[El_Phil]

Interesting certainly and very comprehensive.

A couple of points though:
** Too many secretly built fleets. It's hard enough to hide surface ships from satellites, how are you going to hide not just one ship but a fleet load? This particularly applies to the Nazi rebellion, but also the UN Fleet. The asteroid belt isn't that dense so you can't hide much there.

** Everyone seems far too welcoming of the Icarans. I don't care how nice the laws are, or that I'm a full 'member' of the Empire. My countries being invaded damn it, I'm joining the resistance and death to the invader.! This is a fairly common response to invasion.

** Centuries long warfare and then the ESS just roll over and get lead by Icarans? Like the previous point, far too nice.

** Full marks to the Yuan, somone hands you something you've never seen (A flintlock), replicate it, mass produce it and train people to use it all ultra quickly. Amazing! Metallurgy and precision engineering just like that. The flintlock is 3rd/4th generation firearm and not simple, hell its a 1600s weapon. You aren't going to reverse engineer it easily or quickly.

One technical point, Bronze (being an alloy) was stronger and more expensive than Iron. The reason the Iron age followed the Bronze age is that with cheap Iron you could make lots of tools, etc that you wouldn't use expensive bronze for. As an example Roman officers had Bronze swords while soldiers had cheap Iron swords.

Still it's very ambitious and a fleshed out back story helps a great deal I always think. Especially if your planning a series of books.