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Fwee

The Fwee are a race of tiny hexapods (configured as winged bipeds) native to a small planet with an atmosphere rich in sodium hexafluoride. Due to the nature of their physiology, the relative lack of large predators on the low-gravity world, and the atmosphere's density, they never really developed any sort of aerospace technology. When an "independent explorer" "discovered" the planet (by crash landing on it, as happens suspiciously often), they took the news that other worlds were inhbited relatively well and assisted their giant guests in their departure after making them settle a few internal conflicts; the average Fwee's small size made mastering precision electrical circuit easier than it would have been for other races.

Contemporary Fwee spacecraft generally can leave their homeworld in rockoons, which makes access to space remarkably cheap for the individual Fwee with a bit of cash to burn.

One thing that changed Fwee society was the realization that, in fact, it wasn't so much their "discoverers" who had been gigantic, but rather than they themselves were the smallest sentient race in the known galaxy. The effect of standard oxygen mix on their voices probably didn't help.

Being six inches tall gives Fwee a notable advantage when it comes to precision work, fleet logistics, and infiltration, but it doesn't do much when it comes to diplomacy; after a tentative periood in which offworlders were hired as diplomatic attaches and effectively used as riding mounts by Fwee nobles, which created all manner of uneasy social situations both domestically and interplanetarily, Fwee engineers put their tiny but quick brains to the task and, somewhat later than most other races, developed their own species' version of the land ironclad.

All-out war in Fwee society is rare, but brutal when it happens: the thick atmosphere, low gravity, and necessity to think in three dimensions mean that hand to hand or short-range combat still prevails in internal affairs. Even to this day a Fwee noble is expected to be a master swordfighter.

The Fwee's inability to execute conventional boarding actions, combined with the quirks in their military doctrine and a sudden availability of (relatively to Fwee size) huge batteries and electric motors, culminated in the invention of what is generally translated as the Battleman.

Battlemen today are usually mistaken for the usual sort of "grunt" humaniform droid, but are in fact an admixture of motorized armor and land vehicle, controlled by a small group of Fwee much like a ship is controlled by its crew, for purposes of interoperability with alien races. In general, for obvious psychological reasons a Battleman tends to be on the taller side of average, small enough to fit in doorways but large enough to force others to look up. The actual control station of a Battleman may be in the head or in the hips, generally avoiding the center of mass.

Unlike a droid, a Battleman requires a pilot, but has the advantage of being repairable from the inside, having been built by Fwee technicians. It is in turn speculated that at least some of the advancement in humaniform robot technology is imputable to infrequent, but not too rare, sighting of these machines.

When the Imperials eventually came to "civilize" the Fwee, they were quite ready for it. The Imperials had hoped to bypass a costly fleet engagement by the use of drop pods, confident that a land conflict would be won within days; what they found instead were opponents that could go against foot soldiers, were used to the planetary conditions, and literally had eyes on the back of their heads. This forced the Imperials to fortify their landing positions and entrench them, which left the tiny and quiet Fwee plenty of opportunity for massive nighttime sabotage while keeping up the defence during the day. After the Imperials got one hell of a bloody lip from pixies in giant robots, the exploration of this world was unpublished.

Maintaining a battleman has historically been a right and a duty of local nobles, but recent advancements in CPU technology allow for Battlemen that can be operated by a single crewmember, considerably lowering the barrier to entry to owning one to the point that a Fwee who is unhappy with the generally eusocial arrangement of the society at home can strike it on his or her own for a relatively small investment.