Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: Iterations

[Trenacker]

Foreward
This is the story of an expedition into the unknown. It was an act of desperation undertaken not in optimism or from a place of pride, but because our species, and the civilization it begat, had run out of time. Thus we fled the world we had seemingly destroyed for one that might yet destroy us in turn.

​

The Story So Far
Planet Earth was dying. For two centuries, war had been our unshakeable addiction. We fought until there was nearly nothing left. Disease, too, had ravaged our world, but government was too feckless, and our outlooks too narrow, to countenance the short-term inconvenience of long-term cures. Proclaiming ourselves heroes in an epic saga of redemption, we refused the entreaties of our neighbors and called it an education, overthrew our own servants and called it liberty, despoiled others and called it strength. The soils that fed us, the sweet waters that cooled us, the oceans that bequeathed us--these, we poisoned, as if only to leave nothing foul undone.

Against this relentless drive toward oblivion, the United Nations (U.N.) put up a commendable rear-guard action. Recognizing that in flight lay our only salvation, they inaugurated Project Unity, an effort of unprecedented technological and organizational complexity: launch an emergency expedition to Earth's nearest habitable neighbor, the planet Chiron in the Alpha Centauri star system. The year was 2060.

The Ark
The project was, in generous terms, an unmitigated disaster. First conceived as the American Ares III intra-solar foundry, Unity's derelict skeleton had been a fixture in the nighttime sky above North America for more than a half-century before it was purchased by the U.N.'s Janovic Commission for conversion. The ship then finished another forty-three years in geosynchronous orbit, followed by six of trials that took it only as far as Pluto. By both length and volume, it was the largest object ever built by man. Knowing that technological progress would outpace them before completion, her shipwrights opted for modular design, hoping to install the engines, reactor, and computer mainframe last.

Project Unity was a case study in design flaws, self-destructive behavior, and the perils of consensus-based project management. Amidst countless arguments, industrial accidents, and incidents of terrorism and sabotage, entire sections were started, gutted, and started again as availability of money, materials, and expertise fluctuated. A revolving door of visionaries, sponsors, and builders produced a "Frankenstein's Ark" of obsolete and incompatible systems. Political imperatives often spoke louder than practical science. When the Western powers temporarily suspended their participation in the Project from 2014, Chinese and Warsaw Pact engineers dismantled and stole mission modules for closer study Earthside. During a breakdown in contract re-negotiations, Morgan Aerodynamics sealed over dozens of cargo bays previously installed by competitors including Serrol-Merowe, Fairchild-Grumman, and the American Reclamation Corporation. The matter faded temporarily in light of a terrorist attack and consequent conflagration that severely damaged the ship's water reclamation systems, and in their aftermath, was never revisited. To a U.N. Board of Inquiry completed just hours before his departure for the lunar cradle, Unity's captain, Jonathan Garland, observed wryly that there was not a single integrated or accurate schematic--let alone a proper inventory--of the whole ship anywhere in existence.

Preparing for the Unity Mission
Providing a crew for the ship presented a separate brace of problems. Tens of thousands of crew members perished in training, while many more died at the hands of mobs and terrorists incensed at the idea of being left behind. During times of extremity, the U.N. made a habit of accepting donations from corporations, private individuals, and even criminal enterprises. Earth's best and brightest were therefore obligated to share their one-way trip with exiles, outcasts, and stowaways of every conceivable stripe. Pursuant to a charter further amended beyond recognition after most were placed in cold sleep, led by a multi-national crew on the verge of dissolution since the day it had formed, they were destined for a world where contact with a smaller, earlier mission launched in better times, the Pathfinder Probe, had been lost for reasons still unknown.

Selection to the Unity Project was regarded in the popular consciousness as a matter of life and death. Mortal violence was commonplace when individuals and communities felt passed over, as many did. Accidents of geography dictated that space elevators must be at Earth's Equator where the majority of indigenous peoples languished under colonial rule. In consequence, the U.N. was forced to compromise its previously sterling credentials as the world's foremost champion of self-determination. This satisfied no one. Subject populations correctly accused the U.N. of both hypocrisy and instrumentalism, pointing out that it could have funded construction of a new elevator in Ecuador or at sea. Colonial authorities complained bitterly of having to supplement the ever-beleaguered U.N. presence with detachments from already-anemic local garrisons, which in any case could not be relied upon to suppress their fellow countrymen. The U.N. ultimately maintained tens of thousands of troops to protect the elevators at Rio de Janeiro, Stanleyville, Batavia, and British Singapore by which Unity was initially stocked. Nearly two-thirds were security police commissioned by the U.N. itself, while the remainder were national contingents on temporary assignment from donor countries.

In retrospect, use of colonial space elevators meant that it was often difficult for the U.N. to discern the cause of unrest. Were protestors taking aim at some upsetting aspect of the Unity Project itself, or was the space elevator merely the most convenient and vulnerable symbol of their colonial oppressors? Making matters that much worse, the quality of personnel available to the U.N. was poor, and their political reliability low. In 2026, a Morgan Security Consultants, Inc. analysis found that hundreds of U.N. Security Force recruits were politically suspect. Defection was a constant problem, especially to survivalist and national liberation movements that then exploited these recruits for access to U.N. equipment, procedures, and credentials. During the fifteen years between 2012 and 2027 alone, when violence was at a relatively low ebb, an average of nine protestors and one U.N. policeman died each day.

More than 400,000 colonists and crew were entombed in Unity's seventeen-mile-long hull for the silent crossing to Chiron. The selection process was a monument to bureaucratic rationalism. Each individual was first nominated by a national commission, then processed by a panel operating under the auspices of the U.N. Security Council. Virtually no trade or calling was excluded. Our species's future was to be secured not only by astronauts and botanists, physicists and physicians, but judges and civil servants, poets and preachers, lawyers and musicians. Ninety-two percent of the ship's original crew were single, able-bodied persons of sound mind and body between the ages of 24 and 32. Most had advanced degrees prior to selection, and all--whether "core" expedition members or charter colonists--received a mandatory four years of additional preparation, half of it in classrooms. A standard developmental battery such as that developed and administered by Morgan Adaptive Learning Associates in cooperation with Tokyo University and the Indian Institute of Technology, featured intensive evolutions in physics, agronomy, chemistry, computer science, electric and mechanical engineering, wilderness survival, emergency medicine, civics, and self-defense techniques.

Fewer than one in twenty-three recruits completed the Earth-bound leg of training, after which they took the long journey up the equatorial space elevators to orbital gantries for a further year of practical schooling in zero- and low-gravity maneuvers, firefighting, and heavy rescue. Here, colonists were sorted by division for the first time to practice together the tasks they would eventually be expected to perform after Planetfall. The dropout rate from this point was 84%, and beyond mere attrition, U.N. records tally 42,922 fatalities suffered during the eighteen years of crew selection and induction that preceded mission launch. Survivors could expect to spend a final phase of learning on the Martian surface living and working in environmental domes designed to mimic the Chiron ecosphere.

With the exception of senior command staff, made by direct U.N. appointment, crew were usually seconded from the uniformed services of various donor nations and corporations. As expected, space agency alumni predominated, but many countries used the project as a way to sideline politically unreliable military personnel. The quality of the more than 80,000 charter colonists varied even more widely: while stakeholder Oscar van de Graaf's people were almost all leaders in their fields, Struan's Pacific Trading Company provided Roshann Cobb with less salubrious characters. So-called factors were permitted to employ their own private military service providers to provide settlement defense once they eventually completed their terms of service under the Mission Charter.

As described previously, United Nations selection protocols also relaxed measurably over time. The U.N. made numerous high-level political appointments in exchange for funding and access to required infrastructure such as space elevators, orbital factories, and space construction vehicles. Inclusion of re-socialized prisoners, a Warsaw Pact innovation, represented the most controversial change, and (among other things) prompted the United Nations to furnish Captain Garland and his officers with a complement of marines to ensure their safety. Robotic servitors were introduced in the 2050s after spectrographic analysis of Chiron indicated that planetary conditions would be considerably more hostile than initially projected.

Because of the very large number of personnel moved through the program, the first "sleepers" were placed in suspended animation in October 2061, and the last immediately before departure in February 2110. Cryogenic stasis was achieved according to the Wespe-Quinn-Vagner Process, selected for its comparatively high rate of patient survival. The U.N. settled on Wespe-Quinn-Vagner after a thorough investigation of more than two dozen alternatives. On this, the mission's medical personnel achieved a rare full consensus. Chief Medical Officer Pravin Lal's official memorandum of recommendation to the United Nations Medical College, now housed in the archives of his alma mater, The Aga Khan University, is counter-signed by Unity's Director of Neurosurgery, Dr. Aleigha Cohen; its director of Genetic Medicine, Dr. Tamineh Pahlavi; and Psych-Chaplain Miriam Godwinson, who attended to the ethical implications associated with artificially extending human life. Himself a recognized expert in geriatric therapies, Chief Engineer Prokhor Zakharov took the unusual step of appending an amicus note.

The journey to Alpha Centauri required one hundred-and-forty years of travel. Wespe-Quinn-Vagner slowed patient metabolism to a virtual halt during that time. Cumulative practical aging was less than one full year. Sensitive monitoring equipment filtered toxins and introduced supplemental nutrients into the bloodstream as needed. Dynamic suspension gel exercised muscle groups while psycho-pharmacological cocktails managed the risk of vivid dreaming.

All well above median mission age, most of the command staff faced unique medical risks that could not be mitigated to the U.N.'s full satisfaction. For Zakharov, who was seventy-three years old at mission launch and in declining health, the estimated odds of surviving cold sleep fell to 62%. The outlook for Executive Officer General Francisco d'Almeida and Political Officer Sheng-ji Yang, both octogenarians, was worse still. All signed waivers acknowledging the potential for untenable complications.

The Journey
The odyssey that brought a fully-powered Unity from the Lunar Cradle to the edge of the Alpha Centauri system was no less harrowing. Just hours after launch in March 2110, an explosion destroyed one of the starship's four precious hydroponics bays. Finding that the ship was still space-worthy, Mission Control chose to override automatic crew resuscitation and simply jettison the affected compartments. At the push of a button, ten thousand of the quarter-million crew members were sacrificed on the altar of human survival. The U.N. Intelligence Cell went on to confirm that the cause of the explosion was sabotage. Odds of mission succeeds were revised downwards to >7%.

Seven decades passed, and, against all odds, the Unity was T-minus three weeks from deployment to Chiron's surface. A Forward Contact Team had been planet-side for a whole month, working to a clear a landing zone. Attempts to contact the Pathfinder Probe were unsuccessful, but the evidence of recent human settlement--and terrible civil violence--was incontrovertible.

Then, at 01:19h Zulu Time, 1 November 2180, a micro-object impacted Unity just 0.2 Astronomical Units from Chiron. At once, the impact sheared off three cryobays, gutted a fourth, and destroyed two of three remaining hydroponics modules before striking the ship's solar sail. The port side ventral hull suffered hundreds of shrapnel impacts, depressurizing critical compartments and compromising the primary reactor shield. Coolant system failure triggered a SCRAM, but radiation began leaking into the cryobays housing the crew. They emerged into a steel envelope bleeding oxygen and devoid of light, with hope itself fast running out.

Planetfall
The patchwork crew proved unequal to their new task. Damage control operations began almost at once under the supervision of Unity's Executive Officer, General Francisco d'Almeida, clearing the way for Chief Engineer Prokhor Zakharov's technicians to assess the reactor spaces. They were disrupted by multiple groups of armed stowaways who proceeded to engage in a shooting war between not only themselves, but the mainline crew. One of the ringleaders, Colonel Corazón Santiago, read aloud a manifesto over the ship's internal address system, and was able to secure for herself a face-to-face meeting with Captain Garland. Thirty-six hours later, he was dead at the hand of an unknown assailant. Outside Damage Control, United Nations Marine Corps defenders stacked the bodies of their dead and wounded comrades to continue their losing fight.

The surviving leaders fell into rounds of recrimination. Without extraordinary measures to correct drift, Unity would overshoot Chiron, be forced into a long elliptical orbit, and return only after a transit of eighty-four years. All the crew now-awakened would either need to reenter cold sleep (a deadly-dangerous proposition) or attempt emergency landing on the planet below with whatever diminished quantities of supplies they could reach in the chaos. Zakharov, whose advanced age greatly reduced the likelihood of surviving either contingency, protested that it was still possible for his operators to save the ship and permit an ordinary landing with much of the cargo intact, but other division heads protested that their personnel were too disorganized, or else too few in number, to provide him with the necessary support.

Zakharov bitterly assailed his peers. Deirdre Skye, the mission's head Xenobiologist, diverted first responders away from engineer tasks to reinforce the structural integrity of the ship's remaining greenhouses and seed banks. Francisco d'Almeida appeared to have awakened 400 more personnel than allotted, none of them with the firefighting or heavy rescue billets relevant to the present danger. Camera footage appeared to show Aleigha Cohen overseeing the nerve-stapling of hundreds of newly-awakened prisoners in the ship's forward detention blocks. Citing her authority under U.N. protocol, Godwinson, whom the computer repeatedly flagged as deceased, refused to force crew members in her care to reenter irradiated compartments to undertake crucial repairs. Finding the situation hopeless, d'Almeida, acting as Garland's successor, gave the order for each leader to gather those crew still ambulatory and abandon ship. In his last official act as a U.N. representative, he declared the Mission Charter dissolved.

 

[Trenacker]

Before we discuss what happened after Planetfall, we will first complete the story of Unity herself.

Since, leaders aside, those fleeing Unity didn't necessarily have much choice in whose "care" they ended up, we'll make these decisions without the benefit of knowing which faction we'll play.

Outfitting an Expedition Across the Stars
Mission design changed as frequently as ship design. Many a sponsor forced their indelible mark on crew composition and load-out as a condition of forking over the huge sums, scarce intellectual capital, and precious equipment necessary to outfit a full-scale exodus. To which of the following nations did the U.N. turn in its hour of need, what did they receive, and what did it mean for the survivors?

Choose one of the following options. Voting will close at 12:01 AM Eastern Standard Time.

[ ] The United States of America. After tens of millions of Americans died in recurring pandemics during the first half of the twenty-first century, the United States finally found the technological solution required to endure long periods of home isolation: an army of drones of every conceivable size, shape, and purpose. Drones to sanitize public spaces day and night. Drones to deliver food, fuel, medicines, and other necessities to the front door of every household. Drones to replace the missing labor in factories and fields. "During the long years of civil war and reconstruction in the 2040s," wrote The New York Times, "the Federal government perfected push-button war, then push-button peace." The United States provided Factor Oscar van de Graaf's A.R.C. contingent upwards of 9,000 autonomous labor drones, known as Multiple Use Labor Elements (MULE), on exceptionally generous terms, to help perform colonization tasks safely. Drawbacks of this technology platform reflect the American's national mania for hydrocarbon fuels. Using the MULES efficiently absent Unity's reactors will require the colony to make enormous and continuing investments in its energy grid.

[Selecting this option will add +3 M.U.L.E. to our first settlement. If activated, each MULE will use -2 Energy/Season, which is a steep price to pay considering they gather only basic resources and yield slightly less than a normal citizen. Another issue is their provenance: Oscar van de Graaf and his New Two Thousand opened fire on survivors of other factions who attempted to draw on "his" equipment during the Unity Crisis. While perhaps we were lucky then to escape without notice, Regulators will surely be tasked to "recover" the M.U.L.E.s if ever we come to van de Graaf's attention.]​

[ ] The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Soviet Union staggered out of the short twentieth century and into the twenty-first with its alliance structure in tatters and its economy overheating from an excess of defense spending. Many predicted a quick collapse. Instead, Soviet leaders took deft advantage of the rise of Fundamentalist Islam to achieve a long detente with the West and shove aside discredited or dismantled petrostates to claim a dominant place in the global energy market. As American and European attentions turned increasingly inwards, Moscow wasted no time before engaging in new adventurism, accumulating tidy victories in Syria, Afghanistan, the Congo, and even Bolivia, where Washington signally declined to uphold the Monroe Doctrine during the second Trump administration. But the Red Star rose only so high. If the costs of meddling in the Third World were less than those of an arms race with NATO, a new and expensive threat emerged in the form of China. Successful participation in the Sino-Indian War came with a bill that, paired with the costs of environmental renewal at home, the Soviets paid only with difficulty. Soviet accomplishment in the arts and sciences, starved of patronage, declined precipitously. When the U.N. came knocking in 2065, the Soviets were two generations behind the global standard in electronics. Their once-vaunted space program was but a shadow of its former glory. What the U.S.S.R. did have to offer was the miniaturized nuclear reactor (slim safety margins and all), along with ten thousand junked armored cars readily converted to reconnaissance, liaison, and utility duties in environments requiring full NBC protection. In return, the U.N. agreed to hold Moscow blameless for any "accidental fission" and found a place for 20,000 additional convict laborers.

[Selecting this option will equip our starting settlement with +2 Squadrons UNITY Rovers (Fission), and the huge power output will probably help us economize on what would otherwise be a very expensive part of our economy (not to mention the implications for mounting directed-energy weapons), but vulnerability to catastrophic mishap is a very bad feature for a vehicle we intend to put through hard use. Also, the Dreamers of Chiron will have been especially successful in plundering the ship's stock of convicts, providing them with +2 Drones--the basis for a respectable economic base.]​

​

[ ] The French Union. France retained a substantial amount of overseas real estate and subjects in the second half of the twentieth century, and although the terms of association sweetened progressively, France fought long wars in Algeria, Indochina, and the Levant. In an open secret, France also secured Quebec independence, a gambit for which it was temporarily expelled by the European Union. As in past eras, retention of a colonial empire and tampering in the affairs of other peoples earned the French a certain pride-of-place in international affairs. To protect their considerable investments in Africa, the French also replaced the Americans as the dominant voice and largest contributor to the United Nations. Peacekeeping in Africa took a familiar shape: the French fist, fit snugly in the United Nations glove. French scientists and engineers contributed their fair share to Unity's development, but the launch pads at the Centre Spatial Guyanais were arguably even more impactful. Beyond these traditional aspects of project involvement, however, France distinguished itself in another way: by providing the future colony with defensive equipment when long-range sensing data suggested that Chiron might be home to potentially dangerous megafauna. The original concept for the Unity's small armory placed an emphasis on less-lethal and reduced penetration solutions: stun guns, flechette launchers, and low-velocity plastic munitions. (General Raoul Salan's United Nations Marine Corps were "racked" with their own weapons for rapid deployment and kept separate from the United Nations Security Forces.) France rounded out the lot with surplus hand weapons, both French and American surplus, including Light Anti-Tank Weapons.

[Selecting this option will significantly expand the small arms and light weapons available to your faction at Planetfall (+2 War Stores), reflecting better "pickings" aboard ship. This will make it easier to equip effective militia forces and modify civilian equipment for use in combat. The downside to this option? The same advantage will be enjoyed by other factions as well.]​

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[ ] Republic of India. Internecine conflict prevented the Subcontinent from assuming the position of an acknowledged superpower until very late in the twenty-first century, after the traditional claimants to the title were themselves exhausted by the onslaught of war, disease, and environmental disaster. India suffered through its own share of conflicts, winning a short, sharp naval war with China in spectacular fashion (Indian missiles helped send Xizang to the bottom) but later experiencing the unmitigated horror of a nuclear exchange with Pakistan during the Six Minute War of 2092. Before the war and after, India invested heavily in the Unity Project, if only to affirm, even to itself, that it possessed not just the wherewithal, but the national will, to contribute to the well-being of all humankind even in light of its own heavy need. As work on Unity began, India's technology sector was moving from a service focus to idea creation, while Indian materials science was leading the way in the production of new polymers. The programming language and hardware at Unity's heart, along with its countless 3D printers, were Indian-produced. Urgent requests in the 2070s prompted India to deliver more digital and industrial equipment to the United Nations. As compensation, India secured a larger share of the cryobeds reserved for charter colonists.

[Selecting this option provides +4 Data Nodes and +1 Industrial-Scale 3D Printers to your Landing Pod. The printers will boost your production speed, while Data Nodes can be configured for a variety of purposes, such as speeding technological research, expanding public DataLinks access, and increasing the effectiveness of sensor arrays. Factions led by proprieters--the Dynamic Enterprise, the Dreamers of Chiron, and the New Two Thousand--will each gain +1 Colonist.]​

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[ ] Golden China. The overthrow of China's Communist government was not the momentous occasion so long envisioned. By 2062, China boasted a booming economy that was the envy of any capitalist competitor and a popular culture that gave strong and persistent expression to the national mood, official censorship notwithstanding. The wholesale replacement of an ossified Communist Party oligarchy with an equally decrepit imperial plutocracy changed almost nothing day-to-day. Foremost among China's problems was foo insecurity. The country needed to place more land under cultivation and achieve better production from existing farms, an imperative not lost on the new government. And if China never quite achieved the desired level of self-sufficiency, it nevertheless developed an expertise sufficient to bequeath to Project Unity an enormous seed bank and valuable microbiotic and insect cultures selected for their suitability to enhance greenhouse agriculture.

[Selecting this option will increase the Nutrient yield of your greenhouses by +25%. Achieving a food surplus is the basis for sustained population growth and will stimulate inter-faction commerce. Be advised that Terrestrial organisms, while able to survive in Chiron's environment, are invasive. Even a small release may have unforeseen ecological impacts. Also remember intending to live in harmony with Planet are unlikely to make large investments in Terrestrial farming even over the short term.] ​

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[ ] Corporate Entities. As Unity neared completion, each recognized shortfall took on more immediacy. With so many nation-states laid low, multi-national conglomerates, with their own complicated bureaucracies, access to a diversity of resources, and global reach, sometimes commanded power enough to be worth engagement. The U.N. used no less than twelve prime contractors to complete Unity, each of which in turn spun off work to a hundred different smaller concerns. At times, the continued loyalty of their board rooms was even more crucial to mission success than continued patronage from Washington, Moscow, or Beijing. Corporate brokers augmented Unity's motor pool with the latest in terraforming and heavy-haul machinery. In return, the United Nations made the agonizing concession of off-loading 40,000 trained crew to make space for more charter colonists--a "swap" that accounted for nearly a full 10% of the ship's complement.

[Selecting this option will add +1 Former to your Landing Pod, increasing your construction potential by at least 100%. Such a leg up create an insurmountable advantage if properly leveraged. However, assuming the corporations had their way, there were fewer trained responders available to arrest the speed of Unity's destruction. As a result, your evacuation saved fewer lives. You land with -1 POP. For certain factions, this will be a crippling disadvantage.]​

 

[King Luffy]

[X] Republic of India.

 

[veekie]

[X] Republic of India.

 

[Nevill]

[x] The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

 

[Tayta Malikai]

[X] The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

 

[Japanime]

[X] The United States of America.

 

[Secretariat]

[x] The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The disadvantages of fission rovers are easily mitigated -- they are mobile power plants, not exploration vehicles, and they travel on well-paved roads to established settlements in need of temporary expanded power infrastructure. Otherwise they sit at base, babied by engineers, and power the grid.

Sucks that this benefits one custom faction only. As our patrons might say, they're first against the wall when the Revolution comes.

 

[Happerry]

[X] Republic of India.

[X] The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Both of these seem fun.

 

[Trenacker]

Since most votes came in after the midnight deadline, I've decided to be generous.

Vote Tally
Outfitting an Expedition Across the Stars

The United States of America - 2
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – 3
The French Union – 0
Republic of India - 3
Golden China – 0
Corporate Entities – 0

Outcome: All three preferred conditions prevail in a collision of late votes.

Results:
Unity passed out of our solar system carrying 441,894 souls aboard. By the time word was passed to abandon ship, more than half had been lost.

Survivors faced all the nightmare scenarios cooked up by the Red Teams at Morgan Safety Consultants and more. To approach the reactor halls was to be subject to potentially lethal doses of radiation. Many emergency lockers were inexplicably empty. Under such extreme conditions, most protective gear was donned improperly. So many compartments suffered explosive decompression during the first hour of damage control operations that Executive Officer Francisco d'Almeida began routing responders to cargo bays rather than risk them to retrieve "worthless artisans" and "needless bankers." In machinery spaces, crews repeatedly suffered line-of-fire injuries as equipment shook itself apart. Much of the ship became inaccessible due to structural collapse. Fires raged out of control. Whole cryobays became entombed in fire suppression foam.

Armed assailants calling themselves "Spartans" slaughtered every damage control party they could find, apparently with the intent of dooming the ship to destruction. It would have been easy to do had these not been the same personnel entrusted with the maintenance of civil order. "Colonel" Corazón Santiago, their "appointed spokesperson," was properly "Lieutenant" Santiago, a U.N. Security Force mid-ranker. Subsequent analysis of camera feeds from around the ship depicted men and women in the faded oranges and yellows of the Holnist Movement mixed liberally among U.N. Security Force mutineers. A small fraction may have been the survivalists they claimed. In practice, they were sociopaths, human trash working overtime to conceal racism and misogyny behind pseudo-intellectual papier-mâché. To protest their exclusion from Project Unity, Santiago and her cretins did what came naturally: open fire.

To this cacophony, thousands of further stowaways added nothing sweet. Whether Jean Baptiste-Keller himself ever made it aboard the object of his obsession is unknown. His followers got close enough to ask Garland for his autograph, swarming out of a false bulkhead amidships to revenge themselves on Spartan and crew alike. The cultists made it as far as the damaged computer core, minutes from the Bridge, before rallying Marines broke their momentum with help from sonic grenades. Peter Landers, the Kellerite commander on the scene, grew up on the Mississippi not far from the riverboat casinos. He well knew: when the House starts to win, choose a different game. Presenting as nuclear firemen, Kellerites organized the evacuation of a secondary armory aft that they then picked clean.

D'Almeida gave the official order to abandon ship, but the giving up on Unity's salvation began almost at once. For every courageous soul who obeyed the muscle memory created by months of training and exercise to go and serve their fellows, two others scurried for the exits while the fourth availed themselves of an opportunity for target practice and the fifth fed psychotrophic drugs to those just decanted.

The run on Landing Pods of course went straight through the nearest cargo bays. No faction was to be denied a share of the starship's endless variety of cargo. From apple seeds to ammunition, anxious survivors and would-be monarchs filled Landing Pods with anything they could lay hands on--often after gunning down those who had got there first. Mostly, the objects they secured had immediate value, such as food, medicine, and hand radios. Sometimes, they were a putative investment in the future, as when Tamineh Pahlavi's people emptied cold storage of more than fifty thousand genetic samples. Sometimes, the spoils were people. Oscar van de Graaf's reputation was for mercy, but his mercenary gunmen fought hard and in vain against "poachers" come to pick the cryobays clean of the colonists with the choicest service records.

Your Pod escaped Unity with an impressive accumulation of heavy equipment. Ramirez, the one who plucked you from your failing cryopod and shoved the life-saving re-breather into your mouth, died badly, her small body almost hacked in half by a close-range gut-shot of flechette rounds. Saratov, who saved you from touching a live wire, became trapped by fallen ISO containers and convinced you to go on without him. Since you were so very busy, Reed had the good sense to delay her passing until you were safely away: a snapped harness during reentry accounted for your very last casualty. Let us hope the take was worth the cost.

Faction Inventory

• +2 Squadrons Unity Rovers (Fission)
• +3 Multiple Use Labor Element (M.U.L.E.)
• +4 Data Nodes
• +1 Industrial-Scale 3D Printers

Other

• +2 Drones for the Dreamers of Chiron
• +1 Colonist for Proprietor Factions (Dynamic Enterprise, Dreamers of Chiron, New Two Thousand)
• Gain condition Flashpoint! with the New Two Thousand
• @Tayta Malikai earns +1 vote (bankable) for making me laugh

Today's Episode: Dark Hearts

"A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that." - Moby Dick, Datalinks

Click to shrink...

Probably more than a few meetings in smoke-filled back rooms antedated Project Unity. You brokered a deal of your own in an auxiliary cable room. If you believe in that sort of thing, it was the kind you'll have to answer for on the day you meet your Maker. If not, don't tell Godwinson. Especially not if you're Godwinson.

With whom did you meet? The choices you make here will eliminate the corresponding options during faction selection.

[ ] Prokhor Zakharov. Of all those who believed the Unity's situation superable, Chief Science Officer Zakharov was the most certain. Promising Garland results, Zakharov put six hundred souls to the task of saving either of the ship's two fusion reactors. Those who did not succumb to the radiation were generally executed by the Spartans. To better accomplish his Herculean task, Zakharov laid heavy demands on his superiors: from Garland, he insisted upon an ever-larger percentage of the available human resources (a number fixed by the limitations of the ship's faltering life support systems); from d'Almeida he sought priority for emergency services; from Marine Corps General Raoul Salan, he wanted more than a paltry corporal's guard to see to the safety of his beloved "students." To this day, you aren't certain why Zakharov failed. Was it that his engineers proved unequal to their task? Did Garland's accession to Deirdre Skye's requests vis-a-vis the hydroponics bays really cost us everything, forcing Zakharov to part with crucial personnel at exactly the wrong moment? Or did d'Almeida's readying of the Landing Pods allow the radiation problem to spiral out of control at a time when it was still susceptible of containment? In some ways, Zakharov's tragedy was your fortune. You spared a tear for a man who reminded you of an eccentric relative, arranging a hand-over of cases of Potassium Iodide. In return, he agreed to shunt radiation to a certain compartment to which you desired access--a compartment held (for the next half hour, at least) by a chalk of private military men answering to Roshann Cobb, Tai-Pan of Straun's Pacific Trading Company and one of the mission's largest Factors. If he took the decision without hesitation, you perhaps assumed it was from an over-abdundance of concern for his own subordinates.

[Selecting this option adds +1 Supplies, which can be used to speed construction or boost settlement morale, and +1 War Stores. You will gain esteem from the University of Planet but enter vendetta with the Dreamers of Chiron. Both the University and the Dreamer factions will become closed to your during faction selection.]​

​

[ ] Tamineh Pahlavi. Your encounter was purely chance, and under the circumstances, fairly auspicious. Pahlavi, at the head of a procession of survivors that had traded fire hoses and poleaxes for lab coats and tabletop centrifuges, declared her interests served: she was departing, had no quarrel with you. That was probably for the best, since you saw not a single firearm among the lot of them. Still, they impressed you with their self-possession: these people knew what they were about, and at least looked the part of civilization's heralds, weighed down with the tools of life rather than destruction. (Then again, what else would a near-Nobel Prize winner be expected to do during a crisis but preserve the very thing to which she had dedicated her life: knowledge?) Pahlavi is at least proximally related to the ruling dynasty of Iran, and you wonder now if there might be something to the adage that royalty is in the blood. Since you barred the way and demanded an accounting, Pahlavi made known to you that she was now in possession of both the data tapes containing the neuroimages of fifty thousand colonists and a capsule of their genetic material. Clearly, she assumed you would judge her mentally unsound and tell her to get moving, but for the first time, you considered that she might have a previously unsuspected form of wealth, and arranged a trade. Today, guns, but tomorrow, pipettes. She demanded from you something personal: your genetic pattern. Yes, royalty is definitely in the blood.

[Selecting this option adds +1 Research Pod to your Landing Pod, which will provide a free blind Tech advance on the Discover path. It also means that you allowed Pahlavi to take a sample of your DNA. You know well that she was a lead researcher with the American Reclamation Corporation, which made no secret of its interest in human cloning. You will gain esteem from the Human Ascendancy. That faction will become closed to you during faction selection.]​

[ ] Roshann Cobb. You picked off a few of Tamineh Pahlavi's people, and from a prisoner learned about her decision to put labs ahead of cargo bays, but progress toward your own goals (speaking both metaphorically and physically) went through a man that GQ Magazine once labeled the world's most eligible bachelor. The illegitimate son of a Scottish father and his Chinese mistress, Cobb read philosophy at Oxford before a career in the British Special Intelligence Service. His "homecoming" to Struan's Hong Kong coincided with the start of its precipitous investments in the fields of mnemonics, oneirology, and memory encoding and retrieval. With so much financial muscle behind him, Cobb eventually found his way aboard Unity during a low point in the U.N.'s relationship with its governmental partners. His remit was connected to a large-scale project to monitor the brain activity of Unity colonists during cold sleep. Since Struan's was open about its expectation that the Unity Project was not, in fact, the last gasp of the species, Cobb also claimed an interest in "evaluating" the suitability of Chiron's biological resources for potential pharmaceutical applications. As had become common for charter ventures, Cobb negotiated special allowance for a contingent of private military contractors to accompany him to Alpha Centauri. You met these not-so-kind gentlemen while doing some shopping for a new vehicle. Naturally, both sites got bogged down lobbing less-lethal back and forth, praying shrapnel wouldn't upset one of the notoriously temperamental nuclear reactor vessels behind which the Struan's men were making their stand. A shouting match coaxed Cobb to the neutral ground of the cable closet, where you observed first-hand that he was a high-functioning addict. Fearing the worst if you continued to shoot it out with professional soldiers, you offered them what you hoped would be a more tempting target: the scientists over in the genetic library.

[Selecting this option adds +1 Unity Hydrofoil, an enormous hull filled with enough modular equipment to configure everything from a towing barge to an armored gunboat, along with +1 Medical Supplies, which may be used or abused as you see fit. You will gain esteem from the Dreamers of Chiron but the Human Ascendancy will be massacred at their hands, losing -2 POP. Without Pahlavi's timely action, huge quantities of irreplacable data will be lost before they can be released to the Planetary Datalinks at some point in the future. You will not be able to build the Special Projects Human Genome Project or Secrets of the Human Brain. That said, it is unlikely your role in this travesty will ever be proven. You will not be able to choose either the Dreamers or Ascendenacy during faction selection.]​

​

[ ] Terrance LaCroix. You bore no particular ill will for Captain Jonathan Garland (at least none to which you would confess openly), but his demise did not surprise you. Garland's pronounced sense of noblesse oblige frustrated the obsessive in self-centered subordinates like Zakharov and Skye and, if rumor is true, inspired contempt in the politically savvy and ruthlessly practical d'Almeida, who found his superior officer's intuitive leadership style baffling. Given a crisis that confined him to an emergency operation center and limited his audience to a crew that he had not himself chosen (and against whom, in some cases, he had lobbied quite ardently), Garland's motivational gifts were useless. Still in spite of that, Terrance LaCroix was one of the mission's True Believers. You checked the man's service record: prior to his retention for the Unity Project, LaCroix was a consultant for the New York Police Department's Counter-Terrorism Bureau, in which connection he ran to ground a hyper-survivalist cell plotting to detonate a nuclear bomb in downtown Manhattan. Awakened on Garland's orders after Santiago announced her presence aboard ship, LaCroix managed to isolate her transmissions to within 20 square meters of Cargo Bay Red-423, allowing Salan's Marines to pressure the mutineers long enough to safely evacuate Unity's amidships muster stations. LaCroix headed there himself, in company with the last of the bridge's defenders, when you initiated the gun battle with the Dreamers that brought them up short. Since the chain of command had broken down completely and there was no real possibility of their reuniting with a more legitimate command authority, you offered to take them on. Of course, with so much firepower of their own, they could (and did) impose fair terms: help them to safely evacuate the greenhouses.

[Selecting this option will result in your recruiting net-runner Terrance LaCroix as a faction personality. LaCroix counts as an Elite Probe Team. You will also gain a tough Veteran company of United Nations Marines, easily the best-trained, best-equipped fighting force on Planet. The struggle to save lives on Unity will result in the salvation of the Stepdaughters of Gaia and the Shapers of Chiron, both of which will make Planetfall in much better shape than would otherwise have been possible, but it will cost you -1 POP in casualties inflicted during a hard fight with the Spartan Federation. You will not be able to select any of the factions mentioned here.]​

​

[ ] Peter "Pete" Landers. Okay, so he's not a cult leader. At least, you're not prepared to make a final determination. In fact, of all the command staff you'd ever care to meet in a dark passageway, Landers would admittedly be high on your list. The "Tribals"--they also answer to "Kellerites," but calling them cultists appears to exert an undesirable pull on their trigger fingers--are making the same argument as the Spartans, but you have to admit that it is far more persuasive coming from the mouths of people who conceede that there are some people that shouldn't be shot. If the Tribals want to waste a bunch of Spartans or go toe-to-toe with Salan's jarheads, that's their business. Neither Landers nor you saw any reason to initiate hostilities when you both arrived at opposite sides of the same cargo bay. An improbable coin toss was used to determine the order of selection. You and he then went through the bay with laser markers taking it in turns to designate what should leave with either set of survivors. To speed matters along, you even shared the work of loading one another's Landing Pods. Landers himself operated the forklift that set the final Unity Rover into the cargo bay of your Landing Pod. Before departing, you shook hands and made a solemn resolution of alliance, albeit away from the prying eyes of followers of yours and his who still entertained a level of suspicion you no longer felt. That's when the trouble started. By the time the smoke had cleared, the United Nations Marines in pursuit of Landers and his people lay dead or dying. Together, your fighters and the Tribals gave better than you got (partly because Landers opened fire before the Marines). Some important-looking cables leading to your Pod took the brunt of the battle damage.

[Selecting this option will result in your gaining +3 Supplies, +1 Medical Supplies, and a single Flight of Unity 'Copters, fragile utility aircraft with decent range. The shootout disrupted the final fueling of your Pod. You will not be able to choose where you make Planetfall. You will not be able to choose The Human Tribe during faction selection, but you will be allied with them.]​

 

[veekie]

[X] Terrance LaCroix.

This is one I think I won't regret. Stay true to the mission.

 

[Secretariat]

[X] Terrance LaCroix.

We know, from the scenario:

• Two advance teams are present on Chiron -- the Unity Forward Contact Team, preparing an LZ; and the remnants of the Pathfinder expedition.
  • The Pathfinder team was not able to maintain internal cohesion. Civil disturbance -- and previously constructed settlements -- are likely to be already extant Planetside.
  • There are likely to be survivors of the Pathfinder expedition. They may very well be hostile.

LaCroix gives us a few advantages:

• The veteran Marines provide a solid defense against anything other factions might throw at us, any hostile/opportunistic Pathfinder survivors, and mental discipline to resist mindworms defense against Chiron's megafauna.
• A probe team available during initial descent, plus the comms equipment the Marines should have as part of their company, means that we can access comms equipment -- meaning we can link up with the Forward Contact team and take advantage of a prepped LZ, instead of having to touch down who knows where.

Also, two mod notes --
-- Zakharov is listed as Chief Engineer at the initial post, Chief Science Officer farther down. Is he both?

-- Probably a good idea to threadmark every narrative update, to make quest tallies easier to calculate.

 

[King Luffy]

[X] Terrance LaCroix.

 

[Trenacker]

-- Zakharov is listed as Chief Engineer at the initial post, Chief Science Officer farther down. Is he both?

Click to shrink...

He is, yes, but the way I presented it was confusing. Assume "Chief Science Officer" is his rank, and Chief Engineer a courtesy title.

-- Probably a good idea to threadmark every narrative update, to make quest tallies easier to calculate.

Click to shrink...

I don't know what Threadmarking is.

 

[Trenacker]

Voting will close at 17:00 EST tomorrow, 18 August.

 

[Secretariat]

I don't know what Threadmarking is.

Click to shrink...

When you go to create a new post or edit one, there should be an option to set Threadmark Label and assign it to a Threadmark Category. Those get populated in the dropdown on the left side and at the top of each page; they're navigational aids to help new readers find updates, mechanics descriptions, and background information; and can be tagged as such.

Right now, the first threadmark is the first post, and set as "Quest"; you can set the label to be things like chapter headings or descriptions, as well.

They're also used for the vote tally tool, which will compute a running total of votes between the last threadmark and the latest post.

 

[Happerry]

[X] Terrance LaCroix.

[X] Peter "Pete" Landers.

 

[Silence]

[X] Terrance LaCroix.

 

[Tayta Malikai]

@Tayta Malikai earns +1 vote (bankable) for making me laugh

Click to shrink...

Neat!
Since it's bankable, I assume I'm meant to specify when I want to use the boost.

[X] Terrance LaCroix.

I have to admit, when I saw the name I was thinking of somebody else.

Spoiler

Sebastian LaCroix

 

[Shard]

[X] Terrance LaCroix.

 

[Traveller76]

[X] Tamineh Palavi

 

[012345]

The journey to Alpha Centauri required one hundred-and-forty years of travel.

Click to shrink...

Seven decades passed, and, against all odds, the Unity was T-minus three weeks from deployment to Chiron's surface.

Click to shrink...

So how long did Unity travel in end?

[X] Terrance LaCroix.
Fuck Santiago.

[ ] Prokhor Zakharov
Helping University would be my first option but then we can't actualy chose to be them.

[ ] Tamineh Pahlavi.
She sounds like somebody actualy somewhat sane in that crysis(one of three I would want to chose) trying to help.

Besides this. Trenacker this Quest seems like will be great in future. Its already have long story posts with lots of lore that shows why Project is such clusterfuck(like trying to actualy organise such thing? I am suprised there wasnt a group with was left and got their hands on weapons to try actualy shoting the ship during construction/launch) or why Last Chance of Mankind must try surviving with bare scraps of supplies, rediscover lots of basic tech while surounded by groups that would got execution squads in sane universe.

 

[Hydroplatypus]

[X] Terrance LaCroix.

Interesting. Loved SMAC, glad to see a quest spin up around it. Will be interesting to see how the factions are portrayed, and whether you can make the new quest factions as ideologically interesting as the cannon factions.

 

[Nevill]

[x] Peter "Pete" Landers.

A reasonable ally, a decent cash of supplies, and a unit of scout choppers. What else does one need for world domination from our seat in the Great Dunes where Murphy's Law will unfailingly make us land?

 

[Trenacker]

Neat!
Since it's bankable, I assume I'm meant to specify when I want to use the boost.

Click to shrink...

That is correct, sir.

So how long did Unity travel in end?

Click to shrink...

Thank you for catching that discrepancy. The starship Unity traveled seventy years, not 140, to reach the Alpha Centauri star system.

Besides this. Trenacker this Quest seems like will be great in future. Its already have long story posts with lots of lore that shows why Project is such clusterfuck(like trying to actualy organise such thing? I am suprised there wasnt a group with was left and got their hands on weapons to try actualy shoting the ship during construction/launch) or why Last Chance of Mankind must try surviving with bare scraps of supplies, rediscover lots of basic tech while surounded by groups that would got execution squads in sane universe.

Click to shrink...

In fact, the violence began during the initial crew selection process. Thousands of candidates were lynched. Their murderers variously accused them of being agents of "the One World conspiracy," of turning their backs on communities that needed them still, or of simply being cheats. In some times and places, to be selected for the Unity Mission was the achievement of a lifetime. Even after nomination at the national level, one had to qualify against minimum qualifications set by a joint board of the Royal Society, the National Academies, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, L'Institut de France, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. But not everyone went willingly, or with a full heart. Contre-Amirale Raoul André St. Germaine, later the leader of the New State, wrote to a friend that his appointment to the Unity crew "taught me sympathy with Fortunato's fate!"

The Unity hull and its tenders were constant targets of sabotage and terrorism carried out by dozens of state and organizational adversaries, ranging from Spartan brigades and Kellerite cells angry about being "left behind" to extremist movements articulating a radical "Earth Only" agenda and for whom the Unity Project represented a dishonorable attempt to plunder Earth's last remaining resources to equip an undeserving "one-percent" with golden parachutes while all the rest were left for dead. When the West was ascendant, the Soviets and Chinese did the tampering. When the Communists were in favor with the United Nations, Americans and Europeans applied the monkey wrench. Morgan Industries, itself the Unity's largest prime contractor, wrecked about a quarter as much as they built while attempting to gain advantage in contract negotiations.

Interesting. Loved SMAC, glad to see a quest spin up around it. Will be interesting to see how the factions are portrayed, and whether you can make the new quest factions as ideologically interesting as the cannon factions.

Click to shrink...

I'm proudest of the work we do with the factions of our own design and certainly hope, with input from readers like you, to make them as compelling as the original seven.

A reasonable ally, a decent cash of supplies, and a unit of scout choppers. What else does one need for world domination from our seat in the Great Dunes where Murphy's Law will unfailingly make us land?

Click to shrink...

Haven't you heard? Pete Landers, formerly Sergeant Peter Landers, United States Army Reserve, is a deserter who turned traitor! Jean-Baptiste Keller married his first cousin. During the Red Flu, Kellerite communities hoarded hydroxychloroquine.