There must have been inherent flaws in the organisation of the Interstellar Council (or, as it should more properly be called - The FIRST Interstellar Council). This started to become obvious in the closing Cbluvoe of the Fourth Cycle and gradually worsened in the early Cbluvoe of the Fifth. The evident problem was related to the actual form of the Interstellar Council - which seems to have been a Republican Democracy with a UniCameral Legislature (i.e. a simple Parliament).

As students of Interstellar Political theory will realise, such a form government has inherent weaknesses. Eventually, the size of the legislature become so large (even at only one member per world - and not taking into account population differences) that it became totally incapable of governing itself, let alone the rest of the Consiliar State! Not only did this growing unwieldiness and almost paralysing indecision damage the stability of the state, the Council gradually became less and less representative of the wishes of the inhabitants.

Another major problem was, of course, one of VOYAGE TIME - toward the end of the period, it took upwards of four Uvoe (about 7-8 YEARS) for a ship to travel from the Council's Capital on Home to the edge of Consiliar Space - and just as long to return (whether such a voyage was in a Courier at 50 LY per day or in a slower vessel, we can only speculate - at a standard 10 LY per day, allowing 25% "wastage" for stopovers and maintenance, the radius of the Consiliar region must have been around 13,000 LY! If we allow for scheduling problems - there would NEVER be enough FTL ships to provide "simultaneous" communications with ALL planets - the radius is either reduced to about 10-20% of the above (2000-4000 LY) OR the actual time to reach some systems might be as long as 25-30 YEARS! Since our sources are quite specific that it took 5-6 years to reach the perimeter, we must assume that the Consilium had the latter, smaller radius!). Only as long as such a state is DYNAMIC (expanding) can it survive - but we have reason to believe that the Consilium was become less and less interested in expansion.

The exact reason for this cannot be ascertained with certainly, but we can speculate that the various member planets as well as Interstellar Council became aware of the stresses that lack of representativeness were putting on their society - and began to divert materials from their individual exploration programmes toward ameliorating this problem. Of course, through there was no way they could know this for sure ( the Computational problem would have been so massive that no conceivable Computer-link could have recognised all the variables needed to make an analysis - we can do so on the basis of historical knowledge - the Forerunners, being the first Interstellar Society, had no such basis for comparison).

In fact as we can appreciate, with the knowledge of hindsight, these attempts to solve the problem actually intensified it - and it became a negative feedback loop. The more unresponsive the Council became to local desires, the more resources it - and the individual members - poured into making the system work, and away from the exploration programme! They were, of course, actually cutting their own throats - slowly, without realising it. This process did not, of course, take place overnight - it was a gradual one, and took the best part of an entire Cycle to be completed. When it was finally obvious that was happening, it was too late to do anything about it without hastening the final collapse.

As we might expect, even in such a large and relatively advanced Interstellar state, there were relatively few planets with the Industrial base needed to make FTL Starships. Of course, as the problem intensified, they began to withdraw their Starships from the longer trade and communication routes - putting them to work closer to home. Eventually, parts of Consilliar space became virtually independent - with decades, even centuries, passing between contacts with the Central government.

Just as predictably, as this process went on, some planets - the more powerful ones - began to be tempted with the idea of building their own little empires within the Consilium. Many probably did so with the highest of motive - attempting to maintain the level of consiliar culture at its high point. However, the Consular Starforces - through stretched to the limit - attempted to stop this "secession" movement. Of course, their efforts merely alienated more worlds, and the process accelerated. Once the idea that a individual Empire could be carved out of Consular subjects became commonly known - and relatively easy to achieve, there was also a growth of Interstellar Warfare. Petty Emperors would spring up, often, as it has been mentioned, with the best of motive, and would carve out their own state - this in turn, would encourage those neighbours who did not wish to be "saved" by that particular vision of "civilisation" to seek alliances with those of like mind to resist. Soon, of course, such a situation would degenerate into open warfare - and, in all likelihood, spread far beyond the original area of conflict.

The Consular Starforces were increasingly powerless in the face of such Interstellar anarchy. Of course, the first move of the Council was to withdraw their forces to more settled areas, in the hope of defending them against the collapse at the outer edges. Many of the Fleets and Armies, however, were locally raised - and refused to obey such order; in fact carving out their own states - with the avowed hope of "preserving order from chaos" and, in fact, accelerating collapse!

The rate of collapse slowly increased - the once proud Consilium gradually degenerating into an ever widening snakepit of independent warring states. Needless to say, this period of Interstellar war was the cause of a gradual collapse in the finely tuned Interstellar economy. Few planets required large offplanet imports, but not all of what they did import were luxuries. A small percentage of their trade was in commodities they could not produce for themselves, and, when cut off by the ever expanding web of chaos, resulted in a gradual decline in their technology. Obviously, some planet were badly hit in the vicious conflict that blossomed in the vacuum left by the increasingly more powerless Interstellar Council, and either had their Industrial base destroyed or had their population decimated to the point where they could not man the still intact Industrial plant; the result in any case was a slide backwards barbarism.

This process described above did not take place quickly - and there were occasions where it seemed as if the final collapse of Consular civilisation had been staved off, whole centuries, in fact. But the relentless march of time proved to be the undoing of all the Interstellar Council had worked for. By the end of the Sixth Cycle, the Council - and the advanced technology and civilisation it had represented were dead. However, as none of our sources states (as close as we can get the translation) - "they were not dead for all time. Within the very fires of its destruction the Consilium had sown the seeds which, Phoenix like, would eventually burst forth anew, and rekindle the flame of that lost civilisation".

Several individual planets and small successor states managed to retain much of the old technology. Mostly this was because they were too insignificant to be worthy targets of the marauding fleets of the last years of the Consilium. In at least one case, the planet in question was cut off so quickly that it did not even realise that the Interstellar Council had collapsed! However, their very insignificance meant that, while they were capable of sustaining a relatively high level of technology, not one of them actually had any Starflight capacity - and it took them hundreds of years to "tool up" to producing it, or to simply gather up the vital materials needed in the building of such vessels by the use of STL Starships.

One of these survivor planets was Home - even more resource depleted than she had been when the Forerunners first realised that their only hope for racial survival lay in expanding to the stars. Home was still convinced of this necessity - but lacked the resources to initiate a FTL programme. Apart from this, in the high years of the First Consilium, Home had been turned into a garden planet - and most industries had simply been abandoned, and any manufactured goods needed had been imported. So, it took the locals many centuries to rebuild and gather the technologies and raw materials needed to build their first Post-Consiliar Starship.