Treaty of Farixen: the dreadnought ratio that held Citadel space

The Treaty of Farixen was the arms limitation agreement that governed capital ship construction among the major species of Citadel space. Signed after the Farixen Naval Conference, it fixed a ratio of dreadnought construction between the Citadel Council races and their associates, seating the Turian Hierarchy at the top of the pyramid on the strength of its peacekeeping role. The Asari Republics and the Salarian Union took the second tier, associate members like the volus and the hanar the third, and species outside the Citadel order, from the Batarian Hegemony to the geth, were bound by nothing at all.

The weapon the treaty was written for#

A dreadnought was a kilometre class capital ship built around a single idea, which was the length of its main gun. The hulls ran from eight hundred metres to a full kilometre, and the mass accelerator ran nearly the length of the ship, because barrel length was what determined how hard the slug hit. An eight hundred metre accelerator could throw a twenty kilogram slug at 4,025 kilometres per second, roughly 1.3 percent of light speed, once every two seconds. Each of those slugs carried the kinetic energy of about thirty eight kilotons of TNT, some two and a half times the yield of the fission weapon that destroyed Hiroshima.

Ships of that weight were treated as a strategic resource rather than a patrol asset. They were hoarded, committed only to the most vital engagements, and screened in battle by cruiser squadrons guarding their flanks against any enemy manoeuvring for a shot at their vulnerable broadsides. They could not be landed safely on a planet and had to discharge their drive cores into a planetary magnetic field from orbit. It was this destructive potential, plainly stated, that drove the Council races to the negotiating table at Farixen in the first place.

The Farixen Naval Conference#

At the Conference the Council races agreed to fix the proportions of dreadnought construction between themselves rather than trust to restraint. The pyramid they drew put the turian navy at the summit. The turians carried the peacekeeping burden of Citadel space and supplied the greater number of hulls in the Citadel Fleet, the mixed turian, salarian and asari force that patrolled the relays and guarded the station itself, so the Hierarchy was allowed the largest dreadnought establishment of any signatory.

Below the turians sat the other Council races, the asari and the salarians. Below them again sat the associate races, the client and minor powers with embassies on the Presidium, who were permitted the fewest hulls of all. The ratio set at the Conference was five to three to one. For every five dreadnoughts the turians laid down, the asari and salarians were each permitted three, and an associate species one.

The Systems Alliance joined the second tier in 2183, after the Conference and after humanity's elevation to the Council, an admission generally read as entitling humanity to three hulls for every five turian ones. Before that, as a non-Council member of the Citadel community, the Alliance had been held to the one in five associate share, which at the turian strength of that year worked out to a ceiling of seven.

What the fleets actually looked like#

The paper ratios and the real order of battle were never quite the same thing. As of 2183 the turians held thirty seven dreadnoughts, the asari twenty one, the salarians sixteen, and the Alliance six with a seventh under construction. By 2185 the count had moved to thirty nine turian, twenty asari, sixteen salarian and eight human, and by 2186 humanity had completed a ninth and the volus had launched a single dreadnought of their own.

The salarian figure was the interesting one, because sixteen was considerably fewer than the Union was entitled to build. The shortfall came not from restraint but from engineering. Salarian designs had grown steadily more complex, and complexity slowed the yards. The elcor took the opposite approach and largely ignored the capital ship race, keeping several cruisers and carriers whose real value lay in troop transport rather than in the battle line.

The price of an embassy#

Farixen was never only a naval document. Signing it was a requirement for any species that wished to open an embassy on the Citadel and take up associate membership of the Council, which made the Treaty the threshold every rising power had to cross. An embassy on the Presidium marked a species as having made a genuine contribution to Citadel space, and the volus were the first to hold one, with the human Systems Alliance the most recent.

That threshold could be revoked. The krogan lost their embassy during the Krogan Rebellions. The quarians were asked to leave after the geth achieved sentience and rebelled. The batarians closed their own in protest at what the Hegemony regarded as the Council's preferential treatment of humans. Each closure quietly removed a signature from the Treaty's political foundation, and one of those removals came back to matter.

The powers outside the pact#

The Treaty bound its signatories and nobody else. The batarians, as a non-Citadel race, were free of it entirely, and while their fleet was known to operate at least one dreadnought the true number was never established. The geth were free of it too, and made full use of the freedom. Their dreadnoughts approached the turian total in number and exceeded Alliance hulls in size by as much as thirty percent, built around more expensive and energy hungry weapon systems than any signatory fielded.

A second gap sat inside the text itself. Carriers were vessels of dreadnought size and dreadnought cost, differing mainly in purpose, since they were built to move fighters, vehicles and troops rather than to trade broadsides. The Treaty said nothing about them, so any race could build as many as it could afford. Humanity, newly graduated from surface warfare to space warfare, was the first to treat carrier borne fighters as a fleet's main armament, and did so without breaching a single clause.

Erosion#

The agreement began to come apart in the 2180s. Ahead of the Reaper War, the Migrant Fleet fought a brief action against the Blue Suns on Korlus and came away with the salvage it needed to refit for the campaign to retake Rannoch. The quarians armed every ship in the Civilian Fleet, the liveships included, with Thanix cannons, which converted them into dreadnoughts in all but armour. The Citadel condemned the refit. Admiral Han'Gerrel vas Neema answered that the Council had closed the quarian embassy long ago and that the Fleet was therefore bound by nothing. Admiral Shala'Raan vas Tonbay offered the narrower defence that liveships were built to grow food rather than to fight, and allowed that if it came to it she would apologise formally once the war was over.

The Battle of the Citadel left a second and larger crack, one whose shape depended on how the battle ended. Should the Council have been left to die aboard the Destiny Ascension while Commander Shepard held the relief fleet back, news traffic across Citadel space and the Terminus Systems carried the same report: the turians no longer considered themselves bound by Farixen and were accelerating their shipbuilding, citing the need for greater security. Should the Council have been saved instead, the Hierarchy's renunciation still surfaced later as relations with the Alliance soured. Either way the ratio that had held for generations was treated by its principal beneficiary as a document it could set aside, and the Treaty of Farixen entered the Reaper War as a convention rather than a constraint.