Prologue
The Republic didn't have an easy start.
In an era long preceding the great Diaspora, a colony ship was constructed and launched amidst great pomp and circumstance. The thousands of colonists elected to leave their homes and loved ones rather than watch their beautiful planet slowly die after several centuries of pollution and its environmental ravages that "progress" had brought with it. Many were displaced from their homes after a short, but nasty war had nearly destroyed their country. In what was considered a grand (and expensive) experiment, the colony ship left its home system hoping to eventually settle its cargo on newly discovered planet in a nearby star system. Either through programming error or sabotage, the ship never did make it to its intended destination. The colonists and crew slept through the journey in cold sleep blissfully unaware of their plight.
Eventually, the colony ship's computer awoke from its electronic hibernation to discover it was dangerously off course. Luckily for the colonists, the ship's designers had seen it fit to install a fusion drive with enough fuel that could propel and power the ship for centuries. It spent the next several hundred years searching for a suitable new home for its precious cargo. After a long search of missteps and wrong turns, the ship eventually settled into orbit above a planet fitting most of the parameters to sustain life.
After the initial shock of discovering just how far they were from home and the euphoria of finding a new home after the long journey spent in cold sleep, the colonists had to acclimate themselves to the idea of living on a planet not their own. They grieved knowing the ones they loved and had left behind on their dying planet had been dead for hundreds of years. Try as they might, the colonists were unable to establish contact with their home world, and the fact their current technology permit a message from reaching it for centuries didn't help. Despite the initial setbacks, they had to persevere; they did not have much of choice in any case.
They spent months studying their new home from orbit before sending survey teams planet side, as well as the outlying system. Ecosystems needed studying. There were native species that needed to be catalogued, categorized, and, in some cases, exterminated. Fortunately, nothing remotely resembling sentience was found on the planet. In the meantime, construction began on orbital habitats where the colonists would reside once they were revived from cold sleep.
The colonists spent countless months, then years, carving civilization out of the wilderness. Eventually, small settlements gave way to cities. Industries sprouted and blossomed to feed, clothe, and house the population as more colonists were revived from cold sleep and sent from the initial orbital habitats. The colonization ship was dismantled for building materials for the settlements planet side and mining facilities were established in the outer perimeters of the system to feed raw materials to the growing cities and orbital habitats planet side. Through determination, a pinch of dumb luck, and a lot of blood, sweat and tears, a civilization eventually flourished on the frontier. Not an easy task considering the local conditions.
Their new planet may have resembled their home world in many respects, but there was one glaring difference. There was the matter of the planet's gravity which was about two and half times what they considered to "standard" gravity. Certain changes had to be made before the colony could truly flourish. The livestock in cold sleep, as well as the some of plants in the colony ship's hydroponics bays, had to be genetically manipulated to better cope with the heavier gravity. There was no genetic manipulation done on the colonists, but they did have to make some adjustments. They spent months in specially modified grav chambers on the orbital habitats. The colonists whose bodies were unable cope with increased gravity stayed on the orbital habitats or established settlements on the planet's two moons.
Within several generations, the colony grew and spread throughout the surrounding solar system. New customs and traditions supplanted some of the older ones brought to the new world by the original colonists. After much debate (and some open hostilities), most of the inhabitants of the planet and the outlying system formed a government modeled after one the most powerful nations from their home world. Eventually, the inhabitants no longer considered themselves colonists, rather called themselves citizens of their Republic.
For a couple of hundred of years, the Republic existed in prosperity and relative peace. The population continued to grow. Scientific, technological, and cultural advancement became a way of life. Long term deep space expeditions, eventually primitive faster than light probes, were sent to explore the systems in the space surrounding the Republic's home system. The world their forebears left all those years before eventually became a faint memory...until one day.