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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TheArcanist · Apr 23, 2022

Weird Guy said:
I'm kind've wondering about the endurance of the revolutionary war effort in North America. The entirety of Earth, really.

How long will revolutionary fabber feedstock and energy reserves last?

It is apparently possible to fabricate entire companies of main battle tanks, completely upgrade the gear of infantry units, and make who knows how many drone swarms within only a few days using whatever large-scale fabbers revolutionaries have been able to get their hands on. But those fabber facilities were presumably meant to fulfill civilian demand in a peacetime environment, maybe or maybe not employing a Just-In-Time style supply system to keep the feedstock reserves topped off. Now, revolutionary groups are having those fabbers run at maximum capacity fabricating military hardware and additional fabbers, presumably at a rate those facilities weren't ever meant to sustain.

The question I'm wondering is how long revolutionary groups can sustain their war economy? Energy supply is presumably a non-issue, since Earth is the most developed world in known space, so there's probably power plants everywhere. But are there are any sources of fabber feedstock that can be secured on Earth? I would assume that most surface mining operations have been tapped out, leaving Earth reliant on Sol asteroid mining and offworld shipments to fulfill it's material needs, but maybe I'm wrong.

We included Rhodes technology in the Broadcast, including a bunch of man-portable equipment people can deploy to literally turn random rocks and dirt and stuff into useful feedstock.

clockworkchaos · Apr 23, 2022

Fourteen Days in Sol: May 23rd

Closed Door DMSA Party Caucus Concludes--Political Gossiper

What is going on behind closed doors? On both the 22nd and 23rd, all-day party conferences for the members of this small party occurred behind well-secured doors, with takeout going in but nobody going out except for brief breaks. Those that did would not answer reporter questions, leading many to speculate that a plot against PM Roderick is brewing behind…

[SOL CRISIS NEWS ALERT][Europe] Talks Break Down As War Looms- Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch

Only minutes ago the European Parliament's Spanish and Ukranian delegates, as well as those from Belarus and non-voting delegates from across BNOZ walked out early this morning in reaction to Prime Minister Manu's attempt to pass the relief package negotiated with Compact PM Roderick last evening.

A political manoeuvre that had been expected to be nothing more than a formality has had its momentum halted by the actions of the Spanish, Ukrainian, and Belarusan MEPs.

Despite these setbacks, Manu's coalition still controls the European Parliament and it's expected that the package will passed either this evening or in the early morning of the current emergency session.

Anarchist Air Strikes on Ras Al Mar -France 24

Algerian Units deployed around Ras Al Mar have been subject to intense aerial fire tonight, as Anarchist drones and piloted control aircraft operate freely over their defensive line, undisturbed by Algerian air defences. Military analysts suggest that the Anarchists are employing so-called Locust Swarm tactics, first pioneered by the pacification of Etienne during the First Frontier War, in which huge numbers of cheap drones are stacked up over the target. These massive drones swarms are able to soak up missile fire and rapidly destroy radars, missile and laser systems.

With Algerian air defences suppressed, the anarchists have subjected Ras Al Mar to hours of aerial bombardment. France 24 has also learned that a column of elite shock troops belonging to the Sahel Black Lions has been seen approaching the area, with Fatima Habré's daily address promising no mercy for any Algerian soldier who does not surrender by the time of the anarchist attack, thought to begin no later than tonight.

Anarchist State-Affiliated Media
[Learn More]

Surprise Defeat for North-American Security Forces at the Battle of Seattle - France 24

Black Flags fly over Seattle's Capitol Hill today as victorious anarchist forces lead by the legendary Voltairine de Cleyre Brigade, reinforced by battlegroups from Cascadian, Canadian and Californian anarchists (the so-called allied communes) have inflicted an apparently decisive reversal on Charter security forces, Seattle Municipal militia and SolNav Naval Infantry forces operating in the area of PacificCity's Old Seattle district.

The deployment of the 33rd SolNav Naval Infantry Division along with several fresh Ares and Physical security units to Seattle was meant to turn the situation on the West Coast around, but it appears to have been anticipated by the anarchists, who used their control over the West Coast's rapid transit system to bring in forces from as far away as the San-Diego district, and made use of large amounts of armour and heavy drones. Outnumbered, the Security forces were forced to give ground, eventually falling back to Seattle District's port facilities and being picked up by amphibious vessels chartered from the Brazilian and Argentinian navy. Several attempts were made by the anarchists to sink these vessels in the harbour but Solarian forces say that there was no repeat of the loss of the President Salah, and all major amphibious landing ships were able to get away, despite the loss of several escort craft and a large number of drones.

While Charter forces seek to play up the success of the evacuation, the defeat in Seattle deals a major blow to Compact efforts to resecure the West Coast, with many Solarian units and friendly militias now effectively blockaded inside small defence perimeters surrounded by increasingly increasingly hostile urban areas. Kusinagi, the leader of the Voltairine de Cleyre Brigade publically issued a call for all remaining security forces to lay down their arms and a threat to those who would fight on..

"We are capable of the mercy you have never demonstrated." She said. "But this war has been long, and our patience wears thin." As of yet, there seems to have been little response from remaining security units, however, our correspondents on the ground report a steady stream of defections and surrenders from Charter Aligned militia and police units.

Anarchist State-Affiliated Media
[Learn More]

China Announces New Elections--#SolPoliticsDaily

In a move calculated to bleed off pressure, the leading Chinese Communist Party has declared snap elections. Once an election is held, another cannot be held for two years, reflecting fears that a newly-organizing "Anarchist Electoral Bloc" could form if given enough time. By cutting it off and promoting their own mandate for reform, the CCP seeks to… 1/14

EU Considers Reforms--DailyReform Revival Bulletin

Earlier today the European Union's Legislature narrowly resolved to hold a conference within the next three months to begin reforms in the face of the widespread anarchist and communist protests which have gripped the capitals of every major member-state of the European Union. These reforms are unspecified, but are said to be "Liberal" in character and represent "the highest values of Liberalism to free all the people from poverty and strife…"

Terror Fox seen in Chicago - London Daily Telegraph

Ameranthine Terrorist Theodore "Ambassador" Santiago has resurfaced, this time in Chicago, addressing crowds celebrating the assumed rebirth of the Democratic Federation. Now at the heart of anarchist power, it seems unlikely that law enforcement will be able to capture the Terror Fox until the general disorder in North America has been put down. Despite this, Solarian Marshals have not given up the hunt, and have vowed to avenge their comrades killed in the Jersey City Massacre and bring this terrorist to justice.

[SOL CRISIS ALERT][EUROPE] Coup Underway in Istanbul- Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch

In the early hours of the 23rd, explosions racked Turkey's Capital Istanbul as what seems likely to be a well-planned military coup has been enacted. The legislature has been captured, and so has the Prime Minister, and as of noon it seems as if Istanbul is under control of the military coupists, with much of the rest of Turkey quickly falling in line.

However, those units of the Turkish Armed Forces deployed at the request of the Greek government to put down the so-called "Athenian Commune" appear loyal to the legitimate civilian government as skirmishing has begun to break out between them and coupist troops.

In orbit the small Turkish fleet has openly pledged its neutrality in the growing surface side civil conflict until "the situation is resolved in favour of peace and stability" which many observers have taken as an offer to play king maker.

Though little news is escaping the information control of the new military government, expert sources blame the example of anarchist frontier warlords featured in the iconoclast pirate broadcast who "may have inspired this action by showing the power of naked military rule compared to the compassionate and careful rule of civilians."

Pope Issues Stirring Denunciation of Anarchism and Endorsement of Isthar-Watch--God Daily

Pope Boniface XII was quoted as saying:

"The Church has always been concerned with its obligation to ''the working class'' or ''the poor' as outlined by Pope Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical underlined Catholicism's responsibility to these groups. To claim that liberation theology is the only path, or even the best path, is go be ignorance of the church. Or, as Pope John Paul the Second stated 'The indispensable cry for justice and the preferential solidarity with the poor need not be mortgaged to ideologies foreign to the faith.' Anarchism, even disguised as 'liberation theology' is foreign to the faith. "

As well as:

"I am thus praying constantly for peace, every four hours. But how do I know when to pray? With the Ishtar-Watch. God speaks to me at all hours, and Hermes-Ishtar is there to help me listen. Join me in this Prayer Crusade by purchasing an Ishtar-Watch. If you buy now and use the promo code "Boniface" you will receive 20% off."

Trouble In BNOZ--Balkan Watch!

Ever since the Long, Hot Decades and the rash of genocides in the region, the former Balkans regions and Romania have been under control of the Balkan Neutral Occupation Zone Authorities (BNOZA), a joint project of UN, Compact, and EU forces to establish order in the famously troubled region.

While the reconstruction has been slow, over the past century they have even managed to restore some "nation state" zones, such as Bulgaria, Albania and Romania, and there were speculations that by the end of the 23rd century the mission would be over and these countries could stride boldly and proudly into the 24th century.

This seems increasingly unlikely as protests spread throughout the entire region in the wake of the anarchist movement in Greece, as the EU and UN have temporarily lost control of large portions of the regions. Calls by some administrators to send in full EU security forces have been rebuffed, at least in part owing to events in Spain, which have made them cautious about…

Mexico City Fighting Analysis (OSINT) by BrotherOfStars

There's a degree of pessimism going around that I do not think is warranted by local conditions. Unlike in other major cities, the security forces here have been quick on the ball to react to thrusts. Instead of leaving them "strung out" and "weak to an obvious thrust down their heart" it has instead forced the Neo-Zapatistas to try multiple different approaches. It is unknown how long they can last, but based on casualty ratings reports released by Mexico City, they have been managing a five to one kill ratio, and there can not be enough anarchists to overcome that, unlike in the savage lands north of the Rio Grande. Mexico is more civilised, and its security forces are better funded.

Ultimately we just have to analyse the logistical chains of both countries. The Anarchists seem to be operating without a recognizable logistical trail, while the logistics system of the Security Forces is advanced and well-formed, with its armoured division mounting a strong defence in the city's southwestern corner, and…

Tunisian Protesters Begin To Arm--Comedy Daily Transcriber

A polite society is an armed society. If so, then I believe that Tunisia is well on its way to being as polite as all of Sol. I mean, don't get me wrong, I get tired of hearing about important developments in jokes. Speaking of tired: I flew all the way here, and boy is it good that Compact control of sub-orbital airspace has collapsed.--Tunisian Comedian Hannad Maloof, at a stand-up gig in Italy.

Prime Minister Roderick Meets With Russian, Chinese, and Egyptian Governments--Off-planet source

Roderick's campaign style tour of Earth has come to Egypt, China, and Russia today, as the Compact's most powerful politician has met personally with the leaders of those countries whose panic induced "IP Nationalization" programs threaten to plunge Earth into further chaos.

Unnamed sources within the Prime Minister's Office report that Roderick has brought with her a generous offer of purchase of unlimited use fabricator access for a yearly fee equal to the lost revenue for the Charters. This offer is further bolstered by a Solarian Central Bank backed offer to pay the costs for the first half decade of this program provided that their military forces aid in restoring order across Sol.

While the leaders of Russia and China remain locked in internal discussions, Egyptian Prime Minister Sadat has already responded publicly, stating that, "It is an offer worth considering but not one that Egypt can rush into without careful consideration."

[SOL CRISIS NEWS ALERT][EUROPE] Prime Minister Manu Mobilizes EDF- Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch

"It is with great reluctance and sorrow that I call up the peacekeepers of the European Defence Force for training exercises upon the borders of Spain and Ukraine," Prime Minister Ingolf Manu of the European Union spoke in a press conference held only moments ago, "I hope there is no need for violence, and we shall not attack first, but intelligence I have been presented with makes it clear that an anarchist first strike is coming. In addition to the treasonous sessesson mooted by several of our member states, that provocations in the Balkans Neutral Occupation Zone, indicate that it is almost certain that Europe is falling under siege by the forces of chaos and destruction."

It is speculated that behind the scenes Manu is also preparing to call up the armies of Europe's member states and place them under federal control and Europe's perceived insecurity and need to law enforcement personnel grows.

Georgia On My Mind--Armenian Daily Wire (Blog)

Why has there been no news from Georgia? Is it strange.

Georgia was the birthplace of the Communist Stalin, and now his ideology and its successor, Anarchism, is winning… and we hear nothing from Georgia, not even news of protests? Let me tell you, as a citizen of Armenia I do not believe it! It is simple: Georgia are the ones behind the Broadcasts. They and the Augments, AIs, and their Historical Masters have planned this attack to weaken the fundamental integrity of their rivals: while they maintain a good centre-right government, the rest of the world plunges into anarchism and will be helpless before their Stalinist hordes, which…

Spart117MC · Apr 23, 2022

trooperist said:
This is the same military that has it as standard operating procedure to have officers 'encourage' their subordinates to be loaned out as temp workers to locals whenever they're in port. Oh and the officers get most of the wages their subordinates earn.

So that already sends my expectations of them to rock bottom. In a peacetime military, those that can play the system rise to the top instead of those that are good at fighting.

It's an almost reverse levy where instead of gathering up the local peasants farmers to form up part of their army, SolNav is doling out its army to work as peasant farmers.

At least with modern conscripts and draftees their time spent in uniform is time spent training, it's just that they don't really spend all that much time in those roles making them inferior to militaries that make use of professional volunteers.

While the situation is pretty different, I can't help but be reminded of those stories about how Russian Airforce pilots that have to take up jobs working for commercial airliners to get additional flight hours because they don't get nearly enough from the military and their resultant lackluster performance over Ukraine.

VillaininGlasses said:
Useful option to have though even if it is unreliable.

Well, it works in Supreme Commander.

TheArcanist said:
We included Rhodes technology in the Broadcast, including a bunch of man-portable equipment people can deploy to literally turn random rocks and dirt and stuff into useful feedstock.

"That's a communications system. It needs repair but I'm willing to bet that you've brought one of those famed ~~Starfleet engineers~~ Box-Chans who can turn rocks into ~~replicators~~ fabbers."

Setsul · Apr 23, 2022

Sara said:
I think that the Compact and Charter 'list of priorities' is going to, very quickly, fluctuate at a staggering pace and probably look a lot less unified as different power players in these institutions prioritize different things in the sheer chaos of upheaval if the pace that Sol's revolts have moved in is even a slight indication.

More pressingly, we are almost certainly going to have to be fighting these people again if we let them go, and I actually don't think their is a way to let them go without one side giving up advantage that the other would have to have incredible levels of trust to think they won't exploit. Either we let them pass through the gates unopposed in which case they have free reign to just attack us without worrying about one of our biggest force multipliers, or we do something that leaves them utterly at our mercy to renege on any deals like demand they give up all their warships or escorted in such small elements to guarantee overwhelming firepower to keep them in line that we could easily renege on the deal in order to cripple the task force by taking out their most important assets while their alone.

This is again, assuming that their not faking a lack of hostility in order to minimize causalities before they attack in the hopes were desperate enough to let them past our gates without conditions and pray for their better natures, a ploy that cost them nothing to try.

Even if this wasn't the case, we're going to need to fight Task Force 12.7 at some point and this is our best shot to do this. Even if you think that priority military communications from Solnav base are getting to the fleet slower then news broadcasts from Earth and that SOlnav left no standing orders in case something like the AIC or Sheol cutting off comms from Compact space, the moment they leave the AIC borders their very quickly going to be getting new orders. Those orders are most likely to be either group up with any task force being sent to deal with us or to stay at Gaid-Thoa to supplement the Charter naval forces in case of attack until either the hammer comes down.

Given how we were one of the first examples of a multisystem socialist breakaway state with a actual naval capacity in who knows how long if not ever, and that dealing with us was a top secret affair that the people in power wanted to go as smoothly as possible, it's likely that the task force is made up of some of the more disciplined and better trained ships they had available in case something happened. Even outside of that, their crews know local AIC force disposition and space better then other flotilla in Solnav or among the Charters by virtue of the time stationed their. Their Liason Officers, while we can note they misread the situation, are unlikely to be outliers in terms of competence among their counterparts in the rest of the service and now have had a chance to familiarize themselves with the cultures of the AIC and it's allies to help with occupation and potentially learn from any previous mistakes.

I find the chances that task Force 12.7 is going to be asked to go deal with some far-off problem they have no experience with over supplementing the much closer response to the AIC situation to be very low.

Now you might say, as I know you have been, it's better to let them through and fight them when they come with the wider invasion fleet when we've had time to prepare. I wholeheartedly disagree, because unless Task Force 12.7 is going to end up being the majority of that Invasion fleets in which case we absolutely should try to fight them now when their isolated either way, whatever force multipliers task Force 12.7 is going to get from these reinforcements in the form of specialized ship types, bigger Capital ships, and just the fact that much larger fleets end up being way more then the sum of their parts.

Meanwhile, it seems pretty unlikely that the AIC will have much in the way of force multipliers that it doesn't already have and will only be marginally stronger versus Task Force 12.7 likely being supplemented by comparable if not greater numbers in reinforcements. We don't make ships fast enough to expand the fleet by enough to make up for the differences and we've already used the Special projects we were willing too, unless we're just on the cusp of getting Wormhole comms not just at all but out of the prototype phase into a production phase and we've unlocked some trick like exploiting their flt nature plus relativity under different gravities to give our fleets precognition via time dilation, it's unlikly that we're going to be in a better relative position defensively in the near future then what we can expect to supplement task Force 12.7.

Their are also a number of advantages to balance any losses taken here in this battle. I believe it's been stated that Solnav ships have more advanced tech then their CHarer counterparts due to mixing various FRMs and propriety tech like we do, so this will give us valuble experience with how they fight. Space battles tend to leave a number of ships on the losing side either crippled or surrenduring that we can use to supplement losses, and perhaps most game changingly it allows us too potentilly get a hold of SOlnav gate tech blueprints that could massively boost our own research and that we could give freely out in the next broadcast.

We should still be near the top of the list in the far spinward frontier, we did start all this after all.

Yes, letting them pass without handing them a chance to easily backstab us is difficult, that's what I was trying to figure out. It's a bit easier thanks to them not having a lot of ground troops, but still difficult.

Hard disagree on this being our best shot. I don't fancy our chances in that fight, we're literally getting more ships this turn and next turn, and we have gate defences everywhere. Move the panic projects and we can get the exact same fight anywhere except now with more ships.
Message priority doesn't change lightspeed. Raphanus is much further from Sol and TF 12.7 started moving almost immediately, before we even got most of the news from Sol. Like I said, if they have orders at all, they're going to be outdated. Start of the black summer, not from "oh shit they have tanks now." Any standing orders definitely didn't factor in us kicking off the greatest black summer.
All in all, I fully expect an advantage out of fighting TF 12.7 even just slightly later.

Iirc 12.7 is literally cobbled together because 12th fleet only existed on paper before that. That's usually not the most elite formation you can come up with. And if you believe they are the best for the job, then fighting them while outnumbered seems like a bad idea.
I also expect them to have sent reports, I doubt all knowledge will be lost if we fight them. We also have to win.

Yes, I expect them to be back. Others have argued that we must fight them now or they'll crush some other breakaway state that they're absolutely sure exists. So at least we agree on them being back, I just think that letting them waste time flying around to regroup is good for us.

They already have more, bigger, and better capital ships than we do. They already have point defence and minesweepers that might be able to deal with our panic projects. Yes, it can always get worse, but we're only improving our situation if we win and don't completely cripple or navy. If we lose we're not going to be building anymore ships any time soon. Any reinforcements TF 12.7 was supposed to get will still show up, but ours won't.

Ok, let's be real then. You expect a fleet of at least the size of TF 12.7 as reinforcements and expect ours to get only marginally stronger by the time they arrive. Do you believe we can beat TF 12.7 with almost no losses? Because that's what we'd need to beat the next fleet if you're right. Otherwise it's already over.

Again, what we gain if we win only applies if we win and I don't fancy our chances. A lot of the ships we captured also came down to rather unique circumstances and absurd luck. I would not bet on another repeat of that. There'll be no Inanna sabotage or absurdly incompetent crews if you believe TF 12.7 to be a crack team.

Derkan · Apr 23, 2022

clockworkchaos said:
"I am thus praying constantly for peace, every four hours. But how do I know when to pray? With the Ishtar-Watch. God speaks to me at all hours, and Hermes-Istar is there to help me listen. Join me in this Prayer Crusade by purchasing an Ishtar-Watch. If you buy now and use the promo code "Boniface" you will receive 20% off."

Wow, it's really the little things that shock and piss you off the most !

TheGrape · Apr 23, 2022

clockworkchaos said:
"I am thus praying constantly for peace, every four hours. But how do I know when to pray? With the Ishtar-Watch. God speaks to me at all hours, and Hermes-Istar is there to help me listen. Join me in this Prayer Crusade by purchasing an Ishtar-Watch. If you buy now and use the promo code "Boniface" you will receive 20% off."

I am torn between horrified disgust and disgusted horror

Amazing Abzan · Apr 23, 2022

clockworkchaos said:
Ultimately we just have to analyse the logistical chains of both countries. The Anarchists seem to be operating without a recognizable logistical trail, while the logistics system of the Security Forces is advanced and well-formed, with its armoured division mounting a strong defence in the city's southwestern corner, and…

It's genuinely amazing how these people still don't understand what they're up against. Just thinking about the situation for 5 seconds should explain why the anarchists don't have a "recognizable logistical trail."

Chloe Sullivan · Apr 23, 2022

pheonix89 said:
We do know that exactly one commanding officer has figured out what FabberWar means.

And his decision was to attack prepared defenses in the mountains with what he had ASAP because he realized that waiting for what reinforcements he could get would not improve the balance of forces.

There's also that Intel Officer who seems to be planning on Going Napoleon (TM).

clockworkchaos said:
Pope Boniface XII was quoted as saying:

"The Church has always been concerned with its obligation to ''the working class'' or ''the poor' as outlined by Pope Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical underlined Catholicism's responsibility to these groups. To claim that liberation theology is the only path, or even the best path, is go be ignorance of the church. Or, as Pope John Paul the Second stated 'The indispensable cry for justice and the preferential solidarity with the poor need not be mortgaged to ideologies foreign to the faith.' Anarchism, even disguised as 'liberation theology' is foreign to the faith. "

As well as:

"I am thus praying constantly for peace, every four hours. But how do I know when to pray? With the Ishtar-Watch. God speaks to me at all hours, and Hermes-Istar is there to help me listen. Join me in this Prayer Crusade by purchasing an Ishtar-Watch. If you buy now and use the promo code "Boniface" you will receive 20% off."

I guess the White Catholic Church has forgotten that Ishtar is a Pagan deity. Or are just a corporate PR department now. I forget if we ever got a look at just what is up with them....

OmegaS · Apr 23, 2022

clockworkchaos said:
Fourteen Days in Sol: May 23rd

I'd like to point out what ISN'T being mentioned, the Andes Offensive. That they're not even trying to spin it says its not going well to say the least.

The push from Seattle isn't over until the flash-fabbed DemFed subs have their go, so they're not going to be safe even in open water. SolNav getting kicked so early also doesn't say good things for them.

And OSINT missed the Fabber problem. Or is deliberately avoiding it. The actual question is what portion of those anarchist losses are actual bodies as opposed to material.

frostgiant · Apr 23, 2022

Derkan said:
Wow, it's really the little things that shock and piss you off the most !

I know right! I was like just kind of discounting most of what he was saying as about what i would expect, Then I read that part and wanted to reach through the screen.

Ultimately we just have to analyse the logistical chains of both countries. The Anarchists seem to be operating without a recognizable logistical trail, while the logistics system of the Security Forces is advanced and well-formed, with its armoured division mounting a strong defence in the city's southwestern corner, and…

Man, They just can't seem to wrap their heads around it, and it gives me an evil grin.

Derkan · Apr 23, 2022

Chloe Sullivan said:
I guess the White Catholic Church has forgotten that Ishtar is a Pagan deity. Or are just a corporate PR department now. I forget if we ever got a look at just what is up with them....

With the corruption on Earth and in the Church, would that make ~~Hermes-~~Ishtar the whore of Babylon ?

Setsul · Apr 23, 2022

Derkan said:
Wow, it's really the little things that shock and piss you off the most !

"Rich enough to buy yourself a pope" is not a benchmark I'd have ever expected to see.

bdun140 · Apr 23, 2022

OmegaS said:
The actual question is what portion of those anarchist losses are actual bodies as opposed to material.

I assumed they were just lying out their asses with regards to the body count, sort of like America did in Vietnam. Take all of the confirmed anarchists, then all of the "suspected anarchists" (random civilians dead in the crossfire), and then they just arbitrarily double it.

Evaunit02mark1 · Apr 23, 2022

Don Alverzo said:
It's genuinely amazing how these people still don't understand what they're up against. Just thinking about the situation for 5 seconds should explain why the anarchists don't have a "recognizable logistical trail."

It's like they didn't even listen to the Broadcast.

"Here's a fabber and a list of all the shit that was IP locked, feed anything you want into the fabber to get enough weapons to arm a gundam in less than 24 hours."

I thought you all were very transparent with the wording frankly.

CuriousRaptor · Apr 23, 2022

Evaunit02mark1 said:
It's like they didn't even listen to the Broadcast.

"Here's a fabber and a list of all the shit that was IP locked, feed anything you want into the fabber to get enough weapons to arm a gundam in less than 24 hours."

I thought you all were very transparent with the wording frankly.

Either it's spin, or the people just CAN'T believe we snapped the economy over our leg like an overlong spaghetti noodle.

They probably think we're hyperbolizing, and if they aren't given accurate information of how Anarchist forces have evolved in a disgustingly short amount of time, they might well not understand we delivered EVERY promise and more.

In short its a reverse of that time sun Tzu sat at a city's gates playing a musical instrument while the gates are opened. They see a trick, when there is no trick, and they're about to have a female Cybernetic veteran rip them new assholes.

Model DC.14F · Apr 23, 2022

clockworkchaos said:
Surprise Defeat for North-American Security Forces at the Battle of Seattle - France 24

When danger reared it's ugly head,
The Naval Infantry bravely turned tail and fled.
Yes, the brave 33rd Division turned about
And gallantly they chickened out.

clockworkchaos said:
Once an election is held, another cannot be held for two years, reflecting fears that a newly-organizing "Anarchist Electoral Bloc" could form if given enough time. By cutting it off and promoting their own mandate for reform,

China: Okay, this is only time we'll be asking this for two years. Everyone that agrees with the Anarchists, raise your hands!.......
oh god, that's a lot of hands.

clockworkchaos said:
"the highest values of Liberalism to free all the people from poverty and strife…"

a.k.a. we realized that if we tried to take away everyone's free stuff, we'll end up like Spain and Ukraine.

clockworkchaos said:
"I am thus praying constantly for peace, every four hours. But how do I know when to pray? With the Ishtar-Watch. God speaks to me at all hours, and Hermes-Istar is there to help me listen. Join me in this Prayer Crusade by purchasing an Ishtar-Watch. If you buy now and use the promo code "Boniface" you will receive 20% off."

...I see why Black Catholicism is so popular. He even picked the one charter that is named after foreign gods.

LucidProp · Apr 23, 2022

clockworkchaos said:
"I am thus praying constantly for peace, every four hours. But how do I know when to pray? With the Ishtar-Watch. God speaks to me at all hours, and Hermes-Istar is there to help me listen. Join me in this Prayer Crusade by purchasing an Ishtar-Watch. If you buy now and use the promo code "Boniface" you will receive 20% off."

Reading about a fictional Pope acting like he was a Youtuber with a sponsorship hurts a lot in a way that's hard to describe.

I hope we get a Anti-Pope to kick this heretic out of the Vatican.

The Laurent · Apr 23, 2022

CuriousRaptor said:
Either it's spin, or the people just CAN'T believe we snapped the economy over our leg like an overlong spaghetti noodle.

They probably think we're hyperbolizing, and if they aren't given accurate information of how Anarchist forces have evolved in a disgustingly short amount of time, they might well not understand we delivered EVERY promise and more.

In short its a reverse of that time sun Tzu sat at a city's gates playing a musical instrument while the gates are opened. They see a trick, when there is no trick, and they're about to have a female Cybernetic veteran rip them new assholes.

It's also from a Mexican Nationalist's OSINT, which is a lot like being an "American Nationalist" in the 2250s, which is to say you pretend that the DemFed never happened and was the worst thing ever. (Because again, Mexico became the DemFed too.)

clockworkchaos · Apr 23, 2022

Chloe Sullivan said:
I guess the White Catholic Church has forgotten that Ishtar is a Pagan deity. Or are just a corporate PR department now. I forget if we ever got a look at just what is up with them....

Real catholics grab pagan deities and turn them into saints. I'm not into this 'new age' stuff.

The Laurent · Apr 23, 2022

Hannz said:
Reading about a fictional Pope acting like he was a Youtuber with a sponsorship hurts a lot in a way that's hard to describe.

I hope we get a Anti-Pope to kick this heretic out of the Vatican.

The fun thing is that the first quote is just a completely normal Papal Conservative speech on etc, etc?

Estro · Apr 23, 2022

clockworkchaos said:
Anarchist State-Affiliated Media
[Learn More]

Setsul · Apr 23, 2022

clockworkchaos said:
Unnamed sources within the Prime Minister's Office report that Roderick has brought with her a generous offer of purchase of unlimited use fabricator access for a yearly fee equal to the lost revenue for the Charters. This offer is further bolstered by a Solarian Central Bank backed offer to pay the costs for the first half decade of this program provided that their military forces aid in restoring order across Sol.

"Free if you pay us at least as much as before" is such a generous offer.
"Actually free for 5 years if you start shooting everyone who disagrees with us" is even better.

frostgiant · Apr 23, 2022

CuriousRaptor said:
Either it's spin, or the people just CAN'T believe we snapped the economy over our leg like an overlong spaghetti noodle.

They probably think we're hyperbolizing, and if they aren't given accurate information of how Anarchist forces have evolved in a disgustingly short amount of time, they might well not understand we delivered EVERY promise and more.

In short its a reverse of that time sun Tzu sat at a city's gates playing a musical instrument while the gates are opened. They see a trick, when there is no trick, and they're about to have a female Cybernetic veteran rip them new assholes.

I can almost see why its so hard for people to wrap their heads around. Imagine finding out that humanity had the tech to be, basically post-scarcity for year. Decades! Hell it was already basically implemented!
And then knowing the only reason your society isn't Post-scarcity is because of pure backassward greed.
There are pretty much 2 responses, Sheer fucking rage (See sol burning) or Forced obliviousness (This guy)

clockworkchaos · Apr 23, 2022

Model DC.14F said:
When danger reared it's ugly head,
The Naval Infantry bravely turned tail and fled.
Yes, the brave 33rd Division turned about
And gallantly they chickened out.

Honestly good retreats are seriously undervalued by people. Force preservation matters a lot in war.

pheonix89 · Apr 23, 2022

clockworkchaos said:
[SOL CRISIS NEWS ALERT][Europe] Talks Break Down As War Looms- Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch

Only minutes ago the European Parliament's Spanish and Ukranian delegates, as well as those from Belarus and non-voting delegates from across BNOZ walked out early this morning in reaction to Prime Minister Manu's attempt to pass the relief package negotiated with Compact PM Roderick last evening.

A political manoeuvre that had been expected to be nothing more than a formality has had its momentum halted by the actions of the Spanish, Ukrainian, and Belarusan MEPs.

Despite these setbacks, Manu's coalition still controls the European Parliament and it's expected that the package will passed either this evening or in the early morning of the current emergency session.

Procedural stalling bullshit is a great way to slow down cosmoliberal ghouls.

Anarchist Air Strikes on Ras Al Mar -France 24

Algerian Units deployed around Ras Al Mar have been subject to intense aerial fire tonight, as Anarchist drones and piloted control aircraft operate freely over their defensive line, undisturbed by Algerian air defences. Military analysts suggest that the Anarchists are employing so-called Locust Swarm tactics, first pioneered by the pacification of Etienne during the First Frontier War, in which huge numbers of cheap drones are stacked up over the target. These massive drones swarms are able to soak up missile fire and rapidly destroy radars, missile and laser systems.

With Algerian air defences suppressed, the anarchists have subjected Ras Al Mar to hours of aerial bombardment. France 24 has also learned that a column of elite shock troops belonging to the Sahel Black Lions has been seen approaching the area, with Fatima Habré's daily address promising no mercy for any Algerian soldier who does not surrender by the time of the anarchist attack, thought to begin no later than tonight.

Hi-Lo mix is a good trick in fabber warfare ... till you get the designs refined enough to run straight high. After all unit cost is purely in terms of resources and time needed to assemble fabbed parts for bigger units.

Anarchist State-Affiliated Media
[Learn More]

Censotr tags of course.

Surprise Defeat for North-American Security Forces at the Battle of Seattle - France 24

Black Flags fly over Seattle's Capitol Hill today as victorious anarchist forces lead by the legendary Voltairine de Cleyre Brigade, reinforced by battlegroups from Cascadian, Canadian and Californian anarchists (the so-called allied communes) have inflicted an apparently decisive reversal on Charter security forces, Seattle Municipal militia and SolNav Naval Infantry forces operating in the area of PacificCity's Old Seattle district.

The deployment of the 33rd SolNav Naval Infantry Division along with several fresh Ares and Physical security units to Seattle was meant to turn the situation on the West Coast around, but it appears to have been anticipated by the anarchists, who used their control over the West Coast's rapid transit system to bring in forces from as far away as the San-Diego district, and made use of large amounts of armour and heavy drones. Outnumbered, the Security forces were forced to give ground, eventually falling back to Seattle District's port facilities and being picked up by amphibious vessels chartered from the Brazilian and Argentinian navy. Several attempts were made by the anarchists to sink these vessels in the harbour but Solarian forces say that there was no repeat of the loss of the President Salah, and all major amphibious landing ships were able to get away, despite the loss of several escort craft and a large number of drones.

White Charter forces seek to play up the success of the evacuation, the defeat in Seattle deals a major blow to Compact efforts to resecure the West Coast, with many Solarian units and friendly militias now effectively blockaded inside small defence perimeters surrounded by increasingly increasingly hostile urban areas. Kusinagi, the leader of the Voltairine de Cleyre Brigade publically issued a call for all remaining security forces to lay down their arms and a threat to those who would fight on..

"We are capable of the mercy you have never demonstrated." She said. "But this war has been long, and our patience wears thin." As of yet, there seems to have been little response from remaining security units, however, our correspondents on the ground report a steady stream of defections and surrenders from Charter Aligned militia and police units.

Welcome back to proper industrial warfare.

Where you can compensate for a multitude of sins by sheer weight of metal. And looks like there's plenty of veteran cadre becides VdCB in play ... man they think this round was bad next time will be worse.

And that's the west coast secure against anything save WMD spam.

Also good on Kusanagi to do the carrot-and-stick surrender demand.

China Announces New Elections--#SolPoliticsDaily

In a move calculated to bleed off pressure, the leading Chinese Communist Party has declared snap elections. Once an election is held, another cannot be held for two years, reflecting fears that a newly-organizing "Anarchist Electoral Bloc" could form if given enough time. By cutting it off and promoting their own mandate for reform, the CCP seeks to… 1/14

They get it!

Course, they best cleave reasonably close to what that anarchist bloc wants to avoid being overtrhown.

Terror Fox seen in Chicago - London Daily Telegraph

Ameranthine Terrorist Theodore "Ambassador" Santiago has resurfaced, this time in Chicago, addressing crowds celebrating the assumed rebirth of the Democratic Federation. Now at the heart of anarchist power, it seems unlikely that law enforcement will be able to capture the Terror Fox until the general disorder in North America has been put down. Despite this, Solarian Marshals have not given up the hunt, and have vowed to avenge their comrades killed in the Jersey City Massacre and bring this terrorist to justice.

It's cute you all still think you can put this down.

Also seriously you really need to stop hyping Ambassador Theodore, Capitalist Pigs. Haven't figured out that at this rate if you do kill him you'll just make a martyr?

[SOL CRISIS ALERT][EUROPE] Coup Underway in Istanbul- Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch

In the early hours of the 23rd, explosions racked Turkey's Capital Istanbul as what seems likely to be a well-planned military coup has been enacted. The legislature has been captured, and so has the Prime Minister, and as of noon it seems as if Istanbul is under control of the military coupists, with much of the rest of Turkey quickly falling in line.

However, those units of the Turkish Armed Forces deployed at the request of the Greek government to put down the so-called "Athenian Commune" appear loyal to the legitimate civilian government as skirmishing has begun to break out between them and coupist troops.

In orbit the small Turkish fleet has openly pledged its neutrality in the growing surface side civil conflict until "the situation is resolved in favour of peace and stability" which many observers have taken as an offer to play king maker.

Though little news is escaping the information control of the new military government, expert sources blame the example of anarchist frontier warlords featured in the iconoclast pirate broadcast who "may have inspired this action by showing the power of naked military rule compared to the compassionate and careful rule of civilians."

Not sure if good or bad, but interesting that an expeditionary force is not siding with the coup.

Pope Issues Stirring Denunciation of Anarchism and Endorsement of Isthar-Watch--God Daily

Pope Boniface XII was quoted as saying:

"The Church has always been concerned with its obligation to ''the working class'' or ''the poor' as outlined by Pope Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical underlined Catholicism's responsibility to these groups. To claim that liberation theology is the only path, or even the best path, is go be ignorance of the church. Or, as Pope John Paul the Second stated 'The indispensable cry for justice and the preferential solidarity with the poor need not be mortgaged to ideologies foreign to the faith.' Anarchism, even disguised as 'liberation theology' is foreign to the faith. "

As well as:

"I am thus praying constantly for peace, every four hours. But how do I know when to pray? With the Ishtar-Watch. God speaks to me at all hours, and Hermes-Istar is there to help me listen. Join me in this Prayer Crusade by purchasing an Ishtar-Watch. If you buy now and use the promo code "Boniface" you will receive 20% off."

Purge. The. Heretic.

This makes indulgencies look un-crass!

Mexico City Fighting Analysis (OSINT) by BrotherOfStars

There's a degree of pessimism going around that I do not think is warranted by local conditions. Unlike in other major cities, the security forces here have been quick on the ball to react to thrusts. Instead of leaving them "strung out" and "weak to an obvious thrust down their heart" it has instead forced the Neo-Zapatistas to try multiple different approaches. It is unknown how long they can last, but based on casualty ratings reports released by Mexico City, they have been managing a five to one kill ratio, and there can not be enough anarchists to overcome that, unlike in the savage lands north of the Rio Grande. Mexico is more civilised, and its security forces are better funded.

Ultimately we just have to analyse the logistical chains of both countries. The Anarchists seem to be operating without a recognizable logistical trail, while the logistics system of the Security Forces is advanced and well-formed, with its armoured division mounting a strong defence in the city's southwestern corner, and…

Yes we have to analyze the logistical chains.

And if the anarchists are pulling kit out of nowhere that means they've got a full fabber setup and you are right fucked.

Also counting on KDA claims as a useful metric? When fighting people with fabbers supplying top of the line meds and cybernetics? You can't assume that blowing someone's legs off renders them combat ineffective you idiots! You can't assume anything other than head or torso destruction was a killshot if you don't have a body ... and depending on the level of cybering involved those may not be reliable either.

Prime Minister Roderick Meets With Russian, Chinese, and Egyptian Governments--Off-planet source

Roderick's campaign style tour of Earth has come to Egypt, China, and Russia today, as the Compact's most powerful politician has met personally with the leaders of those countries whose panic induced "IP Nationalization" programs threaten to plunge Earth into further chaos.

Unnamed sources within the Prime Minister's Office report that Roderick has brought with her a generous offer of purchase of unlimited use fabricator access for a yearly fee equal to the lost revenue for the Charters. This offer is further bolstered by a Solarian Central Bank backed offer to pay the costs for the first half decade of this program provided that their military forces aid in restoring order across Sol.

While the leaders of Russia and China remain locked in internal discussions, Egyptian Prime Minister Sadat has already responded publicly, stating that, "It is an offer worth considering but not one that Egypt can rush into without careful consideration."

"Pay a shitload of money for thing you could do yourself for free" is not a generous offer. Normally it's the kind offer you respond to by having security remove the offerer but they can't do that for tactical reasons.

[SOL CRISIS NEWS ALERT][EUROPE] Prime Minister Manu Mobilizes EDF- Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch

"It is with great reluctance and sorrow that I call up the peacekeepers of the European Defence Force for training exercises upon the borders of Spain and Ukraine," Prime Minister Ingolf Manu of the European Union spoke in a press conference held only moments ago, "I hope there is no need for violence, and we shall not attack first, but intelligence I have been presented with makes it clear that an anarchist first strike is coming. In addition to the treasonous sessesson mooted by several of our member states, that provocations in the Balkans Neutral Occupation Zone, indicate that it is almost certain that Europe is falling under siege by the forces of chaos and destruction."

It is speculated that behind the scenes Manu is also preparing to call up the armies of Europe's member states and place them under federal control and Europe's perceived insecurity and need to law enforcement personnel grows.

And Here We Go.

Expect a lot of cross-Med bombardment from the Sahara.

Georgia On My Mind--Armenian Daily Wire (Blog)

Why has there been no news from Georgia? Is it strange.

Georgia was the birthplace of the Communist Stalin, and now his ideology and its successor, Anarchism, is winning… and we hear nothing from Georgia, not even news of protests? Let me tell you, as a citizen of Armenia I do not believe it! It is simple: Georgia are the ones behind the Broadcasts. They and the Augments, AIs, and their Historical Masters have planned this attack to weaken the fundamental integrity of their rivals: while they maintain a good centre-right government, the rest of the world plunges into anarchism and will be helpless before their Stalinist hordes, which…

STOP ATTRIBUTING OUR MASTERSTROKE TO CONSPIRACIES YOU DERANGED LUNATIC!

WE DID THIS! Radiant! WE DID THIS!

NOT WHATEVER THE FUCK THIS IS!

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

Been Better

Fourteen Days in Sol: May 23rd

Amateur human

Subdefective

Fourteen Days in Sol: May 23rd

I have ideas. Sometimes they're even good.

S-s-smell the Prey, S-s-start the Hunt.

Pocky Eating MafiaDoka

Sassy Bitch Stargazer

Wants to be Seven Of Nine