The Sa'arm:

Sa'arm 'units' are around seven feet tall.  They are tripeds.
Organizationally, they are kind of army ants, but physically, they resemble
armored lizards in that they are cold-blooded and fully armored, but it is not
an exoskeleton.  they have three arms -- set above the legs -- and they
operate with one leg forward and two to the sides and rear.  the front arm is
shorter and lighter for delicate work, while the other two are more massive,
such that they can hold an object across their front with their two larger
arms and hands and work comfortably with the third.  They have bullet -- or
mushroom -- shaped heads with three eyes, two oriented more or less forward
and one -- not as well developed -- for watching behind.

They developed on a Hell world where the armor and the 360 degree vision was
absolutely required -- and where the constant roar of various energies made
the development of a sound detection sense a liability.

I have not been able to come up with the nature of their communication
facility yet -- I'd like to see it as a neural net or something that extends
for distances of up to a quarter million miles or so, based upon there being a
large number of them available to generate it.  Long-range communication (as
between systems) consists of literally transporting a specialized unit with an
abstract of the current state of the current hive and any messages to the
target hive for integration. (Catching couriers ends up being the way we get
our live ones -- quite aside from disrupting their communications.)

A key issue that I have described but need to emphasize is their reaction
mode.  Any attack on a single Sa'arm results in immediate reaction from other
hive members in the immediate vicinity.  This would have ugly consequences,
especially for a team trying to collect a live specimen.  I'd planned to frame
a story around this.  A dead body would not be linked, and might fairly easily
be transported out -- but a live one is his own GPS, detectable WELL beyond
low orbit.  Since every resource immediately available would be applied to the
apprehension of the kidnappers -- not so much due to the value of the unit,
but in order to determine the nature of the threat -- I envision not only the
team failling to escape, but it's support vessel being destroyed -- or self-
destructing to avoid capture.

    Obviously, ground combat will be interesting, too.  I saw teams with
antipersonnel mines trying them out on the Sa'arm; one item being a simple
Claymore mine with the trip wire replaced by a laser unit (just an episodic
thing, but it would be something we could combine advanced tech with current
hardware to make...).  Tactics are all about hit & run -- don't be there when
the reaction force arrives.  Preferably, you set up a multi-stage ambush,
drawing several larger and larger sorties -- perhaps culminating with a nice
tactical nuke...

     I didn't see the Sa'arm carrying weapons, as such, early on -- on most
worlds, especially Confederacy worlds, they just landed and took over,
ignoring the locals while they panicked, and creating their honeycombs of
tunnels under the surface to support the surface hive structures -- more or
less after the fashion of an iceberg -- most of their construction beneath the
surface where they're going to be a bitch to get out. .  We'll teach them
differently, of course.  I saw them carrying a very sharp vibroblade-type
energy knife or something to butcher pests with, but nothing more advanced
until they discover that they aren't in Kansas any more...

The Sa'arm aren't big innovators, but they learned a long time ago to study
the hardware of whatever livestock they happen upon.  As a result, they have a
varied arsenal -- but probably not much experience if any at using it.  This
can play into our hands as they field new weapons without an adequate
understanding of their function and end up misusing them...


CAP Testing:

CAP Testing is pretty much a mental and psychological assessment to get not
only IQ, but various personality traits.  As I indicated, it is generally done
by AIs posing as humans on video.  Various scenarios are directly input to the
subject via VR to provide data on their abilities, mental flexibility, and
basic character and projected growth potential.  The physical being can be
edited, but the complex of experience that makes one person a hero and another
a coward can't be generated. Similarly, some people are responsible and
honorable, and others lack the characteristics.  Loner or team player?  Lover
or fighter?  Leader or follower?  Loyal or traitorous?  Maternal and paternal
instincts are also rated, as well as an assessment given as to how inhibited
or uninhibited sexually the subject is.  Jack has some references that he's
been thinking about as referents -- I don't recognize them, not having read
those particular books, but you may have...


The Colonies:

Do colony worlds have a government?  Not really.  It's something to be gone
into, but basically, it's a case of "Dump 'em out and let 'em sort it out."
There will be stories in there regarding the development of government on
several worlds.

I was looking at one AI 'advisor' per colony.  To a certain extent, it is the
government -- or perhaps at least the judicial branch.  Otherwise, we're
looking at martial law...  Drones answer to their sponsors, of course.  The
community probably centers around the military base and/or research facilities
and the Fleet shipyard in orbit.

Numbers?  Nothing specific.  I envisioned about two dozen colonies of
differing capacities due to gravitation and other environmental factors.  Note
that the one world I've described is a moon around a gas giant.  A thousand
pod ship would drop approximately five thousand people -- that's my vague
guess at the bell curve.  There should be a lot of 6s -- at 2 apiece --
somewhat fewer 7s -- at 4 apiece -- a LOT fewer 8s, at 6 apiece -- and very
few 9s at 8 apiece.  Sooo...  400 families of 3, 350 families of 5, 175
families of  7, and 75 families of 9... I get 4850.  Oops!  I forgot children
in the range between birth and age fourteen that get a free ride at the
sufferance of their sponsor -- better say 5000 -- or maybe 5100.  Early colony
ships would carry a tenth of that.  One large ship servicing a colony would
drop 8 times a year... (This assumes as I indicated in Pickup 18 that ships
take a month at slow boost to let colony groups settle out and get their
medical support and indoctrination, but can return at high boost in half of
that time, on average.  Military ships are MUCH faster and there is a
transporter network -- that
colonies have to be plugged into.)  39000 people.     Bigger colonies = more
servicing ships.  Darjee limitations being what they are, there would probably
be an early slow build out of the transport fleet, with us taking over some
capacity where possible.  Fifty ships the first year, 25 of them being the
smaller 100 pod type, perhaps?

Late in the Diaspora, I see a story where some critical manufacturing plant on
Earth is staffed with 5s -- 6.4s with contracts that say if they last 6
months, they get two concubines and at the one year mark they're all lifted
out to a colony world to an identical facility.  (I'm still working on this
concept, so feel free to critique it.  It occurs to me that the 6 and above
group would not have been totally evaced, for instance, so why pick 5s?
Factory workers vs. geniuses, perhaps...  Maybe I should only ship 50% at a
time...)

Confederacy Military Organizations

Generally, the Confederacy's military was down to a few small units doing
ceremonial duties at official diplomatic functions; as a result, humans
carried thier own rank structures into space.  The Navy is the source of
portable heavy weapons platforms capable of long-term independent deployment
of combat power in deep space and in orbit around planets.  The Marines are
the highly mobile strike troops; they rely upon the Navy for transport and
orbital support, but can and do operate on the surface during battle.  The
Army is a collection of the individual planetary militias of the colony worlds
and Earth itself, a force with a largely defensive role, only deployed in huge
operations requiring massive naval and probably supporting merchant transport
support -- operations on the scale of, say, the Normandy invasion times 10.

Rank structures are generally those used in Western military units, especially
US and British formations.  There is some possibility of normalization of rank
descriptions among the services (the whole Ensign vs. 2LT thing), but
initially, we're probably stuck with it.

One thing we ran into is "What is a pilot?"  For Marine troop carriers
designed to support ground attacks, such as assault shuttles (something
heavily armored that might serve in the role of an M2 Bradley or a Ferret
Scout Car or a tank -- but must fly from orbit to be deliverable to target and
to deliver troops) we decided that, like tanks and personnel carriers, they
are organic to the Marine formation and could have what are essentially
'drivers'.  They're pilots, I grant you, but they're not pushing lightly-
armored weapons platforms across space or atmosphere at near-relativistic
speeds.  Marine pilots (officers) would be conducting close air support and
air superiority operations; Naval pilots would tend to work in orbit and
above, with some arguable overlap.  This would tend to make the Marine pilots
a somewhat elite force, since manuever in atmosphere at high velocity is more
challenging than it is in space...

For the Confederacy Marine Corps we go with Marine grades from E1 to E9 and
the officers as listed - we ignore warrant officers and just assign their
positions to the specified grades.

Same for Officers, O1 - O11

Lets face it, we’re creating a new armed force and can do what we like -- so
we force Marine ranks onto the Air Force and the Navy but generously allow
the Navy to keep the title of Captain for the commander of a vessel

So the 2 Lt grades fly aircraft -- promoted after a little experience
Capt commands a flight - 3 to 4 aircraft
Maj commands a Squadron of 4 flights
Lt Col commands a Wing of 3 to 4 Squadrons
Col commands a Group of 2 to 3 Wings -- A Carrier Air Group

Weapons and Technology

We haven't really gotten into technology much here.  The Darjee aren't even
happy with the concept, so generally, they are revealing technology to us
slowly and allowing us to sdo our own thing with it.  One of the first things
we come up with is a pulsed laser that uses a mated focusing crystal and power
capsule as ammunition.  The power capsule pushes massive amounts of energy
through the crystal once, destroying it while generating a much more powerful
laser than would be possible from a sustainable system of similar mass.  This
gives us not only a decent laser hand or shoulder-fired weapon, but is
scalable to heavier batteries and even spacecraft armament, although I haven't
decided if I'm going to allow them to be effective on that scale.  First
contact between Confederate Naval vessels and a Sa'arm hive ship is going to
be a scary thing.

Otherwise, we have missiles and bombs and a lot of basic Earth weapons
technology being augmented in places to make them more effective.  The Sa'arm,
for instance, haven't seen a basic projectile weapon used against them in some
time...  Spacecraft large enough can mount heavy lasers as well as pulsed
lasers.  Tractor and pressor beams turn out to be available (the Darjee don't
realize that they might be effective for some purposes, so they let us have
basic antigrav and it's spinoffs) but they ARE limited; due to physical
restraints, the size of an antigrav generator tends to scale up with the mass
of the platform it is mounted on, requiring up to 10% of that mass, which
limits the relative combat power of such a device.  A grav sled capable of
carrying a 300 lb injured soldier suspended in the air without propulsion is
going to weigh probably 40 lbs to allow for the addition of it's own weight
and the weight of the stretcher, for instance -- and this is a basic field
equalization model, the easiest to build.  Anything required to act as a
propulsion system or exceed the strength of the field it is nullifying scales
up dramatically.

We have tools against inertia, however, granted us by the Darjee -- and the
Sa'arm don't -- or, rather, they didn't until they captured and disassembled
Confederacy ships, and they still don't know what they got...  Inertial
compensators reduce the effects of acceleration in a manner dependent upon the
installation (big ships can really jack things down to 1% or so, but most
vessels only do about 10% -- again a trade-off between the cost in mass of the
generator and the effects.  Merchant vessels like the Aurora tended to use
compensator in a limited way during boost up to hyperdrive velocities and not
like them during approach to a system due to the 'jinking' that occurs when a
ship running under compensators hits a particle moving at relativistic
velocities.  A particle shield is generally used for this purpose -- more or
less a pressor-effect antigrav shield or deflector.  Obviously, scaled up,
THIS has military uses -- but it's not tremendously effective against directed
energy weapons, although it will tend to attenuate the particle content.  The
Darjee don't really see the benefit of being able to manuever at 90 gravities
-- but we do...

Hyperdrive usually protects the ship running it from anything natural -- you
just aren't there, unless the object in question is small and VERY massive and
collapses the field.  The Aurora was probably loafing along quite slowly for a
hyperdrive ship and was unlucky enough to cross fields with a VERY small black
hole -- an amazing accident.  Another, more plausible explanation, would be
collision with another ship -- since the Aurora wasn't annihilated, that
argues
for two objects of relatively the same mass operating within normal physical
laws in the same bubble universe...  IF you can directly chase a vessel in
hyperdrive and IF you can extend your field to intersect it's field, you can
deploy weapons in combat, working inside the bubble of your shared miniature
universe -- but it's difficult to impossible, usually, to make such a thing
happen. The Sa'arm have hyperdrive, but it's primitive; it takes a Hive ship
to move anything at ten percent of what Confederacy ships are capable of,
which gives us the advantage of manuever in open space and even the kind of
chase
capability I just described, since Sa'arm communications couriers only move at
5% of what a Confederacy frigate can boast.  Detection is the worst part of
the equation, as a ship in hyperspace doesn't leave any traces in normal space
to follow after the initial passage disruption, which heals rapidly.

Replication at the molecular level is another gift of the Darjee.  Simple
units programmable by merely presenting a small object for analysis begin at
about the size of a refrigerator, but the closer the input material is to the
product, the better.  Bigger machines that can assemble anything from any
available material by recombining molecules are massive and require a factory
building-sized base -- but if you have one, your primary limitation is design,
not fabrication -- and output quantity if you want something really difficult
to construct.  The Darjee give us replicators capable of manufacturing
foodstuffs by the truckload early on in order to allow us to move our focus
from basic subsistence and rechannel that energy into the defense.

Nannites or nanobots are used extensively by the Darjee as single-purpose
constructors -- to create a dome around a colony pod, you unleash a gallon jug
of nannites and wait two months or so for them to do the job.  More tiny
robots equals more work but after a while they tend to get in each other's
way, and they eventually fail from lack of power or from wear and tear -- but
fortunately, they are simply replicated.  Similarly, underground construction
can be done by having nannites dig and convert the soil into denser material
to support walls, roof, and flooring of rooms and hallways -- but you're going
to get a 10' by 10' room a week from a force that size.  Any single-purpose
activity that might take massive machinery can probably be done more
efficiently -- if slower -- by tailored nannites.  And of course, they are
used extensively in health care...