Vespian Civil War

The Vespian Civil War (8427–8443 NE) was a major interstellar conflict and one of the largest of its kind in Vespian history. Fought between the forces aligned with House Nazarov and House O'Neill, the conflict was fought from one end of the known galaxy to the other, though was for the most part, largely contained primarily within the Cardinal Worlds of the Unified Vespian Directorate.

The conflict traces back to the pre-spaceflight era of the Vespians, with conflict over the ownership of the relics belonging to the creator of the Vespian species, Mikael the Traveler. Conflict over the rights to host the relics led to a series of skirmishes between the Nazarovs and the O'Neills, and follow a number of terrorist attacks, resulted in the O'Neills taking direct action to confiscate the Mikaean artifacts from the Nazarovs, leading to the violent First Battle of Chernaya. The war raged on for sixteen years before the federal government on Vespia was able to muster up the force needed to put an end to the fighting at the Battle of the Wall, and forcing both sides to come to the negotiating table.

Though the conflict had seen the deaths of billions of Vespians, it would not be the largest or the most brutal of its kind, surpassed by the Great Solar War more than four thousand years later. The civil war is credited with forcing the federal government to take a more heavy-handed stance on inter-house feuding, and the formation of the Vespian Defense Forces, which played the prominent role in ending the conflict. Though House O'Neill would gain ownership of the Mikaean relics, and force the Nazarovs to pay for the damages of the war, they would forever carry the stigma of starting the first interstellar war in Vespian history. The Nazarovs would finally pay off their war reparations in 9174 NE, but their hatred for the O'Neills would remain solidified for all time for their humiliation following the civil war.