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Pre-SysNES2: Beta-testing and Submission
- Thread starter Disenfrancised
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This was going to be with the main start, but I didn't like how the information here broke the flow, so instead:
Glossary:
Voidrunner: A group whose journey to the area involved significant amounts of sublight travel
Cosmopolitan: As always, significant amounts of the population are derived from post-Terra cosmopolitan stock, generating by the near full mixing on early habitats and worlds. Melding alleles roughly proportionate to an averaging of the third millennium’s human groups, to a pre-spaceflight observer attempting to fit them into known categories they would most resemble Pardo Brazilians, with olive skin, dark eyes and dark curly or straight hair and considerable intergenerational variance. The phenotype in normal gravity conditions is somewhat taller on average than pre-spaceflight averages, but variance is higher.
Geashial: Similar to the Cosmopolitan type, the Geashial are drawn from a cross selection of the east and south east Asian nations of Terra, and similarly difficult to identify as any single type. In actuality the Cosmopolitan-Geashial difference is very much a continuum, but convention draws the clade boundary closer to the Geashial end.
Filtered: Due to isolation (cultural, physical, or temporal), numerous groups came through to the current era with only a subset of Earth genotypes forming their source stock, resulting in a new ethnogenesis. Pure strains of types known to pre-spaceflight observers are vanishingly rare, which most being from several types and contain shading towards the Cosmopolitan or Geashial categories.
Novel: Post-Terrestrial drift, cultural selection, and mutations have led to the emergence of new ethnic in addition to cultural groups, and technological modifications have only advanced such a trend. Most of the more extreme modifications and changes tend to involve very small populations, and therefore have a statistically high chance of loss or ossification by chance.
Content:
Root-Dathics and near-Dathics
Although at its apogee Datha featured extractions from ten thousands cultures and groups under its meta-cultural umbrella, the old Dathics of the first settlements remained a plurality. This group has populated hundreds of daughter worlds in its time, and makes up a significant fraction of the whole Orion sector, though the daughter worlds in time phase into their own models. The Old Dathics are close to the commonly understood Cosmopolitan-Geashial boundary, appearing a blending of ancient Caucasians and east Asian genotypes with tan skin, round face, strong noses, prominent epicanthus, light brown to dark hair and eyes. Extremely ancestral engineering and selection has created further characteristics of higher than average height (near two metres average for males) and extremely low trunk, extremity, and gynoidal fats, time in civilisation losing the ability to even accumulate significant fats. It is relatively easy to date the splitting of daughter colonies from the root culture by longevity, facial attractiveness and symmetry, as Datha itself saw a continual diffusion of gengineering developments from its elites and its tourism industries. Sexual dimorphism has also been tweaked rather higher. Thus the average Standardite, diverging from the root-Dathics roughly four centuries ago, will die a decade and a half earlier, and whilst still extremely handsome by baseline cosmopolitan standards, lack the beauty of the root-Dathics.
Culturally the Dathics have passed through several models, and the daughter worlds have seen a much higher variance. Constants seem an extraordinary devotion to charismatic leaders, the sheer numbers, interconnectivity, and high standard of living of the people all work to depress the agency of the man in the street. Martial relationships are rather more relaxed, with easy formation and breaking, with children being the property of the mother, men are not expected to provide support though they are expected to provide inheritance for all their biological children. The power of the state and law is generally less trusted than individual leaders and political terms tend to be long and feature considerable patronage. Most Dathics try to work in both creative and practical pursuits over the course of their work cycle. Datha was both famous and notorious for the parties and festivals its people threw.
The Apeilics have been described elsewhere.
Spinward Subsegment:
The Banded Cathedral
The great giant planet of Lipsid Beta has always proved attractive for small unit settlers. One of the first systems of arrival for those taking the low energy route into the segment, jumping from small star to small star, such a tight clump of valuable resources and energy proved very attractive. In the bad old days where the plague and the unsafe nature of jumps in the dust of the nebula (prior to the development of tippler algorithms and ansibyl station keeping only two in three jumps in the Forest didn’t result in destruction, and the odds grew worse further in) created fear, the Lipsid Beta was as far as most people got.
Initially named for the way the magnetosphere and white dusts combined to give a vaulted look to space as seen from the surface of the moons, the name proved prophetic as followers of fringe philosophies from poor regions in the sector migrated to what was seen as an open land, each setting up in their own habitats. Most were some non-Dathic shade of cosmopolitan in stock with nigh every possible set of cultural mores present. Over time a common trade culture came to cradle the bubbles of religious fervour, and power accreted to the three polities that each grew to possess one of the three liveable major moons.
The greatest of these three is the Black Iron Republic. The BIR saw its genesis amongst a sect of pacifist communitarian mining communities named the Iron Republic who followed Fivism (a quasi-humanist philosophy that claims to revere equally from the five sages of Buddha, Christ, Mohammad, Ali Nuri, and Collins). Their trust ethic and mineral wealth quickly brought them economic power as a group, which over the centuries saw them dominating the trade institutions of circum-Cathedral space. When two thirds of the people on the Black Castle (the Cathedrals third moon) followed the council precepts, they decided to incorporate as the Black Iron Republic to integrate government across the moon. Though many criticise their slowness to act and commitments to justice and mercy, these traits has won them the trust of all the minor habitats in ways the other two Cathedral powers lack, and promoted considerable in-migration to the Black Castle from the rest of Cathedral space and beyond. Of basic Cosmopolitan stock (more exotic looking people often face quiet ostracism), they dress in sober and simple blacks and blues, though their space suits and ships are scrolled with stark white lettering. The more pious shave their heads (male and female), though this is not demanded of them. They speak softly and carefully, only wishing to give statement they have full faith in. Contracts and trust are of paramount importance to them.
The Valk Irinate, a cell of the Valk Meta-Empire (or barbarian migration as some theorists describe these types of societies that expand across space without a centralised co-ordinating body or hub system, but have extremely rigid cultural practices that allowed population to move between cells with the assurance the destination will be familiar and comfortable), arrived early on in the Cathedrals history. With their brash, abrasive, and expansionist style they won few allies amongst the other groups, but have maintained their power base thanks to the donations from better situated Valk cells elsewhere in the Orion section, and their control of the floating stations within the atmosphere of the Cathedral itself. With a far few armed confrontations; they eventually won control of the fourth moon of the Cathedral, the Grey Castle. In recent centuries, as the populations grew the Black Iron Republic has managed to curb the Valk excesses with judicious use of the formers minerals monopoly, a fact that makes the Valk deeply resentful. The Valk have a strong religious commitment to their idea of divine universal essence and creator that splits into both physical objects like planets and avatars that are both made by humanity and preceding and inspiring them (it makes sense to the Valk), the mythology of the latter being liberally plundered from the Vedic and Norse Sagas. A rigid caste system and strictly enforced linguistic coherence keep cultural drift to a minimum and making things comfortingly similar decade to decade, with older family and high caste members making the decisions of people’s daily lives. The very lowest castes of pre-space social models have been replaced by automatic habitat functions. Physically the Valk have been filtered for Dravidian genes as regards face structure and skin colour, and tend to carry much more muscle and fat than the average baseline. Tweaking based on ideas of gender roles has given very high sexual dimorphism, and the family lines of many caste groups have been cosmetically altered to suit caste roles (giving heroic builds to warriors etc.), though these changes are not deep or neurological.
The third and least of the Cathedral powers in the Coran Illuminate, based on the second great moon of the Cathedral that they renamed the Seat of Light (from the White Castle). Initially a tiny sect of cyborg refugees, the Corans were just another wacky religious group in the bedlam of the Cathedral. They gained influence selling data services, and proselytised constantly about the benefits of their holy Map. This utterly bog standard augmented reality datasphere is only notable for the constant subliminal religious euphoria its objects induce in many baselines, but it certainly won converts amongst the rubes of the Cathedral habitats with the goal of shared transcendance. Of more import if less note was the development of the Illumination; a nonverbal language and ontology that allows, if not the impossible telepathy, Corans to communicate with each other Coran on the moon more rapidly and with greater fidelity than any spoken language allowed. Manipulating the protocols of the Illumination and the Map has allowed the Enlightened Ones to direct the Coran nation subtly and completely. The Coran Map eventually bound the whole moon into one network well before the Corans wielded any political power, but over the centuries the other cultures dissolved into the Coran model and opted for the Coran modifications. Spreading beyond the seat of light has been halted by greater antipathy from outside, and the fear that speed of light delays would fracture the shared Coran noosphere. Coran spaces and clothes are plain and Spartan, with ornamentation and colour being provided by the Map, and Coran zones are quiet places with most communication going on non-verbally. Physically the Corans are of a standard Cosmopolitan, for the most part, unlike many cyborg clades not going in for gross physical modification. Organ boosting implants to extend lifespan are all small and internal. The one exception is the head, the Coran modifications being mostly concerned with the brain after all. In addition to implant compatibility the Coran genotype modification allows inducible skull plasticity. To hold the comms gear and preventing waste heat from boiling the brain the Corans grow delightfully patterned horns in idiosyncratic shapes to house those bulky IO devices and processers, when heavy thoughts are needed they turn black to help heat radiation. As a Coran accumulates memories and influence in the Illumination, these horns are expanded to house additional devices. To set visitors at ease Corans occasionally grow their hair long and curled to sublimate the horns. A convert born without the Coran genotype change needs rather unpleasant looking metal and plastic extrusions several times the size instead. In the current era the Illuminate wields vast control over the data traffic of the cathedral, with most habitats outsourcing their processing and software jobs to Coran commercial groups.
Also present the circum-Cathedral space are representatives from some of the great banking houses of the Sector. Operating years of travel away from their head offices, these longevity augmented reps guard their deadmans-rigged warehouses of resources and influence to provide safe funds for travellers without the space to take it all with them, and offering banking services to all of the habitats. The two most notable banks with a presence here are the flamboyant Pavonis Bank and the sober LOFG. The garishly coloured and hair dyed representatives of the smaller Pavonis banks have a touch of avarice in their eyes and seem be more willing to take risky deals than then the Lesser Orion Financial group, whose black capped and suitbiz’d emissaries will demand extensive collateral from all but the most reputable of clients.
Standing aloof from the squabbles of the Cathedral are the Niovgroyokia, who have claimed the environs of Ice Giant named (for reasons most forget) Branda’s World. Arriving some centuries ago from a root culture on the far side of the Orion Sector, their purpose at Lipsid Beta remains inscrutable, despite their being facile and jolly communicators on non-important matters. They sell advanced bioproducts and ecosystem consultancy services to the rest of the Lipsid Beta system, and occasionally go traveling to other local systems. Most other inhabitants are uncomfortable around them however, despite a jovial and affable manner, as like many advancer clades they diverge strongly from the human baseline. Averaging 2.5 metres in height (nearly all advancer clades are considerably larger than baseline, as by far the simplest route to longevity and multienvironment capacity is via organ redundancy), their primary modification is of the ‘selkie’ type; this is where a pliant macrosymbiont is grafted to the shoulders or back of a more hominan-normal frame. In human normal environments the selkie hangs loose as a cloak or other structure, whilst in the secondary environment it wraps around the main body as an exoskeleton or living enviro-suit. The Niovgroyokia selkie is optimised for extremely cold and low pressure environments, and is thick with fat and oxygen reserves and covered in layers of red and white insulating fibers. Enwrapped in its selkie the Niovgroyokian resembles and masses much like a polar bear of Old Terra, only with huge traction claws, no mouth or nose, and eyes of dark stone (inspired by the pressure proof calcite eyes of trilobites). The internal hominan frame also has curly red and white patterned hair, inhumanly perfect facial features based on old Caucasian models and milky white complexions are marred by the hundreds of red welts of the selkie attachment ports; but apart from that, the size, and longer than average arms, appears quite normal. It is unknown what, if any, neurological alterations have occurred beyond the interfaces for the selkie and the external eyes. Their governing structure seems to be a form of direct democracy, with individuals tasked with executive power on a case by case basis, and resources are held in common. Children are raised in crèches by extended family groupings until they are able to handle the more harsh exterior environments. When not wrapped they favour little and loose clothing.
Other Spinward Cultures
Beyond the locus of the Cathedral orbit several other cultures that have been heavily influenced by it and the Dathics.
Lipsid Alpha
The inhabitants of the cold world of Yan have been there for millennia, and like the Mernt are probably drawn from pre-tumult explorers of the Orion region who collapsed into pre-industrial primitiveness. Of Geashial extraction and short, rounded stature (selection for cold survival), they continued in obscurity for hundreds of years. The Dathics have always been their patrons, when first the Institute for Anthropology interested in Yan spiritualism stepped in to warn off potential developers, and secondly when the alien relics were found under the ice caps and the full attention of the Dathic scientific community was turned on Yan. Considerable numbers of root-Dathics and individuals from the Cathedral have settled and assimilated into the main Yan society. The Yan have a utilitarian market and representative government, with most being far more interested in spiritual or scientific persuits. The great university departments and priests of the various spiritual traditions compete for attention. Much like the ancient Tibetan Buddhists, every aspect of a Yanii life has some spiritual dimension, praying to the land, the two suns and those who went before (both human and non-human) and gives them an extraordinary sense of place.
The root-Dathic colony on Atooa oversaw the management and protection of the system for Datha and is pretty much a carbon copy of the base culture, if slightly tempered and relaxed by the Yanii influence. Though friendly to the Yanii, they are also rather condescending to their long time clients despite the loss of their homeworlds support.
The Quasi are a people lost in time and space, with malfunctions putting their colony fleet hundreds of years away from its destination in both time and space. Initially arriving at Alnitah thanks to the giant stars drag on the transcends, they wandered the segment for some years, recoiling at the plagued worlds and the foreign bustle of the Cathedral. With their ramshackle fleet on the verge of falling apart they opted for a quieter neighbourhood, and moved into the moons of the lonely ice giant of Lipsid alpha, named the Rimstalker for its vast distance from the systems barycentre. Naming their city the savour, they settled in and started a hard, but quiet and peaceful, life. Their natural skill and building and piloting ships soon saw them setting up low energy and slow routes to all the spinward systems, and they were able to compete on costs for cargo if not passengers. Quasi waystations were set up in other systems, and the Quasi have inventoried a large number of the worlds present in these systems in their pleasant methodical way. Physically the Quasi are paler than average cosmopolitan examples, and are extremely slender and slight as an adaption to low gravity and sparse resources, hematopoietic functions have been moved to the liver and the bones of the Quasi are hollow to reduce weight and give additional oxygen exchange surfaces in thin atmospheres (combat pilots will typically fill their bone spaces with some sort of oxygenated fluid to resist g-forces). Politically the Quasi are still a vague hierarchy left over from the colony ship structure, with a Supreme Captain appointed by a council of elders, but are still pretty meritocratic for all that. Families are typically nuclear and stable. Economically they tend to let each individual act as independent corporations, with the crews of ships and inhabitants of cities also being part shareholders in their infrastructure.
Lipsid Gamma
Lipsid Gamma has always been characterised by resource extraction operations on a more extreme and gigantic scale than the other systems of spinward. Rights to the high pressure hothouse biosphere was purchased some seven centuries ago by a long forgotten corporation during the initial Dathic survey of the subsegment, and passed from hand to hand until it was gained by the Adamas corporation, a grouping out of Dathas close if disliked hypercorporate ally Hexcali. The Adamas scientists had located several highly valuable planet species in the great ocean, which could be used to make Serpens Tea (a euphoric and concentration enabler with little draw backs and high demand) and c456 (an extraordinary potent nonaddictive narcotic). However all the stock plant species were rather fussy and delicate; growing them in a more clement environment or synthesising the compounds would be very expensive. Running the numbers the Adamas accountants determined a class of permanently bonded cyborgs would be the most cost-effective harvesting method. They set to work buying up the contents of the more illiberal Cathedral prisons. Whilst technically the bondsmen were only to serve for two decades, the modifications made them dependent on Adamas technical support and utterly unable to leave. Eventually public outcry stopped the practice of prisoner purchase, but the wealth and influence of the Adamas directors now extended well beyond the segment with billons of customers in Datha alone and prevented any reprisal. In response the Adamas toned down the harshness of their cyborg treatment enough to allow a self-replacing population to develop, adding several germline modifications to what were now generally recognised as their slaves. Generous trade and gifts to the local powers and distance great powers kept the little bubble of Adama’s Vineyard (as the planet was rebranded). The wealthy directors, beneficiaries of the Adamas cyborg longevity technologies, rarely visited the planet, and a caste of unmodified middle managers and their support population grew up. These managers were mostly poor immigrants from the Cathedral, and despised the cyborgs for their criminal past and differences, and took pleasure in controlling their underlings through the hardwired linkages.
When the war stirred up pirate fleets from every under rock, the high ranking Adamas pulled out altogether, leaving managers and slaves alike to their own devices. A pirate attack was not short in coming, as a noted warlord skipped the more heavily defended worlds and instituted a lighting raid of the Vineyard within a year of the pull out. A massive EMP bombardment followed by a swift ground invasion saw everything of value on the islands and warehouses hoovered up within a week, before the raiders disappeared into the void. With the damage to the electronic infrastructure and the loss of life, it was months before the managers noticed that many cyborgs (now collectively nicknamed the Zera after the most common model) weren’t reporting in any more. Though still confused without the constant stream of control commands, the Zeran revolution had begun. Building rogue transmitters the escaped Zeras managed to block out the control inputs to the rest of the slave population, and urged a non-violent strategy of resistance. Faced with the millions of Zera marching in the street, the managers panicked and fled from the refineries and processing centres to their northern holiday towns and fortified themselves there, leaving the Zera to rip out all the remaining control infrastructure and declare themselves a new polity.
Physically inhabitants of the Vineyard are pretty much indistinguishable from inhabitants of the Black Iron republic or lesser Cathedral habitats, and indeed many of the managers have attempted to slip their way back to the cathedral. The Zera however are marked by their cybernetic alternations for their original purpose. Of the cyborg races of the Segment, the Zera have both the most obvious and the crudest augmentations; massive metallic hands and feet contain retractable flippers and vicious barbed hooks, and the trunk and limbs are bulky and chunky with artificial muscle fibres and subdermal pressure plating and armour, the head is encrusted with high power lamps and deployable shields for the eyes and mouth and the nostrils are done away with altogether. Chrome orbs with grilled vents are emplaced within the thighs, back, and neck, extracting oxygen from water and air and filtering nitrogen from the blood, effectively replacing the Zerans lungs. Tragically, thanks to germline modification by the Adamas, a Zera must be cyborgised with these gas exchange orbs to survive to adulthood, as their natural lungs atrophy away (air filled spaces within the chest cavity being a liability after a certain depth), though the rest of the typical Zera package can be skipped (though many choose it for cultural reasons still). Zerans also have high power internal radios giving them non-vocalised voice communication and networking at great distance (though lacking the sophistication and bandwidth of the Illumination), though their inbuilt computational capabilities are minimal. Zeran social models are still in their formative stages with only half formed optimistic ideas of how things should be run. Natural coupling and nuclear families has been adopted to replace the regimented breeding regime of the corporate years, though the ‘work crew’, where a few dozen Zerans were raised and deployed together, remains the basic social unit. Free of restrictions at last, the Zerans choose luridly coloured and patterned shirts and swimming trunks for apparel when out of the water.
On the next planet out, the cold and metal rich world of Cobalt, a very different story but with odd similarities played out. Wishing to break the Black Iron mineral hegemony without travelling to far, the Valk Irinate set up a mining colony some two centuries ago. To get things up and running as fast as possible they allowed non-Valk to be employed and worked the colonists harshly. Perhaps the next door example of how easily one can become slaves inspired them, or perhaps it was new ideas from the foreign workforce, but the miners eventually rose up and rebelled. Efforts of the Valk to crush them provoked the Cobalt War in Lipsid Gamma, with the Black Iron Republic and the Irinate fighting a proxy war (the Adamas aiding the Valk whilst twirling their moustaches of villainy). Eventually the colonists won and declare themselves the nation of Firzonat, and essentially set up a a social model that combined the BIR and the Irinate; a republic with a softer caste system, and a blending of peoples. Over time they have drifted away from the BIR due to economic competition, and now openly dislike all three of the Cathedral powers.
Lipsid Iota
Around the red dwarf lipsid Iota spins the citadel of possible the most anti-social of the spinward groups, the Heph. Like the Quasi they arrived at the segment displaced is time and distance, and settled down to build a new life without the support of anyone else. Turning a small hot minor planet into a single glorious city of metal may take some time, but they have a strong goal in mind. Though possessing considerable mineral wealth and reserves, they release it onto the market only intermittently, whenever their own stocks of other materials run low. The nation is ruled by an elected autocrat who serves for life and daily life is quite regimented though a high quality of life is provided. The Heph are much darker than the cosmopolitan standard and are noted for being nearly hairless and having red tinted sclera and prominent brows. Migrants appear in small numbers at the Cathedral and Yan. They maintain cordial contact with the Quasi out of a sense of shared fate and gratitude (the Quasi gifting them the location of their metal rich world on their first arrival).
Update -1 aka Ethnic and Sociological Groupings of the Alnitah Segmentum aka how I learnt to stop worrying and love the exposition aka I will crush your ideas in the name of narrative coherence/whim
Glossary:
Voidrunner: A group whose journey to the area involved significant amounts of sublight travel
Cosmopolitan: As always, significant amounts of the population are derived from post-Terra cosmopolitan stock, generating by the near full mixing on early habitats and worlds. Melding alleles roughly proportionate to an averaging of the third millennium’s human groups, to a pre-spaceflight observer attempting to fit them into known categories they would most resemble Pardo Brazilians, with olive skin, dark eyes and dark curly or straight hair and considerable intergenerational variance. The phenotype in normal gravity conditions is somewhat taller on average than pre-spaceflight averages, but variance is higher.
Geashial: Similar to the Cosmopolitan type, the Geashial are drawn from a cross selection of the east and south east Asian nations of Terra, and similarly difficult to identify as any single type. In actuality the Cosmopolitan-Geashial difference is very much a continuum, but convention draws the clade boundary closer to the Geashial end.
Filtered: Due to isolation (cultural, physical, or temporal), numerous groups came through to the current era with only a subset of Earth genotypes forming their source stock, resulting in a new ethnogenesis. Pure strains of types known to pre-spaceflight observers are vanishingly rare, which most being from several types and contain shading towards the Cosmopolitan or Geashial categories.
Novel: Post-Terrestrial drift, cultural selection, and mutations have led to the emergence of new ethnic in addition to cultural groups, and technological modifications have only advanced such a trend. Most of the more extreme modifications and changes tend to involve very small populations, and therefore have a statistically high chance of loss or ossification by chance.
Content:
Root-Dathics and near-Dathics
Although at its apogee Datha featured extractions from ten thousands cultures and groups under its meta-cultural umbrella, the old Dathics of the first settlements remained a plurality. This group has populated hundreds of daughter worlds in its time, and makes up a significant fraction of the whole Orion sector, though the daughter worlds in time phase into their own models. The Old Dathics are close to the commonly understood Cosmopolitan-Geashial boundary, appearing a blending of ancient Caucasians and east Asian genotypes with tan skin, round face, strong noses, prominent epicanthus, light brown to dark hair and eyes. Extremely ancestral engineering and selection has created further characteristics of higher than average height (near two metres average for males) and extremely low trunk, extremity, and gynoidal fats, time in civilisation losing the ability to even accumulate significant fats. It is relatively easy to date the splitting of daughter colonies from the root culture by longevity, facial attractiveness and symmetry, as Datha itself saw a continual diffusion of gengineering developments from its elites and its tourism industries. Sexual dimorphism has also been tweaked rather higher. Thus the average Standardite, diverging from the root-Dathics roughly four centuries ago, will die a decade and a half earlier, and whilst still extremely handsome by baseline cosmopolitan standards, lack the beauty of the root-Dathics.
Culturally the Dathics have passed through several models, and the daughter worlds have seen a much higher variance. Constants seem an extraordinary devotion to charismatic leaders, the sheer numbers, interconnectivity, and high standard of living of the people all work to depress the agency of the man in the street. Martial relationships are rather more relaxed, with easy formation and breaking, with children being the property of the mother, men are not expected to provide support though they are expected to provide inheritance for all their biological children. The power of the state and law is generally less trusted than individual leaders and political terms tend to be long and feature considerable patronage. Most Dathics try to work in both creative and practical pursuits over the course of their work cycle. Datha was both famous and notorious for the parties and festivals its people threw.
The Apeilics have been described elsewhere.
Spinward Subsegment:
The Banded Cathedral
The great giant planet of Lipsid Beta has always proved attractive for small unit settlers. One of the first systems of arrival for those taking the low energy route into the segment, jumping from small star to small star, such a tight clump of valuable resources and energy proved very attractive. In the bad old days where the plague and the unsafe nature of jumps in the dust of the nebula (prior to the development of tippler algorithms and ansibyl station keeping only two in three jumps in the Forest didn’t result in destruction, and the odds grew worse further in) created fear, the Lipsid Beta was as far as most people got.
Initially named for the way the magnetosphere and white dusts combined to give a vaulted look to space as seen from the surface of the moons, the name proved prophetic as followers of fringe philosophies from poor regions in the sector migrated to what was seen as an open land, each setting up in their own habitats. Most were some non-Dathic shade of cosmopolitan in stock with nigh every possible set of cultural mores present. Over time a common trade culture came to cradle the bubbles of religious fervour, and power accreted to the three polities that each grew to possess one of the three liveable major moons.
The greatest of these three is the Black Iron Republic. The BIR saw its genesis amongst a sect of pacifist communitarian mining communities named the Iron Republic who followed Fivism (a quasi-humanist philosophy that claims to revere equally from the five sages of Buddha, Christ, Mohammad, Ali Nuri, and Collins). Their trust ethic and mineral wealth quickly brought them economic power as a group, which over the centuries saw them dominating the trade institutions of circum-Cathedral space. When two thirds of the people on the Black Castle (the Cathedrals third moon) followed the council precepts, they decided to incorporate as the Black Iron Republic to integrate government across the moon. Though many criticise their slowness to act and commitments to justice and mercy, these traits has won them the trust of all the minor habitats in ways the other two Cathedral powers lack, and promoted considerable in-migration to the Black Castle from the rest of Cathedral space and beyond. Of basic Cosmopolitan stock (more exotic looking people often face quiet ostracism), they dress in sober and simple blacks and blues, though their space suits and ships are scrolled with stark white lettering. The more pious shave their heads (male and female), though this is not demanded of them. They speak softly and carefully, only wishing to give statement they have full faith in. Contracts and trust are of paramount importance to them.
The Valk Irinate, a cell of the Valk Meta-Empire (or barbarian migration as some theorists describe these types of societies that expand across space without a centralised co-ordinating body or hub system, but have extremely rigid cultural practices that allowed population to move between cells with the assurance the destination will be familiar and comfortable), arrived early on in the Cathedrals history. With their brash, abrasive, and expansionist style they won few allies amongst the other groups, but have maintained their power base thanks to the donations from better situated Valk cells elsewhere in the Orion section, and their control of the floating stations within the atmosphere of the Cathedral itself. With a far few armed confrontations; they eventually won control of the fourth moon of the Cathedral, the Grey Castle. In recent centuries, as the populations grew the Black Iron Republic has managed to curb the Valk excesses with judicious use of the formers minerals monopoly, a fact that makes the Valk deeply resentful. The Valk have a strong religious commitment to their idea of divine universal essence and creator that splits into both physical objects like planets and avatars that are both made by humanity and preceding and inspiring them (it makes sense to the Valk), the mythology of the latter being liberally plundered from the Vedic and Norse Sagas. A rigid caste system and strictly enforced linguistic coherence keep cultural drift to a minimum and making things comfortingly similar decade to decade, with older family and high caste members making the decisions of people’s daily lives. The very lowest castes of pre-space social models have been replaced by automatic habitat functions. Physically the Valk have been filtered for Dravidian genes as regards face structure and skin colour, and tend to carry much more muscle and fat than the average baseline. Tweaking based on ideas of gender roles has given very high sexual dimorphism, and the family lines of many caste groups have been cosmetically altered to suit caste roles (giving heroic builds to warriors etc.), though these changes are not deep or neurological.
The third and least of the Cathedral powers in the Coran Illuminate, based on the second great moon of the Cathedral that they renamed the Seat of Light (from the White Castle). Initially a tiny sect of cyborg refugees, the Corans were just another wacky religious group in the bedlam of the Cathedral. They gained influence selling data services, and proselytised constantly about the benefits of their holy Map. This utterly bog standard augmented reality datasphere is only notable for the constant subliminal religious euphoria its objects induce in many baselines, but it certainly won converts amongst the rubes of the Cathedral habitats with the goal of shared transcendance. Of more import if less note was the development of the Illumination; a nonverbal language and ontology that allows, if not the impossible telepathy, Corans to communicate with each other Coran on the moon more rapidly and with greater fidelity than any spoken language allowed. Manipulating the protocols of the Illumination and the Map has allowed the Enlightened Ones to direct the Coran nation subtly and completely. The Coran Map eventually bound the whole moon into one network well before the Corans wielded any political power, but over the centuries the other cultures dissolved into the Coran model and opted for the Coran modifications. Spreading beyond the seat of light has been halted by greater antipathy from outside, and the fear that speed of light delays would fracture the shared Coran noosphere. Coran spaces and clothes are plain and Spartan, with ornamentation and colour being provided by the Map, and Coran zones are quiet places with most communication going on non-verbally. Physically the Corans are of a standard Cosmopolitan, for the most part, unlike many cyborg clades not going in for gross physical modification. Organ boosting implants to extend lifespan are all small and internal. The one exception is the head, the Coran modifications being mostly concerned with the brain after all. In addition to implant compatibility the Coran genotype modification allows inducible skull plasticity. To hold the comms gear and preventing waste heat from boiling the brain the Corans grow delightfully patterned horns in idiosyncratic shapes to house those bulky IO devices and processers, when heavy thoughts are needed they turn black to help heat radiation. As a Coran accumulates memories and influence in the Illumination, these horns are expanded to house additional devices. To set visitors at ease Corans occasionally grow their hair long and curled to sublimate the horns. A convert born without the Coran genotype change needs rather unpleasant looking metal and plastic extrusions several times the size instead. In the current era the Illuminate wields vast control over the data traffic of the cathedral, with most habitats outsourcing their processing and software jobs to Coran commercial groups.
Also present the circum-Cathedral space are representatives from some of the great banking houses of the Sector. Operating years of travel away from their head offices, these longevity augmented reps guard their deadmans-rigged warehouses of resources and influence to provide safe funds for travellers without the space to take it all with them, and offering banking services to all of the habitats. The two most notable banks with a presence here are the flamboyant Pavonis Bank and the sober LOFG. The garishly coloured and hair dyed representatives of the smaller Pavonis banks have a touch of avarice in their eyes and seem be more willing to take risky deals than then the Lesser Orion Financial group, whose black capped and suitbiz’d emissaries will demand extensive collateral from all but the most reputable of clients.
Standing aloof from the squabbles of the Cathedral are the Niovgroyokia, who have claimed the environs of Ice Giant named (for reasons most forget) Branda’s World. Arriving some centuries ago from a root culture on the far side of the Orion Sector, their purpose at Lipsid Beta remains inscrutable, despite their being facile and jolly communicators on non-important matters. They sell advanced bioproducts and ecosystem consultancy services to the rest of the Lipsid Beta system, and occasionally go traveling to other local systems. Most other inhabitants are uncomfortable around them however, despite a jovial and affable manner, as like many advancer clades they diverge strongly from the human baseline. Averaging 2.5 metres in height (nearly all advancer clades are considerably larger than baseline, as by far the simplest route to longevity and multienvironment capacity is via organ redundancy), their primary modification is of the ‘selkie’ type; this is where a pliant macrosymbiont is grafted to the shoulders or back of a more hominan-normal frame. In human normal environments the selkie hangs loose as a cloak or other structure, whilst in the secondary environment it wraps around the main body as an exoskeleton or living enviro-suit. The Niovgroyokia selkie is optimised for extremely cold and low pressure environments, and is thick with fat and oxygen reserves and covered in layers of red and white insulating fibers. Enwrapped in its selkie the Niovgroyokian resembles and masses much like a polar bear of Old Terra, only with huge traction claws, no mouth or nose, and eyes of dark stone (inspired by the pressure proof calcite eyes of trilobites). The internal hominan frame also has curly red and white patterned hair, inhumanly perfect facial features based on old Caucasian models and milky white complexions are marred by the hundreds of red welts of the selkie attachment ports; but apart from that, the size, and longer than average arms, appears quite normal. It is unknown what, if any, neurological alterations have occurred beyond the interfaces for the selkie and the external eyes. Their governing structure seems to be a form of direct democracy, with individuals tasked with executive power on a case by case basis, and resources are held in common. Children are raised in crèches by extended family groupings until they are able to handle the more harsh exterior environments. When not wrapped they favour little and loose clothing.
Other Spinward Cultures
Beyond the locus of the Cathedral orbit several other cultures that have been heavily influenced by it and the Dathics.
Lipsid Alpha
The inhabitants of the cold world of Yan have been there for millennia, and like the Mernt are probably drawn from pre-tumult explorers of the Orion region who collapsed into pre-industrial primitiveness. Of Geashial extraction and short, rounded stature (selection for cold survival), they continued in obscurity for hundreds of years. The Dathics have always been their patrons, when first the Institute for Anthropology interested in Yan spiritualism stepped in to warn off potential developers, and secondly when the alien relics were found under the ice caps and the full attention of the Dathic scientific community was turned on Yan. Considerable numbers of root-Dathics and individuals from the Cathedral have settled and assimilated into the main Yan society. The Yan have a utilitarian market and representative government, with most being far more interested in spiritual or scientific persuits. The great university departments and priests of the various spiritual traditions compete for attention. Much like the ancient Tibetan Buddhists, every aspect of a Yanii life has some spiritual dimension, praying to the land, the two suns and those who went before (both human and non-human) and gives them an extraordinary sense of place.
The root-Dathic colony on Atooa oversaw the management and protection of the system for Datha and is pretty much a carbon copy of the base culture, if slightly tempered and relaxed by the Yanii influence. Though friendly to the Yanii, they are also rather condescending to their long time clients despite the loss of their homeworlds support.
The Quasi are a people lost in time and space, with malfunctions putting their colony fleet hundreds of years away from its destination in both time and space. Initially arriving at Alnitah thanks to the giant stars drag on the transcends, they wandered the segment for some years, recoiling at the plagued worlds and the foreign bustle of the Cathedral. With their ramshackle fleet on the verge of falling apart they opted for a quieter neighbourhood, and moved into the moons of the lonely ice giant of Lipsid alpha, named the Rimstalker for its vast distance from the systems barycentre. Naming their city the savour, they settled in and started a hard, but quiet and peaceful, life. Their natural skill and building and piloting ships soon saw them setting up low energy and slow routes to all the spinward systems, and they were able to compete on costs for cargo if not passengers. Quasi waystations were set up in other systems, and the Quasi have inventoried a large number of the worlds present in these systems in their pleasant methodical way. Physically the Quasi are paler than average cosmopolitan examples, and are extremely slender and slight as an adaption to low gravity and sparse resources, hematopoietic functions have been moved to the liver and the bones of the Quasi are hollow to reduce weight and give additional oxygen exchange surfaces in thin atmospheres (combat pilots will typically fill their bone spaces with some sort of oxygenated fluid to resist g-forces). Politically the Quasi are still a vague hierarchy left over from the colony ship structure, with a Supreme Captain appointed by a council of elders, but are still pretty meritocratic for all that. Families are typically nuclear and stable. Economically they tend to let each individual act as independent corporations, with the crews of ships and inhabitants of cities also being part shareholders in their infrastructure.
Lipsid Gamma
Lipsid Gamma has always been characterised by resource extraction operations on a more extreme and gigantic scale than the other systems of spinward. Rights to the high pressure hothouse biosphere was purchased some seven centuries ago by a long forgotten corporation during the initial Dathic survey of the subsegment, and passed from hand to hand until it was gained by the Adamas corporation, a grouping out of Dathas close if disliked hypercorporate ally Hexcali. The Adamas scientists had located several highly valuable planet species in the great ocean, which could be used to make Serpens Tea (a euphoric and concentration enabler with little draw backs and high demand) and c456 (an extraordinary potent nonaddictive narcotic). However all the stock plant species were rather fussy and delicate; growing them in a more clement environment or synthesising the compounds would be very expensive. Running the numbers the Adamas accountants determined a class of permanently bonded cyborgs would be the most cost-effective harvesting method. They set to work buying up the contents of the more illiberal Cathedral prisons. Whilst technically the bondsmen were only to serve for two decades, the modifications made them dependent on Adamas technical support and utterly unable to leave. Eventually public outcry stopped the practice of prisoner purchase, but the wealth and influence of the Adamas directors now extended well beyond the segment with billons of customers in Datha alone and prevented any reprisal. In response the Adamas toned down the harshness of their cyborg treatment enough to allow a self-replacing population to develop, adding several germline modifications to what were now generally recognised as their slaves. Generous trade and gifts to the local powers and distance great powers kept the little bubble of Adama’s Vineyard (as the planet was rebranded). The wealthy directors, beneficiaries of the Adamas cyborg longevity technologies, rarely visited the planet, and a caste of unmodified middle managers and their support population grew up. These managers were mostly poor immigrants from the Cathedral, and despised the cyborgs for their criminal past and differences, and took pleasure in controlling their underlings through the hardwired linkages.
When the war stirred up pirate fleets from every under rock, the high ranking Adamas pulled out altogether, leaving managers and slaves alike to their own devices. A pirate attack was not short in coming, as a noted warlord skipped the more heavily defended worlds and instituted a lighting raid of the Vineyard within a year of the pull out. A massive EMP bombardment followed by a swift ground invasion saw everything of value on the islands and warehouses hoovered up within a week, before the raiders disappeared into the void. With the damage to the electronic infrastructure and the loss of life, it was months before the managers noticed that many cyborgs (now collectively nicknamed the Zera after the most common model) weren’t reporting in any more. Though still confused without the constant stream of control commands, the Zeran revolution had begun. Building rogue transmitters the escaped Zeras managed to block out the control inputs to the rest of the slave population, and urged a non-violent strategy of resistance. Faced with the millions of Zera marching in the street, the managers panicked and fled from the refineries and processing centres to their northern holiday towns and fortified themselves there, leaving the Zera to rip out all the remaining control infrastructure and declare themselves a new polity.
Physically inhabitants of the Vineyard are pretty much indistinguishable from inhabitants of the Black Iron republic or lesser Cathedral habitats, and indeed many of the managers have attempted to slip their way back to the cathedral. The Zera however are marked by their cybernetic alternations for their original purpose. Of the cyborg races of the Segment, the Zera have both the most obvious and the crudest augmentations; massive metallic hands and feet contain retractable flippers and vicious barbed hooks, and the trunk and limbs are bulky and chunky with artificial muscle fibres and subdermal pressure plating and armour, the head is encrusted with high power lamps and deployable shields for the eyes and mouth and the nostrils are done away with altogether. Chrome orbs with grilled vents are emplaced within the thighs, back, and neck, extracting oxygen from water and air and filtering nitrogen from the blood, effectively replacing the Zerans lungs. Tragically, thanks to germline modification by the Adamas, a Zera must be cyborgised with these gas exchange orbs to survive to adulthood, as their natural lungs atrophy away (air filled spaces within the chest cavity being a liability after a certain depth), though the rest of the typical Zera package can be skipped (though many choose it for cultural reasons still). Zerans also have high power internal radios giving them non-vocalised voice communication and networking at great distance (though lacking the sophistication and bandwidth of the Illumination), though their inbuilt computational capabilities are minimal. Zeran social models are still in their formative stages with only half formed optimistic ideas of how things should be run. Natural coupling and nuclear families has been adopted to replace the regimented breeding regime of the corporate years, though the ‘work crew’, where a few dozen Zerans were raised and deployed together, remains the basic social unit. Free of restrictions at last, the Zerans choose luridly coloured and patterned shirts and swimming trunks for apparel when out of the water.
On the next planet out, the cold and metal rich world of Cobalt, a very different story but with odd similarities played out. Wishing to break the Black Iron mineral hegemony without travelling to far, the Valk Irinate set up a mining colony some two centuries ago. To get things up and running as fast as possible they allowed non-Valk to be employed and worked the colonists harshly. Perhaps the next door example of how easily one can become slaves inspired them, or perhaps it was new ideas from the foreign workforce, but the miners eventually rose up and rebelled. Efforts of the Valk to crush them provoked the Cobalt War in Lipsid Gamma, with the Black Iron Republic and the Irinate fighting a proxy war (the Adamas aiding the Valk whilst twirling their moustaches of villainy). Eventually the colonists won and declare themselves the nation of Firzonat, and essentially set up a a social model that combined the BIR and the Irinate; a republic with a softer caste system, and a blending of peoples. Over time they have drifted away from the BIR due to economic competition, and now openly dislike all three of the Cathedral powers.
Lipsid Iota
Around the red dwarf lipsid Iota spins the citadel of possible the most anti-social of the spinward groups, the Heph. Like the Quasi they arrived at the segment displaced is time and distance, and settled down to build a new life without the support of anyone else. Turning a small hot minor planet into a single glorious city of metal may take some time, but they have a strong goal in mind. Though possessing considerable mineral wealth and reserves, they release it onto the market only intermittently, whenever their own stocks of other materials run low. The nation is ruled by an elected autocrat who serves for life and daily life is quite regimented though a high quality of life is provided. The Heph are much darker than the cosmopolitan standard and are noted for being nearly hairless and having red tinted sclera and prominent brows. Migrants appear in small numbers at the Cathedral and Yan. They maintain cordial contact with the Quasi out of a sense of shared fate and gratitude (the Quasi gifting them the location of their metal rich world on their first arrival).
Disenfrancised
Beep Beep
Alnitah Subsegment:
Sigma Relay
Originally Sigma Relay was a rather ignored system due to a low expected metals and volatiles content (thanks to its broiling close pass to Alnitah only a few million years ago, with the triple giant still lighting up the nights a thousand times as bright as old Earths moon) and worries about flares from Alnitah proving dangerous. However the past century numerous Dathic commercial entities engaged in speculative developments with the eye for using the worlds as a springboard for commercial penetration of the segment. The system is therefore one of the most root-Dathic in the segment with a strong common culture. However the rivalries between the commercial entities that authored them has often pitted the various communities against each other. During this period a terraforming association introduced water and a thin biosphere to the desert planet of Hearthfire, with efforts concentrated at each of the poles. One late-comer to this race, as the War was just beginning, was the Hank-Sobor consortium, who selling community insurance sought to set up a world far from the conflict zone. Buying out many of the other companies with interests in the system, Hank-Sobor appropriated their resources like the pumping station in the gas giant and the entirety of Hearthfire. However a court injunction back at Datha ruled in favour of the workers of the old TA (now on their third generation) who protested this move and Hank-Sobor only received the northern polar glades. The court also ruled against the rebranding of the planets long established name to Hank for being bloody stupid, though Hank-Sobor managed to sneak an updated name to the ice giant into the charts.
The destruction of Datha lead to a tremendous economic fallout in Sigma Relay and critical supply services were knocked out from under them and the standard of living plummeted. The once carefree root-Dathics turned rather frayed and violent in the aftermath. Hank-Sobor with its exodus only a fraction done, its economic base nearly nonexistant, and a vast shipping fleet, turned to operating merchant runs within the system and beyond, trying to position themselves as middlemen. They spread across the northern glades in sprawling settlements much to the ire of the terraformers. Meanwhile the lunar settlements were bound into one federation by a fleeing military crew from a battlemoon escape yacht.
The most recent arrival, in only the last year, has been the Dardareo in their worldship. In the final climactic battle many of the ancient worldships that comprised some of Dathas hundred moons attempted to flee, the detonation of the drives of some of them adding considerably to that final carnage. The Dardareo was one that managed to limp to a safe transcend distance and flee into the void. Taking a long time-dilating jump to a distant giant star, their attempt to return to the Orion Sector by way of Alnitah was interdicted by the Apeilic Consul, who ordered them to lay up in a nearby system and await probation. This harsh order probably saved them, as their drive systems were dangerously unstable. Arriving at Sigma Relay the drive core went subcritical and it, plus a large portion of the worldship, had to be dumped onto the nearest world, where it made a quite pretty and deadly radioactive crater. Naturally the Hankish and other Dathic residents of said moon of Hearthfire, were rather irate at this action, and the Dardareo have a lot of fence mending to do and a desperate need for supplies, but hey, they and their world has survived after all. Though theyve seen considerable cross-pollination with the main Datha culture, the Dardareo remain their own people; ruled by semi-hereditary Captains, still practical and studious, and still loving to fly their little aircraft within the worldships habitat spaces. A very old and heavily filtered culture the Dardareo trace their descent from middle eastern sources by way of old Terras south America and the Cassiopeia worlds. Dardareo male and female are always recognisable by their headscarves, originally a mechanism to keep hair out of microgravity air conditioning units having grown into a cultural icon, and decorated with family patterns that are thousands of years old. Generally a Dardareo will own a matching space suit with the pattern.
The Forest Subsegment:
For a long time the forest has been shrouded in myth and rumours, with risky and difficult jumps between stars prior to the beacon, dark plagues and terrifying raiding groups, and hiders willing to perform any atrocity to maintain their silence.
No discussion of the Forest could be made without detailing the Mernt, who have marked the red stars of the forest even in their dissolution. Much like the Yanii the inhabitants of the planet Mern were almost assuredly ancient pre-tumult explorers, predating the founding of Datha by millennia, who collapsed into barbarianism. Unlike the Yanii, perhaps protected by their greater isolation and more hospitable homeworld, the Mernt bootstrapped themselves back into a star travelling civilisation. Transcend physics were reinvented some seven hundred years ago, by which point the Buxe system was home to billions on the much improved Mern and the newly terraformed Tren (the next planet out). The fecund population, combined with a religion and ideology based around a vivifying mission drove them onwards to the other stars of the forest, their huge slow colony ships made from converted asteroids. The difficulties of travel prevented a centrally administrated empire, but the Mernt soon had terraforming projects on over a dozen forest worlds and a light trade with the Cathedral and beyond. Advancement in the physical and technological sciences were slow, as the Mernt preferred to focus their intellects on the puzzles of terraforming and vivifying each world presented. It was about four centuries ago, with the apogee of Mernt population in the 15 billion range, that the Mernt plague struck. The Mernt used a set tool box of fauna in their ecologies, and all of them seemed to act as long term carriers and reservoirs for the disease, enabling it to boil up on nearly every world simultaneously, burning through the population the disease caused a few days of feverish and rabid activity followed by death for 99.9% of the population. The virulence and penetration of the Plague cause many to theorise it was a weapon gone wrong or a rogue terraforming bacteria. The entire fabric of Mernt civilisation unravelled in a few scant years, with only a few million survivors hiding in hermetically sealed dome cities or scavenging the ruins in feral gangs. No sample of the plague has ever been successfully captured, and the fear of its return kept most visitors out of the Forest for the next three centuries. The survivors in the open environments died off or reverted to barbarianism whilst the sealed cities went insane or turned their back on the outside world. Without constant management, the crown jewels of the Mernt empire, the terraformed worlds themselves, began to crumble. The atmosphere of Tren frozen and flee to the earth, the deserts spread on Mern and Oia, and everywhere the plants died and the green faded from the Forest.
Their isolation and collapse has led the Mernt to diverge from mainstream cultures linguistically, culturally, and physically. Linguistically the Mernt dialect has seem an explosion of new terms and a tendency to destress every syllable of Root they speak, as well as developing a profusion of noun modifying suffixes. The -t suffix meaning of or from (most Mernt will give their middle name as [wherever they grew up]-t), a normal speaker of Root should be careful not to miss the end of word noises that can completely invert a sentences meaning. Culturally an intense worship of individual life-baring worlds as mother goddess aspects leads to great devotion and the occasional blood sacrifice (returning things to the cycle), with a spill over into extreme matrilinealism when a mans entire worth and prestige are bound up in their mothers family (though like nearly all less wealthy human societies, the greater political sphere is driven by male tribal identities). That matrilineal line is always tied to a particular biome unit that the family see themselves as protecting and nurturing, will to engage in decades long blood feuds with transgressors against their land and the organisms within it. Physically they are small and petite with pale skin, lower than average sexual dimorphism, a Caucasian cast to their features and wavy blonde hair (typically worn long and thick in both sexes). Both sexes also have two or more alleles for red photosensor pigments (in baselines males have one and females one or two), enabling them to distinguish more shades of red in the often dim light of the forest stars. Iris colours are yellow, orange, or violet, thought this is a cosmetic change that became fixed in the small founder population rather than an adaptive modification.
Sigma Relay
Originally Sigma Relay was a rather ignored system due to a low expected metals and volatiles content (thanks to its broiling close pass to Alnitah only a few million years ago, with the triple giant still lighting up the nights a thousand times as bright as old Earths moon) and worries about flares from Alnitah proving dangerous. However the past century numerous Dathic commercial entities engaged in speculative developments with the eye for using the worlds as a springboard for commercial penetration of the segment. The system is therefore one of the most root-Dathic in the segment with a strong common culture. However the rivalries between the commercial entities that authored them has often pitted the various communities against each other. During this period a terraforming association introduced water and a thin biosphere to the desert planet of Hearthfire, with efforts concentrated at each of the poles. One late-comer to this race, as the War was just beginning, was the Hank-Sobor consortium, who selling community insurance sought to set up a world far from the conflict zone. Buying out many of the other companies with interests in the system, Hank-Sobor appropriated their resources like the pumping station in the gas giant and the entirety of Hearthfire. However a court injunction back at Datha ruled in favour of the workers of the old TA (now on their third generation) who protested this move and Hank-Sobor only received the northern polar glades. The court also ruled against the rebranding of the planets long established name to Hank for being bloody stupid, though Hank-Sobor managed to sneak an updated name to the ice giant into the charts.
The destruction of Datha lead to a tremendous economic fallout in Sigma Relay and critical supply services were knocked out from under them and the standard of living plummeted. The once carefree root-Dathics turned rather frayed and violent in the aftermath. Hank-Sobor with its exodus only a fraction done, its economic base nearly nonexistant, and a vast shipping fleet, turned to operating merchant runs within the system and beyond, trying to position themselves as middlemen. They spread across the northern glades in sprawling settlements much to the ire of the terraformers. Meanwhile the lunar settlements were bound into one federation by a fleeing military crew from a battlemoon escape yacht.
The most recent arrival, in only the last year, has been the Dardareo in their worldship. In the final climactic battle many of the ancient worldships that comprised some of Dathas hundred moons attempted to flee, the detonation of the drives of some of them adding considerably to that final carnage. The Dardareo was one that managed to limp to a safe transcend distance and flee into the void. Taking a long time-dilating jump to a distant giant star, their attempt to return to the Orion Sector by way of Alnitah was interdicted by the Apeilic Consul, who ordered them to lay up in a nearby system and await probation. This harsh order probably saved them, as their drive systems were dangerously unstable. Arriving at Sigma Relay the drive core went subcritical and it, plus a large portion of the worldship, had to be dumped onto the nearest world, where it made a quite pretty and deadly radioactive crater. Naturally the Hankish and other Dathic residents of said moon of Hearthfire, were rather irate at this action, and the Dardareo have a lot of fence mending to do and a desperate need for supplies, but hey, they and their world has survived after all. Though theyve seen considerable cross-pollination with the main Datha culture, the Dardareo remain their own people; ruled by semi-hereditary Captains, still practical and studious, and still loving to fly their little aircraft within the worldships habitat spaces. A very old and heavily filtered culture the Dardareo trace their descent from middle eastern sources by way of old Terras south America and the Cassiopeia worlds. Dardareo male and female are always recognisable by their headscarves, originally a mechanism to keep hair out of microgravity air conditioning units having grown into a cultural icon, and decorated with family patterns that are thousands of years old. Generally a Dardareo will own a matching space suit with the pattern.
The Forest Subsegment:
For a long time the forest has been shrouded in myth and rumours, with risky and difficult jumps between stars prior to the beacon, dark plagues and terrifying raiding groups, and hiders willing to perform any atrocity to maintain their silence.
No discussion of the Forest could be made without detailing the Mernt, who have marked the red stars of the forest even in their dissolution. Much like the Yanii the inhabitants of the planet Mern were almost assuredly ancient pre-tumult explorers, predating the founding of Datha by millennia, who collapsed into barbarianism. Unlike the Yanii, perhaps protected by their greater isolation and more hospitable homeworld, the Mernt bootstrapped themselves back into a star travelling civilisation. Transcend physics were reinvented some seven hundred years ago, by which point the Buxe system was home to billions on the much improved Mern and the newly terraformed Tren (the next planet out). The fecund population, combined with a religion and ideology based around a vivifying mission drove them onwards to the other stars of the forest, their huge slow colony ships made from converted asteroids. The difficulties of travel prevented a centrally administrated empire, but the Mernt soon had terraforming projects on over a dozen forest worlds and a light trade with the Cathedral and beyond. Advancement in the physical and technological sciences were slow, as the Mernt preferred to focus their intellects on the puzzles of terraforming and vivifying each world presented. It was about four centuries ago, with the apogee of Mernt population in the 15 billion range, that the Mernt plague struck. The Mernt used a set tool box of fauna in their ecologies, and all of them seemed to act as long term carriers and reservoirs for the disease, enabling it to boil up on nearly every world simultaneously, burning through the population the disease caused a few days of feverish and rabid activity followed by death for 99.9% of the population. The virulence and penetration of the Plague cause many to theorise it was a weapon gone wrong or a rogue terraforming bacteria. The entire fabric of Mernt civilisation unravelled in a few scant years, with only a few million survivors hiding in hermetically sealed dome cities or scavenging the ruins in feral gangs. No sample of the plague has ever been successfully captured, and the fear of its return kept most visitors out of the Forest for the next three centuries. The survivors in the open environments died off or reverted to barbarianism whilst the sealed cities went insane or turned their back on the outside world. Without constant management, the crown jewels of the Mernt empire, the terraformed worlds themselves, began to crumble. The atmosphere of Tren frozen and flee to the earth, the deserts spread on Mern and Oia, and everywhere the plants died and the green faded from the Forest.
Their isolation and collapse has led the Mernt to diverge from mainstream cultures linguistically, culturally, and physically. Linguistically the Mernt dialect has seem an explosion of new terms and a tendency to destress every syllable of Root they speak, as well as developing a profusion of noun modifying suffixes. The -t suffix meaning of or from (most Mernt will give their middle name as [wherever they grew up]-t), a normal speaker of Root should be careful not to miss the end of word noises that can completely invert a sentences meaning. Culturally an intense worship of individual life-baring worlds as mother goddess aspects leads to great devotion and the occasional blood sacrifice (returning things to the cycle), with a spill over into extreme matrilinealism when a mans entire worth and prestige are bound up in their mothers family (though like nearly all less wealthy human societies, the greater political sphere is driven by male tribal identities). That matrilineal line is always tied to a particular biome unit that the family see themselves as protecting and nurturing, will to engage in decades long blood feuds with transgressors against their land and the organisms within it. Physically they are small and petite with pale skin, lower than average sexual dimorphism, a Caucasian cast to their features and wavy blonde hair (typically worn long and thick in both sexes). Both sexes also have two or more alleles for red photosensor pigments (in baselines males have one and females one or two), enabling them to distinguish more shades of red in the often dim light of the forest stars. Iris colours are yellow, orange, or violet, thought this is a cosmetic change that became fixed in the small founder population rather than an adaptive modification.
Disenfrancised
Beep Beep
Summarising all the scattered Mernt tribes is beyond the scope of this monograph, but to touch on each of the significant ones:
The Order of the Fourth Edenic Monks control the city of Eden on the Moon of Lys, the oldest of the settlements off Mern itself. During the plague years the authorities sealed off the city completely forcing a brutal regime of recycling and management of the tiny ecology. Eventually the ecosystem managers became priests, their deity the death of the Mern biosphere. All outsiders are forbidden from their habitat, and those who venture out must undergo a five year ritual of cleansing on their return. They are experts in managing the ecosystems of cities and ships however, and some seek their consultancy services. They have a proprietorial air to Mern itself despite never touching the planet, seeing as a monument or tomb to their religion, the Plague a punishment for some crime.
In earthy contrast to the Monks are the Knights of the Vale. When the Mernt fell, the Vale of SAF1.i (a tidally locked world, with the Vale a vats landform in the sunward hemisphere) proved a small and rich enough planetary biosphere (especially with the nitrate deposits) that it could maintained without advanced technology, merely hard graft. Such management required a large class of workers close to the land, and a feudal system quickly ossified out of those few families who had managed to gain any power in the immediate post collapse. The religion and the need for the serfs to keep the biosphere alive means the lower classes are quite well treated, if forbidden movement, and the Knights themselves have a paternal attitude towards them and the other fallen Mernt tribes. Food ships and a willingness to brawl with encroaching outsiders and pirates (even if not always successful) has lead the other Mernt tribes to look up to the Knights and their armed forces.
The Oiat Kingdom of the Abell system unlike the previous two strains did indeed fall totally into barbarianism, but the wide waterways and canals of Oia (Abell iii) allowed a greater interconnectivity of the tribes even as the biosphere began to crumble. The Oiat had managed to crawl back to raw technological base and atmospheric flight a mere three and a half centuries after the plague. A great hero forged the tribes into a single force to repel a small raiding force, and they refer to themselves as a kingdom in his honour, despite not bothering to elect a new king on his death. The Oiat are nomadic, preferring to travel the rivers and between the oasiss in great houseboats and caravans (built from scavenged aluminium, so much larger and more durable than Old Terra equivalents), setting up farms and grazing lands in different places in each season. The river boats are now crowded with refugees from the mountains, driven out by the new Standard arrivals. The Oiat are rather more tan and taller than the average pre-plague Mernt.
The only other sealed city to make it through to the current era is the settlement on Smi, one of the moons of Buxes outer giants. Most of those cities who isolated themselves generally didnt prove viable over the centuries. The Smit on the other hand had near unlimited volatiles for their small population, and didnt have to be nearly so committed to efficiency. Over time rather than becoming paranoid, the cities bred a trusting personality type (one of the ways society can evolve when there is no external reference), and when explorers began to penetrate the forest they were enthusiastically welcomed. Trying to attract visitors and trade, the Smit touted themselves as a stopover point, and used the old Mernt skill with plant life to reap a vast surplus from their hydroponics to lure passing traders.
The Hiders
The difficulty of travel, the emissions background of the nebula, and the perceived valueless nature of the small stars in the forest made it a favoured place to go for those who wished to depart galactic society for a time. Though the high point of the Mernt empire removed that reputation somewhat, for centuries before and after small populations tried to hide themselves from the wider spaces. Some died off, some may still succeed in hiding even as we speak, but a few have chosen to re-join the wider galaxy after the Apeilics established the ansibyl beacon.
At SAF6 exists a clade that would have panicked the Mernt or Cathedral powers if theyd been unearthed a few centuries before. The Praxzen origin culture has not been identified within the Orion sector, and although they claim to be the descendants of a simple research/survey team they have thus far declined to comment when in the past this actually occurred. They have been burrowed into the first world of SAF6 for at least eight centuries based on the wear on the stonework of some of their cavern cities. The hot core of this world nurtures a subterranean alien biosphere based on organic chlorines, a biosphere the Praxzen have comprehensively domesticated and integrated with a more normal Terran biosphere. The Praxzen dwell beneath the frigid surface in warmer caverns and spaces, and in one region a vast extrusion of plutonic rock has enabled them to carve kilometre wide and tall voids and ravines that theyve filled with cities and forests, beautifully sculpting the ceilings and huge support columns to represent all manner of things. Despite some outside groups recoiling after contact (the Praxzen do tend to do very nasty things to perceived trespassers) and trying to paint the Praxzen as soulless monsters, this tendency towards decoration and art extends to their personal and workspaces, each room of which is eclectically beautiful. For the Praxzen this is a matter of mental health, with life spans running to three centuries or more it is vital to add contextual cues to pattern that sea of memory, it being easier to remember a conversation that took place in the red and gold room fifty years ago rather than one that took place in utilitarian grey cube room #235. Moving a Praxzens furniture once theyve settled on a style for a room can lead to decade long grudges. Politically Praxzen space is something of an anarchy, with each individual having their own concerns and actions and agency for various tasks, the closest thing to a current government being the Atmospheric Integrity Bureaucracy, who manage the boundaries of the Praxzen living spaces. As of this year the Praxzen are in something of a long economic depression as the result of nearing full resource usage stifling investor confidence, the decision to open up to the rest of the segment being rooted in this, as well as calls for a more efficient if less free economy and society are being made by the pragmatic and stoic citizenry. Physically the current Praxzen standard model is not as outwardly radical as some other advancer and cyborg clades, with a basic hominan frame unembellished with additional structures, though macroscale conservativism belays considerable microscale and internal change. Larger than human standard like most advancers the Praxzen frame runs to 2.3 metres on average, though some engage in considerable variance. Limbs and extremities are proportionally longer with slightly expanded joints, this provides additional muscular leverage and a greater heat exchange surface for a body running a feverishly high temperature by baseline standards. The musculature is faster, more precise, and considerably stronger than baseline muscle fibres, but maintaining long term operation requires prodigious amounts of energy (a Praxzen forced to live on a baseline diet needs to nap some 18 hours a day to survive). Hair and facial bone structure is a matter of choice, and tends to follow the dictates of fashion on whatever old style or novel standard of bueaty is current in vogue. Eyes are an intimidating pitch black with a greater spectral range and acuity than baselines and a tapetum lucid to bost photon capture, and a ringed with dark racoon patches that contain infra-red sensitive pits. In its rarely seen default state the skin is corpse-white, but a host of melanophores (brown and blacks), xanthophores (yellows), and leucophores (modulating reflectivity) allows the skin to change colour and texture like a cuttlefish (though without the cuttlefishes reds or blues) and emulate any human skin type. Though with application for stealth, day to day this chameleon ability is used for communication, and the highest resolution is achievable in the face (which also has more muscles than the baseline standard) Praxzen who know each well other can carry out a high bandwidth chat without saying a word, and pre-adult Praxzen will run shock images on a loop over their bodies. More important that even communication is the neural stratum that underpins the chromatophore layers, a dense nerve fabric that Praxzen use as their auxiliary brain. Praxzen views on memory, autonomy and will preclude much of a plug and play attitude with their main brains, and would require technology they have lost anyway; instead an area of the skin neural stratum is programmed with a subroutine (say for solving linear equations) via engineered virus, and the Praxzen communicates with this part of their auxbrain using the same gestalt map channel they use to change its colour and receive an answer by that channels feedback. A Praxzen nerd with a near majority of their skin brain devoted to subroutines will experience notable lag when using the skin for social communication. Underneath the neural stratum is a layer of protective cartilage that thickens as they grow older over their multi century lifespan. At the moment the Praxzen bauplan does not incorporate any radiation, pressure or temperature shielding, but their abdomens do contain four different sets of miniaturised gastrointestinal tracts and livers which they uses to switch between diet chemistries, the native flora and fauna of the Praxzen world being utterly deadly to baseline consumption. The chlorines and other poisons are sequestered in the cartigale layer and slowly shed in dead skin cells (which the Praxzen have a high turnover of) from the extremities, using a mechanism copied from poison arrow frogs, colouring the base layer of the skin lurid patterns of green and yellow (that young Praxzen also enjoy showing off). Shaking the hand of Praxzen who hasnt taken care to flush their system will burn and instantly poison a baseline, and has resulted in stories of horror being spread by some of the few who have visited them and werent sufficiently careful. The Praxzen rolled their eyes at these idiots, and have redone their introductory safety pamphlets in a slightly bolder font.
<Thorpe Tyrar datalink not found>
As divergent as the Praxzen are physically, the Seffessians of SAF10 are off-putting for the distance from baseline of their mental models. For long years low in technology on a dark and foggy world that was just on the breathable side of hellish, the social adaption of the Seffessians to this long nightmare was the constant intake of hallucinogenic drugs from infancy onwards. This drug, apart from easing the pain, makes them extraordinary receptive to stories communicated by community elders. Seffessians assimilate the stories at a deep level as if they were their own memories, supressing their own identity and ego in favour of a group/lineage ego. Many even forget their own names (if they ever had them) becoming subsumed in the agency of the stronger willed and older members of the community. Though bad data and religious idiocy has slipped its memes into the impressed mental heritage, the drugs and cultural attitude give the Seffessians photographic recall (something that makes some suspect genotype modification in their past, though they are quite plain looking Geashials in appearance) and necessary skills are quickly spread through community units. With these structure, altruism, sacrifice and communal living is the rule of the day, with a village packing hundreds happily in a single room being common. These village units cooperate as the social base block of the Seffessians nation rather than the individuals (who arent ascribed legal rights), and discussions between the villages and highly charismatic wandering priests determine policy. Though horrific by Dathic or Cathedral standards, and there is evidence that the Mernt bombed the Seffessian occasionally, their culture is undeniably successful at surviving and extracting value from their terrain.
New Arrivals
With the establishment of the ansibyl beacon the cathedral powers have dipped their toes into the forest, with several stations at SAF2. But smaller corporate entities from the Cathedral have plunged deep (or had set up a few decades before). Some failed and died/slunk back home in shame, but others have succeeded in building little corporate fiefdoms. The JIM Corporation has set up a refinery and Freeport at the planet Murk in the centrally located SAF4 system. A atheist philosophical movement on the Black Castle, they eventually despaired of getting any of their viewpoints across and decided to strike out on their own, positioning themselves to sell refuelling services and construction ships in the assumption that other groups will be following them in an attempt to colonise the Forest frontier. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the pious Saint Rihndell House had to flee the cathedral after one dubious weapons deal too many. Following an ancient treasure map they found the exotic gases of a Robor Gas Giant in an otherwise valueless system a perfect foundation on which to rebuild their reputation as sellers of high end weaponry to all and sundry.
Coming from further afield but with similar aims are an exilic commercial group from the Csserian Confederacy, one of many seeds that state has thrown out in every direction after the post war turmoil. The commerce minded group jumped straight to Abell on the purchased recommendation of the Pavonis Bank; the Forest and the deeper parts of the sector would all be accessible but a slight distance would be maintained from the Cathedral to remain competitive, the Oiat would be a useful client state to mentor up to civilisation whilst supplying the Csserians with foodstuffs, and the second moon of Oia was known to be metal rich from the days of the old Mernt Empire. Perhaps an almost archetypical example of a Cosmopolitan people, the Csserians are defined by their civic religion (and their distrust of augmented clades, even to the extent of refusing the most basic pressure compensating microbes), with a worshipful reverence for their founding social contracts. The new branch culture in the segment as essential copied the old constitution, rolled back a bit on some of its more namby-pamby aspects as benefits a frontier society. Their society is very open and welcoming of nigh anyone who comes and visits (though nearly every Csserian will try and sell said visitor something), and is thickly leavened with optimism and a sense of fun. Families tend to be nuclear due to high population mobility and friendships brief but strong, fashions from the outside wash over the Csserians but leave no discernible trace (the current thing is brocaded jackets in the Oiat style). Arriving with a lot of self-assembling (not replicating!) machinery from their more advanced homeworlds they built some snug domed cities and borehole mines within a tiny span of years and had begun looking outward. However the rosy outlook was complicated by the next set of arrivals, the migration of the Standards.
Though Standard was a small world in terms of the grand systems and powers, compared to the post-Plague forest they were a throng; with millions gleefully seizing on the idea of walking on new living worlds, as marginal as the Mernt worlds might be. A few even schemed of ways to destroy the Ansibyl beacon, and thus cut off surety of access to the Forest behind them, nothing has yet come of it though, and most laugh off their compatriots grandiose plans in favour of practical concerns like food and living space for their clan. Physically the Standards are near-Dathics, removed from the root culture by a few hundred years of separation, being much the same if marginally less handsome, and with musculatures polished by hard labour rather than just the innate Dathic gene modifications. It is culture that distinguishes them from the artistic and calm root-Datha, though they share the ancestral arrogance and hard-partying nature. Believers in personal freedom and the connection of a man to the land he works, the Standards form close, rigid and patriarchal clan groups (when individuals dont just up and go off on their own) and violence suffuses their society from the top down. A Standardite man without a host of scars and a gun on his hip is respected in the slightest, and losing a limb (oft replaced with a weaponised artificial replacement) is rather a badge of honour. Duels are frequent, though property rights are respected if the duel if fatal; the onus is on the victor in a duel to take the losers body and possessions back to the losers clan, compared to someone who runs from a duel challenge whose life and goods are forfeit. It is only the freebooting and argumentative ethic that stops corporate tyranny in the regulation less Standardites, as no corporate endeavour manages to avoid descent into bickering before it becomes to powerful or damaging, though pollution is a problem despite their love of the land.
Arriving in the Segmentum, the Standards travelled to Abell for much the same reasons the Csserians did, but with rather different intent. As their rag-tag but massive fleet filled the skies of Oia, their armies descended. The Standards had be auxiliaries in the Dathic ground campaigns throughout the war, and worn out though they may be, they still had more men under arms than the entirety of the rest of this rather unmilitarised Segmentum, and the chemically propelled weapons of the Oiat were no match for the ion guns and robohorses of the Standardite conquistadors, even if they hadnt been outnumbered twenty to one. The Oiat were quickly routed from half the planets surface as the Csserians looked on spluttering (the Csserians had no ground forces to intervene, and an attack on the Standard Fleet would kill millions of civilian refugees). It was at this point that disagreements broke out between the Commodores; one faction, the lets-not-be-too-prickish-when-everyone-is-watching group, wanting to stop there, set up camp and normalise relations with the neighbours, whilst two other groups (the screw-em-all and the Ive done-the-numbers-and-Oia-cant-support-everyone factions) urged continuing warfare. The Not-pricks won out, but being Standards the other declared undying hatred and fled to the other post-Mernt worlds. The third group had been right as well; even farming as hard as they could the land they had claimed couldnt support the whole refugees and a second wave spilled across the sector like a horde of locusts. The Commodores on Oia tried to maintain a unity, but each distant group they brought back into the fold pushed the others even further away from this big government. Wherever they went the Standard attempted to force out a space on any world with a breathable atmosphere, displacing or outright killing Mernt tribes and even squatting right next to the Seffessians. The Standards who went to SAF6 were never seen again. Some even took over abandoned and ruins domes on less hospital planets in a desperate attempt to survive. By far the fiercest fighting took place between a Standard warlord and the Knights of the Vale, with the warlord urging all free Standards to come support the conquest of that bountiful region (which could indeed hold a good 70% of the Standard Migrant population quite easily).
The Handmaidens Subsegment
The least explored of the inhabited subsectors, the Handmaidens were even dustier than the forest (and spectral analysis predicted life-suitable worlds) and nearly all pre-Beacon exploration had to be done at sub-luminal speeds, and exploitation of the suspected metal troves had to be curtailed. As of the establishment of the beacon on the systems one negligible energy jump from sigma relay have been explored in any detail or developed to any extent. First in were a small consortium of miners who set up a tiny habitat at Glon some sixty years ago, extracting minerals and skimming the sterile waterworld of Glon iv (now iii). Their success inspired others:
The Diamond Network is another meta-empire with a common standard and culture but no centralised hub location; the common culture being a cyborg interface, a specialism in resource extraction and a semi nomadic wanderlust. The Ilosians are one such Diamond network franchise, and arrived at Alnitah on five large ships (ruled by a pentarchy of executives) after hearing of the Glon miners success. Rather than risking a dangerous jump, they crossed to Glon in real space, their ships laser boosted by disposable units in Alnitah orbit, a trek that took some three decades. On arrival some twenty years before the war, they merged their ships into a single habitat in close Glon orbit, the lightsails repurposed as a vast solar furnace. Strip mining the close small worlds to Glon, they reduced Glon i to a husk and completely dismantled the old Glon ii (shifting down the planet designations) and shipped the finished materials to the Cathedral and the wider Orion Sector. During and after the war their commercial agents and contacts in the wider sector were snuffed out one by one and they have hit hard times and have desperate need for new markets. On the other hand after the beacon was established they were first to jump at deeper exploration of the Segmentum, setting up mining operations on three nearby red dwarf systems. In contrast to the usual mental image of dirty and physically powerful mine workers, the Ilosians are ethereal and even angelic in physical appearance, as actual mining is done by waldo units as it has for millennia. Extremely slender and long limbed microgravity dwellers, they possess the Diamond Network founder mix of extreme northern European and northern Geashial genotypes plus larger germline modifications to be near completely lacking in skin colouration, and having grey white or silver hair and eye colouration, plus sharp bone structure with pronounced cheek bones. Their bodies are filigreed with silver and enamel white piping, and the aesthetic is completed by a large spindly wing structure mounted off their middle back. This wing structure is actually several steps of vacuum microgravity locomotor arms with a built in jetpack and oxygen reprocessing plant acting as a second set of lungs. Further vacuum and low gravity adaptions include gripping talons in the feet and a dense anti-decompression weave set subderminally. An Ilosian can survive in calm space for several hundred hours with nothing but an airtight helmet and a lose plastic robe to prevent thermal desiccation. As is the Diamond network ethos, the head and eyes are free of external modifications to aide social communication and having an untamperable optical channel available, the additional multispectral sensors and laser mineral samplers instead being built into the wings and hands. Inbuilt communication gear is voice and vision channel only, the Ilosians having a great love for the privacy of mind and the quiet of dark spaces. In their day to day life the Ilosians are quiet and often solitary workers, loving the satisfaction of a job well done and independent discovery. Children typically stay with only one parent until adulthood, with most Ilosians siring or birthing one child they raise themselves and one raised by another, on adulthood new Ilosians typically work for the state for some ten to fifteen year to pay off their creation loans. Politically the Ilosians are still run by the five executives, with a nearly flat command structure under them, when the executives have a job that needs doing they contact a suitable individual directly or advertise a position for a temp contract.
A later arrival than the Ilosians and luckily non-competing is the Order of the Deluge. A student on a religious exchange program with a Cathedral habitat scanned the news feeds out of Glon, and returned to their a source world with a scheme to set up a new monastery for quiet contemplation on the dust obscured waterworld of Glon iii. Convincing higher ups took some years, and the Deluger ark slipped in just before the War broke out. Dynamic but not aggressive they quickly spread all over the warmer shallows of the water worldand rapidly appropriated the pumping stations of the Glon miners with simple squatting, leaving the latter to retreat to their moon city in a huff. With the instability of the War, a not inconsiderable number of Delugers and converts from elsewhere followed the that first wave and soon the nice parts of the world hummed with activity. Setting up a biosphere proved tricky though (the world is thick with water, even the shallows being tens of kilometres deep, and the water is very nutrient poor) even though everyone agreed the azure and purple sky with Glon and Alnitah blazing away was very pretty and suitable to devout contemplation on matters of gravity and depth (tehe). A hearty trade with the Ilosians has developed, and some say with the establishment of the Beacon the order should trade further afield. Others retort that the order should seek peace and quiet by probing deeper into the dust of the Segmentum. After several hundred years of cultural evolution and directed genetic modification the Delugers have become a truly aquatic biomorph, where instead of legs they have a very flexible five metre long eel like tail with two small flippers below the hips (to answer the age old question its retractable). The length of this body is not just to provide locomotion, but it also has many internal voids full of gill structures. Providing sufficient oxygen for an endothermic human brain is not possible with a few measly gills round the neck, and the Delugers wished to keep their capacity to breathe and hence their old lungs. The concentration of aquatic organs in the tail does allow intriguing options for the deluger on a mission to the outside galaxy a few weeks of surgery will see them tottering about on cloned normal human legs, whilst the tail is kept on ice for their eventual return (the connections between the systems has a socketed design for this very purpose). The few adjustments to the upper body include a much more flexible neck for looking forward, secondary eye membranes, a thicker slightly greyish skin dappled with blue and a thick layer of insulating fats in the trunk and arms (females have impressive gynoidal fat deposits as well), and a few small fins on the back and wrists. The tail can scrub a lot of nitrogen bubbles from the blood, but they can still only dive down only some five hundred metres in earth gravity waters. Typically they live in sunlit cities just below the surface, surround by clouds of green algae which is as far as the vivification effort has managed to get so far. Their society is well ordered and pious with strong marriage ties, with the physicist-priests wielding spiritual rather than political power. The floating cities are democratic, but no planet wide legislature has yet been implemented.
Some groups did make it back from the sigma-relay proximate SAH3 and SAH6 in the perilous time before the beacon, and the tales they brought provoked considerable interest. At SAH3 two small biosphere worlds orbited in a close binary, the microbes from one raining down into the others sky, one chlorine rich and deadly the other more conventional. At SAH6 the moon of the hot brown dwarf SAH6 ii was covered in jet black selenium-carbon vegetation. Both of these attracted exploratory consortiums from Datha and her great power allies, at SAH3 the commercial Saldrid group sought to set up some sort of holiday destination, whilst at SAh6 a pure science expedition set out to find all there is to know. Both had no true character of their own being composed of representatives from dozens of worlds, and both have been cast adrift by the Destruction of the war. Both possess quite high end technology but little development base.
The Order of the Fourth Edenic Monks control the city of Eden on the Moon of Lys, the oldest of the settlements off Mern itself. During the plague years the authorities sealed off the city completely forcing a brutal regime of recycling and management of the tiny ecology. Eventually the ecosystem managers became priests, their deity the death of the Mern biosphere. All outsiders are forbidden from their habitat, and those who venture out must undergo a five year ritual of cleansing on their return. They are experts in managing the ecosystems of cities and ships however, and some seek their consultancy services. They have a proprietorial air to Mern itself despite never touching the planet, seeing as a monument or tomb to their religion, the Plague a punishment for some crime.
In earthy contrast to the Monks are the Knights of the Vale. When the Mernt fell, the Vale of SAF1.i (a tidally locked world, with the Vale a vats landform in the sunward hemisphere) proved a small and rich enough planetary biosphere (especially with the nitrate deposits) that it could maintained without advanced technology, merely hard graft. Such management required a large class of workers close to the land, and a feudal system quickly ossified out of those few families who had managed to gain any power in the immediate post collapse. The religion and the need for the serfs to keep the biosphere alive means the lower classes are quite well treated, if forbidden movement, and the Knights themselves have a paternal attitude towards them and the other fallen Mernt tribes. Food ships and a willingness to brawl with encroaching outsiders and pirates (even if not always successful) has lead the other Mernt tribes to look up to the Knights and their armed forces.
The Oiat Kingdom of the Abell system unlike the previous two strains did indeed fall totally into barbarianism, but the wide waterways and canals of Oia (Abell iii) allowed a greater interconnectivity of the tribes even as the biosphere began to crumble. The Oiat had managed to crawl back to raw technological base and atmospheric flight a mere three and a half centuries after the plague. A great hero forged the tribes into a single force to repel a small raiding force, and they refer to themselves as a kingdom in his honour, despite not bothering to elect a new king on his death. The Oiat are nomadic, preferring to travel the rivers and between the oasiss in great houseboats and caravans (built from scavenged aluminium, so much larger and more durable than Old Terra equivalents), setting up farms and grazing lands in different places in each season. The river boats are now crowded with refugees from the mountains, driven out by the new Standard arrivals. The Oiat are rather more tan and taller than the average pre-plague Mernt.
The only other sealed city to make it through to the current era is the settlement on Smi, one of the moons of Buxes outer giants. Most of those cities who isolated themselves generally didnt prove viable over the centuries. The Smit on the other hand had near unlimited volatiles for their small population, and didnt have to be nearly so committed to efficiency. Over time rather than becoming paranoid, the cities bred a trusting personality type (one of the ways society can evolve when there is no external reference), and when explorers began to penetrate the forest they were enthusiastically welcomed. Trying to attract visitors and trade, the Smit touted themselves as a stopover point, and used the old Mernt skill with plant life to reap a vast surplus from their hydroponics to lure passing traders.
The Hiders
The difficulty of travel, the emissions background of the nebula, and the perceived valueless nature of the small stars in the forest made it a favoured place to go for those who wished to depart galactic society for a time. Though the high point of the Mernt empire removed that reputation somewhat, for centuries before and after small populations tried to hide themselves from the wider spaces. Some died off, some may still succeed in hiding even as we speak, but a few have chosen to re-join the wider galaxy after the Apeilics established the ansibyl beacon.
At SAF6 exists a clade that would have panicked the Mernt or Cathedral powers if theyd been unearthed a few centuries before. The Praxzen origin culture has not been identified within the Orion sector, and although they claim to be the descendants of a simple research/survey team they have thus far declined to comment when in the past this actually occurred. They have been burrowed into the first world of SAF6 for at least eight centuries based on the wear on the stonework of some of their cavern cities. The hot core of this world nurtures a subterranean alien biosphere based on organic chlorines, a biosphere the Praxzen have comprehensively domesticated and integrated with a more normal Terran biosphere. The Praxzen dwell beneath the frigid surface in warmer caverns and spaces, and in one region a vast extrusion of plutonic rock has enabled them to carve kilometre wide and tall voids and ravines that theyve filled with cities and forests, beautifully sculpting the ceilings and huge support columns to represent all manner of things. Despite some outside groups recoiling after contact (the Praxzen do tend to do very nasty things to perceived trespassers) and trying to paint the Praxzen as soulless monsters, this tendency towards decoration and art extends to their personal and workspaces, each room of which is eclectically beautiful. For the Praxzen this is a matter of mental health, with life spans running to three centuries or more it is vital to add contextual cues to pattern that sea of memory, it being easier to remember a conversation that took place in the red and gold room fifty years ago rather than one that took place in utilitarian grey cube room #235. Moving a Praxzens furniture once theyve settled on a style for a room can lead to decade long grudges. Politically Praxzen space is something of an anarchy, with each individual having their own concerns and actions and agency for various tasks, the closest thing to a current government being the Atmospheric Integrity Bureaucracy, who manage the boundaries of the Praxzen living spaces. As of this year the Praxzen are in something of a long economic depression as the result of nearing full resource usage stifling investor confidence, the decision to open up to the rest of the segment being rooted in this, as well as calls for a more efficient if less free economy and society are being made by the pragmatic and stoic citizenry. Physically the current Praxzen standard model is not as outwardly radical as some other advancer and cyborg clades, with a basic hominan frame unembellished with additional structures, though macroscale conservativism belays considerable microscale and internal change. Larger than human standard like most advancers the Praxzen frame runs to 2.3 metres on average, though some engage in considerable variance. Limbs and extremities are proportionally longer with slightly expanded joints, this provides additional muscular leverage and a greater heat exchange surface for a body running a feverishly high temperature by baseline standards. The musculature is faster, more precise, and considerably stronger than baseline muscle fibres, but maintaining long term operation requires prodigious amounts of energy (a Praxzen forced to live on a baseline diet needs to nap some 18 hours a day to survive). Hair and facial bone structure is a matter of choice, and tends to follow the dictates of fashion on whatever old style or novel standard of bueaty is current in vogue. Eyes are an intimidating pitch black with a greater spectral range and acuity than baselines and a tapetum lucid to bost photon capture, and a ringed with dark racoon patches that contain infra-red sensitive pits. In its rarely seen default state the skin is corpse-white, but a host of melanophores (brown and blacks), xanthophores (yellows), and leucophores (modulating reflectivity) allows the skin to change colour and texture like a cuttlefish (though without the cuttlefishes reds or blues) and emulate any human skin type. Though with application for stealth, day to day this chameleon ability is used for communication, and the highest resolution is achievable in the face (which also has more muscles than the baseline standard) Praxzen who know each well other can carry out a high bandwidth chat without saying a word, and pre-adult Praxzen will run shock images on a loop over their bodies. More important that even communication is the neural stratum that underpins the chromatophore layers, a dense nerve fabric that Praxzen use as their auxiliary brain. Praxzen views on memory, autonomy and will preclude much of a plug and play attitude with their main brains, and would require technology they have lost anyway; instead an area of the skin neural stratum is programmed with a subroutine (say for solving linear equations) via engineered virus, and the Praxzen communicates with this part of their auxbrain using the same gestalt map channel they use to change its colour and receive an answer by that channels feedback. A Praxzen nerd with a near majority of their skin brain devoted to subroutines will experience notable lag when using the skin for social communication. Underneath the neural stratum is a layer of protective cartilage that thickens as they grow older over their multi century lifespan. At the moment the Praxzen bauplan does not incorporate any radiation, pressure or temperature shielding, but their abdomens do contain four different sets of miniaturised gastrointestinal tracts and livers which they uses to switch between diet chemistries, the native flora and fauna of the Praxzen world being utterly deadly to baseline consumption. The chlorines and other poisons are sequestered in the cartigale layer and slowly shed in dead skin cells (which the Praxzen have a high turnover of) from the extremities, using a mechanism copied from poison arrow frogs, colouring the base layer of the skin lurid patterns of green and yellow (that young Praxzen also enjoy showing off). Shaking the hand of Praxzen who hasnt taken care to flush their system will burn and instantly poison a baseline, and has resulted in stories of horror being spread by some of the few who have visited them and werent sufficiently careful. The Praxzen rolled their eyes at these idiots, and have redone their introductory safety pamphlets in a slightly bolder font.
<Thorpe Tyrar datalink not found>
As divergent as the Praxzen are physically, the Seffessians of SAF10 are off-putting for the distance from baseline of their mental models. For long years low in technology on a dark and foggy world that was just on the breathable side of hellish, the social adaption of the Seffessians to this long nightmare was the constant intake of hallucinogenic drugs from infancy onwards. This drug, apart from easing the pain, makes them extraordinary receptive to stories communicated by community elders. Seffessians assimilate the stories at a deep level as if they were their own memories, supressing their own identity and ego in favour of a group/lineage ego. Many even forget their own names (if they ever had them) becoming subsumed in the agency of the stronger willed and older members of the community. Though bad data and religious idiocy has slipped its memes into the impressed mental heritage, the drugs and cultural attitude give the Seffessians photographic recall (something that makes some suspect genotype modification in their past, though they are quite plain looking Geashials in appearance) and necessary skills are quickly spread through community units. With these structure, altruism, sacrifice and communal living is the rule of the day, with a village packing hundreds happily in a single room being common. These village units cooperate as the social base block of the Seffessians nation rather than the individuals (who arent ascribed legal rights), and discussions between the villages and highly charismatic wandering priests determine policy. Though horrific by Dathic or Cathedral standards, and there is evidence that the Mernt bombed the Seffessian occasionally, their culture is undeniably successful at surviving and extracting value from their terrain.
New Arrivals
With the establishment of the ansibyl beacon the cathedral powers have dipped their toes into the forest, with several stations at SAF2. But smaller corporate entities from the Cathedral have plunged deep (or had set up a few decades before). Some failed and died/slunk back home in shame, but others have succeeded in building little corporate fiefdoms. The JIM Corporation has set up a refinery and Freeport at the planet Murk in the centrally located SAF4 system. A atheist philosophical movement on the Black Castle, they eventually despaired of getting any of their viewpoints across and decided to strike out on their own, positioning themselves to sell refuelling services and construction ships in the assumption that other groups will be following them in an attempt to colonise the Forest frontier. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the pious Saint Rihndell House had to flee the cathedral after one dubious weapons deal too many. Following an ancient treasure map they found the exotic gases of a Robor Gas Giant in an otherwise valueless system a perfect foundation on which to rebuild their reputation as sellers of high end weaponry to all and sundry.
Coming from further afield but with similar aims are an exilic commercial group from the Csserian Confederacy, one of many seeds that state has thrown out in every direction after the post war turmoil. The commerce minded group jumped straight to Abell on the purchased recommendation of the Pavonis Bank; the Forest and the deeper parts of the sector would all be accessible but a slight distance would be maintained from the Cathedral to remain competitive, the Oiat would be a useful client state to mentor up to civilisation whilst supplying the Csserians with foodstuffs, and the second moon of Oia was known to be metal rich from the days of the old Mernt Empire. Perhaps an almost archetypical example of a Cosmopolitan people, the Csserians are defined by their civic religion (and their distrust of augmented clades, even to the extent of refusing the most basic pressure compensating microbes), with a worshipful reverence for their founding social contracts. The new branch culture in the segment as essential copied the old constitution, rolled back a bit on some of its more namby-pamby aspects as benefits a frontier society. Their society is very open and welcoming of nigh anyone who comes and visits (though nearly every Csserian will try and sell said visitor something), and is thickly leavened with optimism and a sense of fun. Families tend to be nuclear due to high population mobility and friendships brief but strong, fashions from the outside wash over the Csserians but leave no discernible trace (the current thing is brocaded jackets in the Oiat style). Arriving with a lot of self-assembling (not replicating!) machinery from their more advanced homeworlds they built some snug domed cities and borehole mines within a tiny span of years and had begun looking outward. However the rosy outlook was complicated by the next set of arrivals, the migration of the Standards.
Though Standard was a small world in terms of the grand systems and powers, compared to the post-Plague forest they were a throng; with millions gleefully seizing on the idea of walking on new living worlds, as marginal as the Mernt worlds might be. A few even schemed of ways to destroy the Ansibyl beacon, and thus cut off surety of access to the Forest behind them, nothing has yet come of it though, and most laugh off their compatriots grandiose plans in favour of practical concerns like food and living space for their clan. Physically the Standards are near-Dathics, removed from the root culture by a few hundred years of separation, being much the same if marginally less handsome, and with musculatures polished by hard labour rather than just the innate Dathic gene modifications. It is culture that distinguishes them from the artistic and calm root-Datha, though they share the ancestral arrogance and hard-partying nature. Believers in personal freedom and the connection of a man to the land he works, the Standards form close, rigid and patriarchal clan groups (when individuals dont just up and go off on their own) and violence suffuses their society from the top down. A Standardite man without a host of scars and a gun on his hip is respected in the slightest, and losing a limb (oft replaced with a weaponised artificial replacement) is rather a badge of honour. Duels are frequent, though property rights are respected if the duel if fatal; the onus is on the victor in a duel to take the losers body and possessions back to the losers clan, compared to someone who runs from a duel challenge whose life and goods are forfeit. It is only the freebooting and argumentative ethic that stops corporate tyranny in the regulation less Standardites, as no corporate endeavour manages to avoid descent into bickering before it becomes to powerful or damaging, though pollution is a problem despite their love of the land.
Arriving in the Segmentum, the Standards travelled to Abell for much the same reasons the Csserians did, but with rather different intent. As their rag-tag but massive fleet filled the skies of Oia, their armies descended. The Standards had be auxiliaries in the Dathic ground campaigns throughout the war, and worn out though they may be, they still had more men under arms than the entirety of the rest of this rather unmilitarised Segmentum, and the chemically propelled weapons of the Oiat were no match for the ion guns and robohorses of the Standardite conquistadors, even if they hadnt been outnumbered twenty to one. The Oiat were quickly routed from half the planets surface as the Csserians looked on spluttering (the Csserians had no ground forces to intervene, and an attack on the Standard Fleet would kill millions of civilian refugees). It was at this point that disagreements broke out between the Commodores; one faction, the lets-not-be-too-prickish-when-everyone-is-watching group, wanting to stop there, set up camp and normalise relations with the neighbours, whilst two other groups (the screw-em-all and the Ive done-the-numbers-and-Oia-cant-support-everyone factions) urged continuing warfare. The Not-pricks won out, but being Standards the other declared undying hatred and fled to the other post-Mernt worlds. The third group had been right as well; even farming as hard as they could the land they had claimed couldnt support the whole refugees and a second wave spilled across the sector like a horde of locusts. The Commodores on Oia tried to maintain a unity, but each distant group they brought back into the fold pushed the others even further away from this big government. Wherever they went the Standard attempted to force out a space on any world with a breathable atmosphere, displacing or outright killing Mernt tribes and even squatting right next to the Seffessians. The Standards who went to SAF6 were never seen again. Some even took over abandoned and ruins domes on less hospital planets in a desperate attempt to survive. By far the fiercest fighting took place between a Standard warlord and the Knights of the Vale, with the warlord urging all free Standards to come support the conquest of that bountiful region (which could indeed hold a good 70% of the Standard Migrant population quite easily).
The Handmaidens Subsegment
The least explored of the inhabited subsectors, the Handmaidens were even dustier than the forest (and spectral analysis predicted life-suitable worlds) and nearly all pre-Beacon exploration had to be done at sub-luminal speeds, and exploitation of the suspected metal troves had to be curtailed. As of the establishment of the beacon on the systems one negligible energy jump from sigma relay have been explored in any detail or developed to any extent. First in were a small consortium of miners who set up a tiny habitat at Glon some sixty years ago, extracting minerals and skimming the sterile waterworld of Glon iv (now iii). Their success inspired others:
The Diamond Network is another meta-empire with a common standard and culture but no centralised hub location; the common culture being a cyborg interface, a specialism in resource extraction and a semi nomadic wanderlust. The Ilosians are one such Diamond network franchise, and arrived at Alnitah on five large ships (ruled by a pentarchy of executives) after hearing of the Glon miners success. Rather than risking a dangerous jump, they crossed to Glon in real space, their ships laser boosted by disposable units in Alnitah orbit, a trek that took some three decades. On arrival some twenty years before the war, they merged their ships into a single habitat in close Glon orbit, the lightsails repurposed as a vast solar furnace. Strip mining the close small worlds to Glon, they reduced Glon i to a husk and completely dismantled the old Glon ii (shifting down the planet designations) and shipped the finished materials to the Cathedral and the wider Orion Sector. During and after the war their commercial agents and contacts in the wider sector were snuffed out one by one and they have hit hard times and have desperate need for new markets. On the other hand after the beacon was established they were first to jump at deeper exploration of the Segmentum, setting up mining operations on three nearby red dwarf systems. In contrast to the usual mental image of dirty and physically powerful mine workers, the Ilosians are ethereal and even angelic in physical appearance, as actual mining is done by waldo units as it has for millennia. Extremely slender and long limbed microgravity dwellers, they possess the Diamond Network founder mix of extreme northern European and northern Geashial genotypes plus larger germline modifications to be near completely lacking in skin colouration, and having grey white or silver hair and eye colouration, plus sharp bone structure with pronounced cheek bones. Their bodies are filigreed with silver and enamel white piping, and the aesthetic is completed by a large spindly wing structure mounted off their middle back. This wing structure is actually several steps of vacuum microgravity locomotor arms with a built in jetpack and oxygen reprocessing plant acting as a second set of lungs. Further vacuum and low gravity adaptions include gripping talons in the feet and a dense anti-decompression weave set subderminally. An Ilosian can survive in calm space for several hundred hours with nothing but an airtight helmet and a lose plastic robe to prevent thermal desiccation. As is the Diamond network ethos, the head and eyes are free of external modifications to aide social communication and having an untamperable optical channel available, the additional multispectral sensors and laser mineral samplers instead being built into the wings and hands. Inbuilt communication gear is voice and vision channel only, the Ilosians having a great love for the privacy of mind and the quiet of dark spaces. In their day to day life the Ilosians are quiet and often solitary workers, loving the satisfaction of a job well done and independent discovery. Children typically stay with only one parent until adulthood, with most Ilosians siring or birthing one child they raise themselves and one raised by another, on adulthood new Ilosians typically work for the state for some ten to fifteen year to pay off their creation loans. Politically the Ilosians are still run by the five executives, with a nearly flat command structure under them, when the executives have a job that needs doing they contact a suitable individual directly or advertise a position for a temp contract.
A later arrival than the Ilosians and luckily non-competing is the Order of the Deluge. A student on a religious exchange program with a Cathedral habitat scanned the news feeds out of Glon, and returned to their a source world with a scheme to set up a new monastery for quiet contemplation on the dust obscured waterworld of Glon iii. Convincing higher ups took some years, and the Deluger ark slipped in just before the War broke out. Dynamic but not aggressive they quickly spread all over the warmer shallows of the water worldand rapidly appropriated the pumping stations of the Glon miners with simple squatting, leaving the latter to retreat to their moon city in a huff. With the instability of the War, a not inconsiderable number of Delugers and converts from elsewhere followed the that first wave and soon the nice parts of the world hummed with activity. Setting up a biosphere proved tricky though (the world is thick with water, even the shallows being tens of kilometres deep, and the water is very nutrient poor) even though everyone agreed the azure and purple sky with Glon and Alnitah blazing away was very pretty and suitable to devout contemplation on matters of gravity and depth (tehe). A hearty trade with the Ilosians has developed, and some say with the establishment of the Beacon the order should trade further afield. Others retort that the order should seek peace and quiet by probing deeper into the dust of the Segmentum. After several hundred years of cultural evolution and directed genetic modification the Delugers have become a truly aquatic biomorph, where instead of legs they have a very flexible five metre long eel like tail with two small flippers below the hips (to answer the age old question its retractable). The length of this body is not just to provide locomotion, but it also has many internal voids full of gill structures. Providing sufficient oxygen for an endothermic human brain is not possible with a few measly gills round the neck, and the Delugers wished to keep their capacity to breathe and hence their old lungs. The concentration of aquatic organs in the tail does allow intriguing options for the deluger on a mission to the outside galaxy a few weeks of surgery will see them tottering about on cloned normal human legs, whilst the tail is kept on ice for their eventual return (the connections between the systems has a socketed design for this very purpose). The few adjustments to the upper body include a much more flexible neck for looking forward, secondary eye membranes, a thicker slightly greyish skin dappled with blue and a thick layer of insulating fats in the trunk and arms (females have impressive gynoidal fat deposits as well), and a few small fins on the back and wrists. The tail can scrub a lot of nitrogen bubbles from the blood, but they can still only dive down only some five hundred metres in earth gravity waters. Typically they live in sunlit cities just below the surface, surround by clouds of green algae which is as far as the vivification effort has managed to get so far. Their society is well ordered and pious with strong marriage ties, with the physicist-priests wielding spiritual rather than political power. The floating cities are democratic, but no planet wide legislature has yet been implemented.
Some groups did make it back from the sigma-relay proximate SAH3 and SAH6 in the perilous time before the beacon, and the tales they brought provoked considerable interest. At SAH3 two small biosphere worlds orbited in a close binary, the microbes from one raining down into the others sky, one chlorine rich and deadly the other more conventional. At SAH6 the moon of the hot brown dwarf SAH6 ii was covered in jet black selenium-carbon vegetation. Both of these attracted exploratory consortiums from Datha and her great power allies, at SAH3 the commercial Saldrid group sought to set up some sort of holiday destination, whilst at SAh6 a pure science expedition set out to find all there is to know. Both had no true character of their own being composed of representatives from dozens of worlds, and both have been cast adrift by the Destruction of the war. Both possess quite high end technology but little development base.
-End-
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
Awesome descriptions.
Symphony D.
Deity
Based on earlier commentary, does T1 roughly correspond to mid-late 21st century across the board? Asking mostly for story purposes.
Descriptions are, as indicated, quite cool.
Descriptions are, as indicated, quite cool.
Disenfrancised
Beep Beep
Mid to late, with stuff like heavy lifting capacity and all that. They'll have legacy units of better technology like amazingly efficient oxygenating algae and know some effect maximizing tricks that we could do now but don't like fractal beam antennae* on radios and the like.
* <3 Verner Vinge
Disenfrancised
Beep Beep
Could everyone please resend their starting ship designs to me using the most recent ship designer in a single consolidate PM. Anyone who've I forgotten to contact with their starting situation should get in touch.
Symphony D.
Deity
I'm guessing Praxzen hair has been modified on a micro-scale to facilitate heat-radiation instead of heat-retention (if such a thing is at all possible). The surface area it'd provide seems like too good a deal to pass up in that regard. It'd be an interesting statement if short-hair meant something versus long.
Disenfrancised
Beep Beep
Well hair is inert keratin, making it a heat radiator would be effectively replacing it with some sort of nanotech device that would just produce as much heat as it saves (and a pure biotech version would need a circulating fluid). Easier to just speed up blood circulation to the skull. Probably no body hair but retaining head hair in case of encountering cold environs/social purposes/looking cool
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
I'm not overjoyed to report this bug as it technically hurts me, but there is no size marked down in the calculator for Heavy Cladding, refined or unrefined.
Unless that's like, by design.
Edit: The denizens of #nes have told me that Heavy Cladding isn't supposed to increase size by design. So ignore my concerns.
Unless that's like, by design.
Edit: The denizens of #nes have told me that Heavy Cladding isn't supposed to increase size by design. So ignore my concerns.
Disenfrancised
Beep Beep
Yes? Its always been like that, since cladding produces armour and costs based on size, it adding size itself would create a loop.
Where is #nes nowdays anyway? That link in your sig is just to the Mibbet mainpage.
Where is #nes nowdays anyway? That link in your sig is just to the Mibbet mainpage.
qoou
Emperor
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Frozen In Ice
Emperor
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qoou
Emperor
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The mechanics for overfull habitats are a bit wonky. For starters, the growth page doesn't care if people decide to migrate into an overfull habitat. That leads to funny results, like the Standards falling to a net s of -600 after the first turn. Or a luxurious habitat with 80 pop getting instantly drained to ~30 pop if it ever hits the living space limit, despite the migration targets being pretty horrible places to live.
Oh, and the growth calculator allows regions to be left with negative population.
In fact, according to current mechanics. The Standards will start by migrating en-masse to Mern's Southern Mountains and the SAF2/SAF10 colonies. The next turn they'll realize those places suck and have a mass exodus into the capital, with 20% of the total population dying en route, leaving Mern's Southern Mountains filled with rotting dead bodies and the capital holding 95% of the population.
The third turn, another mass exodus to Mern and the SAF2/SAF10 colonies, this time with nearly half of the population dying on the way, most of them let to rot in huge piles in the middle of the capital.
The fourth turn will finally see some stability, with none of the population dying on the way to the capital. By this point however, the Standards are left with less than half their initial population, and due to a massive s deficit have likely regressed into a pre-industrial society that feeds on the huge number of corpses left out in the middle of their cities.
Oh, and the growth calculator allows regions to be left with negative population.
In fact, according to current mechanics. The Standards will start by migrating en-masse to Mern's Southern Mountains and the SAF2/SAF10 colonies. The next turn they'll realize those places suck and have a mass exodus into the capital, with 20% of the total population dying en route, leaving Mern's Southern Mountains filled with rotting dead bodies and the capital holding 95% of the population.
The third turn, another mass exodus to Mern and the SAF2/SAF10 colonies, this time with nearly half of the population dying on the way, most of them let to rot in huge piles in the middle of the capital.
The fourth turn will finally see some stability, with none of the population dying on the way to the capital. By this point however, the Standards are left with less than half their initial population, and due to a massive s deficit have likely regressed into a pre-industrial society that feeds on the huge number of corpses left out in the middle of their cities.
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
Admittedly that'd be if I didn't build any attractiveness modifying buildings but that does seem a bit extreme...
Kozmos
Jew Detective
*reading the descriptions* I wants your babies Dis. Will there be opportunity to join during the summer?
Disenfrancised
Beep Beep
Its an outlier effect caused by Standard high mobility and high crowding stress, I'm going to complicate the population movement model to deal with it.
Edit:thanks kosmos, I like pontificating on biology. Depending on tb's schedule the Quasi may come open.
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