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

[AKuz]

THE ALL-RADIANT CONGRESS

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Setting Information

The Solarian Compact:

Spoiler: The History of 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.

Spoiler: The Composition of the Solarian Compact

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:

Spoiler: Ares Conflict Solutions

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.

Spoiler: Rhodes Mining

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.

Spoiler: Cernunnos Botanicals

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

Spoiler: Omoikane Innovations Group

Techbros, some of them science, some of them explore

Spoiler: Hermes-Ishtar Corporation

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.

Spoiler: Mississippi Shipping Interstellar

Sketchy buggers, they can get you anything tho

Historical Topics:

Spoiler: The Democratic Federation

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:

Spoiler: The Sister/Daughter Worlds

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

Spoiler: Nanomanufacturing, A Brief Summary

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.

Spoiler: Virtual Intelligence, Summary

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

Spoiler: Artificial General Intelligence, Summary

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.

Spoiler: Temporary Limited Intelligences

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.

Spoiler: Seed AI, Summary

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:

Spoiler: Radiant System

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.

Spoiler: Gaid (Radiant controlled)

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.

Spoiler: Shei

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

Spoiler: Five Lions

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

Spoiler: Osliam (Recently Liberated)

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:

Spoiler: Xotreh (Omoikane controlled)

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

Spoiler: Bestreer (Cernnunos controlled)

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

Spoiler: Akleod (Mississippi Controlled)

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

Spoiler: Thoa (Charter Occupied)

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

Spoiler: Kimberly

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.

Spoiler: Full Income Report

Total:


Radiant:


Gaid:


Five Lions:

Head of Diplomatic Corps:

Spoiler: 'Veronica Stardust' - The XP Star

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

Spoiler: Science Committee, Tech Reports

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.

Spoiler: Military Committee Reports

Defence Coordinator:

Spoiler: Maria Awhina, the Commando

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.

Spoiler: Intelligence Reports

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

Spoiler: Forces Stationed in Thoa:

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

Spoiler: Forces Stationed in Osliam:

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

Spoiler: Forces Stationed in Kimberly

-None

Spoiler: Forces Stationed in Bestreer:

-None

Spoiler: Forces Stationed in Akleod:

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

Spoiler: Forces Stationed in Xotreh:

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

Spoiler: SolNav Forces Stationed In Raphanus:

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:

Spoiler: Mobile Assets

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.


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[Amorous Intent]

Sooo.. this is completely bogus and wouldn't work in this game setting despite the advances in technology and science?

Click to shrink...

They shoved the massive handwave away from the reaction itself to the on-demand and apparently free manufacturing of the fuel itself. Yeah, it's bogus. I was already playing around with UDD/metallic deuterium as a fuel, but only as a metastable one that you could make at refineries and carry with you. You'd heat up the ultradense deuterium with a laser to get it to self-ignite, no need for further compression, or run muons through a grain of solid metallic deuterium to compress it enough that room temperature will cause ignition. Unlike normal fuels, metallic deuterium and UDD alike are dense enough that muons will catalyze enough fusion to be useful before decaying.

They're more mass efficient in kspie, in that you don't have to carry a reactor around. I'm not talking about solar sailers, I'm talking about beamed thermal or ion drives. If we have fusion, then a laser network looses lots of its advantage for propulsion uses, but it still has mining, defense, and power generation uses.

Click to shrink...

I know what you're talking about. I still have never seen laser thermal propulsion with Isp better than metallic hydrogen or nuclear lightbulbs. To be clear here, I'm picking lightbulb reactors specifically because they get used in aerospace fighters and are thus close enough to planets for beamed power to be reasonable, instead of trying to pump laser power all the way out to Pluto. They are not used for warpcraft, which generally use fusion or fission fragment engines, or antimatter plasma for fast couriers.

Also, if you're not using the realistic scale solar system mod for KSP, your intuition about beamed power is completely wrong. KSP's system is something like one-sixth scale, and its largest gas giant is the size and gravity of Earth.

 

[Mossconfig]

Also, if you're not using the realistic scale solar system mod for KSP, your intuition about beamed power is completely wrong. KSP's system is something like one-sixth scale, and its largest gas giant is the size and gravity of Earth.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, I use RSS. Ground stations and geosynchronous relays get power to lunar orbit easy, and getting power from down near mercury requires around 10 really huge relay satalites.

That still leaves a laser proto dyson sphere array with mining and defense uses, which are why I'm pushing for it hard. We have antimatter, fusion and fission, so ship drives are out. I saw uranium hexafluoride being mentioned as fuel, and assumed that fission was all we had access to.

 

[tankdrop24]

I just had a crazy idea for an alternative to MIDGEY. Instead of sabotaging the refueling platform, we hide some kind of stealth craft or drone on or near the platform that selectively attaches charges to ships docked there. Then, once the ship undocks, the charges can be detonated once it's a safe distance away from the platform, preferably in such a manner that it could be mistake for a random mine.

 

[CyberFemme]

Yeah, I use RSS. Ground stations and geosynchronous relays get power to lunar orbit easy, and getting power from down near mercury requires around 10 really huge relay satalites.

That still leaves a laser proto dyson sphere array with mining and defense uses, which are why I'm pushing for it hard. We have antimatter, fusion and fission, so ship drives are out. I saw uranium hexafluoride being mentioned as fuel, and assumed that fission was all we had access to.

Click to shrink...

Combine that with MEGA drives that can put out 1N/kW, at 50% efficiency and see if you can use statites for the beam relays.

 

[Amorous Intent]

Yeah, I use RSS. Ground stations and geosynchronous relays get power to lunar orbit easy, and getting power from down near mercury requires around 10 really huge relay satalites.

That still leaves a laser proto dyson sphere array with mining and defense uses, which are why I'm pushing for it hard. We have antimatter, fusion and fission, so ship drives are out. I saw uranium hexafluoride being mentioned as fuel, and assumed that fission was all we had access to.

Click to shrink...

I still mistrust the assumptions going into the mod. The key figure of merit for both propulsion and weapons is not the diffraction limit but the beam waist. Adaptive optics alone places a 1.5-3x penalty on beam waist, which results in 2.25-9x reduction in intensity (intensity is divided by the square of the beam waist M). It's also impacted at every single step of the way, from the laser module itself to the mirrors, and increasing the power of the laser worsens the beam waist. Getting the kind of power density you need for a warpcraft is already nigh-impossible, once you account for the limits of beam combining and scaling, and that's before accounting for the hundreds of relays you need in a physically realistic laser system out to Pluto.

If you want your fancy laser web, it'll only work in the inner system, will be useless for propulsion, and you still need to actually unlock the technology instead of repurposing the already existing comms array. You can't even increase the number of targets right now because you have no ability to build more modules to add to the comms array, and you're already talking as if Archimedes is somehow the solution to you not having access to the blueprints in the first place.

Getting back to questions I missed in my first pass:

Would it be practicable for us to build el-chepo fake warships that we can allow the charters to 'destroy' so they think they are doing more damage to us then they actually are?

Encouraging the charters to underestimate would be good for our long-term prospects.

Click to shrink...

Oh boy! More questions I can't readily answer in character! The only differences between a cheap part and a quality part made in fabber are the tolerances to impurities and material substitutions. Given equal access to materials, a rocket nozzle printed on a home fabber will be very nearly as good as one done in an orbital facility, and generally computers are the only things that can't tolerate single atom thick seams due to misalignments during assembly. A cheap warcraft is going to cost nearly as much as a real one, unless it's a thin shell made to look like an actual spacecraft and will never, ever fire its engines.

More to the point, your shipyards are already at their limit, as they involve a lot of manual labor in assembling the large, unwieldy, car-sized parts and welding or riveting them together into a spacecraft.

Crazy Tom's giant amat torpedos are already pushing the envelope hard, and are built around cheap materials and in situ assembly to get around the limitations of your shipyards. There's a lot of risk involved, and your advisors would prefer you wait to see the results of the crash program before pushing something of vastly more limited utility.

GMs - can we actually have them face off in some sort of training exercise or sim?
It would be pretty done that part of an officer's ranking was based on a very literal ranking in the combat sims.

Click to shrink...

That's below the level of abstraction. As of right now, it would literally just be a dice roll-off, and even if I manage to get CoaDE working to my satisfaction, I haven't even the slightest idea how I would simulate differences in characters in it, except by roleplaying what they would do in specific scenarios instead of in a blank white room.

 

[Tatbee]

Our 2 fleets should engage in real-world and/or simulated wargames, regardless of who becomes Commodore of Home Force.

As gaining more experience is always beneficial, for all of our officers.

@GMs could that be a special project?

 

[me.me.here]

More to the point, your shipyards are already at their limit, as they involve a lot of manual labor in assembling the large, unwieldy, car-sized parts and welding or riveting them together into a spacecraft.

Click to shrink...

This sounds like an issue we should be putting time and effort into resolving, seeing as how it's apparently a critical bottleneck/chokepoint and also ought to be a relatively low-hanging fruit in terms of the difficulty required to fix it. I mean, if the issue is literally just moving big/bulky objects around then a machine to automate grabbing the object, moving it in a predetermined way to another location and holding it while welding/riveting is done before returning to grab the next piece is well within 20th century grade industrial practices, let alone future-tech robotics stuff.

I mean, we'd have to rearrange the shipyard's internals so that the parts are always getting moved in said specific predetermined way that's simple-ish to program a robot arm to do and that would necessitate a pause in production, but eliminating a critical bottleneck and possibly doubling or tripling how fast we can build ships would be well worth it.

I can understand why it'd be an issue for Elysians, since this sort of mechanized assembly line is a very different production paradigm than just programming a fabber and grabbing what comes out, but it shouldn't be nearly as unfamiliar/ 'we just didn't think of it' for the Sheolites. Actually now that I've gone and started thinking about it that's almost exactly where the impetus for this sort of shipyard redesign would come from, some Sheolite just straight up asking why we don't use industrial robots to help put the pieces together like they do.

 

[Krall]

I think on balance I'll keep my votes as they are - Kozlova for Home Force and Rousseau for Mobile Force. I don't like the idea of promoting someone simply to get them experience, but Kozlova isn't distinctly worse than McLean, and McLean is already putting her skills to use as a corvette captain. McLean might make a good Mobile Force Commander, but Rousseau is our most experienced commanding officer, has the confidence of her subordinates, and I'm loathe to disrupt a functioning command that's already performing well.

There is one question I'd like to ask the candidates however. Lemme ask it IC.

[Delegate Alexis Kapoor] "As you're no doubt aware our current forces are far behind what we'd like to have available to combat upcoming Charter reprisals. As such we have to do more with less while we desperately try to ramp up military craft production. My question to the candidates is this: Assuming they were in charge of our forces, what would they advise the Congress prioritise when it comes to new craft production and procurement?"

 

[clockworkchaos]

Crazy Tom's giant amat torpedos are already pushing the envelope hard, and are built around cheap materials and in situ assembly to get around the limitations of your shipyards. There's a lot of risk involved, and your advisors would prefer you wait to see the results of the crash program before pushing something of vastly more limited utility.

Click to shrink...

I think we should name them "Crazy Tom's Fun Ships". The lamprey mines can be "Crazy Tom's Friendship Huggers".

 

[Artificial Girl]

[X] [Home Force] Captain Erina Kozlova
[X] [Mobile Force] Commodore Stephanie Rousseau

 

[CyberFemme]

So what's the state of industrial automation in this setting? Because I'm getting very conflicting vibes. On one hand, we have rather good AI and ubiquitous nanofacturing. On the other hand, there's talk of put upon miners and poverty drafts.

I would have expected profit maximizing megacorps to have eliminated as much human labor as possible based on modern trends. Giant factories where robots service robots who build thing. Private armies of killbots of every stripe of the ethically dubious rainbow, etc.

Does Radiant just not have access to that tech yet in account of being made up of layers upon layers of bullshit middle management and 'content creator' jobs?

And a thought on DRM research: I think it would work a lot better of we knew what the effect of doing a DRM project was. The way it's run now we're basically forced to guess what effects they will have, which makes it feel a little loot boxy. I feel we'd be able to have some more intensive discussion about research if we could make a more informed choice based on predictable outcomes.
This also makes sense in universe - were basically just cracking DRM, these products are all for sale, so their performance should be known to the public. We should have a pretty good idea of what the effects of these techs will be.

Edit: And a follow-up: how long does a fabber need to self replicate, and what resources does it need to do so?

 

[Ultrackius]

[X] [Home Force] Captain Erina Kozlova
[X] [Mobile Force] Commodore Stephanie Rousseau

 

[AKuz]

Scheduled vote count started by AKuz on Mar 9, 2021 at 2:14 AM, finished with 198 posts and 47 votes.

• ---

  25 people have voted

  [X] [Mobile Force] Commodore Stephanie Rousseau

  • Japanime
  • tankdrop24
  • BiopunkOtrera
  • AlphaDelta
  • 10ebbor10
  • Nyvis
  • TheArcanist
  • Tatbee
  • LucidProp
  • Adnate
  • Dermon
  • Stabbtmcstabstab
  • Krall
  • Alex the Average
  • Foxwood
  • clockworkchaos
  • Derpmind
  • Gladsome
  • CyberFemme
  • Sara
  • Artificial Girl
  • Ultrackius
  • spiritualatheist
  • Regency
  • bobbya1

  22 people have voted

  [x] Crazy uncle Tom's crazy projects
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project CERES (Boarding Teams)
  --[x] Use Crazy Tom's lamprey mines
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project HELLBURNER (Fireships)
  --[x] Use Crazy Tom's fireship design

  • AntiSanity
  • Godwinson
  • Adnate
  • Dermon
  • Stabbtmcstabstab
  • Krall
  • Gladsome
  • Rat King
  • The Laurent
  • Model DC.14F
  • Zanfib
  • Shard of Victory
  • Solarstream
  • me.me.here
  • Traehgniw
  • Tatbee
  • LucidProp
  • Alex the Average
  • Foxwood
  • clockworkchaos
  • Donkey Hote
  • Derpmind

  14 people have voted

  [X] [Mobile Force] Captain Shayla McLean

  • thewatcher
  • notgreat
  • tankdrop24
  • AlphaDelta
  • 10ebbor10
  • Nyvis
  • TheArcanist
  • Alex the Average
  • Foxwood
  • clockworkchaos
  • Gladsome
  • spiritualatheist
  • Regency
  • bobbya1

  13 people have voted

  [X] [Mobile Force] Captain Erina Kozlova

  • Tatbee
  • LucidProp
  • Adnate
  • Dermon
  • Stabbtmcstabstab
  • Krall
  • Donkey Hote
  • CyberFemme
  • Sara
  • Artificial Girl
  • Ultrackius
  • Rat King
  • DocSpooky

  5 people have voted

  [X] [AUTH] Authorize Project HELLBURNER (Fireships)

  • Japanime
  • BiopunkOtrera
  • mynameisyouQQQ
  • TheArcanist
  • Chimeraguard

  4 people have voted

  [X] [AUTH] Authorize Project ARCHIMEDES (Comms Laser Relay Weaponization)

  • Japanime
  • BiopunkOtrera
  • mynameisyouQQQ
  • Mossconfig

  4 people have voted

  [X] [Home Force] Captain Karl Xanthopolous

  • Japanime
  • BiopunkOtrera
  • notgreat
  • Derpmind

  3 people have voted

  [X] [AUTH] No Authorizations

  • 10ebbor10
  • QTesseract
  • NHO

  3 people have voted

  [X] Plan Everything but the Kitchen sink
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project CERES (Boarding Teams)
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project ARCHIMEDES (Comms Laser Relay Weaponization)
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project HELLBURNER (Fireships)

  • tankdrop24
  • Oksbad
  • Joppe

  3 people have voted

  [X] Plan secret weapons, not escalation
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project CERES (Boarding Teams)
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project HELLBURNER (Fireships)

  • Nyvis
  • Rockeye
  • thewatcher

  3 people have voted

  [X] [Mobile Force] Captain Shyla McLean

  • Donkey Hote
  • Rat King
  • DocSpooky

  1 people have voted

  [X] [AUTH] Authorize Project CERES (Boarding Teams)

  • Japanime

  1 people have voted

  [X] [Home Force] Captain Victor Raine

  • thewatcher

  1 people have voted

  [X] [AUTH] Project HELLBURNER

  • AlphaDelta

  1 people have voted

  [X] Plan Preserver
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project ARCHIMEDES (Comms Laser Relay Weaponization)
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project HELLBURNER (Fireships)

  • notgreat

 

[Rockeye]

Who is Crazy Tom?

 

[The Laurent]

Who is Crazy Tom?

Click to shrink...

This guy:

So what's the state of industrial automation in this setting? Because I'm getting very conflicting vibes. On one hand, we have rather good AI and ubiquitous nanofacturing. On the other hand, there's talk of put upon miners and poverty drafts.

I would have expected profit maximizing megacorps to have eliminated as much human labor as possible based on modern trends. Giant factories where robots service robots who build thing. Private armies of killbots of every stripe of the ethically dubious rainbow, etc.

Does Radiant just not have access to that tech yet in account of being made up of layers upon layers of bullshit middle management and 'content creator' jobs?

And a thought on DRM research: I think it would work a lot better of we knew what the effect of doing a DRM project was. The way it's run now we're basically forced to guess what effects they will have, which makes it feel a little loot boxy. I feel we'd be able to have some more intensive discussion about research if we could make a more informed choice based on predictable outcomes.
This also makes sense in universe - were basically just cracking DRM, these products are all for sale, so their performance should be known to the public. We should have a pretty good idea of what the effects of these techs will be.

Edit: And a follow-up: how long does a fabber need to self replicate, and what resources does it need to do so?

Click to shrink...

 

[CyberFemme]

What is going on with the personnel votes...

 

[Tatbee]

The vote tally is still messed up.

'Captain Erina Kozlova' and 'Captain Shayla McLean' [Home Force] votes have become [Mobile Force]... for some reason.

*EDIT - no idea how to fix the Home-to-Mobile issue, but at least the tally is clearer this way.

Adhoc vote count started by Tatbee on Mar 11, 2021 at 9:26 PM, finished with 230 posts and 47 votes.

[auth] [homeforce] [mobileforce] everythingbutthekitchensink secretweaponsnotescalation preserver crazyuncletomscrazyprojects

• Total voters in this category

  10

  ---

  5 people have voted

  [X] [AUTH] Authorize Project HELLBURNER (Fireships)

  • Japanime
  • BiopunkOtrera
  • mynameisyouQQQ
  • TheArcanist
  • Chimeraguard

  4 people have voted

  [X] [AUTH] Authorize Project ARCHIMEDES (Comms Laser Relay Weaponization)

  • Japanime
  • BiopunkOtrera
  • mynameisyouQQQ
  • Mossconfig

  3 people have voted

  [X] [AUTH] No Authorizations

  • 10ebbor10
  • QTesseract
  • NHO

  1 people have voted

  [X] [AUTH] Authorize Project CERES (Boarding Teams)

  • Japanime

  1 people have voted

  [X] [AUTH] Project HELLBURNER

  • AlphaDelta

• Total voters in this category

  30

  ---

  13 people have voted

  [X] [Mobile Force] Captain Erina Kozlova

  • Tatbee
  • LucidProp
  • Adnate
  • Dermon
  • Stabbtmcstabstab
  • Krall
  • Donkey Hote
  • CyberFemme
  • Sara
  • Artificial Girl
  • Ultrackius
  • Rat King
  • DocSpooky

  12 people have voted

  [X] [Mobile Force] Captain Shayla McLean

  • tankdrop24
  • AlphaDelta
  • 10ebbor10
  • Nyvis
  • TheArcanist
  • Alex the Average
  • Foxwood
  • clockworkchaos
  • Gladsome
  • spiritualatheist
  • Regency
  • bobbya1

  4 people have voted

  [X] [Home Force] Captain Karl Xanthopolous

  • Japanime
  • BiopunkOtrera
  • notgreat
  • Derpmind

  1 people have voted

  [X] [Home Force] Captain Victor Raine

  • thewatcher

• Total voters in this category

  30

  ---

  25 people have voted

  [X] [Mobile Force] Commodore Stephanie Rousseau

  • Japanime
  • tankdrop24
  • BiopunkOtrera
  • AlphaDelta
  • 10ebbor10
  • Nyvis
  • TheArcanist
  • Tatbee
  • LucidProp
  • Adnate
  • Dermon
  • Stabbtmcstabstab
  • Krall
  • Alex the Average
  • Foxwood
  • clockworkchaos
  • Derpmind
  • Gladsome
  • CyberFemme
  • Sara
  • Artificial Girl
  • Ultrackius
  • spiritualatheist
  • Regency
  • bobbya1

  3 people have voted

  [X] [Mobile Force] Captain Shyla McLean

  • Donkey Hote
  • Rat King
  • DocSpooky

  2 people have voted

  [X] [Mobile Force] Captain Shayla McLean

  • thewatcher
  • notgreat

• Total voters in this category

  3

  ---

  3 people have voted

  [X] Plan Everything but the Kitchen sink
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project CERES (Boarding Teams)
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project ARCHIMEDES (Comms Laser Relay Weaponization)
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project HELLBURNER (Fireships)

  • tankdrop24
  • Oksbad
  • Joppe

• Total voters in this category

  3

  ---

  3 people have voted

  [X] Plan secret weapons, not escalation
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project CERES (Boarding Teams)
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project HELLBURNER (Fireships)

  • Nyvis
  • Rockeye
  • thewatcher

• Total voters in this category

  1

  ---

  1 people have voted

  [X] Plan Preserver
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project ARCHIMEDES (Comms Laser Relay Weaponization)
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project HELLBURNER (Fireships)

  • notgreat

• Total voters in this category

  22

  ---

  22 people have voted

  [x] Crazy uncle Tom's crazy projects
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project CERES (Boarding Teams)
  --[x] Use Crazy Tom's lamprey mines
  -[X] [AUTH] Authorize Project HELLBURNER (Fireships)
  --[x] Use Crazy Tom's fireship design

  • AntiSanity
  • Godwinson
  • Adnate
  • Dermon
  • Stabbtmcstabstab
  • Krall
  • Gladsome
  • Rat King
  • The Laurent
  • Model DC.14F
  • Zanfib
  • Shard of Victory
  • Solarstream
  • me.me.here
  • Traehgniw
  • Tatbee
  • LucidProp
  • Alex the Average
  • Foxwood
  • clockworkchaos
  • Donkey Hote
  • Derpmind

 

[Amorous Intent]

This sounds like an issue we should be putting time and effort into resolving, seeing as how it's apparently a critical bottleneck/chokepoint and also ought to be a relatively low-hanging fruit in terms of the difficulty required to fix it. I mean, if the issue is literally just moving big/bulky objects around then a machine to automate grabbing the object, moving it in a predetermined way to another location and holding it while welding/riveting is done before returning to grab the next piece is well within 20th century grade industrial practices, let alone future-tech robotics stuff.

I mean, we'd have to rearrange the shipyard's internals so that the parts are always getting moved in said specific predetermined way that's simple-ish to program a robot arm to do and that would necessitate a pause in production, but eliminating a critical bottleneck and possibly doubling or tripling how fast we can build ships would be well worth it.

I can understand why it'd be an issue for Elysians, since this sort of mechanized assembly line is a very different production paradigm than just programming a fabber and grabbing what comes out, but it shouldn't be nearly as unfamiliar/ 'we just didn't think of it' for the Sheolites. Actually now that I've gone and started thinking about it that's almost exactly where the impetus for this sort of shipyard redesign would come from, some Sheolite just straight up asking why we don't use industrial robots to help put the pieces together like they do.

Click to shrink...

Robot arms are already used during the exponential assembly phase of fabbers; yes Elysians have thought of it. The problem is that moving car-sized and -massed parts is pretty close to the upper limit of rigid robotic arms. Worse, cold welding gets harder and harder to achieve with precision and speed as you scale up, with even tricks such as correlated magnets at the seams struggling to get good alignment. This means that anything larger needs to use cranes (which don't work in microgravity) or drones to move them into place. Propulsion ruins hard vacuum, which means you can't rely on cold welding anymore. Put together, and what you get is a manufacturing process that would be deeply familiar to 20th century shipwrights, despite the extreme differences in location.

Then there are the economic factors to consider. There simply aren't that many buy orders for spacecraft, space stations, and skyscrapers compared to the number of shipyards to warrant heavy investment into optimization. Already shipyards tend to be starved for resources out on the frontier, and hampered by just-in-time delays shipping in the core. Increasing throughput largely means adding more fabbers, which increases the difficulties maneuvering everything into place in a timely manner without collisions, and increases the chances of even small disruptions in the logistics chain slowing down production. Spacecraft last for decades, and the bottleneck is growing the market, not producing the vessels to fuel the expansion.

Then there are the problem specific to Elysians. Only Rhodes and MSI are seriously invested in higher throughput yards, the former as a means of pushing out new mining products and back end, the latter due to being the primary bulk haulers throughout the Compact. Instead, most Charters take advantage of the fact it's usually simpler to design your shipyards around flexibility rather than deeply investing in static pipelines that need retooling for every change made in the design--one shipyard for every design instead of every design its own shipyard. Elysium was no exception.

Elysium's shipyards in particular were notorious for being a dangerous place to work in, with the barest minimum medical coverage to handle accidents. Shipwrights needed to work quickly to make deadlines, or risk losing contracts and going long periods without work. Those long periods in turn meant that skills would become rusty, only adding to the danger in returning to a fast-paced, high stress environment. Spacers could often spot a (former) shipwright by their extensive prosthetics and devil-may-care attitude. While Elysian shipwrights have massively improved safety since then, the stigma has taken longer to clear up, not helped by the insular spacer community in general. It takes years to train up skilled shipwrights, much of which can only be learned in the field. Without a high demand until recently, the shipwrights have been taking care not injure themselves shaking the rust off.

So what's the state of industrial automation in this setting? Because I'm getting very conflicting vibes. On one hand, we have rather good AI and ubiquitous nanofacturing. On the other hand, there's talk of put upon miners and poverty drafts.

I would have expected profit maximizing megacorps to have eliminated as much human labor as possible based on modern trends. Giant factories where robots service robots who build thing. Private armies of killbots of every stripe of the ethically dubious rainbow, etc.

Does Radiant just not have access to that tech yet in account of being made up of layers upon layers of bullshit middle management and 'content creator' jobs?

Click to shrink...

You finally noticed the central premise of the quest! The system is creaking under the weight of its internal contradictions, and only needs a short, sharp push to collapse. Say, a frontier colony escaping the yoke for long enough to stand up to the might of the Charters...

But perhaps it would be enlightening to explain how these contradictions came be in the first place. A system with 100% automation is a system without workers to buy the products they make. Policies like universal basic income and universal healthcare can keep the velocity of money up, but they fundamentally act as externalities on the corporation to be eliminated with prejudice. Instead, companies need to provide more and more so-called "bullshit jobs" in the form of greater and greater centralized control such as monitoring and "human-in-the-loop" drone control. Veblum goods and new luxuries spring up to get the rich to spend their massive concentrations of wealth and bring money back into the market. It doesn't matter what the job is per se, so long as it reinforces the hierarchy of control and is something that cannot be more cheaply automated, an increasingly difficult proposition.

Edit: And a follow-up: how long does a fabber need to self replicate, and what resources does it need to do so?

Click to shrink...

A household, unlocked fabber takes about 250 seconds to spit out the parts needed to build a new household fabber, start to finish. Standard household fabber size is a 1x1x3 meter rectangular prism that can print up to .5x.5x.5 meter cubes, with 100 seconds start to finish on a single print, and can print out a new build every 50 seconds, starting the second print halfway through the first print. That makes for a 50 lead time on starting up a build, and it takes four .125 m^3 cubes to unfold and manually assemble into a new fabber, for your total of 250 seconds. The largest size is a 4x4x12 industrial fabber that spits out car-sized objects and parts every 200 seconds, with a 200 second lead time on initial print.

As you can imagine, supplying these ravenous things with enough mass to keep them running continuously is a major and ongoing problem.

 

[TheArcanist]

In any case, I do like the image of the Home Front commander's candidate winning by a single vote in-universe, setting up the possibility of a growing political rift within the revolutionary brotherhood.

 

[Tatbee]

As you can imagine, supplying these ravenous things with enough mass to keep them running continuously is a major and ongoing problem.

Click to shrink...

Rather than bring the mass to the fabber, why not take the fabber to the mass?

e.g. would an "Asteroid-Fabber" be a viable design?
Plant on asteroid --> Mine for mass --> Fabricate parts in bulk --> Ship parts for assembly --> Repeat?

 

[Amorous Intent]

Rather than bring the mass to the fabber, why not take the fabber to the mass?

e.g. would an "Asteroid-Fabber" be a viable design?
Plant on asteroid --> Mine for mass --> Fabricate parts in bulk --> Ship parts for assembly --> Repeat?

Click to shrink...

Yes. Rhodes does that sort of thing all the time, but there's not a lot of point in shipping fabricated parts instead of raw feedstock, which is generally much denser and thus saves on packaging. As such, it's generally only reserved for things that are worthwhile to manufacture in situ. Also, you know, stuff that doesn't need other materials shipped in.

 

[tankdrop24]

In any case, I do like the image of the Home Front commander's candidate winning by a single vote in-universe, setting up the possibility of a growing political rift within the revolutionary brotherhood.

Click to shrink...

eh, McLean will probably be a shoe-in next time we vote on appointing a new commander.

 

[AKuz]

Spoiler: winning vote

[X] Plan CANUT
-[X] [IndComm] Begin Energy Collection Operations on Shei 8a (Quality 9) [10BR]
-[X] [MilComm] Recruit ex-Ares personnel directly into existing units [2BR]
-[X] [MilComm] Form Modern Planetary Army [6BR, 3SR, 3E]
-[X] [MilComm] Fortify the Radiant-Bestreer Gate [5BR, 5SR, 3E]
-[X] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management for Rhodes [3SR, 3E]
-[X] [SocComm] Resident Embassies [5 BR]
-[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining [No cost]
-[X] [MedComm] Provide aid to Underground Labour Organizations x2 [3SR x2, 3E x2][6SR, 6E combined]

-

[x] Crazy uncle Tom's crazy projects

[x] [Home Force] Captain Erina Kozlova

[x] [Mobile Force] Commodore Stephanie Rousseau

Spoiler: rolls and results

Begin Energy Collection Operations on Shei 8a: N/A, Automatic, Completed
Recruit ex-Ares personnel directly into existing units: 17+2+18/20 =37/20, Completed
Form Modern Planetary Army: 10+2+37=49/40, Completed
Fortify the Radiant-Bestreer Gate: N/A, Automatic, Completed
Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management for Rhodes: 16+5+03/20=24/20, Completed
Resident Embassies: 7+8(+2 Omake)=17/30, Incomplete
Encourage Retraining: 17+8+(2 Omake)+14/40=41/40, Completed
Provide aid to Underground Labour Organizations x2: 3+20+7=30, Automatic

Spending: 64BR ,38SR, 21E

-

[Recent Front Page Articles on the popular game related Chain-Link special interest page "Villy's Game Round-Up"]

In Games criticism, the phrase "Third Russian Revolution" is often applied to the explosion of innovative and high quality independent titles that came from that particular Earth nation in the middle of 21st century; a consequence of the end of an autocratic regime and the flowering of liberal and left-leaning sentiment.

Games from the "Third Russian Revolution" category are often compared with those made in the Americas at the same time, as both are characterized by an optimistic view of the future, 'solarpunk' aesthetics, the feeling of having broken free from a period of stagnation or decay, and experimentation in what exactly a game could be and do.

However, contrasted to games of the American "Green Tomorrow" school, Third Russian Revolution games often also veer into absurdist cynicism and a feeling that this too will end.

Eventually as the Third Russian Republic and the Democratic Federation went their separate ways so did Third Russian Revolution and Green Tomorrow, diverging completely into "Cosmoliberalism" and "New Socialist Realism". But for nearly fifteen years in the mid 2100s, if you wanted to play the most innovative and artistic titles coming from the most talented devs around, you would look to the siblings of the Third Russian Revolution and Green Tomorrow schools…

[Select to continue Reading this #hastagcontent]​

Click to shrink...

Today's Talking Simulator is going to be a deep dive into Baby Carrot Gaymers' recent title "High Tide".

HIgh Tide is, simply speaking, the most authentic surfing simulator on the market today.

Or well, I assume it is, being only a novice until last week.

But the actual meat of the experience is that it is also a simulator of that ephemeral period of adolescence where you got your first unpaid internship, started your first relationship, and still tried to be seen as cool (And failing at it).

Which I understand isn't actually a universal experience. But "High Tide" is a sort of pastiche of a feeling and a time you didn't personally experience but know that you could have, if your life had gone slightly different.

High Tide perfectly encapsulates a range of feelings associated with a very specific time and place… and also includes some of the best water simulation ever put into a headset....

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Under the Pale Blue Curtain is an exciting entry in the nearly extinct genre of Stage Adventure that has recently been rediscovered by the Elysium Stage and Shakespeare Guild.

It is a fairly conventional Stage Adventure in form, Actors on stage, simple platonic props, and a requirement to bring your own imagination.

What sets Blue Curtain apart from other recent shows like Frankish Pie and The Death and Unlife of a Marketing Drone is the dedication to improvisation shown by the game's actors. It seems the secret to making the Stage Adventure really pop is to blend the standard genres with perspective-challenging dark comedy and top flight improvisational comedians.

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When I arrived at the Persephone Sunside Theater I was ushered onto an opulent shag carpet that would later play a surprising role in the plot...

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Perhaps the most punny work to come out of a game Jam (and avoid this if you don't have a taste for puns). Space Jam Jams is a visual novel based off of Space Jam. The obvious question, 'which Space Jam' is the game's central conceit. The visual novel can be continuously manipulated by a number of mechanics, changing the 'setting' from among many different Space Jam's.

A game coming out of the 'flowering of AU' movement originating in the fanfiction community, Space Jams rejects the concept of a singular 'canon' and instead delights in ambiguity. Such a focus may turn off players who want a coherent story, as the game will almost always force changes and retcons upon the players' individual world even if the player attempts a single, coherent story. At the moment it also suffers from a limited series of combinations, and repetition shows up after a few hours of gameplay.

Even so the system, while limited in the demo, shows promise, as players can compare entirely different worlds, and even import data from other players to modify their own world…

[Select to continue Reading this #hastagcontent]​

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This week I've got my eye on the expansion of a number of gems that come out of that Youth Programmers' Game Jam we spoke about a few months back.

The first title is When the Moon Finally Falls, an exploration of the last days of the Roman Kingdom and Roman Republic, United States and Democratic Federation, and Charter Controlled Elysium via the conceit of remembering past lives. The game plays with themes of cycles and how to break them as well as the decay of an ideal. The game is, I think, often over-concerned with historical accuracy, but also incorporates a hint of mysticism that I'm not sure lands but I'm definitely interested in experiencing.

Next is a personal favorite of mine: Sudden Star / All Death, which has a simple premise: you're a Grim Reaper pursued across twelve increasingly awe-inspiring stages by increasingly well armed and well skilled Charter mercenaries hoping to carry out a hit on you. It's not a particularly intellectual game, but it is damn fun, and plays very smoothly, incorporating a variety of alternate player forms and weapons based off of those of various psychopomps from ancient mythology.

Next is the Final Fantasy Restoration Project. While the long running series is well known in the public consciousness nearly 300 titles have been rendered unplayable by the advance of time and technology. Thanks to nationalisation of the personal classic games collection of one Mr Yang, and the talents of a team of dedicated youths, we may be close to playing these classic games.

Previous Charter rereleases of these games were marred by attempts to "modernize" the games, instead this FFRP is focusing not on content changes but simply in making the code run on modern computers, without reliance on a nested series of overly-elaborate emulators. When they finish the project, the team plans to distribute the project along with fabber plans for older computer equipment if you want to play the games on their original hardware anyway...

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"It has been fifty years since the fifth game in the Open Skies franchise finally landed on platforms to near universal derision.

Though nearly a decade of patches turned the game into an infamous classic and a moderate financial success, Forlorn Hope Brigade's magnum opus was a victim of its own hubris. To such an extent that no one has ever attempted to match it since despite it ultimately sticking the landing.

Many games promise that every choice counts, that every word and action will have consequences. In practice this is usually extended into a sequel at best, or ultimately discarded aside from minor aesthetic and narrative changes at worst.

But in 2180, Hermes-Ishtar backed just about the most ambitious games projection history: an epic quintet of games that would tell the stories of three generations of spacers in a low-fantasy galaxy at war with itself and a mysterious force from deep time.

For nearly twenty years and four games Forlorn Hope Brigade managed to maintain the charade that they were pulling it off, leading to unrivaled anticipation for the fifth game "Open Skies: House of Time" as it was expected that it would finally draw the series to a satisfying conclusion.

But the release of the fifth game in holiday season 2203 would prove to be a disaster of historic and iconic proportions. To this day, many hold that the game would have done financially better to have not tried to deliver on its promise at all...

[Select to continue Reading this #hastagcontent]​

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The first game developed by native Sheolites, Sheol's struggle is at first glance a standard tactical simulator and FPS, taking the role of a squad-leader (known as a 'Rate') fighting the Ares forces in Sheol. However anyone who tries to play it as such will be quickly disabused of the notion. Unlike the games such as the "Commendation" series, these enemies are not stand in for warlords and anarchists ready to be mowed down in the hundreds. Each enemy is not merely tough, but stronger, tougher and more damaging than anything you can call on.

In order to be successful, one must use stealth, ambushes, and numbers to take enemies down, accepting casualty ratios that are almost always unfavorable. Because of this Struggle does not have a single 'main character', as some missions are completely unsurvivable, and you can only hope to damage the enemy, or evacuate your own people, trying to do as much as possible before your entire squad dies.

One disturbing element to my Elysian eyes is the dehumanization of the enemy that is so recognizable from other games in the genre. Especially as I personally know some of the Ares personnel that were affected by the poverty draft.

On the other hand, as one who has never been shot at, it is very easy for me to say this. And it must be noted that those personnel now in Radiant are not the same as those who engaged in quite literal baby murder.

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Crazy Uncle Nox Tom's project's are the talk of Radiant. The project, which allows even those at home to help contribute to our defense, has captured the imaginations of many people. Arguments have even broken out over monopolizing community fabbers for the projects.

But one other problem remains that many don't consider after fabbing the parts for half-a dozen Hellburners. How do you transport it all to a launch site, and where do you put it when you get there? And what does this have to do with the Radiant Wargaming Guild? Read on to find out!

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Journal of M Chakrabarti, Congressional Delegate
July 15th, Mostly clear skies, light drizzle

The victory in Shei has greatly brightened spirits in the General Congress and bolstered our faith that MilComm and the Congressional Navy can stop whatever the Charters throw at us.

I hope that the new ideas that were mooted in the closed session are enough to make that confidence a reality.

I really do feel a growing confidence,

Added to this is the rapidly advancing pace of our collaboration with the Fliveons labour underground, and it's beginning to make us feel like we can do anything.

A potentially deadly feeling, to be honest.

And yet.

I hope that nothing dissuades us from it.

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INDUSTRIAL COMMITTEE REPORTS

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Fortify Shei-Osliem Korolev-Chandraehskar gate

The SCMC's position has been strengthened by being proven right, as it were, about gate fortifications, and several wavering regional councils have fallen in line with the party vote. Despite our insistence that no further Charter attacks in force could come from that chain, the Compact Navy worries them enough to rebuild their defences anyway.

When we asked the SCMC to delay construction for a few weeks until the new gate defence designs were finalized we were accused of attempting to undermine their authority and they pushed ahead with construction along the line of the traditional defensive lay out.

After that I stopped pushing back, except to impress upon them how important it is that we not fire first at any Solarian Navy force. I can only pray they listen.

Gordon Zhu
Construction Coordinator, Shei System​

Project Progress: Automatic

Project Result: Build defences at that gate strong enough to bloody a small attacking force


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Begin Energy Collection Operations on Shei 8a

Fortification construction is taking a significant amount of energy, and Sheol's old grid simply can't keep up much longer. We've assisted in planning a modern energy collection complex in Shei.

Hopefully this new solar collection facility will help to reduce the burden on our networks across the board.

Gordon Zhu
Construction Coordinator, Shei System​

Project Progress: Automatic

Project Result: Increase E Production Infrastructure to Level 1 on selected planet


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MILITARY COMMITTEE REPORTS

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Recruit ex-Ares personnel directly into existing units

A large portion of personnel with space-borne experience that had declined to enlist with Radiant after the liberation of Sheol have come back and volunteered for duty after the engagement in Shei. It seems to be a mix of guilt, response to pleas from shipmates aboard, and feelings of revenge.

While not all these reasons are strictly healthy we need the trained spacers to fill out depleted crew slots, especially on Shieldmaiden, as many of the injured are still going to need several months of organ grafts, reconstructive surgery, and physical therapy before they're up and running, so the relatively low death counts betray just how stretched our crews are.

As well, while the vast majority of our immigrants -and thus our new recruits- are not trained spacers, we still need them to fill out the ranks of our rapidly expanding Ground Forces.

Elena Li
Elysian Deputy Military Recruitment Coordinator​

Project Progress: 37/20 Completed

Projected Results: +1 to All-Radiant Congressional Defence Committee bonus. Completion contributes 20 progress to the Shei Redeployment Program.

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Fortify the Radiant-Bestreer Gate

The ongoing fortification of the Radiant-Bestreer Gate is our first opportunity to put into place the new defensive doctrine pioneered by the Radiant Wargaming Guild.

While we did lose some time programming the new fabber designs, hard work by our people and the change in doctrine from heavy Tactical Assault Missile Shoal use to Limited Mobility Platforms saw the project completed ahead of schedule and well within the original budget.

This gave us enough time to revisit the Gaid-Thoa defences and change the layout to the heavy LMP doctrine. However the defences still are surrounded by large numbers of TAM Shoals, which is not necessarily a bad thing, just unsustainable in the long term.

Whenever the Charters arrive, they'll be in for a nasty surprise.

Rachel Kayode
Construction Coordinator Radiant-Bestreer Gate Fortification Project​

Project Progress: Automatic (Omake bonus applied to refit the Gaid-Thoa Static defences to the new doctrine) savage a small attacking force

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Form Modern Planetary Army

If, Allah forbid, the force that is undoubtedly coming our way from HI is simply too large to best with our own small navy, the fighting will undoubtedly come to the ground here in Radiant, and perhaps once more in Sheol as well. The SCMC has plenty of experience, preexisting hardened sites, and with their own industry expanding they've now got the tech to match-- anyone that tries to engage a Sheolite defense complex is in for a rude surprise.

The same is not true for us. Elysium barely has a police force nowadays, let alone an army-- the old police largely resigned or were exiled, and public safety forces don't have much to do, in all honesty. Solve the occasional murder or rape, and keep a coast watch on the Tartarus Archepeligo, that's about it.

While we can put out ground equipment effectively as needed, we don't have the people to use or crew that equipment ready. There's no way we can actually put together a professional army of the size needed to beat off an invasion in only a few months, but with the help of accelerated XR training, and with the stiffening of trained ex-Ares Immigrants, we should be able to get a pair of fully professional divisions and enough militia units together delay HI ground forces long enough to get a professional force running.

Writing that down, it sounds hideous, and it will cost too many lives. But we've got to prepare for the worst.

Muhammed Tyson
Training Coordinator, Elysium Defence Forces​

I do feel somewhat guilty for high-grading the best trained and most experienced recruits from the Elysian Defence Forces, but the Congressional Liberation Army Corps will be seeing action even if the Charters never set foot on Elysium.

Instead of focusing on entrenchment and concealment the three divisions of the CLAC has been drilling in offensive actions, especially orbital drops and urban close combat. Specifically I've been training our people on mock ups of Fliveons facilities and outfitting the OpFor like a Rhodes security force.

When the time comes to deploy to Fliveons the Congressional Liberation Army Corps will be ready.

Alex Sanders
Training Coordinator, Congressional Liberation Army Corps​

Project Progress: 49/40

Projected Results: Found a new Planetary Army military service for use on the offence and defence, add Permanent +2E upkeep to the ARC

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SCIENCE COMMITTEE REPORTS

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Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management for Rhodes

The Rhodes bypass has been a fantastic success. To that I must not only credit the work left over from our previous DRM, but also the Fliveons MedComm Investigatory project whose data was immensely helpful in cracking the basic Rhodes patterns. We now have access to every single space drill Rhodes has ever re-patented.

As well as a number of actual useful inventions such as the 'Rhodes Yggdrasil', a toolbox sized device that literally grows 'roots' from itself to harvest rare elements from the ground.

Shirley Riaz
Professional Union of Laboratory Technicians and Coders Understudy​

Perhaps just as relevant as the mining tools are the dizzying array of specialist fabbers that massively improve the speed of printing, from the handheld to the household appliance. We're still sorting through them all, particularly as many of them have simply been obsoleted by improved models, but I wouldn't hesitate to say that most of their competitive manufacturing advantage comes from pairing the right fabber to the right print job. They even show up in the strangest places, such as climbing tools like their grappling hook gun, providing kilometers of rope out of a small slug of diamond feedstock.

Callista Moreno
Professional Union of Laboratory Technicians and Coders Spokeswoman​

Project Progress: 24/20

Project Results: Unlock Rhodes light industrial grade 'prints

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SOCIAL COMMITTEE REPORTS

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Resident Embassies

Slow but steady wins the race. Even in the face of a headwind. Even in the face of a headwind of hot air from a ruling clique who are increasingly suspicious of you.

We've had to move slowly on Sheol itself to avoid causing friction with the SCMC, and most of our progress so far has been by highlighting the educational links between our worlds. The Generals desire home-grown expertise so that, ironically, they'll have to rely on us less for their domestic programs.

While the regional governors have been more receptive to exchange programs and building consulates, we've had to pick and choose when and where we take them up on their offers. There is a lot of prestige to be gained as a Regional Governor in hosting an Elysian consulate or exchange program and we've been learning that we don't just have to balance the Governors with the Generals but also balance the various Governors against each other to prevent political ruptures.

Jeremy Cross
Sheol Liaison Program, Sheol​

We're making good progress, thanks to the curiosity for new cultures created by the immigration of ex-Ares personnel to Elysium, our people have also been eager to meet directly with Sheolites and even travel to Sheol itself for non-work purposes.

At the moment we've mostly been converting sections of unused resort complexes to host Sheolites and these jury-rigged consulates have been flooded with volunteers.

Jennifer Porcher
Sheol Liaison Program, Elysium​

Project Progress: 17/30

Projected Results: Improve relations with the SCMC and the Sheolite population as a whole, +2E upkeep per quarter once completed

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Encourage Retraining

We…. we've done it. I can't believe it. Just two years ago we discovered HALF of our population was engaged in complete make-work. Now… anyone who wants to work, can. And it didn't take brutal wages or starvation if they didn't work. All over, people are doing things.

More things, in less time. Can you imagine? We have effectively twice as much population working, and each one is doing more than they were when they were working 100 hours or more hours a week. It just shows how hollow the Charters are. We were breaking our backs… for nothing.

I'm proud of us. Scicom, Soccom, Medcom. All of us helped contribute to this. Without IndComm we never would have had the resources to do it, and without MilComm the safety. And it wasn't just a top-down corporate-driven effort. A rise in hobbyist science programs has created a small fad for entry into the hard sciences. People don't need to be told to do great things, because it is what they do all the time if you give them the opportunity.

Nigel Rodriguez
Delegate, Elysian Social Welfare Union​

Project Progress: 41/40

Project Results: Projected Results: Gain an extra die into one of either IndComm, MilComm, or SciComm

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MEDIA COMMITTEE REPORTS


Provide aid to Underground Labour Organizations x2

"Fliveons has a near-total lack of military space assets, which means that if we could spare our navy to enter the system we'd be able to effectively declare victory. We can't afford to leave Radiant unguarded now, though, especially after the Battle of Sheol.

"That means it's going to come down to underground unions vs. local security forces. The good news is, local security forces don't have anything beyond helicopters and light APCs-- nobody maintains tanks in an area you think you don't need them, which means they'll have to print and train serious combat forces on the go.

"The bad news is, labor organizations barely have small arms and first aid kits. We're going to be fabricating a lot of ATGMs, rifles, and other basic kit to turn our allies into a proper paramilitary."

Green Three Ninety
Fliveons Liaison Agent, Military Committee Shei Liberation Project​

"While most of our focus has been on direct material aid in weapons and support equipment, we also deployed a combined SciComm-MedComm technical assistance team that have jokingly dubbed themselves 'The Congressional Liberation Hacker Collective'.

"While everyone expected our Hackers to be able to run circles around the local Rhodes infotech security people, we didn't expect the level of incompetence on display by the Rhodes people.

"Thanks to a combination of social and network hacking that took advantage of the overworked, underfunded, and often ignored state of Rhodes server security our people now have complete control of the Fliveons intranet.

"Everything from internal communications to security drone IFF is now in our hands.

"Suffice it to say, unless and until Rhodes changes all their passwords we and the Underground Labour Organizations have a decisive advantage. Perhaps the decisive advantage."

Black Four Sixteen
Local Agent-In-Charge of Media Committee Fliveons Investigatory Project​

Project Progress: 37/25

Project Results: Projected Results: Fliveons Underground Labour Organizations grow in membership and are better able to engage in pitched combat with Rhodes security forces.

-

Thanks to the completion of the retraining program you now have another die in:

[ ] [DICE] IndComm
[ ] [DICE] MilComm
[ ] [DICE] SciComm

 

[tankdrop24]

Well, looks like, events permitting, we'll be hitting Fivelions next turn.

I'm guessing most of us are going to want to go for the SciComm die, right?

 

[HeWhoAdds]

I'm guessing most of us are going to want to go for the SciComm die, right?

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I think the big competitor would be IndCom, since it seems like we've been bottlenecked on energy in the past? And IndCom might open up more options by expanding E production faster? But Rhodes-tech sounds like it'll make extraction efforts more effective, so maybe we're safe going SciComm for more FRM cracking?