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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Thalton · Apr 5, 2023

Aranfan said:
I do wonder what their opinion on the new sector lord is.

He gave them the ability to make their lives immeasurably better. He's probably the most popular sector lord in that portion of space in history.

Well, through weight of numbers at least, the nobles would strenuously disagree.

Spart117MC · Apr 5, 2023

T_of_A said:
I was a bit baffled at first, but this does make a lot of sense actually. This is how they reconcile the Box' propaganda with their pre-existing religion, isn't it? Much like how feudal peasant rebellions often targeted "poor advisors" or "nobles we hate" and not the divinely chosen King himself.

Though in 40K's case the God Emperor is less the divinely chosen ruler but the divine itself. Really I would classify the mutiny I wrote about as being closer to an religious civil war more so than a localized rebellion. I envision these guys as being less concerned with individual leaders than the structure that's allowed them to exist. God's not the one on trial, so to speak, the church and the kingdom that claim to stand in his name are.

I imagine this line of thinking is helped along by Box-chan who has access not only to revolutionary literature in regards to oppressive secular institutions, but also centuries of theological theses and archived religious texts.

The influence of Black Christian writings is going to be particularly interesting because there are enough similarities in the worship of Christ and the Imperial Cult for it to fit in the Ecclesiarchy's spectrum of acceptable beliefs at first glance and thus not be instinctively rejected as heresy by your average Imperial reader, but the themes of a benevolent god and understanding of goodwill to others present within those texts will clash greatly with established Imperial dogma.

The texts against humanism too given the Imperium's attitude towards 'abhumans.'

Aranfan said:
I do wonder what their opinion on the new sector lord is.

I've been imagining these guys, or at least the ones that first laid the foundations for the mutiny aboard the Amirani, to be a Guard regiment that was close enough to be supplied with Boxes but didn't necessarily call the sector it was found in home so they wouldn't have the same level of attachment to Lucius in the way his citizens do.

Depending on how he reacts in response to learning the contents of the Box they could either consider him a saint or little more than another cog in the system that they hope to destroy, only one that had the misfortune to fail to grasp what he had unleashed.

Balmung1 · Apr 5, 2023

Spart117MC said:
The influence of Black Christian writings is going to be particularly interesting because there are enough similarities in the worship of Christ and the Imperial Cult for it to fit in the Ecclesiarchy's spectrum of acceptable beliefs at first glance and thus not be instinctively rejected as heresy by your average Imperial reader, but the themes of a benevolent god and understanding of goodwill to others present within those texts will clash greatly with established Imperial dogma.

Actually rthe ecclesiarchy is willing to let a metric shitload of things slip by if it means they can convert a planet.Is your main god a sun god?- well then you get to worship the emperor as an aspect of the sun,do you sacrifice people to your deity?- nowyou sacrifice large animals to the emperor,do you believe in an angry flood god?-that's the emperor showing his wrath to unbelievers,do you lke happy deities-there's the emperor loving all of humanity.In addition the ecclesiarchy is willing to ignore the whole abhuman/psyker thing in order to get worshipers .For example Tallarn worship the god emperor and instead of having regular ecclesiarchy priests they actually worship sanctioned psykers and astropaths as avatars of the emperor who is bonded to them,though some tribes believe this is heretical and that they should just worship the emperor directly.

Aranfan · Apr 6, 2023

Spart117MC said:
I've been imagining these guys, or at least the ones that first laid the foundations for the mutiny aboard the Amirani, to be a Guard regiment that was close enough to be supplied with Boxes but didn't necessarily call the sector it was found in home so they wouldn't have the same level of attachment to Lucius in the way his citizens do.

Depending on how he reacts in response to learning the contents of the Box they could either consider him a saint or little more than another cog in the system that they hope to destroy, only one that had the misfortune to fail to grasp what he had unleashed.

As shown, he's not stupid enough to try and take the box away. He's mostly focused on not letting the xenos eat people's faces.

Derpmind · Apr 6, 2023

Aranfan said:
As shown, he's not stupid enough to try and take the box away. He's mostly focused on not letting the xenos eat people's faces.

So by 40k standards, he's practically a saint.

Nyvis · Apr 6, 2023

Aranfan said:
Yeah. A lot of the rebellions are going to be nominally pro-Emperor, at least to start. That said it is entirely possible for things to get significantly more radical as the Imperium shows that it isn't actually interested in protecting humans, just exploiting them. How things fall out will probably to a large degree depend on the particular circumstances of the places in question. Cadia, Ultramar, and Tellara are likely to respond to the box in quite different fashions.

One thing in favour of the Emperor is that he's locked in the golden throne so it's not wrong to blame advisors for current policies (even if he built the imperium they inherited and that was already a fascistic mess). He also can't speak directly and make things worse, unlike a lot of monarchs who managed to destroy that kind of goodwill, so that could endure for a while.

And of course he'd agree with the anti priest agenda

Evaunit02mark1 · Apr 6, 2023

Nyvis said:
One thing in favour of the Emperor is that he's locked in the golden throne so it's not wrong to blame advisors for current policies (even if he built the imperium they inherited and that was already a fascistic mess). He also can't speak directly and make things worse, unlike a lot of monarchs who managed to destroy that kind of goodwill, so that could endure for a while.

And of course he'd agree with the anti priest agenda

It also doesn't hurt that if he could talk most of what he'd be saying is "Oh fuck oh fuck everything is fucked to hell why did I trust her the game was rigged from the damn start I'm going to flip the fucking table"

Punctuated with the screams of the tattered and tortured souls he's currently using to stich himself together of course.

clockworkchaos · Apr 6, 2023

Nyvis said:
One thing in favour of the Emperor is that he's locked in the golden throne so it's not wrong to blame advisors for current policies (even if he built the imperium they inherited and that was already a fascistic mess). He also can't speak directly and make things worse, unlike a lot of monarchs who managed to destroy that kind of goodwill, so that could endure for a while.

And of course he'd agree with the anti priest agenda

I mean you can insist the emperor 100% supports you while building communism and rebellion. Up to and including going full FATE 'this histirical figure was reincarnated as a cute girl' and insisting box-chan is a aspect of the emperor. And like... no way to prove them wrong.

Thalton said:
He gave them the ability to make their lives immeasurably better. He's probably the most popular sector lord in that portion of space in history.

Well, through weight of numbers at least, the nobles would strenuously disagree.

Aranfan said:
As shown, he's not stupid enough to try and take the box away. He's mostly focused on not letting the xenos eat people's faces.

He's following in the path of Blaze.

Aranfan · Apr 6, 2023

Derpmind said:
So by 40k standards, he's practically a saint.

He's still a horrifically xenophobic piece of shit who sees nothing wrong with suffering not the witch to live. Honestly the only reason he hasn't fallen to "Imperial Realism" and just continued doing the same shit as the last boss, like that one peasant that became chinese emperor during the century of humiliation and promptly decided to change jack shit, is that he kinda has to break everything to reform the sector to take full advantage of the STC. Not changing everything in the face of an actual honest to omnissiah STC would be an unconsionable dereliction of duty to someone who actually believes that crap about the imperium protecting humans from the cruelties of the universe (like Gaius).

Edit: To clarify, what is being built in the Hekartae Sector would horrify the AIC on multiple different levels, but it's way better than what came before it.

bdun140 · Apr 10, 2023

Have a dumb meme while we wait for content:
SPOILER: MOST CHARISMATIC SOLNAV OFFICER

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sgimfISzPs&ab_channel=SNAKE

SPOILER: LEAST CHARISMATIC CROSSROADS PACT OFFICER

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUUhGWig6iM&ab_channel=VitorHunter

Spoilers written out because SV doesn't like it when a post is more spoiler than regular text.

Estro · Apr 10, 2023

AND PRACTICE MY ART

09:32, January 21st, 2255

Brinicle General Hospital, Brinicle, Pacifica

The pad went beep, and for probably the ten thousandth time in my life I wished there was a setting somewhere that could turn that noise off. I could see the sticker had been scanned by the fact I was now looking at the medical charts of… Raleigh Roper, thank you very much.

I stepped back to let the Senior nurses now scan the sticker to bring up the chart, moving to stand next to the only other Doctor doing rounds, Dr Mathieu, a sour old man who's thirty-something appearance and trendy goatee didn't hide the fact he was continually sour over not being promoted to Executive Consultant.

He glanced down at the pad as I proffered it, scanning over the lines in a second flat before scoffing, lightly. "Basic. Not worth my- our time."

As I scanned the pad, while the Nurses started on their examination, I couldn't say I entirely disagreed. I'd had a day off yesterday - blessed relief - and Roper had managed to finally get an NPI done during then. He had mildly fibrinous pleurisy, but his lungs had a partial nanological scaffold installed to prevent pneumoconiosis - he was a Labourer on Foundry - which had been enough for pulmonary medicine to shove it over to us. And, to be fair, looking at the NPI's results, it did seem to be related. The inert alumina supports for the scaffold had been installed too deep, and were rubbing against the endothoracic fascia. Shoddy work coming back to bite him, two decades down the line.

Still, the proper treatment shouldn't be that hard.

I turned my attention back from the pad to the rounds, where one of the nurse students had finished their auscultation.

It sometimes still struck me, how different Pacifica, how different Rhodes was, from Banks. Even the structure of the rounds. With the student stepping back, the nurses formed their own group. Technicians, type seven. Half of them probably deserved to be called doctor, but that was a title not awarded to them. The ward coordinator stood alone, halfway between us, with the scribe next to her. Clerk, types three and six. And then us. Mathieu, attending physician, grasping and venal. He'd not said anything of note since we'd left the Administrator's wards and the Consultants (Executive, type eight a [medical supervisory]) had left. In fairness, on Banks he'd have reached their ranks two decades ago, if not more. And myself, a mere eight months gone from my fellowship. Come to this hick outer system for the pay and the seventy percent assumption of my debt my twelve-year contract granted me, provided I stayed the term. Both Administrators, type twelve.

"So, Peters, what would you suggest for the treatment here?" asked Catherine Mulligan, the seniormost nurse.

"... In this case, uh, micromechanical sonoterminus? That shouldn't interfere with the function of the scaffold, not if we don't select a resonant frequency. We could do Bi weekly injections of nosorem? Dosage would be, uh, what's his weight…"

"Why not a nanological pulmonary reconditioning?" I offered blandly.

Catherine looked at me, her eyebrow rising just a fraction at my interruption. She was leading the rounds with Mathieu as disengaged as he was. From what I'd heard from the nurses - well, what I'd shamelessly eavesdropped on - before I'd turned up Mathieu hadn't bothered doing any more of rounds than what would let him get seen by the consultants.

Fucker.

"Well, Peters?" said Mulligan, passing the question down to the student.

Peters looked up at me, stuttered for a moment, before looking back down at the pad. "Uh… Nosorem is able to be self administered once we designate the targeting, meaning that mister roper can take the lead in his own recovery. If, uh, if someone flags him today after rounds and administers the first dose, if there's no adverse effects he could be out of the hospital before this evening."

"Wouldn't that be nice, getting to sleep in my own bed." Grumbled Roper in his bed. I ignored him.

"Very good, Peters. You also forgot to mention that nanological reconditioning is a Betterman class eight procedure "

" Nine, for pulmonary " I interjected.

"That just strengthens my point. It's impractical to suggest in this context. Besides, it'd take five weeks to recover from that, it's a major procedure." It'd be three if I was lead, Mathieu still used volumetric control measures. Effective, sure, but two decades supplanted, and they caused more inflammation at mechano epithelial interfaces.

I shrug, and let the conversation turn back to the appropriate dosage. When the pad prompted a doctor's signature, I looked at Mathieu, who was checking his phone for something, and sighed. Before Mulligan could cough meaningfully, I scrawled my name across it, and approved the course of treatment.

God, rounds couldn't end fast enough.

---

14:17, January 21st, 2255

My pager buzzed and I brought it up to read the screen, grateful for something to interrupt the monotony. I was in my office - one of the great perks of Rhodes, private office space - running through a bunch of molecular biology papers, trying to remember what mechanism was interfering in one of the executive's new augmentations - sorry, prophylactic genetic alteration package.

I snatched it from my coat pocket, read the code, and punched in a number into my desk's phone. "Dr Kotoba Rensei, augmetics, responding for a consult?"

I idly opened a new window as I spoke, flicking through my default apps. Mostly medical databases, although I had a news app and a sports app among them.

"I, uh, Doctor? Right, yes, yes. Uh. So, this is, uh. I'm Omar Blanquet, with critical care. We admitted a patient late yesterday, who collapsed mid shift. He was admitted, and we've performed our typical slate of tests. It seemed to be uremic syndrome, so we consulted with nephrology, who prescribed several drugs in preparation for dialysis. But, uh, since then, while his hyperkalemia has abated, we've noticed that his -"

"Get to the point."

"The drugs are causing bradycardia, he's at thirty five, thirty six bpm presently. This isn't a known side effect of any of the drugs, and cardiac is just utterly bemused. But, uh, it turns out his maternal grandfather was an elk aug." The voice on the other end of the line rose, almost making it a question.

"Don't you mean that he's an elk aug?" I said, flicking through to one of the genetics apps and typing elk into the search bar. Oh, goddammit, six systemic formulations?

"Uh, no. We'd have noticed. Apparently it just… didn't express in his mother? And so, uh, we're not entirely sure what… is going on there. He's been responsive to cardiac's management, which has stopped the fall, but it's still very low, and his active panel is showing a buildup of bilirubin ever since we've started that."

I mouthed the word "elk" into the air, before drumming my fingers across the desk for a moment as I thought. "You've sent for a DNA sequence, right?"
"Ah, yes, as soon as we found that in his histories. But the labs aren't done yet, and he's not exactly stable."

Non-manifesting transition of augmetic genetics causing endocrinal abnormalities. Oh, this was the most interesting problem I'd had in a month or two. Faulty reading causing the expression of an exotic enzyme seemed the most likely, IEER wasn't unheard of in aug-baseline children, if generally more common in badly designed augments. It was usually discovered during childhood, though. To survive puberty with undiagnosed IEER…

"What's the patient number?" I asked, opening up FILES to see what, exactly, was the current cocktail of pharmacological products. I typed it in as the nurse gave it to me, the patient's files appearing on the screen. Oh… hmm. Cardiac still did intravenous atropine? What was this, the 2100s?

"Allllright. I'm certainly interested in this. Contact me as soon as the sequence is sent, as I can't really do to much until then, as I'm pretty sure it's an extremely weak form of IEER. I'd like to prescribe him thirty micrograms of blooweldine in the meantime…"

The FILES system flashed an alert in front of my face as I made to follow talk with action. Technician class insurance wouldn't cover blooweldine, and so I couldn't prescribe it. I clicked through to see what the system recommended instead, drumming my fingers across the table as I scrolled through the list.

"Strike that. It'll have to be…" I sighed, and just clicked on the option with the highest affinity score. Natnorm. Great. "Give him sixty milligrams of natnorm, I've just entered the prescription. That's the best I can do until I've got the sequence, although from there I should be able to conference with nephrology to design a full course of care for him."

"Ah. Right. We do a fair bit with Natnorm. So, uh, you're willing to take a technician personally?"

I exhaled through my nose, and mentally pictured going after Mathieu and Richards with a hatchet for several seconds. "We'll accept him, yeah. It'll be Richards covering the night, but I'll tell him we're doing this and he'll do this." God save him, he'll fucking do this. "Anything else?"

"Ah, no."

I placed the phone back in the cradle, and spent a couple of minutes typing up the consult into the patient's file, and then leaned back in my chair, unwilling to go back to fiddling with the executive's augment yet. Spinning around, I stared out of the window, looking at the shallow hills falling away, and the twinkling azure beyond their tops, as something nagged at my brain.

Slipping out my personal phone from my pocket, I tapped at it before my eyebrows almost vanished into my hair.

"Wait, they're a type of deer?"

---

20:58, January 21st, 2255

I opened the door to the ward, quietly eyed the members of staff and the patients in their beds, and tsked. Absently resanitising my hands, I walked halfway through the hall, idly flicking my attention over the readouts as I passed each patient, until I was stood next to Canterbury, the chief nurse on night shift. I liked him better than Mulligan, but I'd signed up for a fourteen hour shift today, and it was still an hour until Richards came in, so I was a bit more snappy than usual.

"So. I finally got out of the meeting, reviewed the scans on my way down. It's an interesting case, isn't it?"

Canterbury nodded absently, flicking around the image on his pad, a 3d scan of the patient's shoulder, false colour imposed on the various structures inside it. "It's certainly an odd one."

The patient - Malcolm Ruffin - had previously had a complete dexter arm replacement, exchanging it for some model of arm or whatever, I hadn't scanned the report that deeply. He'd then had the brilliant idea to go wandering in traffic, and suffered - amongst other injuries - complete disarticulation of the limb in the incident. Lacking, as it were, any present augmentations when he arrived at the hospital, he'd been shuffled off to the ICU instead of our ward. Also because Richards would directly admit a Labourer when hell froze over, and not before. Admittedly, I'd have made the same call, the patient wasn't exactly in great shape when he came in, and traumatic injuries of this type weren't our speciality. Still, probably could have come up with a treatment plan if I had to.

He'd healed up nicely - well, mostly, whoever did the facial reconstruction was clearly drunk - and now came our time to put him under the knife again, and reattach his arm.

"Uh… Miss, uh…?"

I looked up, looking the patient in his eyes for the first time. Huh, I'd thought he was asleep. "It's Doctor. Doctor Rensei."

"Ah, sorry, I was just wondering, uh, when will I uh, be getting out of all of this?"

I looked at him for a while longer, then gave a shrug. "Not tonight. Probably not tomorrow, Monday's already been booked out. Wednesday? Maybe. Louis has a shift on Wednesday, right?" Good nurse, Louis. Capable enough to lead this surgery, certainly.

"Yep." chimes in Canterbury, while I took his moment of distraction to get the pad for myself.

"Anyway, I was thinking, if you look at this," I said, changing the mode to produce a different cutaway, "You can clearly see where the patient was injured. Now, I consulted his records, and while the previous attachment points were at the cords of his brachial plexus, we're missing another centimeter or two from the nerves, probably still attached to the arm, wherever it is now. And the scar tissue that's been produced isn't looking good for a standard reconnection. As such, I suggest we actually do this in a two part surgery. We open him up, clear away the scar tissue, and lay down blanks along the pathways, then give him a serious dose of localised neural - and probably muscular while we're there - reconstructives. Proper micromachines, loaded up with personalised cells and all. That'll take another three days, then we take him back under, and reconnect to the cords again."

"I'm not sure you'd get approval for personalised recons. Or reconstructives at all, really." Canterbury, scratched at his designer stubble with one hand as he thought. "Plus, two surgeries?"

"I'd really -" The patient started speaking, before I cut across him.

"It's a minor surgery, we're just laying down path indicators for the machines. Could do the entire thing with needle lay, even." Canterbury nodded, before drawing an imaginary line on the image.

"See, the scarring isn't that bad. We could just cut the divisions clean, and install at the trunks."

"The main plate's connected to the clavicle, I don't want to go that far back, it'll just be basically floating in his body. One over enthusiastic motion - and he's what, a miner?"

"I'm actually in constru-"

"Besides, Canterbury, we'd need to put in an artificial subclavius then, that's still intact here, and we'd need to cut above the branching point to do as you'd say."

Canterbury gave a small nod, and a half hearted shrug. "You're the Doctor. I suppose I could give one of the students a tour on how needle lay works in practice. I can spare the time on Tuesday, if you don't mind me passing 801 and 803's checkups to Killmurry."

"That'd be great." I nod, passing the pad back to him. "You want me to write, I've got enough time before I need to do handover to Michael?"

"Yeah, I think I'd need your access controls to order personalised recons, anyway." He nods, before smiling widely, turning to face the bed more directly. "So, Mister Ruffin, I'm sure you've got some questions about the course of treatment that the Doctor and I have been talking about. First, though, is that if all goes well you'll be out of here before the end of the week."

I nodded once at the patient, again at Canterbury, before spinning on my heel to go do the paperwork. If I did it fast enough, I could probably get a smoke in before meeting up with Michael. Ah, but then he'd just be passive-aggressive about me smelling of it the entire time. Not worth it.

I was almost to the end of the ward before Canterbury called my name, and I spun again. I always enjoyed spinning while wearing a lab coat, it felt so dramatic.

"What is it?"

"Three days of neural reconstructives at the micromachine size, you said? That's how long it'll take for that much tissue?"

"Yeah, what… Ah, right." I tapped my tongue against the roof of my mouth. That was going to be awful. Itching from the machines, phantom sensations from the reconnections, and we can't let him touch the area. Mmm. If it was just muscular, I'd just say nerve blockers, but obviously, that wasn't going to work. Shorter amount of time, we could just keep him under while they worked, but that's not good for anything more than a few hours, and even then it's not preferred. "Uhh… Immobilisation?"

"Doctor."

I waved it off. "Yeah, yeah, just a joke. We could… innervatrobots at C5 through C8, T1, and then blockers? Reduced function, but he's going to be in bed anyway."

"Innervaboos… We've got natives for them?"

I closed an eye for a moment to think. "No… no, they're all still Cern. Or… MSI, actually, for one model strain. Nothing native."

He looked at me meaningfully, an eyebrow raised and I sighed. No way in hell that was getting approved, he was right. "Alright, then, do you have a suggestion?"

"... Haigs?" He said, almost tentatively. "We need something for it, and… Haigs is suited."

"Oh, I know Haigs, they've got all those nice ads," said one patient near to me, who'd clearly been shamelessly eavesdropping. I stared at Canterbury for a solid few seconds, before taking a controlled exhale from my nose.

"Fine. Fine. You want to give the patient Haigs? If Raffin-" "-Ruffin-" "-if he's fine with them, fine. You'll be doing the needle lay anyway."

I spun again, even as I could hear the patient agree to the change, and left the ward with a bare nod to the duty med tech. Standing outside the doors, I stretched my arms for a good moment, checking the watch on my wrist. Tch. I lowered my arms, and started walking towards the Executive Therapeutic rooftop garden

I was having a fucking smoke, and damn Michael's snarky comments.

---

23:13, January 21st, 2255

702, Coralbreeze Apartments, Brinicle, Pacifica.

I opened the door with a lazy slap, and walked into my apartments, the lights automatically turning on at half power. Kicking off my shoes in the alcove, I blearily muttered "Tadaima,", before I saw who was waiting for me.

"Oh, One, what's that? Is that a dead toy? Did you kill it dead? Oh, you did, didn't you, you vicious little thing."

I reached my hand out to try to pet One, but he just tried to bite at my fingertips before I yanked them out of reach. I straightened up, the dead toy in my hand, as I watched my cat vanish into the jumble of cat furniture I had filled the far too large open plan segment of my "Executive class" apartment. It wasn't, of course. I didn't have the cachet to live quite like that. Still, it was far too large for just one woman. The done thing would be to host parties for my colleagues, and other people on what Rhodes call my "social level". I'd never been much for parties, though, and if I held a rave my neighbour would undoubtedly make a noise complaint.

"Order: Print another cat toy off the list."

Some hidden speakers somewhere gave an affirmative two tone chime, and I walked over to the kitchen, double checking the level's on One's food and drink dispensers. Picking out a chicken salad, I ripped the clingfilm off the top, before making my way between the cat furniture towards my actual room.

In contrast to what was still a far too large central room - I'd measured the ceilings, one bored night, they were a full three meters sixty - even with all I'd filled it with; my bedroom was small, almost cramped. A weights machine and a treadmill occupied one corner of the room, while a slapped-together warewulf cluster hummed noisily at the foot of my bed, wired to about fifteen different components that comprised my fullsim rig. The core was a legit Cern fullsim, I'd just altered the form factor after discovering I could not, in fact, get the actual fullsim chair through the door. God knows how many warranties that voided.

I brought up my screen, slipped in my headphones, and with great reluctance went about performing my daily workout, ignoring the voice in my head that said I was overworking myself. That was an atavistic throwback, one that didn't understand the new limits of the human body with modern medicine at hand.

As I finished, throwing my sweat-stained scrubs into the pile in the corner - god, I'd had a day off yesterday, why hadn't I done that - I opened the door into my en suite, slamming all the buttons on my shower onto max. After what was a sinfully long time luxuriating under the hot water, a good ten minutes or so, I finished my shower and padded out into my room, my hair still dripping wet.

Sitting down on the edge of my bed, I sighed, before looking at the view from my apartment. I had the top floor - one of the two penthouse suites in the building - and the view was great. Not by the standards of Pacifica, of course, you could barely see any of the ocean. But I lived on one of the hills surrounding Brincle's city core, and the lights and bustle I could still see even this late reminded me of home, back in Banks.

With a groan, I bent down, picking up the headset for my fullsim, and spoke into the microphone.

"System, open file, c slash windows slash system thirty two slash Input Methods slash Shared slash P-H-M-D slash crimes dot txt."

The little cluster at the end of my bed whirred, the same as always. I'd ripped out the home assistant microphones in this room almost a month after moving in. Honestly, at the time, I'd thought I was going to replace them with a better system, one with a VI. But that was seven months ago. Now, it had a better purpose.

"System, append timestamp."

I swallowed, before lighting up a cigarette, drawing the warm smoke into my lungs to calm me down a little.

"System, append following. Aborted full course of medichines on Jim Falcon due to police arresting him. Prescribed nosorem to Raleigh Roper, suffering from mechanically induced fibrinous pleusry. Nosorem is a pseudoscientific 'sonic massage-based' targeted nanomachine system with no clinical benefits above placebo. Associates: Mattieu, Mulligan, Peters. Personal signature."

I spluttered as I accidentally bit off the end of my cigarette in my annoyance, spitting the filter tip onto the floor. Shit. I lit up another one, before continuing.

"System, continue append. Prescribed, at patient request, medipedia brand 'nat mur.'to Rachel Harlem, a homeopathic tablet that does nothing. Associates, Mattieu, Mulligan, Johnson. Attempted to prescribe biomechanical pancreatic replacement, panmedtrill, to Omar Phillips, denied due to labourer status, prescribed pancreatic replacement drug course instead, despite knowledge of contraindicated medications on list. Associates: Mattieu, pharmacy. Attempted to prescribe blooweldine, a temporary kidney replacement medimachine infusion, to Taylor Laghari, suffering from IEER. Denied, prescribed natnorm, a pseudoscientific 'wholebody health' treatment. No associates; FILES system denial. Aborted full course of treatment on Madison Gardener due to shift beginning in Crucible. Suspect medical facilities in Crucible insufficient, or unwilling to treat. Associates: general staff. Unable to prescribe innervatrobots for diversionary neural connections during neural system reconstruction on Malcom Ruffin. Two foxtrots. Prescribed Haigs brand 'neural suppressant', which is nothing of the sort, just a popular god awful fucking ad supported supplement pill mixed with opioids. Associates: Canterbury. Oh, and Richards kept trying to look down my shirt again. End append. Close file."

I took an especially long drag on my cigarette, staring at the shifting lights of downtown still, warm water dripping down my spine.

Today had been a bad day, even by the usual standards of the hospital. Just case after case where I was either constrained, or made complicit. Oh, sure, there was the usual, rejecting things because people can't pay for them, that was normal. All the more reason to be careful for your health. But actual medical treatments being obstructed, or worse falsified with pseudoscientific garbage, there had been too many of those today. Usually only got, like, three.

I took another angry drag as I started towelling off my hair.

They swore an oath, god dammit. Did they have no respect for the greatest field of scientific enquiry ever conceived? For the responsibilities they had, in ensuring the health of humanity? Was the entire field on this planet nothing but hypocrites? I could see the way they looked at me, as I got in the way of their fucking graft and sycophantic obedience. Like proper medicine had no place in a hospital.

Respected in all times, in all places? Ha, what fucking bollocks.

Stubbing my cigarette out, I fell back on my bed, and placed the helmet firmly on my head. I should sleep, but I was just too angry.

"System, bootup latest project file tagged Hand."

As my surroundings disappeared in a flood of colour and sound, I laid back. Just another eleven years, three months, and six days. And then I could get off this backwater planet, and its suffocating culture.

The Laurent · Apr 10, 2023

If you're wondering why the ritual chant of revolutionary Pacifica is just yelling 'Death!' louder and louder... here's some further hints about Rhodes.

masterofmadness · Apr 10, 2023

Well I certainly hope this log is now being used in a Black Tribunal!

Asmodemus · Apr 10, 2023

I hope to see something about this lady getting to practice good medicine freely in the future.

BoSPaladin · Apr 10, 2023

To be clear. Because I still have trouble believing this.

Those doctors just prescribes multiple courses of placebo's and utter bullshit?

prometheus110 · Apr 10, 2023

BoSPaladin said:
To be clear. Because I still have trouble believing this.

Those doctors just prescribes multiple courses of placebo's and utter bullshit?

At the patient's request and/or due to insurance preventing them from giving actual medicine, yes.

Broken25 · Apr 10, 2023

BoSPaladin said:
Those doctors just prescribes multiple courses of placebo's and utter bullshit?

Better than nothing, which is the alternative.

They are poors after all.

BoSPaladin · Apr 10, 2023

Broken25 said:
Better than nothing, which is the alternative.

They are poors after all.

In one case it's a contraindicted medication. So, it's actively worse than nothing no?

DracoDracul · Apr 10, 2023

BoSPaladin said:
To be clear. Because I still have trouble believing this.

Those doctors just prescribes multiple courses of placebo's and utter bullshit?

I mean IRL we've got doctors prescribing Tylenol for major pain because blaming the existence of opioids is easier than blaming the system that's crushing people.

Gummy_Dragon · Apr 10, 2023

Big Pharma delenda est.

MSH · Apr 10, 2023

And hey, they're not only prescribing placebos. They gave one person ad programed (???) vitamins and fentanyl.

I get the distinct impression that Pacifica's intent to attend the Armstrong Conference is just to pseudo-Broadcast everything the tribunals have learned, and/or engage in some aggressive negotiations.

All the charters are awful in their own ways, but I have to say, there's just something about Rhodes in particular. At least you might have gotten bribed in MSI.

Of course, this is before we've seen what nightmare shit is going on in the Cern blacksites.

Winged One · Apr 11, 2023

For most of the sidestory, I was thinking "this isn't even that dystopian, really." And then she started explaining what those medicines do (or don't do) in crimes.txt. An interesting effect.

Cyanblackstone · Apr 11, 2023

Winged One said:
For most of the sidestory, I was thinking "this isn't even that dystopian, really." And then she started explaining what those medicines do (or don't do) in crimes.txt. An interesting effect.

Honestly, it reminded me of the "look at the five dozen brands of thing at the store, isn't capitalism awesome! Now, here's an article saying they're actually all manufactured at one plant with different boxes and sold to 3 mega-companies to falsify the idea of variety and competition."

The answer to people complaining about medication for Rhodes is Rhodes coming out with another placebo with a different name and marketing scheme forever. So you have hundreds of brands of "medicine" that are all identically produced, most of which aren't even pharmaceutically active.

If you want the good stuff you have to a) actually know that it exists, which most people don't have the time or energy to research, especially if you happen to be in the midst of a medical issue and b) have the money to pay for it.

Otherwise, "take two aspirin, you'll be fine" or "have you tried losing weight" and a pat on the back is what you get unless you're actively in the ER for trauma.

Professor Vesca · Apr 11, 2023

Cyanblackstone said:
Honestly, it reminded me of the "look at the five dozen brands of thing at the store, isn't capitalism awesome! Now, here's an article saying they're actually all manufactured at one plant with different boxes and sold to 3 mega-companies to falsify the idea of variety and competition."

The answer to people complaining about medication for Rhodes is Rhodes coming out with another placebo with a different name and marketing scheme forever. So you have hundreds of brands of "medicine" that are all identically produced, most of which aren't even pharmaceutically active.

If you want the good stuff you have to a) actually know that it exists, which most people don't have the time or energy to research, especially if you happen to be in the midst of a medical issue and b) have the money to pay for it.

Otherwise, "take two aspirin, you'll be fine" or "have you tried losing weight" and a pat on the back is what you get unless you're actively in the ER for trauma.

Think more happy thoughts two times a day and your cancer will go into remission. Crippling depression? Have you just tried choosing to be happy? We can't authorize anti depressants unless you have a history of failure of conservative treatments. So go do like yoga or something.

Forgothrax · Apr 11, 2023

DracoDracul said:
I mean IRL we've got doctors prescribing Tylenol for major pain because blaming the existence of opioids is easier than blaming the system that's crushing people.

This is an incredibly ignorant take that serves only to demonstrate your lack of knowledge regarding the treatment of pain. Opioids are great for the treatment of acute pain and in the setting of hospice care. Otherwise, chronically, they suck. Opioid induced hyperalgesia is not a benign thing.

Our current treatments for pain in general are insufficient. I'd love to have better ones. But we don't rn.

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

Been Better

Amateur human

Team Plasma Grunt

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

Team Plasma Grunt

I have ideas. Sometimes they're even good.

Sassy Bitch Stargazer

AND PRACTICE MY ART

09:32, January 21st, 2255

Brinicle General Hospital, Brinicle, Pacifica

14:17, January 21st, 2255

20:58, January 21st, 2255

23:13, January 21st, 2255

702, Coralbreeze Apartments, Brinicle, Pacifica.

Subversive Element

The Paladin

Join Cayman-Global & be part of the 1E-9 percent!

The Paladin

Transbian Communist

This too shall pass

Not the Simurgh

Good News Everyone!

Not Going Gently