German Empire

The German Empire was a historic human state that existed in Central Europe on the planet Earth in the Sol System that originated in 1871, following the unification of most German-speaking principalities. It also eventually controlled a colonial empire comprised of territories in the Pacific Ocean and interplanetary colonies on Mars and Venus in the Sol System. During its existence, the German Empire was one of humanity's strongest political and military powers. It collapsed following the end of the Great War in 1916 and the German Revolution in 1917, when Germany changed its form of government from a monarchy to a republic.

In 1815, the Congress of Vienna was held to redraw the map of Europe after the defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars. The Congress of Vienna also led to the creation of the German Confederation, an association of German states, which was intended to replace the Holy Roman Empire that been dissolved in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars. However, the German Confederation was weakened by rivalry between its two most powerful members, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire, for supremacy among the German states.

During the German revolutions of 1848–49, which were part of a wave of revolutions that swept through Europe at around the same time, there was an unsuccessful attempt to transform the German Confederation into a unified German federal state with a liberal constitution.

In 1866, the Austro-Prussian War erupted between Prussia and the Austrian Empire as a result of a dispute over the administration of Schleswig-Holstein, which the two of them had conquered from Denmark in the Second Schleswig War in 1864. Prussia was victorious in the conflict, resulting in Prussian hegemony over the other German states. The German Confederation collapsed, and the Prussian-led North German Confederation was formed in 1867 to replace it.

Prussia's growing power and its ambitions to extend German unification led France to launch the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, fearing the shift in the European balance of power that would result if the Prussians succeeded in completely unifying Germany. The Prussian-led North German Confederation decisively defeated France in the war, gaining control of the French region of Alsace-Lorraine. The victory of the North German Confederation in the Franco-Prussian War resulted in the unification of most German-speaking states as the German Empire in 1871. Prussia remained the German Empire's largest, most powerful and most influential constituent state, illustrated by the fact that the King of Prussia was also the German Emperor. The Austrian Empire did not join the German Empire, instead forming the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the Kingdom of Hungary.

The German Empire almost immediately became the most powerful nation in continental Europe. Its formation led former enemies, such as Great Britain and France, to seek closer diplomatic ties with each other. The German Empire inherited the space program of Prussia, which although in its infancy already used revolutionary technologies such as liquid-fueled rockets.

In 1882, the German Empire formed the Triple Alliance, a defensive military alliance, with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy. However, Italy would end up fighting alongside Great Britain, France and the Russian Empire against Germany in the Great War.

In 1884, the German Empire launched a fleet of five spacecraft carrying a total of 35 crew members on its first interplanetary spaceflight toward Mars. The German Empire became the first nation to dispense with the use of the steam-powered Brunel drive design for interplanetary space travel - instead, its ships were powered by a revolutionary liquid propellant consisting of nitric acid and hydrazine. This propulsion system would soon be adapted by other spacefaring nations. Because of their significantly higher speed, the German ships reached Mars after a voyage of only six months, less than half the time of Brunel-drive powered ship designs. The German Empire became the third nation, after Great Britain and the Russian Empire, to make a manned landing on Mars. The German expedition team spent eighteen months exploring the Gale Crater and the surrounding area, finding a few small Martian villages, ruins, artifacts and skeletons. The German expedition departed Mars in late 1885, arriving back on Earth in 1886.

In 1887 the German Empire made its first landing on Venus, sending 70 crew to the planet in a fleet of ten spaceships powered a nitric acid and hydrazine propellant. Arriving after a four month journey from Earth, the expedition team spent one year on Venus exploring the Beta Regio region. The German expedition soon found a cleared section of jungle containing the remains of a huge city constructed entirely out of gold - by far the largest ruined settlement discovered on Venus at that point. At the centre of the city was an enormous golden pyramid, the largest ever discovered. Because of the grand scale of the city, the Germans speculated that it may have been the capital of the Venusian civilization. Germany named the city "El Dorado", after the mythical city of gold in Colombia. After contact was subsequently made with survivors from the Venusian Empire, it was discovered that El Dorado had indeed been the Venusian Empire's capital, and had been named "Oyirosa" by the Venusians. The Germans returned to Earth in 1888. In 1891, explorers from Great Britain established a temporary research outpost at El Dorado, prompting a diplomatic complaint from the German government as the city had been claimed by the German Empire. The British explorers disassembled their temporary base after exploring and studying the ruined city for one year.

In 1893, the German Empire established its first interplanetary colony, landing 500 settlers in the Gale Crater on Mars which had first been visited in the 1884 German Mars expedition. The colony was named "Neues Deutschland" (New Germany). The settlers soon found that the nearby mountain of Aeolis Mons was rich in minerals, including coal, iron ore and gold.

In 1895, the German Empire established a second colony at the ruined Venusian capital of "El Dorado" in the Beta Regio region.

In 1899, after the United States defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War, Spain sold its remaining colonies in the Pacific to the German Empire.

In 1899, a German expedition into the desert of the Aeolis quadrangle on Mars uncovered the entrance to an underground bunker buried beneath the sand. The relatively small bunker contained the remains of advanced Martian weaponry and technology. Examples of these artifacts were shipped back to Earth where German scientists attempted to activate and reverse-engineer them, without any success.

By 1900, a total of 8,000 settlers lived in the German Empire's interplanetary colonies on Mars and Venus. This had grown to a total population of 101,000 by 1914. By 1914, the German Empire had the second-largest population of citizens living on planets other than Earth of any country, behind only Great Britain.

In 1902, in response to a rapid military build-up by the German Empire, Great Britain deployed the first orbital weapons platform. Germany responded by becoming the second nation to launch an orbital weapons platform after Great Britain, which it accomplished in 1905. By the outbreak of the Great War, Germany operated the world's second-largest fleet of orbital weapons platforms.

In 1902 Great Britain also discovered the alien Mons Piton site on Luna. The German government quickly demanded Great Britain to let its scientists have access to the site, suggesting that the study of the alien structure should be a joint human endeavour. In response to the potential threat of an attack on the site by Germany or other nations, Great Britain deployed military forces to protect the Mons Piton site.

After Britain's discovery of the Mons Piton site on Luna, the German Empire launched a major expedition in 1903 to explore Luna's surface in search of additional Venusian technology and artifacts. Despite this, no evidence of the Venusian Empire on Luna other than the Mons Piton site was ever discovered.

In 1905, Germany launched a large expedition to the region of Antarctica on Earth to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. In 1912, German explorers in Antarctica discovered a of a small outpost of the Venusian Empire in East Antarctica, between the head of the Ross Ice Shelf and the Eights Coast. The base contained a small hangar housing two Venusian spaceships similar to the remains of spacecraft found on Mars. However, because they have been surrounded by ice the craft were almost perfectly preserved. The well-preserved frozen bodies of the base's Venusian occupants were also found. Xveca, the leader of the Venusian survivors who had been discovered by Great Britain at the Mons Piton site on Luna, suspected that the research base was established by the Venusian Empire or the Martians to investigate the potential for Earth to be colonized by the remainder of their species after the disastrous Venusian Civil War, however resettlement efforts must have been abandoned as Earth had been going through an ice age around the time that the war concluded. The two spacecraft were transported back to Germany in the hope that the technology from the ships could be reverse engineered. The German Empire's successor state, the German Republic, would eventually succeed in developing the plasma rocket engine from the Venusian ships in 1950.

In the First Moroccan Crisis of 1905 and 1906, Great Britain and France rebuffed a German attempt to diplomatically challenge French control over Morocco and test the new Entente Cordiale between Britain and France. This crisis came to be seen as one of the major events which eventually led to the outbreak of the Great War.

In 1907, the German government protested when Britain refused to allow German representatives to meet with survivors of the Venusian Empire while they were visiting London.

In 1914, the Great War broke out after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The German Empire was allied with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and fought against an alliance led by Great Britain, France and the Russian Empire. The Ottoman Empire later joined the war on the German and Austro-Hungarian side. On the Western front, German strategy was based on the Schlieffen Plan, which involved a rapid invasion of France through Belgium using combined land and air forces to quickly knock France out of the war. However, after taking control of most of Belgium, the German advance was stalled by defending British and French forces, leading to a two-year stalemate dominated by mostly static trench warfare in Belgium and in northeastern France. In the east, the Russian Empire achieved some initial success in the conflict, with its forces advancing into territory held by the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, by 1915 the German and Austro-Hungarian armies had gained the initiative, dealing the Russians heavy casualties and forcing the Russian army into retreat from Russian-controlled Poland. Although the German Empire made some advances on both fronts in Europe, its colonies on Mars and Venus were quickly captured by Allied armies, who possessed larger forces than Germany on those planets. German colonies in China and the Pacific were also captured by Japan.

In 1916 Great Britain, France and the Russian Empire launched a surprise attack using a fleet of armed space capsules and rockets directed at the orbital weapons platforms of Germany and its allies. It was hoped that destroying most of the German-led alliance's fleet of orbital weapons platforms would leave Germany with no way to retaliate against an attack by the Allies' own orbital weapons, which would have forced Germany to surrender and bring a swift end to the war. However, the surprise attack was detected by German forces soon after it began and the leaders of Germany and its allies ordered their weapons platforms to open fire on Allied cities and military targets before they could be destroyed. After the German and German-allied battle stations began firing, the Allies ordered their own orbital weapons stations to fire on Germany and its allies. Many long-range rockets were also used by both sides to strike each other. The short exchange of orbital kinetic weapons and rockets left most of Europe destroyed. Tens of millions of civilians would eventually die from the strikes themselves, as well as from the resulting breakdown of food, water and electricity supplies in addition to outbreaks of disease. The use of chemical shells in many of the orbital projectiles and rockets left some parts of Europe uninhabitable for several years.

The German Empire was one of the countries hit hardest by the Great War and the resulting orbital weapon exchange. In addition to losing more than 1.7 million soldiers in the conventional fighting between 1914 and 1916, at least thirty million German civilians were estimated to have died, largely as a result of the complete destruction of nearly thirty of the country's largest cities by Allied orbital weapon strikes. In total, Germany lost more than 30 per cent of its prewar population. The German capital of Berlin was heavily bombed and destroyed, killing Kaiser Wilhelm II - German Emperor and King of Prussia - and much of his line of succession. Discontent with the war had been growing in Germany due to the conscription, rationing and poor economic conditions the population was subjected to during the conflict, and the power vacuum resulting from the Kaiser's death led to a wave of civil unrest erupting across the country. The unrest ultimately led to the proclamation of the establishment of the German Republic by leftist revolutionaries in 1917 to replace the German Empire, and the remaining constituent monarchies of Germany were abolished. The former constituent states of the German Empire - such as Prussia - were reorganised into constituent republics within the German Republic, with each receiving a democratic constitution.