K'tang Kaktorri

The K'tang Kaktorri are the petty thugs of the Hedgemonic Crux. Wearing extremely powerful mecha armour and desperate to conquer everything in sight, the K’tang are the puppet leaders of the Crux, who believe that they are the inheritors of the Precursor’s technology.

Biology
Despite their fearsome appearance, the K'tang Kaktorri in reality are mere four armed, legless grey worms with two grey eyes native to volcanic homeworld. They survived underground, eating small insects and plants. They have an inferiorty complex, which can often be heard during their bouts of self-pity.

Culture
To make up for their physical shortcomings, the K'tang have devised a none-too-clever but fairly effective ruse to conceal their disadvantage: Bravado and big, honkin' guns. The K'tang are ruthless, zealous, loud, opinionated, and dangerous, the same way a cannon is. They need only be pointed in the right direction, and other people will get the idea not to stand in their way. Their belief, that power equates with superiority, is flawed, but nobody was about to tell them that, mostly because nobody could see past the exterior.

However, they could realize that the K'tang are not a brilliant race. Having no respect for science, thinkers, learning, or the rigors of anything besides glorious combat, the K'tang have attempted a foolish effort to talk big. They throw around words they don't understand, make some up, and generally butcher the Universally Translated language. This makes the K'tang seem like foppish boors, but one is advised not to comment on this. Not only are the K'tang sensitive about their physical shortcomings, they are also keenly aware that other races can be far greater than they are. This of course, cannot be tolerated, and to remind them of that, by pointing out how stupid they look, is only asking for trouble.

One of the many weaknesses of the K'tang is their zeal for bragging. So proud are they when they have "fooled" another race into thinking they are both powerful and clever, they often look right past the obvious fact that their foe is not shaking with fear, they are restraining their laughter. The K'tang will then go off and blab secrets best left unsaid, and do not realize that a non-threatening posture is sometimes a threat in itself. But subtlety is not the way of the K'tang, and they do not know how to appreciate it in others.

History
The K'tang evolved on a volcanic world that was hostile to the survival of all organic life. The creatures that survived there tended to be strong. The K'tang were a prey species for millennia, surviving mostly by burrowing underground and eating roots and smaller bugs.

After the K'tang developed sentience, other starfaring races in the Crux Quadrant began using the K'tang's volcanic planet as war-world - a dramatic setting for gladiatorial combat using mechanized divisions of giant robots. These battles devastated the native population, and wiped out a third of the K'tang.

But the sentient K'tang were able to scavenge enough technology to fight back against the invaders. Inside a war machine, their vulnerabilities were irrelevant. Some K'tang were cowardly, afraid to use their new found war machines to fight the invaders. The more intelligent K'tang had a heroic streak. They planned a lightening strike against the invaders. Their attack was so powerful it succeeded in repelling the other races from the K'tang homeworld.

The war-gaming races hadn't realized there was sentient life on the K'tang planet, and left when they found that a local life-form not only was sentient, but was hopping mad about having had its planet devastated by war games. The war-gaming races didn't care to fight for the planet, and left for greener (or perhaps redder) pastures.

When the heroic K'tang stepped from their war machines to announce that their world was liberated, the cowardly K'tang massacred them and took credit for the liberation themselves. The K'tang population knew they were lying, but it was their word against an ion cannon.

The K'tang cowards now ruled. They purged all K'tang intellectuals, fearing that any K'tang smart enough to beat the invaders would be smart enough to topple their rule. This made it difficult to create new technology, so they had to steal it. They forced all non-armored K'tang into slave building starships. When they had amassed a large stockpile, they launched a series of craven sneak attacks on neighboring planets. They stole large amounts of technology, and forced their victims to manufacture weapons of war.

Five starfaring races decided the K'tang had to be stopped, and joined forces against them. Since the K'tang cowards had killed their best tacticians and stifled intellectual thought, they were easy pickings for a clever foe. They were on the verge of a severe defeat when they attracted the attention of a faction of Ploxis called the Plutocrats. The Ploxis Plutocrats were trying to subdue the rest of the Ploxis race, and saw value in having profoundly dense bullies as allies. They joined with the K'tang, and provided the logistics and tactics the little worms lacked. The K'tang cowards were grateful, but insisted on taking charge of the Crux. The Ploxis humored them, and let them believe they had.

In time, the K'tang served to not only crush most of the Ploxis rebels, but the rest of the Hegemonic Crux quadrant. After this, the Crux turned their eyes upon the Kessari Quadrant, and the K'tang, ever the willing, boisterous grunt, served as the heavies. They also served somewhat poorly in this regard, losing badly against the Harika and Yorn, but thanks to a chance discovery by one of the grubs, the Harika's will was broken through the Xchagger plague. Following that, the K'tang were used mostly to hamper League efforts, which they failed at as well, given their penchant for saying too much.

The Daktaklakpak, having foreseen a time when the K'tang would no longer be needed, had conconcted the King-Seeking Larvacide Missile to pierce their power armor and leave the grubs helpless against the Vivisector's pincers. This item was traded to the League, who wasted no time in employing it against the K'tang. Showing their true lack of spine, the denuded worms surrendered immediately and volunteered to join the Alliance. They offered little wisdom and merely submitted meekly to pilotting their ships for the League cause. They refused all further communication with all races.