Category:Factions

There are seven main factions in NTL. They can be identified by their thruster and engine exhaust colors:

• Astralith - White
• Fabrixi - Green
• Human - Orange
• Nanomorph - Cyan
• Silicarian - Violet

• Xel'Nari - Golden Yellow
• Rebel - Red

Republic ships use human coloring and Stealth ships use Cyan (since they were built by the nanomorphs for Humanity)

Strongest of the set. White means broadband continuum, so an optically thick, very hot, very clean plume with no seed lines. Reads as "we do not need to dump heat into a dopant." Matches the pale teal/lavender/white body palette.

Easy. Carbon in the exhaust gives C2 Swan bands, which are green, and eroding copper electrodes give green-blue. Green is the color of a dirty, cheap, carbon-contaminated industrial drive. That lines up exactly with glass-cannon gear that is powerful and poorly made. Their exhaust is green because they are burning feedstock nobody else would tolerate and their electrodes are wearing out.

Sodium D-lines at 589nm. Sodium is cheap, abundant, and the single most aggressive contaminant color in nature. Humans seed with sodium because it works and it costs nothing. Orange also doubles as lower-temperature blackbody, which sells "older, cooler-running, refit-heavy fleet" and fits the Mako lineage.

Defensible as the opposite of Astralith white: a narrow-line exhaust from precisely metered single-species propellant with zero contamination. Xenon and krypton thrusters really do glow blue-white. Cyan is what perfect process control looks like.

Silicon's strong lines sit in the blue and near-UV, so a silicon-based species venting silicon vapor genuinely radiates blue, not red. Red for Silicarians has no mechanism behind it and collides with Xel'Nari.