During the Age of Expansion, Magnus Osiris unites mankind toward one goal -- reaching into the stars.
Magnus Osiris, then Prime Minister of the United Galactic Republic (UGR), decides that mankind has populated throughout the galaxy until it is near bursting. Humanity needs to explore farther out into space -- and to appease his ministers and military commanders, he promises to conquer new worlds if necessary.
Osiris immediately puts forward a plan to start researching jumpdrives, but his forward thinking and cunning has him establish a secret research project to try and harness the power of black holes, or wormholes. His intent is to recreate a black hole for the purpose of teleportation.
To his surprise, after having had countless trillions of dollars pumped into his projects from all around the galaxy, it turns out that his secret project is the one that comes up with a successful jumpdrive prototype. Where the "official" project was trying to propel a ship farther and faster, the real answer was to build a drive capable of generating a wormhole around the ship, then only a relatively small amount of propulsion would be needed.
The way it works is that a drive generates a tunnel of negative energy almost like a cone -- the narrower end at the stern. Like the throat of a wormhole, something entering one end will be pushed out the other end, the jumpdrive maintains a constant "throat" and with a small amount of propulsion, keeps the ship going in the right direction.
Osiris quickly palmed the secret research off onto the "official" team, and made the secret project public. The outcry was shortlived. After a few tests of the new jumpdrives, it was shown that a craft could cross the entire galaxy from extremity to extremity in just one hour.
More money was pumped into mass production, and working with Sovereign Shipbuilders several colony ships were produced. Some of the larger governments and even a few wealthy families bought colony ships and began spreading through the rest of the universe.
It wasn't long before alien races were discovered -- some even looked very similar to humans. Most were friendly enough, but some were not. At least one early colony ship was lost to unidentified attackers.
Now that Osiris' project was public, his next goal was to find a way to communicate across the distances humanity could now reach. The first primitive version of this communication was to open a direct line using a simulated wormhole like the jumpdrives used, then voice and data could be pushed down the line. However, this was a one-way communication only. It was how the UGR heard the last transmission from one of the colony ships being attacked.
The comms device was upscaled and the research team created the first Nexus Gate. The first colony ship to successfully settle somewhere and report back to the UGR had a small escape pod full of food sent as a test. it almost arrived in the right place. The pod was found floating in space, not too far from where it was supposed to arrive. A few recalculations later and another was sent -- arriving exactly where expected.
The kept this up, supplying the new world with whatever they needed. Meanwhile, Osiris ensured that the Nexus Gate technology remained the property of the Republic.
Over the next couple of decades, expansion continued at an incredible pace; new beings were discovered almost monthly. Humanity found that while there were plenty of places for them to populate, some were already occupied. A few times this resulted in hostilities, but more often than not the colony ships moved on. Where possible the humans either made friendly contact, or noted the coordinates and relayed the information back to the Republic.
During this time, with a few new friendly "neighbours," Osiris pushed for a reorganisation of the UGR. His proposal was for an Intergalactic Confederation, and his goal was to unite different races and to share what technology and information they could. At the same time, the Confederation's reach would expand and would mean humans could cohabitate on "xeno" worlds. This turned out to be a smart move, and more so due to its success, because useful minerals were found on inhabited planets. The most notable of which was the discovery of a lighter alloy used in ship building.
This resulted in the second generation of jumpdrives able to be fitted to smaller ships. Where before it wasn't feasible to fit a jumpdrive onto anything smaller than a battleship, now smaller cruisers and even large frigates were jump-capable. In practice any ship over 100 tonnes was typically big enough and had a frame that could support a jumpdrive. Part of the problem was that jumpdrives had to be fitted next to stardrives -- the "regular" drives that are only capable of going one or two times the speed of light.
The goals of the new Intergalactic Confederation (IGC) were access to markets, free trade, peace, freedom to use space, and intergalactic communications.
Many xenos -- and this term encompasses any non-human, even those that look similar to humans -- saw this as a way to increase their own power and technology and joined the Confederation for selfish reasons. But nearly all of them ended up giving humans back something of value, inherently making most trades fairly balanced.
The IGC expanded continually long past Osiris' death.
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