Welcome to the  first ever dev log for Drifters!

I thought I'd kick things off with some of my thoughts on faction design, as it's a good segue into other things.

One of my goals with this project is to create interesting factions, and to that end the first faction I tried to target was the humble space pirate. I always found media handling of space pirates to be lackluster. They're always the orks of the standard space sci fi universe: chaotic dumb with no clear motivations besides be evil murder hobos. And don't get me wrong, murder hobos can be fun sometimes, but I feel like we can do better.

Who are the kleptocracy?

This is a difficult question to answer, because it's not just one people, and I think that's what makes them interesting. 

The primary question to ask is why someone would turn to piracy, and the most obvious answer is: because of extreme poverty and lack of stable government. Most people don't wake up and decide to try to attack cargo ships and small colonies because of the lawls, they do it because it's either that or starve. I wanted to portray pirates as something more nuanced than simply "evil bad guys everyone hates" but rather a demographic cast aside by society at large and desperate to eek out an existence for themselves, even if it means doing bad things.  

When initially designing them I wanted a name that was more interesting than "space pirate" and when researching different government structures I came across the word kleptocracy. Now the standard textbook definition would be "a corrupt government that steals from the people", but to me there's more to it than that. On closer inspection it's composed of two roots: klepto(thief) and cracy(power/rule). This almost creates a dual meaning. Sure the kleptocracy is indeed composed of pirates and thieves, but many of those people started off by having corrupt governments steal their livelihoods in the first place. Now they're just taking it back. The name is a stab at the people who wronged them much as it is an acknowledgement that they steal to get by.

The duality of space man

I wanted that dual meaning of the kleptocracy to extend to the people making up the faction as well. I think simply making them into noble robin hood type thieves and freedom fighters to be boring, but I also found making mad max psychos boring as well. But what if both groups were to work together under the same banner, complete with all the internal politicking that entails? That's much more interesting to me and I think it's also kind of what makes them even more terrifying and unpredictable. For every sane guy who just wants to take some money/food from you and leave you alive, there's another ship captained by a guy who wants to turn your skin into a hat. The kleptocracy isn't one big group, it's many different groups all operating under the same name.

So how do you unify diametrically opposed groups under one banner? Well, two things. First you establish a pirate code:

No infighting and disputes must be settled with neutral third parties. If you fly under the banner of the kleptocracy you can't be targeted by others flying the same flag. While this prevents all out civil war, assassination and other backstabbing is still common behind closed doors. Second: you simply have an enemy they dislike so much they're willing to work together to undermine, which is a given seeing just how much they hate the various other factions that have screwed them over in the past.

But the thing is, the very thing that unifies the kleptocracy is also the very thing that will never make them a significant power in the sector. While they're not strictly anarchists, they're a people incredibly wary of centralized power, and composed of people with completely different viewpoints from each other. Essentially they're a bunch of crabs in a bucket that will sabotage each other the second one cell grows too big, but at the same time their decentralized nature makes them impossible to truly kill.  Quite a conundrum. 

I think this will also lend itself well to fun quest design and world  building. See, most factions are content merely to beat the other factions, but the Kleptocracy? They hate everyone, including their own members. You're just as likely to get a mission to sabotage another cell as you are another faction.

The mechanical design of the Kleptocracy:

I guess to boil the Kleptocracy's ship designs into one word it would be: desperation. And the thing about being desperate, it's one hell of a motivator.

I find a lot of games tend to treat pirates as nothing more than trash mobs, but the whole idea of pirates is they're scary because they're willing to do things other people won't. While other factions are content with standard military operations and designs, pirates will do anything it takes to win. They're an animal backed into a wall that's not only vicious, but clever. They're fully capable of taking a pile of scrap and engineering it into something that can take out a battlecruiser. And they don't just fly junkyard ships, they steal other factions ships and modify them to be as powerful as they can be, even if it means violating a few OSHA standards. They don't invent much(that takes resources they simply lack), but they can innovate better than anyone in the sector. Many of their designs are either ships far past their expiration date that are still in use because they're just that damn reliable and jam packed with redundant systems and mods, or experimental stuff that's been overclocked where it could explode just by looking at it funny.

So how does this play out mechanically? I boiled this down to a few key philosophies:

• Pirates are perfectly happy taking damage if they can dish it right back. I plan to have hullmods based around buffs for taking damage, ships that have abilities so strong they hurt themselves,  ships that explode violently,  and brawlers that have a lot of firepower but a hard time disengaging. Barring some exceptions, their ships also tend to be a bit faster on average getting them into the fight quicker
• Their ships are dirt cheap both in  cost and maintenance. Pretty straightforward. For early game players  their ships will be good eco ships and often the first a player will salvage as a result. I want them to be good at that role.
• Their ships are smaller tiers on average. Most factions will have capital class ships and a good mix of all weight  tiers, while the kleptocracy focuses mostly on destroyers(the name given to the lowest ship tier) with a handful of cruisers  thrown in.  They can't afford to run big ships and it would just slow them down.
• They can repair quickly. For many factions running  a large fleet is a big deal and getting into combat can leave you vulnerable for a while. Not for the Kleptocracy. One faction trait I'm highly considering is giving their ships a degree of health regen after each victorious round of combat. This means losing even a single skirmish against pirates can be devastating,  and gives incentives for the player using their ships to walk the razors  edge between getting beat up, but not so beat up their ships are disabled and can't be healed. This also makes victory a bit nicer as it's much cheaper to repair post combat.
• Their ships have lower deployment costs on average, giving them a numerical edge both in and out of combat as fleet size is based on deployment points.  Additionally, much like starsector's D-mods, some pirate fleets will be carrying negative hullmods for their ships  which lower deployment cost in combat at the cost of various debuffs, further emphasizing a zergy playstyle.

I think this combination makes them a pretty fun yet powerful playstyle that both early game and later game fleets will benefit from.

Ship Showcase:

I decided on a mix of bug themed names (firefly, termite, cockroach), and names of things you'd associate with a criminal or otherwise not nice person (dagger, knuckle, outlaw).

The cockroach:

The cockroach is basically the indestructible space bus of the drifters universe.  The lore is that it used to be in heavy use for commercial transport with enough weapons to defend itself. The design was in use for basically the better part of a century until newer models came out and it was slowly phased out. But the design was so ubiquitous and robust there's still millions of the dang things sitting in storage or scrap yards. Perfect for any would be pirate to reuse. It's sort of the generalist destroyer for the kleptocracy. Not really good at anything and a decent all rounder, with enough armor, health, and weapons to carry its own weight in combat, while having good storage space as a freighter.

Fun fact: the cockroach was actually the first ship I ever designed, so it always has a place in my heart. Except it looked way, way dumber until I finally gave it a makeover. 

Yeah...it's bad. You can at least see the resemblance and general ideas I was going for.

The knuckle:

The knuckle is designed to be THE brawling ship of the Kleptocracy. Tanky as hell and all forward  facing weapons, it's one of my favorite destroyers in the game so far. The knuckle is actually stolen tech, using experimental shield technology to project dense crystalline barriers in front of the ship, called plate shields. While plate shields are relatively common, the main drawback of them is they break easily and take time to be rebuilt, rendering the ship that uses them vulnerable. The knuckle doesn't have this drawback, and once I get the tech working, will have the ability to instantly regenerate this shield and stay in the fight longer. The downside is the entire ship is focused on the front with only a single rotating hardpoint in the middle, making it easy to counter should it get surrounded by ships or swarmed by fighters.

Weapons:

I've yet to design many weapons specifically for the kleptocracy, but one of the main themes with them is war crimes. All the war crimes. To that end I came up with this fun guy, called the Injector.

Yeah that doesn't look malicious. I'm sure you can guess what it does: injects an enemy ship with a nasty virus, killing the crew over time and damaging internal components until it can be quarantined. I was going for a bacteriophage look with the missile, and I think it turned out alright. Also, where did pirates even get access to this kind of biological warfare tech? That's what a lot of people in universe are wondering.