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[Hard SF] Children of a Dead World

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Wow, that's a stunningly atmospheric opener.

I prefer Ganymede, but Titan is close enough. The far edges, the ragged and thin, with Belters scraping by on close margins. Vital and distant.

[X]Titan: The refueling station farthest from Earth in orbit above the varicolored immensity of Saturn, where ethane oceans wash against the ice. Titan is where the Belters refuel before beginning the Long Burn back to Earthside orbit, and where the habitation domes are the most precarious. You are essential to keep material flowing back to Venus and what is left of the orbital refineries around Earth, but you will have to stay alive to do that.
 
[X]Venus: Home to the fractious thousands of colonists sent by every nation on Earth, a place that is sure to experience turmoil as the news of what happened filters back to the populace. Venus is nominally self sufficient, but lacks the refined raw materials to keep its equipment active. A lot of that came from Earth. Some came from the Belt. You will need to scavenge, ration and pray in order to stay stable and alive, for yours is the new home of humanity. Should you fall, we all do.
 
Core world Venus appeals by being biggest cheese and obvious continuity of human government, but if I'm reading this correctly (mentions we have control of some orbitals) Titan gives us a front row seat to Earth, its orbital infrastructure and most importantly its human and material loot. The warlords might make some noise, but maybe they shouldn't have blown themselves up and maybe they should quiet down before we drop rocks on them some asteroids wind up slamming onto their faces.

The galaxy can be incredibly cruel, after all.

[x] Titan: The refueling station farthest from Earth in orbit above the varicolored immensity of Saturn, where ethane oceans wash against the ice. Titan is where the Belters refuel before beginning the Long Burn back to Earthside orbit, and where the habitation domes are the most precarious. You are essential to keep material flowing back to Venus and what is left of the orbital refineries around Earth, but you will have to stay alive to do that.
 
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[X]Venus: Home to the fractious thousands of colonists sent by every nation on Earth, a place that is sure to experience turmoil as the news of what happened filters back to the populace. Venus is nominally self sufficient, but lacks the refined raw materials to keep its equipment active. A lot of that came from Earth. Some came from the Belt. You will need to scavenge, ration and pray in order to stay stable and alive, for yours is the new home of humanity. Should you fall, we all do.
 
[X]Titan

Abandon humanity, ascend to monke.

We should probably consider abandoning the baseline human frame through genetic engineering to maximize our ability to survive and thrive in this isolated and extreme environment. Obviously we will continue to support Venus, and eventually try to save the remaining humans on earth.

But yeah, we have so many changes we could make to ourselves to make life possible in orbit of the jewel of sol.
 
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Votes are called, and you appear to be on Titan. The second part of colonial customization, that is to say the picking of what your most recent supply shipments contained, will be out tonight. After that we pick what specialized equipment Earth was able to ship to you before it burned.
Scheduled vote count started by mouli on Jan 9, 2021 at 4:00 PM, finished with 43 posts and 39 votes.
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Year Zero: Titan
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    • Year Zero: Titan

    EARTH: Home world of our species and the only planet in the solar system that is home to sentient life. The third planet from the Sun and the fifth largest world in the Solar System, Earth is unique in its atmospheric makeup, allowing its planetary surfaces to sustain life. While recent history has seen human habitation and its environmental effects take a grievous toll on the Earth's habitability, the fact remains that Earth is the most suitable planet in the Solar System and the most suitable discovered planet for human life.
    -From the public information forum of the UN Initiative for Space Exploration, 2153​

    Earth is broken. Old Earth, the cradle of humanity, has been all but shattered in the death throes of what some have called the Last War. Its continents were scarred by climate change and rising seas, marked by pollution events and the great gray swaths of coastal habitation. They are changed now, pocked with the craters of nuclear detonation where life is scorched away by radiation. Clouds gather above the ruins of humanity's cities, scorched northern and southern reaches marked by bombardment while the tropics are burning from heat that their systems are no longer capable of dealing with. Amidst all this, humanity yet scurries in the cracks of the horror that they wrought, but human remnants are few and far between.

    There are bunkers in northern America, where ice and snow once fell in wintertime and tent-cities, encampments and prefabs mushroomed into permanent habitation over the past century of turmoil. Those bunkers are home to uniformed personnel and the huddled masses of those that made it there in time, recycled air and canned rations cold comfort to those that survived. In one of the bunkers a grim, unsmiling man is sworn in as President of the United States, before the Great Seal and speaking to whoever yet listens from a replica of the White House briefing room. Flanking him are hollow-eyed bodyguards in sharp black suits, and around him are a bevy of titles that hark back to an age that died with the bombs.

    A continent away from the north of America are bunkers holding the leadership cadres from Zhongnanhai, where a new leader is selected from what remains of government. Pageantry and thundering speeches are a reminder of the times before what some call the Fall, the ceremonies of the past trapped in the bunkers like flies in amber.

    Across the world, there is comfort taken in ritual and reminder as remnant governments desperately try to survive. In Europe where the bombs fell like rain and radiation sears every inch of the surface, in India where the flatlands are uninhabitable from the planet's warming and the rivers lie lethal and sluggish and polluted, in unhappy Africa where climate change and warfare have melded into a lament of blood and toxic air – across the world, humanity bleeds. The atmosphere yet roils with the ash and dust from thousands of nuclear warheads, food crumbles on shelves amid cities too irradiated for people to move through, and diseases born of the cold skill of pre-War laboratories wreaks a terrible toll on those who lived through the bombs.

    On unhappy Earth the week after the war died down, black rain gently begins to fall on the bunker networks like the poisoned tears of a sorrowful world.


    VENUS: Venus is the second planet from the Sun and the sixth largest in size and mass. Due to its active molten core and the safety from cosmic radiation afforded by its atmosphere, it was chosen by the United Nations Initiative for Space Exploration as a terraforming target by unanimous vote in 2055. Venus' thick and poisonous atmosphere renders conventional surface colonization impossible due to crushing pressures and temperatures as well as the high toxicity, and the use of tailored bacteria seeded from high atmospheric trajectories is intended to eventually render things more habitable by removing the worst of the toxic gases. Water on Venus is in short supply, and the controlled impact of cometary bodies was authorized and conducted in 2081 to mitigate this. Venerian habitation is in the meantime done through aerostats, the massive airship-like habitations where a buoyant envelope allows a city to be suspended in the thick Venerian atmosphere. The aerostats are sturdy enough to resist almost any impact and their subdivided envelopes allow for rapid repair, making them very safe habitations…
    -From the public information forum of the United Nations Initiative for Space Exploration, 2155​

    Venus is a hothouse, it's been called a hellworld and it most certainly uninhabitable. The projections for terraforming as of 2154 were for another one to two centuries of terraforming on Venus, involving the stabilization of its reworked atmosphere and the creation of a proper biosphere before the first colonist hit the surface. Until then the aerostats with their massive upper envelopes composed of polymers multiple meters thick and their suspended cities of tens of thousands were the primary mode of habitation, moving around in the Venerian atmosphere on massive thrusters.

    Those aerostats are sustained by pilots that drive shuttles and freighters through the high winds and acid storms of the Venerian atmosphere, moving cargo from aerostat to aerostat to keep the million humans on Venus alive. It's a dangerous job with a high attrition rate, the pilots moving to closed-off hangars and taxiing out of the aerostats in a sealed shuttle lest the Venerian air kill them as they move.

    Outside of one of the hangars of the is Pilot Simon Kenning, the young American thumbing through photos on a tablet just outside the airtight doors. There are faces smiling at him through the screen, mother and father and sister now dead and gone. There's a house and rooms that he grew up in, now burned away by nuclear fire. It's all gone. Gone, gone, gone.

    A sudden voice from behind him startles him out of his reverie, the pilot looking up to see his copilot's face. She's smiling, telling him to get a move on – the medical supplies shipment is getting late. Kenning nods and folds away the tablet carefully, putting on his helmet and suit in preparation to taxiing out. Before the helmet visor obscures her face, Kenning can see his copilot's eyes.

    They're red and bloodshot, as if she had been crying.

    GANYMEDE: Ganymede is the largest of the Jovian moons and falls under the Galilean group of Jupiter's moons. A hostile place with a thin atmosphere and bombarded by radiation from Jupiter, Ganymede nonetheless is a good outpost in the Kuiper Belt due to its active magnetosphere allowing some habitation without prohibitive amounts of radiation shielding. There are ten thousand spacers on Ganymede, acting as maintenance, repair, resupply and refinery personnel for the Belt mines and for raw material feedstock from Titan. The bulk of this is permanent or semi permanent habitation, with extensive orbital facilities on Ganymede allowing the tubular shapes of long-range freighters to cluster around the moon as they take on freight and supplies…
    -From the public information forum of the United Nations Initiative for Space Exploration, 2155​

    Ganymede is a place defined by Jupiter. The incomprehensibly massive sweep of Jupiter swings below the colonists of the Ganymede outpost, angry red vortices churning its surface and angrily staring up at the moon that holds life so precariously close. The light of Jupiter filters into the colony's windowpanes, radiation washing away at shielding in a futile attempt to sweep the rocky surface of Ganymede clean. Ganymede is a lonely outpost, a collection of linked domes sealed against radiation and the low pressure of the thin atmosphere.

    The reason for its existence is stamped into the landscape, the long black rail of a magnetic launch accelerator curving upwards past a row of domes and trailing past a loading bay where a massive robotic arm stands idle. Flat graded surfaces are testament to more old-fashioned methods, landing pads for dropships from the ships in orbit. Above in the skies are the tubular forms of cargo starships, hanging in orbit above Ganymede while the refineries on the planet feed them freight and the staff on-planet attend to their repair and supply needs.

    Ganymede is defined by these ships and by the giant it orbits, an outpost of humanity precariously clinging to the rocky moon's surface.

    Pungent smells tell a tale of waste recycling in the domes, the colony fed and kept alive by hydroponics technicians who carefully tend to the sprouting plants and the submerged forms of vat-grown meat. Humming machinery keeps the food alive and the food keeps the humans alive, the technicians ensuring it all flows smoothly.

    Technicians like Somnath Desai. The young Bengali has been quiet most of the day, thoughts turned elsewhere. Thoughts turned back to Old Earth, to the country that he came here from two years ago.

    Mrow.

    The soft noise of the dome's resident cat jerks Desai out of the rut that his thoughts were in, the technician absently reaching down to stroke the soft, warm orange cat that presses itself against him and demands attention. For a few minutes, Somnath Desai pets the cat with his thoughts no longer on what happened to Earth. Much like the cat, life goes on.

    TITAN: The outermost point of inhabited space and present only by virtue of its unique atmosphere and planetary makeup. Titan serves as the termination point for retrograde thrust to terminate in the outer system, where freighters carrying ore from the Belt to refuel before turning back for home. In orbit around Saturn, Titan is a hostile world without a breathable atmosphere. This necessitates the use of sealed habitation domes, mitigated somewhat by the relatively high pressure of Titan's atmosphere – a leak does not mean instant death for the outpost...[…]...There are at present thirty thousand people on Titan, almost of whom all are permanent base staff. The rest are on rotation from outposts in the Belt or from freighters in orbit waiting to resupply…
    -    From the public information forum of the UN Initiative for Space Exploration, 2153​

    Earth has gone silent. Nobody knows how this happened, why this happened, or how the remnants of human civilization outside the mother world are to survive. Titan is far from Earth and far from Venus, the outermost outpost of human civilization in the Sol System. It's a place that refuels and resupplies the cargo ships that carry ore and ingots of material back to Venus for processing, a place that mines and refines plenty of metals on its own and serves as the main supplier of nitrogen and ethane to the rest of the Belt and Ganymede.

    From where the colonial administrator's office the clear polymer windows look out onto the magnetic launch rail for orbital heavy cargo, and past that at the clouds that herald methane monsoons sometime in the near future. The reports on the administrator's table talk about the death of Earth and the reactions to it, ranging from detailed supply reports and feedstock projections to the extensive report screaming in genteel language about psychological impacts of the 'recent news'. Spare parts are needed, more processing equipment is needed, more manufacturing gear is needed, psychological stability is at risk for far too many of the colonists, all this and more is what greets the administrator when they open the door to their office. There's already been one suicide, in the bare two days since the news came in.

    In the distance, the Titan auroras gleam as Saturn swings below. For better or worse, life goes on and home is here. For now.

    Pick a name and gender:
    []Write in

    Pick a final supply shipment before the next consignment from Venus arrives:

    []Personnel:     While this will mean more short term supply loss and more rationing until the Venerian supply ships come in, Titan is in the main self sufficient for foodstuffs and basic needs – the issue is more feedstock than basics. Skilled personnel in the meantime will allow more flexibility later on, as they adapt to life in the colony. Allows more options for technical skill development later on, supply crunch worsens early on.

    []Morale Boosters: Things like genebanks for pets – allowing a few animals to be grown and turned loose as a morale boost. Other things like a few bottles of vanilla and seeds for the plants, allowing some more diet variation. Some religious paraphernalia, funded by a wide swathe of organizations on Old Earth before the bombs fell. All of this will help people keep an even keel in these times. Greater psychological stability for colonists, allows rationing of luxuries.

    []Complex Assemblies: Spare parts for the 3D printers that keep most components moving on Titan, some refining gear for semiconductor printing, a spare chipset for the quantum computing setups on the colony, things that Earth once made and Venus can barely replicate at artisanal rates. These are vital in keeping the colony running, although Venus can perhaps take up the slack. Short-term mitigation of supply crunch somewhat, less issues with complex machinery.

    AN: Feedback welcome.
     
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    • [X]Morale Boosters: Things like genebanks for pets – allowing a few animals to be grown and turned loose as a morale boost. Other things like a few bottles of vanilla and seeds for the plants, allowing some more diet variation. Some religious paraphernalia, funded by a wide swathe of organizations on Old Earth before the bombs fell. All of this will help people keep an even keel in these times. Greater psychological stability for colonists, allows rationing of luxuries.

    We have a few thousand engineers stranded on a colony that was never designed to indefinitely support life without resupply from Earth, who know the next resupply is not coming because Earth is dead along with all their friends and family. In conditions like that, preserving morale turns from a luxury to a necessity.
     
    [X] Morale Boosters: Things like genebanks for pets – allowing a few animals to be grown and turned loose as a morale boost. Other things like a few bottles of vanilla and seeds for the plants, allowing some more diet variation. Some religious paraphernalia, funded by a wide swathe of organizations on Old Earth before the bombs fell. All of this will help people keep an even keel in these times. Greater psychological stability for colonists, allows rationing of luxuries.
     
    [X]Name: Blaike Faulknen
    [X]Gender: Male

    [X]Morale Boosters:     Things like genebanks for pets – allowing a few animals to be grown and turned loose as a morale boost. Other things like a few bottles of vanilla and seeds for the plants, allowing some more diet variation. Some religious paraphernalia, funded by a wide swathe of organizations on Old Earth before the bombs fell. All of this will help people keep an even keel in these times. Greater psychological stability for colonists, allows rationing of luxuries.
     
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