Alster Union

This is a player faction. For the affiliated NPC faction, see Unioners

Unioners
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Origin	Rheinland
Alignment	Unlawful
Profile
Date of founding	512 A.S.
Founder(s)	unknown
Base of operations	Pacifica Base, Bering
Primary role
Undermining Republican Shipping
Secondary role
Attacking foreign and domestic shipping, removing Xenos from Bering and Hudson

History

PROLOGUE

Ancient Unioners are today known as an old outlaw group composed of dispossessed Rheinland shipyard workers who engaged in brutal reprisals, chiefly against Republican Shipping. According to the researches conducted for the modern history of Rheinland, expansion into the Independent Worlds changed the agenda of most Unioners from terrorism to piracy and dismantled the already feeble chain of organization with every individual spreading around the universe in quest of his personal passion.

Depressed with the disappointing results of their former alliance with the Corsairs and trying to maintain neutral relations with the entire outlaw organizations of Rheinland, the Unioners are one of the few pirate factions, which refused to pick a side in the Hispanic conflict taking place between the Outcasts and Corsairs.

Born over 120 years ago in the Hamburg system, subsequent to the Eighty Years War, the Unioner movement was created from dispossessed Alster shipyard workers, formerly members of the infamous Alster Union, formed in 521 A.S due to a catastrophic accident aboard the aforesaid shipyard that cost the lives of several hundred shipyard workers. Imperial Shipping, Republican Shipping's direct ancestor and the shipyard's owner, concerned itself little with such trifling details as worker health and safety, rationalizing that the occasional life pension or widow's compensation was nothing compared to the sum to be made from constant productivity.

The Alster Union was formed to improve working conditions for the Hamburgers aboard Alster and later on neighboring station Altona. The skills required to work aboard either station were highly specialized and quite esoteric at the time, and so the Union rapidly established dominance over its employers with benefits and bonuses pouring in, while Hamburg's industry began to change.

The Union, over the centuries, attained so many government subsidies and concessions from Imperial Shipping that labor and production aboard the Hamburg shipyard and aboard Altona were no longer viable - Imperial could no longer compete with the Kusari shipbuilding giants of Samura and Kishiro, and plummeted into financial deficits. Though the Eighty Years War's onset led to a dramatic increase in spacecraft demand, its conclusion, not to mention the Rheinwehr's shattering defeat at the Battle of the Yanagi Cloud, meant that Imperial (rechristened Republican after the Rheinland government was vanquished) was paying for a colossal worker horde without producing anything at marketable prices.

Republican no longer needed its workers - their highly specialized skills had initially led to the Alster Union's great strength - and so it callously disposed of them. Thousands of laborers were cast out to starve to death, any and all concessions to employees were immediately repealed, and the dockworkers of Hamburg were sold into slavery by the corporation they had once had by the throat, in similar, if not worse, conditions as two hundred years previously.

A more radically-minded contingent of the unemployed shipyard workers - at the turn of the century, Hamburg's unemployment rate had topped 30%, a ridiculous figure even by the standards of the corrupted Rheinland government - resolved that, if the soulless Republican suits had left them to die, and if the impotent Rheinland cabinet would let the corporation do as it pleased, they'd simply alter their fates themselves. Thus were the Unioners created.

DIVISION ERA

Though initially a comparatively small organization, similar to the beginnings of the LWB thirty years later, Unioner membership skyrocketed after the Popular Revolt of 703 A.S., during which Rheinland's industrial heart finally stopped its beat after years of weakening. Many more downtrodden throughout Rheinland realized their government's incompetence and incapability and their employers' Orwellian dictatorships - all for the sake of profit - and cast off their shackles to fight for independence. Yet again, ex-Republican employees, particularly Alster and Altona shipyard workers, formed the majority of the new Unioner recruits. Many Daumann and Kruger miners, for example, left to form the Hessians, while students at the New Berlin university created the Bundschuh. Every industrial or economic sector in Rheinland had its revolters - the ranks of the populists swelled, and the Unioners grew mightier.

A NEW HOME

When the first cell of Unioners rebelled and left Hamburg with a fiery farewell (in the form of a series of gravometric mines planted in the Alster docking bays), they needed a semi-permanent base of operations to launch their (remarkably brutal) reprisals against Republican and others. Freeport 2 in Bering tempted them (Freeport 2 had originally been a Republican supply depot, a fact many Unioners found amusing), and there they went. After twenty years of residence there, Freeport 2's Zoner owners had had enough and they issued the Unioners an ultimatum to get off their base. The Unioners, having grown comfortable in Bering, decided to leave the base, but not the system so they carved their own base, Pacifica, out of a sizeable asteroid in the western Tanner Field. Pacifica counts as one of Sirius' most well-hidden pirate bases; though located in a comparatively small system, it's out-of-the-way enough to remain completely invisible at long range, and is concealed among hundreds and hundreds of similar asteroids, as the Tanner Field covers all of Bering. The system's moody lighting, due to its yellow sun, lends Pacifica a tranquil, untroubled setting - quite at odds with its murderous inhabitants.

Diplomacy

Allies

None

Enemies

Republican Shipping

Rheinland Federal Police

Rheinland Military

Bounty Hunters Guild

Xenos

Owned bases

• Pacifica Base, Bering

Other bases populated

• Kreuzberg Depot, New Berlin
• Planet Hamburg, Hamburg
• Freeport 2, Bering