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Buried in Steel

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10ebbor10 said:
Neat.

Interesting that their microbes appear to be "inefficient", and especially fragile. Usually you'd expect the planet to lose water and air well before all live goes extinct, especially with how oxygen is reactive and refuses to stay in place.

Does Earth have any extra-solar colonies? Or has the Union basically "laid claim" to all areas of space.
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There have been historical colonies but they were largely associated with states that subsequently failed. Angel Bay is a result of the Horizon Union and a short-lived alliance of South American socialist nations both laying claim to the planet at the same time; when the coalition back home fell apart, they ended up in the Union, though not without friction.

What the Union managed to do was take de facto control of the Terraformer planets due to being closer in the days when FTL was much slower and Earth was in a much worse state, so Earth's extrasolar colonies are largely modern research bases in places with interesting resources rather than settlement projects. The solar system itself is heavily populated with space mining and stuff though; the Horizon Union is the result of a billionaire madman deciding to take the miraculous FTL-but-not-that-fast translation drive that had opened up the solar system for exploitation and going "fuck it, I'm going to die on that cool exoplanet we just found".
 
Interesting.

So they picked war with the colonies that already had ready-made infrastructure to exploit, over trying to build settlements on the variety of failed-but-possible exoplanets which had now become far more accessible via the very same blinkdrive.
 
10ebbor10 said:
Interesting.

So they picked war with the colonies that already had ready-made infrastructure to exploit, over trying to build settlements on the variety of failed-but-possible exoplanets which had now become far more accessible via the very same blinkdrive.
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Its also entirely possible that any ultimate aims to 'open up' so to speak the various plausibly-terraformable exoplanets and organically expand space colonization outside the cradles of the old Terraformer network might necessitate such efforts in staging resources outside the solar system and sitting on those dead rocks with years of comparatively cruder human bombardments of atmospheric gases and etc... etc... that the Union and the Federation have to be economically and politically united anyway, to meet the industrial demand, and to have a functional forward staging ground for those future colonial ventures.
 
This story has vibes of both Bolos and The Ship who Sang, two of my favorite SciFi franchises. So cool to see this
 
Nalanaya said:
Sorry, but do you mean ecologically dead? Because if the molten core of those planets have frozen, those are not readily habitable planets. The magnetosphere is kinda important.
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The damning indicator the people of Horizon had that their planet wasn't just a lucky find with some funny mountains was when they started doing geological research and realized their magnetosphere was being generated by a massive toroidal ring buried hundreds of miles under their equator, powered by something they can't get close enough to study.

It's the landmark evidence for the "gifts to earth" theory; they argue it's something you'd only do if you were wanted to create a kind of ready-to-colonize geological stasis until a sentient explorer showed up. The competing (and more popular) theory is that this was favoured because the Terraformers were either planning to live on these worlds a very long time before whatever happened to them happened. or because they're off doing something and they plan on coming back.

I thought it would be fun to have this be like… kinda hard sci-fi in the shadow of space opera. This giant war for scraps is being fought on a monument to extinct gods.
 
Nalanaya said:
Sorry, but do you mean ecologically dead? Because if the molten core of those planets have frozen, those are not readily habitable planets. The magnetosphere is kinda important.
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I assume this is why the ones that can't be lived on outnumber the ones that can six to one. There's still breathable air and drinkable water there!
 
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behind the scenes/reword New
  • Informational
    • hey, just giving people a quick update

    i started writing this after some really awful events in my own life, because i've always processed stuff with writing and i just needed the outlet. it was intended to be exactly as hopeless as i felt, reflecting the way i felt like i was barely clinging to life and unable to figure out why to go on.

    i'm still not doing great; I was unable to stick to the weekly schedule because i kept coming apart, falling behind despite the fact i built up a backlog before i started. but... i've also slowly been crawling out of the pit. as i sit down to try to write the next part, im finding the direction i wrote for the story, which was frankly incredibly bleak, is... just not productive. it's not a good story and its not useful for healing, it was a synopsis written as a scream, and you can't keep up a scream for 100,000 words.

    that said, i haven't actually committed to the awful conclusion as of this point, and i think i can see paths for the story to take along similar tracks without ending with the same outright nilhistic despair i originally plotted. i just have to do some reworking to figure out how to get it there, and i have... what feels like a more useful story in the works that i'm going to try and pursue as well.

    my writing fell off a cliff in the last few years because my life did too, getting worse and worse in ways i couldn't control. i've ended up starting and abandoning a bunch of stories because, well, i always tried to write hopeful and romantic works, even when they deal with heavy subjects, and unfortunately the hope and romance got driven out of my life in that time and my attempts to write it became harder and more hollow. i'm sort of in the aftermath of that right now, and one of the commitments i'm trying to make for 2025 is to write more and pick back up as many of my old stories as i can, and see if I can't find those feelings again.

    thank you for reading. i'll let people know what i've figured out where i'm going with this one.
     
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    • Oh, and here I was wondering how you were planning to turn things around...

    Hope stuff goes better in the future, at least.
     
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