So yeah, here's...this. I'm not happy with it, but I just felt the need to post something. If it wasn't obvious, this takes heavy inspiration from Project Daybreak.
The 2580's mark the beginning of the Storm Conflict.
During this time period, as humanity begins to finally get back on its feet with the increasing returns from the many new colonies frantically established during the ending years of the Human-Covenant War and the early decades of the Reconstruction Era, the peripheral effects of the Blooding Years begin to affect the Human Sphere.
Hostile Covenant warlords had begun to take a increasing interesting towards humanity, along with elements of the Reconciliation League beginning to splinter off over a number of political differences, and intelligence reports from ONI employed League agents point towards a possible invasion and annexation of a number of human colonies, including Earth. Strategists believe this is to take a hold of the few prominent Forerunner reliquaries within human space, including the Ark.
Amongst these warlords, the most prominent of them is Jul'Mdama and his Storm of Onyx faction. A Sangheili figure who quickly rose to prominence during the Reconstruction Era due to quick stabilization of his region of space in the Covenant Sphere thanks to convincing a number of other independent and remote Covenant warlords to join him and his Storm. At first believed to be a positive force to the League due to stabilizing conflicts in his sphere of influence and deterring other nearby factions. But as the years went on, it became increasingly clear that he was against the Arbiters policy of cooperation with the humans, forging alliances and building up his armed forces for the goal that League and ONI agents believe is to launch a successful annexation campaign against the UEG.
With these heightened tensions, the already growing militarization of the UNSC increases and there is the launch of various independent expeditions and military operations against remote enemy factions in and around the Human Sphere as a show of force to deter this possible invasion.
However, a new problem had begun to rise from within humanity. Ever since the end of the War, there had been a increasing strain on the relationship between the UNSC and the UEG, especially with the establishment of the Reclamation Initiative, the provisional/iterm government established by Fleet Commander Terrance Hood and the UEG Secretary-General Matild Molnár as a way to facilitate and foster cooperation between the UEG, the UNSC and the various human colonies.
The UEG was still incapable, at least under its current leadership, of properly operating beyond the matters of the core colonies, and with internal divisions within its own ranks its efforts to reassert control over the UNSC and the human colonies were clumsy and unsuccessful.
Due to this, the Reclamation and the UNSC have gained much more positive responses from the colonies than the UEG, and many, even more independent colonies, looked towards the former to lead humanity into the future, especially with the UEG's assistance on adherence to old ideals, ideals that were rendered obsolete long before the War. And there was a growing division within ONI's own ranks and a tension between them and the UNSC over their growing power and their grand ambitions.
This all came to a head on May 23rd 2593, where during a meeting between the UNSC's and Reclamations emissary to the UEG and its head senate, a bombing attack occurred, where a micro-fusion warhead was detonated in the main building where such a meeting was located.
The following days were chaotic. There were many accusations thrown around and there were many who believed this would be the catalyze for the further splintering of humanity. However, when it was figured that the attack was at the hands of a rogue and disgruntled operative group of ONI, Admiral Serin Osman initiated a purge of ONI and rein in any independent elements. Meanwhile, Fleet Commander Hood and Molnár worked together with the Reclamation to stabilize the chaos and after months of convening with the provisional senate, it was decided.
The UEG, the UNSC and ONI would be reorganized and merged with Reclamation, with the results being to create a new leading human government, military and intelligence agency. While many feared that it would simply be a military junta to bring the full control of humanity under the UNSC, that was far from what Hood, Molnár, and the chancellors of Reclamation intended.
This new reformed government would become known as the Federated Union of Interstellar Nations. Not only would it adhere to a far less Earth centralized, more flexible ideology and policy, it would also give more say and autonomy to the colonies, with each being granted a seat in a newly reformed Senate.
The UNSC became the Union of Nations Strategic Defense Initiative, restructuring its branches into the Interstellar Naval Service, the Mobile Expeditionary Corps, and the Colonial Defense Forces. The INS would remain largely the same as the Navy as it was in the UNSC, while its expeditionary authority and the Marines are rolled into the MEC, and the Army, the Aerospace Force and the Militia are rolled into the Colonial Defense Forces. The INS and the MEC would become the main expeditionary and space forces of the UNSDI, while the CDF would (as evidenced by the name) command the defense and security forces of FUIN colonies, though this would be in a far more reduced capacity due to the increasing focus towards interstellar mobility over raw defense and garrison units ever since the beginning of the Human-Covenant War and the new independence given to the Colonies that encouraged them to create their own defense forces.
For ONI, it underwent the most heavy reconstruction, with the far smaller intelligence organizations of the other branches and ONI being rolled into the Central Administration of Military and Scientific Intelligence. This centralization was to ensure that no single intelligence branch could have as much power as ONI had and to streamline the sharing of information between this new intelligence organization, the UNSDI and the FUIN. More especially, the nature of automation that the CAMSI has was reduced compared to that of the now defunct ONI.
It would be half a decade before the situation fully stabilized, but by then the authority of the new government, its military and its intelligence organ would be established.
For the next couple of years, the UNSDI continued its expansion set upon by hostile Covenant warlords and the UIN continued the operations of the now defunct Reclamation and UEG, establishing its legitimacy to the colonies, independent human polities, the Pliffus and the League through diplomatic efforts. However, as the 2600's began, a number of colonies came under attack by raids from an unknown Covenant polity.
At first it seemed based off of the ship hulls and equipment that these attacks were at the hand of a polity known as the Servants of the Abiding Truth. But after additional CAMSI analysis, it was discovered that the true antagonizer was the Vogga-Kel, a Covenant polity located on the coreward side of the Epsilon Indi Reclamation Zone of significant size, and did these raids to capture humans in order to unlock a large repository of Forerunner reliquaries that the Vogga found in their territory.
After a convening with the League, it was agreed that the only response was a military action. This provided the opportunity to test the effectiveness of the new armaments and the new military doctrine of the UNSDI against a true large scale Covenant polity.
Known as the Kel Campaigns, this operation went on for three years, with UNSDI fleets striking at outer Vogga strongholds while League flotillas established a No-Flight zone around Nexus space, though there were reports of a number of these flotillas letting a few Nexus personnel pass these zones, while the Council of the League tried to convince that the Nexus that if they promised to not make anymore hostile actions against the humans, they could stop this conflict and decrease the severity of punishment that UIN would no doubt level against them. But no response was ever received from Nexus leadership.
By the end of the campaign though, when UNSDI battlefleets were poised to strike at the remaining core territory of the Vogga after burning its outer holdings and finishing off its middle holdings, the leadership surrendered and agreed to the Leagues proposal, much to the chagrin of certain UNSDI personnel. Still, the Nexus was efficiently dismantled and its territory was split between the EIRZ-located members of the League and the FUIN, with all humans captured during the raids being returned and a even split between all Forerunner artifacts (and more advanced examples of Covenant technology that the Nexus had) originally under Nexus control, and any major technological breakthroughs would be shared with each other. Though on both sides there were arguments that they deserved larger splits, the cooler heads at respective leaderships ensured that no conflict came of these arguments.
The artifacts recovered by the UNSDI were mainly cultural antiques that provided some decent insight into Forerunner culture, though there were only a few that were of technological examples. However, these examples did allow some breakthroughs, with main being the means to industrially create slipstream modulation crystal lattices used in Covenant and Forerunner slipspace drives. The following development and later mass production of new generation slispace drives using these SMCLs and other improvements caused the next massive expansion out of the Local Bubble.
Additionally, the Voggas own advanced Covenant technological examples provided a number of improvements to some of the UIN/UNSDI's Covenant derived technologies and a fully functioning mobile Assembly Forge vessel the size of a large habitat, which its study also finally allowed humanity to fully create their own Forges. This vessel would eventually be modify for human use and commissioned into the Naval Logistical Corps as the UNSDIN Jyta's Forge, named in honor of the late Gaiden'Kelli Nexus metallurgist-engineer Jyta 'Katan, who was a prime Assembly Forge manufacturer and materials scientist that worked closely with the UNSDI in order to help improve its manufacturing and metallurgy capabilities.
With the success of the campaign and the proven effectiveness of the new technologies and military doctrine during it, UNSDI AI strategists believed that it was enough to deter Jul'Mdama and his warlords from attacking FUIN colonies, but CAMSI reports said the opposite, with the Storm beginning to make large movements in the Covenant Sphere.
While the reports weren't exactly crystal clear, primarily due to the sheer size and incomplete mapping of the Covenant sphere, they were still able to get the point across. He was hiring up mercenaries, mainly those who fought in the Covenant during the War, convincing minor but industrially strong Covenant polities to lend some of their services to him, fabricating enough ships and military equipment to make even the League more cautionary, and reining in more anti-human warlords, which in return would dedicate their respective armed forces to him.
There was also signs of possible tampering and interfering with diplomatic efforts between various human colonies in the human sphere, with AI analyst models calculating that Storm agents were most likely trying to exploit the tentative nature of relations between UIN, its colonies and independent human polities to create, if not a armed conflict than some kind of diplomatic complication that could disrupt any sort of military effort towards these warlords.
With this in mind, militarization and rearment efforts would continue with increased funding, despite increasing concerns over stretching out the resources of the FUIN and the UNDSI too far, decentralization efforts continued (especially within Sol), and the CAMSI began a long campaign to find and capture any Storm operatives a part of the diplomatic disruption efforts in Human Space.
During these waning years, the FUIN continued colonization and reconstruction, while the UNSDI continued its growing forces, with the main events of focus during these years mainly being first contact with the Palaxian Astral Republic.
It was during 2735 when what would become known as the Diaspora Period began.
On September 7th, the sudden growth tensions between members of the League, its satellite polities, and a number of large factions in the Covenant finally broke from simple political conflicts to a military one. Across a thousand worlds, and thousands more habitat, asteroid and lunar colonies the sights of heavy fighting between Covenant factions that were common during the Great Schism and the Blooding Years repeated.
While the conflict all the way to its end didn't cover the entire or even half of the Covenant Sphere, it was heavy in and around the holdings of various members of the League and many other polities, with even the Arbiter himself and his faction, the Sword of Sanghelios, forced to fight in the conflict. It would be long after the start of the Disperoa Period when it was pieced together that Storm operations in the human sphere was merely a distraction, and Jul'Mdamas true disruption efforts where being focus towards starting the conflict in the Covenant sphere.
Now, there reports of ramping up hostile activity in the Human Sphere, causing more demands of militarization, but the UNSDI is struggling with a internal political mess between various parties arguing over this, and a system that was beginning to overstress, with industrial, economic, and personnel capacities reaching maximum limits despite increased funding from the FUIN. The consequences of the barely controlled rapid growth of the UNSDI was finally starting hit them.
It did not help that a recession had also hit FUIN, causing large losses in the value of military contracts.
With the Covenant Sphere facing a second Blooding Years, the FUIN a economic downturn and their military overstressed, the PAR a disasterious first contact with a new Perseus Arm polity and other systems facing their own struggles, the shadow of disaster looms.