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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Neshuakadal · Apr 27, 2022

clockworkchaos said:
I'm sorry, my original post was way out of line and inappropriate.

Like... behind the curtain here for a moment.

A surrender involving letting you have their ships, and placing themselves in a place where you could easily then turn around massacre them was not a reasonable set of terms. Especially because your fleets aren't that far apart. Surrenders work when you have enough of an advantage that people are pretty sure they can't win, or have already lost a battle and now it's 'surrender of go down fighting'. Right now, 12.7 isn't remotely at that level.

I also wouldn't entirly count out the fact that their fleet knows you've offered surrender terms, and that they can get back if they give up, which might keep some from trying to go down fighting.

Offering surrender isn't pointless, but you do need to understand if it's one you expect to be taken up on, and if so, when.

My issue with surrender terms being offered while the 12.7 is still around Oslium is that they are still around Oslium. They don't have to do anything. If it was offered when they were burning away from the planet they might have to make some tough choices regarding fuel. As it stands they can just sit there being a strategic thorn in our sides.

But the GM's have made their decision. In the future I won't vote to offer surrender until the battle is joined. Anything else cedes far to much strategic initiative for my liking.

Redshirt Army · Apr 27, 2022

Neshuakadal said:
For me lesson leaned. Don't offer surrender terms in the future. Seems entirely pointless.

As the one who actually made the winning plan, 12.7 immediately surrendering their ships without any shots being fired was always an extreme longshot.

The point of the plan was not for the surrender to be accepted (though of course I would have been thrilled if it was), it was to gain PR as not "firing without warning", sow potential discord in the fleet as the news percolates down, and to push 12.7 to surrender if the actual fleet battle turns against them, rather than fighting to the last.

Artificial Girl · Apr 27, 2022

Omake: Maybe it's another drill

CNS Velasco, June 12th

Remote Operations Officer Lieutenant Eva Huang-Velasquez clambered up the ladder to settle into her seat on the flight deck of the strikecraft preparing for take-off, touching the stylized red wolf's head beneath the cockpit as she went. The normal tradition for good luck. Behind and above her, her pilot, Lieutenant-Commander Issak Saparov was settling into his seat. While Issak would manage the actual flight of the strike-craft, it was Eva's responsibility to monitor and control the swarm of smaller drones that they would launch once they were in position. Hooking her suit into the strike-craft's oxygen system, she began running through her system's checks and gave a thumbs up to the deck crew. The cockpit began to close over them and the intercom clicked.

"Nervous?" Issak asked. He didn't usually ask that, but with the days slowly counting down towards the arrival of SolNav, it had to be weighing on everyone's mind. Eva didn't think about it herself.

"Not really." Eva said, tapped the side of her helmet where a red death's head stared out at the world. She'd grown up on Shei--the specter of sudden and imminent death didn't bother her the way it seemed to bother a lot of off-worlders, even void pilots from Chinook like Issak who had to know how dangerous what they did was.

"We're gonna fly, and whatever happens, happens." She'd already said her goodbyes in a message home. As far as her family were concerned, she might as well be dead already--if she made it back to them alive, that would be a blessing, but she was ready to die her second death in defense of Shei and the Congress.

"Checklist is green on my end. All sensors operating, all systems nominal. Radio green. RADAR green. LiDAR green. ECM drones, green. ECCM drones, green. Attack drones, green." she continued as rote as ever. Another simulation, another drill, another day to hone themselves into a blade that would carve the guts out of the Compact.

"Sometimes I envy you weirdos," Issak muttered as the flight elevator began to lift them up to the launch deck. "Life support operational, check. All flight systems, check, all engines, check, all maneuvering thrusters, check. Weapons green," he continued.

"We're ready to fly," his voice was settling. Evening out into a professional coolness. It was normal to get nerves before something like this, Eva thought. At least for people who weren't already dead. She just hoped that when the real thing came, he wouldn't let his nerves override the need to complete the mission.

"Let's get to it, then," Eva said as the armored cover to the cockpit slid firmly into place, temporarily blocking out the view of the launch deck through the canopy before the holographic displays flickered into life and synched with helmet HUDs to show an expansive view that simple windows couldn't hope to match.

"Flight Control, Red Wolf One-Seven. All systems green and prepared for launch," Issak spoke into the radio.

"Red Wolf One-Seven, Flight Control. Affirmative. You are in the pattern for launch. Stand by for launch in Thirty seconds." A pause that felt almost two long, then: "Ten, nine, eight--" The countdown ticked by and as the calm woman's voice finished, the pair of them were pushed back into their seats by a sudden lurch of acceleration as the launch catapult flung them out into the void. Thrusters fired briefly to give additional delta-v and then the craft turned to burn away from the ship. On Eva's display, blue dots sprung up, identifying friendly capital ships, strike craft, and drone swarms. As neatly as anyone could hope to, Issak slotted them into formation.

Formation, they called it, even though there were tens or hundreds of kilometers between them and the nearest manned strike craft, the intervening distance filled with the drone swarms. Eva focused on her work and as they settled into position her display indicated successful deployment of her drones into formation. Good. The forward swarm was moving sluggishly, maybe three percent below the rest of them. She'd talk to the maintenance folks, see if they could straighten that out when they finished up the simulation.

Eva looked up through her display and out at the void of space stretching before them and the distant lights of the gate and its defenses. Beautiful. Radio chatter hummed in her helmet, the wing commander counting down the minutes until the simulated attack would begin.

Her eyes closed for a moment and she could see the blue skies of Shei stretching out in front of her, bright and cloudless as she made her aerial strikecraft dance through the beams of sunlight. A place where you could reach out and touch God, if only for a moment. A place where the line between the living and the dead thinned.

A place where you knew your soul could transit to infinity.

Eva was here to make sure that those skies would never again hold fear and death for her young siblings. For her nieces and nephews born and unborn.

For every child born since the liberation who would never grow up knowing the sky was a thing to fear.

If that meant dying, then she was already dead. What was a single life against a future for millions?

Yes.

This would be a good place to die a second death.

SemiRational · Apr 27, 2022

Question:how many objects do fleets track and what is the minimum size? when is an object too small to be worth tracking?

Setsul · Apr 27, 2022

You all had the chance to write down horribly complicated and detailed plans that still wouldn't have gone like you expected, but in different, more interesting ways.

Or be like me, and wait until has no chance of winning anymore, because it seemed horribly complicated and overly detailed, so that you never find out if it could've worked.

Seriously though, demanding a surrender only once they're on a collision course with the minefield we put in front of the gate to sow confusion is a very specific plan, not the normal way of demanding a surrender. At that point there'd barely be any difference to the usual in combat surrenders we've seen.

Also, as far as I understand it, there's warp drives but no magic momentum-cancelling technology. If a fleet is hurtling towards a gate at a significant fraction of c because they want to get somewhere and prefer not to spend days within shooting range of gate defences, then there is no magic button to make it stop in seconds. Or am I wrong about that?

The winning plan included the option for negotiations and you can't do that at the last second.
I completely forgot actually writing down that point in my plan, even though I had planned to include it (still too long even without it), but letting the negotations get bogged while keeping TF 12.7 interested enough to stall for time would've been a valid strategy too.

Anyway, to me it seems like there were a lot of different expectations for how and what to use the surrender demand for that don't really work with the plan because it wasn't really designed to do that by Redshirt Army.
The way the QMs choose to interpret it does work with what he intended though, if I'm reading his post correctly.

100thlurker · Apr 27, 2022

tatbee is taking a short vacation. Hello everyone, sorry to interrupt.

@Tatbee will be taking a vacation from this thread for 72 hours to cool their head after an unfortunate outburst. It will be appreciated if no one quotes or tags them in the meantime.

Model DC.14F · Apr 27, 2022

So, battle results tomorrow or Friday?

AKuz · Apr 27, 2022

Fourteen Days In Sol--May 27, 2255

Business Associations Attack PM Costa's Inactivity-Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch

Responding to the paralysis of the Altantis government under Atlantis Liberal Democratic Party PM Felix Costa, leading trade and commerce organizations across the system have issued a full throated attack on the government's inaction.

The blistering press release, issued jointly by the Atlantis Chamber of Commerce, the Atlantis Small Business Association, and Cernunnos Botanicals, Atlantis' largest employer in conjunction with a number of the system's leading families have hotly denounced the government's inaction saying, "Every moment that passes is another moment closer to anarchist violence" and that "the strike threatens to destroy the tax base that Atlantis' famous welfare net relies on".

At the moment there has been no response from the PMO, however a representative of the Atlantis Labour Congress has replied by saying that "The Congress is prepared to sit down with the government and establishment stakeholders wherever and whenever they finally decided to negotiate an end to this deadlock"

Community Consultations Continue--Olduvai Beacon

Today is the third day of the so-called "Community consultations", in which protestors occupy major corporate offices and government buildings and demand that the members of Olduvai's legislature come to community meetings since "your own place of work is no longer available."

Hundreds of MPs have been practically touring the planet as discussion and debate continue. These"Community Consultation" protests are generally guarded by volunteers armed with non-lethal weaponry that is of a higher standard than that of most Law Enforcement organizations.

These protest groups have also been reportedly in communications with radical lawmakers throughout Olduvai. The government seems torn between these radical dissidents and mainstream politicians.

Community organization camps, a sort of neighborhood protest organization, have sprung up across the planet, and thus far have remained peaceful, are even better armed up to military standards.

Nonetheless, despite a few isolated incidents the relative lack of violence has been notable, with greater and greater numbers of Olduvai's citizens leaving work and taking advantage of the emergency three day holiday declared by the Prime Minister last night. This holiday, designed to reduce tensions and quell angry demands that the Olduvai Self Defence Force be dispatched to arrest the birthworld's slide into tyranny, have taken on a festive atmosphere with spontaneous festivals and community parties erupting across the system.

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European Parliament Rejects Compact Loans In Narrow Vote--Humanity Herald

In a close confidence vote that lasted through the night and into the late morning, the European Parliament voted to reject Compact Prime Minister Margaret Roderick's crisis assistance package.

Reeling from the defeat, European Prime Minister Manu wasted no time in tendering his resignation, saying in his resignation speech that "Europe cannot afford to be paralyzed during this crisis, nor can she afford a Prime Minister who has lost the confidence of Parliament."

Manu's resignation has temporarily left a power vacuum as Europe's parties scramble to to replace the "Man without a Nation", and the Compact itself is placed on the backfoot by the sudden loss of one of their staunchest European allies in this crisis, leaving many to question who will act to stop the spread of anarchism south of the Pyrenees.

Parliament Rejects Negotiation With Sahara In Non-Binding Resolution--European Voice

…when asked about the logic of rejecting the Compact Loan and also negotiations with the Saharan revolutionaries for the basic Solar Power that powers Europe, MP Stannis Borlev was reportedly speechless and unable to explain the decision, decided by only three votes.

Opposition Caucus declared Seditious--New Washington Observer

Citing their links to insurrectionary groups and open attempts to subvert the legitimate government of the Community of Humanity, a bipartisan alliance has voted to withdraw Parliamentary Privilege from the Opposition Caucus and ban those MPs from Parliament, with only several abstenions registered among the PRHL and JDAP.

Spokesperson for the Party of Human Rights and Liberties, Martin DeVere said, "While we must respect the democratic process, this does not extend to allowing traitors waging active war against the government. All members of the DMSA present on Sol have been arrested so that they may be fairly and freely tried in a legitimate court of law."

Caucus Solarian National List MP for Southeast Asia West Safa Rostami spoke on behalf of their suspiciously absent colleagues saying, that "The eyes of history are upon us, we have not bent. Can you say the same?

As disgraced former MP Rostami was taken into custody on charges for abetting of terrorism, sedition, and treason additional warrants have been issued for their remaining co-conspirators in the "Opposition Caucus" who are believed to have gone underground.

[For More On Silvia Greene's Controversial Abstention Vote Click The Link Below]

European Union States Try To Negotiate With Anarchists--Daily Volksturmer

In a move of utmost cowardice, individual nations of the European Union have begun negotiating with terrorists. In France, Germany, and Italy they have allowed large regions of the country to fall under the control of anarchist communes and rebels, and are even now trying to find a path forward. Is there anyone left who will save Europe and liberalism from this cowardice from people who were otherwise good, progressive Liberals?

Our only solace is that these attempts will fail in the face of the bloodthirst which Anarchists engage in, and the uncompromising nature of their demands.

Voltairine de Cleyre Brigade "Justice for all" worm brings the realities of war to reactionaries –Unwired

Muramasa doesn't seem like a woman more than two hundred years old. Dark haired and heavily rebuilt with Omoikane and other high end military cybernetics, she looks more like she should grace a Morro Bay advertisement than one of the legendary ghosts who have haunted the compact since the fall of the Democratic Federation.

"The real breakthrough for us was when we started to capture the physical advertising servers" she told me. "The fact that almost the entire Compact use devices are wired into a set of four or five advertising services introduced a huge element of vulnerability into their architecture."

Muramasa, and the Brigade's special operations section hit on a plan to use this, and their long term skills at cyberwarfare to their advantage. "Modern warfare generates an extraordinary amount of footage of combat, everything from weapons sights to the eyes of operatives to drones and securityware views the battlefield and records what happened. Combining that with the data on Charter and Compact atrocities being put together by various groups across earth, we have a powerful weapon against enemy morale."

The concept of the Justice For All worm is deceptively simple. Combining advanced software weapons and Brigade knowhow and the advertising system, the worm gets into the advertisements we're used to viewing before using most applications. Then, instead of an advertisement it replays the story of the crimes, and death, of an enemy operative in all it's uncensored glory. "The biggest challenge was collating everything and fact checking it." Muramasa says. "We're interested in showing the truth, not making things up."

Some have suggested that this use of footage of enemy dead constitutes a war crime. When asked, Muramasa was philosophical about the prospect. "This is my responsibility and maybe I'll see a cell for it, but I'm immortal, and I think this will shorten the war. I can't imagine a world in which destroying the enemy's morale can be worse than destroying them with bombs." It is a remarkably self sacrificing suggestion for someone who's already sacrificed so much for freedom. "Honour," she says, "can come when we are strong."

So far internal VdCB figures show that over one point seven million individuals have seen the crimes, and deaths of five thousand separate reactionaries, and this number is climbing moment by moment. Soon, they hope, everyone will know the ignoble fate of opposing the Democratic Federation's rebirth.

Japanese Anarchists announce plan to shelter fugitive AIs –France 24

In a prepared speech today, Reizei Sakura, spokeswoman for the Japanese Anarchist United Front has announced a controversial plan to repurpose the self replicating network of reconstruction machines to serve as a haven for AI refugees fleeing the war across Sol and the Compact.

"AGIs are among the most persecuted beings across known space." Reizei said. "It is only right that they be given a shelter, one that cannot be destroyed."

The Polyethene Lobsters, a small self replicating cleanup machine based on modified versions of Ares battlefield recovery drone refitted with HI derived environmental cleanup package have been widely distributed in East and South East Asia, targeting the large garbage islands and other wreckage created by the climate change and war of the late twenty first century. Versions of the design have been deployed as far away as Hawaii and along the coast of Myanmar.

Politicians in China and conservative groups in alarm have met the plans with alarm, but with Chinese military forces committed to stablization operations all across its border regions, leaders in Beijing believe there is little to hamper reconstruction efforts, even if they include such radical pro-machine policies.

The move was welcomed by AGI pressure groups across the system, including Continental Digital Consciousness Association who declared that "For the first time we shall have a homeland."

Anarchist State-Affiliated Media
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New Democratic Federation Offensives Launched--#SolarianNewsLine

While they have not revealed where they are, the Democratic Federation has declared that they are done playing "defence" in Atlantic City, and they intend to strike out big within the next week, despite the expected influx of new Compact forces expected to arrive from offworld in the coming days.

China Sends Peacekeeping Forces to Australia--West China Bulletin

In what can only be called a flexing of their extensive might, China has not only sent forces to deal with unrest in Thailand and evaluate the new government, and sent divisions into North Korea to help secure their new government, but has also pledged to send a peacekeeping force to Australia to tamp down on the violence and negotiate some sort of peace.

Foreign policy experts speculate that China's Communist Party, the CCP, needs a victory in Australia to reassure its China-First voters that the country is still a significant and major player in global politics, and that the recent rise of South Korean Anarchism and Indian intransigence has shaken this confidence necessitating firm action, especially as news of the massacre of Chinese nationals and Chinese Australians by the new commune have only furthered the call to action with many.

Free Communes the Maghreb declared in the wake of victory over Solarian occupiers of Morocco and Algiers--People's View

FCIM spokesperson Kheira Touati has officially declared victory against the charter puppet governments of Morocco and Algiers, securing a decisive victory for the Free Communes in the Maghreb. They have also called upon Egypt to return the ex-government and generals for trial, while the 'government in exile' has vowed it will continue the fight.

In the wake of this victory, the former Saharan Commune has expanded to form the Free Communes in Iberia and the Maghreb, an anarchist space that spans a greater part of North Africa.

The Egyptian Government has declined to comment

All Is Peaceful In United Kingdom, From His Royal Majesty's MicroStories Account

Unlike other, lesser nations, the British stiff upper lip means that there has been no troubles whatsoever, and indeed we have thrived whereas others have fallen into chaos and dissension, thanks to…(1/100)

Excerpts from an Interview With Military Coupists In Turkey--German News Nightly

Thomas Sean: I am sorry, can you repeat that? I did not understand what you say your ideology is, it…

Captain Alp Serin : We are Council Anarchists in the Sheolite model, and we will create a military democracy in which all civilians are included, for the whole of society must be aimed at defence and self-assertion. We have been preparing a revolt for years against the cosmoliberal destruction of human rights that the former ruling party had been engaged in, but Sheol has shown us the way to civilian-military cooperation and military democracy that will allow us to fight off the Charters and any potential Russian incursion. This new state will model itself on…

Thomas Sean: The Prison planet?

Captain Alp Serin: The former prison planet, yes. And the bold deeds of those who maintained democracy in the most trying of circumstances! The Sheolites have shown us the way, how we can be anarchist and military at once. No Gods, No Masters, No Junta of Generals. We stand with our comrades in Greece and Ukraine, just as Sheol stands with their comrades in Radiant…

Anarchist State-Affiliated Media
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Marcy Collins case highlights the barbarity of the Charters - Los Angeles Times

Fourteen year old Marcy Collins never intended to read fanfiction. So she tells me, so her parents tell me. She simply read the wrong Egyptian based Hearts Align web forum. For this, she was dragged from her school by four Hermes Ishtar goons, and she and her parents were faced with a Kafkaesk nightmare of the Hermes criminal justice system

"I was shocked," Mina Collins, a Forty Four year old Management Consult and mother of three tells me. "We were doing everything the system told us we should do, and our daughter was one mistake away from imprisonment and life time unemployment."

When Marcy was arrested, the Collins were told that she could face up to three years of juvenile corrections, another name for prison, years of probation and permanent marks on her employability and credit records. Only a Scared Safe Tour, where children as young as twelve years old are taken through adult prisons to be 'scared straight' would allow her to escape such a fate. These, however, had been cancelled by Ares due to overcrowding, now known to have been caused by the loss of their Sheol off world prison facility to the AIC. Her parents, desperate, fought hard to get her on the first Scared Straight Tour available, On May the 19th, the day of the storming of Alcatraz.

"They didn't do anything to protect us. They pointed guns at Anna, just because she was an augment!" Marcy tells me. "Everyone was screaming and running and shouting at us! It was so loud!"

The Ares police contractors went so far as to use the tour group as human shields, herding them into the facility's command centre in order to 'protect' them from the fighting. When they 'made too much noise' one of her classmates was shot at and Marcy herself was physically brutalised. However, with the facility liberated, Marcy and her tour were saved by fighters of the heroic Voltairine de Cleyre Brigade.

"I'm just glad to be home." Marcy says. "And I hope no girl will ever have to go through what I did just for reading fanfiction."

Anarchist State-Affiliated Media
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City of London Suspends Trading due to Anarchist Attack - Financial Times

Due to an attack on the network lines connecting the London Stock exchange to several major banks and trading firms, the London Stock exchange has been forced to suspend trading until the connections can be re-established.

'We do this,'' says Lord Robert Edmund Rathbone, the chairman, 'to preserve the integrity of our venerable institution. For four hundred and fifty years we have acted to allow everyone to participate in the markets and companies of these isles, and what we do now is to preserve that free market we have created. By temporarily suspending trading, we ensure that those banks now disconnected are not unduly penalised and that those still connected do not unduly enrich themselves at their expense.'

As of the last close of trading, the FTSE 250 was down 23%; the FTSE 100 down 17.6%, and the pound sterling had closed up 6% against SolCoin.

Mafia Coup in Sicily?!--Italian Social Democratic Herald

…reporters on the group are confused at the sequence of events, which began with a declaration of the Sicilian Commune followed not by them being put down by the proper government forces, but by illegalist forces associated with the so-called "Mafia" in Sicily. These groups, which tend to be Far-Right, seem to have matched the Anarchists in printing capacity using the stolen blueprints, and have more experience enacting violence… or so it seems, as they have executed the Provisional Council of the Sicilian Commune on newstream and declared Sicilian independence and would soon be a zone in which Humanity would once more rule and in which traditional values--including those related to gender or race--would be restored.

For more coverage…

Parliament Under Attack!!--Earth News LtD

The bloodthirsty animals who call themselves anarchists have reached a new low as they launched a massive attack on the Solarian Compact, and humanity itself. Stunned eyewitnesses describe the sky turning black with drones, and although many of them were destroyed by the brave defenders of the Solarian Marshals' Parliamentary security detail, some few were able to make it through and cause horrible and senseless deaths of many innocents, including famed Columbian statesman James Rogers.

Despite the danger, Parliament remains unshaken, and the leadership of all legal parties has issued a joint statement declaring their intent to remain in Atlantic City and assist the war effort in any way possible until the anarchist scourge is defeated.

For more reports of anarchist atrocities and the heroic resistance of those who stand against the tide, [click here]

Reinforcements arrive in orbit -#FleetWatch

As of two minutes ago, the reinforcements from KC that have been making their way across Sol for the better part of a week have finally arrived.

Over four hundred thousand of Humanity's finest fighters, four entire Corps of Solarian Navy Naval Infantry are now in position to conduct landing operations across Earth.

It remains to be seen how PM Roderick and Seventh Star Minister Vandermeer will deploy these troops.

Nuew · Apr 27, 2022

Other than the Mafia coup in Sicily and the 7th Fleet Arriving, this looks like a day of good news. For some reason I doubt tomorrow will be so pleasant.

TheGrape · Apr 27, 2022

AKuz said:
All Is Peaceful In United Kingdom, From His Royal Majesty's MicroStories Account

AKuz said:
City of London Suspends Trading due to Anarchist Attack - Financial Times

AKuz said:
the British stiff upper lip means that there has been no troubles whatsoever

I swear, these news updates seem way too coordinated. It must be collusion! They're working together now!

Acc. No. 1409 · Apr 27, 2022

I just realized, there's more leftist views in the update. And not just the ones reporting things as they are happening that are tagged as being Anarchists by the Cosmoliberals, actual leftist voices are there. Whether this implies a turn in the tide is a question for another time.

The death of Compact and Charter influence in Europe appears to be starting with the current developments. Soon Sol shall be free.

Still hoping against hope that the Atlantis situation goes peaceful revolution, because that will be a nice change of phase from the rather necessary revolutionary violence that being doled out.

Paramilitaries and the like are being armed, this does not bode well in this not turning into a tit-for-tat violent reprisal situation.

Balmung1 · Apr 27, 2022

…reporters on the group are confused at the sequence of events, which began with a declaration of the Sicilian Commune followed not by them being put down by the proper government forces, but by illegalist forces associated with the so-called "Mafia" in Sicily. These groups, which tend to be Far-Right, seem to have matched the Anarchists in printing capacity using the stolen blueprints, and have more experience enacting violence… or so it seems, as they have executed the Provisional Council of the Sicilian Commune on newstream and declared Sicilian independence and would soon be a zone in which Humanity would once more rule and in which traditional values--including those related to gender or race--would be restored.

The more things change the more things stay the same considering that during WW2 the US government released and made deals with the Sicilian/Italian mob in that in return for releasing their members they would assist when the US invaded Scily/Italy it did work and it allowed the US to advance faster but it also made the Mob very influential in Sicily

Chlof · Apr 27, 2022

AKuz said:
Voltairine de Cleyre Brigade "Justice for all" worm brings the realities of war to reactionaries –Unwired

Interesting that this isn't tagged as anarchist affiliated media

LucidProp · Apr 27, 2022

AKuz said:
Mafia Coup in Sicily?!--Italian Social Democratic Herald

Wow, an actual streamed execution.

Gang states will be alive and well on earth it seems. Makes me worry for the Russians who have a similar problem.

SemiRational · Apr 27, 2022

So far it's a pinpoint of black in a sea of red, hopefully the north african communes deal with them or at least start launching missiles at whatever targets of oppertunity present themselves.

The Laurent · Apr 27, 2022

SemiRational said:
So far it's a pinpoint of black in a sea of red, hopefully the north african communes deal with them or at least start launching missiles at whatever targets of oppertunity present themselves.

More Brown than black, I'd say.

Chlof · Apr 27, 2022

AKuz said:
Mafia Coup in Sicily?!--Italian Social Democratic Herald

AKuz said:
"Mafia" Attacks Break Up Anarchist Protests In Sicily--Sicilian Enquirer

..accusations that they have any connection with local MSI corporate forces are of course a harmful and racist stereotype designed to further division among the people of Earth and promote anarchism and violence, these were not in fact "Mafia" but instead concerned citizens who… 3/7

Who could've seen that coming

neutronium95 · Apr 27, 2022

I think that I know what's up with the siege on the Compact Parliament. The group in the Andes just demonstrated that troops being dropped from space can be hideously vulnerable to ground based fire. The Compact cannot allow the Parliament to be captured, but they can't just drop ortillery on the attackers if they stay close enough to the target.

I'm thinking that the DemFed has seeded every anti aircraft asset they can get their hands on in the area, and that tomorrow might be an exceptionally bad day to be a SolNav marine.

Rockeye · Apr 27, 2022

TheGrape said:
I swear, these news updates seem way too coordinated. It must be collusion! They're working together now!

I would like to note for thread readers unaware that the City of London is not part of London. It is an insanely legally complicated technical city state that in 2020 was a massive center of business and finance with many corporate headquarters where votes are distributed to companies.

The Laurent · Apr 27, 2022

Fourteen Days In Sol--The Last Actors On The Stage (May 27, 2255)

Dramatis Personae

FatBlunt: Our Hapless Hero, Thrown Into The Position as a Symbolic Weapon Designer, expected to contribute but also be historic and dignified and presumably also a functional human being. Unfortunately, they are FatBlunt.
Kusanagi: She is very, very scary. In fact, terrifying. She's also kinda symbolic and kinda not. It feels a lot like having a Religious Order of Knights on the council. She's also the only person FatBlunt truly knows.
Manfred Folly: Named by a very, very disappointed parent, one assumes, he is an Orc Augment and is… logistics something? Oh, right! He is in charge of Logistics Coordination on the West Coast, whereas…
Manfred Folly, again: is in charge of logistics coordination in the Atlantic region. How exactly was he elected twice? He seems overworked. Poor guy.
Tabitha "Sol" Queens: The overwhelmed woman thrown up as the representative of all of the various many Federative bodies fighting on the Pacific Coast, she comes equipped with a list of notes that she desperately consults
Karl Osterling: The man representing the groups in the southern half of the Atlantic City. Knows how to fake it till he makes it.
Captain Smythe: Just a fun name to say, isn't it? Smythe is a very skilled person when it comes with working on armored units. Also absent. They're a lot like Godot, when you think about it.
Arala Vines: The 'Media Warfare' coordinator who has somehow also become the chief MicroStories propagandist and works with…
Jade E. Washington: The head of the 'Actionable Intelligence Council' in Pacific City, now trying to coordinate military intelligence bodies. She's bald, and honestly, that's just cool. FatBlunt could never manage that.

******

FatBlunt checked in the faux-mirror again and thought about how to say "It's an obscure reference" as they looked over their shirt. They were a rather conservative, though slimming, blue-black skirt, with hosiery ending in sensible flat shoes, and then there was their shirt.

It was red, black, and green and included a label for a band that never existed: "Ladle of Stench" it declared over a rather grotesque and charming skull that complimented their earrings well. They wanted to make an impression and weren't sure whether it would be a good one or bad one. They were just here, after all, because they were FatBlunt and of course, you wanted someone like that there.

They looked in the faux-mirror, which just sent a camera signal back at them, and then took a breath and stepped into the small room, one of a thousand office buildings in Chicago which had all been given to one group or another or another or… it was so generic, inside, except for the people, that one simply had to picture the boardroom to any cheap H-I drek movie about Corporate Empowerment and one would see it. It had all of the common elements: bad wallpaper, floating holochairs, Motivational/Thought Building games on the walls for executives to play in order to build up Synergy, towering and creeping plants meant to invoke a feeling of the natural beauty of the world… just all the typical, boring stuff of the average executive conference room. In the middle was a large table, which seemed to have been created to be no shape in particular. Too sharp to be an oval, but not enough to be an octagon. Round cornered and indeterminate.

Of course, if you looked out the window there were marching crowds, street parties, and aerospace defense missiles set up amid the clutter. Beyond the windows was a city in revolution.

"Good to see you," Anala Vines looked up from her feeds. "I hoped you'd show up, there are a few people missing so far." She was a round woman with hair that indeed resembled vines because she'd chosen that last name herself. She was in charge of… 'Media Warfare' which in this case was mostly press releases and social media. Ah, the future, gotta love it. They'd lived just a few years in a world where Social Media Product Coordinator was a job, and then a few decades in which it really, really wasn't.

And now here they were back again, but different. "Ah, like who?"

"Smythe, you know they're busy trying to fix up the automated vehicles for the big push on the Atlantic. Personally. I think they just… like getting involved and meddling."

"Captain Smythe… now there's a name to conjure with. You got him to defect?" FatBlunt asked, wishing they had something to smoke to calm the nerves. But against type and against branding they'd decided that this had to be a sober meeting.

"Yes, or rather; he defected years ago. There was an… operation that Jada was involved in."

Smythe, of course, had been one of the people in charge of maintenance of Compact tanks and other such vehicles and had had something of a reputation as a wunderkind, the sort of person you asked, "Why are they in Sol instead of somewhere more important."

And there's the explanation.

FatBlunt was learning new and exciting wonders today! Wonders like: meetings!

They settled down in one of the overly soft corporate chairs and took out their notepad to do everything but take notes, including doing a little doodling of the faces around them, especially the dashing Orc Augment who was simultaneously the Pacific AND Atlantic Logistics officer in a baffling mixup in which he'd been on both ballots and--or so the gossip went--won both, both because he was good at his job and because who wouldn't vote for someone named Manfred Folly?

FatBlunt would vote for Manfred Folly to make bureaucratic centralization all over the DemFed in exchange for a gunshow or three.

(Not really, but it felt like that when they were randy.)

"...so yes, the Fabbers can work miracles but no 'just take from the looted equipment' isn't really a solution. We've been working on building up a logistical footprint, and it's going well but we're going to see brownouts in Pacific City… and maybe Atlantic City as well. As fast as we spool up more Energy capacity we have non-civilian uses for it. The good news is…" Manny shrugged--could FatBlunt think of him as Manny in the comfort of their mind? Sure, they decided, why not--and continued, "It's been just a few days. Even the most restive populace isn't going to react to two or three days of spotty brownouts in the middle of a continent-wide victory march by losing faith in us, especially since we're going to hit the peak soon enough. I think the bottleneck is training, really, and you'd have to look at Sung Fai for that--"

A very little woman perhaps five feet tall who they were pretty sure could kill half the people here.

…but definitely not…

Well, they weren't attracted to women, and they had lost the love of their life a century and change, and then, even more, change back, but it was hard not to notice the striking figure of the only person even close to their age here. Well, there was Ryan Crossfield standing in the back, not part of the meeting and so just observing. But Kusanagi was not the kind of woman you could ever miss.

You'd think someone like Kusanagi would be very still. But they weren't quite like that at all. They remembered those first days when she wasn't used to it. She'd been even more so than what she was now in a way: birdlike, or like some centipede, head moving back and forth, vanta black hair twitching back and over the white of her shoulders, the red of her combat uniform as she watched and listened to all the talk. There was a lot more than that, of course, but it was the mannerisms that drew their eyes: in an absolute sense, they had known what to expect. But.

(They recentered themselves and erased some of the lines of the doodle they'd made of Kusanagi. Perhaps try easier delegates to caricature first.)

There were offensives planned everywhere and plans to take advantage of the likely Compact focus on Atlantic City. While they had the chance, they were going to come back in Texas, there were a few isolated militia groups in the "Southeastern Interior" to deal with, and Karl Osterling outlined what was being done in Atlantic City. He was very different from Tabby: whereas she was smart but overwhelmed, he knew how to fake it and pretend as if he wasn't just repeating the notes and talking points of the other defense committees that he was responsible too.

The talk ranged far and wide, before returning to what had already become an old, sore wound.

"We really do need to do something about Toronto," Arala said, shaking her head. "Another offensive before the stench of defeat comes… you lost good… good people there," she looked over at Kusanagi and they could watch the moment that she trailed off.

"What, does Toronto have legs?" Kusanagi asked, dismissively.

"No, wheels, it practices Municipal Darwinism," FatBlunt said, for the purpose entirely and exclusively to make references that nobody gets and that everyone would hate if they did.

Kusanagi did not even flinch as they made an offhand comment about all the exact number of shades of grey in the conflict up north, or about how the "killmongers" were doing, or… they just kept on throwing them in and didn't care what it made them look like. They were doing something more important than taking notes. They were sketching caricatures of the people in the room, and making little personality notes.

"We should concentrate our efforts." She said, head still on one side, at the end of a long, long discussion. "Without Montreal-Ottawa or the rest of the great lakes, Toronto is indefensible in the medium term. We contain. We deal with vital targets."

They were sketching the way this person panicked, and what that person looked like in half as much sleep as they needed. They were trying to understand this odd body, and the talk continued on and on…

The truth was, they were winning but the easy days were behind them.

The truth was that the easiest day was yesterday.

Still, the funnest day was tomorrow. They felt like they were only a hundred again, young and light as a feather, for the moment. The sadness and sorrow were lurking there, like a clown waiting to jump out and eat your face.

But they were just a little bit better in the moment, and they saw Kusanagi's lips twitch once or twice. Maybe. Or maybe they were imagining things. It was towards the end when they finally spoke in something that wasn't references or small quips.

"I would just like to say one thing. It is heartening to see so many new faces gathered here for a victory over the capitalists, and a fight to change it. I am one of the oldest, and most senile of the fogies, though I do not look like it, so I'll keep this brief. But it is heartening. It reminds me of my younger days. Ahh, the days of my youth… like the scent of fresh lemon! Why I remember working with the people down in what then was not called Mexico City for a time. There were so many debates about what to call it… Zapata, some called it, didn't they?" They smiled, aware they had thoroughly distracted almost everyone.

Kusanagi, though, was watching them.

"I'll be blunt: and maybe I'm just a silly old enby, but your entire southern offensive strategy in the southwest and its defensive technique's going to get a few hundred thousand killed," they said, without keeping their tone anything but light. "The Cartels are using the Box and were from the very start. Heck, they have my Fat Blunts, which shows they have allies on the other side, in former Utah, and probably connections with those Individualist fucks in Texas… who are going to start using the Fabbers sooner or later without even relying on "fabbers free"." They grinned ghoulishly. "If you underestimate the Cartels and forget that they effectively control a third of the southern region and parts of California,"

"Could they have just been included in Fabbers free, I didn't hear anything about…" Jade Washington began.

FatBlunt settled back into their seat, still smiling pleasantly. They wanted to say: you're kids, you're great but you're kids, and you can't read it like I can. But that would be… rude. So they began to bring up the reports they'd obsessively read. They were just a symbol, they knew that everyone there knew they were just an imposter, knew that there had been a half-dozen leading people (and dozens of other helpers) on every project they'd done except the latest gun… and who had it saved in Toronto? What had the FB Model 69 really done for anyone?

They had thought there would be absolution on the other side, a sort of cold, nothing-comfort from it. But here they were, alive.

And they were just the same imposter (Sus! Was in electrical, oh how those old neurons filled their brain with the detritus of that last decade, what absurd horseshit it was… they wondered whether immortality treatments actually kept old age and the obsession with the past from coming on, or just gave one a young-ish body to feel it in) that they had always felt like through every day of the Democratic Federation.

Kusanagi chimed in, five minutes. "They know logistics. And… those reports make sense."

"We do remember Sicily," Manfred said with a wince. "I'll run the numbers again, see if the offensive might be paused."

"Either paused for weeks or moved up to tomorrow, depending on how far you think you can make it," FatBlunt guessed. "You know Fabber logistics… probably better than any of us here making Strategic Plans. I'm just… trying to figure things out."

******

It was after the meeting, and FatBlunt went out for a smoke. They'd met the cyborg's eyes, which is not something everyone could do--besides the height issue.

They were staring out over a balcony, though of course it was screened from reactionary attacks by large whirling cloth attachments and alert VdCB snipers. It was late in the night, the meeting had dragged on and now the moon was hanging in the sky. It was just the two of them.

The last actors on the stage in a passion play, the last fools capering about long after the Court had grown bored.

"You are not as rusty as you think," Kusanagi, who could probably kill them with less effort than it'd take her to convince a girl to go out with her. They'd not known her personally, but some things will always be in the head waiting to ambush you. They remembered all sorts of details they could provide if they really wanted to pierce her reputation, like that screaming fight they just happened to overhear in the last weeks of the Democratic Federation, or the way she'd almost nodded off to the explanation they'd been giving when talking about the logistics of Stay Behind Forces, or, of course, all those rumors of her and Juliet Cortez back in 2067, one of the messiest breakups in the military world, so messy that they couldn't help but hear about it even though they were retired at that moment and had two teenagers that were--

(No, they could remember their husband even if it was with a feeling like their whole world ripping to pieces. But they could not remember those two at all and still survive. What they had was a memory buried beneath the sands. What they could hold onto now was a mention, a gesture, a sigh, a memory less of a complete picture and more of the subtleties of stage directions for characters cut from the script.)

"I remember when we couldn't even see the stars, for all the pollution and light pollution. And we still can't," they said.

"Yes," Kusanagi said, and they knew that she is never going to be lured out by naked vulnerability, that she was the least sentimental being in the galaxy facing down one feeling this odd sort of soulless sentimentality.

Sentiment in the 17th-century sense, perhaps? They don't know. They want something to drink.

"Why didn't you kill me?" FatBlunt said, frankly.

"Do you want to be killed?" The cyborg's head cocked to the side, like a hunting bird.

"Oh yes, of course. Death is a relief and life a nightmare," FatBlunt said with a laugh at the ever so slightly off-kilter look on Kusanagi's face. "Come on, I only truly came of age in the 2020s, we made suicidal ideation and gallows humor into a way of life. But I was a traitor, and you kill traitors."

"I never believed you had truly betrayed the cause," Kusanagi said, with all the signs of meaning it. The slight smile, the moment of careful modulation, the… the everything. She'd gotten used to lying, they realized.

Got used to saying "Everything will be okay" or "We won't pull out" when nothing was okay.

"Bullshit," FatBlunt said. "I was a sellout bastard who probably still provided a little bit to the Charters--"

"Your insights were judged some of the most valuable in the galaxy," Kusanagi said, and now they had finally hit something as she sounded almost chiding. "You're hiding even now, aren't you? As long as you're the ancient relic and the dumb fossil with smiles and tells everyone they're idiots, as long as you are an… an… imposter then what you did for the last hundred and fifty years isn't--"

(No, too easy, FatBlunt decided.)

She stopped as if startled by her own wording. She'd wanted to say it for a while, perhaps. Not sentimental, but they'd parted on such terms, hadn't they? Talked, at the very least. Her expression returns to neutral, even wry. She is hard to flap and when you do it doesn't last for long.

"It's monstrous," they confessed. "Even now if you killed me it would only be a… a…"

They dug around for a phrase. "A Tactical Sin, perhaps a political one, not a moral one," FatBlunt said. "I can say I had no choice, but then I look at you and I know that I had every choice."

"We thought you a honeypot," Kusanagi said. This time more honest, driven into a dry, sort of brutality. "That attacking you would be the last mistake for a dozen Swords."

"Ah." Quite possible, and in the early years perhaps they had been elaborate bait without fully realizing it. But at the same time… they knew what happened if they got close to anyone, and supported any causes at all.

They were useless for that by the 2100s.

Still there it was.

They were here for the sequel, but they were playing different roles and would probably only meet at times like this.

They were fine with this, really. They just wanted to talk, wanted to hear themselves think, wanted her to say certain things and she'd said most of them.

FatBlunt was a dealer of death, and everything they'd made in the "dead decade" when they'd retired, all those attempts to make a thousand other things (sculptures, paintings, mobiles, new forms of transportation, logistical systems, more) had never felt as good, as oddly pure in the sense that an ink-soaked white sheet of paper was pure, as making weapons.

As the challenge it presented. (Was it also that they hadn't felt as good at any of those? Could they have loved it with time? Who knows. The DemFed had hit a rough patch and they'd returned because they had to because they had once upon a time known what duty was.)

That had been where it started, stripping away all ideals and ideology, and even the self-doubt that was a shield. A bleak sort of pride, a desire to push further for no good reason at all. ("Why… why did you do this?" "To test the limits of my ability.")

There. On the other side of this bitter hopelessness, there was the past and the future twisting around each other, the sterile life that was now their own no longer owed to the "one last gun." They'd find the groove again, as worn as the sandy peaks at the home they'd lived in for generations, and simply plow forward howling back into their job: they made things, and people died because of it, and that's all there was to it.

Then Kusanagi said something that broke the sort of acceptance they'd been building up. Made it feel as if their whole self was a broken limb badly set broken once more.

She had to know what it did to them. This had to be why she said it.

"Besides…"

They barely heard it and had to strain their ears to hear it as she pushed off and walked away, off stage.

"I don't kill artists."

BiopunkOtrera · Apr 27, 2022

Chlof said:
Interesting that this isn't tagged as anarchist affiliated media

It's cause it's a magazine article.

Edit: The Prose above is kind of my favorite Omake of the whole thing, kudos @The Laurent for writing it.

frostgiant · Apr 27, 2022

Oof, Never thought I would ever type this sentence... Ever, but poor Fatblunt

SemiRational · Apr 27, 2022

How spiteful of her, perhaps justified but still, Ow!
I do wonder if making weapons for the demfed will make up for it for either Kusenagi or Fatblunt.

BlueTwinkleToes · Apr 27, 2022

The Laurent said:
And they were just the same imposter (Sus! Was in electrical

I feel way too many emotions at this

Artificial Girl · Apr 27, 2022

Both FatBlunt and Kusanagi make me incredibly sad.

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

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Fourteen Days In Sol--May 27, 2255

“Mankind, be vigilant. We loved you.”—Julius Fučík

Her Ladyship

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