Tholian Holdfast

The Tholians are a crystalline based insectoid race, not native to the Milky Way. Their home world was a place of intense heat, pressure, and chemical clouds, where life evolved from inorganic crystals. The Tholian race as a result requires extreme life support to survive, and has a biology incompatible with most other lifeforms. However it has left them with the unique ability to interfact directly with technology, as their own nueral systems resemble that of computers and capable of generating and receiving complex Electromagnetic fields. In addition, Tholians are strong, highly intelligent, and long lived.The Tholian rise of civilization was not entirely natural. Tholian history records that in the distant past their ancestors were uplifted as slaves by a powerful but mysterious race, the Shedai, which appears to have held territory across the entire local galactic group. The Tholians turned this race's own technology against them, wiping them out in the Tholian home galaxy of M81. From the ruins of the Tholian Will emerged, going on to conquer nearly all of their home galaxy. However with power came great arrogance, and the Tholians made the same mistake as their progenitors, uplifting slave races to serve them and control races in environments the Tholians cannot enter safely. One of these races, the Seltorians, slipped the Tholian controls and rose up in revolt, systematically destroying the Tholian Will.

The Tholians that survived the Seltorian Holocaust did so by fleeing their own galaxy. Refugee fleets set out all over, and the fates of most are unknown. one of the largest groups, the inhabitants of a small Dyson sphere, managed to rescue their entire society by using a Shedai transportation device to move the entire solar system, Dyson Sphere and all, to the Milky Way. The Tholians arrived in a largely abandoned area of the galaxy, near the Taurus Reach, a former Shedai stronghold. The region was claimed by the Fledgling Klingon Empire, but was an empty region with few native civilizations. The Tholians rapidly moved to secure their new territory, bringing them into direct conflict with the Klingon Empire.

Territorial Claims

The Tholians hold onto their territory with iron claws, but are rarely expansionary. Their territory covers several hundred parsecs, mostly of barren territory of little interest to anyone except for their resources. however it sits right across what would be several very lucrative trading route to several more attractive regions, which has led to frequent conflicts. The heart of the Holdfast is the Dyson Sphere, renamed Tholia in memory of their lost home, which serves as homeworld and capitol. The Sphere is small, built around a Brown Dwarf which has been artificially ignited and controlled. The interior has never been seen by a non-tholian, but is believed to be made over into the image of their lost homeworld, with Crystal forests and an entire ecosystem supporting a population of trillions. The Sphere also houses their primary shipyards. The Sphere is constantly guarded by a strong fleet, as the klingon's found out in the early 23nd century when one of their extermination efforts managed to reach the Sphere and inflict damage to it before being utterly destroyed. Spread across the Holdfast are a great many outposts and bases, military bases and resource colonies constructed to support the Dyson sphere's population, and it's defenses. The Tholians have few planet based facilities, as none of the worlds in their territory are suited to their life support needs, or good prospects for Tholiaforming. Those few planetary outposts they do have are largely on airless worlds, where large dome and underground cities can be constructed. A handful of worlds in their territory possess native civilizations, most very primitive. The Tholians have chosen to isolate these systems and observe them. to what ends is unknown. The Xenophobic Tholians are unlikely to see these races as allies, or to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors, but they seem to have adopted a hands off policy regarding those races, even to the point of defending those worlds against invasion.

Government

The Tholian Government is called the Tholian Assembly. This body is massive, and intricately structured into tiers and sections, the exact nature of which is largely unknown to non-tholians. Because Tholians can communicate by EM fields and direct contact, the Assembly operates as a pseudo-hive mind, debates occurring at the speed of thought across the whole. The Assembly selects representatives to relay its decisions to across the holdfast, apparently sacrificing speed for security and to inform regional leadership face to face.

Military Forces

The Tholian Military is called the "Might", and its primary directive is the defense of the Holdfast. Operating out of asteroid bases and with a focus on mobile defense, the Might will confront and ward off any incursion into Tholian territory. It's structure is not fully understood, but they appear to use a structure similar to most other races, with equivalents of Admirals, Captains, non-commissioned, officers, and so on. however this organization seems to be fluid when viewed by outsiders, with individuals sometimes ceding authority to seemingly lower ranking individuals, suggesting that it has unknown rules and limits unknown to outsiders. When the Holdfast was first established, the Might had a limited number of vessels, and infrastructure for expansion ofthe fleet was limited. which led to the development of several new classes based on easily produced components. as the Holdfast grew and expanded, the ability to construct classes from their home galaxy became a priority, and in the mid 23rd century new shipyards were built to construct them. To the powers of the Milky Way, these designs appeared to be new, advanced designs, meant to counter the wave of advanced ships being built by the Alpha and Beta Quadrant races.

Tholian Asteroid Base:

Unwilling (or unable) to devote precious resources to building large free floating space stations, the Tholian Holdfast instead makes use of base facilities built into the ubiquitous asteroids of stellar systems. The thick layer of rock and metal around the base facilities give these stations durability as well as helping to hide their locations from enemy forces. Individually these stations are small, however their ease of construction allow the Tholians to build multiples in a system, often clustered together.

Type: Station
NPV: 1352
CPV: 812
Mass: 360
Thrust: None (station)
Hull: 52 (4 rows, 18 crew units)
Armor: Shell 1: 30, Shell 2: 30
3x Fire Control
6x Pulser (6 arc)
3x Beam 1 (6 arc)
Hanger Space: 126 mass limit
Cargo Space: 24 mass
Passenger Space: 5 mass