OBT Forum

Tossing around the idea of doing a Terran Hegemony fanbook.

Tossing around the idea of doing a Terran Hegemony fanbook.

Was that a question or a statement?

I've got a question that has always kind of bugged me.  The planets of the TH are the most advanced in the IS and the TH is the strongest, wealthiest, and oldest state in the IS.

Were the strongest and wealthiest.  Most of them were bombed back into the stone age during the coup.

No grumbling for a return of the TH.

Why would there be?  It was run by a string of increasingly horrible incompetents (the Camerons), it failed to protect its people from being conquered by a tin-pot dictator, and the one man who had the power to set it right walked out on them like a dead-beat dad!  Why would anyone clamor for something that's done them so wrong?

No prestige for the old TH planets.

Hard to lord your prestige over others from a crater full of glowing rocks. 

Did the ending of the Cameron line, Amaris' Coup, and Kerensky's liberation so devastate the TH worlds that there was just nothing and no one left to put back any of the pieces? 

In a word, yes.

Did the Coup, liberation, and Exodus so gut the TH worlds that there just wasn't anyone left to care?

Comstar.  I assume you don't count them?

Did the centuries of SWs and emigration so dilute the TH populations of the worlds that they lost their identities?

What's there to be proud of?  "Yeah, we screwed up royally and bombed ourselves out of existence before being bombed again by everyone else."?  Yeah. 

MadCap summed that up nicely.

MadCapellan for Chancellor.

It's not that the people of the Hegemony disappeared entirely so much that the idea of a unified Terra-centric government, particularly in the form it had previously held, became a poorly regarded idea. 

Who would legitimately wish the Camerons back?  Even if they did, where would they find any?  Was there really anyone else acceptable to be Director General?  Even if there was, wouldn't they simply end up lording over an impoverished rump state being slowly devoured by it's powerful neighbors?  We do know that a handful of former Hegemony worlds opposed annexation by the Great Houses, and were generally met with orbital nuclear fire.  Even if the entirety of the sixteen unaccounted SLDF divisions united behind the defense of the Hegemony, it is unlikely they could have kept it from being conquered. 

It was far better for the livelihood of the inhabitants of those worlds to sign on willingly with an acceptable Great House, and gain the benefits of their (then) more intact economies and infrastructures and militaries to defend them than to hold out hope for a rag-tag band of survivors of the greatest clash of arms in human history to be able to defend the sovereignty of their bombed out, irradiated rocks so that they can continue to live in abject poverty in a post-apocalyptic wasteland of their own creation.

Much the way Rasalhague nationalism was temporarily suppressed and eventually resurfaced with enough force to make it a reality again.  The lack of viable heirs from the original leaders didn't stop any of that -- though it would have likely been a spur to the revitalization of Rasalhague nationalism faster & stronger than what we ended up with.  And Rasalhague was conquered by the Combine well before the formation of the Star League, so the TH -- as the Protectorate & Republic -- saw a resurgence much faster than Rasalhague.