Post-ascension remnants who wander the universe in a hollowed-out mobile Terra while shipping goods and ferrying life-forms from system to system, galaxy to galaxy?
Today they stop over to lend aid to disaster relief in the nearby system on the galactic fringe, tomorrow they offload several million tonnes of screaming crystals on their client's planetary port in the galactic core and linger for a week waiting for boarders for the next galaxy where they have a request to ferry a delegation across the galaxy's length to finalize a peace deal.
Basically a non-asshole version of the Silver Tribe from Heroic Age.
Jordan Watson
Earth never formed a unified government. Instead, colonization efforts were spearheaded by major nations and coalitions.
Jayden Ross
Merchant Republic (Capitalism Ho!)
Christian Theocracy (What if the Crusades were successful?)
Galactic Roman Empire (What if Rome never fell?)
Communist 'Utopia' (Brave New World, but in red)
Josiah Wilson
That sounds cool. How exactly are we gypsies? We build makeshift shantytowns in the middle of an asteroid field? Or we just bum around and steal shit from other races when we can.
A kind of alliance between clades, planets, empires, pirates, nomad habitats and corporations in which they pledge themselves to one another. Unstable, hard to say who's in power, their power projection can amount to a paltry battleship or incredible amounts of varied hulls and configurations, the only common trait being some cargoholding and endurance or speed. Coming to power in this kind of model can be hard, just like Agammenon's rise during the Trojan War. Keeping the power is harder.
What really binds them together is a cultural memeplex and possibly a common origin. This would be formed into a sociocomm cryptographic protocol intentionally obtuse and hard to figure out, requiring such amounts of time and dedication that some outsiders mistake it for a religion.
One would dread to fight them just because of their unpredictability. Third-party probing attacks would be required to test the waters.
Joseph Johnson
Individual countries laying claim to pieces of space with defense lasers.
Jonathan Phillips
Probably large flotillas a-la the quarians. In ME they had a bad reputation for being thieves and spoke in predominantly Eastern European accents while wearing colorful robes. They were meant to be space gypsies, so you'd do humanity similarly to them, I suppose.
Christopher Nelson
Little bit of both, but mainly the latter. Humans are a tiny minority in the majority of the galaxy, and are exclusively the descendants of generation/sleeper ships that were sent out in the early days of deep space exploration. So largely they just have absolutely no infrastructure, no way to get infrastructure, and next to no production capacity. So they end up having to scrounge stuff up and live mainly as extended family groups. As a byproduct of this, they also now have a very bad reputation as thieves and bums among most species. Doesn't help that most aliens will never see a human, or even really associate the word "human" with them because a bunch of AIs have been using that word since before the first ships made landfall.
Joshua Hughes
Pretty much
Evan Bennett
I like this - having the solar system dotted with corporate claims and things like US States/Unincorporated Territories, French Région d'outre-cosmos, British Outer-space Territories (or possibly Commonwealth Realms), Russian Federal Subjects, Chinese Provinces/Autonomous Regions/Special Administrative Regions etc.
