I've been a fan of sins since the OG game came out and one of the things I loved was the hints about the lore and backstory scattered throughout the game and the manual to really help flesh out the universe. Unfortunately I haven’t seen as much of that yet sins 2, something I'd really like since the game has had quite a few changes since its first incarnation and it'd be cool to hear the official in-universe explanations for some of them.
But until then I thought I'd have a crack at making a few fan theories of my own, so here for your pleasure is my personal speculation as to how and why the sins universe has evolved.
Exotic Resources
War and technological progress are two of the greatest drivers of change and the galaxy has seen much of both in the last few decades, resource deposits that were once abundant have been depleted, destroyed or lost behind enemy lines. All the while the three-way arms race between the factions has come to rely more and more on rare materials to fuel their war efforts. Thus the three races have begun to look for alternate sources of such materials, many wrecks and debris, both in orbit and upon the surface of planets that once would have been overlooked have begun to be salvaged for what are now precious resources and all three powers have established large scale industrial facilities to fabricate many of these materials, though their production is far from cheap the critical importance of these resources justifies their expense.
Modularity
The societies of the Trade Order, Vasari and Advent had all been mostly static, to the point perhaps even of stagnation for centuries if not millennia. Be it due to peace and prosperity, religious fervour and puritanism or tradition and martial doctrine, all three remained relatively unchanged until they came into contact with each other. However, with the outbreak of the war, once the initial shock and surprise had subsided, all three began to re-evaluate what had worked for centuries. The first of these efforts to bear fruit were the starbases, none of the factions had definitive ideas for how these mammoth constructs should function and so they pursued a different path, flexibility. A commander could outfit a starbase as he chose with a variety of modules, be it reinforced defences, trade ports, shipyards or all manner of other facilities. Gradually this mindset would spread, during the rebellion era there were some experiments with planetary specialisation, though these were cumbersome and met with limited success. At the same time as the technology around starbase modularisation was maturing, all three factions began looking into overhauling and retrofitting their ageing capital ship fleets and the topic of flexibility surfaced again. The idea was born of miniaturising this modular system and applying it to warships, allowing them to field a much more varied arsenal of equipment, better suiting their situation and their commanders preferred style of combat, it would also allow for the utilisation of more rare and exotic technology aboard these ships, should it be obtained. In parallel with this the planetary specialisation doctrine was scrapped in favour of far more flexible planetary buildings to specialise worlds, though building is something of a misnomer as these are often entire sprawling facilities and complexes dedicated to a specific purpose.
Trade
Before the war the Trade order had a vast economic network that spanned the entirety of known space, all this changed with the invasion of the Vasari and later the Advent. Their great trade empire was shattered and reduced to a handful of small routes between individual planets and systems as arteries were blockaded and many captains were pressed into military service. Upon their discovery of the now Trader Emergency Coalition, both the Advent and Vasari initially attempted to copy the TEC’s trade networks with ones of their own, with limited success, however these were eventually phased out some time after the rebellion era, with their ports and facilities repurposed into refineries to help quell the shortages of now vanishingly rare exotic resources. The TEC in turn gradually refocused its existing orbital refineries from augmenting the production of bulk metals and crystals to specialising in these same exotic resources as it rebuilt and retooled its trade network, creating new cheaper and more heavily automated ships to limit the numbers of personnel it had to spare and the costs of lost vessels, while finding new routes and re-establishing connections between the core worlds and the outer reaches. With this the wealth and industry capacity of the coalitions heart could flow out to the front lines of the conflict, allowing barren, resource poor systems to be transformed into thriving, heavily fortified bastions against the enemies of the coalition.
And there it is for now, I decided to test the water with some of the larger and more noticeable alterations and I might delve into some of the more granular changed such as ships if I continue with this, some things like Vasari and Advent trade ports also might no longer be canon but I decided to include them anyway since I felt like the challenge of trying to explain them within the game’s universe, feel free to let me know your own thoughts below.
