New Recruit Processing and Acclimation Center

The New Recruit Processing and Acclimation Center was the facility at which applicants for the Dominion Armed Forces were inducted into military service. There, each applicant was given an entrance exam designed to gauge their reaction and adaptation to stressful situations. On the strength of that test a recruit was sorted into a specific role, assigned to a squad or unit, and given instruction on when and where to report for active duty. The center was a piece of the everyday machinery of the Terran Dominion's war effort, the bureaucratic threshold through which ordinary citizens of Korhal and the colony worlds passed on their way to becoming soldiers of Arcturus Mengsk's empire.

Purpose and procedure#

The center existed to turn applicants into assigned soldiers. Every prospective member of the Dominion Armed Forces was made to sit an entrance exam, the stated purpose of which was to gauge how the applicant reacted and adapted to stressful situations rather than to test any prior skill. The questions placed the recruit in tense or morally loaded scenarios drawn from ordinary life in the Dominion, on roads and in cantinas and refineries, and read their character from the answers. Once the exam was complete, the applicant was sorted into a particular military role, assigned to a specific squad or unit, and issued instructions on when and where to report for active duty.

Assignment and resocialization#

The exam channelled each recruit toward the trade for which their temperament best suited them. Those with a steady, dutiful disposition were funnelled into the rank and file as marines, the infantry backbone of the Dominion's colonies, while the compassionate were directed toward the combat medic program. Recruits with a reckless appetite for destruction were marked out for the firebats or for the pilot's seat of heavy war machines such as the thor and the viking, and the timid but loyal were set to work as SCV pilots maintaining the military's outposts and supply trains. A rare few were identified as latent psionics and recruited not as ordinary soldiers but into the Dominion Ghost Academy to be trained as the empire's elusive ghost operatives. Several of these postings came hand in hand with neural resocialization, the Dominion's program of mental conditioning carried out on Korhal IV, which reshaped the recruit's mind to the needs of the service before they ever reached the barracks.