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.

DISCORD LINK:

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armentho · Mar 18, 2021

AKuz said:
You can sell the planet as a colony, or lease It out.

It also doesn't need to be actually profitable to do so, you just need investors in the core to keep dumping money in in the hope that someday they become turbo hyper mega rich because [hype]. It certainly monkeybrain feels like something that should be worth mega dollars.

The Uber/Tesla/Start Up model but for colonization.

Someday the terroforming boom will collapse! But that's not this day!

admitedly there are billions of planets

so between orbitals,planets when you can create sealed off colonies and terraformable planets,you will likely go extinct or turn into an entire different species than run out of space to build real state

space colonization real state bubble is actually indifinetly sustainable in terms of space avaible to build alone

now comms logistics make things harder

Krall · Mar 18, 2021

NAME: Fool's-Errand

BIO: A narrow AI made by Ares high-tech subsidiary Mneme Skunkworks as part of the failsafe in their ASI experiments, their contract defaulted back to Ares when the ASi experiments failed to bear fruit and Mneme went bust. Legally constrained by their indefinite contract and NDA, Fool's-Errand was bounced around various white collar jobs within Ares for the better part of a decade before participating in the Liberation of Shei. Part of Rousseau's clique, Fool's-Errand had been the PA of the much loathed system administrator (and long time friendly rival to Rousseau in their gaming sessions), and used their position to prevent the system administration from co-ordinating a coherent response.

Subsequently they gained ARC citizenship and passed through MilComm's officer training program in record time. The issues of having an AGI officer were solved mostly by Fool's-Errand running on a bespoke server-body with limited self-mobility and physical manipulation abilities, as well as connectors allowing them to directly interface with ship systems. Though crew were initially unsure how to react to serving alongside a gunmetal grey fridge on wheels, the bitter wit Errand had developed as Ares' half-forgotten plaything, their excellent performance as a communications officer during the Second Battle of Shei, and the fact that they are technically 9 years old has earned them a bit of a memetic reputation among Navy personnel.

CN SERVICE HISTORY: Defection and comms disruption during the Liberation of Shei, Communications Officer aboard CNS Valiant during the Second Battle of Shei.
COMMAND TRAITS: Technically minded, comms and EWAR focus, deep understanding of computer systems, limited experience in managing and relating to humans.

(Feel free to alter how they function as an officer if being a giant chunky R2D2 doesn't make sense.)

CyberFemme · Mar 20, 2021

Me, coming back to the thread on Tuesday after being away for, like, a day:

Ok, sorry for the late reply, had no spoons all week for a long enough post.

Godwinson said:
I hope that we don't go with too much of this omake as being canonical, especially the mechanics. I'm not a fan of the approach it takes. Nor, frankly, of Crazy Tom trying to back-door override a previous vote regarding naming themes, though that's a separate matter.

Firstly, how about not implying that I'm seeking to undermine the will of the rest of the thread? Because I joined after whatever discussion was had on naming, and the most I remember about Radiant military aesthetics from speed reading the updates was that you guys picked customizable uniforms.

Edit: I'd like to clarify this point. I was informed in the Discord that there had been a vote on calling our space force a navy, but hadn't realized it extended to the class naming convention when I was writing the omake. I thought it was more of an implicit trope of the navy name, rather than something explicitly voted on.
I'm sorry, I made a mistake with the naming reclassification, but it wasn't malicious.

tankdrop24 said:
Less so if it's 'This hyper optimized New Way of Doing Things is always better despite it being over complicated and has more moving parts than what came before.'

Counter points:

First, specialized systems are better at their specialization than general ones. In out case, the specialization is military action, while the Charters are mucking about with police actions in support of capital.

Second, systems tend to greater complexity over time. Having more moving parts is immaterial if it means the system is more effective at doing it's thing.

10ebbor10 said:
I can't square your mechanical ideas with your motivations.

Your motivation is the lack of connection with individual ships and the tendency for doomstacking, but your system abstracts individual ships away, and heavily incentivizes doomstacks.

I would argue that it's not doom stacking if the stack is the individual ship. Then it's just upgrading the 'ship'. The core essence of the ship – the crew – remains much more constrained in scope and easily engaged with narratively, compared to having a thousand ships, each with their own crew.

10ebbor10 said:
Anyway, some more thoughts :

Edit :

Dissenting opinion :

1) Space Combat is not deterministic :
While it enticing to conclude that space combat is deterministic based upon simple assumptions, practical experience have shown us that it is anything but. Spacecraft are fragile vessels, and while it might seem like the odds of a weapon impact can be statistically averaged (due to the high number of projectiles fired) most forces operate in coordinated firing patterns, and as such each firing event is not statistically independent. If a ship gets hit by one projectile, it is very likely that it will be hit by the remainder of the barrage. If the first projectile misses, it is likely that the rest of the projectiles will miss as well. This results in a very divergent tactical landscape, where the balance of power can shift rapidly depending on whether a ship gets eliminated or not.
While technically deterministic (like every other event in the universe), lightspeed, sensor and computer limitations mean that prediction is a futile task.

2) Space Combat is not attritional :
As shown in the battle over Shei, space combat is swift and deadly. A single exchange resulted in a number of vehicles destroyed or rendered combat incapable and the remainder surrendering. As such, the importance of individual firing runs is tremendous. A single successful attack can win the battle. Coupled with that, the importance of maneuver warfare can not be understated. Our capture of Shei isolated the Ascension- Osliam branch, forcing their forces to attack us. Similarly, an attack upon Gaid or Shei would force us into action, each time triggering a decisive fleet battle that will end the war. For the compact as whole, several such targets are known to exist, though military intelligence is as of yet insufficient to identify them. Even so, we know that a small force taking out key logistic elements can easily defeat a much larger force by depriving them of reaction mass and resupply. As such information and correct strategy can easily overcome raw attritional action.

3) Specialized spacecraft are a weakness.
Though a specialized spacecraft outperforms a generic spacecraft on an individual level, this analysis fails consider the loss of information that is inherent in the use of specialized platforms. Since each platform excells at a given task, the enemy can determine the task of each fleet element (and thereby, the chosen strategy) based upon the force composition and maneuvering of individual fleet elements. This loss of information inflicts a severe tactical and strategic penalty compared to a generic fleet which might be weaker on paper, but is tactically far more unpredictable.

These are good points, and I need to read up on both the Salvo Combat Model and Lanchester's Laws before replying to this.

Derpmind said:
@Crazy Tom Your writeup is an impressive amount of thought and effort, but-

-unfortunately what it boils down to is replacing mass numbers of individual ships with a single constellation. Say you have a ship with 5 railguns and 3 shield generators. That ship has 5 attack and 3 defense. In a constellation, the formation has 5 rail-ships and 3 shield-ships, so the constellation has 5 attack and 3 defense. What you've come up with is a way to reduce combat between hundreds of individual ships from complex formation warfare into an individual 1v1 scenario. You've given reasons why individual ships don't matter in order to make the entire fleet an individual ship. (And what happens when 3 or more constellations get into a fight?)

For a 4x game like Stellaris where you build fleets with dozens or even hundreds of ships, this makes sense. Each ship is a product of an economic interstellar empire and its individual worth and characteristics aren't nearly as important as simply how many ships you have in total. For a 4x game, your system could well be a great improvement. But this quest is not a 4x game. Each ship doesn't cost 100 minerals out of a resource income of 1 million minerals. Each ship we build costs us actions (dice) from our very limited pool of dice each turn. Individual ships and their quirks already matter here; we have far fewer of them. We're not going to spend a large amount of time creating a ship design only to spam that design over and over again. We have built a grand total of two ships so far. This is an (orange) solution to a problem that doesn't apply to our (apple) story. Moreover,

I don't want to read about a fleet battle between two godlike fleet commanders where nothing matters except the decisions of those two individuals. I find that completely contrary to the themes of this quest. The Charter corporations would love this setup. Just like corporations love exalting their CEOs as superhuman Great Men, they'd like nothing more than to give massive AI-controlled fleets that obey a single CEO's every whim. All the repair and maintenance personnel who keep the ships in the fleet running are just cogs in the machine.

I haven't developed the model far enough to think about 2 v 1 combat yet. My instinct is that there will be some sort of splitting of attributes on the part of the singular constellation, but it remains to be determined. It might just reduce to the two constellations being lumped together if there's no significant benefit from modeling their separation.

Our ships are not as numerous as those of a 4X game… but neither are those of a 4x game in the early game. And given the ubiquity of nanofabrication and the already existing fractalization of combat units (ie: fighters being drone control units – this was talked about in the Discord), the GMs actually said that a lot of this isn't really that different from what's already happening.

And also, this is hardly about "fleet battle between two godlike fleet commanders where nothing matters". I don't even know where you get that? If anything it would be more about collaborative decision making between an entire staff of officers constantly trying to optimize their strategies cooperatively.

tankdrop24 said:
Yeah, I'm going to be fairly leery if this turns into something like that incident where a guy used an early computer he made to design a fleet for a space war tabletop game tournament that was basically boring mass of drones that proved completely invincible to the people who actually did their designs manually.

That actually sounds ideal in the context of this quest tho? Like, if I was Awhina and someone presented me with a warfleet plan that was a 'boring mass of drones that proved completely invincible" I would JUMP on that.

10ebbor10 said:
There are a few examples, but overall we haven't really had that much opportunity for it.

That said, a number of the proposed designs create massive weaknesses that render them almost entirely useless.

For example, the Ramstar, by relying upon projectiles fired from other ships for propulsion, is limited to an incredibly small amount of vectors on which it can accelerate. It also can't change it's course to account for incoming projectiles. because then it misses it's propulsion packets. As such, it will be trivial to shoot down with a simple kinetic projectile. Either the ship stays on course and gets hit and obliterated, or it deviates, misses it's burn and floats off into space.

As a second problem, consider the Basestar. It's a big obvious target, and whereas a normal fleet can survive the loss of it's command vessel with some loss in efficiency, the destruction of the basestar would render the entire Constellation bereft of essential services. Not command, but also all repairs, maintenance, refuelling, rearming, and so on. After all, all these services were stripped from the original vessels to allow hyperspecialization.

For the third problem, each role is supposed to have it's own specific place in the formation. The problem here is that that is not quite how space works. You don't have 2 fleets sitting next to each other patiently plonking away at each other at their preferred ranges. Orbital mechanics mean that ships can rapidly close or change ranges. The problem then is where the hyperspecialized fleet works perfectly in it's ideal engagement where each element gets to sit patiently at it's preferred range for the entire battle, in a more typical battle each element would need to deal with a rapidly varying set of ranges, which it can not do because all it's components are optimized for maximal performance at a given range.

A more generic fleet can adapt to the varying set of circumstances it will inevitably find itself in.

The ramstar is a every big missile booster, it accelerates HARD then basically coasts until the enemy starts to wear out it's glacis and releases all it's attendant missiles/drones. So maneuverability doesn't really matter in the context of its attack run.

Defensively, the propulsion charges only have to detonate under it's magnetic pusher plate, they can come in from the sides just fine.

The basestar is a keystone in theory, but in practice it's also the most well defended craft type (being behind the overlapping defensive and sensor field of most of the constellation). And nothing says you only need a single basestar. Indeed, you can distribute manufacturing, maintenance, and command capabilities across a number of basestars.

Orbital mechanics is explicitly called out as a limitation on this analysis, which is focused on deep space combat. Also, maintaining preferred range is not something new or radically difficult? If the enemy is burning toward you, you burn away, and vice versa.

If a fleet warps that's a problem, but a fleet at warp is also so much more vulnerable, that the GM have said that ships will specifically drop out of war before combat because it's too dangerous otherwise. So if you're warping, you're not fighting, and can recall all the non-warp capable units to their war capable transports.

Finally, in-setting nanofabrication means that there's really no such things as a generalist fleet – you could literally rebuild your fleet on the go to new specifications of your tech was good enough. Ok, maybe not rebuilt – but definitely optimize withing constraints.

tankdrop24 said:
It just strikes as being more like that quest thing where we decide that everyone before us was morons and we dominate them all with our army of spherical cows that everyone else was too stupid to build.

I thought I explained pretty well why nobody would have built this before? Also, in broad strokes, this apparently already happens to a degree in universe and does not represent as dramatic a shift in doctrine as I expected when I first wrote this.

tankdrop24 said:
Maybe, but aesthetically I just don't think these swarms are going to be anywhere near as interesting. Like I don't quite think we could have that moment of tension almost losing the Shieldmaiden if everything involved was just a swarm of smaller ships.

I'm also not sure why we don't just upscale the Basestar a bit and call it new type of Carrier, or something?

That's just aesthetic TBH. You totally could call it a carrier.

[Farquaad]Some dramatic tension maybe be lost. But that is a sacrifice I am willing to make. [/Farquaad]

Ultimately, the aesthetic and narrative preference of the people involved are just that. I can't fault you for disliking it on those terms.

The Laurent said:
My own thought/potential headcanon is that unlike the Solarian Navy, the Charters are mostly not actually designed for fleet actions as the main use of their firepower, as opposed to 'enforcement actions' against generally inferior enemies. So it might well be that a somewhat more specialized (but not hyperspecialized) fleet of highly coordinated ships is more like what the Solar/Compact Navy does, whereas the Charters tried that sort of thing and either bungled it, thought it cost too much, both... or did the analysis and noted that as an anti-piracy and "Minor Black Summer Crushing Machine" the more coordinated fleet was kinda honestly a failure compared to small numbers of generalist units that can be sent anywhere to mop up a 'rebel' frigate or two.

But since we're not the people in charge of the galaxy, and we will be fighting many back to back existential fleet actions, we could in fact use a greater focus on coordination... which admittedly won't help us if the Compact Navy has basically come to the same conclusions and eventually faces us down.

In such a case, the only advantage we'd have is, potentially, Warp Comms.

THIS

It would be a transitory advantage, but one that should at least help with the midgame.

clockworkchaos said:
I don't think that's what it's saying, at least my interpretation. Each fleet contains multiple constellations, so you have multiple sets of people, not a single godlike CEO. Also, why are you accusing it of the repair and maintenance personal of just being "cogs in the machine". They are still in the battle and would be stationed on the basestars, the same place as the commander themselves.

Edit: Also the undercurrent of 'if you support this you are a bad, CEO supporting person' is extremely shitty.

Thank you, the support personnel are the si qua non of modern military conflict, and they should get more attention.

Pyro Hawk said:
I mean, having it such that we have Drone Carriers as a major component of our future fleet sounds like a good thing. Same with designing ships where the majority of the effort is automated, and the human crews are mostly about damage control, repairs and back ups. But unless we can guarantee that we're winning the ECM and Cyberwarfare parts of the war, they shouldn't be the majority, or even critical, parts of our ship and fleet design.

Which basically means we're going to want FTL Comms first before starting as that'll make it harder for the Charters to disrupt our control over the drones or even ship systems. Eventually they'll have been able to acquire the tech in one way or another I'm sure, so it's not going to be a perfect defence. Especially as I doubt that mobile FTL Comms hubs are going to be secure point-to-point communications unlike what I suspect the fixed wormhole communications hubs will be.

The FTL comms will be secure by nature unless my understanding of wormholes is way worse than I thought. A com wormhole would be connected back to a hub deep in our space, because wormholes can only connect two places, and thus a hub is the most efficient means f letting ships talk to each other.

But to bring it around to you main point you are correct. The charters do have ways of disrupting our ships (Discord, search 'basilisk hacks') which is why I've explicitly outlined 'a skeleton cyberwarfare crew'.

tankdrop24 · Mar 21, 2021

Crazy Tom said:
[Farquaad]Some dramatic tension maybe be lost. But that is a sacrifice I am willing to make. [/Farquaad]

Ultimately, the aesthetic and narrative preference of the people involved are just that. I can't fault you for disliking it on those terms.

Then I'm afraid we're at something of an impasse. I just find the idea of us replacing our ships with drone fleets would probably kill off a good ten-fifteen percent of my interest in this quest. Double that if it turns a good chunk of our next few battles into consequence free stomps. Like, if I wanted to read about that, there are a billion more threads for that.

I mean, they aren't literally RTS commanders, but a smoky roomful of wargamers deciding on the optimal way for drones to do war better isn't much more interesting.

And if our opposition adopts these things themselves, that means space combat going forward from there would just be two big piles of drones smooshing into each other from there on. Which doesn't strike me as that exciting to read about.

Derpmind · Mar 21, 2021

Crazy Tom said:
I haven't developed the model far enough to think about 2 v 1 combat yet. My instinct is that there will be some sort of splitting of attributes on the part of the singular constellation, but it remains to be determined. It might just reduce to the two constellations being lumped together if there's no significant benefit from modeling their separation.

Our ships are not as numerous as those of a 4X game… but neither are those of a 4x game in the early game. And given the ubiquity of nanofabrication and the already existing fractalization of combat units (ie: fighters being drone control units – this was talked about in the Discord), the GMs actually said that a lot of this isn't really that different from what's already happening.

And also, this is hardly about "fleet battle between two godlike fleet commanders where nothing matters". I don't even know where you get that? If anything it would be more about collaborative decision making between an entire staff of officers constantly trying to optimize their strategies cooperatively.

The point I was trying to get at is that your system is ~~optimized~~ specialized for a 4x game. And because of that it doesn't fit nearly as well into a narrative story. Its not that it can't work, but it's inherently not intended for this format.

CyberFemme · Mar 21, 2021

Derpmind said:
The point I was trying to get at is that your system is ~~optimized~~ specialized for a 4x game. And because of that it doesn't fit nearly as well into a narrative story. Its not that it can't work, but it's inherently not intended for this format.

But our game is a 4x game? At least it looks that way from where I'm standing.

tankdrop24 · Mar 21, 2021

Maybe the skeleton is, but that's not what puts it above the rest.

CyberFemme · Mar 21, 2021

tankdrop24 said:
Maybe the skeleton is, but that's not what puts it above the rest.

I don't see how this makes constellations bad then? They're meant to capture the spirit of 4x early game combat when individual units matter and extend it throughout?

It's, fundamentally, tinkering with fluff to prevent naratively disconnecting from your units.

Crimson Alchemis · Mar 21, 2021

I am confused by the opposition over Crazy Tom's suggestions. This game was tapped as hard sci-fi, there should be an expectation that mass drone warfare will be a thing.

What stretches credulity is the expectation that space-based and ground-based warfare will be carried out predominantly by humans. In a setting that has nanomanufacturing, advanced algorithms, and a variety of AI?

tankdrop24 · Mar 21, 2021

Crazy Tom said:
They're meant to capture the spirit of 4x early game combat when individual units matter and extend it throughout?

How can individual units matter when said units are already utterly formless blobs of drones? Like, if multiple constellations are fighting together, I don't see how they'll not end up effectively just end up being one really big swarm of drones? If anything, it brings the problem forward, not fixes it.

Crimson Alchemis said:
I am confused by the opposition over Crazy Tom's suggestions. This game was tapped as hard sci-fi, there should be an expectation that mass drone warfare will be a thing.

What stretches credulity is the expectation that space-based and ground-based warfare will be carried out predominantly by humans. In a setting that has nanomanufacturing, advanced algorithms, and a variety of AI?

Well, from a realism perspective you are correct. We're just disagreeing on a 'what is actually fun' view.

The Laurent · Mar 21, 2021

Yeah, it's not going to fully happen, so that's that. There might be elements of more coordination and so on. But as far as it goes? For me, the combat is honestly not the big draw of this Quest. It's not that I'm not somewhat interested in it, but I'd much rather figure out the SCMC situation then thrill about a big new Dreadnaught, for instance.

CyberFemme · Mar 21, 2021

tankdrop24 said:
How can individual units matter when said units are already utterly formless blobs of drones? Like, if multiple constellations are fighting together, I don't see how they'll not end up effectively just end up being one really big swarm of drones? If anything, it brings the problem forward, not fixes it.

I feel like we may be talking past each other a bit. For me, there's no practical difference between a swarm (it's not a stone swarm, since a lot of the units are manned) and a ship. View are just different configurations of stuff means to accomplish a particular goal.

10ebbor10 · Mar 21, 2021

Crazy Tom said:
Finally, in-setting nanofabrication means that there's really no such things as a generalist fleet – you could literally rebuild your fleet on the go to new specifications of your tech was good enough. Ok, maybe not rebuilt – but definitely optimize withing constraints.

You make the mistake of assuming that a fleet which can rebuild itself in flight, is not a specialized fleet.

This is not Star Trek. A fabricator is not a microwave sized box which can provide everything you need.

Our Corvette shipyard is the size of a cruiser. Building one consumes about the same amount of resources per quarter as maintaining our entire civilization, and 20% of the power consumption. A larger shipyard would consumed 10% of out entire civilization's current power consumption just for it's own maintenance. And these facilities take entire quarters just to build small ships.

A fleet that carries sufficient fabricators and support infrastructure to adapt itself is a fleet which dedicates 95% if not more of its available tonnage to such systems. It is a fleet which will always be outgunned and outmaneuvered by every single target it encounters. The ability to specialize doesn't matter when the cost of that ability cripples the fleet before it can even launch.

LucidProp · Mar 21, 2021

Personally, a horde of drones is incredibly boring to imagine. It's much more striking to have ships in space, with their own Space Nelsons leading them, rather than have what is essentially esports pro players sitting in a desk far removed from the battlefield. This is ultimately fiction, so I don't really care about the how unrealistic it is to have fighting men and women in space and on the ground instead of the more "practical" drone swarm.

Derpmind · Mar 21, 2021

Crazy Tom said:
But our game is a 4x game? At least it looks that way from where I'm standing.

Off-topic, but: Quests are not videogames. They may use mechanics taken from or similar to video game mechanics, but such quests are at most a combination of story and game. (And quests usually lean towards being more story than game.) For example, the many "CK2" quests partially emulate empire-building videogames, but they're still structured very differently than the Crusader Kings II videogame they were initially inspired by.

This quest may in some ways be similar to a 4x videogame, but on both a mechanical and narrative level it is very different than one. We are not an empire-controlling player hovering over a picture of a galaxy. We are instead playing as the voters of the General Congress, and even though we have some input through our votes we ultimately have less control over where the game goes and what events happen than the QMs do.

Shard of Victory · Mar 21, 2021

I don't like crazy tom suggestion, but i don't like "but drones are boring", "but space navy", opposition even more. I allways hated "space is an ocean" trope, but hyperspecialisation seems bad idea to me. Ebbor is right about fabricators.

clockworkchaos · Mar 21, 2021

Quick note I've included a timeline so that you can tell when this is taking place. Also, the 'medical documents here give important context to some of the actions by other people in the omake.

April 2251 - Turn 1 start
June 2251 - Loyalists tried, BLG imp, Gaid taken
July 2251 - Turn 2 start, Milcom head
KAY IS HERE
September 2251 - First new mine, mass retraining started,
October 2251 - Turn 3 start
December 2251- Shei situation discovered, anti-overproductivity campaign started
January 2252 - Turn 4 start, Dipcom head
March 2252 - Anti-overproductivity campaign finished
April 2252 - Turn 5 start, name chosen
June 2252 - Prep for Shei liberation
August 2252 - Turn 6 start, SHEI LIBERATED
September 2252 - GAID INCURSION, integration started, Fiveleons infiltrated
November 2252 - Turn 7 start, Flag Chosen
January 2253- VEMP implemented, Chinook, integrated space patrol
February 2253 - Turn 8 start, Shei tensions
April 2253 - Military build up, army started
August 2253 - Turn 9 start, Shei breakout, Crazy Tom plans approved
October 2253 - Army finished, retraining finished, Fiveleons hack

Previously

clockworkchaos said:
Kay nodded. Confused but, aware that you didn't ask for clarifications in launch party lines. She quickly made her retreat, comprehending her prize. The entire thing was… strange. You were supposed to go through the line and then have to say some slogan, or give a cheer, or sign up for a mailing list, or something, to get your food. Then, you'd get a hand stamp, (or get a ticket earlier, and give it now), so that you didn't take more than one. But they…. Didn't? How did they keep people from taking too many? How did any of this work without security? How did they deal with all the chaos?

Stewing in these thoughts kept her occupied until she arrived back in her apartment. There she bit into her prize.

She felt a bit mixed. It wasn't the chocolate cake she was used to. Darker, and a hint of some new spices. It felt more complex and less sugary which was probably…. Good? Even so, she kind of missed the old cake.

A Place in the world

Part 3: Living Rent-Free

(July-Augst 2251)

After her trip out, life settled. Groceries were secured, though they had gotten… weird. There was always plenty of food, but it had gotten all… there were both more things and less. Fewer brands, you couldn't get twenty different brands of tomato sauce. But also more, vat meat sauce, mushroom, and fish catsup. It was like someone had let loose the 'new flavor foods' for every single item at once, and they were all there.

It was overwhelming, everyone wanted to talk, to tell you how cool this stuff was, and made her feel bad when she just wanted the same things each day. She'd never been great at new foods, especially mixing them. And adding to that pit in her stomach was that sense as she left, as she kept taking them, and no one caring. She kept waiting for someone to stop her, to ask why she hadn't paid. She knew it was stupid, that she should just get with everyone else and be a new Radiant… person (how long would her implant last?).

Mostly, she stayed in her apartment. They'd let her keep it, no one had even come for it, so far. Food, electricity, internet. It was all provided. Even fab opportunities, if she asked. So far she'd managed to dip into her accounts for that, she… didn't want to ask for any since the planetary reserve might run out. She could see the talks of people going out and doing things, helping others. Removing old properties, establishing a defense force, even taking an entire system, trying those who were guilty. She was guilty. Even if she wasn't on trial. She was a slug, a parasite, who had only ever done useless work for corporations that the trials were making more and more clear was useless.

She didn't deserve this. She didn't deserve any of it. She never had.

It started with a toothbrush.

The Giatech(™), modular automated toothbrush to be exact. She should have gone out when it broke, but she kept in. Not moving until the next part of the problem came up.

The Transtech(™) implant was the finest non-custom hormone regulator in charter space. It carefully controlled the endocrine system to keep her hormones properly balanced, and avoid becoming a man. In order for it to keep that balance, it needed several metrics, which is why she needed the Giatech toothbrush, it was the only compatible brand available on Radiant. Without it the implant lacked vital metrics, as it was now pinging her internally. If she did not get a new brush and sync it with the implant, it would automatically shut down for her own safety.

She'd waited, delayed, and if she didn't solve it soon, she'd pay the price. The first step was just a trip to the store. Or would have been, Hygiènesta was closed. Apparently selling high-end toiletries was not, as the company website had stated, those within's true passion. Instead, it would require a trip to the community fabbers.

The community fabber wasn't exactly like a store. It was more… well the closest thing was a vending machine. If said machine had been free to use, and had a selection that was 'anything'. When the first had been introduced, the interface had been an arcane nightmare, having to determine what subsystem it was under and enter the code that was anywhere from 8 to 16 characters with any number of combinations. Some numeric only, some alphanumeric, some with symbols.

Thankfully some of those who had originally operated them had offered to hang around the center and help direct it, so you could get what you needed, assuming the right one was there. Still, any of it involved Talking To People. Talking To People had definitely become worse. She'd used to have a set of conversation topics, it had been a nice one, researched and everything. Only now they weren't. It turned out that asking 'what brand do you prefer?' or '''what excites you most about your work?' or 'how do you manage your time?', had been 'creepy' and 'robotic'; and 'something no real person actually did', like everything else she did.

It wasn't as bad now. A few volunteers had come up with Genie as a look-up site; brand, category, name, hit it and the codes could be saved or printed out. Once you had them, you could just enter them yourself, no talking required. Granted, people still tended to hand out there, and talk. But it was a lot less than a store. No one tried to sell things. She just had to enter the code and go.

She entered " Giatech(™), modular automated toothbrush"

"Item not yet cracked."

Her heart dropped. She'd suspected, told herself, but… even so, it hurt to see. Grimly, she read on.

"Hey, if you are seeing this message, then sorry, this is under another Charter's FRM. In this case, Cernunnos. Since we haven't cracked the FRM for them we need company script to create this, as such we ask that you carefully consider if you need this item. Cernunnos items include vital medical supplies. Please, we will have the basics cracked soon, if you can at all delay please do. If not please contact anyone from The Congress of Caregivers and Physicians who can help with funds from the Fund for Radiant's Economic Emancipation*.

Kay's arms wrapped around her as she felt the tears well up, holding in her eyes without quite flowing out. It wasn't… it wasn't fabbable. She… she had been stupid, it had been stupid to think about. Even if she fabbed it, the silver** plan she had for it wouldn't come with it, and without the subscription, it wouldn't take the vitals, and in turn, deliver them to the implant.

For a moment she looked at the second part, the fund. And then hated herself. Hated herself for her greed, her desire. It was supposed to be for vital supplies. Not her… or soon his, frivolities. This stupid selfishness, the reason she could never really save money. Wasting it on take-out and games and movies instead of saving it. Now she wanted more.

A part of her. A selfish greedy part said why shouldn't she get some of it? She'd donated to the fund, all of her non-HI and Cennarus credit savings she had had gone into it and plus half of her HI. The rest of her quashed that. The donations she'd made were a third of what would have been her rent. If the world had no use for stupid spreadsheets, that was her problem, not it's. She'd only donated once she knew it was safe, once she'd known food and rent didn't cost, not when it hurt. She was so useless.

Still, she should… she should at least make an appointment. Not to ask for one. That would be selfish. But to talk about what she should do as a he. It was the sensible thing to do. She needed to stop imagining that somehow it was all just… going to work out and she'd get her brush. She had to be sensible.

Rn. Michael Jordan had been Kay's regular Nurse. And, thankfully he was still up for appointments. Though now his consulting appointments were only 15 minutes each… hopefully enough time to finish that. One of the advantages of being out of work was that she had plenty of time to get there and ended up arriving the recommended 30 minutes early at 10pm instead of only 5 minutes to spare.

She walked into a wave of noise. People were everywhere, the open, wide space that defined the waiting room was now full, filled with children, adults, and teens. Talking, chatting, and noise, so much noise, and confusion. She closed her eyes and breathed in as she tensed up mentally preparing herself for going someplace crowded

Go forward, don't stare at anyone else. Keep yourself controlled. Watch your body. Don't start doing anything weird, that would bother others. It wasn't as bad as it could have been. At least it was a waiting room, not someplace she was expected to hold a conversation..

"Hi, there!" Kay stopped as a greeter met her. Since when did nurses' offices employ greeters? "First time here?"

"Wha- um no?"

"Great fill out-" She stopped. "Wait, really? Cool." She began to turn around.

"Um, do I need to fill anything out?"

"Nah. We have to have everyone fill stuff out cause the stupid Med records systems for the low-grade plans aren't worth shit. Cause who cares if they have a history of problems, not like they were going to keep them long enough to care." There was a slight maniacally joyful edge to her voice. "I am just so glad I can just say that. But uh, back to work!"

"Uh, what about insurance verification?"

"Insurance?"

"Oh…. right." Stupid, no insurance anymore. "You- um don't need to verify my identity?"

"Only problem if you have the wrong identity is you are going to get some weird medical care."

"Oh, thank you." Kay trailed off retreating as the woman was mercifully distracted by someone else coming to ask for help with the forms. She sat down, settling in an unoccupied chair that was surprisingly comfy. Like one might like to have at home, instead of the hard ones she thought of as normal. The sound dampened as she sat down, which was… sound dampening chairs were the kind of thing that she'd always wanted. Technically affordable for her but… but enough that it would be choices between that and other costs. One, or more than one just existing in a public place was wrong.

Kay dove into her phone, trying to focus on reading and not everything else. It didn't work. Even if the sound was dampened, it was still there. If felt like being at work, waiting for someone to look over your shoulder and see you using it. She looked up. The mix of people was… different. There was…. More activity. More teenagers and children for one but also, more augments, and some mechanical parts, something Kay had barely seen at all.

She shouldn't stare. It was rude, and worse, might result in eye contact. So, again, focus on the phone. But even so, there was that knowledge that everything was going on. A sense of shame of doing nothing, being 'on your phone' instead of engaging with the class/meeting/discussion. Another look up, glancing the room, so as not to stare.

Other people were doing things. Filling out tablet-forms. The workers, identified by a single armband, rather than any sort of uniform, were going from person to person completely swamped. While she sat doing nothing. As the uneasy feeling set in her stomach, as she got up and went over.

"Hey, sorry the nurse should be with you shortly."

"Oh um." Kay averted from the worker's gaze. "I was just um wondering if you um… need help?"

The woman blinked, and after a moment's thought. "You've done all the forms before, and did them on your own, right?"

"Um, yes?"

"Great." Kay found herself guided over to a table. "Hi, Kay, this is Sarah. Sarah, this is Kay, she's gone to a nurse before, and can help you with the form."

"Hello," Said Kay, as her stomach twisted. Goes to a nurse before, or almost all the time. Only in really bad times had she had to use an uncert. Everyone else here probably actually needed medical care. And she was just here for something that wouldn't kill her. Even so, she forced it down and smiled. "Kay Maclaine."

The woman, a darker-skinned argument with wolf-ears, blinked and then smiled back, two small extended canines showing at the edge of her mouth against the otherwise human teeth. "Sarah LaFleur, pleased to meet you, ma'am. And this is my litter Beverly and Kerry." She indicated two children, both of whom had the same wolf-ears, who were currently occupied with paper and crayons.

"So, um, what seems to be the problem?"

Sarah looked at her. "Um, just about everything. I'm not really good at this."

"Dietary restrictions?" Kay asked.

Sarah frowned. "Um… what do they mean by that?"

"Things you can't eat."

She bit her lip. "Can't eat, or um, shouldn't eat ma'am? Cause, like anything with onions, is off the menu. Also, chocolate, guess I ended up with a dog's stomach as well." There was a pause and silence, and Kay realized she seemed to be waiting for something.

"Oh, I'm really sorry about that."

Another pause, the sort that met that she had gotten the wrong thing."Yeah, um, the lack of onions makes things hard. But for chocolate, can't miss what you've never had right?
Except for the time one of the idiot watchers gave these two it. Had them barfing all day." The two in question, (who Kay embarrassingly had forgotten which was which), ears perked up. They were still drawing, but Kay was certain that they were now paying attention.

"Well, that would definitely fall under restrictions."

"Okay, but what's the number on the side of the thing?" Sara asked, pointing at the screen.

"Oh, that's the level of restriction, how much you can't eat it," Kay said.

Sarah nodded. "Mmmm, right." Then after a pause. "So for onions and chocolate, I'd put a 5.?"

"Um, actually I think that 5 is the mildest category. 1 is the most severe."

"So 1 then?"

"Well… with the chocolate, they were sick afterward, but um, they didn't need to have it immediately removed or they would die."

"Would've if they had more. Stupid asshole." Sarah stopped, her ears flattening against her head. "Sorry ma'am. I didn't mean to curse like that, bad behavior on my part."

Kay once again got the feeling she was missing something there, undercurrents she wasn't catching. Conversations always felt like being on a lake, she was smart enough to know the depths were down there, and things were happening, but not what. Best to smile and move forward and be helpful, people usually were happy if you were helpful. "Then it would probably be a 2, which is potentially fatal, but not like a one, which is where even a tiny bit will cause reactions such as seizures or can kill you.

"Thank you ma'am. I really appreciate someone with all the knowledge."

It wasn't really knowledge, just stuff she knew, not like her statistics, which she had paid for education in. "So any others."

"Yogurt. Not all of it is bad, but um… often makes me feel sick, a three maybe?" She stopped, counting off on her fingers. "And spices, I can only handle very mild stuff, safe for them, but I can still have some, so maybe a 5?"

"Actually um, I think that might be a 4." Kay offered.

"Oh, okay, then what is a 5?"

"Things that produce some side effect of no threat and not related to direct digestion."

"What sort of thing does that?"

"Fries." Said another voice. Kay looked down, one of the kids was looking up.

"Fries?" Kay asked.

Sarah signed. "It's only a little thing. But I get itchy when I eat fries. And it's not that bad. Still worth it for those Paradise Burger fries." Kay understood that even knowing what a health disaster they were, the fries were a terrible temptation.

"Justice." Said the other one.

The first nodded. "Justice for fry thievery."

Sarah signed. "It's a family meal, I give you both kid portions, if I gave you any more you wouldn't even eat the rest of the food."

The two seemed unconvinced, having adopted the gaze of a five-year-old who knows they are right. One of them, smiled, looking very smug, and leaned over to Kay, and in a whisper that everyone could hear. "You need to watch your fries around mommy."

Kay nodded. "Okay, thank you for telling me. I'm um, going to put that down as a 5 okay?"

Sarah sighed. "Ugh, doc will tell me I'm being a bad girl and I have to give them up."

"I mean, maybe he would have a way to let you eat them without the problems?"

"You think?"

"No!" Shouted one of her children.

"So for medications, the only one I have is Zerluna, um 8 brand. The entire family needs to take it at least once a week, even if some people don't want to." Here she looked at her kids, who had managed to snatch one of the block sets from the main play table, and were now on the floor assembling towers. And then with glee, smashing said towers, occasionally to the great chagrin of the other. "But I can't find it anywhere in the medication section."

"Hmmm." Kay scrolled through the medications. "Hmmmm, do you know if it comes in another name?"

"Not that I know."

Kay frowned and brought up her phone. "Do you know how it's spelled?" The search pickings were slim, mostly a few posts from augments asking if anyone knew jobs that supplemented it. It was about the fifth one down when, 'wait this say it's an enzyme, do you know if it's a diet supplement rather than a drug?"

"Um, It might be?" Sarah offered. "Would that make a difference?"

"Yeah, then it would fall under dietary supplements."

"But there hasn't been a dietary supplements section."

Kay tapped back. "Oh it's part of the restrictions, if you hit the side button here, it changes the values to negative, and you can enter in needed supplements. Now is this something you would die without?" Kay waited for an answer then turned to Sarah after she received only silence.

"Why would they do that!?"

"Why don't you fill out teeth problems here?"

"That's dental, nurses don't cover dental."

"Okay, so that's just about finished for me. Now we just have to do these two, so, only…. On…. third… down."

"Actually if it helps also long as you set them to blood relations you can hit the options button and select 'copy member' to copy a section like food restrictions down."

"Oh thank goodness!"

"Kay Maclaine?"

"Oh, um, sorry, that's me. I need to go. I think it should be everything? Or at least one of the volunteers can help you finish it."

Sarah nodded. "Thank you so much for your help." She gave a small curtsy. "I hope to see you again soo- actually that doesn't make sense does it? Um… thanks?" She finished akwardly.

Kay nodded, following the volunteer and feeling slightly awkward. It wasn't like she had really done anything other than help a bit with the form. The gratitude felt so… unearned. Like she got it for nothing. It almost made her feel more guilty. She mulled on that until she arrived at the office.

"Kay!" Nurse Jordan said as she entered. "Wow, someone whose name I actually know. How are you doing?"

"Um, okay. It's um not anything major, and I'm sorry about taking up your time when you are so busy."

He snorted. "I'm no more busy than I was before. Now let me get your vitals read and… everything seems to be healthy."

More guilt. "Yes, um, I'm really sorry." She looked down, not meeting his eyes. "Um, my toothbrush, the one you helped me pick out to go with my implant? It broke, and they said that I needed to talk with a Nurse before I could get a new one. So now the implant is saying it will be shutting down soon.."

"Oh…. yes that toothbrush." His voice… angry, disappointed? She wasn't great at telling voices, but it wasn't a positive, voice. She tried to force herself to be stoic, she had known this was coming. This was what she had expected, or tried to expect. Even so, some stupid part of her had hoped that he would have said that they had plenty of credit, and she could have a new one. "You won't be needing it anymore. Let me just change the coding, and there".

"I… I see. Um, how long do I have?"

"Until?"

"Until I um… I… I start." Don't cry. Crying makes people uncomfortable. No one wants to be near someone who makes them uncomfortable, no one wants to help them. She breathed in "Until I start, going through male puberty."

"Male puberty… wait, do you want to turn the chip off?"

"No!." Kay shouted, unable to hold it together. "But without the toothbrush that you said, I didn't need and-"

"Kay, Kay calm down. I said you didn't need it because I turned off the pairing for it. The chip will still function fine." Rn. Jordan soothed.

Kay forced herself to breathe. "But… but I thought. I needed it? To monitor things?"

"It should be fine on its own, I can now remove the settings that demand it be hooked up, so it shouldn't bother you anymore.." He said, sounding pained. "I'm um, sorry that this caused you so much stress. We will probably need a replacement in about a year, but hopefully, it will be cracked by then? If worst comes to worst we can use the old-time drugs for it."

She sniffled, a feeling of relief making her body almost unable to stand. . "I… thank you. I'm sorry for bothering you, it… I know it wasn't important. "

"Seems pretty important to you." Rn. Jordan said. "Plus, removing these stupid overrides isn't a burden, more a blessing for me."

She should have kept silent, but a small whisper of "I saw how busy you are." came out.

He laughed. "Please, I'm no more busy than usual. Just treating everyone." Kay felt another stab, as she was reminded that she'd been one of the people to have a nurse when most only had uncerts.

"I don't… I don't deserve it. All I ever did… was make numbers do what they wanted to see. Not anything useful. like you."

He looked back at her and frowned. "I don't think… I think a lot of people, um, maybe weren't doing things that were as useful as they could be. I mean, do you know how much of my time was insurance." There was a laugh, loud, forward.

"But all I did was numbers."

"I can't say exactly, but with all their worry about making the currency last until we can get a proper hack, and all the talk about needing to set up more resources, I'm not sure it was so useless. And if not, they got training programs. Just… as your medical professional I'm going to ask that you take a look at the pamphlets in the waiting room. They have all sorts of volunteer and training opportunities. If you don't feel good about what you did before, working on something that feels useful now goes a long way, I promise."

Kay nodded. "Um, do you have any other medical recommendations?"

"What? Oh, those. Um, no I think you are fine. Besides, I have a lot of other people to see, right?" He gave a stilted chuckle.

"O, okay. I promise I'll take a look. Thank, you, I'll let you get to your next patient." Kay half nodded, half bowed as she retreated out of the room. It was only after she was out of the hallways that she realized that, without discussing the latest medicines and medical devices, the appointment had barely taken 5 minutes.

Author's notes:
*Because Radiant may have revolted, but you can take stupid acronyms from their cold,dead hands.
**Plans come in bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, black, pro, and executive. Draw your own conclusions from the fact that a semi-middle-class woman who considers this a life-defining thing can only get a silver plan.
Author's live of comments, save a starving author, give a comment.

The Laurent · Mar 21, 2021

Good, but you accidentally repeated it twice!

10ebbor10 · Mar 21, 2021

clockworkchaos said:
"Oh…. right." Stupid, no insurance anymore. "You- um don't need to verify my identity?"

"Only problem if you have the wrong identity is you are going to get some weird medical care."

That's actually a pretty big problem though.

Gladsome · Mar 21, 2021

Well, that was another amazing Omake, really conveying Kay's boatload of issues courtesy of capitalism. Hearing about the toothbrush felt entirely believable and made me want all sorts of things to happen to the people responsible.

I know Kay probably wouldn't appreciate a hug, but hopefully she can get some support and understand that she deserves happiness as much as anyone else.

nocarename · Mar 21, 2021

Poor Kay. Change is hard.

Inevitable too, but that doesn't make it easier.

notbirdofprey · Mar 21, 2021

The kids were really cute, and did they deliberately make those forms as confusing as possible?

clockworkchaos · Mar 21, 2021

notbirdofprey said:
The kids were really cute, and did they deliberately make those forms as confusing as possible?

They are the old-pre revision forms because it's like 3months in and they haven't had time to revise. The forms are a mess of various mid-level managers at the first that tend to fund the nurses' offices (owning your own practice lol) all looking to make their mark on the form so they can can put it on a resume. As such they are full of eccentricities that someone with a middle-class background just knows because it's like that all their life. But someone without one wouldn't know. Thus creating another unofficial barrier to medical care for people. (Doctors have entirely separate forms a well, so if Kay wanted that, she'd be screwed).

trooperist · Mar 21, 2021

Of course the charters would do something like having an implant continue working only if you buy a few of their other products, as well as medical appointments being mostly overly long advertising sessions trying to get people to buy the latest medical craze.

Kay really needs to go through the retraining program, or at least volunteer for something that makes her feel useful like when she helped that lady with the overly complex forms. Languishing in her apartment feeling sorry for herself doesn't help her situation. Then again it is rather rough to have your whole life changed and find out your work, the thing you were slaving away every day for, was basically completely useless.

10ebbor10 said:
That's actually a pretty big problem though.

It was the early days of the revolution so I'd put it down to everyone being swept up in the whole 'free healthcare, fuck bureaucracy, fuck the charters' hype.

clockworkchaos · Mar 21, 2021

10ebbor10 said:
That's actually a pretty big problem though.

To clarify, they ask for your name. What they don't want is a eye-scan, password, and photo ID to prove you are who you say you are. The verification is to catch people pretending to be someone else for health care purposes. Something that doesn't really happen, but the charters put outsized effort fighting because what if someone got away without paying. Also cause if you fail, they can legally deny payments.

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