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

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  • Informational
    • THE ALL-RADIANT CONGRESS

    ​

    Setting Information
    The Solarian Compact:

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    The Charters:

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


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


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


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


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


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

    Rhodes Mining


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


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


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


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

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

    Techbros, some of them science, some of them explore

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


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


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


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


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


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

    Sketchy buggers, they can get you anything tho


    Historical Topics:

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    Misc Details:

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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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

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


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


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

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


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


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

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


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


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

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


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


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


    The Spinward Frontier:



    The Middle Spinward Frontier

    The Core Region:

    UNDER RADIANT CONTROL OR ALLIED:

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

    Gaid A1: An airless world. Quality 10.

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

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

    Gaid AI: An asteroid belt.

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

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

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

    Gaid B2: An airless world. Quality 10.

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

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

    Gaid B5: A small icy planet. Quality 3.

    Gaid B6: A frozen world. Quality 7.

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

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

    Shei 1: A Cthonian world. Quality 15.

    Shei 2: An airless world. Quality 12.

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


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


    Gravity .95 Earth Standard. Quality 12.

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

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

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

    Shei I: Asteroid belt.

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

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

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

    Shei II: Asteroid belt.

    Shei 7: Jovian planet. Quality 13.

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

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

    Shei 8: Ice giant. Quality 6.

    Shei 8a: An icy moon. Quality 9.

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

    Population: 103,000,000

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


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


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


    Five Lions 3: A rocky ball. Quality 7.


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


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


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


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


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


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


    Five Lions II: An asteroid belt.


    Five Lions 7: An unremarkable Jovian. Quality 2.


    Five Lions III: An asteroid belt.


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


    Five Lions IV: An asteroid belt.


    Five Lions 9: Jovian planet. Quality 9.


    Five Lions V: An asteroid belt.


    Five Lions 10: Neptunian ice giant. Quality 8.


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


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


    Population: 15,000,000

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    Population: 650,000

    UNDER CHARTER CONTROL:


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


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


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


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


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


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


    Xotreh A6: An unremarkable icy ball. Quality 4.


    Xotreh AI: An asteroid belt.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    Xotreh 6: A dense ice giant. Quality 4.


    Xotreh 7: Jovian planet. Quality 6.


    Xotreh 8: An exceptionally cold Jovian. Quality 9.


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


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


    Population: 54,000

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


    Bestreer 1: An airless world. Quality 2.


    Bestreer 2: An airless world. Quality 6.


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


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


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


    Bestreer I: An icy asteroid belt.


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


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


    Bestreer 7: Another Jovian. Quality 14.


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


    Bestreer 8: An icy ball. Quality 10.


    Population: 450

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


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


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


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


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


    Akleod I: An asteroid belt.


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


    Population: 5,000

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

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

    Thoa System Stats:

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

    Thoa 2: An unremarkable airless metal ball.

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

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

    Thoa I: An asteroid belt.

    Thoa 4: A normal Jovian planet.

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

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

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

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

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

    Thoa II: A Kuiper belt of icy objects.

    Empty Systems

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

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

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

    Kimberly 3: A Jovian world.

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

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

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

    Total:


    Radiant:


    Gaid:


    Five Lions:


    Head of Diplomatic Corps:

    Name: Amanda Redcrest, Victoria Blackwell, and Kayla Hayashi


    DoB: "2222", 2219, 2227, 2224


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


    Cons: XP celebrity, little diplomatic experience, three people


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


    Unlocked FRM

    Ares Peacekeeping Grade - Access to planetary army formation

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


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

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


    Cernunnos Consumer Grade - +1 to all Soccom actions

    Cernunnos Enterprise Grade - NOT UNLOCKED


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

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


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

    Hermes-Ishtar Production Grade - NOT UNLOCKED


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

    MSI Enterprise Grade - NOT UNLOCKED


    Original Tech

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


    Defence Coordinator:


    Name: Maria Awhina

    DoB: 2165

    Current Position: Military Committee Delegate from the Radiant Veterans Guild


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


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


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


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


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


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


    Pros:

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


    Cons:

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


    Command Traits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    -None

    -None

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

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

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

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

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

    Solarian Marines now spread throughout the system

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

    Mobile Force:

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

    CO: Commodore Stephanie Rousseau

    CNS Velasco, United States of America-class Fleet Carrier

    -CO: Captain Esteri Attar

    -Orca Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft (Customized)

    -CO: Wing Commander Jasmine Ang

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

    -CO: Wing Commander Heloisa Kimura de Lima

    CNS Shieldmaiden, Great Heathen-class Light Cruiser

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

    CNS Shamhat, Great Heathen-class Light Cruiser

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

    CNS Righteous Tempest, Cossak-class Frigate

    -CO: Captain Vehement Shade

    CNS August Willich, Cossak-class Frigate

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

    CNS Elysium, Cossak-class Frigate

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

    CNS Asphodel, Cossak-class Frigate

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

    -


    Home Force:

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

    CO: Commodore Erina Kozlova

    CNS Blaire Mountain, New Model-Class Strike Corvette

    -CO: Captain Guillermo Kageyama

    CNS Scutum, Comet-Class Patrol Corvette

    -CO: Captain Martin Pagonis

    CNS Buckler, Comet-Class Patrol Corvette

    -CO: Captain Samuel Smiles

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

    -CO: Captain Jean-Paul Beaumont

    -


    Radiant System Self Defence Force:

    Current Orders: Defend Radiant, comet patrol

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


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

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

    Switchblade Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft

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

    Apogee Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft

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


    Battery A, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

    Battery B, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

    Battery C, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

    Battery D, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

    Battery E, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

    Battery F, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

    Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

    (Radiant-Bestreer Gate)


    Radiant Orbital Yard 1

    Current construction: None

    Radiant Orbital Yard 1

    Current construction: None


    -


    Gaid System Self Defence Force:

    Current Orders: Defend Gaid

    CO: Commodore Victor Raine

    Battery A, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

    Battery B, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

    Battery C, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

    Battery D, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

    Battery E, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

    Battery F, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

    Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

    Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

    Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

    Zephyr Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

    -CO: Wing Commander Ara Helge

    Aeolus Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

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

    Gale Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

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

    -

    Frontier Force

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

    CO: Commodore Shayla McLean

    CNS Kiel Mutiny, Kaiserreich-class BattleCruiser

    -CO: Captain Inana Devlin

    CNS Choreographer, Janissary-class Light Tender

    -CO: Captain Karl Xanthopoulos

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

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

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

    -CO: Captain Fool's Errand

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

    -CO: Captain Rouge Napier

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

    -CO: Captain John Rankin

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

    -CO: Captain Nkiru Chaudhari

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

    -CO: Captain Sumac Barros

    CNS Revolutionary Will, Cossak-class Frigate

    -CO: Captain Yamamoto Hanae

    CNS Revolutionary Grace, Cossak-class Frigate

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

    CNS Under New Management, Don-Class Fast Tanker

    -CO: Captain Adras Kierenos

    CNS Liberte, Hollywood(C)-Class Frigate

    -CO: Captain Colin McRae

    CNS Egalite, Hollywood(C)-Class Frigate

    -CO: Captain Adelia Swift

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


    DISCORD LINK:

    Join the Wordsmiths Discord Server!

    Check out the Wordsmiths community on Discord – hang out with 897 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
    discord.gg discord.gg
     
    Last edited by a moderator:
  • Informational
    • Nyvis said:
    Maria is a ground commando, I don't think that implies anything about a subject we're explicitly told she has only minimal knowledge of.
    Click to expand...
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    The same could be said of the Gamer, but even worse since she doesn't have a professional background in it, not even a theoretical knowledge learned in a military academy. The Commando meanwhile, has that and is intimately familiar with the Corp mindset. That's often a understated of military victories, knowing how your enemy thinks is how a people like the Mongols won so much acclaim for example since they could accurately predict what their foe would do, and how to best exploit that with the limited assets present.
    Nyvis said:
    What's stopping them from just rushing for our home system and slagging it to rubble before they go put out the fires, even assuming they let traffic from our controlled sectors through, which would be dumb because they're not going to trade with us and corps will avoid those systems once we're revealed.
    Click to expand...
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    The fact that they don't know we're already in rebellion?

    We actually have time and opportunity to start fires everywhere and spread corp assets thin before our true colors are revealed.
     
    Last edited:
    Remove ads
    Vote closed
  • Voting
    • Scheduled vote count started by AKuz on Dec 17, 2020 at 3:23 AM, finished with 113 posts and 37 votes.
    Click to expand...
     
  • Voting
    • My god, watching that vote countdown timer go down to 0 was the most stressful thing I've ever experienced in this forum. :cry:
     
    Is us getting crushed on the battlefield obvious? Or is it what the charters want us to think? We took over a major world and all it had around was one light carrier we seized and a few asteroid shooters. I'm not sure the corps are that good at this military stuff. A large standing military is a colossal budget and they'd be the ones paying for them rather than receiving graft for it like the traditional military industrial complex. They're also likely to think this is a problem for our parent charter and leave them alone to deal with it at first rather than unite to deal with us. They might even backstab the weakened competitor.

    On the other hand, they're vastly spread and I don't think we can start enough fires to entirely avoid conventional battle, and in space you only need to lose one of those for them to show up over your planets and destroy them.

    Anyway, there's more to our military than our leaders so I hope we'll have more flexibility than merely our pick's current target strategy.
     
    Nyvis said:
    On the other hand, they're vastly spread and I don't think we can start enough fires to entirely avoid conventional battle, and in space you only need to lose one of those for them to show up over your planets and destroy them.
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    Uh, not really? It still takes time for ships to go anywhere and get into position to bombard things. It's much more about positioning assets for intercept because there's technically no practical speed limit (although different ships may have different practical limits on how fast they can accelerate).
     
    Lupercal said:
    @Amorous Intent @Cyanblackstone could we get confirmation on space raiding? Cause both Maria and piracy patrols imply that it is a thing.
    Click to expand...
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    There are two general types of combat in this universe:

    1) Gate Assaults. These are direct, bloody, and over fast. A knife fight with all sorts of nasty tools and generally high casualties on both sides.

    2) Post-Assaults. Once you've taken a gate, all you've done is secure entrance into a system. It still takes days to weeks to get to other gates or useful planets in-system-- and that leaves a lot of room for maneuvering, skirmishing, and raiding. You've got to take down other mobile defenses in-system, soften up or take planet- and moon-based antiship systems, and if it comes to it put boots on the ground.

    Generally, ship types are going to be better at one of these than the other. Assault-class dreadnoughts, for example, are your go-to for gate assaults, but maneuver like stuck pigs. The only place they're going after that is a straight line, and they'd better hope nobody has the accel and delta-v to come up on their sides or rear.
    Nyvis said:
    On the other hand, they're vastly spread and I don't think we can start enough fires to entirely avoid conventional battle, and in space you only need to lose one of those for them to show up over your planets and destroy them.
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    Nobody's going to show up and nuke planets to glass. That is, in a word, frowned upon by the Compact itself. Any Charter that tries will get ganged up on by the Compact and the other charters in the name of "humanitarian aid" and divvied up.

    They'll either have to put boots on the ground or starve you out, whether that means resources for industry or literal food.
     
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    Cyanblackstone said:
    Nobody's going to show up and nuke planets to glass. That is, in a word, frowned upon by the Compact itself. Any Charter that tries will get ganged up on by the Compact and the other charters in the name of "humanitarian aid" and divvied up.

    They'll either have to put boots on the ground or starve you out, whether that means resources for industry or literal food.
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    I think you're still done if you lost orbital control though, right? Ships are probably assembled in orbit so you'll never get back into the fleet game and you're cut off from industrial supplies you'd get from the rest of the system.
     
    Nyvis said:
    I think you're still done if you lost orbital control though, right? Ships are probably assembled in orbit so you'll never get back into the fleet game and you're cut off from industrial supplies you'd get from the rest of the system.
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    Assuming you don't have other systems and concentrations of forces, yes.

    But if you do, then you settle in for a good old-fashioned siege.
     
    Nyvis said:
    Ship boarding is something I was thinking of. Maybe in anti piracy operations?

    Cities could be interesting, hopping from building to building as vantage points.
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    Just remember that ship boarding basically isn't going to be happening for the revolutionaries, given that they don't need have the same need to stop smuggling as the Charters do, and therefore no need to do police action, or you need to be doing piracy on the same planet as a Charter. As a revolutionary.

    Cyanblackstone said:
    There are two general types of combat in this universe:

    1) Gate Assaults. These are direct, bloody, and over fast. A knife fight with all sorts of nasty tools and generally high casualties on both sides.

    2) Post-Assaults. Once you've taken a gate, all you've done is secure entrance into a system. It still takes days to weeks to get to other gates or useful planets in-system-- and that leaves a lot of room for maneuvering, skirmishing, and raiding. You've got to take down other mobile defenses in-system, soften up or take planet- and moon-based antiship systems, and if it comes to it put boots on the ground.
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    3) Skip the whole thing and try to slip through disguised as a merchant ship. This is the current state of the Charter cold war, so they're well aware of the tricks involved in this.
     
    10ebbor10 said:
    Having 10 Battleships compared to your enemies 8 battleships doesn't matter as much, if the battlefield ensures that you can only ever deploy 4 at once.
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    On the flip side, having zero battleships to our opposing force's one or two matters a great deal, and that's the state of affairs we're currently looking at. We're going to need enough of a navy to be able to fend off a moderately determined assault (say a handful of cruisers and their attendant corvettes, or about 2-4 times the standing garrison in Sheol) or said assault is going to be able to occupy/interdict intersystem travel in Radiant and then pretty much everything's over but the dying.

    Given that all of our refurbishable ships put together would only be a quarter of this and we currently have no naval production capacity whatsoever Kozlova isn't really wrong to say we need to seriously bulk up on industry, because we are at a minimum going to need three or four corvette shipyards and a light carrier/cruiser sized shipyard - that's the minimum amount of yard capacity to be able to build and maintain a garrison capable of matching local forces that we are guaranteed to need to fend off.

    We might not need more than that if we are very careful not to piss off any execs into thinking with their egos instead of their bottom line or lucky enough to manage to prevent Charters from being able to concentrate forces at all through espionage/diplomacy, but even if we are there's a pretty big gap between what we have and what we need.
     
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    September 2251: Reports to the General Congress
  • Threadmarks
    • [X] Plan Hiding and Training the Revolution
    -[X] [FOCUS] Social Committee
    -[X] [IndComm] Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1 (10 BR)
    -[X] [MilComm] Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production. (10 SR, 5 E)
    -[X] [SciComm] Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management (3 SR, 3 E)
    -[X] [SocComm] Encourage Retraining x2 (-10 E per turn when completed)
    -[X] [MedComm] Maintain the Charade x2 (4 SR, 10 E)

    [X] [ARCHIPELAGO] Permanent Internal exile

    [X] [CO] Maria Awhina, the Commando

    Begin Mining Operations for BR on Radiant-1: AutoPass
    Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette Production: roll=20 for 26 total for 26/20
    Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management: roll=6 for 7 total for 23/20
    Encourage Retraining x2: rolle 13,15(cat)= 28+6=34 for 34/30
    Maintain the Charade x 2: 7, 13(cat)= 20 for 27 total for 27/20

    Journal of M Chakrabarti, Congressional Delegate
    July 7th, Heavy Rain

    In the end, the General Assembly simply couldn't risk going against what was quite vocally the public sentiment so early in its existence. The archipelago has been stripped of any communications devices that could transmit to orbiting couriers, and their landlines airgapped to make sure they can't easily slip a message through there either.
    Maybe in a decade we'll be able to revisit this decision, once tempers have cooled and the situation stabilized.

    God, I hope so. Are we really going to have a lifetime exile as an acceptable part of our criminal code? Are we incapable of reform, or perhaps forgiveness?

    -

    Defence Coordinator

    De fence Coord inator

    De fence Co ord ina tor

    Maria Awhine turned the words around in her head over and over again, coming at it from various angles as her body moved a forkful of pasta to her mouth on autopilot.

    Defen ce Cord in ator

    No matter which way she approached the words they didn't seem like real words. Defence Coordinator didn't feel like a title that should be paired with the words 'Maria Awhine'. If the job of Defence Coordinator hadn't sat beneath the full Military Committee and the General Congress she probably would have rejected the appointment outright.

    DEFENCE COORDINATOR MARIA AWHINE, she thinks loudly enough to drown out the light chatter and clatter of utensils around her. That the likes of her could have the trust of so many is… humbling and terrifying in equal measure.

    On reflection, Maria would never have been able to turn down the position once offered. She had a history to make up for and people around her that it was her duty to protect.

    "Ma'am? Helloo?"

    The intrusion of Erina Kozlova halted Maria in her tracks, and she tooks a moment to carefully pack away her guilt and doubts into a little box labelled 'unproductive' and file it away for whenever she had the time to go through it -probably in a few decades- before giving the much younger woman a raised eyebrow, "Ms. Kozlova?"

    Erina gives that little smile that Maria still has yet to decide is either charming or punchable, "Just wondering you'd like to share dessert with us."

    Erina Kozlova was just about Maria's opposite in every way. Where Maria was a tall and well-built woman with close-cropped black hair and dusky skin, Erina was a dainty little thing whose blonde hair and white skin was almost blinding sometimes. Where Maria was dressed in the same sort of simple non-descript white blouse and black slacks that she'd worn to work for decades Erina wore a shimmering blue dress that was entire too eye-catching for Maria's tastes.

    Gregory Mansur leans forward, proffering a dessert menu, cutting a striking figure with his neatly trimmed salt and pepper grey beard, twinkling brown eyes, and dressed in the simple blue jacket of the Space Patrol, "If I may, Maria, Jeremy here makes the best creme brulee in the entire system, he picked up the recipe from…" he clicks his tongue against his teeth, "this chef that retired here about fifty years ago, part of the retinue of the VP at the time, Vargas." Maria takes the menu from the older man and he continues, leaning back, careful not to knock the black peaked Space Patrol cap he'd jauntily left hanging from his chair loose as he settled back into his seat, "He left with the guy in fifteen, but Jeremy's been perfecting his version ever since."

    "I'm just getting a decadent chocolate cake with chocolate ice cream and chocolate fudge." says Dr. Sheila Bissonnette, letting everyone know, as always, exactly what her opinion is, "In this one instance Humanity stumbled upon the perfect combination centuries ago. I can't imagine picking anything else." The Doctor smiles her self satisfied smile as she shakes her head, red haired pony-tail shaking behind her.

    "Here, here!" says another one of their tablemates, Victor Marat, a member of the Military Committee, and the elected Delegate for the Asphodel orbital community.

    Maria nods seriously, studies the menu carefully for a moment, then swipes across the entry for 'Nanimo Bars', then pauses for a moment and swipes across for the creme brulee too.

    Setting the menu down, Maria regards the others sitting at the table with her, not just the other three individuals who'd also been candidates for Defence Coordinator, but the full eight members of the newly created "SubCommittee on Military Operations", of which she was now chair. With Kozlov, Mansur, and Bissonnette serving as her chief of staff, chief of space operations, and Inter-Committee representative respectively.

    "I know we don't start work until tomorrow," begins Maria.

    Dr. Bissonnette raises an eyebrow. "Officially, you mean?"

    "Exactly, Doctor" Maria points at the Dr's simple blue and silver dress with a single finger, "I suppose we can actually start by talking about fashion tonight?"

    One of the other delegates laughs, then trails off when Maria favours him with a look she developed in long years of gatekeeping penitents at Yang's office door.

    "Yes, fashion, and other things. I want to create a professional force, that doesn't just mean the rules of engagement and procedures, but uniforms and unit emblems, names. Things that our people can be proud of."

    "I agree wholeheartedly," says Gregory, "If we want people to be proud to serve in a uniform, they need a uniform to be proud of."

    "Huh, hadn't really considered a dress code to be something that we'd need to set so soon," says one of the other committee members.

    Gregory leans forward, and grabs hold of one of the cuffs of his jacket, "We're going to be deploying these people in space, Jim, space is a dangerous place, we can't let people wear whatever they want." His face falls near imperceptibly. "Do you want to find out what happens when a loose cuff snags an important instrument by accident?"

    "Huh." Kozlova favours the old spacer with a thoughtful expression. "I guess it does make sense. I suppose we can't just issue fancy uniforms like in Black Horizon or Galaxy Flame." She looks almost… disappointed?

    Bissonnette shrugs, "Just issue vacsuits during operational conditions."

    Maria narrows her eyes, "Obviously, but what about at other times?"

    "And, like a vacsuit that looks like what?" shoots back one of the other delegates, "We need style! I mean, I'm not talking style over substance, but we need to look the part of heroes!"

    Just a fun little flavour vote on uniforms feel more than free to create a write in, I'm not a fashionista by any means!:

    The discussion goes late into the night, and moves onto other topics that will be finalized by the SubCommittee on Military Operations the next day, but not after converging on a few design themes that are submitted to the General Congress for approval:

    [ ] [Unis] Keep it simple - Space Patrol

    Taking our cues from Mansur and the pre-existing space patrol, our design sensibilities will lean towards unadorned light blue, with patches representing position, name, and unit. The dress uniform will provide senior service members with a black peaked cap.

    [ ] [Unis] Keep it simple - Charter Utilitarian

    Maria pushes forward the idea to use simple lightly armoured black full bodysuits that are popular with cost conscious military and paramilitary forces across Human space.

    [ ] [Unis] Stylish - Drawing from Elysium's literal decades of design work, the SubCommittee proposes to the General Assembly a uniform that is a stylish militaristic cut blue and black jumpsuit with silver highlights. Position, department, and unit information is indicated by coloured stripes on the neck and lower arms. This proposal lifts design elements from the hero uniforms of a half dozen pieces of the most popular space themes media made on Elysium in the past sixty years.

    [ ] [Unis] Write In:

    -

    Quarterly Committee Reports to the General Congress as of the end of September 2251

    Industrial Committee:

    Begin Mining operations for BR on Radiant-1

    "Even without top grade Rhodes gear it's not too hard to set up initial mining operations over a target that's been previously surveyed. The equipment almost runs itself.

    "Well, no. It does run itself, our personnel are basically on site to make sure that the nanofabricator devices keep to plan and to fix the machines that fix the machines when they break.

    "Now, we're almost certain that there are ways to optimize performance and construction, but half the crew were a loose gang of stock market analysts running from job to job ahead of their creditors at the start of the year.

    "If we do get around to experimenting with our mining platforms I'd prefer to do it when we have more than one of the things, and have ANY amount of experience with working with this kind of equipment."

    Arthur Harrington
    Radiant-1 Orbital Mining Platform Shift Foreman    ​

    Project Progress: 2/Autopass
    Results: Gain level 1 mining infrastructure on Radiant-1 (+10 BR per turn)

    -

    Military Committee:

    Convert Courier Orbital Yard 1 to Corvette production.

    The yard's proven easier to convert than we initially expected. We think that's because this is pretty much a copy of an Ares shipyard design. Hermes-Ishtar reconfigured the design in the first place, and we're just reverting it. Sourcing some of the missing equipment has been a bit of a challenge, but we've made due through simply putting more workers than originally intended on the platform.

    The yard is now ready to copy our trio of corvettes in a design, but if we could get our hands on some H-I military 'prints or even better, Ares ones, that would do wonders.

    With our experience converting this yard, there will be absolutely no trouble converting the other yard, as they're identical designs.

    Project Progress: 26/20
    Project Results: Courier Yard-1 converted to Corvette Yard-1, Courier Yard-2 Conversion project progress gains +10 and cost reduced to 5SR and 5E

    -

    Science Committee

    Bypass Charter Fabricator Rights Management

    "We've finally cleared the backlog of encrypted Hermes-Ishtar blueprints. Everything from our former corporate overlords we've become resigned to renting, and everything the rich have grown accustomed to owning that was forever out of our reach, is now free for anyone and everyone to use and modify as they see fit. I can't even express how much this will change how we live. We'll be feeling the ripples of this for decades to come, but the hardest work is still ahead.

    "We probably would have gotten the job done faster if we had kept going as we had, but we were starting to get burned out after the frenetic pace we maintained in the initial revolutionary fervor. If any other groups are like us, we might have to serious talk -like, whole planet here- about how to change our work culture to let ourselves actually     use the time off we accrue, to not force each other to take overtime just because someone else's work is a blocker for you, to not push ourselves unnecessarily, and most of all, to take care of our mental health. We might have deposed our bosses, but for many of us, they live on rent-free in our heads. I'm worried that if we don't come to terms with this Radiant-wide, we'll just wind up replicating the abusive conditions we've always known, instead of escaping them. Permanent crunch culture won't just end itself.

    "This time around, we got lucky. One of our teams got bored of manually clearing out the malicious code, and started experimenting with training a VI to do it for them, using the already cleaned work as training examples. Once they got it working, the one team managed to not only finish the rest of the work by themselves, but did a victory lap by unlocking the entire back catalogue of Hermes-Ishtar entertainment and software, from games to movies to XP streams to CAD programs. All in less time than it took us to do the initial work. The VI isn't likely to transfer particularly well to the other Charters' blueprints, but the techniques they used certainly will.

    "The remaining month and a half was spent catching up the rest of the teams on the techniques we've pioneered and the various nasty traps we've stumbled across. I think once we work out our remaining cultural holdovers, we'll have the best damn cracking team in the galaxy."
    Callista Moreno
    Professional Union of Laboratory Technicians and Coders Spokeswoman    ​




    Project Progress: 23/20
    Project Results: Complete back catalogue of Hermes-Ishtar civilian blueprints, software, and digital entertainment, fundamentals of FRM and DRM cracking.

    -

    Social Committee

    Encourage Retraining

    "From: Trojan City Union of Educators
    To: Trojan City Fabricators' Fabrication Request Exchange

    Message:

    We require another fifty XR units. We have seriously underestimated the numbers of people who desire retraining.

    As discussed previously, we only need basic bulk designs at this time and can wait on your new designs long term. But we really, really, need anything right now."



    "Jay Eff Cee, Cecilia. I'm running the numbers again and I think I've discovered the issue.

    We were running the numbers based on what Hermes-Ishtar itself had decided were 'non-essential occupations' then adding management to the pile.

    But it turns out that here too Hermes-Ishtar has economics completely Jayzee Fucking Chroist wrong.

    Over HALF of our population contributes nothing to our economy now that we've (perhaps overenthusiastically) abolished all the bullshit jobs and given everyone a base level living standard.

    You get that now? Our estimates were off by upwards of 60 to 80 percent. It's not a few tens of millions of people who want retraining, but over a hundred million.

    Our only saving grace is that plenty of people who used to falsify spreadsheets to massage some executive's feelings now want to do the same thing but using actual data, empirical evidence, and real people instead of p-Hacking, spherical cows, and Homo Economus."


    Internal Correspondence within the All-Radiant Teachers Federation​



    "As of the end of the September training period all school districts combined report that just over thirty four million people have undergone one sort of basic training or another with crash course XR programs.

    Our current recommendation is that we continue to follow up with our students with a continuing education program, but we can safely say that each of those thirty four million people now have a basic level of competence with at least one new career or passion project."
    -The Curiosity Newsletter
    All-Elysium Federation of Educators    ​
    Project Progress: 34/30
    Results: Gain a die in:

    [ ] [RETRAINING] The Industrial Committee
    [ ] [RETRAINING] The Military Committee
    [ ] [RETRAINING] The Science Committee

    -

    Media Committee

    Maintain the Charade

    We managed to finagle the yearly report to Sol from Yang by telling a half-lie. Having the deepfake admit there were extensive protests and civil unrest on Radiant, but that he was handling it, gave us the excuse to not have his usual mannerisms quite down. We even included a little bit of the tamer footage of the Revolution to give it validity. Stress changes the way you act, after all. Between that and the correct codes, we managed to get by with nothing but a courier-load of "problem solvers" being sent our way to arrive sometime near the end of the year.

    Honestly, an unarmed courier boat filled with thugs and propagandists isn't much of a threat. Worst comes to worst, we'll intern them all or blow the ship up.

    It's not a task force, and that's what counts for now.

    -Calvin Nedim
    Creator's Forum Delegate to MedComm    ​

    Project Progress: 27
    Results: Bought another quarter of silence.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Oof. In hindsight, should have pushed more for that 3 year trial then reevaluation write in instead of permanent exile, but I hesitated on even voting for that. Definitely not happy with how that turned out.

    On the other hand, 1 turn completing the first corvette yard is great news, so there's that.

    Just gotta hope we don't make any more mistakes in policy.
     
    Chimeraguard said:
    Oof. In hindsight, should have pushed more for that 3 year trial then reevaluation write in instead of permanent exile, but I hesitated on even voting for that. Definitely not happy with how that turned out.

    On the other hand, 1 turn completing the first corvette yard is great news, so there's that.

    Just gotta hope we don't make any more mistakes in policy.
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    The guys who were exiled were the worst of the worst--no real expectation that they were going to see the error of their ways, and while it is unlikely that they would ever get the chance to reoffend, there's nothing to suggest they wouldn't take that chance in a heartbeat if it presented itself, either through structural weaknesses in Radiant's government, or through hostile action. They had their chance.

    I'm leaning towards stylish uniforms--Radiant's all about the media, might as well lean into it.

    As for dice, we have so many options in Industrial that I think that it should go there, although I think there's a reasonable case for Military as well. SciComm can wait on that for now, I think.
     
    I agree, we absolutely have to go for stylish uniforms, the question is whether we want to go for pulp sci fi jumpsuits or something that says People's Revolutionary Guard
     
    AKuz said:
    Gregory leans forward, and grabs hold of one of the cuffs of his jacket, "We're going to be deploying these people in space, Jim, space is a dangerous place, we can't let people wear whatever they want." His face falls near imperceptibly. "Do you want to find out what happens when a loose cuff snags an important instrument by accident?"
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    So that's a no on the epaulets and tricorn hats then? :V

    I am also behind the stylish option!
     
    [ ] [Unis] Stylish - Drawing from Elysium's literal decades of design work, the SubCommittee proposes to the General Assembly a uniform that is a stylish militaristic cut blue and black jumpsuit with silver highlights. Position, department, and unit information is indicated by coloured stripes on the neck and lower arms. This proposal lifts design elements from the hero uniforms of a half dozen pieces of the most popular space themes media made on Elysium in the past sixty years.


    We want to be seen as heroes, so we damn best look the part! Even when we're corpses in the dead of- waitaminute
    HeWhoAdds said:
    So that's a no on the epaulets and tricorn hats then? :V

    I am also behind the stylish option!
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    Tricorns and epaulettes? I'm sold. When do we start modernizing that aesthetic? :V
     
    Rhymes said:
    The guys who were exiled were the worst of the worst--no real expectation that they were going to see the error of their ways, and while it is unlikely that they would ever get the chance to reoffend, there's nothing to suggest they wouldn't take that chance in a heartbeat if it presented itself, either through structural weaknesses in Radiant's government, or through hostile action. They had their chance.
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    It's not the specifics so much as it is the principles and precedent it sets. And I'm very worried we just created one hell of a bad precedent in terms of people, even awful people, getting a permanent punishment without chance of rehabilitation.
     
    I support either the Space Patrol or Charter uniform options. Fancy isn't going to save anyone in the cold vacuum.

    We want our enemies and allies alike to take us seriously.

    Granted, I am willing to support a plan that features a decent amount of red in its uniform design.
     
    Eh. There's no uniform that'll save you if you get shot into space. I'd rather draw a sharp line between us and the charters.

    Fancy Uniforms might have an effect on morale, too. Not once deployed maybe, but before we have to fight.

    I guess I just don't see the downside of having a more swish uniform?
     
    I don't disagree with that logic. You're certainly right that we need to represent a break from the Charters.

    As long as function isn't sacrificed, I don't have a major problem with a fancy uniform winning. Not as if any silly hats will make it to the battlefield.
     
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