Great House Io
The Great House Io is one of the five current NPC factions that can be encountered around the galaxy in Career Mode.
Ships
Great House Io ships specialize in heat-based weaponry.
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Codex
Long before the discovery of the Armstrong Monolith and the destruction of Sol, as the cold war between Earth and Mars was heating up, many of the richest and noblest families of the Imperial Martian Matriarchy, known as The Great Houses, abandoned their sworn empress and fled their war-torn world to colonize the moons of the outer gas giants.
One such Great House, the Rodomonts, ran an industrial metallurgy and construction empire that spanned the Sol system and pioneered the modular starship-welding techniques still in use today. The Rodomonts, along with tens of thousands of their servants and most skilled employees, settled on Jupiter's moon Io, the most volcanically-active object in the Sol system, and formally restyled themselves as "The Great House Io". Using their metallurgical prowess, they tamed Io's volcanos and harnessed its heat for near limitless energy, all in less than a decade.
And then, for reasons only known by the House's top matriarchs, they decided to leave. Undertaking the largest and most ambitious construction and geo-engineering project in the history of humankind, they converted Io into a giant interstellar generation ship. Using Io's near-limitless internal heat to fuel the largest rocket thrusters ever built, Io escaped Jupiter's gravity and departed the Sol system. For hundreds of years, the Great House Io was never seen, presumed dead and lost forever.
That is, until the moon Io itself suddenly reappeared on the weakly-guarded outskirts of the Centauri Imperium, only now with a population in the millions thanks to an aggressive breeding program, and thousands of warships wielding advanced heat-based weaponry that were smelted from Io's molten iron core. Great House Io caught the Centauri Imperium by surprise and quickly conquered much of its rear territory, plus a handful of Fringe-aligned star systems, thus destabilizing the galaxy's delicate balance of power. Their mission, which was publicly broadcast throughout the known galaxy, is to unite Humanity under the rule of Io's matriarch in order to focus all of humanity's resources against a much larger threat they claim is looming on the horizon. But what that threat is, or what they saw in their hundreds of years traveling between the stars, they will not say.
Codex Entry