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

AKuz · Dec 10, 2020

THE ALL-RADIANT CONGRESS

Setting Information: The Solarian Compact:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Charters:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rhodes Mining

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

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

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

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

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

Techbros, some of them science, some of them explore

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sketchy buggers, they can get you anything tho

Historical Topics:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misc Details:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spinward Frontier:

The Middle Spinward Frontier

The Core Region:

UNDER RADIANT CONTROL OR ALLIED:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaid A1: An airless world. Quality 10.

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

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

Gaid AI: An asteroid belt.

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

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

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

Gaid B2: An airless world. Quality 10.

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

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

Gaid B5: A small icy planet. Quality 3.

Gaid B6: A frozen world. Quality 7.

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

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

Shei 1: A Cthonian world. Quality 15.

Shei 2: An airless world. Quality 12.

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

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

Gravity .95 Earth Standard. Quality 12.

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

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

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

Shei I: Asteroid belt.

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

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

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

Shei II: Asteroid belt.

Shei 7: Jovian planet. Quality 13.

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

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

Shei 8: Ice giant. Quality 6.

Shei 8a: An icy moon. Quality 9.

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

Population: 103,000,000

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

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

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

Five Lions 3: A rocky ball. Quality 7.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Lions II: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 7: An unremarkable Jovian. Quality 2.

Five Lions III: An asteroid belt.

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

Five Lions IV: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 9: Jovian planet. Quality 9.

Five Lions V: An asteroid belt.

Five Lions 10: Neptunian ice giant. Quality 8.

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

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

Population: 15,000,000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Population: 650,000

UNDER CHARTER CONTROL:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Xotreh A6: An unremarkable icy ball. Quality 4.

Xotreh AI: An asteroid belt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Xotreh 6: A dense ice giant. Quality 4.

Xotreh 7: Jovian planet. Quality 6.

Xotreh 8: An exceptionally cold Jovian. Quality 9.

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

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

Population: 54,000

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

Bestreer 1: An airless world. Quality 2.

Bestreer 2: An airless world. Quality 6.

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

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

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

Bestreer I: An icy asteroid belt.

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

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

Bestreer 7: Another Jovian. Quality 14.

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

Bestreer 8: An icy ball. Quality 10.

Population: 450

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

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

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

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

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

Akleod I: An asteroid belt.

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

Population: 5,000

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

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

Thoa System Stats:

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

Thoa 2: An unremarkable airless metal ball.

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

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

Thoa I: An asteroid belt.

Thoa 4: A normal Jovian planet.

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

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

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

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

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

Thoa II: A Kuiper belt of icy objects.

Empty Systems

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

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

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

Kimberly 3: A Jovian world.

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

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

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

Total:

Radiant:

Gaid:

Five Lions:

Head of Diplomatic Corps:

Name: Amanda Redcrest, Victoria Blackwell, and Kayla Hayashi

DoB: "2222", 2219, 2227, 2224

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cons: XP celebrity, little diplomatic experience, three people

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

Unlocked FRM

Ares Peacekeeping Grade - Access to planetary army formation

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

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

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

Cernunnos Consumer Grade - +1 to all Soccom actions

Cernunnos Enterprise Grade - NOT UNLOCKED

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

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

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

Hermes-Ishtar Production Grade - NOT UNLOCKED

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

MSI Enterprise Grade - NOT UNLOCKED

Original Tech

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

Defence Coordinator:

Name: Maria Awhina

DoB: 2165

Current Position: Military Committee Delegate from the Radiant Veterans Guild

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Command Traits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-None

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

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

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

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

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

Solarian Marines now spread throughout the system

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

Mobile Force:

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

CO: Commodore Stephanie Rousseau

CNS Velasco, United States of America-class Fleet Carrier

-CO: Captain Esteri Attar

-Orca Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: Wing Commander Jasmine Ang

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

-CO: Wing Commander Heloisa Kimura de Lima

CNS Shieldmaiden, Great Heathen-class Light Cruiser

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

CNS Shamhat, Great Heathen-class Light Cruiser

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

CNS Righteous Tempest, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: Captain Vehement Shade

CNS August Willich, Cossak-class Frigate

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

CNS Elysium, Cossak-class Frigate

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

CNS Asphodel, Cossak-class Frigate

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

-

Home Force:

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

CO: Commodore Erina Kozlova

CNS Blaire Mountain, New Model-Class Strike Corvette

-CO: Captain Guillermo Kageyama

CNS Scutum, Comet-Class Patrol Corvette

-CO: Captain Martin Pagonis

CNS Buckler, Comet-Class Patrol Corvette

-CO: Captain Samuel Smiles

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

-CO: Captain Jean-Paul Beaumont

-

Radiant System Self Defence Force:

Current Orders: Defend Radiant, comet patrol

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

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

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

Switchblade Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft

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

Apogee Wing, Switchblade-type strikecraft

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

Battery A, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery B, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery C, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery D, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery E, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Battery F, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

(Radiant-Bestreer Gate)

Radiant Orbital Yard 1

Current construction: None

Radiant Orbital Yard 1

Current construction: None

-

Gaid System Self Defence Force:

Current Orders: Defend Gaid

CO: Commodore Victor Raine

Battery A, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery B, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery C, Blindfire-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery D, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery E, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

Battery F, Airstrike-Pattern LMP Constellation

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

Shoal A, Macross-Pattern TAM Shoal

Zephyr Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

-CO: Wing Commander Ara Helge

Aeolus Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

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

Gale Wing, Switchblade-Type Strikecraft (Customized)

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

-

Frontier Force

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

CO: Commodore Shayla McLean

CNS Kiel Mutiny, Kaiserreich-class BattleCruiser

-CO: Captain Inana Devlin

CNS Choreographer, Janissary-class Light Tender

-CO: Captain Karl Xanthopoulos

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

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

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

-CO: Captain Fool's Errand

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

-CO: Captain Rouge Napier

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

-CO: Captain John Rankin

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

-CO: Captain Nkiru Chaudhari

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

-CO: Captain Sumac Barros

CNS Revolutionary Will, Cossak-class Frigate

-CO: Captain Yamamoto Hanae

CNS Revolutionary Grace, Cossak-class Frigate

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

CNS Under New Management, Don-Class Fast Tanker

-CO: Captain Adras Kierenos

CNS Liberte, Hollywood(C)-Class Frigate

-CO: Captain Colin McRae

CNS Egalite, Hollywood(C)-Class Frigate

-CO: Captain Adelia Swift

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

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TaliesinSkye · Dec 20, 2021

The Laurent said:
The actions we've been taking are ones that are added to the Broadcast, actually.

I thought we had subtle propaganda going out embedded in the content of our regular entertainment broadcasts?

The Laurent said:
And, we're already at war. I just don't understand how you don't see that as obvious. We have an incredibly temporary ceasefire that they're going to be breaking before we know it, and think about this from a political point of view.

I do get that we're in a conflict. But I don't think we're presently in a total war to the death with the Compact and every Charter. Which is more or less what we're likely to have when the broadcast goes out, minus however many assets get tied up by the effects of the broadcast, which is an open question.

I like our odds better in a war where we're an annoyance rather than an existential threat. Our enemies will allocate a lot less in the way of resources to squashing us.

The Laurent said:
What do you think the Ruling Party will do when that gets out? They sure as hell can't afford to say, "Actually, I'm in favor of Charterless Anarchism that's being portrayed as monstrously horrible." Nobody can, as long as that's the frame that dominates. The furthest Left party in the entire legislature wants to do a stupid bandaid of a single worker rep on Corporate Boards.

Think about it. There are a lot of ways for a government to say they're all for squashing the communists, but in practice be really ineffective at squashing the communists. Exactly like how they said they'd take an accounting of the frontier while pursuing policies that were anything but.

The Laurent said:
You fundamentally view one of the two major parties of the Compact as "the good guys" that can be "worked with" even when everything we've seen indicates quite the opposite.

This is a misrepresentation. Please try to be more honest if you want to debate, okay? Putting quotation marks around things that aren't quotes is...well, I don't want to call you a liar, but when you claim someone has said something and hasn't, you're lying about them. It should be fairly obvious that's not a good thing to do, no matter how passionate about a position you feel.

I don't think the PM or ruling party are good guys. As I made very clear, I think there's a good chance they want to use us as a tool to weaken the Charters so they can increase the relative power of the Compact. That's all. It's an 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' situation that may be ripe for an alliance of convenience. Hopefully that clears things up.

The Laurent said:
If they survive the coming election, it will be through promising that the Compact can crush the Anarchists without needing to rely on the Charters. Hell, such a victory would be ideal for them. They could add a few token regulations to the Frontier if it's the Solarian Navy that reconquers them, and the Solarian Navy could glut itself on the profits made by either taking them over or selling them back to the Charters. It has all the advantages of any sort of bastard hell collaboration with us, and none of the drawbacks.

As best as I can tell from the oblique references in the text, existing Compact law would likely require that the Compact return corporate 'property' for free. If you have any concrete references that indicate to the contrary, present them by all means.

I don't think the Compact has anything to gain by fighting us on the Charters' behalf. It would cost them limited resources and give the Charters even more territory in the end.

Torgamous said:
1. The content of their scheming is that our existence is bad for the Prime Minister's reelection chances, because it is bad that she let communism get a foothold during her term. The Prime Minister standing to lose by being associated tangentially with our success does not mean she wants us to succeed.

Correct. It also doesn't mean that she wants us to fail. She might reasonably want us to succeed (to a degree) to weaken the Charters and want to keep the existence of the rebellion secret from the public at the same time. For political reasons and to give us more time to grow into a greater threat to the Charters, in order to hurt the Charters more when they come to put us down. (Which she'll probably conclude is a foregone conclusion, but one that fits her purpose of weakening the Charters to increase her own power relative to them.)

Torgamous said:
2. The current administration hasn't destroyed us because pretending we don't exist is better for the stock market. Last two lines of the scene. You know what else is bad for the stock market? Siding with a communist alliance against every major corporation.

Remember that this information is from a member of the opposition. That's just his conclusion. We don't know if it's the reason the PM is doing it, or if it's the only reason she's doing it. The character is speculating.

Torgamous said:
3. Both major parties are capitalists, and therefore think communism is bad. You can tell because they're both running the Compact, a centuries-old cosmoliberal hell that makes current neoliberalism look downright friendly. It could not exist in the form it does if one of the major parties, and the current ruling party, saw communism as the lesser evil compared to the Charters.

I've already addressed this point. The Compact doesn't have the power to reign in the Charters. At least some of the political power in the Compact is no doubt in the pocket of the Charters, but that doesn't mean we can conclude that all of it is. It would be rational for some of them to take the nationalist position of wanting the Compact to regain the power it once had, before the Charters grew out of hand.

Model DC.14F said:
Okay, I'm been on wrong end of making assumptions and misunderstanding people before in this thread.
Just to clarify, what do you think will happen if we send the broadcast, vs if we don't send? And what do you think the Compact's beliefs and goals are?

Because I'm not sure if you're arguing that the Compact will not declare war as long as we don't sent the broadcast, or if you're saying that they'll only send token forces that we can easily defeat if we don't send the broadcast. Either way, it sounds like you have a different interpretation of them than most of the thread, especially regarding their beliefs and how they would regard us.

I think if we send the broadcast, the Compact and the Charters will treat us like an existential threat. They'll come at us with everything they can spare from whatever chaos the broadcast causes. Sending the broadcast is thus making an all in bet that the chaos will be sufficient that they won't be able to send more than we can defeat militarily. I don't think that scenario is impossible, but I think it's a tremendous risk. I don't like making all in bets unless I know I'm very likely to win, or I have no other choice.

I think if we don't send the broadcast, I think it's fairly likely a few of the Charters will eventually get together to take a swing at us. Or maybe it'll be the Compact, after the elections. Either way, we won't be their only priority, and it won't be absolutely everyone and their dog gunning for us. We'll be an annoyance negatively impacting bottom lines somewhat, rather than an immediate existential threat. Although I think it's not impossible that if we play our cards right and get lucky the Charters and Compact might be too busy with other concerns to make a serious run at us for quite a while. Meanwhile we spend the time developing more options. A way of shutting down the gates would be nice, but we'd also benefit from portable wormhole communication, more ships, more defenses, and any other unexpected out of context threats we can come up with.

I think the Compact is a heavily subverted late capitalist 'democracy', in the sense of barely being a democracy any more because of the amount of regulatory capture but still going through the motions. I don't think the Compact is a nice place to live or ruled by anybody who cares all that much about the actual wellbeing of the population, although it's not completely impossible that some people in politics could be of that persuasion, just unlikely. People like that probably have a hard time getting enough campaign funding to win elections because nobody rich is interested in bribing them.

I think the Compact has multiple powerful internal political factions. I suspect, and I'm working on limited evidence here, two of these factions are the Charter bribees who are in the pockets of the Charters (and the opposition party are predominantly in this category) and a group we might call nationalists, who want to reclaim the Compact's lost position of dominance over the Charters for some mixture of self interest (increasing Compact power increases their power) and ideology. I think the current PM might be the leader of the nationalist faction, who are in control of the ruling party/coalition. I think if that's the case, then they've been playing games with outwardly paying lip service to the Charter agenda while subtlety undercutting Charter power when they can do so with deniability.

The Laurent · Dec 20, 2021

TaliesinSkye said:
I think the Compact has multiple powerful internal political factions. I suspect, and I'm working on limited evidence here, two of these factions are the Charter bribees who are in the pockets of the Charters (and the opposition party are predominantly in this category) and a group we might call nationalists, who want to reclaim the Compact's lost position of dominance over the Charters for some mixture of self interest (increasing Compact power increases their power) and ideology. I think the current PM might be the leader of the nationalist faction, who are in control of the ruling party/coalition. I think if that's the case, then they've been playing games with outwardly paying lip service to the Charter agenda while subtlety undercutting Charter power when they can do so with deniability.

This is a bit off-base. Both parties are in the pockets of the Charters, the PM is in the one that wants to modestly regulate them slightly while also being the party that regards Augments as Subhuman.

E: So if we wanted to make nice with the "mildly regulate corporations while also hating minorities" part, we shouldn't have sent a revolutionary diplomat who hates corporations and is a minority.

TaliesinSkye · Dec 20, 2021

The Laurent said:
This is a bit off-base. Both parties are in the pockets of the Charters, the PM is in the one that wants to modestly regulate them slightly while also being the party that regards Augments as Subhuman.

I think you may be confusing your personal speculation/conclusions about the PM's motivations with provable facts. But if you have any proof from the text about why she is acting the way she is, preferably from her POV or the POV of someone in the ruling party, please do quote the relevant passages. I'm open to being persuaded by evidence.

The Laurent · Dec 20, 2021

TaliesinSkye said:
I think you may be confusing your personal speculation/conclusions about the PM's motivations with provable facts. But if you have any proof from the text about why she is acting the way she is, preferably from her POV, please do quote the relevant passages. I'm open to being persuaded by evidence.

I mean, about which part?

Here's the quote summary by one of the QMs of the two parties, you can find it in thread:

"PHRL:
-love Earth, want to gentrify it, whatever the Nations think
-Bioconservative, but 'woke' about it (Fukuyama's "Our Posthuman Future" vibes)
-small NRx wing
-whig history baybee
-maybe a couple taxes for some useful shit?
-The First Colonies should take their cues from the Compact's Central Authority
-so should the near frontier
-maybe expand representation/taxation/rule to the frontier
-Contribute more to the Solarian Navy from taxes
-like planetary colonization
-AGI rights are in a good place
-Proposed General Ban on ASI research
-maintains laws that ensure that legal identity is tied to social media accounts

JDAP
-think Earth's a dump, Nations can be ignored
-Moderate sized Neo-reactionary wing
-no taxes, only CHARTERS
-more independence for the Sisters
-No, we support our Navy more, give tax breaks to Navy enterprises
-the future lies in a Frontier of strong yeoman ~~failsons~~ small business owners (small but vibrant anti-Charter wing)
-transhumanism is good for business
-space colony expansion should be the focus, not planetary colonies
-maybe AGI should have more rights?
-block the General Ban on ASI research
-some privacy in social media could be good"

And, when I asked about the Common Sense reforms done, on Discord, here is the following unredacted whole:

But attempting to reign in the worst Charter excesses
[8:00 PM]
Fiddling with raising Charter taxes a smidgen to lower Small Business Taxes
[8:01 PM]
(Small business means: operates within a single atmosphere)

The_Laurent — Today at 8:01 PM
Hmm, right, any other major successes/reforms that we'd have heard about?

Kiarael — Today at 8:02 PM
Sure, I could make some shit up live and in public
>: V
[8:02 PM]
I feel a major internal tariff reorganization to create regional blocks
[8:03 PM]
(Ie First Colonies, Spinward Near Frontier, Middle Trailing Frontier, and Far Coreward Frontier for example)
[8:04 PM]
Including "forcing" the Charters to play by those rules
[8:05 PM]
And expanding the bureaucracy to enforce that so that they get wrapped across the fingers of the Charters use colonial control to play games with tariff import/export
[8:08 PM]
I suspect a lot of trade policy reforms that stays out if internal planetary, charter, and colonial domestic affairs would allow the PHRL to chip away at Charter free trade zones that de facto give a monopoly to whoever's controls that system or colony
[8:08 PM]
And is popular in the near frontier
[8:09 PM]
Hence letting the PHRL chip away at that "golden circle"
[8:15 PM]
Theres probably also like... a Woke and vaguely menacing program to "recognize" different augment "breeds", which has been both praised for raising the profile of augment issues, recognizing augment culture, and highlighting the differences between the groups instead of them being one mass. On the other hand no one asked for government recognized bloodlines tied to state categories (recognized Indian status gang gang), worries that this others augments as non-human, and criticism that they recognize most "morph" breeds like different Nekomorph or Canid breeds and silently ignore the fact that baseline looking augments like genetetically augmented for zero gee spacers or augmented for military service (Rousseau, though she's specifically from a military space geneline) are left out of these classifications leading to accusations that the program is kinda fetish and entirely about visual distinctions
[8:15 PM]
Also like

Carys — Today at 8:15 PM
no please i hate it

Kiarael — Today at 8:15 PM
"Hmm, the party that kinda considers augments as subhuman ard categorizing and giving them special ID tags now"

TaliesinSkye · Dec 20, 2021

The Laurent said:
-snip-

Ah, sources that weren't in the story, thank you for pointing these out. Much better, although a sincere apology wouldn't go amiss.

These line items:

PHRL (Ruling Party)
-love Earth, want to gentrify it, whatever the Nations think
-whig history baybee
-maybe a couple taxes for some useful shit?
-The First Colonies should take their cues from the Compact's Central Authority
-so should the near frontier
-maybe expand representation/taxation/rule to the frontier
-Contribute more to the Solarian Navy from taxes

Look nationalist to me. By that, I mean that they want to increase Compact authority and power over the Charters, but their ability to actually do so is limited by Charter power.

The augment racism stuff is bad, but I'm not claiming these people are saints. I'm claiming they want to increase Compact power at the expense of the Charters when they can find a way to do so and get away with it in a political environment where the Charters collectively have a lot of power.

These line items:

JDAP (Opposition Party)
-think Earth's a dump, Nations can be ignored
-no taxes, only CHARTERS
-more independence for the Sisters
-No, we support our Navy more, give tax breaks to Navy enterprises
-the future lies in a Frontier of strong yeoman ~~failsons~~ small business owners (small but vibrant anti-Charter wing)
-transhumanism is good for business

Look Charterist to me. Like this party is heavily interested in increasing Charter power (or wealth, but it's much the same thing) at the expense of the power and control of the Compact.

The Laurent · Dec 20, 2021

TaliesinSkye said:
Ah, sources that weren't in the story, thank you for pointing these out. Much better, although a sincere apology wouldn't go amiss.

These line items:

PHRL (Ruling Party)
-love Earth, want to gentrify it, whatever the Nations think
-whig history baybee
-maybe a couple taxes for some useful shit?
-The First Colonies should take their cues from the Compact's Central Authority
-so should the near frontier
-maybe expand representation/taxation/rule to the frontier
-Contribute more to the Solarian Navy from taxes

Look nationalist to me. By that, I mean that they want to increase Compact authority and power over the Charters, but their ability to actually do so is limited by Charter power.

The augment racism stuff is bad, but I'm not claiming these people are saints. I'm claiming they want to increase Compact power at the expense of the Charters when they can find a way to do so and get away with it in a political environment where the Charters collectively have a lot of power.

These line items:

JDAP (Opposition Party)
-think Earth's a dump, Nations can be ignored
-no taxes, only CHARTERS
-more independence for the Sisters
-No, we support our Navy more, give tax breaks to Navy enterprises
-the future lies in a Frontier of strong yeoman ~~failsons~~ small business owners (small but vibrant anti-Charter wing)
-transhumanism is good for business

Look Charterist to me. Like this party is heavily interested in increasing Charter power (or wealth, but it's much the same thing) at the expense of the power and control of the Compact.

They want to increase Compact power at the expense of the Charters, but you can't extend that out forever and just assume that if they had a chance to back a communist power seeking to end capitalism they actually would. And we cannot in any real way hide that about ourselves, just to be clear.

Because that's pretty obviously not true. It's like assuming that because the Democrats want to slightly regulate the "free market" economy that means that if they could they'd side with foreign communists trying to destroy capitalism just to get one up on the corporations.

Instead, Democrats tended to be driven by Cold War logic and their own beliefs into not being particularly "softer" except in perception on the Soviet Union et al.

The parallel is not and should not be taken too far, because Akuz went out of her way to make the two parties not simply map onto staid and old American politics, but I feel like that set of facts is still important to understand how far the PRHL will go and how far it won't, and what that means for us, who again are kinda like Cuba or some communist Latin American country in their backyard, but considerably more dangerous.

*****

They cannot afford to go easy on us, they just really can't. They're the parties that also crush the Black Summers as well, after all.

Worse, we've seen no indication that they're interested in going easy on us, either.

yeastmobile · Dec 20, 2021

TaliesinSkye said:
Ah, sources that weren't in the story, thank you for pointing these out. Much better, although a sincere apology wouldn't go amiss.

You seem to have a wildly different interpretation of the text then most readers of the thread does so of course people are going to assume you have a different viewpoint that doesn't fit. They don't need to apologize for that.

The Laurent · Dec 20, 2021

It's also very moot as a point because again we sent as our diplomat the revolutionary minority with instructions to raise hell. We couldn't tell him otherwise even if we wanted to, which we don't, and if he did he'd be a very bad fit for playing nice and sucking up to the PM (who has been PM through literally all of the abuses that caused us to rebel and clearly hadn't even begun to address them) of the "Party that thinks Augments aren't human."

trooperist · Dec 20, 2021

The Laurent said:
Kiarael — Today at 8:15 PM
"Hmm, the party that kinda considers augments as subhuman ard categorizing and giving them special ID tags now"

Thanks I hate it.

This and basically anything about the two parties just solidifies to me that a Broadcast with everything in it is the right thing to do and hopefully it will end up burning Charter and Compact society to the ground.

yeastmobile · Dec 20, 2021

I will be excited to see the compact and charters scrambling to contain the absolute chaos of the broadcast though. Can't send a fleet after us if the bases are revolting and all that jazz.

TaliesinSkye · Dec 20, 2021

The Laurent said:
They want to increase Compact power at the expense of the Charters, but you can't extend that out forever and just assume that if they had a chance to back a communist power seeking to end capitalism they actually would.

Because that's pretty obviously not true. It's like assuming that because the Democrats want to slightly regulate the economy that means that if they could they'd side with foreign communists trying to destroy capitalism.

Instead, Democrats tended to be driven by Cold War logic and their own beliefs into not being particularly "softer" except in perception on the Soviet Union et al.

The parallel is not and should not be taken too far, because Akuz went out of her way to make the two parties not simply map onto staid and old American politics, but I feel like that set of facts is still important to understand how far the PRHL will go and how far it won't.

*****

They cannot afford to go easy on us, they just really can't. They're the parties that also crush the Black Summers as well, after all.

Worse, we've seen no indication that they're interested in going easy on us, either.

Of course the PM doesn't think we're going to successfully overthrow capitalism. We're doomed. Obviously. How could anyone survive against the economic power of the Charters. Even the Compact can't fight all the Charters at once!

And that line of thinking is why she might use us, you see. If we're doomed, as (to her) we obviously are, then using us to hurt the Charters isn't a risk. You see the calculus? From her perspective, it is so very, very easy to underestimate us. It's like the cold war CIA aiding some petty south american facist dictator to hurt the commies. It's not like some el presidente is going to cause a fascist revolution in the United States. That would be absurd. But he can keep the red menace, which is what they're actually worried about, from spreading. So they send guns to el presidente.

It's about arrogance and thinking we can be useful tools. In reality, our odds aren't as bad as she would assume with her limited information.

yeastmobile said:
You seem to have a wildly different interpretation of the text then most readers of the thread does so of course people are going to assume you have a different viewpoint that doesn't fit. They don't need to apologize for that.

Disagreement is fine, that wasn't the issue. The issue was misrepresenting my argument and making up quotes of words I never wrote so he could attack them as straw men. That's not okay.

The Laurent said:
It's also very moot as a point because again we sent as our diplomat the revolutionary minority with instructions to raise hell. We couldn't tell him otherwise even if we wanted to, which we don't, and if he did he'd be a very bad fit for playing nice and sucking up to the PM (who has been PM through literally all of the abuses that caused us to rebel and clearly hadn't even begun to address them) of the "Party that thinks Augments aren't human."

As I've pointed out multiple times now, the PM doesn't have the power to reign the Charters in. You cannot point to the failure to reign the Charters in as evidence of an unwillingness to reign the Charters in when an inability exists instead. The PM may or may not want to reign in Charter abuses.

But even if the PM doesn't care about Charter abuses, it only matters for our purposes whether or not the PM might be willing to use us to hurt the Charters, and I think there's good odds the answer is yes. As for it being a moot point, we'll see what the PM pitches.

We don't need to like someone to work with them. Stalin was a useful ally against Hitler.

yeastmobile said:
I will be excited to see the compact and charters scrambling to contain the absolute chaos of the broadcast though. Can't send a fleet after us if the bases are revolting and all that jazz.

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that everyone's military power won't be completely tied up by the effects of the broadcast. We could even wind up in a situation where there are no serious immediate revolts at all, or only a few worlds see public disorder issues bad enough to require military intervention. That would be bad for us.

yeastmobile · Dec 20, 2021

TaliesinSkye said:
Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that everyone's military power won't be completely tied up by the effects of the broadcast. We could even wind up in a situation where there are no serious immediate revolts at all, or only a few worlds see public disorder issues bad enough to require military intervention. That would be bad for us.

Comrade do not let revolutionary defeatism blind you, for the masses of the galaxy are oppressed and suffering. If we show them a better way and give them the tools, they will stand up for themselves and fight like we did before them!

TaliesinSkye said:
You cannot point to the failure to reign the Charters in as evidence of an unwillingness to reign the Charters in when an inability exists instead. The PM may or may not want to reign in Charter abuses.

To be fair the writing is based off of real life, and we are all well aware of politicians being completely 100% able to reform the system, and not doing it because it benefits them. The PM can not be worked with, and they will not reform the system even if given the opprotunity. It just does not happen.

The Laurent · Dec 20, 2021

TaliesinSkye said:
Disagreement is fine, that wasn't the issue. The issue was misrepresenting my argument and making up quotes of words I never wrote so he could attack them as straw men. That's not okay.

Your argument doesn't make any sense. I was not accusing you of having said those exact quotations. It's just that time and again you've been obviously misunderstanding the PRHL in a way that gives them far too much credit as a reasonable, if temporary, ally.

The Compact literally cannot exist without the Charters. Some elements of it, deeply enmeshed all the same in Charter economic situations, want to somewhat increase the regulations on the Charters.

No more than that, and often a great deal less.

Waiting until they've dragged our names through the mud and done everything they can to defuse our appeal to the galaxy before releasing the Broadcast is an obvious mistake.

The very existence of the "Peace Fleet" shows that they are moving to counter us. The Fleet is considerably larger, for all that it lacks ships capable of occupying a planet. My interpretation and I don't think it's an unlikely one, is that they're the anvil to a hammer that will be coming. "Small businesses" like those the PRHL are also courting will fear us as well. So will the middle class, etc, etc, especially if we're allowing the enemy to start a propaganda blitz against us with no response but a few pieces of non-news media.

Whatever the laws say about property and ownership, if the Solarian Navy is the one reclaiming the Frontier from the Vile Anarchists, that's a major win for the idea that it takes Compact Regulations to run the frontier. The Solarian Navy will be in a very strong position to dictate terms no matter what the technicalities say.

Argent Citadel · Dec 21, 2021

Its my understanding that the Compact and the Charters are not monoliths. They are divided, and fight each other all the time. Ultimately, to some extent, they are intertwined and need the basic system to continue to preserve their power, but they still jockey for position and survival within that system.

I think everything we've seen so far shows they don't grasp the threat we pose to them. Academically, perhaps, many in the Charters might see the danger in our existence, but in practicality, these are the rulers of the End of History. The Dem Fed, the last proper challenge to the system, is beyond living memory of everyone expect immortals. It also lost. The Charters have spent ages with the only threat to their power and existence being other corps and Compact regulation. They are, very slowly (a bit faster, in the case of Hermes-Ishtar and Ares) realising we are a threat rather than an annoyance, but an existential threat? The idea is laughable, the system always wins.

As long as we remain a second order threat, that will limit the resources they throw at us - have to keep their coin for the main event, the fight with each other. Indeed, we are a useful tool in their manoeuvrings. They may even support us to undermine their rivals.

That is probably going to change when the broadcast happens.

I think we really could make a great deal of use of our status as a spoiler if we hold off on the parts of the broadcast that are the most threatening bits to the Compact - specifically the Box, FRM Warez and revolutionary instructions, and just stick to documenting charter abuses and showcasing us. That's going to politically poison any offensives against us, and empower opponents of the Charters within the Compact, while not provoking as much of a backlash. Then we have the time to put together our own doomfleet while using our media and diplomatic savvy to divide and manipulate the Compact's unwieldy system.

Burned_Cookie · Dec 21, 2021

[X] Plan: Real Spies Work in Embassies
[X] Plan Look At Us Now ARG Edition

Also, hi.

nocarename · Dec 21, 2021

I want to throw out a B5 quote, but well, it seems a little pretentious if you aren't wearing an encounter suit.

Anyway. We've prestaged a lot of work. If we back off now we get a guaranteed terrible outcome.

Will we cause chaos and disruption across human space? Oh yes. But I wanted the anarchist vote at the beginning to win.
The hierarchies are unfair and post scarcity is prevented by licensing agreements, tight control of fabrication systems and misused math. Flip the table, destroy the system and see what potential unleashed reveals to the galaxy.

The Laurent · Dec 21, 2021

Argent Citadel said:
I think we really could make a great deal of use of our status as a spoiler if we hold off on the parts of the broadcast that are the most threatening bits to the Compact - specifically the Box, FRM Warez and revolutionary instructions, and just stick to documenting charter abuses and showcasing us. That's going to politically poison any offensives against us, and empower opponents of the Charters within the Compact, while not provoking as much of a backlash. Then we have the time to put together our own doomfleet while using our media and diplomatic savvy to divide and manipulate the Compact's unwieldy system.

The FRM Warez and the Box are the most fundamental and valuable parts of the Broadcast. Snipping them out risks every single human being in the entire galaxy never getting them when the Charters fix the loopholes we use to spread it.

And... our own doomfleet? How exactly? We did not choose Alexander, the option where we could actually win by building up a fleet and attacking them.

Redshirt Army · Dec 21, 2021

The timeline if we don't send the broadcast, and the current government doesn't invade us, looks something like:

Scenario 1
• Our existence gets dropped as an "October Surprise" equivalent bombshell by the opposition party. (We have literal in-story confirmation this will happen.)

• The more hardline pro-charter opposition party handily wins the election, running on a campaign promise to crush us. The current party becomes a political laughingstock and loses power for a generation, having lost an entire arm of the galaxy to anarchist rebels.

• Fleets from HI (for Elysium), Ares (for Sheol), Cern (for Idyllia) and Omoi (for Ascension) utterly demolish us. They out-economy us roughly 100:1, even if we had dedicated the entirety of every turn to nothing but ship production we would be laughably outmatched.

Naturally, the current government is aware of the enormous risk of embarrassment that our existence poses to them and doesn't want it to happen.

As such, their plan looks something like:

Scenario 2
• Dispatch a supporting fleet of the Solarian Navy to "reinforce" the gate building fleet. (Note the curious absence of any construction vessels you would expect to see in such reinforcements).

• Hammer and anvil the communists between the SolNav fleet at their back and a new SolNav assault from the front.

• Sweep the whole thing under the rug before the opposition can credibly come forward with the news.

The charters prefer Scenario 1 to Scenario 2, so they've directly given the opposition party all the information they need - the government probably suspects this, but doesn't know for certain, and doesn't know whether the opposition has enough evidence to make the accusation stick yet - but they do know that the longer we're around, the more time the opposition will have to find that evidence and the worse things will look for them.

We, on the other hand, don't want to be destroyed, so we've collectively decided to try to do:

Scenario 3

• We send the Broadcast, and pre-empt both the October Surprise and the governments cover-up invasion.

• This sets the Charters and Compact to maximum aggro towards us, but that hopefully doesn't matter, because:

• A tremendous amount of fires will have just been set off across the entire galaxy, and invading us will be trying to close the barn doors after the horses have already escaped - once the Broadcast goes out, the effects will be effectively permanent even if Elysium gets nuked to the stone ages.

• As such, despite their undying hatred, there's only so many resources the Compact and Charters will actually be able to afford to send at us when something like 20% of the galaxy just spontaneously had a revolution.

• As such, we try to weather the storm. There's significant odds that this just straight up destroys the Compact as a unified polity before they even manage to scrape up a new fleet to get to our doorstep. If we get conquered, so be it, we'll turn our planets into a Stalingrad nightmare and make them bleed for every inch. If they glass us, then at least we sent the post-scarcity message out and destroyed the nightmare of the Compact and Charters on they way out.

Is it a perfect plan? Well, no, probably not, but it's the plan that we're actually commited to. We're something like 80% of the way done with it the plan have already pulled the trigger on several instructions tied to it, so if you don't like it, the time to register complaints was IRL months ago. Backing out now just gets us the worst of both worlds.

@AKuz on Discord:
Going to quickly make an *Ex Cathedra* statement that if co-existence was viable, you've steered away from it enough that you can no longer escape the gravity of what you've done

Burned_Cookie · Dec 21, 2021

[X] Plan: The Battle Is Going Again

Eh no matter what happens, at least we'll have made it easier for the next revolutionaries.

clockworkchaos · Dec 21, 2021

So Vice-QM interpretation of recent discussion. This is my opinion, not sure if the other would disagree.

I don't think there was any opinion where the compact was friendly or allied with you. However that didn't mean that you didn't have alternative options. The below was intended to be a viable option

AKuz said:
Play the Game

SocComm Analysis: One of the more intriguing options. This has happened naturally more than a few times, so it shouldn't be that hard to force. We'd want to form a sub commission to determine what the election players are (which will need passive listening from the hack to do) to cause maximum chaos. Advanced projects might even include deals with politicians to support them in exchange for lobbying for peace with us. I'm not sure of its long term viability, but short term it has potential. The biggest problem is contacting them, some sort of free travel agreement would be needed, and FTL communications to help us know what is going on in the compact elections would be a major boost.

The biggest downside is it does little about the Charters themselves. They would still be restrained by the current laws, but the chaos might make them willing to try a lot more.

[ ] Play the Game - One of the things we know about the core is how unstable it's governments are. We can use this to our advantage by tailoring our broadcasts to prevent governments from forming.

The idea isn't that they become friends, just that could are able to use their goverment's failures, the very ones they built in place to make it inefficient in controlling charters, against them. Keeping a Compact fleet off your backs and the Charters semi-restrained. You absolutely would have been attacked, but it would have limited it. At this point it would be much less effective then the (intended viable) path offered back then.

TaliesinSkye · Dec 21, 2021

Redshirt Army said:
Is it a perfect plan? Well, no, probably not, but it's the plan that we're actually commited to. We're something like 80% of the way done with it the plan have already pulled the trigger on several instructions tied to it, so if you don't like it, the time to register complaints was IRL months ago. Backing out now just gets us the worst of both worlds.

If the die is cast, I think the best plan is to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Hopefully the broadcast will be as effective as the thread hopes it will be, but in case it isn't - if there's a significant time lag on the start of revolutions, for example, or the Charters are unexpectedly good at suppressing them - then I think you need viable plans for dealing with those 100 to 1 odds.

The only ideas I have there are to plant scuttling charges on the gates just in case and/or to figure out how to shut them down in decisive but less destructive ways with a crash project. Maybe that means hacking, maybe it means technical work, maybe it means our special forces kidnapping gate building personnel from under the nose of the Solarian Fleet. I'm open to other suggestions, but when you make a big gamble like this the wise thing to do is hedge your bet.

Just the threat of blowing the gates may be enough to stop fleets from coming through, if they're that afraid of what will happen. If they want us dead anyway at that point pissing them off more won't matter.

Diomedea · Dec 21, 2021

The Solarian Navy don't need the gates to hit us, and protecting the gates is the core of their mission. If there was one thing that would let the Navy ignore the other rebellions and demands on their hulls, it would be blowing our gates. Now, it would limit charter access, but I think trading fewer charter fleets for more Navy fleets is a poor trade. Particularly since it's clear the Charter ships have been cost cut and optimized into putting down ground rebellions to the point they punch under their weight class.

The Laurent · Dec 21, 2021

Diomedon said:
The Solarian Navy don't need the gates to hit us, and protecting the gates is the core of their mission. If there was one thing that would let the Navy ignore the other rebellions and demands on their hulls, it would be blowing our gates. Now, it would limit charter access, but I think trading fewer charter fleets for more Navy fleets is a poor trade. Particularly since it's clear the Charter ships have been cost cut and optimized into putting down ground rebellions to the point they punch under their weight class.

Hmm, while I don't agree with the idea of knocking down the gates, they do rely on the gates to get to us, or at least, anything other than the Friendship Fleet that is already there.

Torgamous · Dec 21, 2021

We've got a compromise available in rigging the space gas station to blow. Automatically take out whichever giant murderpancake the fleet is wrapped around, at the cost of angering the spacers. Might be worth it now that we've already got one fleet on our ass that's a match for our fleet, and since stories of our misdeeds might spread less effectively in the post-Broadcast galaxy.

cilax · Dec 21, 2021

How much do we know about the FTL capability of the Solarian Navy?
Im not entirely sure that i trust the entity with a centuries long monopoly on gatetech to not have hoarded some improvements. Especially when HI toook not that long to come up with possible Improvments.

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