Humans have always watched the stars. The vast celestial forges of the sky formed the basis of mythologies across the globe for eons. To this day the stars remain shrouded in mysteries, and mankind simply walks in their shadows, separated by vast lightyears of travel.
As always, mankind has held on to the intrepid spirit of exploration which had conquered the globe in ancient times. The globular cluster now called
Haven was once a mere bead in the eyes of telescopes across the human world. Now it is a bustling center of commerce, the crown jewel of human settlement and exploration.
The Mass Migrations
(You don't have to read all this...)
Most colonists came from three major regions of the galaxy, starting in the 46,000's:
- Settlers from the galactic core, whose values emphasized freedom, liberty, and an all-consuming desire to explore the universe and its wonders. They've since coalesced into the Ross Contingency, a federation of single star systems with common ideals and a lack of imperial ambition.
- Settlers from Sol and the original stellar neighborhood. This region had undergone many shifts in regimes and powers, and as such their outlook was cynical from the beginning. Colonists from Centauri quickly established a bi-stellar nation in 46,093 and absorbed others stars over time, declaring the First Centauri Empire in 46,127.
- Settlers from the outer rim of the galaxy, whose journeys tended to be more out of desperation than for economic gain. Rim-dwelling clans from afar settled Haven over many hundreds of years, becoming the Aroth as they are known today. The Aroth are not a state per se, but rather a term for the many nomads who wander the edge worlds, some having common backgrounds.
There were also two major great migrations which formed ethnically distinct regions:
-In the early stages of colonization, a ship called the
Polaris crossed the whole length of the cluster (a 60 lightyear journey) and in 46,078 formed the first multi-stellar political entity bound by mutual co-dependence and ideals: The Free and Independent Republics of Polaris, otherwise known as Fair Polaris.
-In the 46,200's, the inhabitants of the planet Cyrus fled a collapsing ecosphere brought about by their system's variable star. Knowing they would be economically behind all nearby states, they chose to flee their fellow colonists from the galactic core and set out to colonize the far side of the cluster. Led by a charismatic leader, the Cyrians established an autocratic directorate which lasted two hundred years until the death of its genetically-altered leader. Afterward, New Cyrus split into two main factions: The Heirarchy, which maintains a rigid militaristic tradition, and the Reactionary, who prefer self-governance and independence.
The
Ross Contingency are mostly democratic states aligned along liguistic grounds. The most common languages are Germanophobic and Cosmopolitan (the exact meanings and definitions of these terms are subject to much speculation), but both languages only comprise a plurality, not a majority of the citizens in the Contingency.
The main seat of federal power is located in the
Ebony system. Its namesake planet, Ebony, is a world dominated by vast, slowly-growing treelike organisms whose roots have since fused with the bedrock, providing the groundwork for vertically sprawled cities that dominate the world. Its low surface gravity allows for cheap launch into orbit, but its thin atmosphere makes spaceplanes unfeasible. Thus, all commerce regulated on a strict launch schedule and everything that enters or leaves the biosphere is recorded on dataplate records. Rogue launches and landings are illegal.
The diplomatic capital is Iesac, a tropical world dominated by raging seas and a wide tropical region, filled with dangerous wildlife toyed with by genetic engineers two thousand years ago. It is mostly a frontier world with little in the way of permanent settlement or colonization. However, its Terran levels of gravity are much preferred to the low gravity of Ebony, which is beneficial to non-Ebonites who work with the government. The Iesac Subterranean Fortress is located here, which is fortified against orbital assault and stocked with long-term supplies and munitions.
Other major commercial centers inside/nearby the Contingency include:
Brandenburg : A commercial center, one of the first to be colonized in all of Haven. A terraforming project attracts millions of jobs on the planet Berlin, a snow-covered world, while planet Neumark hosts a population of several billion and exports luxury goods all across the cluster.
Aurora : A world of lush pines and imported Earth biolife. Lacking mineral resources, this planet is still settled largely due to the impracticality of shipping billions of people offworld. On the bright side, the planet imports massive amounts of resources from the other three planets in the system, creatign a thriving economy with countless opportunities for freelancers.
Deluge : A rainy world with only a few million wealthy inhabitants. Here it rains oil and hydrocarbons, making the planet the chief exporter in the Contingency.
Aldros : A semi-independent feudal system that's heavily militarized. Owing to its treacherous (though sometimes profitable) position between the Contingency and the Empire, it often faces routine pirate activity and patrols from both the Contingency and the Empire. While their relations with both are good, the Ross have been attempting to expand their influence here in recent times and encounter several face-offs with Centauri forces every year.
The
Centauri Empire is a sprawling political entity spanning dozens of stars and claiming lordship over hundreds more. They have the largest organized navy in all of Haven and routinely patrol all systems within their borders, even the numerous empty systems between those with planets. The government is a hereditary monarchy led by the
Julians, a relatively young dynasty which only ruled for a decade as of yet. The Julians replaced the Songs, who ruled Centauri for also two hundred years prior, after usurping the throne from the Habsburs.
Their capital is located in the
Centauri system, on the planet Centauri Prime. An arid world lacking a developed ecosystem, the world has since been terraformed into somewhat of a paradise in select regions. Water is shipped from the polar regions into equatorial metropolis built around rocket pads and launch loops used for commerce.
Other major commercial centers in the Empire include:
Cornbow : The Empire's industrial capital. Massive orbital shipyards can be seen from this system's gas giant with an amateur telescope. Massive fusion reactors beam power to the countless orbital habitats and manufactories above the metal-rich eponymous planet. Trade booms every thirteen years as Cornbow's two-planet system aligns, making orbital transfers affordable by practically anyone.
Gwinfer : Home to one of the few ruins of an interplanetary civilization ever found. Though this globular cluster is rife with societal graveyards, the civilization in this system had constructed self-replicating clockwork, a miracle even by today's standards.
Eothryx : An oceanic world known for its azure skies and luxurious cruises. It is one of the only good sources of meat in its local stellar neighborhood, making the seven million inhabitants rather wealthy.
Helias : Named for the star's uncanny resemblance to Sol, Helias IV is the planet of chief significance in this system. The cold, glacial world provides most of the water in the system to the two other planets (both carbon planets with plentiful minerals and hydrocarbons). However, the presence of a millenium-old orbital habitat in orbit keeps it from fading into obscurity.
The
Aroth are wandering nomadic clans who mostly exploit planets for their resources and abandon them over time. They do not form trade networks of any significance and don't have much in the way of a capitalistic economy. However, their population is mostly spaceborn and most of their infrastructure has been mobilized. In matters of military, their capabilities are second to none, able to manufacture fleets during interstellar travel and launch surprise attacks anywhere.
There are four major clans:
Novak Trive : Based on the frigid planet Caldr, the Novak are mostly nomadic aside from certain core systems far from civilized space. They have above-average tech for a nomad group, and often sell weaponry to the Centauri in exchange for passage rights in Empire space.
Azobos Crew : A notorious pirate gang with a leader, the
Azobos, elected by the fleet admirals, who are in turn elected by the ships' crews. They are feared among the Ross and Centauri and have bases all over the border systems, from which they launch their attacks.
Charon Ascendancy : Another technologically advanced group. The Charon make extensive use of computer technology, which gives them an edge in combat. They cannot replace losses easily, however, and so they are mostly seen picking on lone traders most of the time, rather than confronting navies.
Zakroff Collegiate : A group of 'civilized' pirates. They claim to act for the benefit of all humanity when they raid official navy supply shipments and merchant marine vessels. They rarely attack independent traders.
Fair Polaris started as an idealist project, developing since into a thriving political ecosystem composed of single-system microstates.
But the Republic is dominated more by two mega-corporations than anything else:
Phoenix Engineering and
Novatech Industries.
Phoenix specializes in arms and construction technologies. They market several competing lines of civilian and military corvettes and frigates. They also contract a private navy force composed of larger vessels of their own designs.
Novatech specializes in advanced methods of power generation and propulsion, as well as exotic weapons. They design their own ships primarily for paramilitary use, but a civilian market exists for their old decomissioned vessels, which are typically repurposed and auctioned-off as yachts to wealthy buyers.
The four most significant planets in the Republic are:
Osiris : Home to Phoenix Engineering's headquarters. A barren, rocky planet with vast miles of underground city just below the surface, Osiris II is one of the most heavily fortified worlds in all of human space.
Weal : Home to Novatech's management division. A thick dust belt around a young star obscures most of what Novatech performs in secret--and also hides plenty of pirates who sign non-aggression pacts with Novatech in order to use the dust belt as cover.
Veritas : Legend has it that the duke of this world gave an adventurer thirty ounces of gold for saving the system from a pirate invasion. The system is governed by a local aristocracy, but the low population means that there aren't really any subjugated classes. Pretty much everyone having any business in the system is rich.
Sigma : A planet with a thriving ecosystem, home to a peaceful race that never expanded past the age of Greek-style thinking. Toga-wearing aliens and Obsidian monoliths blanket the countryside, making this world a popular tourist attraction.
The
Cyrian People are torn between two major powers: The
Heirarchy and the
Reactionary. The former hosts a rich military tradition, a remnant of former policies established with the aim of unifying the disparate migratory groups.
The latter aims to demilitarize the culture, also encouraging Haven's nomads to settle within Cyrian space.
The Heirarchy fully owns and controls the following major systems:
Locyrmor : A capital world that was once a thriving paradise, now reduced to ash, the result of a nuclear winter. A grim reminder of why most civilizations in the universe never get past the space age.
Kanto : A frosty planet with fierce winds and rare gems buried beneath the surface. While also the seat of the ruling heiarch, Kanto is the prime training ground for Cyrian troops.
Ashur : Home to the Regal Swallows, the highest military division in all the Heiarchy. The arid world of Ashur supports a modest industrial base, enough for an interplanetary transport force.
The Reactionary exists in the following systems, with varying levels of control:
Three Mountains: This system hosts three moons around a gas giant in the habitable zone. All three have life and are in some way populated. The capital of the system is Okinawa, the center of the Reactionary, while Kansei and Vazin are more sparsely-populated and mostly settled by independently-minded Cyrians.
Titan: Named for its system capital's resemblance to the legendary Saturnian moon. Titan itself is a hydrocarbon exporter and is in many ways deemed too big to fail. Through threats and coercion the Heiarchy has prevented the Reactionary from taking sole ownership of the hydrocarbon mines, but they can't risk a violent invasion either. The black gold must flow.
Zeony: A Venus-analog in close orbit to a firey, blazing red giant. A sophisticated magsailing culture has been fostered, but due to a lack of major exports the system itself is mostly a pit stop for traders headed into the border worlds.
Pathis : A far-off edge world with minimal influence from both sides. While of Cyrian descent, Pathis remains free of militaristic influence for the most part, and the Reactionary gets a lot of recruits from the lone, eponymous planet here.
It is worth noting that the scale of each major state is in the dozens of stars under centralized control. However, the average population of a space station is tens of thousands, while most moons and planets have hundreds of thousands to millions at most. Border worlds sometimes have hundreds of millions, but being parts of smaller states they are not listed here for brevity.
((This means you and I can make them up at will for plot purposes))
(Most reading is optional...)
ComputersThis is somewhat of a rocketpunk setting in which computer technology has hit certain limits. Additionally, humans in general have genetically progressed to the point where they can perform complex calculations in their heads rather quickly.
Rather than solving society's problems, this has tended to make most wars and crimes worse simply due to the fact that the perpetrators are simply more capable than they were in the past.
More importantly, warfare had evolved to a point up until around the 45,000's to where computers formed the backbone of virtually every technology in use. Everything was connected, so to speak, to the point where a single virus could not only cripple a starship's navigation and weapons, but forcibly take control of people's powersuits, all through the network.
Thanks to constant warfare, various cultures began to phase all-purpose computers out of their daily lives, or otherwise replace multifunctional internet devices with more "human" tools resembling those humanity used long ago before the information age.
Handheld PDA's and the like, for example, are virtually nonexistent. They are vulnerable to the Space Virus (see below) and there is a social stigma against people who spend all their time on a handheld device.
Instead, people write on Pages, which are touch-sensitive hyper-thin sheets that can store hundreds of pages and can be written on using a stylus.
Some styluses, such as a the popular Calcupen, can do more than just writing. A calcupen will auto-complete formulas and calculations so the human doesn't have to.
Virtually all computers require input data to be physically brought on a bus chip, or otherwise transferred by cable. This is because wireless transmission is the prime vector for Space Virus transmission.
Robots and artificial intelligences exist, but they have to be shielded from radio and other harmful vectors, so they cannot interface with a lot of systems unless physically plugged in (and even then, most consumer AI's don't have bus ports), and their senses have to be similar in capability to those of humans, or else they may contract the Space Virus from non-radio sources such as a flashing light encoding malicious bits of information.
The most drastic threat to humanity's overcomputerization in the 45,000's was the Space Virus. It first popped up in the California Nebula, spreading aboard FTL vessels to nearby systems with surprising speed. Since FTL is a rarity, warnings took a lot of time to get across, so most systems found themselves unprepared and suffered catastrophic failures in their computer systems. Thousands of ships were stranded.
The Virus itself is a logiform entity that infects computers through radio systems. This means that any digital device with an antenna and a radio chip is susceptible. It is rumored psychic in origin, but the general public is typically told that it is a cyberweapon lingering throughout space (which is not technically all-too far from the truth).
Any computer infected by the Space Virus shuts down most of its functions and reconfigures itself into becoming a vector for the further transmission of the Virus. To date, hundreds if not thousands of infected transmitters remain in almost every system,
The Virus appears sentient in some regard, as it is able to react to its surroundings based on the current level of threat to itself. It also appears sapient, as it is capable of forming complex plans and remaining dormant especially on FTL vessels.
Most starships are slower-than-light. There exist huge solar beams in major systems used to accelerate to relativistic speeds, but craft outside of these systems use antimatter-based propulsion instead.
Some starships are capable of FTL. The exact means by which they travel is a fiercely-kept secret, but they seem to function as a sort of warp drive with a nonzero travel time, as trips aboard one still take time. The ship does, however, disappear from normal space during FTL transit.
Most surface-to-orbit flights are done by SSTO
Orion Drive launch vehicles. Some worlds use cheap chemical rockets instead, especially those without a ready source of nuclear fuel.
For slower-than-light travel in systems, most ships use some variant of nuclear fusion, often antimatter-catalyzed or magnetic-confinement engines. However, nuclear thermal (NTR) engines that use plain old fission are much less fragile and easier to take care of, and since most vessels use fission reactors anyway most ships have backup NTR drives.
Using fusion drives, a ship typically accelerates at 1G or less and remains accelerating for most of the trip. It takes only about three days to travel a single AU (astronomical unit) or about 499 light-seconds. Travel times and deltaV costs scale based on the square root of the multiple of distance, so doubling the distance multiplies both by √2.
Using NTR, travel times are typically on the scale of low-energy orbital maneuvers and sometimes high-impulse trajectories if fuel is plentiful: hours-days between moons, and months-years between planets.
Due to the Space Virus, a lot of tasks on spacecraft are entirely manual.
Many militaries are paranoid about the Space Virus transmitting itself through wavelengths other than radio, including visible light. This means that many military vessels especially lack cameras or sensors entirely. Some still have active and passive sensors linked to analog computers, and no incidents have thus been reported, but analog computers are painfully slow and so humans are typically involved to speed up the process.
Most ships have a Bridge or Observation Deck, the latter of which can serve a dual purpose as an Observatory.
All ships (except the cheapest and most infectible civilian craft) have an Observatory, where telescopes are stored and records are usually kept along with old-school tools such as
blink comparators and gyroscopes. Some observatories are connected to the ship via cable and can be released in order to free the observatory from the ship's rotation. This is helpful when the ship is spun like a centrifuge. Other observatories are simply located on the nose or somewhere with good coverage.
Navigation is done by the stars or by a computer on some civilian ships (though said computer is kept strictly isolated from outside contact. It has nothing but a screen and a keyboard on which coordinates are typed), meaning that detailed maps and models are often kept which show the positions of various major stars in Haven, along with the positions of planets in the system. Explorers without a map of a star system will have to find the planets manually, though planets are much easier to find than ships.
Because telescopes are needed to see other spacecraft most of the time, most ships can get away with stealthy maneuvers in space. Most ships are not detected unless they loiter close to places-of-interest like moons and stations. Uncharted pirate bases located in asteroids are a common occurence, almost rampant in some systems, and trade vessels often stick to predicable paths making a pirate's life rather straightforward.
Spacecraft firing their engines do not always require a telescope to view if it is nearby. Additionally, if a ship is merely coasting and not firing its engines, it is almost invisible.
Radio technology is still functional as long as it isn't connected to a computer. Most communications between ships are either verbal (transmitted by radio) or visual (beamed by laser at long distance, or spotlights at close distances).
Weapons typically use regular optics and periscopes, and a combat bridge is always present on warships, buried deep within the hull. Periscopes in this case are used to get full coverage, but there is still a risk of damage to a ship's observatory during battle, so equipment is often mobile and bolted onto rails for fast transport into safer places during battle stations.
Ships regularly do battle with particle beams, missiles, mass drivers, railguns, coilguns, and lasers. Most starships are nuclear, powered either by fission or by gargantuan fusion reactors found more often on stations than mobile vessels
Missiles can be computerized--they are disposable after all, and since they have no radio transmitters it does not usually matter if one contracts the space virus at the last second so long as they can be remotely detonated by a ship's crew.
Some ships have solar sails packed into the cargo bay as a last resort, just in case the engine stops working. But solar sails also have a combat use in scrambling enemy optics and masking your own ship's silhouette.
Metallurgy and structural materials are advanced, with carbon fiber and nanotubes as the basis of all high-end armors. Regular titanium alloys are used in economical cases, and steel is rarely used for spacecraft due to its weight. Weight is not an issue with a station built from scratch in space, however, so there still exists a market for iron and steelworks.
Most habitable planets are not much more habitable than they need to be. Almost all suffer from shortages of phosphorous, which made early attempts at colonization rather difficult. Phosphorous is known as life's bottleneck and while plenty of it existed on Earth, there wasn't a lot of it to begin with on most of these worlds.
To sustain large populations, phosphorous is mined out of asteroids and high-metal-content planets where it naturally occurs in economical deposits. This phosphorous is then extracted from ore inside space-based refineries and shipped to planets with high population growth, the places phosphorous is needed the most.
Some worlds are naturally more fertile and already contain lots of phosphorous in their ecosystem. These worlds are prime sites to grow rare tropical plants such as chocolate, sugar, and more exotic alien lifeforms which require a developed ecosystem. These are often shipped out to the less fertile planets, with trade stations and orbital habitats profiting along the way.
Many space stations are simply repair sites and fuel depots for travellers. Water is one of the most important resources in space, but it is also too heavy to carry around most of the time, so most ships will stop by at depots near asteroids or low-gravity worlds to pick up volatiles.
In the less-habitable regions of Haven, such as systems near the core of the cluster (where an intermediate-mass black hole lurks, of several tens of thousand suns' worth of mass), most of the basic necessities of life are valuable in and of themselves. Nitrogen is a valuable gas and a resource for growing plants. Hydrocarbons are essential for plastics, but are only found in high quantities on certain planets and moons. People themselves are a commodity in some parts of space, since a large spacecraft requires hundreds of people to properly man (a corvette or skiff can get along with six people or so).
Author
Topic: Space Wizards 4: Now with more rocketpunk. Turn 14 (Mar 25) (Read 21275 times)