Author's Note: I tweaked Ch. 3 to be a bit longer, so please go take a look! Anyway, this chapter is a codex chapter on the alliance. Next chapter time-skips to the start of the Reaper's invasion.
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Codex: Alliance FTL The FTL drives developed by the alliance tend to be somewhat slower (only reaching 6-8 light years a day, when Council built ones can do 10-12 light years a day), but they have the advantage of being able to go for up to 5 times longer without discharging. They stated that they have managed this due to discharging the drive in flight using the magnetic field of the entire galaxy, but this is unconfirmed.
Codex: Alliance laser weapons The Alliance failed to develop kinetic barriers for the simple reason that they already deployed energy weapons on a large scale by the time they were able to build such a thing. Handheld laser weapons operate in the visible spectrum, they have effective ranges from 30 meters for a pistol, to 1.6 kilometers for a sniper laser. Handheld laser weapons deliver a large amount of energy with each shot, yielding roughly 3 times the killing power of an equivalently sized mass accelerator. The major drawback to this is energy needs, a laser requires a significantly larger amount of energy to fire than a mass accelerator. This means that the Alliance's standard issue AL-4 needs to have the power pack changed every 32 shots, which was designed to be as seamless and efficient a process as possible.
Starship mounted laser weapons operate in the X-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The Alliance managed to mitigate the problem with laser degradation to some degree by implementing rather comprehensive self-maintenance protocols into their shipboard laser weapons. A 'standard' Alliance laser cannon is about 30 meters long, and has an effective range of 5,000 km inside which it delivers energy roughly equivalent to a kiloton of TNT.
Of course, this all pales in comparison to the Bomb-Pumped X-Ray Laser (often shortened to BPXRL). In this device, a nuclear weapon is initiated inside a specialized X-Ray Laser, resulting in roughly 34% of the bomb's energy winding up in a laser beam aimed straight at the target ship. Worth noting is that BPXRLs are disposable weapons and are destroyed when they are fired.
Codex: Alliance Mass Accelerator Assisted Nuclear Laser Launch System
This weapons system is what the Alliance deploys instead of conventional Mass Accelerators or disruptor torpedoes. In it, a missile carrying a BPXRL is fired from a mass accelerator at roughly 500 km/s. It then gets to within its warhead's effective range of the target ship (usually outside the target ship's GARDIAN range) and fires the onboard BPXRL.
Codex: Alliance AIs The AIs produced by the alliance are different from the 'normal' blue boxor consensus types. Alliance AIs actually instead work by creating a large cluster of virtual neurons in the same general configuration as an organic brain. This means that Alliance AIs are almost psychologically identical to organics. In addition, their brain being completely virtual allows for them to jump between various bodies more or less at will. It's quite common in Alliance space for an AI to sign on as a ship's life support for a year as an example.
Codex: Neural Interface Technology
The Alliance has, partially with the intent of curing a destructive brain disease known as Alzheimer's, created a means to copy memories to or from an organic brain. This technology also allows the user to control compatible pieces of technology almost like they were a part of the user's own body. It is also infamously used as a punishment in their court system, as the criminal is forced to experience every wrong they ever inflicted on another sapient being all at once. Needless to say, the rate of repeat offenses is very low. Notably, Asari are somewhat offended at that last use of NI technology, as it reminds them all too much of Ardat-Yakshi.
Codex: Alliance Culture It is said that the 1st Human to visit the Citadel responded by saying "It's a bit large, but I bet we could make a bigger one if we had to." This turned out to be true. Due to having (as several analysts have said) 'horrible luck at finding Garden Worlds' the Alliance is primarily a space-based civilization. The main population centers for the Alliance are actually 25 km long rotating space habitats not too dissimilar to the Citadel, the main difference is that 5/6 of an Alliance 'city' is given over to maintaining an independent biosphere for the purposes of providing a closed-loop ecosystem. The importance of these self-sufficient habitats only increased after the Alliance's home-world was rendered uninhabitable by a massive super-volcano known as Yellowstone. An interesting side-effect of this is that Alliance citizens tend to think in cylinders, rater than flat planes, in terms of how a place is organized on a large scale.
The Alliance also has a rather intolerant view towards slavery and sapient rights abuses, as for 35 years an oppressive regime known as Fletcher's Dominion resided within their home system's asteroid belt. They removed Fletcher's regime from existence (and subjected Fletcher himself to the punishment many Asari have taken to calling 'mind rape') through an extremely bloody 4 year war. Afterwards the general opinion about slavery became "we suffered enough bringing that horrible injustice to an end once, and we will never let it happen ever again." This has put the Alliance at odds with the Batarian Hegemony, with the Alliance launching periodic raids into Batarian space to liberate slaves and 'mind rape' slavers.
Codex: Synthetic Eezo The Alliance is notable for having no natural eezo deposits in their home system. This led to them attempting to replicate the synthesis process. They eventually succeeded at this, despite the fact that the revived Protheans have confirmed that they were incapable of synthesizing eezo. Noting the reference to super-novas, the Alliance (at the time divided into various nations occupying different parts of their home system) built a reactor capable of inducing fusion in iron, which requires more energy to fuse then you get in return (the catalyst for a supernova), and added various amounts of trace elements until they found the correct one that would yield eezo when exposed to the aforementioned pseudo-nova. The correct trace element in question eventually turned out to be cobalt. The process also produces large amounts of Tellurium as a byproduct, as it is the result of iron-iron fusion.
The council notably has had a horrible run of experiences with synthetic eezo production. Roughly every 1 in 3 Synthetic Eezo Plants built by the council either explodes or collapses into a short-lived singularity. The Alliance has stated that this was a problem for them too in the early days of the technology's usage. Notably, the rate of incidents has reduced greatly ever since the year 2148, which was also the year 46 live Protheans were discovered in stasis during an archaeological dig and successfully revived.
Codex: Alliance cities The Alliance is capable of building rotating space stations similar to the Citadel that are up to 60 km long and 15 km in diameter. Usually, however, they just build ones 25 km long with an 8 km diameter to save resources. In fact these space stations are where the vast majority of the Alliance's population lives. The reason for this is that in the Alliance's pre-FTL days a wealthy industrialist by the name of Jennifer Dawes ran a social experiment to see if a planet-independent society could work. Given that the resulting "Dawes Republic" wound up being the De-facto ruler of their home system within 50 years, the result was an astounding 'yes!'. As a result of this, the Alliance doesn't really care whether a system has a garden world or not, they'll gladly just build a few hundred 'cities' there and make it home. Worth noting is that the Alliance has in fact built a significant number of 'nomad cities' equipped with engines and FTL drives. The Quarians have in fact built a nomad eezo synthesizer (and 15 nomad cities) for themselves, easing their population restrictions somewhat.
Codex: Alliance Ship design The Alliance failed to develop kinetic barriers, as they would not block the Alliance's energy weapons anyway. The Alliance, instead of favoring shields and agile dodging maneuvers like the vast majority of the species out there, instead build their ships with exceedingly thick armor. Though this tends to hurt the maneuverability of Alliance ships, it is made up for by the fact that said ships have a well-deserved reputation for being indestructible. Take Alliance cruisers as an example, they have a 600 meter external diameter (the Alliance builds their ships and cities cylindrical in most cases), but the interior has only a 400 meter diameter, as the cruiser's armor is 100 meters thick.
In terms of weaponry Alliance ships tend to go for a massive spinal laser (similar to the mass accelerators found in council vessels), capable of demolishing targets at ranges of 1 light second with yields of 200 kilotons for cruisers. this is supplemented by 2 (for corvettes) 4 (for frigates) 6 (for cruisers) or 12(for battle-spheres) MAANLLS tubes, firing from the hull at a 3 degree angle. This weapon loadout is completed by a 6-angle broadside of 18 (for corvettes) 30 (for frigates) 60 (for cruisers) or 180 (for battle-spheres) 'standard' laser cannons. As they are accustomed to dealing with missiles where the warhead has a longer effective range then any ship-mounted point defense system ever could, they typically deal with incoming missiles by launching smaller missiles, which are equipped with 1 kiloton BPXRLs.
Codex: The Relay 314 Incident The Alliance was 1st contacted when a pirate vessel was pursued through 4 uncharted relays by Amvus Sylrinus, at the time captain of the ship sorry, we ran out of names The incident shares its name with the 1st Relay the pirates activated, relay 314. Upon arriving in the Alliance-owned Aurora system, the Pirate vessel started an attack run on one of the Alliance's only 4 Garden worlds. Not wanting to go along with this, the local System Defense Coordinator Cammie Goucher ordered a 1 megaton BPXRL fired at the pirate vessel, which was destroyed in one hit.
Amvus' patrol exited the relay shortly after and pursued the light-lagged image of the Pirate vessel, until the light from the pirate ship's destruction reached them. As they were turning to decelerate a 200 kiloton BPXRL shot hit Amvus' ship near the tip, but barely failed to penetrate the extra-thick ablative armor that the ship had been fitted with. The 1st contact package that was broadcast before a 2nd BPXRL shot could be fired thankfully defused the situation.