Hive Queen Quest

That depends entirely on your knowledge of the subject technology. If you've ever passed by an industrial district on the highway and blankly thought "wow, I have no idea what that is for" then try and picture looking at a structure built by aliens. While you do have information gathered from captured Scavengers, most of them are about as wise in the ways of scav industry and logistics as you or I. That said, you can made rather reliable broad generalizations, such as distinguishing military, logistical, or commercial structures from one another using only a rough grasp of the species architecture and culture.

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As for the Scav world-ships, they are somewhat easy to figure out in this way, due to their harshly spartan culture, everything is very practical in design, and thus tends to be more easy to interpret. In addition, unlike proper space cities, the world-ships seem to be more tightly designed, without a large, spinning ward structure but instead being a solid chunk of armored and shielded hull to maximize defense and minimize exposed surface area, and that surface is almost entirely devoted to weapon batteries, hangar bays, retractable dock yards, and industrial scale resource extraction and processing intakes. From your gathered memories of the scav society, you do know that most World-ships are built around scavenged sacred technology left behind by their gods, in addition to whatever valuable tech they find on the worlds they strip. The process of building a world-ship is in itself a form of worship, with the scavs using the resources they find to create a structure whose form itself is an expression of their devotion to the gods, using what resources they find like a divine, ship-building version of Iron Chef. As such, the world-ships are not always optimally built with a singular purpose in mind, but are instead built to maximize the use of the scavenged infrastructure. It is not uncommon for entire wards to be stripped districts of alien space cities or weapon batteries to be stripped down battleship hulls split open and grafted over the outer hull, but the inner core is almost always some manner of highly potent Watcher technology, which they tend to try to theme the rest of the ship around.

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Everything, even inanimate objects are vulnerable to void scrying. The difference is that it is much more difficult to find something when it is not psionically active unless it is personally linked to the one searching. While it is more difficult to find a default human than to find a psionically active human using scrying, the real differences are in the resistance to mental attack or manipulation. A normal human has a passive resistance that relies largely on its mental stealth to passively not be attacked, and once targeted directly will tend to corrode over an extended period of time, preventing being made into a long-term servant without modification, as you have seen. A psionically active individual, however, gains a layer of active mental defense built upon their own training and mental abilities to actively fight off any mental attack and resist such influences. A human psion has sacrificed a portion of their natural shallow presence in the Void in order to gain mental powers, but this effect is not 100% lost, only their long term self-destructive nature is totally removed. In essence, you could assume that the modifications made to the humans to allow them to suffer the influence of the Void are not all that dissimilar to your own receiving-only relay that you gave to Lee.

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To think of it in typical RPG combat terms, default human resistance is essentially Evasion Tanking, while a psion is armor tanking, while a human psion is dipping into both.

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The Commonwealth has just about every form of government there is representing somewhere within its space, but very few would qualify to be democratic in nature. For the most part, the matter of migration is less an issue of legal statutes and more one of decree by a planet's ruling monarch, council, chairman, dictator, or oligarch class. In the case of Argos specifically, the planet pledges fealty to a prominent house of nobility within the Ruenthal Empire, and as such the various noble representatives involved will discuss where there is an excess of population, if any, and where they would be most appropriate to relocate to. Royal proclamations do require certain rights to be granted to its subjects, both in the negative and positive manner, these "peasant privileges" include such things as free basic education, health care, and guaranteed housing, among others. These are ostensibly designed by the Emperor to prevent peasant revolts by ensuring a basic standard of living. These regulations say nothing about the distribution of technology and the like, but for the most part, the subjects of any planet working under a neo-feudal system do have a standard of living that is at least not oppressive.

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In the case of Argos, those too young to work attend an education system designed to test the aptitude of students and train them in the appropriate fields of study needed to operate and maintain the machinery used in the planet's many manufactories, mines, and processing plants. While these systems are largely automated, they do require technicians to repair and maintain, as well as update them as improvements are developed and build new facilities as needed. In addition, those who are especially skilled are given the option to attend off world officer academies, as the Commonwealth fleet maintains recruiting stations on every world, and is always on the lookout for potential officers. Those who are too old to work or are especially injured or incapable of work are cared for by their families, who are paid a stipend by their lords for the extra effort. If they have no family, or their family is unable to care for them even with the stipend, they are sent to care facilities that are typically maintained on a dedicated floor of some of the larger hospitals on the planet, typically in the planetary capital or major metropolitan center if the world has any. They're certainly no five star hotel, but they are clean, efficient, and peaceful. Pretty much what you would expect from a retirement home, really.

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Not quite. While it is true migration is more controlled in the Commonwealth, this is largely due to its decentralization and wealth disparity and not regulation. Those who can afford to move tend to be in charge of the worlds they live on, and those who would wish to move tend to be unable to, leaving military service as the only real option. This also means that civilians are seen as a valuable resource on most Commonwealth worlds, and no self-respecting member of the nobility would turn down a large influx of even moderately skilled laborers, which Argos has many. In addition, Argos itself is a major world of great strategic value, as it is an industrial powerhouse with a great deal of shipyards and industrial infrastructure along with a bounty of natural resources. Despite the loss of most orbital structures, the surface still has many factories and processing plants that can be repaired, and the Commonwealth will place a great deal of priority on bringing the planet's industrial sectors back up to full production as soon as possible. In all likelihood the planet will actually receive an influx of migrants to replace those who died in the fighting and help with reconstruction, and not an outflow of displaced refugees.

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None that are known. They interact with the Valen in a peripheral sense, using them as intermediaries when dealing with the Union, and having very infrequent trade agreements on occasion as well as the occasional mercenary contract, but their overall interactions with non-human civilizations is otherwise highly limited. Taidaren are largely barred from Commonwealth space, ostensibly for health reasons, but more accurately because they know the evolutionary prerogative that directs their general behavior, and are not interested in establishing a semi-hostile parasitic underclass that the taidarens have created on so many Union worlds. By and large, Ceph are seen as potential enemy agents, and the Commonwealth want nothing to do with them, since Void Cutters rarely raid or attack Commonwealth forces and both the local planetary leadership and the wider Commonwealth administration believes giving shelter to Ceph refugees would only increase the odds of that changing for the worse.

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The only alien species other than the Hive that the Commonwealth has any official interaction with is the Valen clans, which are cordial, but deliberately distant, with no treaties for gate building and no embassies recognized or held by either party, although there are a number of delegations and clan representatives spread across both factions' space representing the interests of local planetary authorities and individual competing banking clans, such arrangements are done carefully and with as little attention as possible to avoid the larger Commonwealth administration from shutting things down for fear of allowing valen influence over local rulers to grow too strong. The Valen capacity for subterfuge is well known, and any treaty proposed or contract offered is given a great deal of suspicion as a result.

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The fact that the Commonwealth have allowed themselves to interact so closely with the Hive in so short a time speaks more to their desperation than to their diplomatic instincts, as they normally respond to alien diplomatic gestures with hesitation and paranoid xenophobia, though your strong-arm interactions with the other factions in the area could have influenced that in some way. Regardless, the Commonwealth's primary goal has always been to maintain the stable human hegemony within their space, and the furthering of human self-interest policies within the region, and they have always functioned on the unstated understanding that all other species' governments function along the same, or similar prerogatives for the self-interest of their own species and species sub-factions. Because of this, the only outright hostile relationships they have historically have had, is with the Union, who claim to be more egalitarian in nature, a claim the Commonwealth considers to be a cover for a mixture of corruption and incompetence in avoiding alien influences in policy decisions.

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From what you can gather, the Cluster utilized evolution on a mass scale as a kind of skunkworks, seeding life on harsh worlds to then harvest the resulting adaptations, with most of their population, if you can call it that, living in space in nomadic cluster forms. The Watchers on the other hand are less clear, but seem to have been more artistically minded, viewing a planet's biosphere as something akin to a highly complex work of art, like a bonsai tree in need of careful pruning and grooming. Such garden worlds were likely not intended to hold any practical function beyond their simple beauty and artistic appeal, collecting all manner of interesting creatures, or even shaping and guiding evolution to make them more interesting, and micromanaging them in a carefully balanced ecosystem, like a fish tank or terrarium, but on a planetary scale.

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Yes, such Agents do not require a level of civilizational development to recruit, although such a lack of development would cause any recruits to be weighted away from scientists and more in favor of specializations that relate to their native environment, such as survivalist, brawler, or species-exclusive specializations, just as any recruited taken from a highly developed world would be much less likely to be skilled at surviving wild environments and more likely to be an engineer, tech, or spin doctor, while those who live on less developed, but still advanced worlds would have more a mix of survivalists and sharpshooters. Scientists require highly specialized training, and can't typically be recruited from a general population, while psions are made through implants, but are instead noted during recruiting drives as being individuals with notable mental will who would, if trained, have notable psionic skill. In this case, psion is actually not an exclusive specialization. A newly recruited Agent won't only be a potential psion, instead, out of a list of newly recruited Agents, some will have the potential of becoming skilled psions with the proper implants and training, while others simply lack the willpower, so psion is less like a specialization and more like a modifier. You can get a Tech, for example, who then tests to be suitable to be a psion, and then you will have a psionic Tech Agent.

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