Isolated Sol and other setting-building fluff

...and I'm back. Finally.

Sheesh.

Took me long enough.

Anyway, as I mentioned at the end of the last post, I'm gonna start the whole Futurum (and it's still a placeholder name, not what I'll actually use) blog off for real with some general setting fluff.

Timeline & General Setting Conceits

The game takes place approximately 130+ years from now, in the mid-2130's. Since I have no metaplot, all writing for this game assumes it is the year 2135, I was inspired by the original 1st Edition Exalted, which had as a basic premise that there was only backstory, no metaplot, since player characters were assumed to break any metaplot by their actions and so adding one would be kind of pointless. I placed the game 100+ years into the future because it's long enough away to let it be vaguely plausible while still being a highly improbable space opera future.

As mentioned in the first post, the setting of Futurum is a space opera setting, or more accurately a space hong-kong-action-movie setting, with wild stunts, people shooting blaster pistols akimbo while diving sideways across the room and hot alien babes (for all preferences, hopefully).

This is not a science fiction setting. I want to make this clear from the start. The setting will not yield to any hard sf conceits, will not follow the rules of the "realism"-proponents, and will not have any major transhumanist themes. There are playable humanoid synthetics, but mostly for flavor, not to explore what humanity is or any of that stuff. There are some very good games that already do that, such as GURPS: Transhuman Space and a few others I can't recall right now. If the exploration of humanity, the idea of mankind transcending their flesh and the post-singularity phenomenon is something for you...you might want to delete this bookmark right now. That ain't my bag.

Ain't nothin' wrong with the bag, it's just not mine.

Futurum...is space opera/HK action movie/space western. Even though it lacks magic powers (psi, the Force, whatever you wanna call it) it's not a real-world-style setting. So if anything in the timeline or science is wrong, wonky or odd...this is intentional. No, really. It's not just that I suck at science.

...hey, if you can accept Star Wars for what it is, you can accept this.

Okay, so...

2010-2080: The Expansion Era

2010-2022: The world goes on as it has. Financial crisis, politics, small wars, North Korea waving their nuclear dick every time the military elite and government runs out of food and money. The usual.

2023: Scientist Erwin Galimuna finds, in an experiment to create a new polymer, what he at first believes to be a compound that generates static electricity when exposed to heat. As it turns out, the reason things stick to the material has nothing to do with electromagnetism, but with a different force of nature: gravity. The material can be made to repel or attract, and the force is literally gravitic. Extensive experiments using particle colliders and powerful electron microscopes allow for the final, working evidence of so-called "graviton" waves, or artificial gravity.

2025-2070: Safe and simple artificial gravity allows not only for technologies so far only dreamed of (hover-vehicles from buses down to skateboards, airplanes that require no wheels, resurgent dirigible technology), but also helps a heap in existing or experimental technologies. Galimuna-Tokamak fusion becomes common and inches out fission power, space launches into orbit becomes simple (though kind of slow) when no powerful rocket boosters are necessary to leave the gravity well, and within decades mankind has not only colonized near and far orbit, but also have cities on the moon and a small terraforming station on Mars.

The big boom comes in the early 2070's, as corporate and national interests race for the asteroid belt and the untold wealth in minerals that lie within it, not to mention the moons of the gas giants. Simple ion engines or oxygen thrusters combined with crude gravity-drives allow for travel times within the solar system of months instead of years.

2080-2115: The Stellar Expansion

2080: Experiments in force-field technology yields results, though not quite the way one expected. The technology is too energy-inefficient to be easily portable, but vehicles, cities, roads, all kinds of implementations are dreamed up. But it also opens up true intrasolar travel. Combining the technology with gravity-tech creates what is known as repulsor technology. The slow, steady space-launches of old are but a memory, a ship no bigger than a small jet can easily reach orbit within seconds, and the inertial compensator fields that combining gravitech and force-field tech in different alignments make allows for immense speeds.

2081: The Earth-Jupiter passenger vessel SS Lu Bu vanishes en route after attempting to break the light-speed barrier. The last, fragmented transmissions reveal desperate screams for help and rantings about "space not making sense". Most FTL-experiments are put on ice or slowed down as everyone tries to figure out just what went wrong. Most theorize it has to do with the mass of the vessel increasing exponentially, but the messages oddly mention nothing of this...

2082: The Russian deep-space probe Laika VI finds what appears to be the devastated wreckage of a spaceship approximately half a light-year outside the outer rim of the Sol system. The message takes over six months to reach Hades Station in Pluto orbit.

2083: The Red Cross rescue vessel Louis Pasteur arrives at the wreckage alongside a Kenyan military escort, and finds that the ship is the Lu Bu. The old passenger liner has been exposed to tremendous forces and has hullbreaches all over, the crew is dead...but due to exposure to space, nothing else. The ship's log reveals that the ship arrived mere hours after the disappearance near Proxima Centauri, over 4 parsecs away. The ship's surviving crew effected repairs and attempted to repeat the journey home the same way they arrived, there the log ends. The question scientists ask themselves is: why did they survive traveling at lightspeed? Twice?

2086: Scientists at Jomo Kenyatta University, Botswana, dust off an old 20th century scientific theory...hyper-space. A theoretical plane of existence next to ours, where the laws of physics are different, allowing for what amounts to skipping around faster-than-light. Many governments and corporations and universities conduct repeated experiments using powerful unmanned probes to repeat the incident, and while many successfully send a ship into hyperspace, few escape it, and those that do are badly banged up.

2091: Syad Fida Hussain, at the University of Sorbonne, manages to crack the calculations necessary to send a vehicle safely into and out of hyperspace, and also how to send communications through it. His calculations yield him fame and notoriety (and that year's Nobel prize), but it also makes for an invaluable discovery that finally allows mankind to see the stars. Unfortunately for science fiction fans throughout human space, the calculations also show that exiting hyper-space before you entered it relative to your own time is impossible. So...no DeLorean time machines. Bummer.

2092-2115: Mankind colonizes the nearby stars. None have habitable worlds, as such, but reasonably self-sufficient dome colonies are built on several of the more exploitable planets. None hold life...

By the end of 2114, mankind controls a sphere of space roughly 22 lightyears in diameter. The UN is charged with policing, patrolling and controlling human space, and the UNSN (United Nations Star Navy) is provided materiel and personnel by most nations, since none want to be left out. It is the biggest undertaking ever taken by any alliance of nations in the history of mankind

2115: The Dokidoki Express, a commercially owned cargo ship on the Luyten-Sol run, is hailed by an unknown vessel. The vessel turns out to belong to a species that calls itself the Mirrimel (closest approximate phonetic enunciation), and everything changes again.

The Mirrimel (say it very fast, with a stiff, thin-lipped mouth) are peaceful, sulfur-based cephalopoid-like life-forms that have possessed hyperdrive for about a century, and have slowly colonized their own sphere of interest. Diplomatic and mercantile envoys are sent from both sides.


2116-2135: Current Era/Exploration Age

2116: Encouraged by mankind's first instance of First Contact and the existence of sapient life in the galaxy, the UN sets up the Cooke Foundation. The foundation is entrusted with 0.5% of every UN member nation's total annual budget (gross, not net), to be portioned out in prizes for any explorer to find evidence of sapient life, actual sapient life and habitable worlds that have not been claimed by anyone else.

The gold-rush to the stars begins.

2117: Explorer-scout Ginseng Money out of Ares City, Mars, discovers a reptilian civilization in the Hollerman-Tilpfer system, 35 light-years from Sol. The reptiles are peaceful herbivores (though they get...rambunctious in mating season) who have reached an early 21st century technology level, and though they're only mildly interested in humanity's more advanced technology, they strike up peaceful relations.

2122: Korean explorer Park Soon-Gie finds herself stranded with a broken hyperdrive just off the axel of Hayasawa 21. After two days of broadcasting an SOS, a ship of unfamiliar make arrives. The species is called the Chirruug, and are wing-less avians who most of all resemble five-foot turkeys with enlarged heads. The Chirruug provide parts, and Soon-Gie finds herself wealthy beyond her wildest dreams on her return to Earth.

2128: A ship from what calls itself the Aquamarine Hegemony exits hyperspace near Hades Station. The ship contains three different sapient species (the amphibious mammalian Kriiiii, the arthropod-like C'K'K'T and the sapient silicon-based fungal Colonies) from the same number of star systems, who have heard of Earth from the Mirrimel and decided to open trade relations. The three star nations have a very...abrasive mannerism, and relations become strained very quickly.

2135: The merchant and explorer Daniel Yokabwe-Hiroiichi procures the star-maps to a rumored inter-species space station 67 parsecs from Sol, and travels there in his beat-up freighter the Iskander.

He discovers Junction Station (this is the most accurate translation to date), a trading outpost and gigantic artificial city in space, situated near the borders of thirteen powerful star nations, and home to over five hundred different species.

Three weeks later, the Aquamarine Hegemony is attacked by unknown forces arriving from the othr side of the Milky Way. The only message that escapes before every sapient is brutally slaughtered is "The Kragga are coming."

=====================================

...and that ends the basic timeline.

Why didn't Earth get any messages from other civilizations if they're that near?

Well, it's like this, the sub-particle transmission waves of the positron hadron flux reacted with the chitty-chitty-bang-bang-we-love-you energies and...

...no, I'm sorry, I won't do Star Trek technobabble. Simplest explanation? We're in the equivalent of a space valley, surrounded by mountains on all sides. Basically, any radio-wave transmissions have to pass through so much cosmic junk, radiation belts, nebulas and sheer interstellar crud that by the time it reached Sol it was just random white noise. That's why Fermi's Paradox does not apply here.

...pseudo-junk-science? Well, duh. See the setting conceit rant above.

Next Up: The Alliance Species & The Kragga