family names while the powerful keep their posts, at longest, a few years at a time. Subterfuge is not welcome outside of a duel, though there's plenty of underhanded tactics to gain power in a political duel. Most duels are fought to the death, with very few resulting in the losing party being crippled or lost. This system worked very well in their tribal period, though with the advent of modern medicine and a sprawling empire, they adopted what might be seen as one of their most important policies over some time. Though no laws specifically state this, any Cruxian knows that challenging a political official endangers their family name greatly, the whole group being shunned and spurned by society if one of their members fails to win a duel against a public figure. This doesn't effect the loser, if the loser was the one challenged. If the challenged party loses, the family remains unaffected. This has lead to fabulous folk tales of lowly criminals rising through the system to eventually become emperor through years of duels, working their way eventually to the top. Practically, any one could do it, but it would be a massive undertaking. Emperors are typically appointed by tournament, quadrant counselors going through a quick series of non-leathal battles in a tournament-style elimination match that eventually names one Emperor, the cycle working it's way down, all the way to the lowest branch until every position has been re-filled; the process usually taking no more than a month or two, though this usually means the quadrant who's counselor was named emperor usually sufferes political deadlock until the tournaments are concluded.

As  far as self expression is concerned, they care little beyond music and clothing. Their music is roughly as diverse as human music is, though most of it tends to be more violent than not, feelings such as love and compassion being mostly foreign to them. Unfortunately for the rest of the galaxy, and the only reason they understand the meaning of the word "love", they hold a deep appreciation for neon. Neon lights and colors are everywhere in Cruxian society, fashion, and even military, officer uniforms being trimmed in luminescent neon. No colors in particular are dominant, as they all catch Cruxian eyes. There is literally no planet within the empire that doesn't have at least one glowing neon skyscraper.

Military


From the beginning of their known time, the Cruxians have been militaristic, taking  what they needed or wanted by force. Their technological development lagged severely due to constant warring, not smart enough to develop technology past the bow, but smart enough to recognize when something is useful. Their military today is more or less the same. Their long time lack of ranged weaponry leading to the, even now, widescale use of melee weapons in conflicts. This isn't to say they don't know how to use proper, current energy and ballistic weapons, just that they greatly prefer and focus on up-close and personal conflict, their weapon of choice being the Boiler Lance. Nearly all infantry within the Cruxian military is issued one of these devious weapons. Of joint Hakeome and Cruxian make, the Boiler Lance is a weapon that hasn't needed much improvement over it's hundreds of years of use. A collapsable, light-weight, reach weapon, it has dual properties of being built of very strong alloys, along with a motor which causes it to vibrate very intensely on an ultrasonic level. Additionally, the blade is heated in combat to a temperature that causes water to boil instantly upon touching it; Roughly 325 degrees celsius, which additionally gives it the ability to melt some cheaper metals.

Cruxian ship design is, like the Boiler Lance, a joint venture of Cruxian design leads, and very harassed and annoyed Hakeome scientists. To make them as simple as possible, most ships are modular, allowing the simpler minded Cruxian engineers the ability to simply jettison parts of the ship that are beyond repair, ships that are more likely to be damaged in combat even going so far as to fashion mods that, upon jettison, can be fired as 'dumb' bombs, whether or not there are still crew still inside. The ships are built from the core, which provides all essential ship functions from basic cargo, crew compartments, bridge, engines, life support etc. While the rest of the ship has units fitted on to mod the ship to do exactly what it needs to do. Cruxians have four sizes of this, and then their capital ships in the background, which are all custom built and really show off Hakeome design. From frigates to battlecruisers, the ships are rather interchangable, cheap and efficient.

Their military also encompasses the Cruxian First Contact Fleet; a group who's sole purpose is to encounter new planets and, if required, invade them. If they find friendly races, they generally work out a way to communicate with the natives, build military fortresses, share some technology, and then demand a tribute of a certain percentage of all the planet's materials and food to fund the Cruxian military campaigns while keeping a force ready within the constructed fortresses to enforce it's half-hearted rule.

Economy
Cruxian economy is fairly straightforward. Housing and food is provided for, due to mandatory military conscription, so the only thing the denizens need to pay for is entertianment and fashion. Employment is gainful, seeing as the population is thinned out during the military phase of their life. Shops are typically passed down through the family, and those who don't have a shop typically gain employment through managing the workers in mines or construction. Generally those who are unemployed after the military are cripples or those who do not wish to work. The minimum wage is generally the only wage, even most political figures not making much more than that. Most of the money goes to the military, which uses those funds typically in trades with other, non-empire species, the goods being attributed to them through the many worlds they've 'enslaved.'