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The Collective

Slow, resilient bruisers with a preference for close-quarters combat.

The Collective are an ever-spreading swarm of machines of uncertain origin which have set up shop quite comfortably in areas vaguely near the galaxy's edge. Though not sentient in any meaningful way, their adaptation in response to outside threats (read as: the spiky plant infestation) has led to a noticeable increase in the number of point-defence systems mounted on their vessels and the hasty armament of certain models of the scaffolds and processing blocks that line asteroids wherever the Collective can be found. This is not to say they are particularly advanced - if anything, the technology utilised is crude, direct and lethal... most of the time.

Features:
- Heavy armour (and I mean heavy). On my designs, primarily used as an outer "skin" for the vessel.
- Thrusters with sufficient force to shift asteroids around, because you'll probably need that much force to move a reasonably sized vessel with any meaningful amount of speed. Of note is that all except the smallest variant spool up with usage, achieving maximum power with sustained use.
- Ambient buildings, most of which are harmless, and asteroid chunks to attach them to on the off-chance there are no naturally-occurring asteroids to hand.
- One variety of shield (unless you also count the station shield which weighs an obscene amount).
- Various shotguns, slug cannons, and other, smaller weapon systems.
- Many point defence options, from flakburst cannons to lances to kinetic leech beams to simple pellet spreaders.
- Spinal heavy weapons, of the "massive cannon" and "continuous death beam" varieties, as well as a targeting laser so you can line up shots that actually connect/terrify your enemies with the knowledge that a really big gun is being aimed at them.
- Basically no meaningful missile or drone presence outside of an unguided rocket launcher and two varieties of defensive/supportive drone. As noted before, this is not a faction suited to long range combat.

With any luck I've managed to get the balance of this faction somewhat in the ballpark of the vanilla ones.