A science fiction setting! There are a great many inhabited systems, humans and human-descendants only. The Attani Empire is the strongest known galactic power, an expansionist empire that approves of genetic engineering and disapproves of rebellion; Tsirona is a planet they conquered. Tsirona doesn't want to be under the Attani Empire any more! The Attani Empire does not care!

The Attani Empire has an unusual succession system: Genetically engineer a bunch of super-competent teenagers, teach 'em everything you can, and then drop them all on a planet they don't care about, and see who conquers it. Their argument is that this is Version 2.0 of the Ottoman succession system (civil war), which was the most effective system for locating competent heirs in human history; it actually tests who's good at winning loyalty and winning wars before you hand the entire empire over to them. They just picked Tsirona to be the test subject, so there's an *astonishing* amount of military geniuses, charismatic rebel leaders, oddly influential back-bencher politicians, and random high-tech bullshit running around the planet.

The setting's FTL method is 'wormhole tunnelers', a very expensive piece of spaceship technology that lets you establish a portal between two semi-arbitrary points far enough from a gravity well. Build stations on both sides, expand the wormhole when you need to send ships through and contract it to save on power the rest of the time, and you have a permanent link. If anything happens to the station on either side, the gate closes. If you use a wormhole tunneler to open an initial link to an enemy system, the enemy can see where the tunnel is going to come out before it does and prepare an ambush. This produces a strong defense-advantage situation, where overwhelming local superiority is required to take systems.

The Attani have more differences from baseline humans than baseline humans do from each other, and they are semi-crossfertile - there are a lot of half-Attani, but they're more likely to fail to conceive and a lot of them are sterile, blind, or have other severe health conditions. Attani improvements include higher average IQ, muscles that automatically keep tone, very good senses, better reflexes, longer lifespans, vastly greater durability, and only needing four hours of sleep a night. Cocoon Children are used as test subjects for improvements to these processes and quietly shuffled out of the way if they don't work.

The Attani have recently invented artificial gravity. It's primarily used to allow spaceships to accelerate faster than their crews could previously survive, but they're coming up with lots and lots of new uses for it.

AI is taken maximally seriously and banned by international treaty, with a few hollowed-out exceptions for AIs that existed before the treaties were signed and are obviously not trying to wipe out humanity, with the scariest example being the Attani Empire's Central Computing.

The trump card in planetary warfare is orbital bombardment, but there's also aircraft (fighters, bombers, 'skycruisers') and powered-armor-wearing infantry (It's *very very good* powered armor; think of it as wearing a personal tank), and, theoretically, navies - surface ships are generally agreed to be obsolete against aerial attack.

Most Attani weapons are magnetic weapons in one form or another; notable examples are "hand needlers" (machine-gun pistols; not very accurate, bounces off armor, very deadly against lynch mobs, standard Attani sidearm) and "AP rifles" (essentially a tank's main gun, detached from the tank, standard Attani main weapon - it takes a lot to get through powered armor).

Attani tech is gene-locked so only Attani can use it. This recently got broken by the leader of a major rebellion, which is very odd.

Tsirona recently got "invaded by aliens," or so they say. The aliens might be genetically-engineered monsters instead. They're nicknamed the granchi, look sort of like crab-centaur-spider-monsters, live deep underwater, don't appear to be sapient, and try to kill people a lot.