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

AKuz · Dec 10, 2020

THE ALL-RADIANT CONGRESS

Setting Information: The Solarian Compact:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Charters:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rhodes Mining

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

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

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

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

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

Techbros, some of them science, some of them explore

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sketchy buggers, they can get you anything tho

Historical Topics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misc Details:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spinward Frontier:

The Middle Spinward Frontier

The Core Region:

UNDER RADIANT CONTROL OR ALLIED:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaid A1: An airless world. Quality 10.

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

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

Gaid AI: An asteroid belt.

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

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

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

Gaid B2: An airless world. Quality 10.

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

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

Gaid B5: A small icy planet. Quality 3.

Gaid B6: A frozen world. Quality 7.

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

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

Shei 1: A Cthonian world. Quality 15.

Shei 2: An airless world. Quality 12.

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

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

Gravity .95 Earth Standard. Quality 12.

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

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

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

Shei I: Asteroid belt.

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

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

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

Shei II: Asteroid belt.

Shei 7: Jovian planet. Quality 13.

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

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

Shei 8: Ice giant. Quality 6.

Shei 8a: An icy moon. Quality 9.

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

Population: 103,000,000

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

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

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

Five Lions 3: A rocky ball. Quality 7.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Lions II: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 7: An unremarkable Jovian. Quality 2.

Five Lions III: An asteroid belt.

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

Five Lions IV: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 9: Jovian planet. Quality 9.

Five Lions V: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 10: Neptunian ice giant. Quality 8.

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

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

Population: 15,000,000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Population: 650,000

UNDER CHARTER CONTROL:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Xotreh A6: An unremarkable icy ball. Quality 4.

Xotreh AI: An asteroid belt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Xotreh 6: A dense ice giant. Quality 4.

Xotreh 7: Jovian planet. Quality 6.

Xotreh 8: An exceptionally cold Jovian. Quality 9.

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

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

Population: 54,000

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

Bestreer 1: An airless world. Quality 2.

Bestreer 2: An airless world. Quality 6.

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

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

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

Bestreer I: An icy asteroid belt.

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

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

Bestreer 7: Another Jovian. Quality 14.

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

Bestreer 8: An icy ball. Quality 10.

Population: 450

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

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

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

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

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

Akleod I: An asteroid belt.

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

Population: 5,000

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

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

Thoa System Stats:

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

Thoa 2: An unremarkable airless metal ball.

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

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

Thoa I: An asteroid belt.

Thoa 4: A normal Jovian planet.

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

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

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

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

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

Thoa II: A Kuiper belt of icy objects.

Empty Systems

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

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

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

Kimberly 3: A Jovian world.

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

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

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

Total:

Radiant:

Gaid:

Five Lions:

Head of Diplomatic Corps:

Name: Amanda Redcrest, Victoria Blackwell, and Kayla Hayashi

DoB: "2222", 2219, 2227, 2224

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cons: XP celebrity, little diplomatic experience, three people

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

Unlocked FRM

Ares Peacekeeping Grade - Access to planetary army formation

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

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

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

Cernunnos Consumer Grade - +1 to all Soccom actions

Cernunnos Enterprise Grade - NOT UNLOCKED

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

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

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

Hermes-Ishtar Production Grade - NOT UNLOCKED

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

MSI Enterprise Grade - NOT UNLOCKED

Original Tech

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

Defence Coordinator:

Name: Maria Awhina

DoB: 2165

Current Position: Military Committee Delegate from the Radiant Veterans Guild

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Command Traits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-None

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

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

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

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

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

Solarian Marines now spread throughout the system

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

Mobile Force:

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

CO: Commodore Stephanie Rousseau

CNS Velasco, United States of America-class Fleet Carrier

-CO: Captain Esteri Attar

-Orca Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: Wing Commander Jasmine Ang

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

-CO: Wing Commander Heloisa Kimura de Lima

CNS Shieldmaiden, Great Heathen-class Light Cruiser

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

CNS Shamhat, Great Heathen-class Light Cruiser

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

CNS Righteous Tempest, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: Captain Vehement Shade

CNS August Willich, Cossak-class Frigate

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

CNS Elysium, Cossak-class Frigate

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

CNS Asphodel, Cossak-class Frigate

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

-

Home Force:

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

CO: Commodore Erina Kozlova

CNS Blaire Mountain, New Model-Class Strike Corvette

-CO: Captain Guillermo Kageyama

CNS Scutum, Comet-Class Patrol Corvette

-CO: Captain Martin Pagonis

CNS Buckler, Comet-Class Patrol Corvette

-CO: Captain Samuel Smiles

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

-CO: Captain Jean-Paul Beaumont

-

Radiant System Self Defence Force:

Current Orders: Defend Radiant, comet patrol

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

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

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

Switchblade Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft

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

Apogee Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft

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

Battery A, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery B, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery C, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery D, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery E, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery F, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Radiant Orbital Yard 1

Current construction: None

Radiant Orbital Yard 1

Current construction: None

-

Gaid System Self Defence Force:

Current Orders: Defend Gaid

CO: Commodore Victor Raine

Battery A, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery B, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery C, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery D, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery E, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery F, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

Zephyr Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: Wing Commander Ara Helge

Aeolus Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

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

Gale Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

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

-

Frontier Force

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

CO: Commodore Shayla McLean

CNS Kiel Mutiny, Kaiserreich-class BattleCruiser

-CO: Captain Inana Devlin

CNS Choreographer, Janissary-class Light Tender

-CO: Captain Karl Xanthopoulos

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

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

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

-CO: Captain Fool's Errand

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

-CO: Captain Rouge Napier

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

-CO: Captain John Rankin

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

-CO: Captain Nkiru Chaudhari

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

-CO: Captain Sumac Barros

CNS Revolutionary Will, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: Captain Yamamoto Hanae

CNS Revolutionary Grace, Cossak-class Frigate

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

CNS Under New Management, Don-Class Fast Tanker

-CO: Captain Adras Kierenos

CNS Liberte, Hollywood(C)-Class Frigate

-CO: Captain Colin McRae

CNS Egalite, Hollywood(C)-Class Frigate

-CO: Captain Adelia Swift

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

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Derpmind · Jun 2, 2024

Gulping said:
tl;dr: Normal is Space Alito and he's backed by every horrible small business idiot tyrant everyone collectively reading this thread has ever had the terrible misfortune of ever interacting with in any capacity.

I think the most merciful thing we could do for the people of Atlantis is mass-scatter the planet. That's a truly refined vision of Hell. Legitimately the bleakest thing the QMs have put in the thread since they revealed that Rowling is still alive.

Let's not casually discuss killing 12 billion people, please.

Nuew · Jun 2, 2024

It should also be noted that despite the rosy picture the article portrays, there is still a civil war/insurgency ongoing (assuming it hasn't been defeated?). Atlantis has a chance of going red/black.

MSH · Jun 2, 2024

And most importantly, Gaston Gains is from Atlantis! Once the war is over we should just steal all of the 9th's SolCoins and donate them to Gaston.

Come to think of it, could we cryptographically break SolCoins and generate as many of them as desired?

Professor Vesca · Jun 2, 2024

Gaston Gains is perpetually a single errant flex of his muscles away from shredding his expensive silk suit into rags. It creaks every time he moves.

MSH · Jun 2, 2024

That's a donation redeem on his streams. He keeps bringing better and better hidden cameras into classified government meetings, not because he's spying, but because the hustle never sleeps and JN OK's bodyguards can die mad about it.

Professor Vesca · Jun 2, 2024

No one
Shifts like Gaston
No one grifts like Gaston
No one hustles a new income stream like Gaston
Yes as a specimen I am intimidating
Oh what a guy that Gaston

Ekzentric Lohner · Jun 3, 2024

That random name generator has given this quest such wonderful gifts.

Gulping · Jun 3, 2024

Derpmind said:
Let's not casually discuss killing 12 billion people, please.

I was being hyperbolic about how miserable the situation on Atlantis is thanks to Normal being President Patrick Bateman and his main political backing being landlords, chain restaurant franchisees, and guys who own car and/or boat dealerships.

I know that jokes are frowned on in this very serious thread and I apologize.

SaltyWaffles · Jun 3, 2024

Gulping said:
I was being hyperbolic about how miserable the situation on Atlantis is thanks to Normal being President Patrick Bateman and his main political backing being landlords, chain restaurant franchisees, and guys who own car and/or boat dealerships.

I know that jokes are frowned on in this very serious thread and I apologize.

I'm pretty sure his political backing takes a backseat to being backed by the people with guns and orbital supremacy. After the spectacular backfiring that reform and peaceful protest were, considering just how many people were on organized strike (wasn't it something like a billion people?), I imagine there are going to be a lot of resistance groups quietly arming up and trying to network with each other over time.

Combine that with a massive, sweeping curtailing of long-established rights that Atlantis enjoyed at the hands of an unelected government and fresh memories of large-scale massacres against peaceful protestors, and things will get very interesting on Atlantis sooner or later.

Very, very interesting. One might even say very not normal.

Gulping · Jun 3, 2024

SaltyWaffles said:
I'm pretty sure his political backing takes a backseat to being backed by the people with guns and orbital supremacy. After the spectacular backfiring that reform and peaceful protest were, considering just how many people were on organized strike (wasn't it something like a billion people?), I imagine there are going to be a lot of resistance groups quietly arming up and trying to network with each other over time.

Combine that with a massive, sweeping curtailing of long-established rights that Atlantis enjoyed at the hands of an unelected government and fresh memories of large-scale massacres against peaceful protestors, and things will get very interesting on Atlantis sooner or later.

Very, very interesting. One might even say very not normal.

Sounds like Cosmoliberalism functioning as intended tbh, just not bothering with the veneer of democratic norms and civil rights anymore.

Titanic Toxicity · Jun 3, 2024

So if Atlantis isn't a wierdo transhumanist fascist Cern controlled place does such a place exist? Seems like a narrative waste to give a charter such a.....unique ideology have them fracture into a bunch of Warlords then have exactly zero of said warlords try to build a actual state based on said wierd ass ideology.

Ekzentric Lohner · Jun 3, 2024

Titanic Toxicity said:
So if Atlantis isn't a wierdo transhumanist fascist Cern controlled place does such a place exist? Seems like a narrative waste to give a charter such a.....unique ideology have them fracture into a bunch of Warlords then have exactly zero of said warlords try to build a actual state based on said wierd ass ideology.

I think the Far Trailing is like that? Scott Caulder (bad) and his forces vs Izzy Caulder (based) and her allies. Izzy's side hat that black flag with three claw marks in red, and Scott's side had a green flag with I forget what on it.

Genderite · Jun 3, 2024

Ekzentric Lohner said:
I think the Far Trailing is like that? Scott Caulder (bad) and his forces vs Izzy Caulder (based) and her allies. Izzy's side hat that black flag with three claw marks in red, and Scott's side had a green flag with I forget what on it.

Don't forget Canlin which is... very Cern Fascism.

SaltyWaffles · Jun 3, 2024

Yeah, there are major inhabited systems that aren't in the core. The core systems get a lot of focus because of the amount of population they have, the amount of infrastructure/industry that they have, and the political influence they have. They are the heart of the Compact; if the polite fiction that the Compact claims to be blatantly stops applying there, then there is no longer a foundation for the Compact to continue existing. Currently, most of the core worlds are either putting up a thin veneer of pretend/plausible deniability of still being part of the Compact (Olduvai, Epsilon), under the steel boot of a Charter and their local patsies/allies (Atlantis, Columbia), or are very much in full rebellion against the Compact but the Compact is just in full denial about the reality of the situation (Penglai, Sol).

Which leaves just KC as the only major Core System that is both under actual Compact control and is Compact in spirit.

But outside the core region, the charters have a much freer hand to rule directly. That's where you'd see Cern going full tilt, Rhodes running the entire planet openly and emphatically, a planet run by media executives (Symphony), etc.. Only MSI has adapted ahead of the collapse, giving itself a new skin to wear to pretend it isn't what it is.

Setsul · Jun 3, 2024

SaltyWaffles said:
But outside the core region, the charters have a much freer hand to rule directly. That's where you'd see Cern going full tilt, Rhodes running the entire planet openly and emphatically, a planet run by media executives (Symphony), etc..

I want to add for emphasis that most of the systems outside of the core are outright owned by the Charters.
There's some Charter Economic Zones in the core, like a chunk of the former DemFed territory on Earth, but it's the exception rather than the rule.
Outside of the core, entire systems are a CEZ owned by a single Charter that is legally the government there and can do whatever the hell it wants, as long as it follows what few Compact laws apply in a CEZ, and if it doesn't no one might find out anyway because it is in sole control with no one looking over its shoulder.

There's been some Colonial Reform, so the populated non-Daughter systems in the core are System Republics and get to govern themselves and vote, some of the more populous systems in the Near Frontiers are Frontier Republics that get to govern themselves a little and vote, and in theory there's some Colonial Republic out there that get to govern themselves a tiny bit but in practice are more often than not still run by the Charters and they don't get to vote in the Compact-wide elections anyway.

But Potosi and Symphony, despite each having a higher population than any of the Frontier Republics, are still full CEZs. Rhodes and HI get to do whatever they want there, no figleaf required. In theory their inhabitants get to vote for SolParl if they register themselves in a 'home' system in the core, probably whichever system the Charter's HQ is in. The only problem with that is that for "security reasons" a physical ballot needs to be shipped out after the polls open and then shipped back and arrive before the polls close.

Anyway, what I wanted to add is that Drake, Springtide, Tereshkova, and Trescore are all Frontier Republics and that the first three are in an interesting sort of limbo.
Especially with the Spinward Triage Command sitting on them, the Compact arguably got more control over them than over the big six in the core.
Which brings me to this:

SaltyWaffles said:
Which leaves just KC as the only major Core System that is both under actual Compact control and is Compact in spirit.

Tereshkova and Drake have their own problems and Trescore has officially declared independence if I remember correctly, but there is still Springtide.
It's not a core system, but it does have more population than KC, and from what little we've seen, things are as calm as they can be there. It's not great, but it's something.

Other than that, Atlantis still isn't Cern country. It's more like Drake. The awfulness is sourced locally in both systems, not imported by Charters.

obssesednuker · Jun 3, 2024

Nuew said:
It should also be noted that despite the rosy picture the article portrays, there is still a civil war/insurgency ongoing (assuming it hasn't been defeated?). Atlantis has a chance of going red/black.

Last full-on omake story from Atlantic I recall had a police officer whose daughter got gakked in the protestor massacres sneak into a police ceremony with a bomb vest strapped to himself.

So yeah, I'd say that's a sign that Normal's attempt at normalcy is running into... hiccups.

Ekzentric Lohner said:
I think the Far Trailing is like that? Scott Caulder (bad) and his forces vs Izzy Caulder (based) and her allies. Izzy's side hat that black flag with three claw marks in red, and Scott's side had a green flag with I forget what on it.

Genderite said:
Don't forget Canlin which is... very Cern Fascism.

You probably have all sorts of zany attempts at new ideologies and forms of government being tried out. I fully expect at least one unironic attempt at Managed Democracy and for it to explode spectacularly.

Torgamous · Jun 3, 2024

obssesednuker said:
You probably have all sorts of zany attempts at new ideologies and forms of government being tried out. I fully expect at least one unironic attempt at Managed Democracy and for it to explode spectacularly.

I don't know if you've noticed how the Compact is running elections these days, but they look pretty managed.

obssesednuker · Jun 3, 2024

Torgamous said:
I don't know if you've noticed how the Compact is running elections these days, but they look pretty managed.

Look, until the Compact has people fill out a questionnaire on their personal preferences and then have a VI-algorithm casts the vote for them based on those preferences, their democracy can only ever be the fake kind. That's what the Ministry of Truth tells me and why else are they called that if they didn't speak it?

namar13766 · Jun 3, 2024

Gulping said:
Sounds like Cosmoliberalism functioning as intended tbh, just not bothering with the veneer of democratic norms and civil rights anymore.

Sounds like the Super-Earth of Helldivers in a happy-go-lucky form.

MrRageQuit · Jun 7, 2024

obssesednuker said:
Last full-on omake story from Atlantic I recall had a police officer whose daughter got gakked in the protestor massacres sneak into a police ceremony with a bomb vest strapped to himself.

So yeah, I'd say that's a sign that Normal's attempt at normalcy is running into... hiccups.

As the one who wrote it, I can tell you it's not actually canon since they put it in Apocrypha. It's the sort of thing that probably could happen.

spacemanelliot · Jun 8, 2024

I had to dig into some old posts to figure out what exactly planet quality means (literally just the amount of mine expansions you could put on it, apparently, which also neatly answered my other question as to how many expansions we could make on a planet), and I saw some indication that there's potentially some research we could do to improve our resource income on a given planet based off of planet quality. Is that still in the cards, or has that idea been tossed aside between way back then and now?

clockworkchaos · Jun 28, 2024

Media you should know about in a post Broadcast world

By Harry Fakename, Coreward Cell Arts Critic-Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch in Exile

If you have people, you have media, it has always been such: even a single person isolated on an island or a space-station will make up stories to stave off madness and keep themselves entertained.

There is always a media landscape, and for much of the past two centuries that landscape has been dominated by Hermes-Ishtar and its predecessors. Massive interstellar corporations with the SolCoin to rival God and the drive to fill every mind with their product at every moment.

Every living being was exposed to the promoted genius of HI's product, carefully planned and executed sometimes decades in advance, the one single overriding goal of Hermes-Ishtar was not to make money directly, but capture and own the imaginations of every citizen of the Community of Humanity.

Great projects were launched, immense campaigns waged, springing off from great cultural marshaling grounds like those of Chronicle, Symphony, or Elysium and all centrally planned from Number One Aspire Plaza on Penglai by rank after rank of dedicated marketing personnel and a constellation of all-too-perfect executives.

Yet despite this, most media produced in the Compact remained locally sourced, often not even produced by Hermes-Ishtar. Indeed, large segments of the media landscape were produced by the other Charters for internal consumption in the frontiers (sometimes by subsidiaries or by contracting out to Hermes-Ishtar) or by companies local to the First Colonies and thus proportionately powerful in their own right. The leading example of such being the family owned Sun Media empire of Penglai.

The power and planning of Hermes-Ishtar and the immense scale of the First Colonies means that the mass media landscape has been integrated into a single market with many tiny segments ripe for exploitation. While any single individual may find themselves with a unique media consumption pattern, they will remain aware of a shared landscape around them.

This single media sphere is in fact something that the Cosmoliberal Establishment of the Solarian Compact is quite proud of, as it reinforces the concept of the Community of Humanity as being a single indivisible whole.

Though challenged by Amaranthine's Broadcast and the subsequent political strife, that single media sphere has remained. In fact, the participation of the Amaranthine revolutionaries in the RBC and SolComm projects has strengthened the idea of all Humanity participating in a single living media ecosystem, giving it legs as a project that may outlive the Cosmoliberalism that birthed it.

That is to say, the current media landscape of Humanity finds itself in the midst of sea change. We find ourselves in a transitional period where the ideas of yesteryear and tomorrow exist together at once. Where the great media behemoths decay and metamorphosize at the same time as new properties emerge onto the scene and both the private and personal find themselves on the same screen as the ideological and state-mandated.

To begin, we look back to recent years. For multiple media cycles now the Compact's media landscape has been dominated by the 'Feel Good' movie. Often (though not always) set in an idealized past, these properties tended to have little ongoing plot and focused instead on mood, crafting an unchallenged and enjoyable experience. These properties centered themselves on broadly drawn and unthreatening characters -characters a consumer could easily insert themselves into. This crypto-voyeuristic experience let billions imagine themselves separated from the hustle and bustle of the workday and instead leading an easy and comfortable life.

While the leading examples of the format were feature films, regular half hour installments of various series were how most regularly experienced this vibes-based artistic movement. Often a popular series would receive elevation to relevancy with a feature film or a successful film would inspire an extended series.

As for Unscripted Content, the world of XP was tailor made for the Feel Good era. Ideally XP stars would participate in experiences or consume products that the average consumer had trouble finding the time and money for. While in previous eras this would trend towards the exhilarating or titillating, more recent XP stars would instead record themselves in comfortable and relatable situations. Relatable or comfortable situations facilitated by the goods and services of whoever was sponsoring the broadcast.

Many predicted the fall of this genre after the smash success of "Empty Passages" and its sequel, which heralded the rise of what became known as the 'Frontier Thriller'. Representing what feature movies and games could provide best: sweeping action and epic setpieces an uncountable number of imitators were rushed into production.

Most of these, ended up high-profile flops. The most infamous of these failures were HI Big Set Features "Edge of Space" and "Hollow Guns" both flops due to endless director driven cost overruns and failure to capture the moral ambiguity that characterized the Frontier Thriller. Interestingly enough the Frontier Thriller found its true calling as mid-budget TV series. "Only the Sky Can Save Us from Our Own Sins", "Hollow Dawn", and "Morningstar" proved to be smash hits for original properties and semi-successful in their own rights, avoiding cancellation for multiple seasons while building a devoted following of hundreds of millions or even low billions.

While the Frontier Thriller genre did displace the Feel Good movie and game from the Feature Product and Mid Budget Show market segments and posed a challenge to the dominance of the Feel Good era, Feel Good media remained dominant with smaller series and XP recordings until the Broadcast upended the entire landscape.

Since the Broadcast has been another matter entirely, one that must be dealt with on a region by region basis. I've included some major media you might have heard of and should probably be aware of, even watch if you want to understand it. I don't promise it's all good, or even moral, but it is good to understand where our current media landscape is at. You should of course, follow all legal requirements of whatever place you are in and definitely not look for illegal methods of media consumption made easier thanks to the technologies of the broadcast.

Sol

Despite her fallen status, Earth's population and diversity of culture ensured that her status as a cultural production center never really went away in the same way as her policial and industrial strength.

Though more and more media from Earth tended to hide its origins, the Broadcast, and a wave of planet-wide patriotic fervour, has gripped Earth. While patriotism is at an all time high, the current trend lends itself towards a patriotism of 'our nation and all our buddies on Earth vs the Compact' rather than the traditional patriotism of nation vs nation. This patriotism also tends to be both top down and bottom up, with state funded Feature Productions accompanied by a flood of amature productions coming out at a pace that is threatening to overtake even Penglai's traditionally prodigious output.

As befits such an important cultural center, more than one of their local products has entered the galaxy's discourse and imaginations.

Fellow Travelers

Fellow Travelers represents the 'top down' side of Earth's patriotism. A prestige drama and Small Stage Feature directed by the legendary Miranda Ogundare (rumored to have been coaxed out of retirement by a personal visit from UNS General Secretary himself) Fellow Travellers tells the story of how the real historical figures of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin worked together to defeat fascism at the start of the atomic age.

By turns harrowing and heartwarming it's a propaganda piece with a surprisingly dark comedic edge that allows some honest points about the flaws of both men. Told in an almost epistolemic style unfolding over nearly two decades, Fellow Travellers sits in an odd place where it could almost, almost have been something that would evade the wartime censor's brush for general release, but an unseemly brutality towards the invading Germans in Russia saw its distribution limited in Loyalist space among with press outrage -something which has only enhanced its mystique and deepened its viewership.

Fellow Travelers ends on a tragic tone, where the stress of war ends up destroying both men. FDR dies in a literal manner, leaving Stalin to drink himself into a shell of a man who returns to his paranoid ways. In their wake there is a falling out that weakens both their nations. A harrowing timeline of collapse that interspersed the credits of Fellow Travelers implies that the collapse of both the United States and Soviet Union and the return of fascism in the 21st century stems from the inability of their successors to deal a final deathblow to international capitalism and their own countries' incipient imperial ambitions.

2 Nations

Contrasting the stories of Miranda Ogundare and Studio Hadi, 2 Nations comes from Áoxiáng Studio. Founded in the wake of the Broadcast, Áoxiáng Studio drew its staff from that segment of Chinese creatives previously employed in what were derisively called the "HI Farms". A success for the newly formed group, 2 Nations has been hailed as a foretaste of what post-Compact Earth Media could and should be.

Like Fellow Travelers, 2 Nations is a Feature Product set during the Second World War around the time of the foundation of United Nations itself. Unlike the Small Stage Fellow Travelers, this Big Set Feature has been described as an "ahistorical historic". Nominally 2 Nations is about a volunteer squadron of United States pilots named "The Flying Tigers" aiding a weak China against the invading Japanese Empire.

But what 2 Nations is really about is the People's Republic of China and the Democratic Federation, and doesn't hide it. The American pilots are heavily coded as modern Chinese, and the Chinese coded as modern DF, though each mixes this with actual historical aesthetics in a way meant to deliberately blur the lines, given 2 Nations an incredibly unique stylization. This look has buoyed an ongoing wave of interest in looking back to historical Earth-cultural aesthetics rather than interstellar Compact-focused ones.

CSI: Real Pacific City

CSI: Pacific City was a gritty show about the grim lives of Pacific city, where in order to catch the criminals the cops tortured, killed, lied, and worse to hold the line against a greater evil. Which was, of course, treated as necessary and good. Post revolution, some creators, along with some remaining cast members, reimagined the show with an iconoclastic and contrarian ACAB bent.

The previous heroes are now the villains, and many of the villains revealed to have indeed been innocent like they claimed or to have committed crimes far less than those they were punished for.

Normally Real Pacific City would have entered the local consciousness and maybe picked up a mod sized following, but two things have propelled it to galactic fame.

Firstly, locally "CSI:RPC" captured a key zeitgeist of Pacific City shortly after the North American Resurgence, and then in turn clips and then entire episodes made it out to the wider Compact, enraging or enrapturing fans of the original show, whose engagement in turn fueled further engagement throughout UNS and allied space.

Pacifica especially has developed an especially large following with Patriot faction leader Gergory Liao promoting the show as an example of the Federation's own drive for militant justice being universal. Naturally CSI: RPC has inspired the production of several local imitators in the Citizens' Federation.

As a show, the number of contributors and often amateur writing leads to wildly varying tones and quality. CSI:RPC is often satirically biting at the original show, or even mean spirited anger. It has episodes that hit like a knife and ones that just flail without a point.

Overall the most recent series has started to even out as the creators find their footing and have gotten a glut of volunteers, but even so it's an open question weather CSI:RPC will attain any real staying power or merely be relegated to a flash in the pan phenomenon.

Luminary

Taking advantage of Hermes Ishtar having lost their control of Terrestrial Media, and the UNS General Assembly throwing the Charter's intellectual properties into the public domain, Studio Hadi, one of the genuinely prestigious Earth-based Egyptime studios, opted to adapt this hit Empty Passages fanfic (In which Captain Loria finds herself captured by Rosepierre).

Interestingly, Luminary itself is something of a fanfic having received a major revision along with the blessings of the original writer. While the original fic kept the original Empty Passages premise that the revolution had gone too far even if Rosepierre herself was good, rewrites blessed by original Luminary writer Ms. Alija Han opts to instead have Loria confront the evils of the Compact itself.

From my own review, I can tell you that Luminary is 'the most fucking Egyptime space fight that ever Egyptime'. And 'someone on this team is horny for sleek triangle ships, and is giving several people new fetishes'.

Atlantis

CAPITAL PD: Counter Terror Unit

The latest iteration of the CAPITAL PD series of police procedurals overseen by regular producer Armand Maras, CPD:CT reunites CAPITAL franchise veterans with Atlantis' most talked about up and coming talent.

Following the fictional Counter Terrorism Unit of the Capital City Police Department, writers, actors, and staff of CPD:CTU have been given unprecedented access to the CCPD's very real Terrorism Response And Prevention Section under the direction of a Normal Regime which sees CPD:CTU as a key locus in habituating Atlanteans to the day to day reality of law enforcement under the PROTECT laws.

Headlined by veteran CAPITAL PD actor Vincent Montrose returning in his role as Captain Cal Malheur, newly reassigned to the CTU after an initially unspecified terrorist attack on the fictional Precinct 51 (The setting of the recently concluded CAPITAL PD: PRECINCT 51). He is joined by an all-star ensemble cast who find themselves weekly drawn into the machinations of extremist groups threatening the Peace, Order, and Good Government of Atlantis even as Captain Malheur investigates off the books to uncover the true culprits behind the destruction of Precinct 51.

The result is a glossy but cynical procedural who's plots are often too fanciful for its general aesthetic. Almost every episode arc features low level criminal acts turning out to be the machinations of some shadowy outside force. As of the current point, nearing the end of the second blockbuster season, all of the "Congressional People's Navy RAVENS", "United Earth Special Forces", "Revolutionary Student and Workers's United Front", and "Baseline Rights Alliance", have all taken turns as being the shadowy mastermind of their own respective arcs. As of the current arc, it appears that all four groups are secretly working together to stir the pot on Atlantis, backing the frightening "Shadow Council" of the "All-Atlantis Industrial Workers' Union" a corrupt Adamsist union with links to organized crime.

As a show CPD:CTU is a perfect example of Atlantis' new favorite production model: establishment propaganda in a mid budget TV format dressed up like a Big Set Feature Production. Take an existing franchise, give its producers a budget bigger than God, grant them exclusive access to subject matter experts, lend them real government resources to fill in the gaps and then sprinkle liberally with veteran actors and younger up and comer true believers willing to give their all.

CTU's ripped from the headlines veneer and Normal Regime support do little to detract from the slick and well produced series, because as a show CPD: CTU delivers well acted and well presented chills and thrills, moving at a pace so fast that one doesn't have time to really think about the politics on display.

Captured Raindrops

A trio of Small Stage Feature Production films about the refugee experience presented in reverse chronological order, Captured Raindrops follows the generational struggles of a Chinese family through the Xinhai Revolution, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and the Fourteen Days as they suffer upheaval at the hands of revolutionaries heedlessly causing destruction in the pursuit of an impossible dream.

While each generation is forced from China by the actions of utopian idealists causing untold horrors, they eventually return to their homeland helping to restore prosperity, only for the cycle to repeat again. Using period sources and current day interviews with refugees from Earth Captured Raindrops captures their mourning for their lost home, the feelings of disconnection, and lack of understanding among those they meet in atmospheric scenes that are allowed the time to properly breathe in Director J Nilfar's signature Atlantean Melancholy style.

While its political themes are obvious (Revolution is bad, nowhere on Earth is safe until the revolution collapses on itself) an undeniable authenticity and heartfelt production makes Captured Raindrops J Nilfar's, one of the best known of the Atlantean new wave's normal melancholy style. The result is a heartfelt drama which has seen large scale distribution even on Penglai and other revolutionary worlds.

While there are currently no rumblings of spin offs, rumour also holds that originally Captured Raindrops was a single movie about the most recent generation of refugees produced out of pocket by Nilfar and a circle of friends. It was only after by the Atlantean Ratings Board that Normal Regime media liaisons suggested that the movie be expanded to a full trilogy leading to a hasty production schedule for the later two period piece Feature Productions.

Great Wars (™) Series--Compact's Edge

The latest in the Great Wars ™ franchise of hard core competitive online strategy games, Compact's Edge has been in production for nearly a decade. Despite an extended production cycle that would usually herald disaster, Compact's Edge has come out to near universally positive to glowing reviews, with its eclectic mix of micro and macro scales being well-received.

Compact's Edge narrative (such as it is) involves taking the players through a series of campaigns reminiscent of the actual Charter Frontier Wars, or alternate scenarios branching off from various "what ifs". Compact's Edge also sees the return of the "referee" system returning from 2243's smash-hit spin off "Great Wars: Campaigns: -Warpath" in which the player is encouraged to balance their degree of conflicts with other Charters against the possibility of Naval and Parliamentary involvement if they create too much market disruption or become front page news.

With the success of Compact's Edge, official and consumer-involved expansion content is already announced to be on the way being proposed for the game involving alien invasions, major alternate histories, and more detailed gameplay.

However, not all is smooth sailing for Great Wars Studios as some Normal Regime media figureheads view its moderately anti-Charter, if generically pro-Compact atmosphere as potentially disloyal. Already a petition with several million signatures has been forwarded to Great Wars Studios asking that the studio rush out official expansion content set in the current moment in which a resurgent Solarian Compact crushes crazed Anarchist Revolts on the Frontier.

Thus far Great War Studios have refused to bend, citing that it goes against their creative vision as a history focused series. This has led the Atlantis Rating Agency to publically muse on increasing the rating for the entire Great Wars Series to Adults Only, or pulling its advertising from public spaces. At the moment, however, the controversy has only driven sales and given it the appearance of a far more politically radical game than it truly is.

Columbia

Ghost Recon: Risen Dead

The latest iteration of the long running and oft rebooted Ghost Recon series, Risen Ghosts is a 2070s Feature Product game period piece that follows the titular United States special forces over the period of the death of the United States through their long exile during and into the last days of the Democratic Federation. The plot of Risen Dead involves the Ghosts attempts to prevent a group of anarchist terrorist cyborgs known as the "Revenants" to build and use the "Atmospheric Depletion Bomb" (a fictional super weapon) against their political and personal enemies.

Rated as dire and barely functioning on release, Risen Dead had a deeply troubled production. Initially set in eastern Europe in the early 2020s and featuring Gangster Russia as the antagonists, production was hastily retooled into the current game after an infusion of USC Army funding.

The result, a much expanded, but extremely buggy game that required a 120 hour a week crunch by most of the staff. While officially painted as a passion project, off the books there have been reports of several hospitalizations from the abuse of stimulants and circadian regulators by programming staff.

The current v1.390c patch has put Risen Dead in a more or less functional state, though most players prefer the early stage setting sections, where the Ghosts are on a mission in Eastern Europe (reusing assets from the original 2020s maps but pushing the timeline forward) when they hear the news of the fall of the USA into anarchy. While the "Interregnum" chapters are well regarded for their asymmetrical cat and mouse gameplay against Democratic Federation secret police during the Federation's height, the concluding fall of the Federation segments are comparatively much weaker, and the publisher, FreedomSoft, has promised further patches to improve things.

Recent discourse has revolved around how deep Risen Dead's emotional story beats actually are when not interrupted by crashes or glitches. Telling a story of exile, revenge, and hatred, Risen Dead appears to draw a direct correlation between the Ghosts and Revenants, with the Revenants playing the role of dark mirror with all the worst moments of the Revenants being reflected in some way by the Ghosts before a sadly underwhelming climactic set piece in Earth Orbit that sees the Ghosts defeating their personal and professional demons embodied by the various members of the Revenant team.

The discourse around the story is sadly not driven by the merits of the game as a work of art, but over how much of said depth was patched in (a common joke is to post an image of FreedomSoft patch notes solely containing the words "Added Gameplay and Story") after the fact. Much of the story of the middle act was entirely rewritten between release and the present, moderating a much more bombastic tone and adding in character beats that would be retroactively called back in the closing act.

Those used to FreedomSoft's usual politics will be pleased to note that Risen Dead has a surprisingly friendly and nuanced portrayal of augments, including interactions between the squad and new cyborg member Able.

A crossover with popular monster movie franchise Howlers is planned for release in the next few months.

Bounding II

The sequel of a somewhat-successful Feel Good Big Stage comedy featuring a lagomorph augment babysitter teaching her charge basketball in order to stick it to a neighborhood bully, with the surprise twist that augment "Bell O'Hare" didn't know anything about basketball herself.

This movie takes the usual response to the success of the first Bounding by expanding the scale and stakes. Now known in the neighborhood as an expert basketball coach, O'Hare finds herself coaching an entire team of kids for the Big Tournament and being just as unprepared for the job as before, with predictably comedic results.

A Feel Good Era Feature Product film released post broadcast, Bounding II is absolutely out of sync with the current cultural moment, even disregarding rumored production issues. The film would be unremarkable if not for Humanist influencers on Columbia pointing to the comedic consequences of O'Hare's inexperience as the 'Natural result of putting an augment in a position of power'. The absurdity of the statement led to a re-evaluation of the film and its ironic adaptation by the Columbian anti-Humanist community in memes.

Having observed the buzz around the movie Mercury-Manat producers are already laying the groundwork for Bounding III.

Royal Lao Army

Published by super grognard history hobby publisher Bayonet Games, Royal Lao Army is a period piece tactical shooter centering around a unit of paratroopers fighting Communist insurgents in South East Asia during the Cold War of the 20th century.

Bayonet Games have published a large number of extremely well researched historical war games over the years, and Royal Lao Army was simply another in the series. However Royal Lao Army's release only six months after the broadcast, and script revisions which sharpened the game's anti-Communism saw it capture the Columbian zeitgeist at the time.

Bayonet doesn't quite know what to do with this success, but is apparently workshopping several follow up ideas with their devoted fanbase.

Olduvai

Dark Depths

The latest horror novel from perpetual best selling Olduvai horror writer Yonas Samuel, Dark Depths follows a group of police officers who learn that their friends, family, and even government have been infiltrated by sinister and eldritch things from beyond the stars. These beings, called the Worms, have made common cause with various augmented radicals and seek to mutate humanity into a new slave race.

Dark Depths has been condemned by members of the ruling Social Reform Party and various media critics for its overt Humanist themes, and most horror fans and even fans of Yonas Samuel's previous works think that her Humanist politics have leaked too hard into her work.

The Broken Circle

A prestige mini-series about the Broken Circle Conspiracy and its unraveling.

Produced with unprecedented access to government and OCPS personnel and records and featuring interviews with everyone from ground level soldiers and police following both sides up to Prime Minister Izem Meziane himself, The Broken Circle is either considered the most deeply intimate and well researched documentaries produced in recent times or blatant propaganda providing causus belli for the "real" coup, Meziane's Night of Popular Renewal.

Either way, it's hard to argue that Broken Circle isn't very well produced, and was made with the blessing and enthusiastic cooperation of the current Olduvai government.

Sol - A Musical Odyssey

The revival of the smash hit orchestral-style musical Feature Product, first produced on Olduvai in 2200, has by pure chance arrived at a truly fortuitous moment under the direction of Conductor Wind Ruto and the famed Zambezi Symphony Orchestra.

A Musical Odyssey's invocation of the musical history of Sol, and especially its focus on the whole musical history, from recreations of the oldest songs in East Asia, Greece, and Africa, to a dizzying and almost worrying array of popular music, metal, remixes and more, celebrates all the facets of Earth's musical history, and thus was viewed even in 2200 as an intensely Daughter-aligned work of musical prowess.

On August 21, 2255, the current run of A Musical Odyssey became a subject of great controversy. In its farewell performance on Olduvai, at which point it had been scheduled to go on the road across the Core Worlds (now, after hasty schedule revisions in the last months, sans Sol and Penglai), the musicians of the ZSO staged a protest at the end of the performance by playing a very familiar chiptune ringtone before launching into several old and several new revolutionary songs from Earth, including some recent chart-toppers from just a month before.

Seen as a protest against the Atlantis Ratings Agency, which had requested veto power over the performance, the gesture led to widespread controversy which saw the musically-interested public divided but generally intrigued by the controversy.

Pengalai

The Rats

A fairly low budget but extremely visceral Small Set horror film from Penglai, The Rats features a small student commune's battle against rats infected with the runoff from a broken corporate lab which was examining alien material.

Extremely gory and exploitative, with The Rats main heroine (played by pre-war video blogger and real life student revolutionary Mona Chrome) and her enby love interest spend almost a third of the film naked or topless, The Rats is emblematic of the so-called New Films on Pengalai, produced since the revolution often on almost no budget or script approval from a production company. Whether the lack of corporate oversight has really led to a good film or not is disputed by many. But regardless New Films like The Rats and its like have become a staple of easy entertainment on Penglai.

With the protagonists being the only ones willing to fight against the rats while various other groups won't listen, won't cooperate, or have become engaged in self destructive factionalism, the film is totally unsubtle in its unificationist politics. The Rats is also is marked by the same New Films horror genre convention of almost the entire cast going down fighting against the monster.

A sequel, "The Plant", is in production.

Mr. February II: From the Edge of Beyond sSpace

Mr. February was a generally well reviewed 'Feel Good' film released in 2252 about a somewhat hapless man managing to find love and a family over a ten year period. Its sequel was released… on May 19th. Far too late for any changes in a post broadcast world.

It was not the only film to completely miss the cultural zeitgeist of a post-broadcast world. Many films did, with already released films seeing no impact post broadcast, and new releases seeing next to no viewings, or even hasty retools or canceled production.

But it was Mr. February II that most captured the discontinuity between the news and the media being released in the public imagination, enough to grant it a second life as a discussion piece.

Part of the infamy was timing, as Mr. February II was the largest film to be released into Penglai's revolution, and part of it was that Mr. February II was, honestly, a rather clever film. With the plot revolving around the family moving to the colonies, the film took a comedic look at the 'Frontier Thriller' genre, lampooning a genre that had far more misses than hits.

As some critics had pointed out, in many ways Mr. February II's writing team 'understood' the message of Empty Passages far more than many of the trend-chasers who aped its style without substance. Underneath its comedy and feel good feelings was a comedic critique of the colonial abuses, often showing the colonies as incompetently run and as a place to send meritocrat failchidren so they won't embarrass the big families of the Core worlds.

Watching it now… there is a sense of haunting wrongness to Mr February II. Jovial, joking critiques that were biting in one era suddenly reduced to ineffective, near toothless gnawing only weeks later. Mr. February II's optimistic sense that everything would turn out alright feels utterly alien in the wake of recent chaos. The film's sense that the First Colonies were sturdy and certain and that some things only happened 'in the frontier' are now strange to worlds that have all experienced unimaginable upheaval, for good or for ill.

The movie's most discussed aspect these days is viewers' experiences watching something that is at once so familiar and so alien.

The War of Queens

Adaptations of Romance of the Three Kingdoms have always been popular, but The War of Queens is a science fantasy retelling set in an ancient human civilization with a caste entirely devoid of all types of men is perhaps the oddest to have become popular in recent years.

Much of the project's success perhaps owes to its directors, as it grew out of a project between rising star of the Penglai Landing Island action circuit Naomi Song, and darling of the Atlantean New Wave Liliana Azure. Azure's flight to Penglai shortly after the broadcast apparently left her feeling depressed and useless and the love story between her and the much younger Song has drawn attention and gossip to the project.

The initial pitch was put out more than a year before the broadcast and production was well begun when Song met Azure preparing to jump off the roof of a Landing Island party a few weeks after the Broadcast. She talked the other director down, and pulled her into the project, on the promise of teaching her a new form of cinematic language, that of action cinema.

The round of re-shoots and computer editing, and the expansion of the project brought by the Shintokyo Art School Death Commandos liberation of the massive Hermes Ishtar prop warehouse near the Charter's old HQ contributed to a massive escalation in scale for the project.

The result has been a uniquely artistic piece of action cinema which has almost perfectly captured the current Zeitgeist of chaos, hope and depression across the Compact, and has become one of the most popular pieces of media on all sides across Penglai and beyond.

Stand out performances include Kasumi Wu as Cao Cao, in a breakout performance apparently influenced by recently discovered early 21st century retellings of the story, and Daisy Kim as Zhuangzi, one of the leaders of the yellow turban rebellion, whose show stealing performance owes a lot to Empty Passage's Robespierre (and her real life inspirations).

Perhaps the single most viewed piece of media in current times (second only to the Broadcast itself) The War of Queens has made a massive cultural impact across the galaxy. Even bleeding into contemporary meme culture The War of Queens is set to be one of the defining pieces of media produced in the current era. The immense success consequently solidifies the fact that Penglai is Humanity's beating cultural heart at a time when the very idea was in doubt, no doubt to the chagrin of frontier separatists and Compact loyalists alike.

Epsilon

Roulette

A light, feel-good comedy set on Lakishima. Only notable for definite favouritism from Epsilon's first-among-equals Mary Zhang, Roulette appears to be a contemporary take on the Feel Good Feature Product film.

Roulette is the work of first time Director Bradly Chess-Station, who had previously been a mechanic before the rise of the Interstellar Prosperity Association, who said that he got the idea for Roulette from his own experiences trying to manage a family trip to Lakishima in 2239.

Roulette is often accused of being a propaganda piece as the film emphases Lakishima as a fun and family friendly place that is in line with the greater IPA values. However, by all evidence Chess-Station seems to merely be a Director who believes into the IPA's worldview and Roulette is not a deliberate work of propaganda.

It is said, although this might merely be rumors, that not only did Mrs. Zhang watch Roulette twice (a confirmed fact) but that she laughed both times. Certainly, it is the case that if her enjoyment is entirely performative it is a rather overstated performance as she personally attended the second viewing with a who's who of Epsilon movers and shakers and paid the tickets of all in attendance out of her own luxury stipend.

The Uvarian Newsroom

A comedy show about the cast of a newsroom in the fictional Uvarian system. The Uvarian system has recently had a revolution, only no one can decide what that revolution was for. Day to day coup and contrecoup result in governing systems that are Anarchist, Corporatist, Communist, Humanist, and even Loyalist. Meanwhile the cast of the newsroom tries to survive by reporting in a way to please the current party in charge, often having to change direction midway through broadcast.

Cynically, one could argue that it is Epsilon propaganda, portraying most other systems as wild and dangerous hellscapes. Unfortunately for those who point this out, it's also bitingly funny, and its willingness to take shots at most everyone means there are at least a few clips aimed at people you hate that you will circulate.

Korolev-Chandrasekhar

(Quick side note: Unlike the rest of the core, KC has never had much of a movie industry due to its fairly small population and large preponderance of its economy dealing with the navy; however, during the revolution on Sol, it gained a windfall in the form of several famed directors from Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood who saw the winds on Earth as unfavourable to them. This included Mark Li and famous action director Kiran Langtree. The Navy of the Solarian Compact has since produced multiple high budget propaganda movies that combine military realism with the talents of several of Earth's finest directors.)

HELLHOUNDS

Following a team of SNNISDOGS (Solarian Navy Naval Infantry Special Detached Operation Group) commandos, HELLHOUNDS is a Big Set Feature Product film movie-cycle of the kind that Mark Li previously did for the First Frontier War and the Great Black Summer of 2187. The tale is somewhat more fanciful than Mark Li's last few years of more gritty and realistic fare and harkens back to his work of the 2230s, though it shares the same realistic style of his more modern work such as "The Cooper Extraction" and "DZ.".

HELLHOUNDS follows a SNNISDOGS team trapped on a rogue Battlecruiser whose crew of defectors seek to bring a salvaged alien probe full of strange technological secrets to the UNS.

HELLHOUNDS stars frequent Mark Li collaborator Olivia Felix who received several new augmentations to get the role, and took a large amount of advice from KC's real SNNISDOGS teams. This has led to much interest from military nerds who believe it might expose SNNISDOGS tactics and procedures, though most experts think that it does not expose more information than is already publicly available.

In general, HELLHOUNDS has Mark Li's deft touch, though some consider the combination of ripped from the headlines current events and 2230's era quasi-horror science fiction slightly strange.

HELLHOUNDS is also the cause of a minor but growing breach between the Solarian Navy and the government of Atlantis, after the Atlantis Ratings Agency banned HELLHOUNDS from official release there due to its mention of the Atlantis civil war as a site of a previous mission and source of angst for the team. Private screenings of the film have become a way for the more peaceful and pro-capitalist opposition to Charles Normal's regime to show their displeasure with the government's growing censorship.

2187

While Mark Li's KC career has turned back towards his earlier work, Langtree has turned to new horizons. Her latest film, 2187--while the bones had been in pre-production, casting, or storyboarding for years--gained fresh life in the last year. 2187 is a historical epic about the Great Black Summer of 2187 mostly from a Sol Nav perspective. Based on numerous books, interviews and access to Sol Nav's archives on the subject and even broaches the topic of Admiral Jurriaan Ayodele who notoriously killed himself during the height of the crisis.

High budget and with several excellent actors from across the Loyalist Compact, 2187 has been described as a "Drama for Real Adults" by the Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch, and "the highest budget competency porn in existence" by famous Penglai Film Critic Jetro Hillfold. While an excellent movie with both good action and scripting, it rather suffers from its almost total omission of the revolutionary perspective on the events of the greatest pre-broadcast Black Summer.

Some controversy has been attached to the film due to its condemnation of elements of Compact politics (especially the old Roderic Administration) for their failure to learn the lessons of 2187. The shadow of the broadcast can be seen hanging heavy over many of the events of the film, and much of the latter fighting carries a feeling of melancholy exhaustion which is new to Langtree's filmography.

Release of the film has however recrystalised interest in 2187 and several historical epics on it are planned across the Compact and in Sol itself.

Chronicle

Chronicles

A 'independent' news service . Chronicles was considered one of the more respectable news organizations for its independence from most of the core world mainstream media enterprises, leading it to break news on several scandals in the core worlds and hold a decent investigative journalism budget.

In reality Chronicles was an autonomous HI subsidiary overseen by HI Regional Senior President Derek Hussain who directed its focus. However, as Hussain's interests were in keeping its content on brand and not investments in core worlds, Chronicles came to have far more willingness to touch topics other news media wouldn't.

In the wake of the broadcast it became the newly renamed Chronicle system's de-facto state news outlet. Depending on who one asks, Chronicles is either now a government mouthpiece or more objective and stronger than ever before.

In either event much of the reporting on the Near and Far Trailing that arrives in the Core and Spinward Frontiers comes from Chronicles reporting.

Star Rising: Star Admiral!

Star Rising! Is a long running franchise from Isekai about… Isekais. Like many long running franchises it has different series, each lasting a couple seasons and featuring new characters and settings, with each new setting being a destination that you too could visit on Isekai!

A middle tier exercise in entertainment marketing, Star Rising was a long running franchise that had plenty of unnoticeably alright series, a few bad ones, and even some that were considered good and resulted in breathless reporting like my own article "Yes I know it's Star Rising but it's Really Good Right Now." about the twenty second season.

What the franchise did not have was a season so infamously, staggeringly, reprehensible as the ongoing thirty third season "Star Admiral!"

To draw from my colleague, Navigator Towards-Heavenly-Stars-Go-I's review: "I had no idea it was fucking Hermes-Ishtar of all people were actually preventing Isekai media from getting more tasteless."

Well put, Navi.

The dual protagonists of Star Admiral! are the late Seventh Star Minister Elaine Vandermeer and her subordinate Vice Admiral Jefferson-Smith. Yes, the ones who tried to glass Earth. After their respective suicides they find themselves transmigrated to a fantastical new world instead of hell due to a clerical error which both are too shocked to dispute.

Hailed as the saviors of "Theia" the pair are identified as prophesied saviors against a tide of demonic evil. Confused and shocked the pair stumble from misadventure to misadventure and eventually discover that the world of Theia is slated to be purged by angels from the heavens due to its corruption and only they can stop this unjust act

By using real people, Star Admiral! has something for everyone to hate. For those loyal to the Compact, depicting the pair of Admirals as largely ineffectual, cowardly, and babbling, is annoying, and the overall subtext is even less welcome. For those Sol-aligned, having the one time near executioners as protagonists you are still rooting for and their slow progression to unironic semi-heroes, is enraging.

Both pro and anti augments find having Elaine Vandermeer reincarnated as a cute elf-girl is offensive. Admiral Jefferson-Smith's family has publicly called his portrayal offensive even though the man maintains his chastity and loyalty to his wife despite a cavalcade of available and nubile young men and women all but throwing themselves at him. No matter what, there is something to be disgusted at for utter tastelessness for someone.

A shame, perhaps, that Star Admiral! Is so controversial, as its story arcs are rather compelling, with the show being hilariously cruel and mean spirited towards the fantasies they once embraced. ("Even I know slavery is wrong and I once tried to incinerate a half billion kids for copyright infringement", "I need you to make me a sign that says that I'm off the market", "Don't tell the knife ears but this 'being an Elf' thing is actually pretty fun") Star Admiral! also writing and plotting that can be quite funny and highly meme-able in its own right. (Everyone alive must have seen the clip where Jefferson-Smith is talking to Archangel Jeramehel and proclaims "Following orders to destroy an entire world based on nothing but panic and the lack of identity outside a rank pin doesn't actually go down too smooth. Just ask the brain-splattered mirror in my old stateroom.")

Which means that clips of it are everywhere and people can't help but follow it. While most hate-watchers consume Star Admiral through other reviewers, they still follow it.

Increasingly the main debate swirling around Star Admiral! is if it's shocking tastelessness is an intentional affect making the point that the series has always been tasteless, and if so, does it make the tastelessness any more bearable?

Outtakes

It appears that in the aftermath of whatever revolt occurred in the Isekai (now Chronicle) system the local populace set out to make their own version of the AIC's "Putting Together the Pieces" or Pacifica's "Black Tribunals". Media campaigns that so thoroughly interrogated the old regime that they became cathartic for the local populace and informative for the rest of the galaxy.

The problem, according to the series' commentary is that when the Chronicle Truth Commission were releasing the early documents for internal viewership it turned out that the incidents that everyone shared, noted, and talked about weren't the really horrible ones, they were the funny ones. The absolutely insane requests. The shitshows of management. The things that might be a nightmare, but only long enough that it'd take to clock off and bitch about it over a drink in a carefully private location.

Eventually those producing the documentary opted to change tact and lean into the mood, changing the show into two series: a grounded documentary series called "Observations on the Behavior of Guests to the former Isekai System" and an anthology series called "Outtakes" in which each episode was a dramatized version of the most infamous stories shot in double: with an "in universe" and "out of universe" version of the unfolding events.

The documentary series itself is supplemented with real interviews with involved staff and supporting documentation drawn from HI's internal records system, and has been hailed as a "genius example of comedic journalism".

The anthology accompanying series "Outtakes" show is mostly focuses on the stupid, funny, and memorable incidents and the various offputting requests and insane guests that have been hosted over the decades.

However Outtakes is infamous for episodes slowly transitioning from dark humour to full on horror, often with only a pre-credits warning card, showing both sexual and physical abuses by guests that staff had to put up with. These episodes only hit all the harder for the contrast with the otherwise silly tone of the anthology.

Outtakes skewering of the Compact's upper-crust has given it a wide range of appeal, not least because even among the middle-upper crust who could have visited, they can always see it's skewing as aimed at the wrong sort of upper-crust.

Much like Star Admiral and War of Queens, Outtakes infamy and popularity have spawned a variety of memes widely used across the galaxy like, "Just try and act more dead next time.", "NEXT TIME I'LL THROW THE CHEST OKAY!?", Chocolate Tea Guy, "So when you get down to it, the moral of this story is that if I had sexier feet, the Compact would have never fallen.", and "So, he doesn't want to fuck the horse?"

Symphony

Counter-Melody Records

A music label with a reputation for signing 'indie' (IE no massive corp pre-selection) artists. Its CEO, Anna Khan, values the 'brand' of independence enough to genuinely give the artists far more leeway than most Compact media, and it has constantly courted controversy for this. Currently hosting both Anne Silver and Tryon-X releasing actively dueling songs condemning the nuking of Earth and the revolution respectively.

STRIFE // OLYMPUS STARS

While owned by Ares, at least 51% of the multimedia STARS franchise series was produced by Ares or HI subsidiaries on Symphony allowing it to claim to be "Syphony produced" and therefore take advantage of the prestigious branding as well as local tax incentives. Due to the size of the franchise and its multimedia productions, it is one of the single largest individual media employers on Symphony, especially as other low profile, "low skill", work moved from Symphony to Radiant. As such it's been considered a key component of Symphony's media landscape by previous and current governments, even if many of Symphony's highest profile critics and influencers despise the franchise for 'devaluing what Symphony means'

Despite recent revelations, Ares continues to be bullish on the product, pointing to increased user engagement and even many new users coming to explore the setting and its associated products. While there has been a decrease in purchase-per-user most of this can be attributed to broadcast hacking, and it is projected that once protections are fully in place, growth is projected to triple its previous high. As such Ares has been happy to continue to fund production on Symphony, with many new products coming out in its latest WeFall2Gether event.

Rumors that current board head Emily Wiessman despises it are false, as she herself has come forward to praise it, the jobs it creates and the ties it allows with Ares.

Ignore any involuntary eye twitches that appear unprompted during these statements.

The Breeze is Still Free

The Breeze is Still Free is a Symphonic Harmonic--a form of live performance that is part music, part story, a little heavier on the music than a typical musical--which is a well-respected art-form within the Compact and on Symphony especially. The Breeze is Still Free is a well-like piece from two years ago that could be thought of a Symphonic Harmonic take on the then dominant 'Feel Good' genre of Feature Product. Heavier, with a bit more waxing nostalgic than a proper Feel Good product, but not particularly radical or anti-radical for the time.

It would be otherwise unremarkable if not for the recent announcement that recorded performances would be made available as part of the upcoming Symphony offerings. This has lit a firestorm under several of Symphony's most respected Harmonic writers and directors, as traditionally Symphonic Harmonics have not allowed recordings, even XP recordings and most were traditionally live only performances, as part of the special charm of the medium.

The Breeze Is Still Free is set to perform exclusively in select areas on Symphony at first, then be allowed to be performed at other theaters off-world, and finally will be recorded into XP adaptations of the viewing experience.

This "special run" is considered a test run for future mass distribution of a unique local art form and is deeply controversial in local artistic circles. The controversy has even expanded into the vocabularies of Symphony patriots who decry this as heavy handed anti-free speech censorship caused by the overbearing near-totalitarian crypto-anarchism of Chairwoman Emily Wiessman's emerging SFREA government.

Nonetheless, despite harsh outcry and even pushback by the remaining members of Hermes-Ishtar's executive board in exile, SFREA Chairwoman Emily Wiessman has pushed forward with the The Breeze is Still Free test run.

Other

The Claus Conspiracy -Trescore

A kid friendly parody of a political thriller played straight and starring an everyboy named Kevin (Played by first time main actor Kevin Pham). Kevin discovers that Santa isn't real and tries to expose the vast "Claus Conspiracy'' but is hunted at every turn (by school administration, for causing a ruckus) and ends in a climax where he is brought before the Principal and his mother who ask him to keep the story of Santa Claus alive because kids need the hope that the Claus myth provides and that it would cause panic if it got out that Stanta Claus was fake because "children, like all people, need a beautiful lie to believe in, Kevin".

After a grandstanding speech on truth, Kevin is eventually cowed, letting Christmas happen. On Christmas he wakes up to see extra presents under his tree for "being such a good boy" and "for believing". He attempts to ease his guilt by sharing them with Julia, a reindeer augment friend of his, but she rejects them as they are 'his presents' for being good. He looks at her pile, and is presumably reminded of all the times she's been called out in class despite being one of the nicest people he knows, and the film ends on a long reverse shot of Kevin's anguished face as the pantomime of a cheerful holiday unfolds behind him.

Despite the ridiculousness of the premise, the movie plays the concept with a straight-face. Never once does Director Barry Wash acknowledge that the Claus Conspiracy is anything other than a serious premise we should take 100% seriously. Which, in turn, only heightens the humor.

Despite its general popularity, the film has mixed reception on Trescore itself. Given that it has become a galaxy wide hit, and not Atlantic, the elaborately produced and extravagantly expensive Big Set Feature Product mini-series Revolutionary Liberalism wank alternate history period piece. Atlantic centers on the American, French, Haitian, and Bolivaran revolutions allying to topple the European Empires and founding the "Atlantic Federation" (Featuring a strangely IPA shaped East India Company as a major villain!). Despite being heavily pushed by the Trescore government as a must see film, Atlantic remains only a hit in Trescore itself and is little known elsewhere)

Drake - Drake

A propaganda reel for the Drake Humanists. The film is a propagandic retelling of the history of Drake, the scourge of the augments upon it, and the triumph of the Human spirit enduring and then correcting the stain on the planet's surface before taking to the stars and defeating all comers.

Widely mocked across the galaxy, Loyalist media commentators everywhere like to compare it to other revolutionary films and outlets such as the Black Trials or RBC works, with a conspiracy having cropped up claiming the AIC is behind the Drake Humanists (used as a cat's paw to distract Compact and Ares forces), and pointing to the surprisingly competent filmmaking and actions scenes in the movie as indicative of Radiant backing.

Thalton · Jun 28, 2024

clockworkchaos said:
pointing to the surprisingly competent filmmaking and actions scenes in the movie as indicative of Radiant backing.

So actually good movies makes Compact stooges think that Radiant is behind it?

Take that Symphony. You'll never supplant our spot.

StarSingerBlue · Jun 28, 2024

clockworkchaos said:
While each generation is forced from China by the actions of utopian idealists causing untold horrors, they eventually return to their homeland helping to restore prosperity, only for the cycle to repeat again.

"And once again, the bourgeoisie loses their slaves and eggs and cries about it"

clockworkchaos said:
Those used to FreedomSoft's usual politics will be pleased to note that Risen Dead has a surprisingly friendly and nuanced portrayal of augments, including interactions between the squad and new cyborg member Able.

Cursed.

clockworkchaos said:
Private screenings of the film have become a way for the more peaceful and pro-capitalist opposition to Charles Normal's regime to show their displeasure with the government's growing censorship.

You guys are utterly spineless.

clockworkchaos said:
Currently hosting both Anne Silver and Tryon-X releasing actively dueling songs condemning the nuking of earth and the revolution respectively.

BRUH

Aliya · Jun 28, 2024