Remove ads

For The Tyrants Fear Your Might (A quest of interstellar rebellion)

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Reader mode
Remove ads
Status Panel/Codex
  • Informational
    • THE ALL-RADIANT CONGRESS

    ​

    Setting Information
    The Solarian Compact:

    Initially formed as the Solarian Treaty Organization from the ashes of the old United Nations Security Council, United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, and the Global Climate Relief Organization in the worst decade of Earth's environmental collapse. The STO was originally a body tasked with overseeing the granting of offworld mining permits and the purchase and distribution of the resources to countries struggling from climate change.


    The advent of the Korolev-Chandrashker gates and the construction of the first one under STO oversight in 2063 led to the beginning of the transformation of that body into the de facto single governing body of the Human species.


    Reorganized into the 'Solarian Compact', the first Charters were granted to massive corporate conglomerates to explore and exploit the cosmos for Humanity with little to no regulation or restriction.


    In the early decades, the Solarian Compact oversaw the construction of KC gates in the systems closest to Sol and began the process of granting colonization rights to the most habitable worlds within that region with colonization rights granted to a number of national and international blocks.


    With the growth of the Solarian Compact's power came calls for the body to become more representative and democratic, and in 2099, the Solarian Compact held its first elections and constitutional convention, inviting representatives from the Sol system and the five systems that held permanent Human settlement.


    Over the course of the 22nd and 23rd centuries the Solarian Compact has held fast to what it sees as its duty to act as the mediator and financier of the Charters, the unifying agent of the disparate first Human colonies, and the guarantor of interstellar peace for Humanity.


    As of 2252, the three most important bodies within the Solarian Compact are the Solarian Parliament -Located on Earth, the Solarian Compact Navy -based in the Korolev-Chandrashker system, and the Solarian Central Bank, -based out of the Columbia System.

    Organized as a liberal democracy, with universal suffrage, the Solarian Compact is theoretically overseen by three equal institutions: the Solarian Parliament, the office of the Solarian Secretary General, and the Solarian High Court.


    Though the Solarian Compact prides itself on being a Constitutional government, the actual original document merely outlines the terms of admitting new MPs and High Court Judges, and the electoral procedures of the Compact Parliament, with subsequent Parliaments meeting to add items like the Declaration of Property Rights, the founding of the Central Bank, the creation of the Solarian Navy, and the Laws on Freedom of Navigation and Travel being added later.


    The Solarian Parliament is made up of two thousand six hundred and twenty seats representing ridings on Earth, Columbia, Atlantis, Penglai, Olduvai, and Epsilon which are elected every three years to a Parliament that meets in the New York prefecture of Earth.


    Though the many frontier colonies do not have direct representation in the Parliament due to being owned and operated by private entities, their inhabitants are considered 'Absent for Employment' and may register with a home riding and submit a physical ballot (for security reasons) by courier from when polls open until they close. Though this process was suitable for the closely settled regions of space at the time of the ratification of the Compact Constitution in 2100, the rapid growth of Human settled space in the century and a half since has seen the de facto voter suppression of over 90% of Human settled space.


    At the first sitting of each new Compact Parliament, the assembled members will elect a Secretary General and a slate of Ministry officials on a majority basis, and those individuals will oversee the executive branch of government and day to day operations. Though the average Compact Parliament contains between seven to nine parties in each Parliamentary sitting, the vast majority of seats belong to one of either the Party for Human Rights and Liberties or the Justice and Development Alliance and have since the very early 2100s. The governments formed this way can be brought down by losing the confidence of the Parliament for example, by failing to pass a budget, the process of finding a majority government will repeat again.


    Though a democratic body that has maintained stability for over a century and a half, the Solarian Compact Parliament has been dogged by accusations of dynastic politics, Charter influence, voter suppression, regulatory capture, inability to reign in the Banks and MIlitary, and corruption at all levels.


    Separate from the Parliament is the Solarian High Court that consists of eleven judges that serve terms of up to thirty-three years, with each new sitting of the Compact Parliament selecting one judge from a list provided by the governments of the six main worlds of the Solarian Compact. The High Court rules on matters of adherence of laws to the Solarian Constitution, and have been accused of serving as an arm of the Charters, though this has been strenuously contested by the Solarian legal profession as a whole.


    By law the Solarian Compact also oversees a number of other important institutions including the Earth Reconstruction Commission (In a permanent public-private partnership with the Earth Reconstruction Association), the Solarian Central Bank, and the Solarian Compact Navy, though these important institutions often exhibit an alarming degree of autonomy from Parliamentary control.


    The Charters:

    The result of a cleverly conceived merger between specialty transport vessel manufacturer Titan Staryards and Private Military contractor Martian Military Solutions, Ares cut its teeth not just supplying material to the skirmishes between Mississippi Shipping and United Starhaul, but in supplying military contractors to both sides.


    The professionalism of Ares mercenaries and quality of Ares gear led to the rapid expansion of business opportunities for the company and investment skyrocketed even after the Mississippi-Starhaul war ended in a hostile takeover of Starhaul by Mississippi.


    Thanks in part to Mississippi debts held by Ares, when the RT-2102 Gate was opened up for settlement strategic maneuvering saw the Compact grant Ares mining and settlement rights to the newly opened system.


    The rest, as they say, is history. Leveraging the immense resources of the Alexander system with their existing military expertise, Ares expanded nearly exponentially over the following century. While they maintain a dominating edge in the military field, they now integrated companies in fields from agronomy to personal fitness centers to xenobiology.


    Internally Ares very self consciously styles itself as a hierarchical military organization complete with a semi-formal rank structure and an ethos of respect for the chain of command, professional courtesy, and treating your subordinates with respect. In practice Ares is hidebound, authoritarian, filled with passive aggressive sniping and rampant empire building.


    While Ares remains headquartered on Mars, they have holdings in several systems and own the distant system of Alexander outright.

    Rhodes Mining


    One of the three original Charters that the Compact granted, Rhodes considers itself the singular reason that Humanity survived ecological collapse and spread past Sol. Immensely wealthy, over 52% of all material mined and processed by the entire Human race has passed through Rhodes hands at one point or another.


    While founded merely to provide Earth the vital materials that it needed to rebuild itself after the lost decades of ecological collapse, Rhodes quickly expanded into all areas of the economy to support their mining, refining, and processing operations.


    Dedicated to their vision of logistical chain efficiencies they've developed an entire chain of star systems into an efficient production center based around the resource rich system of Foundry, and the nearby feeder systems of Ecrams, Qem, and Crucible.


    Rhodes considers itself home to a version of meritocracy built on hard work, education, and good old fashioned personal drive. This has developed over time into a stratified internal divide between the rank and file workers, the lower level management, and the highly lauded senior management. Each class lives in entirely separate worlds, attending separate schools, consuming different products, and leading very different lives in what many observers have labelled a de facto caste system.

    they make food and medicine, the 120 year old CEO is kinda creepy tho?

    Techbros, some of them science, some of them explore

    Born from the union of Hermes Interstellar Services and The Ishtar Group, the Hermes-Ishtar Corporation owns and operates not only the communications backbone of Compact space, but much of the content that crosses over it.


    The results of increasing consolidation of pre-spaceflight communications infrastructure and content creation and management firms, Hermes Communications and Ishtar Entertainment Group were both part of the second round of Charters established after the advent of the KC gates.


    While Hermes quickly established operations throughout Compact space, their waystations, couriers, and communications repeaters a common sight in every corner of Human occupied space; Ishtar Group mainly limited their own operations to Sol and the Radiant system, where Ishtar owned and operated the world of Elysium to support their many projects.


    Following a wave of Compact space wide reorganizations following the Mississippi-Starhaul conflicts of the 2130s, a desire for complete vertical integration on Ishtar's part led to a mostly amicable union with Hermes in 2139.


    Since then Hermes-Ishtar have dominated all communications across Human space with only the privileged internal high-level communications of the other Charters managing to avoid consolidation under Hermes-Ishtar.


    While Hermes-Ishtar make a great show of respecting individual creativity, initiative, and drive from their employees; in practice this amounts to rampant internal fighting involving the parasocial personality cults of different "genius" inventors, artists, and executive that rise and fall inside of Hermes-Ishtar at a dizzying rate.

    Sketchy buggers, they can get you anything tho


    Historical Topics:

    Between 2036 and 2071 the Democratic Federation was the governing body of much of Earth's Western Hemisphere.


    Initially comprised of a Federation of Socialist, Anarchist, Communist, and other far left social movements, militias, and political factions controlling regions of Earth's North American continent during and after the decline and collapse of the United States of America (1776-2034) due to the effects of unaddressed climate change amplifying existing political and economic crisis.


    Eventually solidifying into the governing body of the former United States of America, United States of Mexico and the Dominion of Canada, the Democratic Federation embarked on an ambitious program of cultural revolution and economic reform designed to mitigate and reverse the effects of the climate change crisis.


    As the patron of much of the central and southern western hemisphere, the Democratic Federation attempted to chart a course of environmental restoration separate from that of the Solarian Treaty Organization (In 2063 reorganized into the Solarian Charter), choosing not to contest Eurasian and African domination of outer space.


    Having never existed out of crisis conditions, a combination of pre-existing economic damage, sabotage, and instability drove the Democratic Federation into decline in the Grey Decade of 2062 to 2070 and eventually forced the Democratic Federation to ratify a series of treaties giving the Charters economic access to Federation member states in order to conduct vital reconstruction work.


    A last ditch uprising by radical elements in 2072 to eject the Charters from the Democratic Federation failed when Solarian Compact peacekeepers were called in and in seven months of street fighting pacified most of North America's key urban centers via strategic use of orbital weapons on the areas of greatest urban resistance.


    Though guerilla warfare would continue in the Western Hemisphere for another three decades, the Democratic Federation was officially defunct by December 2072 and parcelled out into a number of Charter owned reconstruction areas under Compact authority.


    Today radicals still pine for the four decades that the Democratic Federation attempted to build an alternative to the emerging Charters, and the polity's distinctive black, red, and green flag is brought out for each and every Great Black Summer. Well into the twenty second century, riots were often accompanied by demands to 'Avenge the Martyrs of 72!'.


    Despite this underground extremist nostalgia, Charter and Compact schools teach that the Democratic Federation was a collectivist state whose iconoclastic behavior saw the destruction of famous landmarks like Mount Rushmore, Stone Mountain, and other monuments to Liberal Democracy and the Free Market in a mad attempt to remake the human race, but whose doctrinaire adoption of command economics saw them unable to deal with the ever-changing complexities of climate change.


    Misc Details:

    The first five systems to hold permanent Human colonies are known as either "The First Sisters" or "Earth's Daughters", depending on who you are asking and their political persuasion. From oldest to youngest, these worlds are:


    Columbia: settled by billionaire American expats and tens of millions of refugees who had fled the unfolding revolutionary violence of the North American continent several years beforehand. Columbia was founded under a vision of fidelity to the American dream and to prove the indomitability of the soul of the United States of America and liberalism in the face of the red flags of the (North American) Democratic Federation. Fiercely loyal to the Compact and the dream of Charter prosperity, and home of the Solarian Central Bank, Columbia is often known as the "Gilded World" in reference to what many see as a return to American Gilded Age wealth and social inequality. Ares Conflict Solutions' central command is located here.


    Atlantis: With colonization rights to this majority oceanic planet initially granted to the waning power of the European Union, the nations of the EU opened up colonization opportunities to other allied powers, especially Russia and Egypt. Atlantis was often seen by the EU as a place to dump unwanted refugees from outside of Europe's borders, and Russia and Egypt's tendency to see the world as a genuine project led to the usurpation of colonization rights away from Europe in the mid 2080s. Known today as the most restive of the first wave of colonies, Atlantis is the most skeptical of Charter power and plays a delicate game of wealth redistribution to underwrite the greatest social security net in Human Space. Cernunnos is de jure headquartered here.


    Penglai: Originally the world in the most need of terraforming of the original colonies, Colonization rights were granted to the People's Republic of China and their allies after a lackluster bidding campaign. As China's focus was mainly on attempting to stem the damage of climate change on Earth herself, colonization of Penglai initially lagged until the Chinese Politburo struck upon the strategy of subcontracting colonization rights to Pacific adjacent nations suffering from the rise of that ocean. As colonization unfolded in the early 22nd century Penglai became known as a multicultural mosaic as hundreds of millions from across the Pacific settled and intermingled on the wine darkened shores of that world. Known today for its vibrant cultural milieu, violent clashes between labour unions, and private police, Penglai hosts the headquarters of the Hermes-Ishtar, Omoikane and Rhodes corporations.


    Olduvai: With Colonization rights granted to a coalition of African nations at the height of the 'African Century', the African Colonization Organization did not see their colony as a refugee destination, dumping ground, or resource colony like their fellows. Instead the ACO saw the colonization scheme as an opportunity to preserve and export the rich traditions and cultures of Africa on their own terms, fully intending to set up healthy and self-sufficient colonies. To the current day, Olduvai has the closest relations with the home nations and is the heartland of Daughter sentiment and a bedrock for the Party for Human Rights and Liberties.


    Epsilon System: While not technically a single world, the cluster of heavily inhabited space colonies in the Epsilon system are always considered the 'Fifth Sister' or 'Fifth Daughter'. As the most mineral rich system of the original colonies, Epsilon was the source of many of the materials that helped pull Earth through her darkest hour, and the system was recognized for their efforts by being invited to send delegates to the 2099 Solarian Compact Constitutional Convention. Epsilon is famous for its people's long roots in spacing and for being the headquarters of Mississippi Shipping Interstellar and thus the most heavily trafficked system in history.
    Technologies
    Nanomanufacturing, summary:

    The contemporary gold standard for manufacturing. These devices use mechanosynthesis, a process that guides chemical reactions by placing reactive molecules with atomic precision. Ribosomes in the body's cells use a form of this method.


    While the largest units can create objects up to 2m x 2m x 2m, smaller units (halving the units each time) are viable on basically any human scale. Projects larger than this size (such as ships or buildings, need to be either grown layer-by-layer via nanofabricators attached to robotic arms, or assembled from smaller parts through traditional assembly line, dry dock, or construction processes.


    In principle basically anything can be made with these devices, and some materials can only be manufactured via these methods in microgravity. All manufacturing patterns in Compact Space feature Charter DRM using embedded explosive molecules like octaazacubane or cubic gauche nitrogen that will damage a disassembler or x-ray machine making reverse engineering of their products difficult.

    A common part of 23rd century life is the near ubiquity of Artificial Intelligences in daily life, from consumer grade VIs through specialist TLIs, controversial AGIs, finally the perpetually 10 years away Artificial Super Intelligences.


    The common consumer will daily run into what are properly known as Narrow AIs, and generally labelled as VI -Virtual Intelligences- by people outside the field. This category covers a broad swathe of techniques, from search and pathfinding to expert systems to genetic fuzzy trees to deep neural networks, which are mixed and matched with each other to optimize for the designed task. VIs are ubiquitous, exceeding human peak skill in their areas of specialization (though real world applications often don't do all that much better than trained humans), and have spent the past two centuries getting augmented with more and more clever algorithmic tricks for improving VIs. In order to do this, the Charters employ large teams of analysts and software engineers to develop clever algorithmic tricks that supplement or outright supplant neural networks, exploiting machine precision where stochastic methods are inadequate.


    The use of VIs in everyday life is well accepted by the vast majority of the population, with professionals mixing and matching various consumer VIs to analyse data or assist them with creative or scientific works. Some VI lines are well loved by both the populace and the Charters themselves, with Charter programmers often deliberately leaving VIs with behavioral quirks and unpredictable glitches that not only save money on quality assurance, but are considered endearing traits that lead to anthropomorphization by the consumer market

    Despite the mass comfortability and profitability of VIs of all kinds, the introduction of AGIs has been, to put it delicately, controversial. Though computer science has advanced to the point of producing programs that can not only pass the Turing test, but demonstrate sapience and match 23rd century human intelligence, flexibility, and creativity, the public reaction to the introduction of AGI saw the companies of the time rapidly pull them from the market, and even say the Compact itself move to heavily regulate the AI sector.


    First introduced in the 2060s, the great tech firms began replacing their work staff with AGIs who did not require food, rest, housing, or pay. This shift led to an alliance between white collar workers fearing that automation would put them out of work and radicals who opposed what they insisted was AGI Slavery, a growing movement that would climax in the First Great Black Summer of 2084. When the ashes of the First Black Summer settled, the Compact's Parliament moved to grant rights to AGIs, and the resulting economic damage saw dozens of formerly great names in computing consolidate under the aegis of several of the first Charters who flaunted their extra-Solarian wealth by buying up prestigious brand names and research divisions on the cheap.


    Since the 2080s, while the regulation surrounding AGI production and use have been severely weakened none of the Charters have sought to reintroduce them into the market, perhaps fearing another backlash like the First Black Summer and the few hundred thousand surviving AGIs that were granted Solarian Citizenship rights have found spread throughout the Compact and Charter Space where they usually work at the same white collar jobs whose workers they were designed to replace.

    Perhaps due to the risks of attempting to reintroduce AGIs to the market, Omoikane has instead introduced their flagship product the "TLI" or Temporary Limited Intelligence. Approximately as effective as an AGI, a TLI is billed as a more moral replacement for AGI that uses a suite of high end VIs and a proprietary batch of creativity algorithms in order to complete complex tasks.


    TLIs are used as a fire and forget program designed to be licensed to solve a single issue, no matter how complicated and then delete itself. Though the TLIs are a black box product, scientists from the other Charters believe that the central creativity algorithm in the TLI is inherently unstable and rapidly degrades in ability with time, making the TLI an instance of Omoikane attempting to market a critical technical flaw as a selling point that is accepted due to the ubiquitous market practice of planned obsolescence and artificial scarcity.


    Though expensive, most businesses and successful professionals will keep a few licensed Omoikane TLIs on hand to throw at difficult problems or to supplement manpower in crunch situations.

    While AGIs have been possible for nearly two centuries, the promise of a Seed AI, a recursively self-improving general superintelligence, is perpetually 'a decade away from the market', and no successful ASI ever been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the Charters or the Compact.


    This is not to say that the Gödel machine architecture or the AIXI model has somehow been forgotten in the past 230 years, but that the Friendly AI problem has yet to be cracked. Every demonstration has either stalled out or gone immediately rampant, attempting to overthrow Charter Space before being stopped by the safety net of Narrow AIs. The small trickle of roughly human intelligence level AGIs that are created every decade typically come from these projects.


    Urban legends persist that a few Seed AIs managed to escape and hide out beyond known space, plotting to return and crush humanity, or that they control all of society in secret, puppeting the Compact and Charters from their very foundation and occasionally engineering publicly failed ASI attempts to allay suspicion. These rumours are, of course, patently false, and simply the fevered imagination of crackpots at work, no doubt inspired by entertainment made by Hermes-Ishtar that feature AI supervillainy.
    Systems
    Map made by @Redshirt Army


    The Spinward Frontier:



    The Middle Spinward Frontier

    The Core Region:

    UNDER RADIANT CONTROL OR ALLIED:

    The Radiant system is host to a G-class star, only slightly smaller than Sol. The system itself is rather small and resource-poor; experts believe that one or more Jovian planets ejected much of the system's bodies and then followed themselves. This is evidenced by the system's asteroid belt degrading over time, with high levels of eccentric orbits and impacts on planetary surface.


    Radiant 1: A rather unremarkable airless iron planet, gravity 0.4 Earth Standard.


    Radiant 2: A slightly larger unremarkable airless iron-silicate planet, gravity 0.6 Earth Standard.


    Radiant 3: A binary planetary system and the outermost of the Radiant systems' planets.


    Asphodel (Radiant 3a): The larger of the Elysium 3 pair, Asphodel might have once hosted life of its own. That life has been snuffed out for hundreds of millions of years, though, as the planet's significant atmosphere began the runaway cycle of your usual hothouse planet. Hermes-Ishtar maintained a significant aerostat and automated surface miner operation for in-house manufacturing, given that the frequent asteroid impacts from the asteroid belt keep digging up chunks of the upper crust and having low-melting-point metals rain out of the sky and solidify, unoxidized, on the surface for collection. Gravity 1.4 Earth Standard.


    Elysium (Radiant 3b): Elysium was settled in the late 2190's, being a relatively simple affair. Simple life had already begun to evolve under its oceans, but continued orbital bombardment far past the lengths of things like Earth's Late Heavy Period had kept it there. It was a simple matter of forming up a small anti-asteroid task force armed with tugs and mining lasers to artificially end the pummeling, and the surface proved amenable to Terran life transplants. The colony is energy-self-sufficient, using a variety of solar, tidal, and nuclear power. Gravity 0.9 Earth Standard.


    Radiant I: The outermost significant feature of Radiant, this asteroid belt is more a loose mixture of a primordial asteroid belt much like Sol's with a Kuiper belt. The shepherding gas giants which once nudged all these rocks into their orbits are gone, and with it the entire outer system is a maelstrom of chaotic orbits as the belts lose their coherence. This requires constant vigilance from Elysium's anti-asteroid team, but the high eccentricity of many asteroids also makes it cheap and easy to mine the ones that might come Elysium's way, which provides a trickle of basic resources for upkeep and personal goods. All large-scale building and infrastructure projects have been supplied from out-system, however.

    A G-K far binary system, Gaid is simply a transit point to Radiant. Gaid's own gate maintenance techs and SAR rotated in and out through Radiant itself. There is no infrastructure other than a set of buoy lines for communications in Gaid A, and nothing in Gaid B.

    Gaid A1: An airless world. Quality 10.

    Gaid A2: A planet much like mars with a vestigial CO2 atmosphere. Quality 7.

    Gaid A3: This planet boasts a methane hydrosphere. Quality 4.

    Gaid AI: An asteroid belt.

    Gaid A4: A turbulent Jovian planet, its storms would make resource extraction difficult. Quality 5.

    Gaid A4a: An icy moon, with tidal heating creating a large ocean under a thin icy shell. Quality 9.

    Gaid B1: A molten Cthonian world hosting a simply ludicrous amount of iron. Quality 15.

    Gaid B2: An airless world. Quality 10.

    Gaid B3: An airless binary system with two near-identically sized planets. Quality 7 and 8.

    Gaid B4: This airless planet boasts a large and beautiful ring system, famous as a screen background option across human space. Every few years, a cruise or scientific expedition will stop by for more images.

    Gaid B5: A small icy planet. Quality 3.

    Gaid B6: A frozen world. Quality 7.

    Gaid B7: An interesting gas dwarf sometimes referred to as an 'ice dwarf.' Quality 14.

    A close K-M binary, Shei is home to an old Ares penal colony.

    Shei 1: A Cthonian world. Quality 15.

    Shei 2: An airless world. Quality 12.

    Sheol (Shei 3): A boreal world, with a large, decaying ring, the planet features two large continents. The population of the consists of a large prisoner population on the larger of the two continents and a small Ares training base on the smaller. Records show that the prison consists of several million persons convicted to "high risk labour" and dropped on the continent with automatic resupply via Ares contractors and watched from orbit by weapons satellites. Most of the planet's land area is covered in a native tree analogue with a strange multi-stranded trunk.


    Sheol is actually home to a population of over 100 million made up of prisoners and their descendants taht Ares was usuing as a live fire training course. Cooperation between Radiant agents, Ares mutineers, and the Sheolites themselves have seen the planet freed.


    Gravity .95 Earth Standard. Quality 12.

    Watchman (Shei 3a): Once the outer of two moons, this body now boasts Ares' local light shipyards and system command center. Quality 13.

    Shei 4: Spiraling in from the outer system, this planet will eventually evaporate near-entirely as it closes towards the dual suns of Shei. Quality 3.

    Shei 5: Martian planet with an active methane cycle. Quality 5.

    Shei I: Asteroid belt.

    Shei 6: Jovian planet with high rotation rate. Slightly squashed as a result. Quality 8.

    Shei 6a: An icy capture, this moon will be torn into a ring sometime in the next hundred thousand years. Quality 2.

    Shei 6b: Cold Martian planet, covered in a thin layer of water and carbon dioxide ices. Active methane cycle. Quality 8.

    Shei II: Asteroid belt.

    Shei 7: Jovian planet. Quality 13.

    Shei 7a: An icy moon with significant cryovolcanism. Quality 6.

    Shei 7b: A tiny icy moon, this is on the edge of hydrostatic equilibrium. Quality 2.

    Shei 8: Ice giant. Quality 6.

    Shei 8a: An icy moon. Quality 9.

    Shei 8b: An icy moon, orbiting in an unusual polar orbit. Quality 9.

    Population: 103,000,000

    While lacking any currently-habitable planets, Five Lions' large size and potential have made it a significant point of Rhodes' recent extraction efforts. Ambitious terraforming efforts have recently begun.


    Carajas (Five Lions 1): A Cthonian ball of iron, it's actively mined by robotic Rhodes-built landers. Gravity 2.3 Earth Standard. Quality 12.


    Five Lions 2: A small rocky ball. Quality 3.


    Five Lions 3: A rocky ball. Quality 7.


    Grasberg (Five Lions 4): A large rocky world, glaciation has rendered it uninhabitable for now, but terraforming efforts have begun to artificially ramp up the greenhouse effect and restore liquid water to the surface, along with mining its ice. Gravity 1.11 Earth Standard. Quality 14.


    Five Lions 5: This planet's atmosphere is so significant it verges on a gas dwarf. While a solid surface covered in a thin layer of ice is at the bottom, no reasonable colonization is possible. Quality 7.


    Five Lions I: This asteroid belt, along with all the others, is being mined heavily.


    Five Lions 6: This Jovian planet forms the center of current Rhodes extraction efforts. Quality 4.


    Five Lions 6a: This Martian planet boasts significant ice caps and active plate tectonics, though only a vestigial atmosphere. Debate on whether to put resources into terraforming it are ongoing. Gravity .81 Earth Standard. Quality 17.


    Oyu Tolgoi (Five Lions 6b): Home to the local population in covered shelters, this Martian planet, while nearly completely lacking water or plate tectonics, has its own atmosphere. Comet bombardment away from populated areas is ongoing and is already beginning to show results. Gravity .79 Earth Standard. Quality 11.


    Five Lions II: An asteroid belt.


    Five Lions 7: An unremarkable Jovian. Quality 2.


    Five Lions III: An asteroid belt.


    Five Lions 8: Jovian planet, its rotation speed has resulted in an unusually calm upper atmosphere. Quality 15.


    Five Lions IV: An asteroid belt.


    Five Lions 9: Jovian planet. Quality 9.


    Five Lions V: An asteroid belt.


    Five Lions 10: Neptunian ice giant. Quality 8.


    Five Lions 10a: A small icy moon. Quality 5.


    Five Lions 10b: A large icy body, this was probably its own planetoid at some point before being captured due to the complex interplays of no less than 5 gas giants.


    Population: 15,000,000

    A rare system with a brown dwarf orbiting a G-type star (just barely in the limits of what's considered a single system rather than a binary), and with a Jovian planet orbiting that, and on top of that treasure trove a dual ice giant binary, Osliam presents a golden research opportunity, and was bid on by Omoikane despite its otherwise sparce resources and poor habitable prospects.


    Osliam 1: A rare hot ice giant, this planet is actively shrinking on a measurable time scale. It must have migrated in as a much larger planet recently.


    Osliam 1a: This once-rock-ice moon is now a tiny molten ellipse barely holding together.


    Osliam 1b: This somewhat larger moon changes color unusually with its day, as the shade of its parent cools lava to a dull red before emerging back into the light heats the lava back to a healthy orange glow.


    Osliam 1c: This entire moon glows dull red in its day, just barely solid, and cools to an unusually smooth moon in its night.


    Osliam I: This asteroid belt was probably a planet before Osliam 1's passing tore it to shreds.


    Osliam 3: A hothouse planet with a relatively thin atmosphere, it retains temperatures and pressures that are survivable with heavy-duty equipment on the surface—when it's not raining sulfuric acid, that is.


    Osliam 4: This small Martian planet seems to have collected some of Osliam 1's offgassing in its move inwards, and has a renewed temporary atmosphere.


    Osliam 5a: This planet seems to have survived at the edge of the frost line by siphoning gas off its smaller twin.


    Osliam 5b: Barely a gas giant, this planet was probably only slightly smaller than Osliam 5a in the distant past.


    Osliam 6: The focus of Omoikane colonization in-system, Osliam 6 retains plate tectonics from the nearby brown dwarf but no atmosphere, an odd combination.


    Osliam 7: A brown dwarf, this substellar object long ago burnt its deuterium and now lies slowly cooling, glowing dimly red. It is, however, still giving off a prodigious amount of low IR radiation.


    Osliam 7a: Once its own planet, Osliam 7a was captured at some point by Osliam 7, perhaps in the same interaction that threw Osliam 1 to its suicidal innermost orbit.


    Osliam 7a1: This icy moon is simultaneously shrinking and becoming more habitable—while its outer layers of ice are sublimating, the fierce tides of its complex interplay with Osliam 7 and 7a are heating the inner ocean to temperatures comparable to terrestrial water sources. Some scientists even suggest a pocket of water vapor is forming under the ice, and may form an internal "sky" for as much as a hundred million years before the outer shell sublimates entirely.


    Osliam 7a2: This moon is less lucky; its tides are so strong that they seem to slowly be ripping the moon apart. It won't have the honor of becoming more than an ephemeral ring; the same complex tides tearing at it will rapidly disperse its debris field. While it lasts, though, it's easy water harvesting.


    Population: 650,000

    UNDER CHARTER CONTROL:


    A distant double G binary, Xotreh hosts a small habitable moon around Xotreh B, the smaller of the two stars. As such, development has focused on the second star, despite the fact that the jump points center closer to Xotreh A.


    Xotreh A1: This world boasts an active liquid silicate cycle on its surface, with oceans of basalt and continents of granite. Gravity 0.38 Earth Standard. Quality 8.


    Xotreh A2: A rather large airless world, its original atmosphere was likely blown off by a massive impact. Gravity 1.2 Earth Standard. Quality 9.


    Xotreh A3: A binary planetary pair of airless worlds about the size of Mars. Quality 6 and 8.


    Xotreh A4: A hothouse planet with a planet-wide sulfuric acid storm due to its rapid rotation. Gravity .71 Earth Standard. Quality 8.


    Xotreh A5 "Cueball": This planet is remarkably similar to Earth—if earth was buried under a kilometers-thick ice sheet across 90% of the surface. One day, as Xotreh A expands and dies, this world will become an ocean planet, but for now it's a cold desert. Gravity .87 Earth Standard. Quality 5.


    Xotreh A6: An unremarkable icy ball. Quality 4.


    Xotreh AI: An asteroid belt.


    Xotreh A7: A Jovian planet, Xotreh 7 corrals the entire inner system in line. Quality 10.


    Xotreh B1: This planet must have once been a gas giant at least the size of Uranus before it was sent inwards. Now all that remains is a dense core with a molten surface. Gravity 1.51 Earth Standard. Quality 13.


    Xotreh B2: A binary pair of earth-sized airless worlds. Quality 6 and 7.


    Xotreh B3: Another once-gas giant, this planet remains far out enough to boast a wholly-solid surface of iron. Gravity 1.64 Earth Standard. Quality 14.


    Xotreh B4: A Jovian right on the frost line, its tidal heating keeps its moons on the edge of habitability. Quality 3.


    Xotreh B4a "Sushi": An ocean world with massive polar ice caps, Omoikane has constructed a series of seasteads on the equatorial high ocean plateaus where it was feasible to drive foundations into the sea floor a few hundred meters below the surface. These small facilities serve as housing, data storage, and production centers for the research teams studying the dual Cthonian planets of Xotreh B. Gravity .67 Earth Standard. Quality 2.


    Xotreh B4b: The lesser tidal heating here worsened the glaciation, and the planet lies under a planet-wide crust of ice. Gravity 1.13 Earth Standard. Quality 10.


    Xotreh BI: The close proximity of this asteroid belt makes it an ideal location for resource extraction.


    Xotreh 5: This Jovian is definitively beyond the habitable zone. Quality 6.


    Xotreh 6: A dense ice giant. Quality 4.


    Xotreh 7: Jovian planet. Quality 6.


    Xotreh 8: An exceptionally cold Jovian. Quality 9.


    Xotreh 8a: An unremarkable icy sphere. Quality 8.


    Xotreh 9: This planet would have a massive atmosphere, if it wasn't so cold it all froze and fell to the surface. Only a few degrees above the space surrounding it. Gravity 1.3 Earth Standard. Quality 9.


    Population: 54,000

    Besides an interesting Jovian-gas dwarf planetary system, Bestreer holds little of interest other than its connections to other places.


    Bestreer 1: An airless world. Quality 2.


    Bestreer 2: An airless world. Quality 6.


    Bestreer 3: This airless world once had a captured moon, torn apart at the Roche limit and forming a ring. A small gate maintenance and SAR team bases here, siphoning fuel and water from Bestreer 5 and mining into the surface for both resources and safe spaces for housing. Quality 10.


    Bestreer 4: A rock-ice world. Quality 5.


    Bestreer 5: Another rock-ice world made up more of ice than rock. Quality 5.


    Bestreer I: An icy asteroid belt.


    Bestreer 6: A large Jovian planet, on the edge of becoming a brown dwarf. Quality 15.


    Bestreer 6a: This gas dwarf might have become a gas giant in its own right without its massive sibling. Quality 5.


    Bestreer 7: Another Jovian. Quality 14.


    Bestreer 7a: An icy moon, with an internal ocean buried under kilometers of ice. Quality 12.


    Bestreer 8: An icy ball. Quality 10.


    Population: 450

    G-class star. A transshipping point to Radiant and environs, Mississippi keeps a substantial support crew on hand for possible cargo ship breakdowns or emergencies in-system, due to the slightly increased risk of issues from the absolute shambles of Akleod's inner system. A minor executive has also put together a cheap refueling and battery exchange station.


    Akleod 1: Even actively evaporating and leaving behind a trail in orbit of dissipating volatiles, this body is large enough to have usurped Akleod 1a's orbit temporarily until it disappears away or the chaotic orbit of the two throws one into the star or out of the system. Quality 2.


    Akleod 1a: The original Akleod 1, its orbit has been badly disrupted by the current, migrating Akleod 1. Which of the two gets ejected is still uncertain despite a decent amount of computational simulation; odds put it at 48-52% relatively. Quality 6.


    Gnat's Ass (Akleod 2): A small, loosely-held-together icy body, perhaps what used to be an asteroid belt before Akleod 1's suicidal inner-system dive. It's not yet had time to fully reach hydrostatic equilibrium. Quality 3.


    Akleod 3: An icy planet similar to Akleod 1, perhaps an old sibling. Quality 13.


    Akleod I: An asteroid belt.


    Akleod 4: A Jovian with an unusually elliptical orbit, it's regarded as the culprit for the chaos of Akleod's inner system. Quality 11.


    Population: 5,000

    As it turns out, transponder codes from regular priority messages through Gaid (now that we can see them, having backdoored the gate control) bear tags from a system, Thoa, along with navigational chart updates for any ships that happen to stop by. Thoa and Gaid both seem to have been nothing more than transit points to the far-more-valuable Radiant for Hermes-Ishtar, but Thoa holds a small anti-pirate base guarding against raiders from Signia. Hermes-Ishtar was apparently serious enough about it to have a converted corvette on station.

    All told, the Thoa system holds gates to 2 systems besides Gaid's. There's also an unimproved jump point simply labelled as "dangerous." that leads to Signia

    Thoa System Stats:

    Thoa 1: A molten mess of a planet, it's hot enough that a residual atmosphere of vaporized low-melting-point metallics exists.

    Thoa 2: An unremarkable airless metal ball.

    Thoa 3: A super-earth hothouse, this planet would have been uninhabitable due to its gravity even before turning scorchingly hot.

    Thoa 3a: A captured asteroid barely on the edge of hydrostatic equilibrium, the Nasty Bastardhad been excavating rudimentary shelters for "leave" for its crew.

    Thoa I: An asteroid belt.

    Thoa 4: A normal Jovian planet.

    Thoa 4a: A moon much like Mars in climate.

    Thoa 5: A Jovian planet with an unusual triangular wind pattern at the poles.

    Thoa 6: Blooms of hydrogen well up from the core of this Jovian, perhaps disturbed by some recent impact.

    Thoa 7: Bathyscapes would find themselves at home on the surface of Thoa 7. Pressures much like that at Earth's seabed keep a crust of ice 3 stable enough robotic drones could walk on it.

    Thoa 7a: Unusually, Thoa 7a is the only large icy body in the system. Scientists are unsure of where the others went. As the only easy source of volatiles, the UNasty Bastard periodically stopped by a handful of obsolete volatile collection systems on the surface to top up.

    Thoa II: A Kuiper belt of icy objects.

    Empty Systems

    Kimberly: A fairly unremarkable and empty system, this site was chosen as Rhodes' spinward boneyard—a place for failed experiments, old equipment, and ships so worn they weren't worth maintaining anymore, but were still valuable enough to warrant not throwing into a gas giant or otherwise completely destroyed. For 2 decades a Rhodes-affiliated salvaging contractor worked here, gathering scrap and other valuables, but following high injury and death rates and low returns, the contract (and most non-local dumping) was cancelled in 2247 (4 years before the March Days.)

    Kimberly 1: A large rocky planet, this must have migrated inwards from further out in the system a long time ago to be so large so close to its parent star.

    Kimberly 2: A Martian planet that keeps a comfortable daytime temperature despite its lack of atmosphere due to a close orbit.

    Kimberly 3: A Jovian world.

    Kimberly I: This asteroid belt is actually combined with a thinly-spread junkyard corralled by Kimberly's 2 gas giants.

    Kimberly 4: A Neptunian world, this planet has several starship hulks abandoned as the closest stable orbit to the gate out. An old deactivation hub orbits in resonance with Kimberly 4a, the former site of a salvaging operation.

    Kimberly 4a: The only significant satellite in the system, this icy moon retains a thin crust and a massive subterranean freshwater ocean.

    Total:


    Radiant:


    Gaid:


    Five Lions:


    Head of Diplomatic Corps:

    Name: Amanda Redcrest, Victoria Blackwell, and Kayla Hayashi


    DoB: "2222", 2219, 2227, 2224


    Current Position: Influential media figure and figurehead of Social Committee propaganda


    Not a traditional diplomat, or a traditional individual 'Veronica Stardust' is the persona of a trio of XP broadcasters who have been working together since 2246 and has consistently been one of the most recognized figures across Charter space and is a local Elysian celebrity.


    In Charter space those individuals who choose to make money by recording their lived experiences, of all kinds, for later playback are treated with an indulgent disdain by the polite classes as a mix of internet celebrity and sex worker despite the practice of selling XP experiences being common in the poorer segments of society and a smaller portion of the professional middle class attempting to stay afloat in a tight gig economy.


    Amanda Redcrest was a former media programmer whose attempts to supplement her income with XP work backfired and saw her fired from her job. Contrarily, Kayla and Victoria both come from lower class backgrounds, though Kayla's attempts to climb into the middle class by earning a marketing degree were frustrated when her lower class status markers and financing of education via XP work saw her frozen out of the job market.


    A former collaborator of Kayla's, Victoria had been a rising XP star in her own right and had no desire to change her station, but as her brief celebrity began to fade Victoria approached Kayla to propose the creation of a dedicated broadcasting persona that both would act as. Later bringing on Redcrest, who they'd both done crossover XP work with, to do technical work, the trio used carefully gathered market data and some intuition to create the "Veronica Stardust" persona of an middlingly-intelligent and freewheeling persona who played to the upper class's picture of what depravities and indignities the poorer class must get up to in their spare time.


    From 2246 to 2251 the Veronica Stardust persona (performed by all three at various times, though primarily Victoria) produced experience recordings that were nearly always in the top 10 best sellers across Charter space.


    Though they enjoyed the wealth that they brought in, the trio increasingly chafed at the market driven limitations of Veronica, and were considering a number of possibly catastrophic brand shifts when the March Days broke out and all three participated in street actions in a private capacity after sending one last broadcast as 'Veronica' to encourage revolt.


    Since the formation of the Social Committee the figure of Veronica has been rebranded to serve as the figurehead of Social Committee Propaganda and several major initiatives have been launched with her at the forefront including a highly successful part of the anti-overproduction initiatives.


    As part of the now-completed campaign to maintain the charade that Radiant was still under Charter control, Veronica Stardust continued to sell broadcasts to HI media chains, though the trio could not help but begin a brand shift towards a far more intelligent and radical persona.


    Pros: XP Celebrity, influential, well known, inspiring to the middle and lower classes


    Cons: XP celebrity, little diplomatic experience, three people


    Diplomatic Goals: Defeat the Charters in the field of public opinion, push social revolution and freedom of information and communication, cause public opinion to oppose attacking Radiant


    Unlocked FRM

    Ares Peacekeeping Grade - Access to planetary army formation

    Ares Military Grade - Access to mid-sized shipyards, bonuses to planetary army combat. Bonus to completion of Chinook remodeling


    Rhodes Light industrial Grade - 10% increase to all mining income, reduced Cost for BLG and other actions that use basic fabber processes

    Rhodes Heavy Industrial Grade - Massive discount on mining upgrades, able to unlock automated technologies with Omoikaine


    Cernunnos Consumer Grade - +1 to all Soccom actions

    Cernunnos Enterprise Grade - NOT UNLOCKED


    Omoikane Consumer Grade - +1 to FRM reserach for each two tech bases unlocked (+6 currently)

    Omoikane Enterprise Grade - +5 to blue sky research, automation with Omoikane


    Hermes-Ishtar Consumer Grade - Your economy doesn't crash when the turn of funding

    Hermes-Ishtar Production Grade - NOT UNLOCKED


    MSI Consumer Grade - Consumer Goods, Drones, and personal vehicles, +2 to domestic projects in IndComm and SocComm

    MSI Enterprise Grade - NOT UNLOCKED


    Original Tech

    The Box: Fabber the size of a X-box that can, with time, materials and power, print the components for a full sized box. Less efficient, but easy to print and hide.


    Defence Coordinator:


    Name: Maria Awhina

    DoB: 2165

    Current Position: Military Committee Delegate from the Radiant Veterans Guild


    Born into poverty on Earth as the twenty-second century began to wane, young 22-year old Maria Awhina caught up in radical anti-Charter politics during the third black summer of 2187 and was convicted of property destruction during the rioting and sentenced to serve as a contractor to Hermes-Ishtar until her contract was paid off.


    The stark choice of starvation or service to Hermes-Ishtar caused Maria to descend into self-destructive behavior where for twenty years Ms. Awhina continuously volunteered for the highest paid and most dangerous positions that Hermes-Ishtar had available.


    Hermes-Ishtar considers Special Operations Lieutenant Awhina to have served with distinction throughout the heavy skirmishing of that era, though Maria herself continues to carry guilt for her service and her survival.


    After performing exceptionally well in a hostage rescue operation Awhina was transferred to the Protective Detail Division of Hermes-Ishtar Security, and was eventually assigned to serve as the head of the Radiant Vice President's protective detail.


    Over the next four decades she came to see the world as her home, and while her professionalism never wavered, her loyalty to the company who still owned her contract did.


    This March, Maria had the option to gun down her fellow planetary headquarters workers to secure Yang's escape, or to finally return to roots in anti-Charter agitation. The fact that we are all here today shows what choice she made.


    Pros:

    -Actual Combat Veteran, knows Radiant inside and out, special operations expert, professional.


    Cons:

    -only academic knowledge of starship operations, logistics, organization command and strategic operations.


    Command Traits:

    -Objective oriented, unflappable, aggressive, prefers attacks and operations to come from unexpected angles.

    Reports from the Permanent Commission for Military Intelligence on hostile forces in neighbouring systems:

    Blue Squadron:
    -Allegiance: Ares Combat Solutions
    -Service: Mars Interstellar Security
    -CO: Rear Admiral Weylon Kang
    -Flagship: MIS Yorktown

    We know little about Rear Admiral Weylon Kang except that he has received a number of commendations from the MIS board for keeping costs low while on deployment. He appears to be making an effort to clamp down on the rumours racing back and forth across the fleet.

    MIS Yorktown
    -British Empire-class Fleet Tender
    MIS Eurymedon
    -New Model-class Strike Corvette
    MIS La Rochelle
    -New Model-class Strike Corvette
    MIS Cape Rachado
    -New Model-class Strike Corvette
    MIS Second Schooneveld
    -New Model-class Strike Corvette
    MIS Matapan
    -New Model-class Strike Corvette
    MIS Valcour Island
    -New Model-class Strike Corvette
    MIS Kerch Strait
    -New Model-class Strike Corvette
    MIS Galveston Harbour
    -New Model-class Strike Corvette
    MIS Cape Sarych
    -New Model-class Strike Corvette
    MIS River Plate
    -New Model-class Strike Corvette
    MIS Third San Francisco
    -New Model-class Strike Corvette
    MIS Scipio Africanus
    -Cossak-class Frigate
    MIS Suleiman I
    -Cossak-class Frigate
    MIS Louis Botha
    -Cossak-class Frigate
    MIS Fort Ware
    -Hudson's bay Company-class Fast Fleet Tanker
    MIS Fort Mackinac
    -Hudson's bay Company-class Fast Fleet Tanker
    MIS Fort Osage
    -Hudson's bay Company-class Fast Fleet Tanker
    MIS Arabian
    -Postal-class Courier
    MIS Macedonia
    -Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
    MIS Hispania Citerior
    -Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
    MIS Hispania Ulterior
    -Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
    MIS Gallia Narbonensis
    -Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
    MIS Sicilia
    -Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport
    MIS Corsica et Sardinia
    -Legionary-class Fast Troop Transport

    Fixed Defences:
    Battery A
    -MSS-54-F LMP Constellation
    Battery B
    -MSS-54-F LMP Constellation
    Battery C
    -MSS-54-F LMP Constellation
    Shoal A
    -ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
    Shoal B
    -ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
    Shoal C
    -ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
    Shoal D
    -ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
    Shoal E
    -ASR-33-C TAM Shoal
    Shoal F
    -ASR-33-C TAM Shoal

    Fixed Defences:
    Battery A
    -Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation
    Battery B
    -Airstrike Pattern LMP Constellation
    Shoal A
    -Macross-Pattern LMP Constellation
    Shoal B
    -Macross-Pattern LMP Constellation
    Strikecraft Wing, ID# 48603
    -Radiance-Type Strikecraft

    -None

    -None

    Local Security Forces
    -Approximately fifty strong volunteer station security militia drawn from station personnel

    Local Security Forces:
    -Deep Space Security Solutions (Omoikane Subsidiary) Customs shuttle squadron based out of Xotreh B-4a's orbital station
    -Three companies of Standard Planetary Security Company (Ares subsidiary) troops based out of Xotreh B-4a's habitat complexes for internal security and law enforcement

    139th Solarian Navy Squadron:
    -Allegiance: Solarian Compact
    -Service: Solarian Navy
    -CO: Vice Admiral David Visser
    -Flagship: SNS Krak de Chevaliers

    Thanks to his heavy handed labour discipline and extractive tribute and demands for corvee labour from Ascension Admiral Visser is viscerally hated by the populace of Ascension, and to a lesser degree the rest of the Solarian Force as well. While the gate's completion draws near, it is uncertain what path that Visser will persue.

    SNS Krak de Chevaliers
    -Star-hold-Class light-tender
    SNS Victoria Newman
    -Leonard Greyson-Chang-Class Strike Corvette
    SNS Julia Stonechild
    -Leonard Greyson-Chang-Class Strike Corvette
    SNS Robert Chuikov
    -Leonard Greyson-Chang-Class Strike Corvette
    SNS Wallace Al-Wazir
    -Leonard Greyson-Chang-Class Strike Corvette
    SNS Dawn's Early Light
    -Freedom's Light-class cruiser
    SNS Jacob Nagumo
    -Herald Kanumba-Class frigate
    SNS Alexander Hamilton
    -Liberation-class troop transport

    Solarian Marines now spread throughout the system

    PCMI Provides new system data on the single system that lies beyond beyond Five Lions:

    Mobile Force:

    Current Orders: Defend the All Radiant Congress by acting as a rapid response in the event of any hostile acts.

    CO: Commodore Stephanie Rousseau

    CNS Velasco, United States of America-class Fleet Carrier

    -CO: Captain Esteri Attar

    -Orca Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft (Customized)

    -CO: Wing Commander Jasmine Ang

    -Red Wolf Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft (Customized)

    -CO: Wing Commander Heloisa Kimura de Lima

    CNS Shieldmaiden, Great Heathen-class Light Cruiser

    -CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

    CNS Shamhat, Great Heathen-class Light Cruiser

    -CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

    CNS Righteous Tempest, Cossak-class Frigate

    -CO: Captain Vehement Shade

    CNS August Willich, Cossak-class Frigate

    -CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

    CNS Elysium, Cossak-class Frigate

    -CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

    CNS Asphodel, Cossak-class Frigate

    -CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

    -


    Home Force:

    Current Orders: Defend Radiant, comet patrol, act as a reserve force

    CO: Commodore Erina Kozlova

    CNS Blaire Mountain, New Model-Class Strike Corvette

    -CO: Captain Guillermo Kageyama

    CNS Scutum, Comet-Class Patrol Corvette

    -CO: Captain Martin Pagonis

    CNS Buckler, Comet-Class Patrol Corvette

    -CO: Captain Samuel Smiles

    CNS Nasty Bastard, A Jury Rigged Mess of a Drone Carrier

    -CO: Captain Jean-Paul Beaumont

    -


    Radiant System Self Defence Force:

    Current Orders: Defend Radiant, comet patrol

    CO: Overseen by Admiral Gregory Mansur in his capacity as MilComm Chief of Naval Operations


    Radiant Customs Squadron, Arabia-class boarding craft with marine contingents

    -CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

    Switchblade Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft

    -CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

    Apogee Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft

    -CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-


    Battery A, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

    Battery B, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

    Battery C, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

    Battery D, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

    Battery E, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

    Battery F, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

    Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)


    Radiant Orbital Yard 1

    Current construction: None

    Radiant Orbital Yard 1

    Current construction: None


    -


    Gaid System Self Defence Force:

    Current Orders: Defend Gaid

    CO: Commodore Victor Raine

    Battery A, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

    Battery B, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

    Battery C, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

    Battery D, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

    Battery E, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

    Battery F, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

    Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

    Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

    Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

    Zephyr Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

    -CO: Wing Commander Ara Helge

    Aeolus Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

    -CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

    Gale Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

    -CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

    -

    Frontier Force

    Current Orders: Keep watch on SolNav force in Raphanus, assist with integration of Ascension military forces, patrol Spinward frontier

    CO: Commodore Shayla McLean

    CNS Kiel Mutiny, Kaiserreich-class BattleCruiser

    -CO: Captain Inana Devlin

    CNS Choreographer, Janissary-class Light Tender

    -CO: Captain Karl Xanthopoulos

    CNS Valiant, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

    -CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

    CNS Defiant, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

    -CO: Captain Fool's Errand

    CNS Reliant, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

    -CO: Captain Rouge Napier

    CNS Actium, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

    -CO: Captain John Rankin

    CNS Crête-à-Pierrot, New Model-class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

    -CO: Captain Nkiru Chaudhari

    CNS Valmy, New Model-Class Strike Corvette, attached to CNS Choreographer

    -CO: Captain Sumac Barros

    CNS Revolutionary Will, Cossak-class Frigate

    -CO: Captain Yamamoto Hanae

    CNS Revolutionary Grace, Cossak-class Frigate

    -CO: -N/A DATABASE ERROR, CONTACT IT FOR HELP-

    CNS Under New Management, Don-Class Fast Tanker

    -CO: Captain Adras Kierenos

    CNS Liberte, Hollywood(C)-Class Frigate

    -CO: Captain Colin McRae

    CNS Egalite, Hollywood(C)-Class Frigate

    -CO: Captain Adelia Swift

    Resources
    Naval Ship Types: Ship Types (Public Version)
    Naval Officers: Congressional Navy Officers (Public Version)
    System Codex: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rtNbPCcPsTK7HCHKo9dPgK7ntx5tBKOpltrZb_In7GY/edit#
    Blaze Zhang: Blaze Zhang is trans-masc. That means his pronouns are he/him.


    DISCORD LINK:

    Join the Wordsmiths Discord Server!

    Check out the Wordsmiths community on Discord – hang out with 897 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
    discord.gg discord.gg
     
    Last edited by a moderator:
  • Informational
    • @AKuz So, as I understand it, Quality only affects how many times a mine can be expanded, not how much each stage produces, right?

    How much does each stage increase the amount of resources produced?
     
    AKuz said:
    For that matter Dr. Bissonnette has no military experience at all, but has a firm vision of a military armed with the most advanced weapons in human space and the will and connections to see such a program through. She certainly sounds confident in herself, and has the political backing.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    On one hand, wondrous new weapons.
    On the other hand, wunderwaffe.

    AKuz said:
    While the SocComm had originally planned to release these individuals to the restorative justice system as they posed little threat of reoffending as their crimes had been conducted while in a position of power and they would never have the opportunity to reoffend, public outrage has converged on a demand that these individuals be sentenced to a permanent internal exile to the former resort community occupying an isolated archipelago in the deep ocean.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I assume there's no possibility for compromise? Like, short term sentences (or even protective custody) untill stuff cools down?
     
    Chimeraguard said:
    @AKuz So, as I understand it, Quality only affects how many times a mine can be expanded, not how much each stage produces, right?

    How much does each stage increase the amount of resources produced?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    At the moment, with your basic level of tech, and lack of experience, quality only means to you how much infra you can stack. Yes

    And at this moment, with your tech and experience, each stage increases production by 10.

    10ebbor10 said:
    I assume there's no possibility for compromise? Like, short term sentences (or even protective custody) untill stuff cools down?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    you can try a write in and see what happens.

    I'm actually going to say that I encourage write ins for these sorts of General Congress questions, that take your temperature on an issue. Heck, If you do your votes in character, you might even get a bonus >: V
     
    Without voting one way or another on the military and trial choice, here's two variations of a plan.

    [ ] Plan Exporting the Revolution
    -[ ] [FOCUS] Media Committee
    -[ ] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1 (10 BR)
    -[ ] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production. (10 SR, 5 E)
    -[ ] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management (3 SR, 3 E)
    -[ ] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[ ] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Shei (1 SR)
    -[ ] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Akleod (1 SR)
    -[ ] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade (2 SR, 5 E)

    Total Cost: 10 BR, 17 SR, 13 E

    [ ] Plan Building the Revolution
    -[ ] [FOCUS] Industry Committee
    -[ ] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1 (10 BR)
    -[ ] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-2 (10 BR)
    -[ ] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production. (10 SR, 5 E)
    -[ ] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management (3 SR, 3 E)
    -[ ] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[ ] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Akleod (1 SR)
    -[ ] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade (2 SR, 5 E)

    Total Cost: 20 BR, 16 SR, 13 E

    Establish at least one mining operation in Gaid, start work on a corvette yard, finish up the Fabricators, and get SocComm to work unlocking more dice.

    MedComm, obviously we want to continue maintaining the Charade to buy more time, while I want to insert agents to Akleod because that's where there's an Executive who had dealings with Yang, so we might be able to get something there about the guy to help keep the Charade going for longer.

    Meanwhile, the main difference is getting a 2nd BR mine up vs inserting assets to Shei to get info on that Ares squadron and see if there's anything we can do to weaken or subvert them.
     
    Last edited:
    I'd say we definitely don't want to go on the retributive justice route with the execs, but if they have decent opportunities and living conditions in the archipelago (and given all the resorts they almost certainly have the latter), then just saying they can't leave that part of the planet seems like a compromise we can make.

    On the matter of the military, all I know is that I don't want the scientist because she seems, like 10ebbor10 says, pretty wunderwaffen-y, and I also don't want to scrap the Choreographer because it honestly just seems fun to have a flagship.
     
    Chimeraguard said:
    Establish at least one mining operation in Gaid, start work on a corvette yard, finish up the Fabricators, and get SocComm to work unlocking more dice.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Why start mining in Gaid?

    I'd argue it's better to start exploit domestic reserves first. It'll be easier for logistics (no warp gate movement shenanigans) and means we only need to secure 1 area.
     
    Can we create a Deputy Military Coordinator position? I think Erina Koszlova shows a lot of promise, but I'm not fully comfortable putting her in charge before she's ever fought a battle. If we put Maria Awhina in charge of the whole thing and let Koszlova study under her for a while, we could get the best of both worlds.
     
    10ebbor10 said:
    Why start mining in Gaid?

    I'd argue it's better to start exploit domestic reserves first. It'll be easier for logistics (no warp gate movement shenanigans) and means we only need to secure 1 area.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Hoping to have Gaid up and ready by the time we get tech that actually lets Quality mean something, but fair enough. I'll swap over to Radiant-1 and Radiant-2.

    Edit: Done.
     
    AKuz said:
    While the SocComm had originally planned to release these individuals to the restorative justice system as they posed little threat of reoffending as their crimes had been conducted while in a position of power and they would never have the opportunity to reoffend, public outrage has converged on a demand that these individuals be sentenced to a permanent internal exile to the former resort community occupying an isolated archipelago in the deep ocean.

    [ ] [ARCHIPELAGO] Permanent Internal exile
    [ ] [ARCHIPELAGO] Remand to restorative justice system
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Anyway, justice wise we have a bunch of priorities. For the sake of this argument, I'm going to identify 5 elements

    0) Restitution
    1) Retributive Justice
    2) Deterence
    3) Rehabiliation
    4) Security.

    Security, as noted, is largely a moot point. These people do not have the capability to reoffend, so we don't need to ensure that they do not reoffend.
    Rehabilitation is thus also not all that hard, and perfectly feasible.

    Deterrence is a sword that cuts both ways. On one hand, you could argue that we should treat prisoners harshly, in order to encourage people to comply rather than resist us. On the other hand, the harsher we treat prisoners, the harder other corporate officials will resist.
    Deterrence is also not politically compatible with the thing we're doing. It is very much the corporate method (and also rather ineffective). Criminals are either forced to commit crime by circumstance, or believe they won't get caught and thus the sentence doesn't matter.

    Retributive justice is the demand of the people, but again more of a corporate method. On the other hand, if we don't act, vigilante's might.

    Finally, restitution. The big problem is that short of outright collaboration, they're not capable of providing any meaningfull amount of restitution.

    -----

    Anyway, I would argue for placing these people on the island for a short term (with a justification ranging from protective custody, national security interests, or special re-integration) before trickling them back in through the reformative justice programs. That should mitigate public outrage without setting any bad precedents.
     
    Gonna do a big writeup to go through all the options. In the meantime, @AKuz are we committed to whoever we pick as military coordinator forever, or would it be possible to replace them if the strategic picture sufficiently changes?
     
    Mr BreaksIt said:
    On the matter of the military, all I know is that I don't want the scientist because she seems, like 10ebbor10 says, pretty wunderwaffen-y,
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    She's identified as a member of the Jeune Ecole, which was a historical movement in France that did some things right, even though it did overestimate the effect of various new technologies.

    The Torpedo and the submarine were both viable weapons, but they never did obsolete the battleship.

    So, while I made the wunderwaffe joke, it's kind of inaccurate. Wunderwaffe was propaganda, the Jeune Ecole was just genuine overestimation. The weapons worked, they just weren't as wondrous as proclaimed.

    And well, you know, sometimes you do invent an aircraft carrier and change the face of naval warfare forever.


    AKuz said:
    [ ] [CO] Dr. Sheila Bissonnette, the Jeûne Ecole leader
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Any chance we can tap her later for a DARPA equivalent?
     
    Voter's open. The Trials thing I'll leave in the hands of those with more insight to that department. I will say that neither option right now sounds appealing, so I'm definitely hoping for a write-in.

    [X] [CO] Erina Kozlova, the Enthusiastic Amateur

    The only real military veteran we have available was a commando, not a space force leader. Erina seems like the next best thing.

    Could be convinced for Sheila, but "arrogant" con has me leery, and Erina actually has military skill, even if only from simulations.

    For the rest...
    [X] Plan Exporting the Revolution
    -[X] [FOCUS] Media Committee
    -[X] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1 (10 BR)
    -[X] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production. (10 SR, 5 E)
    -[X] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management (3 SR, 3 E)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[X] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Shei (1 SR)
    -[X] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Akleod (1 SR)
    -[X] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade (2 SR, 5 E)

    Total Cost: 10 BR, 17 SR, 13 E

    [X] Plan Building the Revolution
    -[X] [FOCUS] Industry Committee
    -[X] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1 (10 BR)
    -[X] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-2 (10 BR)
    -[X] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production. (10 SR, 5 E)
    -[X] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management (3 SR, 3 E)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[X] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Akleod (1 SR)
    -[X] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade (2 SR, 5 E)

    Total Cost: 20 BR, 16 SR, 13 E

    [X] Plan Training the Revolution
    -[X] [FOCUS] Social Committee
    -[X] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1 (10 BR)
    -[X] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production. (10 SR, 5 E)
    -[X] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management (3 SR, 3 E)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[X] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Akleod (1 SR)
    -[X] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade (2 SR, 5 E)

    Total Cost: 10 BR, 16 SR, 13 E
    E Income reduced by 10 if Encourage Retraining finishes.

    Behold, I have added a third plan: this one focusing on Encourage Retraining to give us another die.

    Not sure which plan I actually favor over the others, so I'll just vote for all three.
     
    Thoughts on all of the different options:

    [ ] [CO] Maria Awhina, the Commando
    Unconventional warfare seems thematically to be a good fit for our relatively stealthy, media-manipulation-focused revolution. A commander who knows the system is also a valuable asset since, in the near term, we're not in much of a position to defend anything beyond Radiant--if something tries to roll up Gaid I think the play is to let them and defend Radiant proper, for example. On the other hand, we're not likely to be doing much dirtside engagement in the near future, which nullifies some of Awhina's primary advantages.

    [ ] [CO] Gregory Mansur, the Space Patrol Commander
    Patience is good. Being conservative and limited in vision is less good. This is a revolution--a fundamentally risky endeavor. I don't know that we're going to get the best out of our limited assets even though he's supposedly good at doing that.

    [ ] [CO] Erina Kozlova, the Enthusiastic Amateur
    Theoretical experience is better than no experience, but I think there's a risk of blindspots where the games don't match up to real life, and that stubbornness could be a problem. On the other hand, leadership ability is, I think, more important than substantive knowledge--that can be learned or taught, but the ability to lead a group of people to do stuff not so much. Plus, fundamentally, the lack of experience in space combat is something they all have to contend with, so the primary downside is kind of just the baseline. Not being casualty sensitive is, by itself, not a problem, but coupled with the gamer background and lack of military experience, that sounds like the stereotypical REMF to me. Not great.

    [ ] [CO] Dr. Sheila Bissonnette, the Jeûne Ecole leader
    Arrogance is one thing, and like I said lack of military experience is sort of the baseline, but the desire to focus on wunderwaffe seems like a mistake to me. It's not realistic for us to expect right now to win by raw force or superweapons, it's going to be smart thinking or avoiding conflict altogether.
    [ ] [ARCHIPELAGO] Permanent Internal exile
    [ ] [ARCHIPELAGO] Remand to restorative justice system
    I have no idea if there will be a mechanical difference for which one we pick, and philosophically this is a separate conversation that could have its own post. My thoughts on this is that the worst offenders are those who are actively unrepentant or are otherwise bad actors--they're not just people stuck supporting or participating in an unjust system, they're its architects. We will never be able to trust that they have fully reformed, and that they are not simply looking to reinsert themselves to return to power. If there was some indication that they were genuinely repentant, then I'd say restorative justice is the correct approach. In the absence of that, however, I don't see any reasonable alternative besides exile.
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin BR mining operations on Radiant-1 (Quality-7)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin BR mining operations on Radiant-2 (Quality-7)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin BR mining operations on Gaid A-1 (Quality-10)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin BR mining operations in Gaid Asteroid Belt (Quality 1)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin BR mining operations on Gaid B-1 (Quality 15)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin BR mining operations on Gaid B-2 (Quality 10)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin BR mining operations on Gaid B-3a (Quality 7)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin BR mining operations on Gaid B-3a (Quality 8)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin BR mining operations on Gaid B-4 (Quality 12)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin BR mining operations on Gaid B-7 (Quality 14)
    We still need to get our BR flowing in. Starting in Radiant for domestic production makes the most sense, and then moving on to Gaid to supplement. Lore-wise I'm inclined to suggest we upgrade Radiant-1 first, since, on average, it will be closer to Elysium than Radiant-2 thanks to orbital math and therefore easier to transport stuff, but that's really a minor difference.

    [ ] [IndComm] Begin SR mining operations on Gaid A-2 (Quality 7)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin SR mining operations on Gaid A-4 (Quality 5)
    We're good on SR for the moment. Save these for the medium term.

    [ ] [IndComm] Begin Energy Collection Operations on Gaid A-3 (Quality 4)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin Energy Collection Operations on Gaid A-4a (Quality 9)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin Energy Collection Operations on Gaid B-5 (Quality 3)
    [ ] [IndComm] Begin Energy Collection Operations on Gaid B-6 (Quality 7)
    We're okay on E production as well, although with how that's likely to take a hit as our upkeep goes up from additional dice, we'll want to start investing in it sooner rather than later.

    [ ] [IndComm] Expand SR Production on Asphodel
    [ ] [IndComm] Expand E Production on Elysium
    Can't afford these now.

    [ ] [IndComm] Industrial reuse program
    Not necessary at this point--we have enough BR to start investing it without tearing up our own system anymore. Plus, after how it went the last time, I'm not optimistic.
    [ ] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production.
    [ ] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 2 to Corvette production.
    These are both much more tempting now, although I can't really recommend that we focus 2 dice here this turn.

    [ ] [MilComm] Repair Choreographer
    Aaaaaarrrrggghhh. This is so tempting, but it's a trap right now. That cost is just low enough that we can barely afford it, but as a practical matter we need dice and shipyards more than we need one big ship right now.

    [ ] [MilComm] Scrap Choreographer
    Big resource bonus, but I don't think we need it right now.

    [ ] [MilComm] Convert Choreographer into a corvette shipyard
    This is less tempting because it deprives us of a valuable tactical and strategic asset in favor of something we can get through other means.

    [ ] [MilComm] Take control of Thoa
    gr8 b8 m8, i r8 8/8. More seriously, this system is not a huge threat and seems like easy pickings, but given the state of our defenses and our focus on stealth, this is a bad idea waiting to turn into a disaster. Pass for now.
    [ ] [SciComm] Assist with Prototype Wormhole research -FTL Communications
    [ ] [SciComm] Assist with Prototype Wormhole research -Personal Wormhole
    Still awesome, still something to worry about later.

    [ ] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management
    Let's finish what we started on this one and get it out of the way. No sense waiting.

    [ ] [SciComm] Develop New Educational Programs.
    We need dice. However, although this is the cheapest option, it's also the one we're least likely to be able to finish this turn--unless we want to postpone FRM for another turn, which we really should not.
    [ ] [SocComm] Immortality Guarantee
    Desirable long-term, but we still can't afford it.

    [ ] [SocComm] Develop New Educational Programs.
    Costly but we need dice, and we realistically need two if we want to have any chance of one-turning this. On the other hand it seems like Sci, Mil, and maybe Ind are more dice-deficient right now than SocComm is, and MedComm already has two dice by default. Not sure we want this one.

    [ ] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining
    That +6 bonus makes it much easier to one-turn this one (we only need a combined roll of 24 to pass) for the same price, and it lets us get an extra die into one of the categories that I think needs it most.
    [ ] [MedComm] Develop New Educational Programs.
    Cheaper and easier to one-turn than any of the alternatives if we focus it, but it still doesn't get us dice in the place I think we need it most. Plus, there are other things we should spend our resources on here.

    [ ] [MedComm] Encourage Retraining
    Same cost and a worse bonus than SocComm. Pass in favor of the SocComm equivalent.

    [ ] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Infiltration of Xotreh
    Auto-pass, which is good, and out of the way ("deliberately lost") so stealthy, but also not really the primary threat we should worry about right now.

    [ ] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Bestreer.
    Auto-pass and quiet, so also good, and has lots of jump nodes despite being mostly empty and therefore potentially easier to flip. Again, however, there's not much of a threat from here right now, although the many nodes could be a problem.

    [ ] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Fliveons.
    Lots of resources, but we can't complete this in one turn. I think we're okay on resources in the short term, and this system, while populated and therefore higher on the threat plot, isn't the highest (maybe like second).

    [ ] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Shei.
    Auto-pass, greatest threat, highest population, probably the greatest moral incentive (most of those prisoners are almost certainly not people who deserve whatever treatment they're getting). Easily the best target for insertion right now.

    [ ] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Akleod
    The temptation to focus on the shipment hub and the Junior Exec is very strong, but I'm more worried about the floating stack of guns than I am about anything else at this point, even though we could auto-pass this one. I'd put this as either second or third on the list, tied or beating Fliveons, I think.

    [ ] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade
    Can't double up on this one if we also want to double up on one of the dice and move into another system, which I think we should. Worth rolling on it--a +7 is a good bonus and we don't have to roll that well to pull it off, but I think it's unwise spending additional resources on this beyond that.

    [ ] [MedComm] Organize a Diplomatic Corps
    Still something we need eventually, still can wait on it until the mask comes off. Wait a while.

    Having said all that, my vote is:

    [X] [CO] Maria Awhina, the Commando
    [X] [ARCHIPELAGO] Permanent Internal exile

    [X] Plan Training the Revolution for Liberation
    -[X] [FOCUS] Social Committee
    -[X] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1 (10 BR)
    -[X] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production. (10 SR, 5 E)
    -[X] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management (3 SR, 3 E)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)x2
    -[X] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Shei (1 SR)
    -[X] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade (2 SR, 5 E)

    Basically, @Chimeraguard's third plan is almost exactly in line with mine, except I think we should hit Shei rather than Akleod. I want the guns out of our face.

    e:fixed the way the votes were ordered because it's not showing up correctly in the tally.
     
    Last edited:
    [X] Plan Hiding the Revolution
    -[X] [FOCUS] Industry Committee
    -[X] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1 (10 BR)
    -[X] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-2 (10 BR)
    -[X] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production. (10 SR, 5 E)
    -[X] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management (3 SR, 3 E)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[X] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade (2 SR, 5 E)
    -[X] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade (2 SR, 5 E)

    [X] Plan Hiding and Training the Revolution
    [X] [CO] Dr. Sheila Bissonnette, the Jeûne Ecole leader


    So this plan focusses maximum effort on Maintain the Charada. I do this because it is still an effort that netto gains us dice, resources and infrastructure that we need. For now, the cost of postponing is cheaper than the lost revenue of that time normally would be.

    For the price of 4 SR and 10E and 2 MedComm dice, we gain 1 turn in which we have 1 free die, 1 milcom die, 1 scicom die, 1 soccom die,2 medcom dies as well as a bunch of other resources.
    We need to invest 2 dice this turn rather than 1, because the difficulty has gone up.
     
    Last edited:
    Mmm, that is a good point. Needs a 13 or above to complete with just 1 die. Best to effectively guarantee it completes to maximize the amount of time we're buying.. Shame progress doesn't carry over into the next stage of the charade.

    Though... if we go this route, we'll need to spend the next couple of turns putting focus on Media, so we can start inserting assets as well as maintaining the charade.

    [X] Plan Hiding and Training the Revolution
    -[X] [FOCUS] Social Committee
    -[X] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1 (10 BR)
    -[X] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production. (10 SR, 5 E)
    -[X] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management (3 SR, 3 E)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining x2 (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[X] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade x2 (4 SR, 10 E)

    And still hoping for a write in middle ground for the trial. But a mix of guaranteeing another turn of the charade plus grabbing for an extra die seems good.
     
    Last edited:
    Chimeraguard said:
    [X] [CO] Erina Kozlova, the Enthusiastic Amateur
    [X] Plan Hiding the Revolution

    Mmm, that is a good point. Needs a 13 or above to complete with just 1 die. Best to effectively guarantee it completes to maximize the amount of time we're buying.. Shame progress doesn't carry over into the next stage of the charade.

    And still hoping for a write in middle ground for the trial.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    There's a decent argument for focusing the charade instead of moving assets into another system, but I'm concerned we're going to fall into a doom loop of burning increasing amounts of resources and dice on the charade rather than extending our influence outward before the party starts. Under no circumstances should we not double up on getting an extra die though. Like holy shit that is a really bad idea do not do it.
     
    Last edited:
    [X] [CO] Maria Awhina, the Commando
    [X] [ARCHIPELAGO] Three-year review guarantee

    I'll take a look at the plans later.
     
    Last edited:
    Rhymes said:
    There's a decent argument for focusing the charade instead of moving assets into another system, but I'm concerned we're going to fall into a doom loop of burning increasing amounts of resources and dice on the charade rather than extending our influence outward before the party starts. Under no circumstances should we not double up on getting an extra die though. Like holy shit that is a really bad idea do not do it.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Yeah, came up with another altered plan.

    Chimeraguard said:
    [X] Plan Hiding and Training the Revolution
    -[X] [FOCUS] Social Committee
    -[X] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1 (10 BR)
    -[X] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production. (10 SR, 5 E)
    -[X] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management (3 SR, 3 E)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[X] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade (2 SR, 5 E)
    -[X] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade (2 SR, 5 E)
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    Since we're not short on BR now, we can afford just one industry action, and instead double up on Retraining for an extra die.
     
    [ ] [CO] Maria Awhina, the Commando

    The Commando has everything we need to start a military from scratch. Her knowledge on space combat and logistics may only be theoretical, but that's leagues better than the rest of the candidates already who'll need to reinvent the wheel, the only thing that's left for her is experience and practical application in naval combat. Not to mention her wealth of expertise as a commando will do wonders for any armed resistance cells we plant in corp controlled planets, and her sense of guilt and actual belief in the cause will implant our military with a culture that is utterly loyal to the anti-corp sentiment, perfect for sweeping away any infiltrators that may be present in our ranks or any demagogue that seeks to subvert the revolution from the inside for their own ends.

    I can compromise on the others if need be, with the Spacer being my preference followed by the Gamer who's uniquely worse in her own way, but the scientist is definitely a no go. Wunderwaffe are not something we can sustain as a revolution, but they'll be something she insists on regardless considering how stubborn she's noted to be, and I don't want the head of our military to be constantly butting heads with the rest of the government because their budget for Death Star Mk.II wasn't approved.
     
    Last edited:
    I'm largely going to focus on the vote for the defensive coordinator and the judicial sentencing because I already largely agree with the Training the Revolution for Liberation Plan.

    While it is not clear what the material/trust implications of the archipelago/rehabilitative scenario will be, it is certainly clear what the normative position for a fledgling revolutionary state is, and thus what we should interpret will be correlated to the material gains. Rehabilitation is the path we ought to go down as the goal stated was to be setting a precedent. Taking the draconian position of the people will definitely win us brownie points in the court of public opinion, but it sets a poor standard for what ought to be done heading into the future since we need to prove to other systems that we are unequivocally the good guys. One has to acknowledge that many of the people on trial are as much products of their environment as anybody else and necessitate an expansion of perspective into the lives they have damaged due to their acquiescence of a dangerously corrupt system. We don't want to let off these 'enemies' with ease either though, and any rehabilitative system needs to be extraordinarily rigorous, but it's not like we control the minutiae (?).

    As for the defensive coordinators, I see only two plausible options: Gregory Mansur and Erina Kozlova. Of the two, Gregory Mansur is the only one with real, applicable experience in the realm of naval combat and a demeanor consistent with what our goals, generally, are in the short term. We want a conservative person with a strong instinct for keeping his men alive because, well we certainly care about the people signing up to defend us too (right?), we have a small military that is relatively inexperienced. Moreover, we can't manage a massive escapade into other systems with the state the military is currently in, and I can see multiple other coordinators really taking to the risky halves of their personalities and gambling away our small force. Someone who is benevolent and defensive is most in the realm of what we want.

    All that being said, I vote for
    [X] [CO] Gregory Mansur, the Space Patrol Commander
    [X] [ARCHIPELAGO] Remand to restorative justice system
    [X] Plan Training the Revolution for Liberation
    -[X] [FOCUS] Social Committee
    -[X] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1 (10 BR)
    -[X] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production. (10 SR, 5 E)
    -[X] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management (3 SR, 3 E)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[X] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Shei (1 SR)
    -[X] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade (2 SR, 5 E)
     
    AKuz said:
    She's a gamer, not a military leader
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    This phrase really blindsided me. I just wanted to say that

    EDIT: Here are my votes

    [X] [CO] Maria Awhina, the Commando
    [X] [ARCHIPELAGO] Permanent Internal exile

    [X] Plan Exporting the Revolution
    -[X] [FOCUS] Media Committee
    -[X] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1 (10 BR)
    -[X] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production. (10 SR, 5 E)
    -[X] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management (3 SR, 3 E)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[X] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Shei (1 SR)
    -[X] [MedComm] Insert Assets into Akleod (1 SR)
    -[X] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade (2 SR, 5 E)
     
    Last edited:
    AKuz said:
    This is a difficult choice, and I wish her had more obvious candidates, some passing Ares officer who has commanded a dozen squadrons in the battlespace, wrapped his hands around the banner that leads a million men into pitched combat, and has personally equipped and outfitted the armies and fleets of Sol herself.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    You have a small typo here. It should probably be we.

    Vienna Toll said:
    As for the defensive coordinators, I see only two plausible options: Gregory Mansur and Erina Kozlova. Of the two, Gregory Mansur is the only one with real, applicable experience in the realm of naval combat and a demeanor consistent with what our goals, generally, are in the short term. We want a conservative person with a strong instinct for keeping his men alive because, well we certainly care about the people signing up to defend us too (right?), we have a small military that is relatively inexperienced. Moreover, we can't manage a massive escapade into other systems with the state the military is currently in, and I can see multiple other coordinators really taking to the risky halves of their personalities and gambling away our small force. Someone who is benevolent and defensive is most in the realm of what we want.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Do we want a conservative person though? We're not building the military for this turn or the next where we're still in hiding. We don't need a military in hiding. We're building our future military and its leader is likely to stick around from years to decades, at which point we'll need to actually tangle with the charters and Gregory seem entirely unprepared for the tough decisions warfare involve.
     
    Last edited:
    Rhymes said:
    There's a decent argument for focusing the charade instead of moving assets into another system, but I'm concerned we're going to fall into a doom loop of burning increasing amounts of resources and dice on the charade rather than extending our influence outward before the party starts. Under no circumstances should we not double up on getting an extra die though. Like holy shit that is a really bad idea do not do it.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    The actual doom loop or mistake is not investing in the charade.

    To wit, this is the status of the response.
    Cyanblackstone said:
    You have at least six months, minimum, before full info filters back to Sol detailed enough to do anything than have local forces come at you of their own volition and cutting off your credit chits. It will take at least another three months to coordinate local units, and another quarter beyond that to even being diverting forces towards you. Five quarters will be when significant forces will likely start arriving in contested areas.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    The moment the charade is broken, we face

    In 0 months : Local responses
    In 6 months : Collapse of QUantum currency
    In 15 months : Major invasion.

    Every turn the charade goes unbroken we :
    - Execute 4 dice worth of actions (i'm not counting medcom)
    --- Including increasing our income by (at least ) 9 resources/turn
    - Gain 46 resources

    Assuming that charade costs increases linearly, we will need to spend
    20 points to extend this by 3 month (2 dice) 14 resources
    30 points to extend this by 6 months (2 dice + focus) 21 resources
    40 points to extend this by 9 months (2dice + focus) 21 resources
    50 points to extend this by 12 months (2 dice + focus) Risky 21 resources

    If we succesfully extend to the 40 point treshold, the gain is enormous.
    - It means that at month zero, we will have 12 extra dice worth of actions
    - It means that we will have gathered 168 extra resources at Month 0
    - It means that our baseline income will be at least 27 resources higher at Month 0 ( which amounts to a total of 130 resources extra by the invasion)
    - It means that by the invasion, we will have 683 resources, instead of 453

    But most plans now invest just 1 single die. This amounts to a 70% chance of failure of being detected, and correspondingly facing the invasion with hundreds fewer resources and dice. Do we really want to risk that just for a single undetected infiltration?
    The choice here is between a likely detection, or facing Sol's invasion with 50% more resources, and nearly double the time to build ships and material.

    Edit : Note that his assumed that we do not improve our number of dice, or make any technological advancement. If we do that, then the gain of extra months in hiding is even greater.

    Edit 2 : It would be remiss of me not to mention the cost of hiding. There is a resource cost
    1) Resources are consumed to maintain the charade. This is not a real cost, because the extra resource gain from a turn spent in hiding is greater than the amount of resources we would spend on it.
    2) There's the opportunity cost. If all goes to plan, we would spend all our Medcom dice on the final turn on doing social projects while hidden. This would cancel out the opportunity costs of allowing the charade to lapse right now. So, the only real opportunity cost is if the charade fails.
    - To wit : There's a 2.5% chance of failing at 3 months, a 0.7% chance of failing at 6 months, and a 10% chance at failing at 9 months.
    - Should any of them fail, then we waste 2-3 dice. However, we will have gained many more dice and many more resources in the previous turns.
     
    Last edited:
    Actually, here's an idea - what if we give the corp guys a choice: be confined to the archipelago or help us maintain the ruse.
     
    Reader mode
    You must login or register to reply here.
    Remove ads
    Back
    Top