Jack of Harts

The United States Marine Corps of Jack’s childhood was actually America’s primary planetary combat arm. They used both Army and Space Force designs to fight on the ground and to secure the planetary orbitals, and they built their own Marine designs when they needed something to fill a niche those didn’t. They worked out of Army or Space Force bases, and deployed with every Naval ship in the cosmos, which allowed them to continue the old tradition that “every Marine is a rifleman.” Or a mech pilot. Or a tank driver. Maybe a fighter pilot. In the end, if you were a kid who wanted to play with guns and go to the stars, you wanted to be a Space Marine. When things were going wrong and the Americans needed to send someone to personally sort the bad guys out, it was usually the Marines who rode in to stack the bodies. Or they caught the smugglers trying to avoid local laws. Maybe they just boarded your broken down spacecraft and brought you back to the Navy starship that had come all this way to rescue you. Or they delivered disaster relief supplies. The Marines did a little bit of everything, and so they could be seen everywhere that America went.

The United States Space Force had the mission of defending America’s homeland and colonies from spacebased attacks when Jack was young. They operated powerful orbital and ground forts designed to support the smaller craft that are their primary offensive and defensive arm. They flew many fighters and bombers over the years, but the F-7 Hellcat was their baby from day one. It had aerodynamic maneuverability and space flight capabilities, and the paired lasers and missile pods quickly became a symbol of American ingenuity over all the worlds. The Hellcat was so overwhelmingly successful that every other branch of the military began using them in time. Which was when many began to see the Space Force as a secondary arm, only there to help the Navy defend our worlds. The Space Force couldn’t let that stand, so they created the Avenger and Marauder programs to build the first hypercapable American fighters and bombers. The B-14 Marauder deployed a decade before The War started, and showed once more that the Space Force didn’t need no stinking Navy to reach out and crush America’s enemies.

The United States Federal government ran four primary military services in Jack’s time. The United States Space Force operated orbital forts, and aerospace fighters with a mission of maintaining space superiority over America and her colonies. They also performed customs enforcement in planetary orbitals. The Navy sailed deep into black, projecting American power throughout the cosmos, and performed their own customs enforcement outside planetary environments. The Army defended the District of Columbia and the far flung colonies with everything from individual soldiers to ground support air and spacecraft. They also sometimes engaged in offensive warfare. The United States Marines were called on to perform everything from ground combat to space superiority missions, and therefore used both Army and Space Force weapons and craft, as well as their own custom systems. They most often deployed from Space Force fortifications, Navy warships, or Army bases, and rarely operated in a truly independent nature.