The Panark Fleet

The Panark Fleet is a vagrant nation originating from a loose coalition of stateless buccaneers. As the military technology of the major oceanic powers increased, the proto-Panarkians shifted from raiding merchants to acting as independent shipping contractors. After the tense Banana Incident, in which Panark nearly came to war with Lepazzia, the Panark Fleet declared itself as a sovereign state and sought membership in the Disputatious Assembly. This was initially rejected on the grounds that Panark did not control any land, which prompted Panark to spend the next few years covertly stealing sand, topsoil, and gravel from other countries until they had turned their major carriers each into their own biome. This provoked intense debate in the Assembly as to what kind of land a country needed to control to be recognized. The matter was eventually settled in Panark's favor by pressure from Ulgrav, which had begun selling off all of its land and wanted some precedent set to keep its own Assembly seat.

Since the advent of computing technology, Panark has become the world's largest provider of computer cycles. Most large-scale computing is done in massive server clusters stored in the depths of Panarkian carriers, which use the ocean as an unlimited heatsink. This has drawn the ire of the Hegemony of Whales for its effect on ocean currents, resulting in a status quo where the Panark Fleet is constantly on the move to avoid the Hegemony's military. The Fleet took this as a provocation to stop paying their Whale Tariffs, which has only worsened relations. Unlike Flandrean oil ships, Panarkian cruisers are rarely contracted as tariff-free transport because they cannot move in predictable routes without the Hegemony catching them.

Because of their substantial available computational substrate, the Panark Fleet has the greatest number of computational theologians per capita, and most of the non-carrier ships are run essentially as techno-monasteries. The technomonks of Panark are widely regarded for their charitable acts and unmercenary IT work. Their critical role in engineering the systems that allow the Hegemon of Whales to attend the Disputatious Assembly in the flesh is responsible for keeping the stormy relations between the two from breaking into open war.

The Fleet is generally opposed to the Disarrangement Act on the grounds that having to take on more land would overburden their ships. Most suspect that a more pressing concern is that carrying out the Act will raise uncomfortable questions as to how and whence Panark obtained the land they currently have.

Another reason that the Hegemony of Whales isn't too keen to press its case against the Panark Fleet by force is that the Fleet essentially controls the Taurus Research Station. When every space-capable country and Kingsland attached their own thrusters to the station, there was no rhyme or reason to where the thrusters were placed. Now turning the Taurus in any direction requires calculations too complicated for anybody but the Fleet to compute, by virtue of their unmatched computational resources. Nominally, the Fleet does the math for the Assembly as a due, but whenever other sovereigns make fun of Panark for having "fake land", they always change the topic to the Taurus, and eventually the others caught their drift.

Citations: The Hegemony of Whales / Taurus Research Station