The United Planets Federation
An interstellar federation of 350 to 400 colonised systems, some with multiple colonies. Founded on the principle that major race status, including a seat in the Federation, belongs to races that independently developed jump drives for interstellar travel.
The Federation has known inter-race conflict in its history but has been broadly peaceful for the last few hundred years. Standard Federation policy is non-intervention: civilisations are left to succeed or fail on their own terms. Earth received an exception on two grounds: its incalculable cultural and scientific value as the progenitor world for humanity, and its psionic gene pool.
The governing principle of the Federation's intervention on Earth is minimum collateral damage. It is not conquering. It is intervening.
Earth and the Sol System
Earth is the progenitor world for humanity: the planet from which humans originally evolved before an ancient civilisation, the Precursors, seeded human populations across other worlds approximately 300,000 years ago.
Earth was discovered by Federation scouts 400 years before the story's setting. Over the following 300 years, an observation post watched Earth's industrial civilisation develop. The last 100 years brought escalating concern. The Federation calculated that without immediate extreme intervention, Earth would reach catastrophic destruction through runaway climate collapse or global nuclear war.
The Federation delivered an ultimatum: all nations must disarm and submit to a global governor appointed by the United Planets Federation. All nations refused except one small nation in the southern Pacific. The invasion followed.
The Interviewer
An Earth human. A Ukrainian war journalist who lived through both the war in her country and the United Planets Federation intervention that ended it. She has seen what the intervention cost and what it prevented.
She has been given unfettered access to the people who conducted the invasion, and full editorial control over the documentary. She mostly wants to understand.
Her central question runs through every interview: you had the technology to change everything immediately. Why still let people die? It is not rhetorical. She genuinely does not know the answer at the start. By the end of the series, she does.
Her Ukrainian identity is not incidental. Her country was specifically intervened in. Every conversation about cost, doctrine, and proportionality is personal.
Psionics
Psionic ability exists across multiple races and takes three forms: telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation. These are understood by the Federation as a biological phenomenon, not a supernatural one.
Approximately 10% of Earth humans are psionic, compared to roughly 5% of Federation humans. The higher rate on Earth is one factor in the Federation's decision to intervene: the progenitor world's gene pool is of cultural and scientific value beyond its history.
The Federation has operational procedures governing psionic use. Reading or influencing a mind without consent is treated as a serious violation except in mission-critical circumstances.
Federation Technology
The Federation's foundational technology is gravity manipulation, developed as a prerequisite for the jump drive. Everything downstream flows from this: reactionless spacecraft, stable fusion power at small scales, and power armour that makes conventional military force effectively obsolete against Federation troops.
Against Earth air forces, Federation craft are not competing in the same category of flight. Earth pilots cannot out-manoeuvre a craft with no aerodynamic constraints, no reaction thrust, and internal gravity systems that eliminate g-force for crew.
First-in troopers enter through disposable drop pods. Survivors deploy in power armour in three configurations: scout (high mobility, rail gun), assault (heavy, weapons-platform), and artillery (battlefield support). All configurations carry full electromagnetic spectrum sensors and gravity densitometers.
All Federation military personnel carry nano hives: implanted nanobots that sustain the trooper through injury and accelerate recovery. Civilian versions of this technology, capable of curing practically any disease, are among the first things deployed in New Zealand after the intervention begins.