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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BurnBright · Aug 18, 2023

I just reread the 14 days, and like every time I've reached

AKuz said:
Midnight

on a reread, there are tears in my eyes. The authors have really created an amazing story, here.

StarSingerBlue · Aug 20, 2023

I have a question: if a child in the AIC has a shitty home life and wants to leave while having a support network that either supports or enables abuse and not many contacts outside of that, what do they do ?
What about in the Solarian Compact ?

Can they just grab a Box-chan and go live in a treehouse in the woods ? (With indoor plumbing and a library)

Also, have physical books become more popular with Box-chan's arrival ? Can she just print them ?

Aranfan · Aug 20, 2023

StarSingerBlue said:
I have a question: if a child in the AIC has a shitty home life and wants to leave while having a support network that either supports or enables abuse and not many contacts outside of that, what do they do ?
What about in the Solarian Compact ?

Can they just grab a Box-chan and go live in a treehouse in the woods ? (With indoor plumbing and a library)

They can. The difficult thing with these sorts of situations is always the abused realizing that they can just leave.

StarSingerBlue · Aug 20, 2023

Aranfan said:
They can. The difficult thing with these sorts of situations is always the abused realizing that they can just leave.

Does Box-Chan come with tools to help with these sort of situations ? Like, for example, a gentle reminders guide to make food or clean the treehouse when someone might otherwise be too stressed to remember or do so and would get even more stressed once they realised they forgot to do this important thing ?
Or therapy aids and fanfic recs for difficult times ? (By therapy aids, I mean calming music or those special meditation breathing thing you can find online)

Torgamous · Aug 20, 2023

StarSingerBlue said:
I have a question: if a child in the AIC has a shitty home life and wants to leave while having a support network that either supports or enables abuse and not many contacts outside of that, what do they do ?
What about in the Solarian Compact ?

Can they just grab a Box-chan and go live in a treehouse in the woods ? (With indoor plumbing and a library)

Also, have physical books become more popular with Box-chan's arrival ? Can she just print them ?

Children in the AIC are organized, and have parent-child negotiators even in cases of no abuse.

AKuz said:
Expand BLG with Food Forest Initiative
"Okay, just to be clear, I am here only as a neutral negotiator. I had nothing to do with this offer, here is the new offer from your parents.

You can add your own waste to the compost piles, but will need to do so in outhouses until new piping to the compost sets is installed. In exchange they agree to upgrade their houses, the first starting within a month, the neighbourhood not to be finished in more than six months.

Sanitary guidelines to be followed on the handling of all compost.

Meat eating plants are to be allowed, as long as they are limited to bug eating, preferably pests. Nothing that could bite off your hand, no matter how cool.

All other genetic engineered plants allowed, as long as they are approved by the Committee on GE plants.

In the event that the garden is not maintained on at least

Yes Timmy, sorry, right

5. In the event that the food forest is not maintained on at least a weekly basis, penalties and reductions of size may be imposed.

6. Fungus will be allowed.

That work for you?"

"Yes Sam, I recognize that your parents are being reactionary by forbidden new plants. I'm just the negotiator."

"Yes, I recognize that makes me a tool of the burgess, though honestly not sure that's how it's pronounced. I will convey that you have guns and are ready to defend your territory with the full force of soaking water."

"You parents have responded. They acknowledge your super soakers, and have fabbed ponchos and are prepared for full water actions, should it come to that. Also, they have emphasised that you can't stay in the food forest forever, and you are going to get hungry."

"Yes, Timmy I understand the point of a food forest. However, they would note that the food isn't grown right now. So while you can manage that after it's set up, you can't right now. Also, several of your parents point out that you can't cook on your own because you said that was boring."

"Yes, I realise this is a starvation tactic. Your parents inform you the community fabber 'goo' as you call it is perfectly healthy."

"I see, I'll convey your counteroffer back to them."

Corporal (Ret.) Blake Cameron
Local Grown Up, Drafted Parent-Child negotiator, New Thebes

We also see here that at bare minimum, kids who want to ditch their parents for any reason still have access to the community fabber, they just have to make do with goo and nutrient bars for food in the event that they can't convince anyone to cook for them.

The Compact presumably still treats children as the property of their parents and/or employer, because it's not really capable of anything else.

Balmung1 · Aug 20, 2023

Torgamous said:
The Compact presumably still treats children as the property of their parents and/or employer, because it's not really capable of anything else.

I honestly think that it depends on the place.In some places it's employee/property.In more 'liberal' parts of the Compact children are their own independant employees as soon as their born which is why you can't sue the school for using your child as free labor/guinea pigs because your 6 year old is their own independent person and fully capable of signing a non-disclosure agreement in accepting a cookie and you are a filthy old fashioned idiot for not treating your child as their own person.

Aranfan · Aug 20, 2023

Balmung1 said:
I honestly think that it depends on the place.In some places it's employee/property.In more 'liberal' parts of the Compact children are their own independant employees as soon as their born which is why you can't sue the school for using your child as free labor/guinea pigs because your 6 year old is their own independent person and fully capable of signing a non-disclosure agreement in accepting a cookie and you are a filthy old fashioned idiot for not treating your child as their own person.

sure, and laws that limit the working day are violating the worker's liberty.

AKuz · Aug 22, 2023

Welcome to the July Patreon Q&A, going to briefly apologize about the ongoing slowdown in content. While recently I said I was doing better, recently IRL got worse. Then now it's back on track to getting better again, so 🤷‍♀️ life's unpredictable, but I'm still slowly chipping away things, so just know that behind the things stuff isn't stalled, just slow A F.

Good to hear you're doing better Kia! What's the United Nation of Sol's biggest issue right now?

I hope you're paying close attention to the series recently started by @clockworkchaos for their real biggest issue.

However as the UNS itself sees it, their biggest issue is cohesion in the face of the eventual collapse of the unofficial ceasefire between themselves and the Solarian Compact.

Most UNS officials believe that the only thing holding back a counter-attack is that the Solarian Parliament simply doesn't understand how much things have changed. They're convinced that once it's sunk in that Sol WANTS to be out of the Compact, and that this isn't going to end with some minor negotiations that leaves the Compact in the driver's seat, Parliament will authorize a campaign full scale assaults through the Sol-KC KC gate led by the actual no shit dreadnaughts of Third Fleet.

At home they know that there's a large portion of their population that's accepted the 14 days as fait accompli and would also accept a counter-revolution the same, at least at first. This has led to a massive propaganda campaign to highlight the Compact's crimes (and simultaneously play down much of the imperialism of Earth's major players like the EU, EAF, PRC, and Russia by displacing the anger away from national governments to the Charters and Compact) and raise awareness of Sol as a unified entity and part of an interstellar movement for freedom.

As part of this the United Nations is reaching back to their earliest foundation as the grand alliance that destroyed the Fascist Axis Powers 300 years ago. Propaganda highlighting the international effort is common, and so the claim runs that anti-Fascism is in the very soul of the UN and has merely been sleeping after the split between the Communist East and Social Democratic West led to the collapse of both sides not even a century later.

This time, loudly asserts a slowly radicalizing UN General Assembly, bureaucratic meritocracy will not ossify Communism and Anarchism and capitalist meritocracy will not undermine Social Democracy. This has led to both growing calls that the UNS must pursue "de-fascism" and "anti-meritocracy" and the growing backlash to those calls as being too radical.

Are their any notable cuisines that have developed on Sheol?

The Sheolites are primarily known for their community and field kitchens producing vast amounts of rice noodle stir fry that uses beans, prepared tree cambium, leaves, fish, and sometimes a small amount of shredded meat as a treat. This is accompanied by a variety of rice based side dishes inspired by east asian cuisine.

To Elysian palates the most notable aspects are Sheol's two favourite liquids: the universal use of a fermented fish sauce as a condiment, and a form of stimulating herbal tea that is confusingly called "Coffee".

Sheolite cuisine has a number of influencing factors, the first being that for the first decade of Sheol's settlement Ares dropped Nutritionally Complete Meal Systems (NuCoMS) to the surface to support the prisoner population, and would periodically drop more when large prisoner transfers were made that theoretically swelled the official population.

This led to the birth of Sheolite cuisine being attempts to make the NuCoMS rations edible as they were in large part hermetically sealed tubes of paste without taste or texture. Sheolite legend states that "Paste feeds the body, but not the soul or mind." And even today Sheolite units in the field go out of their way to establish field kitchens instead of using prepackaged rations. This does mean however that the Sheolite rations which do exist are notoriously awful, reinforcing existing sentiments.

Initially, the primary issue in making the NuCoMS edible was the lack of indigenous foodstuffs. Early settlement teams had been provided with monocrops of a Cernunnos form of nutritionally complete "Sheolite Rice", "Sheolite Beans", and "Sheolite Raspberries", with the rest of the biosphere being designed by Ares and Cernunnos contractors to prevent consumption. (And unbeknownst to the Sheolites at the time, their crops were designed to be easily destroyed by a purpose built bioweapon as a prisoner control measure, though this contingency was never activated and appears to have been entirely forgotten by everyone involved.)

Naturally, these measures were unsuccessful and the Sheolites soon afterwards found that they could cook and eat the unusually thick cambium of the "Sheolite Cedar" and even process otherwise poisonous berries of said tree into a very bitter alcohol. Popularity this cambium is for edible wraps, or often sliced into strips and salted and fried in bean-derived oil as a snack food.

Over time, the Sheolites were able to breed a shockingly diverse family of offshoot species from the "Sheolite Bean" that were primarily grown in underground facilities and supplemented aquaponic rice farms and vast surface forests containing Sheolite Cedars and Sheolite Raspberry bushes, a practice that became a secondary influence in the Amaranthine Food Forest Project after the more developed Chinook system.

Additionally, Sheolites discovered that the otherwise toxic flowers of the "Sheolite Raven Primrose" can be rendered into the mildly psychoactive stimulant that replaced coffee for Sheolite culture. Confusingly for their allies, Sheolites simply call this sickly-sweet powdered flower drink "Coffee" and often complain loudly about the horrifically bitter taste of "Elysian Coffee".

Since the liberation, the Sheolites have taken naturally to imported vegetables and Sheolite community and field kitchens have quickly taken to experimentation.

While the Sheolite diet was intended by Ares to be entirely vegetarian, turnover in colonial leadership in the initial decades led to the disregarding of the carefully considered quarantine protocols. Over time bored Ares officers introduced various kinds of edible fish in the coasts surrounding Ares bases, and imported various animals as pets, or for hunting.

Naturally, many of these animals escaped containment shortly after their introduction.

While the Sheolites were unable to maintain large scale fisheries operations on Sheol's seas, a number of bunker complexes set up extensive aquaponics facilities to raise primarily Penglai Salmon and Drakean Pachamama Anchovies, which were selectively bred into the modern Sheolite varieties that near universally appear in Sheolite meals.

Indeed, the presence of a form of Anchovy has led to the near universal adoption of a form of fermented fish sauce as a Sheolite condiment, that early Sheolites dubbed "Garum" as a reference to a similarly derived Roman condiment.

On land, Sheolites tended to raise large herds of Martian Reindeer shepherded by Sheolite Reindeer Dogs who trace their descent from various pet dogs that escaped Ares facilities. Despite these herds being a target of Ares special operations teams and easily tracked from orbit, their value as a source of meat meant that the morale boost overrode purely practical concerns. Due to this the reputation of the planet's Reindeer Herders gained a nearly mythical status, both for their constant exposure to the elements and Ares' official stance that the herds were "illegal ecological contamination".

This limited access to meat led to it either being used sparingly in dishes, or as the centrepiece of festivals and celebrations where it is shared by military units of extended families. This led to a shift in the meaning for the term "meat eater" so that it now means something analogous to "hoarder" or "coward", as someone whose diet is primarily meat is clearly someone who is not sharing it from others and is staying away from front line duties where meat is even more scarce.

Surprisingly, the post-liberation ready availability of meat from vats and specialized fabricators hasn't led to an explosion of meat consumption. Instead of small amounts of meat replace fish in some stir fry dishes and large meat centric dishes remain a celebratory food.

Though Sheolite Youth League members having off-world Youth League inspired printed meat heavier dishes like burgers, chicken strips, or pizzas at their gatherings is yet another moral panic that older Sheolites point to along with their (relative) pacifism.

What do the various humanist polities and social movements think of The Box? I imagine they have a fairly complex relationship with The Box given its origin and their willingness to use it.

As you guessed, there's a spectrum of views, with the Anti-capitalist Humanists having a more warm opinion, and the more generic Cosmoliberal Anthrochauvanists utterly despising it.

For status quo favouring Cosmoliberal crypto-Humanist Anthrochauvanists, the Box is actively working against Human Nature as market economics, capitalism, and liberalism are the natural way of life for Homo Sapiens Sapiens, hence it being the End of History for a couple centuries.

Primitivist/Retroculturalist Humanist groups believe that Human civilization went wrong after a certain level of technology robbed Homo Sapiens Sapiens of their "Humanity". All of these put that level at least two centuries below the level that The Box acts as a floor for. The Box is the single greatest disaster to ever befall the species and must be stamped out.

Anti-capitalist Crypto-Humanist groups, tend to view the box as a misstep, and while they appreciate the idea behind the box, they feel that the inclusion of cybernetic and genetic technologies was a misstep that will lead to speciation and eternal war of all against all.

And yet all except the Cosmoliberal loyalists are willing to use the technologies provided to conduct a counter-revolution in reverse. Revolutionaries may have had the first mover advantage, but the Humanists are willing to spill an ocean of blood to reassert the supremacy of Humanity over the various factions who are trying to destroy the species.

Are there any limits to how many different councils a person can belong too? Also which person is on the largest number of councils?

There's no limit beyond what a person can keep up with, and it's expected that generally speaking an Amaranthing will be at least participating in a council for where they live, and one for their chosen profession or hobby.

As for the single person who is the member of the largest number of committees, the smart-ass answer would be to ask someone to count how many Adamsist committees there are, but Elysian Jeremiah Chang is on over fifty councils: The Persephone City Neon Square Municipal District, the Hector Beach Lifeguard Committee, the Deep Sea Search and Rescue Safety Standards Committee, the Hector Beach Ecology Council, the Hector Beach Beautification Alliance, as well as a further fifty-one other separate Beach Ecology and Beach Beautification Committees across Elysium. Not only does he throw a killer beach party, he's a recognized expert in the field of beach management and is generally fun to be around.

However, Chang's membership on most committees is honorary and limited to quarterly attendance.

Man loves his beaches.

What's happened to the original founder of Radiant especially with the Persophone Dome incident being well known now?

Frontier Developments CEO Maxwell Cater?

He escaped Penglai along with a number of other Hermes-Ishtar Board members, and was shoved into comfortable lodging and forgotten about on Symphony after discovering that Chairwoman Emily Weismann holds all the cards in the SFREA.

Like a number of other HI Board members he found himself dispossessed when that Charter was carved up for parts, and he's increasingly frustrated with his loss of personal prestige and power. Frustration that has him working with other former Hermes-Ishtar bigwigs to supplant Weismann's "crypto-Anarchist" regime.

Of course he underestimates Weismann's public support and is entirely unaware of the rapid growth of the "Customer Support Section" of the Symphony System Police Service, and his own value as a scapegoat for everything wrong with the Frontier.

The Pacificans aren't the only ones who know the value of a good show trial.

TheArcanist · Aug 22, 2023

AKuz said:
Of course he underestimates Weismann's public support and is entirely unaware of the rapid growth of the "Customer Support Section" of the Symphony System Police Service, and his own value as a scapegoat for everything wrong with the Frontier.

The Pacificans aren't the only ones who know the value of a good show trial.

oh we're about to see the establishment of director-citizen-for-life emily weissman aren't we

god, she would call her personal secret police/death squad "customer support" wouldn't she, like every bargain-bin pinochet in her mold

AKuz · Aug 22, 2023

TheArcanist said:
oh we're about to see the establishment of director-citizen-for-life emily weissman aren't we

god, she would call her personal secret police/death squad "customer support" wouldn't she, like every bargain-bin pinochet in her mold

The Customer Support Section is a previously existing unit, one that worked in conjunction with HI analysts in Echo to ensure the smooth functioning of Hermes-Ishtar operations in the region, by ensuring that complaints against the HI Corporation were taken seriously and resolved in a timely manner.

Though their budget has increased lately, and been put under new management which has been granted an expanded operational remit.

TheArcanist · Aug 22, 2023

AKuz said:
The Customer Support Section is a previously existing unit, one that worked in conjunction with HI analysts in Echo to ensure the smooth functioning of Hermes-Ishtar operations in the region, by ensuring that complaints against the HI Corporation were taken seriously and resolved in a timely manner.

Though their budget has increased lately, and been put under new management which has been granted an expanded operational remit.

you aren't denying anything i said aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-

infinityDivided · Aug 22, 2023

AKuz said:
Primitivist/Retroculturalist Humanist groups believe that Human civilization went wrong after a certain level of technology robbed Homo Sapiens Sapiens of their "Humanity". All of these put that level at least two centuries below the level that The Box acts as a floor for. The Box is the single greatest disaster to ever befall the species and must be stamped out.

Oh goodie, Space Amish. I'd care about their opinion if they had even the slightest means of enforcing it-

AKuz said:
And yet all except the Cosmoliberal loyalists are willing to use the technologies provided to conduct a counter-revolution in reverse.

Ah. Bunch of hypocrites.

greendoor · Aug 22, 2023

AKuz said:
Are their any notable cuisines that have developed on Sheol?

I love discussion of Fictional foodways. This is fascinating.

It's also another reminder of how heartbreaking Sheol's existence before liberation was, and the impressive heights of ingenuity and industriousness that human communities will reach when sufficiently driven by strife and desperation.

clockworkchaos · Aug 22, 2023

AKuz said:
Welcome to the July Patreon Q&A, going to briefly apologize about the ongoing slowdown in content. While recently I said I was doing better, recently IRL got worse. Then now it's back on track to getting better again, so 🤷‍♀️ life's unpredictable, but I'm still slowly chipping away things, so just know that behind the things stuff isn't stalled, just slow A F.

Good to hear you're doing better Kia! What's the United Nation of Sol's biggest issue right now?

I hope you're paying close attention to the series recently started by @clockworkchaos for their real biggest issue.

It's child soldiers and 15 minute cities.

AKuz · Aug 22, 2023

greendoor said:
I love discussion of Fictional foodways. This is fascinating.

It's also another reminder of how heartbreaking Sheol's existence before liberation was, and the impressive heights of ingenuity and industriousness that human communities will reach when sufficiently driven by strife and desperation.

I also giggled like a naughty schoolgirl when I realised that I could make the "martial" people think being carnivores is cringe.

"Why the fuck are you eating a steak you greedy coward? Eat your seafood rice noodle stir fry slathered in fermented fish sauce like a real soldier!"

HeWhoAdds · Aug 22, 2023

AKuz said:
Not only does he throw a killer beach party, he's a recognized expert in the field of beach management and is generally fun to be around.

However, Chang's membership on most committees is honorary and limited to quarterly attendance.

Man loves his beaches.

Now there's a man who's got life figured out.

greendoor · Aug 22, 2023

AKuz said:
I also giggled like a naughty schoolgirl when I realised that I could make the "martial" people think being carnivores is cringe.

"Why the fuck are you eating a steak you greedy coward? Eat your seafood rice noodle stir fry slathered in fermented fish sauce like a real soldier!"

TBH, on the note of the Sheolites, as a person who enjoys Military SF alot, I actually really enjoy the Sheolites as a nuanced example of a 'Militarized society'. Like sure, their do or die approach to the revolution, their ardent military professionalism, and their somehow managing to survive fighting a war for decades against a massively technology superior enemy through grit and societal discipline is really cool, but more importantly Tyrants never fails to depict their very existance, the fact that something like Sheol even happened is a horrific tragedy, and that though their achievements and survival against Ares are heroic, their slow social transformation and no longer having to live a authoritarian, spartan existence of fear, discipline, and deprivation is objectively a good thing.

The thing about them thinking eating too much Meat is cringe is also just really funny, yeah.

Model DC.14F · Aug 22, 2023

AKuz said:
As part of this the United Nations is reaching back to their earliest foundation as the grand alliance that destroyed the Fascist Axis Powers 300 years ago. Propaganda highlighting the international effort is common, and so the claim runs that anti-Fascism is in the very soul of the UN and has merely been sleeping after the split between the Communist East and Social Democratic West led to the collapse of both sides not even a century later.

Now I want to see a series of "This man is your FRIEND He fights for FREEDOM" posters updated for the different UNS groups, along with other WWII propaganda posters.

AKuz said:
Initially, the primary issue in making the NuCoMS edible was the lack of indigenous foodstuffs. Early settlement teams had been provided with monocrops of a Cernunnos form of nutritionally complete "Sheolite Rice", "Sheolite Beans", and "Sheolite Raspberries", with the rest of the biosphere being designed by Ares and Cernunnos contractors to prevent consumption. (And unbeknownst to the Sheolites at the time, their crops were designed to be easily destroyed by a purpose built bioweapon as a prisoner control measure, though this contingency was never activated and appears to have been entirely forgotten by everyone involved.)

Naturally, these measures were unsuccessful and the Sheolites soon afterwards found that they could cook and eat the unusually thick cambium of the "Sheolite Cedar" and even process otherwise poisonous berries of said tree into a very bitter alcohol. Popularity this cambium is for edible wraps, or often sliced into strips and salted and fried in bean-derived oil as a snack food.

Over time, the Sheolites were able to breed a shockingly diverse family of offshoot species from the "Sheolite Bean" that were primarily grown in underground facilities and supplemented aquaponic rice farms and vast surface forests containing Sheolite Cedars and Sheolite Raspberry bushes, a practice that became a secondary influence in the Amaranthine Food Forest Project after the more developed Chinook system.

Additionally, Sheolites discovered that the otherwise toxic flowers of the "Sheolite Raven Primrose" can be rendered into the mildly psychoactive stimulant that replaced coffee for Sheolite culture. Confusingly for their allies, Sheolites simply call this sickly-sweet powdered flower drink "Coffee" and often complain loudly about the horrifically bitter taste of "Elysian Coffee".

Since the liberation, the Sheolites have taken naturally to imported vegetables and Sheolite community and field kitchens have quickly taken to experimentation.

While the Sheolite diet was intended by Ares to be entirely vegetarian, turnover in colonial leadership in the initial decades led to the disregarding of the carefully considered quarantine protocols. Over time bored Ares officers introduced various kinds of edible fish in the coasts surrounding Ares bases, and imported various animals as pets, or for hunting.

Naturally, many of these animals escaped containment shortly after their introduction.

I enjoy this entire section, as it reiterates that as powerful as the Charters supposedly are, reality and their own incompetence end up undoing what should have been a foolproof way to control Sheol. Purpose build the biosphere to be unedible? It isn't. Have a backup to destroy the crops? It gets forgotten, and the prisoners just breed better crops. Carefully craft quarantine protocals to prevent invasive species? They get ignored by your own officers for their own amusement.

On paper, Sheol should have been a perfectly planned prison, where the prisoners have to obey or starve. Instead, every part of that plan failed on its own. Makes me wonder if that was how Sheol ended up the way it did, with the original attacks trying to destroy early Sheolite Agriculture, that Ares' leadership realizing they could use the purges as training, then deciding to create the Forever War that we found.

TheArcanist said:
god, she would call her personal secret police/death squad "customer support" wouldn't she, like every bargain-bin pinochet in her mold

Now I'm imagining an omake where some Charter Exec is trying to get a hold of one of their wetworks groups to 'take care of a problem', only to keep contacting the actual regular help-desk type groups.

Genderite · Aug 23, 2023

Model DC.14F said:
Now I want to see a series of "This man is your FRIEND He fights for FREEDOM" posters updated for the different UNS groups, along with other WWII propaganda posters.

Depending on how the fighting goes they could end up with posters for all the different revolutionary groups, including the more exotic groups in the Far Trailing and Coreward Frontiers.

TheArcanist · Aug 23, 2023

AKuz said:
Though Sheolite Youth League members having off-world Youth League inspired printed meat heavier dishes like burgers, chicken strips, or pizzas at their gatherings is yet another moral panic that older Sheolites point to along with their (relative) pacifism.

it's also extremely funny that the olds in Sheol are literally descending into a moral panic over kids eating chicken nuggets

some ridiculously hard-bitten sheolite NCO that has Seen Some Shit losing their goddamn mind because they saw a cadet eating a hamburger and being convinced that this is an existential threat to the revolution

Nervos Belli · Aug 23, 2023

The day someone introduces the turducken is the day the counter-revolution begins.

Random Member · Aug 23, 2023

AKuz said:
I also giggled like a naughty schoolgirl when I realised that I could make the "martial" people think being carnivores is cringe.

"Why the fuck are you eating a steak you greedy coward? Eat your seafood rice noodle stir fry slathered in fermented fish sauce like a real soldier!"

The West has fallen.

Trillions must die.

AKuz · Aug 23, 2023

Random Member said:
The West has fallen.

Trillions must die.

It's funny because that diet literally put him into a coma and gave him brain damage.

trooperist · Aug 23, 2023

AKuz said:
It's funny because that diet literally put him into a coma and gave him brain damage.

Looked that up on YouTube and all those videos are just full of people simping for Peterson while going on about how an all meat diet helped them lose weight, cure their depression/diabetes/arthritis, gave them immense energy, and probably gave them the power to fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes. Usually from accounts with with four numbers at the end. Only the finest of comment bots I guess.

HeWhoAdds · Aug 23, 2023

AKuz said:
It's funny because that diet literally put him into a coma and gave him brain damage.

simply further proof that eating meat saps your vital essence and destroys your warrior spirit.

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

Been Better

Zenryoku Zenkai !

Team Plasma Grunt

Zenryoku Zenkai !

Aspiring Gynoid

Expand BLG with Food Forest Initiative

Team Plasma Grunt

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Good to hear you're doing better Kia! What's the United Nation of Sol's biggest issue right now?

Are their any notable cuisines that have developed on Sheol?

What do the various humanist polities and social movements think of The Box? I imagine they have a fairly complex relationship with The Box given its origin and their willingness to use it.

Are there any limits to how many different councils a person can belong too? Also which person is on the largest number of councils?

What's happened to the original founder of Radiant especially with the Persophone Dome incident being well known now?

Been Better

Prince Of Doom

(Verified Door)

Are their any notable cuisines that have developed on Sheol?

Good to hear you're doing better Kia! What's the United Nation of Sol's biggest issue right now?

Been Better

(Verified Door)

Don't think this means you've won!

Gardener of Human Happiness

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Cinnamon Roll AI