Recent content by Axis Kast

The seventh Social Engineering theme is Romantic choices. Romantic societies attempt to preserve and reproduce a mythologized past. Their focus is less on traditional materialist or esoteric truth-seeking activities than maintaining immediate community integrity against outsiders. Romantic...

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Hive drones receive sedation before entering mandatory suspension. Making people live like insects was massively inefficient. For two centuries, the Hive stumbled through perpetual energy crises. Underground water sources were sweeter and more abundant than anticipated, but flowed too slowly...

As many are aware, Racing the Darkness is a multimedia project. One aspect of this endeavor has been to suggest game mechanics for a kind of reboot to the original game that expands the range of Social Engineering options and other game mechanics. In that spirit, please enjoy and comment on the...

A member of the U.S. Army Reserve's 61st Cavalry Division stands by an M2050 Whipsaw single-occupant reconnaissance hovercraft in a promotional still. Allied Corporation's M2050 Whipsaw so impressed the United States Army that they ordered one thousand to equip the newly-reformed 61st Cavalry...

Showing strategic acumen atypical of Morgan-aligned forces, these SafeHaven mercenaries patrol a favored water route for smugglers on the Lower Khordḗ River in southeastern Golgu not far from the cynically-named diamond beds known as the Creditbores. Even more to their credit, the crew has...

Hunter watchtower under construction in the Lesser Hyperion Range of the Sawtooths, c. MY20. The conical shape and use of metal struts in construction reflect the Neo-Tropical style favored by mainline lodges. With such prominent defenses and the guarantee of regular patrols, the Warden hoped to...

Absolutely, although, to clarify, this is much more about underwriting the economic side of things than about supporting a physical occupation of space. The West Germans are sending Deutschmarks, lathes, cranes, trucks, and think tanks, not battalions. We’re talking about a megascale object...

The Dutch have West New Guinea, where they have built an equatorial space elevator.

The Space Elevator at Singapore occupied most of what had been Bintan and Lingga Islands, purchased at exorbitant prices from newly-independent Indonesia. Imperialists in Europe insured their colonies against rebellion by mortgaging them to the space race, and, ultimately, the U.N. Mission to...

This is true. I often use Biblical names for characters from imagined nations on Old Earth, but in this case, there was no need to go into that. Wojnak has a Polish given name, and Tamm's name is Finnish-Estonian. "Daedam" is the Korean word for "bold." Joem Hoon is a generic Korean name.

Wojnak's Grove was a protected farm at a minor oasis on the Octanali Salt Pan in the eastern foothills of the Upper Sawtooth Range established by Kellerite renegade Jerzy Wojnak and his household in MY7. Its chief occupation after MY11 was the manual cultivation of samp using seed stock...

A major question, as I see it, is what entities might be able to provide some of the same functions as states. As I mentioned in Post #240, governments must satisfy the demand for value. If we set aside the role that governments play in providing physical security against threats both foreign...

10 October 2049 - Rangoon in the aftermath of Cyclone Charni. Her Majesty's Government found the costs of reconstruction unbearable and earned the intense enmity of its Burmese subjects by taking the decision not to rebuild the colony's capital city. Supercharged by global warming, storms with...

Горячий рассвет, a geothermal powerplant abandoned by its University operators in late MY16 after it was rendered inaccessible by natural disaster. The partially-picked-over remnants of a quadrapidal drilling rig, still fat with leavings. Hive scrappers approach in the foreground, game for...