Professor Wayne King-Meiouf of the University of ProximaThis is part one of my series on the Tarbotian Empire which i have been researching for the last few months. In later parts i will cover topics such as the Tarbotian military and their culture and ethos but first lets describe the empire itself.
The Tarbotian Empire is often misunderstood, for a start many people think it is a lot smaller than it actually is. Unlike other powers such as the DTA and HCS which can be covered in weeks by fast ships the Tarbotian Empire is many times larger. Its so large that only about 20% of it has been mapped by the UNP or allies! (Other sources including Tarbotian maps captured during wars which map the entire empire are available to the DDS though these are kept outside of the public sphere). If you look at the UNP Starmap then you can see that quite a sizeable portion these days includes the Tarbotian Empire, however this is only a tiny fraction of their total spread.
The capital itself Tarbot, has only recently been shown on UNP maps (which currently shows space 200 light years around Proxima Centauri) and is about 150 light years from P7. Only with the advent of worm drive is that reachable in anything less than "many months". Tarbot itself is fairly close to the border of the empire, the furthest reach of the empire is said to be about 980 light years from P7.
The empire thus is over 1000 light years across and encompasses a vast area of space. A colleague of mine calculated that if you could combine the DDS, DTA and HCS space together (itself a large area of space) it could fit around 27 times in the Tarbotian Empire!
Hundreds of inhabited systems are under the Tarbotian yoke and hence trillions of individuals. As you can imagine the Tarbotian Empire is a massive juggernaut however luckily for everyone else a massive empire has massive borders and so the vast majority of the Tarbotian Empire's resources are devoted into border and internal security.
That does not mean they don't pose a dire threat to us, their fleet is very powerful as i shall explore in part 2.
