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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DeltaV11.2 · Aug 14, 2022

Setsul said:
You are aware that 9th Fleet is 3 battlegroups and 201st Squadron was just half of one?
Those remnants are 5 times as large as what we fought.

Any pen-based strategy to turn Symphony (much better than trying to occupy a planet with 2 billion population) requires first to actually be able to defend against 9th Fleet.
Right now the only thing saving us is that 9th Fleet hasn't deemed us worthy of more than 1/3rd of their attention.
And after that we can't rely on Symphony just shrugging and refusing to build ships either.

Symphony and 9th Fleet likely can't deploy any more than the 2 battlegroups that we're probably facing(one split, and one in reserve). We don't have other fronts to worry about, but they do. Both Asgard and Trescore have considerable fleets, and neither really like them. Even if they're not formally at war, they can't risk a scenario where a hostile fleet parks itself over Symphony and blockades the gates in.

BarbaCoPut · Aug 14, 2022

Derpmind said:
[ ] [SciComm] Gate Examination: In for a Penny, In for a Pound
Part of wormhole research. Unknown progress needed, and currently at zero progress.

Largely a mystery box, besides the ability to construct new Gates. Is SolNav merely engaging in a very aggressive form of copyright protection? Is there some Dark SecretTM behind the Gates? Maybe they can be nova-scale bombs, or they can travel to alternate universes, or they actually travel through Hell, or who knows what? But while I remain very curious, whatever we find out, SolNav has already known for two hundred years. It's vanishingly unlikely that this project will provide the kind of game-changing advantage we hope to get out of FTL Comms. Still, the biggest mystery of the setting is within our grasp now. I'd vote for plans that put a die on this project, but not at the expense of a die on the much-more-immediately needed FTL Comms.

Besides a general agreement on your points (I've been bothering everyone with the importance of Automated harvesting from before this turn...)
Something that I thought this project, which should be put on hold for some time, something that it could provide, is a way to A. Safely close gates. B. A way to "selectively close" or control the flow through gate somehow...
After investigating the gates and perhaps gaining the ability to create new ones, we would probably get a project to improve them , and one to learn how to safely close the gates, or a way to put an unbreakable Iris on them or something like that ...

Setsul · Aug 14, 2022

Driven by Apathy said:
Is there a list of all our military assets and where they are deployed? It's kind of difficult to make informed decisions while being uncertain about the situation.

If I understand correctly, the Tripwire gate defenses are far from the strongest possible? At least the name certainly seems to imly as much. If so, we should probably place a high priority on strengthening the gate defenses at Bestreer-Arizona and Chinook-Thoa. Even higher than on building ships, possibly, if gate defenses offer as much bang for the buck as seems to be implied.

Unless of course building gate defenses and shipbuilding don't compete with each other - can our automated shipyards construct gate defenses?

Tripwire is just a fancy name. They cost the same and perform the same as normal gate defences. The only differences is that they're built somewhere else and then shipped out. Ever since we had the ships prepared to do that we can now repeat it whenever we want at no extra cost.
Chinook-Thoa also got the normal defences already.

For military assets I'd look here and here
The latter for Frontier Force which is new and should be in Ascension.
The former needs some adjustments.
Vanguard Force and SUFSF-VEF are in Bestreer now. All battle damage has been repaired, but 2 frigates, 1 minesweeper, and the single Cruiser are gone.
We have converted some civilian liners to Auxiliary Cruisers that may or may not be similar to the Stakhanovite-class Light Cruisers (those used to be ore-haulers though) and Auxiliary Carriers that may or may not be similar to the War to the Knife-class Escort Carriers (used to be freighters).
2 cruisers each for Mobile Force and Vanguard Force, 2 carriers for Vanguard Force.

To get an idea about what we're facing look here.
Our best guess is that 201st Squadron was exactly half a battlegroup (now reduced to just the battlecruiser, light cruisers, 1 pdd, and 1 wing plus tenders/carriers) and that 129th is the same except with the full complement of 4 wings. There may or may not be another battlegroup like these two Squadrons combined in Bastion. We don't know for sure.

DeltaV11.2 said:
Symphony and 9th Fleet likely can't deploy any more than the 2 battlegroups that we're probably facing(one split, and one in reserve). We don't have other fronts to worry about, but they do. Both Asgard and Trescore have considerable fleets, and neither really like them. Even if they're not formally at war, they can't risk a scenario where a hostile fleet parks itself over Symphony and blockades the gates in.

There's a difference between can't and won't.
Kitsuragi's prediction was that without Kimberly we'd exceed 9th Fleet in strength by 2259 and she will have told them that. Unless their plan is to simply lose, they're going to send something at some point.
Symphony still has at least one more battlegroup as well, and while the Iyuhi situation isn't confirmed, it seems to me that the SFREA is expanding. You don't do that if you're worried about not being able to hold your territory.

If they really wanted to kill us right now they would've thrown both battlegroups at us or at least one entire battlegroup through Bestreer while half of our navy was still tied up in Chinook to watch Blue Squadron. Unless they badly mistimed 129th there's no point in sending only a single battlegroup in beatable chunks. Either arrive at the same time to split our forces or put everything in one place and hope we're already split due to Blue Squadron.
If we do not assume incompetence (or the third battlegroup being gone for whatever reason), this was not meant to kill us, it was containment.

Dealing with the AIC is going to take longer than dealing with lone planets with lower population that have only been in revolt for a few months at best. So if I wanted to carve out my personal frontier fiefdom, I'd grab all the systems that no one controls first both because it's easiest now and so that no one else gets them, and only then go to war with one of my neighbours, not the other way around.

Forgothrax · Aug 14, 2022

If I had to guess, our initial wormhole comms will be very expensive to place and very limited in use. Actually making them useful and not godawful expensive will take time and research that we will need to focus on. We need to avoid shiny other things and stay with the shiny that we picked.

Beyogi · Aug 14, 2022

Forgothrax said:
If I had to guess, our initial wormhole comms will be very expensive to place and very limited in use. Actually making them useful and not godawful expensive will take time and research that we will need to focus on. We need to avoid shiny other things and stay with the shiny that we picked.

Indeed, the only reason to go for Gates now is if we desperately need to safely shut them down to prevent being overrun. As long as that doesn't happen we should focus on one shiny and put the rest into solids.

Forgothrax · Aug 14, 2022

Beyogi said:
Indeed, the only reason to go for Gates now is if we desperately need to safely shut them down to prevent being overrun. As long as that doesn't happen we should focus on one shiny and put the rest into solids.

It might not be ideal, but a fleet does not *need* a Gate to transit. Shutting them off is not going to be an instant solution to the problem of enemy fleets. If it was and it was known to be possible, SolNav probably would have used that to their advantage. It not being known to be possible means that shutting down wormhole points is probably waaaay down the tech tree if it even exists at all.

Cassiemouse · Aug 14, 2022

I did have a thought that would be funny to try one turn. If we had like 4+ wormhole projects then what about just focusing on SciComm one turn and doing them all?

Aranfan · Aug 14, 2022

I just hope we do the tech debt sooner than later.

Setsul · Aug 14, 2022

Forgothrax said:
If I had to guess, our initial wormhole comms will be very expensive to place and very limited in use. Actually making them useful and not godawful expensive will take time and research that we will need to focus on. We need to avoid shiny other things and stay with the shiny that we picked.

A very succinct way to put it.

Regarding gate shutdowns: Did everyone already forget that 12.7 is traveling from Raphanus to Isthmus just with warp literally right now?
Gates are interesting because we've got a lot of unfinished ones, maintenance is going to come up eventually, though hopefully in the far future, and for logistics trying to build the proven to work gate technology in different places is probably a better angle than trying to turn person-sized wormholes into ship-sized wormholes.
But the shutdowns would only buy a little but of time, unless we go for an unsafe shutdown that destroys the attacking fleet. And that's a sure way to get SolNav to drop everything in favour of razing the AIC.

Wormhole comms are the shiny we picked, Automated Harvesting is the shiny we need, tech debt is the next useful shiny when we've got unlimited resources and are only limited by how fast we can spend them and then way, waaayyyy down the priority list come the other shinies.

slybrarian · Aug 14, 2022

Setsul said:
A very succinct way to put it.

Regarding gate shutdowns: Did everyone already forget that 12.7 is traveling from Raphanus to Isthmus just with warp literally right now?
Gates are interesting because we've got a lot of unfinished ones, maintenance is going to come up eventually, though hopefully in the far future, and for logistics trying to build the proven to work gate technology in different places is probably a better angle than trying to turn person-sized wormholes into ship-sized wormholes.
But the shutdowns would only buy a little but of time, unless we go for an unsafe shutdown that destroys the attacking fleet. And that's a sure way to get SolNav to drop everything in favour of razing the AIC.

Wormhole comms are the shiny we picked, Automated Harvesting is the shiny we need, tech debt is the next useful shiny when we've got unlimited resources and are only limited by how fast we can spend them and then way, waaayyyy down the priority list come the other shinies.

The remnants of 12.7 are doing their best to win the Rozhestvensky Award For Dubious Navigational Decisions, and I'll be surprised if the result isn't either a mutiny to turn around or one ship full of cannibals reaching Istmus. If SolNav wants to dedicate fleet and then an entire second fleet of just tenders to send ships of a decade-long journey through interstellar space I would be thrilled.

Setsul · Aug 14, 2022

slybrarian said:
The remnants of 12.7 are doing their best to win the Rozhestvensky Award For Dubious Navigational Decisions, and I'll be surprised if the result isn't either a mutiny to turn around or one ship full of cannibals reaching Istmus. If SolNav wants to dedicate fleet and then an entire second fleet of just tenders to send ships of a decade-long journey through interstellar space I would be thrilled.

I assume they wouldn't be doing it if there was no chance of making it.
And to be fair, 12.7 did bring two light tenders that weren't carrying any corvettes.

The other option the report mention was that they might be going for uncharted jump points. We have a lot of those too.

All in all, there are definitely ways to get a fleet to us without gates, possibly even through the same jump points the gates we shut down were in.
We can argue about how much time it buys us, but it's definitely not guaranteed safety.

Also, shutting down all gates and therefore communications and then sitting her for the next 100 turns building ships without any news about anything would be terribly boring.

Kirook · Aug 14, 2022

Omake: Their Rising All At Once Was As The Sound…

"Fucking traitors."

Samir (I'd finally stopped thinking of him as Mr. Khan) was snarling from across the table, lit by the fiery light of sunset streaming through the window. "We had one chance, one, to stop Sol from falling to the anarchists, and those rat-bastards decided to side with the fucking—"

"Of course they did," I said placidly. "They were ordered to nuke their own home planet."

Ms. Beaumont—Isabelle—gave a disdainful sneer, so perfect that it had to have been practiced. "Give them a few years of anarchist rule and they'll certainly wish they had. I always knew Sol was a backwater in the age of the Compact, but I never suspected the nations of Earth would be that shortsighted."

"Didn't you get the memo?" George wasn't as spitting mad as Samir, but I was learning to read his expressions. He seethed quietly with anger as he leaned forward in his seat. "The age of the Compact is over, to hear our new Chairwoman tell it."

Jun sighed, giving the rest of the board an exasperated look from over the top of his glasses. "You're all taking this too personally. Sol betrayed the Solarian Compact, not the Hermes-Ishtar Spinward Frontier Regional Board. Earth, not Chorus, is the planet wracked by rioting and disorder. Take a step back and try to be objective, please."

Finally. At least someone besides me was beginning to get the picture. "Exactly. You've all been marketing executives for decades. If you had to sell 'nuclear bombardment is the only way to stop the anarchists', could you have made that sales pitch in two weeks?"

Silence was the only reply. I'd expected as much; even they didn't truly believe that "you'll regret anarchism more than being glassed" was a winning argument with anyone.

"Here's the thing," I said. "SolParl and SolNav made the same kind of mistake that you made at the beginning of the Radiant Revolution—they dismissed the threat until it was too late to stop it—except theirs was much worse. At least you have the excuse that you couldn't possibly have known that the Broadcast was coming. They saw the whole thing and still decided that it was a flash in the pan."

"Yeah? And what could they have done about it?" Samir's fists were still clenched, as if he were about to try to punch a hole in the metal table. "The Earthers turned out to be snakes in the grass all along. So did the fucking First Fleet. How can you stamp out anarchism when you can't trust your own soldiers not to turn their coats?"

"I can understand why you'd think that," I replied, and I wasn't just trying to placate him. I knew firsthand what a hotbed of anarchist sentiment Earth could be. "But revolutionary sympathies don't just appear from nowhere. SolNav created them when they forced everyone on Earth to choose between our side's demands—which were 'hurl your homes and families screaming into nuclear hellfire'—and the anarchists' demands, which were 'no, don't'."

George turned to me, eyes still icy. "You almost sound like you agree with them."

It seemed he hadn't quite forgiven me for my behavior at the emergency conference after the Broadcast. True enough, I hadn't exactly been at my best that day as far as decorum was concerned—but then again, I'd still been trying to cope with the death of the only civilization I'd ever known.

"George," I said, almost gently. "I watched the footage from the Solarian Mutiny. I listened to the comm recordings. There's a moment in there that's going to stick with me probably for the rest of my life. Well, there are a lot of moments in there that will stick with me for the rest of my life, but there's one that stands out above the rest. It's right at the start of the battle, before the SolNav defections. The EU and Japan are alone and badly outnumbered, and for a moment it looks like the Navy is going to hold the field. Then Earth's nations—all of them—start launching fighters. And everyone cheers and celebrates, because in their eyes it means the planet is saved. If it were in a movie, it would have been a perfect climactic moment—the cavalry arriving at the last minute to save the protagonists in their darkest hour. And do you all know who got the loudest cheers that night?"

No one spoke.

"No?" I raised an eyebrow. "No one has a guess?"

They did, I was certain—they just didn't want to say it out loud.

"It was the Democratic Federation," I said.

Four faces fell, or fell further. They'd been hoping for a different answer, any other answer. But this room was one place where I couldn't tell people comforting lies. I let it sink in as the sun fell further below the horizon, the light shifting its hue from incandescent orange to blood-red.

"Two centuries of reminding people of the failures and atrocities of the DemFed. Four centuries of trying to warn them away from anarchism and socialism. All of it down the drain because the anarchists just flipped the script on Empty Passages. We need to stop the bleeding and remind people why the Compact mattered, and what's at stake if Amaranth wins."

Jun pushed back his chair, taking in the whole room as the sunlight faded. "I agree with all of that, Emily. But there's a problem. As you should know better than anyone here, the key to how Symphony has created so many successful media franchises is through market research. With your help, we gathered data on our audience and our competitors' audiences, so that we could understand how to appeal to customers. Unfortunately, we have no such research on the AIC or its allies. Our assumptions have been thoroughly upended by the Broadcast, but apart from the obviously biased content it contains, Radiant's inner workings still remain—if you'll forgive the phrase—something of a black box. If you hope to create a counter-propaganda narrative, I'm compelled to ask: how do you plan to solve that?"

"I'm glad you asked," I replied, and I really was. I'd been waiting for a long time for people to start realizing that there was something there that needed to be understood. "I've had people working on a report on the AIC's economic and political structure since the day you promoted me. As soon as it's done I'm going to present it to you personally. If you want to know the enemy, this is the best opportunity you'll get."

A smirk spread slowly across my face as the last rays of the sun vanished into the twilight. "It's time to remind Radiant that they were never as good at this job as we are."

Kirook · Aug 14, 2022

Omake: …Of Thunder Heard Remote

The little drone took flight from my hand with barely more than a whisper. Camouflaged in black and dark blue against the night, it darted off from the roof down toward the police cars below. I tried to focus on what I was doing; getting caught now could be far worse than arrest. I took a deep breath and tried to clear my mind—

"So," came a wry voice from next to me. "I hear Caitlin's started working on propaganda lately. Think she's still got the magic touch when she's not writing about getting tied up and spanked?"

I sighed and turned fractionally away from the drone controller, looking at the speaker out of the corner of my eye. It was a bit difficult to make out her features in the dark, but I knew what I'd see if it were daytime—a tall, broad-shouldered Latina with close-cropped, bright blue hair and a perpetual smirk.

"Give her a chance, Estrella," I murmured. "She's good at what she does. And besides, I read her fanfic. It wasn't like that, it was very tasteful."

Estrella chuckled. "Whatever you say, man."

Well, so much for focusing on the task at hand.

I guided the drone down to where the police cruisers sat dormant in the motor pool. I'd designed and fabricated it myself, with the help of the Box and the treasure trove of technology that had been opened up by the Broadcast. One of the treasures in that trove was a powerful ultraviolet laser no bigger than a finger, which I had mounted on the drone's underbelly—and which I fired now, melting a nearly invisible pinhole through the body of the cop car and into its internal systems. I left it on for a few moments, letting it sear through wiring and melt insulation into a useless blob, and then moved on to the next car.

As I processed what I'd just done, it occurred to me that maybe focusing too much might not have been the right idea after all. Theft and spying was one thing—but now I'd graduated to sabotage, and of the police at that. I was committing more and more to this cause with each passing day. It was exciting in some ways, promising hope for the future—but it was also scary to think of taking on the might of a Charter with so few of us.

To chase those thoughts out of my mind, I glanced at Estrella again. "There was a lot of data on that hard drive I pulled out of H-I headquarters. Did you get the chance to go through it and find out why they fired you?"

Estrella wasn't looking at me, but that was a good thing—her eyes kept careful watch all around us through Box-fabricated night vision goggles, ready to alert me if danger reared its head. The theft of the hard drive had been the first direct action I'd ever taken alone, and it would also be the last. I fired the laser again, secure in the knowledge that I had someone watching my back.

"I did, actually," she said finally. "They ran a routine background check and found out that I had a 'history of vagrancy'."

"So you got fired for getting evicted," I summarized.

Estrella's only answer to that was a short, sharp nod.

"I should've made this fuckin' laser bigger," I muttered through clenched teeth, stabbing my finger down on the activation button.

"Heh." There was no mirth in the sound. "Man after my own heart."

"I think I'm out of the dating pool for a while," I replied as I floated the drone down the line of cars. "You know, on account of becoming a mortal enemy of the Community of Humanity and all."

"Yeah." There was a faint click as Estrella adjusted her goggles, peering out in the dark. "I guess your last one didn't go too well, huh?"

"I don't want to talk about Em—the Chairwoman. And anyway, she and I were never involved."

I couldn't see her face, but I could imagine a mischievous look in Estrella's eye as she asked, "Did you wish that you were?"

"That's none of your damn business," I snapped, barely remembering to keep my voice down.

"That's not a no," she said in a nearly singsong voice.

I heaved a weary, exasperated sigh and looked down pointedly at the drone feed. "This conversation is over."

"Okay, okay." Estrella lapsed into silence for a moment. Then she muttered, "'Mortal enemy of the Community of Humanity'. I'm gonna have to tell Caitlin about that one. It's got a nice ring to it. Very lyrical."

I supposed that was her way of apologizing. "Thanks."

On the screen, I watched as the drone's laser speared through another police car. The beauty of this form of sabotage was that it was nearly undetectable until the car was turned on. Even if you looked under the hood, you'd at most see a few scorch marks and frayed wires. But as soon as current began to flow, short-circuits and overheating would fry the engine into a useless mess of scrap metal and plastic.

The coin-sized patch of red-hot metal around where I'd made the hole began to fade, and once again I sent the drone on. "Last one," I announced. "If these cops want to get somewhere after this, I hope they like walking."

"Which means no homeless sweeps in this neighborhood for a damn good while," said Estrella with deep satisfaction. "Hey. Kai?"

"Yeah?"

I looked over at her in time to see her open her mouth to speak, close it again, and then bite her lip. "…Thank you."

"Don't thank me," I said. "This is what we do."

Truth be told, though, it mattered a lot to hear that. Sometimes I forgot that this wasn't just about lashing out at people who had wronged me. Lives depended on our work. The horror stories the Broadcast had told about the Charters were being repeated across the galaxy…including here at home.

Maybe we weren't liberating the planet. But this mattered to someone.

The drone hovered in front of the last car, waiting for its orders. I looked up and offered the controller to Estrella. "Would you like to do the honors?"

"Definitely." She took it from my hand and lifted up her goggles so that she could see the screen. In the faint light it cast, I could see her eyes, narrowed with determination and defiance.

"Luis," she whispered as she pressed the button, "this one's for you."

Beyogi · Aug 14, 2022

Forgothrax said:
It might not be ideal, but a fleet does not *need* a Gate to transit. Shutting them off is not going to be an instant solution to the problem of enemy fleets. If it was and it was known to be possible, SolNav probably would have used that to their advantage. It not being known to be possible means that shutting down wormhole points is probably waaaay down the tech tree if it even exists at all.

They can't? I was under the impression that wormholes are basically untraversable for larger masses without a gate system. IIRC the masses on both sides needed to be balanced or the whole thing collapses. (Which in itself might be a way to shut it down)

If they use some sort of Alcubierre to invade that'll take years in black space. I mean it's a possibility, but IIRC they'd have to traverse the physical distance between systems instead of taking a shortcut.

BaseDeltaZero · Aug 14, 2022

Forgothrax said:
It might not be ideal, but a fleet does not *need* a Gate to transit. Shutting them off is not going to be an instant solution to the problem of enemy fleets. If it was and it was known to be possible, SolNav probably would have used that to their advantage. It not being known to be possible means that shutting down wormhole points is probably waaaay down the tech tree if it even exists at all.

It requires equalizing mass to transit without a gate. That means that the gate needs to be transited very slowly, and carefully, by sending small ships through, which then launch countermass through the gate in the form of asteroids etc. This is, needless to say, a long and vulnerable process.

For all intents and purposes it is impossible to assault through an unimproved jump point. The problem is that gates are, essentially, one way: You don't actually need a pair to send a larger vessel through, only one on the side you're sending it from.
(As for the question of 'SolNav probably would have used that to their advantage: They did, at Cronus.)

The reason we want Gates, not necessarily now, but at some time in the future, is because that's a monopoly that the Compact still holds, and it's a monopoly that is vital to the function of human space. In the state of civil war the galaxy is now in, it's a matter of time until a gate gets broken, at which point it needs to be possible to repair it, because Sol Nav isn't going to.

That said, they are not necessarily the biggest priority we have. That's... well, wormhole comms seems half done, and then we have infinite BR. I think Infinite BR would probably be helpful to a lot of things, honestly.

The Laurent · Aug 14, 2022

BaseDeltaZero said:
It requires equalizing mass to transit without a gate. That means that the gate needs to be transited very slowly, and carefully, by sending small ships through, which then launch countermass through the gate in the form of asteroids etc. This is, needless to say, a long and vulnerable process.

For all intents and purposes it is impossible to assault through an unimproved jump point.

This is not quite true. It's difficult and tricky, which is why it's a skill that was deemed highly valuable across literally every single frontier war. A fleet highly trained in gateless warfare is a more valuable asset than you'd know, but it's also not a skill you can just spin up in a hurry.

bdun140 · Aug 14, 2022

"Two centuries of reminding people of the failures and atrocities of the DemFed.

"Why do people keep acting like horrible oppression now is worse than mild property damage 200 years ago?!"
A delightful reminder of just how astonishingly out of touch these people are.

TheArcanist · Aug 14, 2022

bdun140 said:
"Why do people keep acting like horrible oppression now is worse than mild property damage 200 years ago?!"
A delightful reminder of just how astonishingly out of touch these people are.

"give it a few years of dread anarchist rule and the people of Earth will wish we'd nuked them!"
-the haute bourgeoisie having the most reasonable and normal opinions

masterofmadness · Aug 14, 2022

Kirook said:
"I'm glad you asked," I replied, and I really was. I'd been waiting for a long time for people to start realizing that there was something there that needed to be understood. "I've had people working on a report on the AIC's economic and political structure since the day you promoted me. As soon as it's done I'm going to present it to you personally. If you want to know the enemy, this is the best opportunity you'll get."

God I want to read this report! I can only imagine the half-truths and misinterpretations they will be putting in! Maybe if Emily is lucky she can work in some correct assumptions via reframing?

"It appears that the Permeant commission on counterintelligence is less a secret police force and more an attempt to control the population's fervor towards suspected internal enemies. The AIC seems frighten of the idea of allowing too strong an internal security apparatus in fear of it leading a coup."

Or something like that?

Kirook said:
A smirk spread slowly across my face as the last rays of the sun vanished into the twilight. "It's time to remind Radiant that they were never as good at this job as we are."

I think there will be time to remind Symphony that were never as good as they thought they were.

You know when we get around to it, we got far more important things right now, but we will get around to shattering their pride eventually.

Kirook · Aug 14, 2022

bdun140 said:
"Why do people keep acting like horrible oppression now is worse than mild property damage 200 years ago?!"
A delightful reminder of just how astonishingly out of touch these people are.

It's not just about being bourgeois generally. Emily has a particular axe to grind against the ideological successors of the DemFed—her family was a lot richer before the First Great Black Summer.

Derpmind · Aug 14, 2022

Aranfan said:
I just hope we do the tech debt sooner than later.

Why not this turn? Like I said earlier, every Megaproject we've done so far has been worth it, and we don't have any on the docket currently. Maybe something like:

[] Plan Sketch: Tech Debt Now
-[] [FIRST FOCUS] Military Committee
-[] [SECOND FOCUS] Science Committee

-[] Megaprojects
--[] Galactic Outreach Commission
---[] Don't Broadcast. Wait for finishing Genetic Augmentation Jailbreak next turn.
---[] Maybe details on firing it off immediately if the Jailbreak manages to finish this turn?

-[] Shipbuilding
--[] Building ships goes here. Probably exclusively rebuilding ships from the Kimberly gatcha like Redshirt's plan does.

-[] IndComm
--[] Build Capital Craft-sized spacedock in Five-Lions 33/80 +10 (1/2 turns median chance)
--[] Automated Harvesting Breakthrough 16/??? +5
--[] Recommission Battlecruiser "Argent Chevalier" in the Congressional Navy 5/50 +10 (1/2 turns median chance)

-[] MilComm
--[] Examine Captured Warcraft and Cracked Designs 0/25 +6 +5 47.5%
--[] Begin Construction Projects
---[] Fortify the Thoa-Pasnato Gate
---[] Fortify the Thoa-Relay Gate
---[][] Smallcraft Yards in Radiant 11/30 +13 +5 100%
--[] Logistical Overhaul 0/30 +7 +5 27.5%

-[] SciComm
--[] Unknown FTL Comms Project ???
--[] Genetic Augmentation Jailbreak 22/50 +5 +1 7.5%
--[] Prepare for TLI Emancipation 26/30 +10 +1 100%
--[] Initiate Mega Project: Clearing out Tech Debt 1/2 turns

-[] SocComm
--[] Fractured Skies Combination Projects: Embrace the Monster Within 0/25 +7 27.5%
--[] Propagandize Against Bioconservatism 8/25 +12 92.5%

-[] MedComm
--[] Formalize Diplomatic Service 0/30 +11 22.5%
--[] Found Espionage Agency 0/30 +9 12.5%

All completion calcs made with the assumption that an omake bonus might be used, as at a quick count we currently have a massive 64 omake bonuses as of the last update.

MrRageQuit · Aug 14, 2022

Omake: Not Normal
Warning: Graphic violence referenced and depicted.

It was April 19th, 2252 when the Triton City Police Department squad car pulled up at the scene. The door swung open, and Kerensky unbuckled his seat belt and stepped out. It was a measure of of his excitement that he'd done so before the car had turned off. Yellerman, the driver, made sure of it before exiting in turn, shaking his head in mild amusement and exasperating. "Cool your jets, kid. I know you're eager..."

"Sorry," Kerensky apologized to the older man, a tad sheepishly. He was eager after all. His first case as a detective after all. And fortunately, Yellerman was one of those veterans who didn't complain about having a 'learning the ropes' newbie as a partner.

"I remember that feeling," Yellerman acknowledged. "You'll be surprised how fast it goes away." But it didn't, that day, as the pair headed into the Jesus F. Morton Park, and the uniform filled them in on the vic.

It was May 26th, 2255 and the station was buzzing as usual. Didn't matter that a bunch of anarchists had upended the galaxy. Didn't matter how many people were in Settlement Mall, or the offshoot in Morton Park. Crime wasn't stopping, so neither were the police.

Kerensky typed out his report on the Nguno case, tuning out the TV's low drone, an anchor reporting on the continuing protests and Bernard Hall's paralysis. A clanging sound led him to turn his head - Zhuan apparently had thrown something into the wastebasket with considerable force.

"Why aren't the SWAT getting called out?" The mustachioed Asian vociferously complained. "Costa might just roll over for these troublemakers, but I voted Bengo into the Mayor's seat because he promised to really back us up." He did that once a day now, but for the most part everyone just let it pass.

"It'll blow over." Yellerman replied, returning from the restroom. "Besides, it's just a bunch of kids my daughter's age who think they'll change the Compact. And at least they're saving us the need for overtime." Zhuan sneered but made no reply, and certainly didn't comment on the fact that Arianna Yellerman had gone all the way up to Settlement Mall. No one was going to make insinuations there.

Yellerman was one of of them, after all, a solid detective and a team player, and had grumbled about his daughter's decision to Kerensky. Kerensky had been to his partner's house for dinner several times, and met Arianna. A sweet girl really, who meant well even if she was surrounded by a bunch of anarchist sympathizers at the moment. And his partner's older child, Travis was a good patriotic boy serving in the SDF.

And he was right. At least these protesters had the basic decency to not behave like those criminal hooligans on Earth. It could be far worse.

It was May 29th, 1900 hours roughly, and they were no longer spared overtime. After Valerie Shah's assassination, Bernard Hall had finally gotten its act together under ex-Judge Normal. SWAT and federally deputized Charter private security units had dispersed Morton Park. Zhuan was smiling like Christmas had come half a year early. Kerensky felt relived to some extent as well, but it didn't show on his face, as he watched Yellerman redial his daughter's cell number for the tenth time.

With yet again, no response.

"She'll be fine." He heard himself say, reaching out to rest a hand on his partner's shoulder. "Ari's a smart girl. She'll have gotten out of the way."

"Travis was in Second Squadron." Yellerman said, voice drawn hard. "The news is saying the crew stations were vented."

Oh shit. Kerensky shook his head hard, dismissing the thought. "He's a logistics clerk, Sam. The last person to be pointing a gun at loyal soldiers. They'll just be keeping him in a cell until everything gets sorted out. Trust me."

It was June 5th, when it turned out Kerensky had been wrong. He'd seen dozens of corpses over his two years as a detective, but out here in the capital, the bodies seemed far worse. Arianna had been a pretty girl, but making that out now was impossible from the heavy caliber exit wounds that littered her head and chest.

Right now, Kerensky had an arm around Yellerman, who looked like he could barely stand. "Those animals!" He half bawled, half yelled, for the third time. The 'animals' were the diehard rabid anarchists that the report said riddled her with bullets from behind when she'd ran away rather than fight the authorities. "They did that to my little girl!" Yeah, that was whom Yellerman was referring to. That evening, word came down Travis' body was officially unrecoverable.

It was June 22nd when Kerensky returned to work. Everyone understood. Yellerman was a widower, and there were some worries that without someone keeping him company, he might have thought about blowing his brains out. Thankfully, instead Yellerman resorted to the time-honored method of drinking gallons of booze. He'd also lost pleasure in previous habits, such as the Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch's crossword puzzles - having canceled his subscription entirely.

It was July 2nd when Yellerman was finally cleared by the therapist to start work again. Some pencil-pushing motherfucker outside the station had raised concerns regarding his son and daughter, but even Lieutenant Zhuan - promoted in the post-29th shakeup - wouldn't stand for it. Yellerman was one of of them, after all, a solid detective and a team player. Besides, they needed every detective they could get.

The new Yellerman was taciturn and unsmiling to a fault, but he kept his edge and diligence. Burying yourself in your work was another time-honored method for handling grief, after all.

It was August 29th, and Kerensky was back in Morton Park. There was a big press conference and rally for the government, democracy and order. The mayor was there. So was the police commissioner, various bigwigs, and in front, the biggest of all the wigs, Solicitor General Aiden-Ribera. Unsurprising a top federal official would be there, Triton was in the top five largest cities in Atlantis. And naturally, the TCPD was there in force to provide security.

Kerensky took a bite out of his hot dog, as Aiden-Ribera, finally got to the crux of his speech. Sorry, but the man was not a natural speaker.

"...And so, while the extension of these measures for another month may seem onerous, your support will help the administration swiftly complete our promise: to make Atlantis normal again."

"ATLANTIS ISN'T NORMAL!"

Kerensky jerked short, coughing up the half-chewed chunk of meat and bread. Was that Yellerman?! What was he doing up on the stage? How'd he get on the stage? Wait, what was in his hand--

"ATLANTIS SHOULD BE FREE!"

Startled, confused as much as Kerensky, nearby security failed to react for a long, fatal moment as Sam Yellerman pressed down on the button. The explosives underneath his coat, modified from a Broadcast design to better pass sensors, detonated, consuming the stage in a roar of flame.

The shockwave couldn't reach him at this distance, yet Kerensky still found himself sprawled on the ground, the word 'Normal' pounding in his head.

clockworkchaos · Aug 14, 2022

Kirook said:
It's not just about being bourgeois generally. Emily has a particular axe to grind against the ideological successors of the DemFed—her family was a lot richer before the First Great Black Summer.

Hey, she should be happy. We just helped her regain the family fortune. Where's the gratitude?

Nuew · Aug 14, 2022

PRESS RELEASE

IFDG Releases 2255 Report on the State of Galactic Democracy in a Time of Crisis

Institute for a Free and Democratic Galaxy, Devi Station, Korolev-Chandraskar

There have been near-universal decreases in galactic freedom over the past four years, according to a new report released by the Institute for a Free and Democratic Galaxy.

The Institute released its 2255 report on fulfillment of civil and democratic norms today, set to coincide with the beginning of the Compact's general election. These decreases have occurred primarily over the last few months, though some, particularly in the Far Spinward, date several years back. More recently, there have been substantial decreases in freedom and democracy even in core systems, particularly in Sol, Pengali, and Atlantis. The compact itself has also, for the first time in history, lost its "Excellent" Democracy Rating™, falling to "Acceptable".

[…]

It is exemplary of the state of the Galaxy that this is the IFDG's first (and hopefully only) report to be released from its temporary headquarters on Korolev-Chandraskar, where it was forced to flee due to anarchist chaos and the consequent drastic decrease in Freedom Score® at their permanent headquarters in Atlantic City. The IFDG urges that all systems and countries within the Community of Humanity immediately act to reverse these universal losses in our common heritage and to assist with the creation and maintenance of liberal democratic order in those places that cannot do so themselves.

(Selected Excerpts):

The Solarian Compact

Freedom Score®: N/A
Democracy Score®: 7.4 / 10 (Acceptable; Decrease of 1.3 points from 2251)

…a notable decrease in democratic conformance, primarily (though not exclusively) due to the decision to deal with anarchist-controlled systems using so-called "virtual representation"…

Atlantean Colonial Union (Atlantis)

Freedom Score®: 4.4 / 10 (Poor; Decrease of 5.4 points from 2251)
Democracy Score®: 5.9 / 10 (Acceptable; Decrease of 3.9 points from 2251)

…The violent removal of protestors and especially the massacre of the Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch…

…The extra-constitutional installation of Charles Normal as Prime Minister has…

…While it cannot be disputed that the protests were illegal and needed to be resolved…

United States of Columbia

Freedom Score®: 7.6 (Excellent; Increase of 0.4 points from 2251)
Democracy Score®: 6.4 / 10 (Acceptable; Decrease of 1.4 points from 2251)

…good progress on Augment rights…

…unusual and emergency appointment of John Pavlovic as President…

Olduvai Federal Republic

Freedom Score®: 6.2 / 10 (Acceptable; Decrease of 3.3 points from 2251)
Democracy Score®: 4.8 / 10 (Poor; Decrease of 4.2 points from 2251)

…extreme reaction to a purported "coup attempt" … unnecessary and destabilizing purge of the civil service…

…proliferation of extremism and widespread turn away from democratic values…

Drakian Frontier Republic (Drake)

Freedom Score®: 0.7 / 10 (Unfree; Decrease of 1.6 points from 2251)
Democracy Score®: 2.6 / 10 (Poor; Decrease of 0.2 points from 2251)

…has begun a genocide of its augment population…

…extremely limited political representation for minorities…

"Amaranthine Interstellar Commonwealth"

Freedom Score®: 3.2 / 10 (Poor)
Democracy Score®: 1.0 / 10 (Undemocratic)

Editor's Note: The so-called "Amaranthine Interstellar Commonwealth" would not normally be included, and, as Charter Economic Zones, none of its component systems have been included in prior editions. However, the universal interest and our reputation as unbiased analysts has lead to the decision to include it nonetheless; see the Introduction to this report for details.

…exceptionally limited freedoms in several areas…

…claims of "true democracy" are facile…

"Shei United Front"

Freedom Score®: 0.6 / 10 (Unfree)
Democracy Score®: 0.0 / 10 (Undemocratic)

Editor's Note: The so-called "Shei United Front" would not normally be included, and, as a Charter Economic Zone, Shei has not been included in prior editions. However, the universal interest and our reputation as unbiased analysts has lead to the decision to include it nonetheless; see the Introduction to this report for details.

…our first ever Democracy Score® of 0.0…

…essentially a total surveillance state, without almost any freedoms whatsoever…

…military junta poorly masquerading as an "anarchist democracy"…

natruska · Aug 14, 2022

lmao people are gonna be partying in the streets of Sheol to celebrate this incredible, ground-breaking achievement.

good job SUF, you beat us!

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