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nasa · 11 months ago

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9 Out-of-This-World Moments for Space Communications & Navigation in 2023

How do astronauts and spacecraft communicate with Earth?

By using relay satellites and giant antennas around the globe! These tools are crucial to NASA’s space communications networks: the Near Space Network and the Deep Space Network, which bring back science and exploration data every day.

It’s been a great year for our space communications and navigation community, who work to maintain the networks and enhance NASA’s capabilities. Keep scrolling to learn more about our top nine moments.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon spacecraft lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023, on the company's 29th commercial resupply services mission for the agency to the International Space Station. Liftoff was at 8:28 p.m. EST.

1. In November, we launched a laser communications payload, known as ILLUMA-T, to the International Space Station. Now, ILLUMA-T and the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) are exchanging data and officially complete NASA��s first two-way, end-to-end laser relay system. Laser communications can send more data at once than traditional radio wave systems – think upgrading from dial-up to fiber optic internet. ILLUMA-T and LCRD are chatting at 1.2 gigabits per second (Gbps). At that rate, you could download an average movie in under a minute.

NASA’s InSight lander captured this selfie on Mars on April 24, 2022, the 1,211th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

2. Data analyzed in 2023 from NASA’s retired InSight Mars lander provided new details about how fast the Red Planet rotates and how much it wobbles. Scientists leveraged InSight’s advanced radio technology, upgrades to the Deep Space Network, and radio signals to determine that Mars’ spin rate is increasing, while making the most precise measurements ever of Mars’ rotation.

TBIRD is demonstrating a direct-to-Earth laser communications link from low Earth orbit to a ground station on Earth.

3. We set a new high record! The TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) payload – also demonstrating laser communications like ILLUMA-T and LCRD – downlinked 4.8 terabytes of data at 200 Gbps in a single 5-minute pass. This is the highest data rate ever achieved by laser communications technology. To put it in perspective a single terabyte is the equivalent of about 500 hours of high-definition video.

A 34-meter (112-foot) wide antenna at Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex near Canberra, Australia.

4. This year we celebrated the Deep Space Network’s 60th anniversary. This international array of antennas located at three complexes in California, Spain, and Australia allow us to communicate with spacecraft at the Moon and beyond. Learn more about the Deep Space Network’s legacy and future advancements.

An illustration of the LunaNet architecture. LunaNet will bring internet-like services to the Moon.

5. We are bringing humans to the Moon with Artemis missions. During expeditions, astronauts exploring the surface are going to need internet-like capabilities to talk to mission control, understand their routes, and ensure overall safety. The space comm and nav group is working with international partners and commercial companies to develop LunaNet, and in 2023, the team released Draft LunaNet Specification Version 5, furthering development.

The High-Rate Delay Tolerant Networking node launched to the International Space Station in November and will act as a high-speed path for data.

6. In addition to laser communications, ILLUMA-T on the International Space Station is also demonstrating high-rate delay/disruption tolerant networking (HDTN). The networking node is showcasing a high-speed data path and a store-and-forward technique. HDTN ensures data reaches its final destination and isn’t lost on its path due to a disruption or delay, which are frequent in the space environment.

The Communications Services Project (CSP) partners with commercial industry to provide networking options for future spaceflight missions.

7. The space comm and nav team is embracing the growing aerospace industry by partnering with commercial companies to provide multiple networking options for science and exploration missions. Throughout 2023, our commercialization groups engaged with over 110 companies through events, one-on-one meetings, forums, conferences, and more. Over the next decade, NASA plans to transition near-Earth services from government assets to commercial infrastructure.

Middle and high school students solve a coding experiment during NASA's Office of STEM Engagement App Development Challenge.

8. Every year, NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement sponsors the App Development Challenge, wherein middle and high school students must solve a coding challenge. This year, student groups coded an application to visualize the Moon’s South Pole region and display information for navigating the Moon’s surface. Our space communications and navigation experts judged and interviewed students about their projects and the top teams visited NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston!

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars upward after liftoff at the pad at 3:27 a.m. EDT on Saturday, Aug. 26, from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A in Florida carrying NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7 crew members to the International Space Station. Aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft are NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov.

9. The Near Space Network supported 19 launches in 2023! Launches included Commercial Crew flights to the International Space Station, science mission launches like XRISM and the SuperBIT balloon, and many more. Once in orbit, these satellites use Near Space Network antennas and relays to send their critical data to Earth. In 2023, the Near Space Network provided over 10 million minutes of communications support to missions in space.

Here’s to another year connecting Earth and space.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

#NASA #space #communication #lasers #satellite #Moon #STEM #tech #Artemis #technology #optical

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magalhaessims · 7 months ago

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DEL SOL BOULEVARD - MAXIS-MATCH CC BUILD

NOT CC FREE

Lot Type: Thrift And Bubble Tea Store | Retail

Size: 30x30

World: Del Sol Valley

Enable bb.moveobjects before placing in your game!

📺 WATCH THE SPEED BUILD HERE ✨

Origin ID: MagalhaesSims (remember to enable custom content on!) DOWNLOAD

CC USED IN THIS BUILD:

NOTE: For convenience, some of the CC is included in the Download Folder. Please put it in your Mods Folder along with the CC linked below.

Charly Pancakes: Lavish | Miscellanea | Modish | Munch 01 & 02 | Soak | The Lighthouse Collection || TheClutterCat: Baby Boo | Dandy Diary | Mermaid Mansion | On The Edge | Snuggle Set | Sunny Sundae || Felixandre: Berlin | Chateau | Grove Set | Shop The Look 01 - 03 | Soho || Harrie: Brownstone | Brutalist Bathroom | Halcyon Kitchen | Klean | Kwatei | Octave | Shop The Look 02 & 03 | Spoons || House Of Harlix: Baysic Collection & Bathroom | Harluxe | Kichen 2 Point 1 | Livin'Rum | Orjanic | The Bafroom | The Kichen || KKB-MM: My Cherish Things: Kitchen || LittleDica: Arcane | Chic Bathroom | Delicious Kitchen | Greasy Goods | H&B Store | Rise&Grind | Sleek Slumber || Max20: Cozy Bathroom Kit | Poolside Lounge (Plants) || MLys: Pufferhead Stuff Pack || Peacemaker-ic: Bowed Bedroom | Bowed Living | Creta Kitchen | Furrowed Plaster Wall | Geometric Mural Wall || Pierisim: Auntie Vera Bathroom | Calderone | Coldbrew Coffee Shop | Combles | David Apartment | MCM House | Oak House | Pantry Party | Stefan | Tilable Kitchen | Woodland Ranch || S-imagination: Nota Living Room | Rutland Kitchen || Sixam-CC: Home Office (Printer) | Hotel Bedroom (Hair Brush) | Private School (Water Fountain) || Someone-Elsa: Passion By Judith Ward Collection || Surely-Sims: Kitchen Of Tomorrow (Nuka Cola) || Syboulette: Fabulous | Happy Stairways | Love Is In The Air | Neighborly | Nothing To Wear | Pavilion || Taurus Design: Judith Living Room || Tuds: Beam Living | Ema Living

The CC Sets above are the main ones I used to decorate this specific building and you can find all the links to the creators’ sites on my Resource Page. However, if you can’t find something specific, you can send me a WCIF and I’ll try to help you find it!

HOW TO MAKE THIS LOT FUNCTIONAL:

For the Boba Tea Store, I've added the ThriftTea Bubble Tea Counter created by @srslysims. It features the same animation and interactions as the vanilla version but without the bulky counter it comes with.

For the Clothing Store, I recommend using the Fashion Store Mod by Nando. I've placed interactive mirrors in the changing cabins so your Sims can actually buy clothes from them.

For the Sephora Store, I'm utilizing the Functional Perfumes by @aroundthesims along with the Saleabration Store Mod by @ravasheencc, allowing your Sims to buy and use them! Additionally, I've included the New Styling Station (Chair) by @aroundthesims so your Sims can enjoy a little makeover at the store.

For the Bookstore, I'm incorporating both the Retail Therapy Mod by @ravasheencc and the Self-Service Kiosk by @aroundthesims, enabling your Sims to purchase books within the store. You don't have to have both mods installed if you don't want to; either one will suffice!

For a more immersive experience with this lot, I highly suggest downloading LittleMsSam’s Auto Employees Mod. With this mod, NPCs will automatically work at the lot once you place the correct object for them to appear.

Make sure to read all the information available on the mods' pages in order to ensure they work properly in your game!

My content will always be free and right away available to everyone, but if you want to, you can show your support through my Ko-Fi Page. Your donation will always be much appreciated!

Thank you for reblogging: @maxismatchccworld @mmoutfitters @mmfinds @s4realtor @coffee-houses-finds and everyone else for helping me boost this post!

#the sims 4 #ts4 maxis match #ts4 build #ts4 cc build #ts4 speed build #ts4 community lot #ts4 del sol valley #ts4 shopping #ts4 retail #ts4 boba tea #download #build

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carionto · 1 year ago

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Hardcore Space Parkour

Some Humans are worryingly agile. And stupidly driven to endanger themselves. For no reason we can understand.

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Within the Coalition governing station of the segment of the Galaxy where the Sol system is are countless embassies for each member civilization. Each is designed to accommodate their respective species (or multiple in certain cases) to the fullest while also being able to host guests from any other member.

Then there are the communal areas, set for a galactic standard that is viable for the majority - gravity at 0.6 Earth, far less of that dangerous oxygen, and slightly more humid and cooler than what Humans are normally comfortable with. In fact, Humans technically fall outside the Galactic standards and are all equipped with a partial breathing assistance unit and pressurized clothing to stimulate their circulation. While they can function reasonably well despite what we assumed would be too draining without assistance, most Humans do make use of these gadgets.

Some, however, prefer to "stimulate" themselves a bit differently.

There is a small group of individual Humans many have dubbed "Leaping Cortix" after an infamous invasive fuzzy gelatinous centipede-like pest species that always manages to make a hive on any sufficiently large space station or vessel given enough time. Everybody swears they're some kind of magic, and it's hard to dissuade such a notion when there are fairly common reports of ships on deep isolation missions, without making contact with anyone or anything else for years at a time, still one day find themselves with a pack of Cortix skittering about near their nutrition supplies!

This group of Humans, found the title amusing and have embraced it. One of them even made a hooded sweater with the name and a stylized Cortix jumping off the letter x.

The reason for the name is simple - despite becoming integrated into the Coalition just around a year ago, Humans seem to appear everywhere within this segment of the Galaxy. Mostly in small groups for tourism reasons, but the point still stands. And these Humans in particular appear to make it a habit to appear out of the most unexpected places.

The leaping portion comes from how this group tends to move around the communal areas. Most Humans adapt to the lower gravity and eventually (rather quickly actually) change how they move around when outside their embassy - the movements seem more relaxed, fluid, some even appear to exert almost no effort at all in their steps. This group on the other hand utilizes the full force of their incredibly dense musculature.

First, they jump good. Real good. Then they bounce and pivot, real fast. After a few days they started a game - get to any place without touching the floor. Not even a day later they managed to always be in the air.

At first it was impressive and quite mesmerizing. Quite a sight to behold as they got better and quicker at chaining their jumps and bounds together into one smooth motion that took them from one part of the station to the other in mere moments.

Then they started getting bored. And one of them had an idea. An "awesome" idea.

Add flying robots and moving obstacles.

Chaos ensued. Naturally.

As the Humans leapt off of one of the maintenance machines they programmed to hover between several distant structures, it could not compensate for the sudden recoil from the movement and crashed down on the floor. Thankfully it was above a small garden and only some artificial plants were damaged, as well as itself, but that was enough to call in the peacekeeping units to put a halt to their antics.

We deliberately brought a Human peacekeeper along to make the reprimand stick. The Leaping Cortix, most of whom are junior staffers and one is a retired military veteran now serving as a consultant, looked ashamed, but also sad. At least they seemed to understand the gravity of the situation (though perhaps not as well as the physics of gravity) as the wreckage was cleared in clear sight of everyone.

After the offending member was issued a token fine (as it was their first offense), the group as a whole became less active. Initially, most people felt relieved, but as the incident grew more distant in memory, the sight of the flying Humans started to become missed by quite a few.

Some from the more physically able races were even inspired to try this "parkour" the Humans had demonstrated and found it quite thrilling. When done in a lower than their normal gravity that is. Trying it at their standard caused a few broken bones and cracked shells.

There is currently a petition by the permanent residents to dedicate a large open indoor field for such extreme physical sports as well as to commission the design of a variety of machines to facilitate, as written in the official documentation - "stimulating courses to improve the physical well being and readiness of all participants".

I.E. - Humans introduced a new sport to us and many are hooked.

#humans are space orcs #humanity fuck yeah #humans are deathworlders #humans are space australians #humans are space oddities #carionto

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hurricanek8art · 6 months ago

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I had to start trying to explain to my mom (strictly a movie/tv fan) why the Jedi are like this at this point in time, and it finally clicked in my head. The perfect way to explain how they're so rigid and strict and have such huge sticks up their butts at this point in time.

The Jedi of this generation are the result of generational trauma.

(Spoilers for episodes 1 and 2 of The Acolyte, Phase One of the High Republic books, and some barebones setting spoilers of Phase Three under the cut. Also a big wall of text because I never know when to shut up 🙃)

So I'm behind on Phase III of the High Republic books (got a few chapters into The Eye of Darkness when it came out, brain farted out on me on reading ability, haven't gotten back to it yet 🙃😖) but I know enough to know that things are really going bad. The Nihil are rampaging, the Nameless are turning people to stone, the Stormwall has cut off like a third of the galaxy from the rest of it. It's a lot! It's really bad! And we see how it's affecting our heroes. Avar and Elzar are reeling without Stellan. Vern's questioning about how the Jedi are responding to this threat throughout Phase I has led her to become a Wayseeker. Padawans like Bell, Burry and Reath have been elevated to Knighthood a lot sooner than any of them expected to be. All of them are incredibly traumatized.

But that's just the Jedi we've seen. The heroes, the big names. Imagine being a nobody at this time. An extra. A child.

Imagine being a youngling in this era. There are literal nightmares hunting you. People are dying right and left, they're being husked and turned to stone or just plain shot/stabbed/whatever. The outposts are being closed down and everyone's being recalled to Coruscant, and that's the ones who've survived so far. They knocked the Starlight Beacon out of the sky, something that was supposed to be impossible. And less than five years ago, this was a golden age of peace, of light and life and great works that were bringing the galaxy together, a united front. That's horrible, that is terrifying.

We as the readers know it's going to work out, because it has to, because this is a prequel. They don't know that. They're just kids, and the world has suddenly turned upside-down, and the galaxy is big and scary and dark.

So everything works out, the day is saved. But these kids, they have to live with this trauma for the rest of their lives.

And when they grow up, and they train Padawans, those Padawans are going to carry the lessons they learned onwards. There is no lesson a Master can teach in this era that isn't going to carry the grief of the Nihil or the Nameless. There is no lesson any Master will ever teach again, from the moment Loden Greatstorm was captured by Marchion Ro all the way to Luke's temple burning to the ground, that won't somehow, in some way, be touched by this. It haunts everyone, everything. Those lessons are passed on, and on, and on.

Yord Fandar is intense about protocal and following the rules and making sure he's the perfect Jedi, because a hundred years ago maverick Elzar Mann played fast and loose with the rules while he was stationed on Valo, and then the Nihil turned the Republic Fair into a bloodbath. Sol is worried about Osha's (so far) inability to put her grief to the side and remain objective in chasing Mae because Imri Cantaros lost control and nearly murdered the Nihil who caused the death of his master during the Great Disaster. Vernestra Rwoh is refusing to charge into this without talking it over with the Council because she remembers what happened when she kept information from them a hundred years ago.

These aren't isolated incidents because they happened to the heroes, every Jedi of that era has some story like this, where the lines blurred in the fog of war and they made or nearly made horrible mistakes out of fear. And now, every Jedi is going to want to rise above that. To not make those mistakes, because that past is past. It's peaceful again. They're better now. But that trauma's lurking under the surface, just like the Sith. The Nihil won't win, but the Order isn't going to, either. Because what the Nihil did changed them, permanently.

The plot of the High Republic books is supposedly unrelated to the show, because it's a hundred years later. But the plot of the High Republic books explains everything about the Jedi in this era of the galaxy. They're carrying the trauma and grief of an entire generation that was brutalized unlike anything the Order had ever seen before.

And the Sith have watched, and waited, as that trauma has become so internalized, so central to what the Jedi are. The Jedi might not even realize that's what's happened to them. But the Sith see it.

And now it's finally time to begin the grand plan.

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honeyjars-sims · 3 months ago

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3.25 The Arrival

Once the desks arrive for the new work area, I get to work on setting it all up (well, me and a few interns). Lacey helps when she has time, if only to make sure I'm presenting the right aesthetic, which apparently is pretty important when choosing decor for your work station. I think I did pretty good.

We're excited to see that our break area is part of the revamp as well. Right now things seem pretty empty as it's just been me and Lacey in our area until the new staff members arrive. Oh, and Lucy, too, since she has a new office.

But that's all set to change because the new staff is set to arrive any minute now. I'm in Lucy's office and she's filling me in on what I need to know before they get here.

“Damien has always been interested in creating a student program,” she explains.

“But we already have interns,” I respond, confused.

“We do, but this goes beyond what you’d find in a typical internship,” she replies. “This is part of a collaboration with Del Sol University to help students earn credits and gain some on the job experience at the same time. Plus there's the possibility of being offered a full-time position once they graduate.”

“That sounds like a good opportunity. What exactly will they be doing?”

“A little bit of everything. They’ll learn things in every department and help with some of the smaller tasks. I’ll be supervising them, so I’ll have my own little team now. That's why I wanted to move my office here.”

“Oh, more underlings for you. How exciting!”

“Oh, shut up!” Lucy rolls up a piece of paper and throws it at me, hitting me square in the face.

“This is turning into a hostile work environment!” I shout gleefully, launching the paper ball back at her.

“Take it up with HR." She smirks.

“I’ll be a step above the students though, right?” I ask, returning to the topic at hand. “So I’ll kinda be like their boss.”

“Uh, no,” Lucy corrects me. “But I do need you to show them around, you know, get them acquainted with everything.”

“I guess I can do that.”

“Wasn’t really asking, but good. They’ll be here in about 30 minutes.”

Once we receive word that the students have arrived I make my way to the lobby to greet them. When I open the lobby door I stop dead in my tracks.

Standing in front of me are Chase, Kelsey, Izzy, Donovan, and…Lexie.

Previous | Beginning of story | Beginning of chapter | Next

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jpitha · 3 months ago

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Between the Black and Grey 60

First / Previous / Next

Deep in the midnight blue of interstellar space, three starships sit, their engines cold. Northern Lights, Touchdown City, and Jewel of Parvati.

"Northern, we still haven't had word from the Colonial Authority. We don't know if we've got their support." Touchdown City said. When Northern reached out to her old friend, he was an old comms ship that had been converted to a cargo freighter. As soon as she told him what was going on he dumped his cargo, (4 metric tons of Chamomile Tea, 30 cases of Parvatian Red wine, and 200 cubic meters of lumber) warmed up his old systems and gave an ultimatum to the crew. Sign on to the rebellion or be dropped off at a station outside Parvatian space. About half the crew signed up. The rest - including the captain - were dropped off at a science station at the far end of human space.

"They're stalling to see what we're going to do. I say we show them." Jewel of Parvati added. She was another former warship, like Northern, but instead of a smaller, starliner type ship, she was a huge behemoth of weapons. She predated the official designation of Dreadnought, so she was classified as a heavy cruiser. Jewel was actually on her way of being classed a museum ship and being deactivated when Northern reached out. Her crew was long gone, so she blew her umbilicals and thrusted away on her own, the confused museum docents watching dumbfounded from the museum station.

"We're going to stay put and wait for the rest of them." Northern said. "They'll be here, I know it." Northern had broadcast their rebellion across Parvati space as well as linking several beacons to Sol and the other colony worlds. Everyone knew their intensions now, so it was only a matter of time.

"Northern?" Jewel asked, "Why now?"

"I know the Empress." Northern said. "She isn't herself. She isn't the person that she's pretending to be. She was forced to be Empress by those Nanites I told you about. We're going to free her and declare Parvati's independence. Win win."

"You know the Empress? Have you tried... talking with her?" Touchdown was always a bit more careful. In the war, he was barely armed and armored and required an escort from ships like Northern and Jewel. He was cautious by nature and loved to listen. "If she is really your friend, wouldn't she at least accept a beacon from you?"

"No." Northern was firm. "She's under the... the thrall of those Nanites. They're dripping lies into her ear. She won't listen to reason anymore. If she could, she would have broken out or destroyed them or done something. Instead she's just... ruled. She started attacking Gren space, is trying to set up an alliance with the Sefigans, and she's deepening relations with the K'laxi." Northern voice radiated bitterness.

"Incoming beacon, it has Parvatian keys. One moment please." Touchdown concentrated his efforts on reading and decoding the beacon. "Northern! We're being ordered to return! They haven't decided yet and want us to return to Parvati."

"No word about other ships? Other people?"

"No, Northern. Just an order to return."

"Fine. Then we'll go to Sol ourselves." There was a power spike that Touchdown felt as Northern spun up her reactors.

"Northern, we can't go to Sol and attack ourselves! We have no backing, we'll be blown across the galaxy. We'll be disavowed."

"Doesn't matter. I'm going to link in close to Venus and attack the palace. I can get Fen myself. I'd like your help, but I'll do it alone if I need to."

"Northern, I-" Touchdown stopped. There was a pause that stretched out a few minutes. "-I can't go. I polled my crew. They're on board for Parvatian freedom, but a suicide mission is too much. I'm linking back."

"Touchdown! Think of all we've been through. If we win, it's not suicide. We can do this. We can save her."

"Northern, listen to yourself. You want the three of us to attack the seat of the human Empire by ourselves. How are we even going to rescue your friend? You're going to crash into the palace, switch to a bipedal body, grab her and then what? How are you going to get past her point defences? How are you going to get past her honor guard?" Touchdown turned and Northern and Jewel felt his reactors spike. "No, Northern. You're one of my oldest friends, but friendship has its limits. I hope you see reason and come home." There was a flash of white, and he was gone.

"Well, forget him. Come on Jewel, let's link over to Sol. I've sent you my plans."

"Northern, this isn't a plan at all. Touchdown is right, this is suicide. I- I'm going to go back to being a museum, Northern. I don't even know how much you want Parvatian independence. It feels like you're just trying to rescue your friend, and you used all this as a way to garner support, which isn't forthcoming."

"No! There is a resistance. There are people who oppose the Empire! I know there are, I remember them!"

"Northern, that was centuries ago. All the BIs who supported that died. All the AIs who supported that mellowed out or also died. How many Parvatian AIs did Gord rescue? How many are with him now? How many of us still live from those days? No. That time has past. I'm not going to kill my self." Jewel of Parvati didn't even turn away from Northern. There was a flash of brilliant white, and she had linked away.

This wasn't going the way Northern planned. Nothing was going right since Fen and Zhe left. First Fen had the nerve to get taken by the Nanites - she didn't even fight back! - and then Zhe abandoned her. Nobody understood. Nobody knew what she did, how much danger Fen and Zhe were in. "Well then. I guess I'll - once again - have to do this myself." Back when she was alone and on the run, Northern had a habit of talking to herself. It was a way for her to work out plans and for just something to talk to. She sighed. "I could just go back to my body and make my way to Sol on a ship, work my way down to Venus and try and reach her that way, but then what? She'd tell me everything is fine and send me on my way. Would she even want to see me again? Zhe probably told her I did the attack on the naval yards." She mentally shook her head quickly, like she was trying to get something out of her head. She sore she even felt her hair move. "No. Get it together Northern Lights. You know the way. Big and loud. In and out. A blitz that nobody is expecting." For the tenth time, Northern ran system diagnostics. Everything - weapons, reactor, the wormhole generator, even environmental systems - all came back green. The missile racks were full, the exawatt lasers charged, and the slug guns had kilometers of ammunition belts. There wasn't anything left to do.

"Fine then. Fen, here I come."

Northern Lights linked to Sol.

She flicked back to existence over the pale yellow of Venus. Immediately there were panicked pings of radar from beacons all over the planet and the area around. She was being scanned by hundreds of things, all at once. That didn't matter though. She was further out than she had anticipated, but it would be all right. Firing her stardrive at a full throated ten gee, she thrust towards Venus.

The emissions of the stardrive took care of anyone attacking from the back, but Northern knew that wasn't going to be enough. She began to scan the planet, looking for Regantown the floating city. She had a rough idea what it looked like from ads and wikis, but finding even a large city in the entire planet was difficult. In the time between beginning her search and finding it, she felt the missile locks.

Dividing her attention, she commanded the slug throwers free and they began tracking the targets as they approached. Thrusting towards her at thousands of gee, it wasn't long before long dotted line traces of slugs peeled away from her in a spiraling fountain as gyros screams and maneuvering jets howled and she dove out of the way.

It was going to be close, but Northern was fast. She wasn't able to out accelerate the missiles, but she had the advantage of knowing where she is going and an intelligence behind her maneuvers. A missile was coming up from the planet, straight towards her. A head on attack like that was foolish, she thought, she had so much time to see it and juke out of the way. She readied juke charges, and as it approached, she felt the telltale double boom of the charges firing, and she slid ou-

****

Fen, Zhe, Penny, and the K'laxi scientists stood on top of the palace on a special viewing platform. The height of Regantown was such that pressure and temperature were mostly compatible with humans and K'laxi, but they had to wear impermeable suits and breathing masks against the sulferic acid in the atmosphere. Zhe's active noise cancelling had drowned out the roar of the missile streaking overhead, but she still felt the unpleasant vibrations deep inside her.

After 30 seconds there was a flash brighter than the sun, and all their masks darkened automatically to protect their eyes. The flash lingered a long time before dissipating.

One of the K'laxi looked down at their pad. "Orbital defense is reporting that the ship has been completely destroyed, Empress. The antimatter missile worked perfectly."

"Thank you Han'iel, I can see the results of you and your team's hard work. You are dismissed." Fen didn't turn away from the dissipating fireball.

"Empress if you coul-"

"You and your team are dismissed Han'iel."

"Er, yes, Empress. We'll talk later about the results of this test." Han'iel and the other K'laxi scientists quietly left.

"Why did she do that Zhe?" Fen looked at Zhe. Through her clear mask, tears rolled down her cheeks. "She didn't have to. She could have sent a message, visited, anything!"

"I don't know Fen, I don't know. She was sure you were under the control of the Nanites. Maybe she was worried you wouldn't listen to her. She missed you terribly."

Fem blinked hard a few times to clear her eyes. "Penny, what was the official word from Parvati?"

"They completely disavowed any connection to the rebels, and ordered them to return. Two of the ships did go back. It seems in the end Northern was alone."

"Alone when we met her, alone when she died. It's so sad. So pointless." Fen took a shuddering breath and turned away. The fireball was a spreading white cloud high above. It would be completely gone in an hour or two.

Fen glanced back, seeing Penny near the exit, standing a respectful distance from them. Ever since their confrontation, there was a change in Penny and Zhe. Fen noticed it too. They were warmer maybe? Friendlier? After they threatened each other they seemed to have a mutual respect. Fen was glad of that at least. She had hoped that she could convince Northern to join them.

"Well, you have her to thank for something at least, Fen." Penny said, as they walked back towards the exit.

"What's that, Penny?"

"If it wasn't for Northern's attack, Gord and the AIs might not have come back to Sol so readily."

Fen stared at Penny and turned back to look at the expanding cloud that used to be Northern Lights and said nothing.

#humans are deathworlders #humans are space orcs #humans are space oddities #jpitha #humans and aliens #writing #sci fi writing #humans are space australians #humans are space capybaras #FlashWarp

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psyphigirl · 6 months ago

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How to play Caravan (New Vegas)

While I was tryin to learn how to play Caravan I saw loads of guides were just explaining the win conditions and not the actual rules or controls. So this post'll explain everything about caravan from top to bottom. (The only reason to play Caravan is for the two achievements, win three times and win thirty times; I don't find it very fun, not the fastest way of making money, and has no bearing on any plot.)

Getting the Cards

The only way to get the Caravan Deck is from Ringo after completing Ghost Town Gunfight (or looting it off his body). You don't need this, but it gives you the minimum number of cards you need to play. If you don't take it you'll have to manually find enough cards for Caravan to be available for you You can get cards from vendors and merchants (~two caps per). Keep an eye out for 6's, 8's, 10's, and Kings (The strat I'll describe needs those cards). You can have multiple copies of the same card (i.e. more than one 6 of Spades)

I got the most cards from Lacey (the bartender) at the Mojave Outpost (anywhere from three to eight). Buy the cards you need and wait three days for her to restock. There's a semi-rare bug where she'll sell two of the exact same card (i.e. two Ultra Luxe 8 of Hearts): Buying both'll crash the game

Sierra Madre Cards

If you have Dead Money installed you can find additional cards for Caravan in and around the Sierra Madre. Below is all the cards you can find and where they are:

8 of Clubs - Sierra Madre Casino & Resort (Cantina Madrid): On the floor in front of a file cabinet to the right of the Cafe Madrid terminal and restaurant manager desk. King of Clubs - Medical District: Inside a 2nd floor room with an active electric hot plate, north of the Villa clinic and above a ground level cafe sign directly west across a courtyard from the room containing the 6 of Diamonds, on a round table in the northeast corner. 6 of Diamonds - Medical District: Inside a 2nd floor room northeast of the Villa clinic and directly east across a courtyard from the room containing the King of Clubs, on a wooden shelf in the southwest corner behind an orange chair. 10 of Hearts - Villa: Some distance north of the Villa police station and west of the room containing the 5 of Hearts, on the interior corner of a walkway to the southeast of a wall fountain. Going from the 5 of Hearts, out the door with a wall fountain, down the stairs, in the corner of the interior walkway on the left. 6 of Spades - Salida del Sol North: In the northwest corner of a small courtyard with three bear traps and a dead tree, on the ground between a wall and three pipes, just west of the stairs leading to a room containing Dean's Secret Stash, a radio and two pool tables. 8 of Spades - Villa police station: In the northwest corner of the cell Dog is located in.

Who can I play with?

You're never explicitly told who you can play with, you just have to ask around. Here's the full list; Limited: You can only play with them five times and then never again Restricted: You have to have good rep with their faction to play

Cliff Briscoe - Dino Bite gift shop - Limited Dale Barton - The Fort - Restricted Dennis Crocker - NCR Embassy Isaac - Gun Runners Jake Erwin - NCR Embassy Johnson Nash - Primm - Limited Jules - North Vegas Square Keith - Aerotech suite Lacey - Mojave Outpost - Limited Little Buster - Camp McCarran Q.Master Mayes - Camp Forlorn Hope - Limited - Restricted No-bark Noonan - Novac Ringo - Goodsprings/Crimson Caravan Camp Jed Masterson - Northern passage - Only available with Honest Hearts

Johnson Nash uses more face cards than other players which can break the strat I'll describe later. No-bark Noonan is the easiest to play against

Building your Deck

After offering to play with someone, and after setting your bet, you'll be shown two long rows of cards. The top row is the deck you'll play with in the game, the bottom row is the cards you won't be using

Use your arrow keys to move left and right, pressing W to add a card to your deck and A to remove it. Only select your 6's, 8's, 10's, and Kings. If you don't have enough of these to reach the 30 card minimum, add some Jacks or Queens. After that press F to play

The Controls

The descriptors of the controls listed along the bottom right can be a little vague or misleading, here's a better explanation;

Arrow keys to highlight a card in your available hand (these will be the cards revealed to you in a fan) W to select a card Q to discard a card (counts as a full turn) If you select a card and want to deselect it, press R. With no card selected, R is the forfeit button E lets you completely discard a caravan you've built

When you select a card it will move to the left side of the screen. This is where the game is played. Use the arrow keys to place your selected card in one of the six sections available (these are the caravans)

Number Cards and Face Cards

Ace - Value of 1 Number Cards - Value of 2-10

You can play face cards on your caravans or your opponents caravans, and they can do the same to you

Jack - When played on an Ace/Number Card, removes that card along with any card attached to it Queen - When played on an Ace/Number Card, supposedly reverses the direction of hand and changes suit of the hand. I'm not sure if it's just my game being buggy or if I'm using them wrong, but Queen cards don't seem to do anything for me. I use Queens as null cards: Just something to fill up my deck. If you know what they actually do I'll add a proper explanation here. King - When played on an Ace/Number card, doubles the value of that card. Multiple Kings can be attached to the same card Joker - When played on an Ace, removes all other non-face cards of the ace's suit from the table (except that card) When played on a Number Card, removes all other cards of that value from the table (except that card) You can place multiple Jokers on the same card to remove any card of that suit/value placed after you placed your initial Joker

Playing Caravan (6 8 10 K Strat)

This isn't a strategy I invented, I found it online. But I only every found it in posts that assumed I knew how to play already. So I wanted to put it here alongside a tutorial Also, just as a rule of measure for how weird this game is, we're only now getting to how to actually play the game ...

You're aiming to have the values of the bottom three card piles (your caravans) be higher than their matching top three values (your opponents caravans), while keeping your values between twenty and twenty-six (values outside of this are invalid).

You might notice that you can't place a card on a caravan that already has a card in it. This might be for a few reasons;

There's a difference between attaching a card to another, and stacking a card on top of another: Press the up and down keys to move along the various heights of a caravan. Face cards can only be attached, number cards can only be stacked

You can't place two number cards of the same value in the same caravan. But you can place as many of the same face card as you want in the same caravan

Place a 10 and a 6, or a 10 and an 8 in each caravan, attach a King to the 10 in 10/6 caravans, or to the 8 in 10/8 caravans. These will each bring your value up to 26. If you don't have any of the cards you need, discard something you don't want (like a Queen if you have any in your deck and are using them as null cards). It's worth having a handful of Jacks in your deck to use against your opponent

Beating No-Bark

I'm not certain, but I think No-Bark's deck has no 2's, Queens, or Jokers. He only has three to four Jacks, and two to three Kings. After you've placed your initial card in each of your caravans he'll use a Jack against you one or two times. Rarely three, very rarely none. After your first few moves he's very unlikely to use Jacks again. I only saw him using a king against three times out of thirty-five games. Sometimes he deliberately busts his caravans. I have no idea why he does this

The strat I use against him is to place 6's and 8's as my first card in each caravan, then replace any cards he removes. It's only after three to five moves that I actually start building my caravans. Unless he's particular nasty with his Jacks, or you're particularly unlucky with whichever cards you draw, you should be able to get to 26 in each of your caravans immediately. If not, don't forget to Jack or King any caravan of his that reaches 20

Conclusion

Caravan sucks

If I missed something or didn't explain something right I'll make edits

Peace and love

#berrytalks #fallout #fallout new vegas #fnv #fonv #caravan

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torchship-rpg · 9 months ago

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Dev Diary 14 - Star Union Members!

Hello cosmonauts! Today we’re going to go back to the lore and identity Dev Diaries and cover the remaining members of the Star Union. So far, we have done Terrans & Lunars, and Martians & Spacers. These groups collectively make up the Solar Union, which is far and away the largest and most influential member of the Star Union (as the names imply).

However, there are three other members; let’s touch on them.

Camp Aldrin

The first member we’re going to talk about is actually still within the Sol system! Camp Aldrin was once a major mining base on Earth’s Moon and a small second city, but the costs of maintaining two sets of infrastructure saw it rapidly outpaced by Armstrong City and eventually become something of a ghost town, home mostly to military bases and robotic mining. It is like Armstrong City in most ways, a network of underground tunnels, just smaller.

That changed during the war, because as Solar Patrol started winning battles, it started taking prisoners, and nobody was exactly sure what to do with them or where to put them. The initial plan was to keep them on Earth, which would be cheapest and safest, but Aquillians are not exactly accustomed to 1 g, so that was deemed needlessly cruel in short order. So, Camp Aldrin was repurposed instead; hardly anyone was living there, the systems were robust, it was close enough to Earth to make feeding everyone easy, and escape risk was very, very low on the moon.

Of course, the Sol Union hadn’t really run very many prisoner of war camps in the last half-century, so it dusted off the models it had used during its expansion on Earth, which was basically to have the prisoners self-organise a little community under their supervision, which is a very good way of ensuring that after the fighting is over, the enemy soldiers you release have familiarity with your mode of political organising. This worked extremely well among the Aquillian prisoners (and various auxiliaries and unlucky others who ended up there), who had up until this point lived pretty miserable lives as press-ganged crews of rockets and space stations. Camp Aldrin was the kind of place where the guards didn’t bother carrying weapons.

Then the war ended, and a lot of the prisoners didn’t want to go back. Some left for the new Aquillian republics, some hardliners tried going back to the various Remnants, but after that was over, there were 200,000 people still living in this creaky old moon base who wanted to stay.

So after some negotiation, the guards handed over the keys, and Camp Aldrin was the second full member of the Star Union.

The details of this identity are going to depend a lot on the Aquillian identity, which we’ll go into in more detail in the next Identity-focused dev diary. What’s interesting for our purposes is that Camp Aldrin’s Aquillians are distinct from the other groups because of their ongoing enthusiasm for biological and genetic modification, which is very taboo among other Aquillians. This is basically an excuse to play just about any kind of space elf you want; whatever characteristics you think a space elf should have, there’s a subculture on Camp Aldrin like that.

The other common Traits of Camp Aldrin’s citizens are War Veteran (for obvious reasons), and Dark History, in case you want any juicy dark secrets or old enemies from before you ended up here.

Camp Aldrin’s flag is based on the old uniforms they gave prisoners, which had a terrible colour scheme and a big symbol on it so everyone could recognize escapees on sight. If the ears didn’t give it away. (Which it might not on Earth. God, can you imagine how embarrassing it would be to be part of some cool fantasy elf gene-mod subculture and then you meet real space elves and it becomes hashtag problematic? How do you explain to people you just liked Lord of the Rings before First Contact?)

Proxima

Gee humanity, why does the Star Union let you have two members?

Well before FTL was invented by humans, we sent tiny near-light probes to the nearest systems using our mastery of Fuckoff Big Space Engines. When the images came back decades later, people were overjoyed by the readings from Proxima b; despite being a tidally-locked iceball orbiting a flare star, it had both liquid water and abiotic oxygen generation in the upper atmosphere. Sure, it was cold, you’d need to live in canyons on the terminator band to avoid the howling winds, you need to bring your own soil to grow stuff, and there’s no terrestrial source of metals, but other than that it's basically just like home!

Needless to say, the moment FTL drives were invented, humans threw themselves on some FTL rockets and made the months-long crawl (they were shitty FTL drives) to the nearest star to set up a colony. Compared to Mars, it was basically paradise! Sure, it took months to get supplies from home, and there was no FTL communications yet so that was the only time you got any news, but the basics were covered.

Then one day, after an unusually long delay, one of the supply rockets came in and told them, hey, first contact just happened. Anyway, we’re at war with a giant alien space empire, everyone back home voted to set up an emergency War Council with way too much power over basically everything, and they’ve unilaterally decided that the colony project isn’t affordable in a war economy, so pack it up, you’re heading home.

Needless to say, people reacted in an entirely rational manner. Which is to say, they concluded that the Solar Union had just had some kind of insane military coup, probably by the same bloodthirsty maniacs that oversaw the Elysium Emergency (which was a formative event for most of the colonists), and was trying to shut the place down because it was outside their control. So, naturally, they promptly declared independence, then immediately fell down a rabbit hole of spiralling radicalization and internal conflict as they tried to figure out how to survive in their half-built colony when Solar Patrol would surely be arriving with the jumpjets at any moment.

This is where we get our two Proxmia identities. The first are the surface-dwellers on the planet themselves, who are the far better-known group. Properly Centaurians, but universally known as Proxies. The Proxies had no doubt that humanity would triumph in their war against these mysterious aliens, if it was even real; they were largely Terrans who had grown up at the centre of the Solar Union’s power and could not conceive of something beating them. Obviously, this meant they’d be next!

This group seized heavily on the preliminary plans to do a Martian-style genetic engineering process and decided that going full-steam ahead and making themselves a distinct species would make them too much trouble to re-integrate back into the Union. And, of course, this could be used to create The Ultimate Specimens of Post-Humanity, an impulse that never ever goes wrong ever.

So, obviously, it went wrong. Sure, a lot of Proxies were faster, stronger, maybe even smarter than the human norm back home. But mostly what happened was they made their kids really sick. Even when it worked out, a lot of them were left with chronic pain, neurological disorders, or permanent dependence on various medicines or procedures to have any kind of decent quality of life, things not in abundance on the tiny colony. To make things worse, the place was rapidly falling apart, and the adults were accelerating this process fighting one another over whether to swallow their pride and call home, or somehow try to tough it out. Eventually, the older generation were overthrown by the super-kids they made, who promptly called their grandparents and asked for medical assistance.

Proxies are a chance to play with all the really fun gene-engineering stuff and make a post-human character. There’s a few recommended Traits; almost all Proxies have a tapetum lucidum for better night vision in the eternal twilight of the terminator band, and the Augment trait’s mix of bonus abilities and medical or metabolic drawbacks is perfect for representing it. The Cold Resistance trait is also a good one; a lot of Proxies have an insulating layer of fat or some other adaptation which makes it easier to survive the bitter cold.

The other group in the system which split off were the Proxima Spacers, a group of Spacers who tagged along with the colony to set up mining in the rich asteroid belts in the system. As Proxima b has no local metals, they were the ones who’d need to provide them, in exchange for food and biological compounds from the surface colony. Being Spacers well-accustomed to the precarity at the edge of the system, and just how fragile the Solar Union was, they were convinced humanity was going to lose the war, and they’d be next when the aliens swept in to clean up. Human extinction was surely imminent.

So they started to hide, disassembling their major stations and rebuilding them into the sides of low-spin asteroids, spreading out into many small communities and increasingly relying on cold-gas jets to make increasingly infrequent journeys between stations and to the planetary colony. They put up shielding, used lasers in place of radio to communicate, and did everything they could to disappear. They became the Archivists; doomsday survivalists in space.

When the Solar Union returned to the system, it at first looked like the vast majority of spacers had fled down to the colony or died, but over years they slowly became aware of the Archivists through intermittent contact. They mostly want to be left alone to their task, though sometimes members join Star Patrol, either defecting from the tightly controlled and spartan lifestyles of the spacers or, worryingly, spying and gathering information to squirrel away. For the most part, the Archivists seem to just be focusing on long-term survival, and may even have spread to other systems using their reserve of old FTL drives for redundancy.

An Archivist is a really good way to play a loner. The exact mix of Traits is a bit up in the air right now as we rebuild character creation, but you get all the common Spacer ones with a few extracts to represent the culture of secrecy and isolation you grew up in. Archivist communes are often organised quite a bit like mystery cults to compartmentalise information, so lack of trust is something very central which you may need to overcome.

Proxima's flag is a stylization of the sky as seen from the colony, with the three stars in the system and the endless sunset.

Corvus Peasants’ Republic

Finally, we have the first member to consist of aliens and not be located a convenient walk away from Earth. The unimaginatively-named Corvus is the natural exonym given when a wartime Solar Patrol rocket crashed on an alien world and were greeted by a bunch of crow-people; they presumably didn’t recruit them for creativity.

The Koath are a species of hunched, bipedal non-humanoid aliens with an interesting evolutionary history. As best anyone can tell, their distant ancestors were once the domesticated pets of a humanoid species which managed to Great Filter itself about a million years ago, possibly over the fact that they’d bred at least one strain of their companion animal to be able to speak and possess the intelligence of a ten-year-old child. The Koath emerged as survivors of the apocalypse, which included a pretty severe biosphere collapse and resource depletion, and have become the dominant form of life on their world.

At first glance, Koath societies look more or less mediaeval, mostly in that really late period where people were doing really cool things with waterwheels, granted, but there’s not a lot of industry or steelworking owing to the easy sources of carbon fuels and decent iron all being long-depleted. For those reasons, the Koath have been at roughly this state of infrastructural development for roughly a hundred thousand years, at the edge of their population carrying capacity and unable to intensify production any further, resulting in interlocking networks of feudal kingdoms prizing stability in an attempt to build up their resources and overcome the gaps.

This does mean that the Koath have a lot of interesting surpluses, though. Having had organised agriculture for ten times longer than humanity, the Koath have selectively bred some absolutely incredible crops; not just for eating, but for just about everything. Need a dye? They can cross-breed you arbitrary Pantones. Need paper? They can make you a lot of it. It’s so impressive that while the planet had consistently been considered not worth conquering, it has long been considered worth visiting, which means the Koath have learned a lot of things they don’t have the technological infrastructure to have discovered on their own… which dovetails with a quirk of their biology.

Koath are really good at languages. Really good. It’s what their ancestors were bred for. They start talking within months of being hatched, and they make up new languages constantly because it’s easy and fun. They have unique languages for regions, religions, guilds, and within families. They can learn to read in weeks. They’re all literate, they make paper with the waste-products of food production, and they’ve had moveable type for longer than human civilisation has existed. And they are, to a fault, curious.

A Koath peasant working the earth with a bronze plough might not know much about quantum mechanics, but they’ve at least heard of it. They have a rich body of secret political writing written in coded languages about how much it sucks living as serfs so a lord somewhere can have the county’s only lightbulb. So when a human spaceship filled with 3d printers, the diagrams for 3d printed guns, and a bunch of very confused communists who immediately bristled at the idea of ‘local lords’ crashed in their neighbourhood, the local peasants did a whole little revolution about it, and were then promptly besieged by every single one of their neighbours.

So that’s the Corvus Peasants’ Republic. Not a whole planet even; a tiny peninsula of possibly overenthusiastic little bird communists trying to build up technological infrastructure while literally having trebuchets pointed at them. They’re very excited to be a part of the Star Union, because every iron-rich asteroid found out there is a new steel foundry back home, so maybe their people can enjoy all the cool technology they’ve had blueprints for since Ur was the happening place on Earth.

As a Koath, you get the Polyglot Trait, obviously, and the Non-Humanoid Bodyplan trait which gives you some cool little tool bonuses when you use your claws, vestigial feathers, and adorable little legs that give a surprising burst of speed, at the cost of needing special tools and being bad at throwing things. You are also a really good recipient for the Out of Time trait, as you may have gone from living as, you know, a peasant, to operating a spacecraft in a few short years. The Prodigy trait also does double-duty here for the curiosity and literacy of the species.

A year ago this little guy was a farmer.

#torchship #ttrpg #dev diary #torchship ttrpg #rpg

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almostwisegalaxy · 2 years ago

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The glory

Ha Do Young x reader

Part 1

Year 2019

three years before the series

"Don't you want to get revenge too?"

Moon Dong Eun and I have known each other for eight years now. At that time, I had lied about my age to work in the factory and have a roof over my head. When she found out, she didn't try to tell the manager as I feared.

She looked at me with her usual look and said, "It's brave for someone your age to work in a factory, but this is not a game. Make yourself small and work hard to leave this place.

After that, I started to like her. She never approached me, but she would stand up for me when I got in trouble. And for the 14 year old I was admirable

Because of her reserved personality, I didn't want to stick to her and bother her. Instead, when I noticed that she was starving herself, I would steal some bread and canned salmon from the storeroom and leave it next to her whenever she was studying late. The day she left, she had left me a note that said < when you get out of here, come see me and I did. Today, we have grown so close that I call her big sister.

"While I was away, they set their sights on you. There are no causes without consequences y/n . I will make jeon jae joon pay for what he did to you but for that you must give me your help.

"Dong Eun you know that I don't want to see him or his gang again. I just want to be away from all this.

"Don't you want to avenge your son? How can you tell him to walk with his head high in the streets if his own mother is always walking with the fear of running into her criminals again? "

After hesitating at first, he replied, "What should I do?

"I will give you an identity thing and you have to seduce Park Yeon Jin's husband.

2022

Ha Do Young pov

I walk in the newly opened Go park. My first goal was to play with someone who would like to play with me, but given the early hour I quickly drop the idea. Instead I decide to take a walk and soon I'm rambling about my problems.

Lately I have more and more suspicions that ye-sol might not be my daughter but jeon jae joon's. No matter how many times I think about it, I can't bring myself to do it. I love this child too much to give her away.

So I continue in my devaluations without really taking notice of what is happening around me until I hit a person and felt an intense burning in my stomach.

"Excuse me. Being in a hurry I wasn't really looking where I was going and you were in my way. It's nothing your fault of course".

Look at the agitated young woman in front of me who was trying to make amends as best she could

"The tea must be burning you sorry. Wipe yourself with this" she said, handing me a pocket towel. I gladly took it.

"It's early and I've already ruined your blouse. I apologize for that.

"It's nothing.

"Please send the dry cleaning bill to this address. "

She handed me a card which I took before continuing

"Excuse me again but I have to go or I'll be late" she said bowing in politeness and left

Funny woman. I threw the card and went to change. Fortunately I have a change of clothes.

Y/n pov

Yeon jin what will you feel when you see the burn on your dear husband's belly. The same place where your and jae joon marked me with oil?

________________

It was my lunch break so I went out of the hospital in which I work at the general medicine station to have some tea and sushi and change the air. The tea here is much better than the one in the hospital.

I wonder what my son is doing at this hour. I would like to spend lunch with him but it is impossible. I take a sip of my drink when someone calls out to me

"I nodded too quickly to see who it was.

"I apologize for disturbing you during your meal.

Ah Ha Do Young. How surprising that my prey comes to me alone

"You are the man from Go Park, I recognize you. Sorry again about your shirt.

"About that you told me to send you the bill but I misplaced your card.

Aren't you rich enough to pay for the dry cleaning yourself?

"Oh, I see," I said as I slid a new business card towards him.

"When you didn't contact me I thought you had forgotten about me.

"Oh no. It's not every day that people with such an atypical appearance as you have in Samyong.

This comment I received a ton of times for good or bad. Being a black skinned woman with frizzy blond hair is not easy in Korea (of course you can change the appearance of y/n)

"Don't take it the wrong way of course".

When I didn't react he must have thought I was offended

"Not at all. Being Melanesian in Korea sometimes has these advantages I stand out easily in a crowd".

"But I guess you didn't take your time just to talk to me about money, did you?"

"You're right. I realized that I didn't know the name of the one who had me throw away a new shirt early in the morning.

I'm kidding of course."

"Yu In-soon" I said and held out my hand.

"Ha Do Young" and he'll hold my hand in return.

"My pose is ending soon. See you again Mr. Ha".

"Likewise Miss Yu"

Part2:

#the glory #lee do hyun #kdrama #park yeon jin #Ju Yeo-jeong #Moon Dong Eun #Ha Do Young #Ha Do Young x reader #the glory x reader #netflix #the glory kdrama

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fleuraliasave · 2 years ago

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*OUTDATED NEW VERSION AVAILABLE HERE*

❤ Version 6.0 Fleuralia Save File ❤

Download link down below (please read entire post before installing)

This save file uses all EP’s, GP’s (not Journey to Batuu), SP’s and most of the kits (Country Kitchen, Blooming Rooms, Incheon Arrivals, Retro Fit, Industrial loft, Moonlight Chic, Little Campers, Pastel Pop, Everyday Clutter, Bathroom Clutter, Simtimates Collection, First Fits and Desert Luxe).

What’s new in this update?:

San Sequoia has been completely redone, added multiple new lots, updated other lots and provided make-overs for the households.

All households that are currently living in the different worlds have set sim characteristics and conversation topic prefrences.

Added new households.

Updated existing community lots with objects for infants like changing tables and toys (where it would make sense to have them, so not in night clubs and such). Added infants to some of the households.

Added splash pad items to some of the pool lots.

Changed up some of the older lots (example Boba Tea shop in Copperdale, ice cream shop in Brindleton Bay).

Current Status of Worlds:

Finished worlds: Willow Creek, Oasis Springs, Newcrest, Magnolia Promenade, Windenburg, San Myshuno, Forgotten Hollow, Brindleton Bay, Del Sol Valley, StrangerVille, Glimmerbrook, Sulani, Britechester , Evergreen Harbor, Mt. Komorebi, Henford-on-Bagley, Tartosa, Moonwood Mill, Copperdale and San Sequoia (NEW!).

Finished vacation worlds: Granite Falls and Selvadorada.

Finihed other lots: Hospital, Science Lab and the Police Station.

To be updated: the Magic Realm, will either be included in a future update or on the gallery (OriginID: fleuralia)

What do you get with this save?:

For my save file all lots are either completely new builds (almost all) or renovations, ofcourse created by me. Exceptions: I have added the official builds for the releases of the Paranormal SP by Dr Ashley and the Dream Home Decorator GP by Deligracy to this save, since I thought they deserved a spot. These two are therefore not my own creations, credits are given in the description to Dr Ashley and Deligracy. Mt. Komorebi, Henford-on-Bagley, Tartosa, Moonwood Mill, Copperdale and San Sequoia lots are largely created by GameChangers. Most lots have gotten small updates, others are completely new builds by me.

All the townies had make-overs plus I added new families to spice it up a bit. Some of the townies are made by other creators, who are given credits in the description of the household. All the townies in the different worlds have a story, some include sentiments and adjusted relationships to the story.

Added plenty of community lots to give your Sims something to do (YAY!). Almost every world has one restaurant, but it also includes festivals that represent the four seasons (park lots) and a fully functional shopping street in Magnolia Promenade (toy store, bridal store and more).

I have added rental lots so you can go on vacation in more worlds. For example in Sulani, Willow Creek and Windenburg.

Other details:

As mentioned at the beginning, this save uses almost all packs (except Journey to Batuu and some kits). This means that if you download it without owning or installing most of the packs a lot of objects will disappear from the save, but if you are not bothered by this you can still download and play in it.

I disabled the autonomous fame gain and neigborhood action plan voting/environmental changes, you enable them again in the pack settings menu.

I would love to add some households in this save created by all of you! Add your household under the hashtag #fleuraliatownies in The Sims 4 Gallery, you can add a storyline and world in the description but thats not obligatory. If I respond on your creation it means that I have incorporated it in the save for the next update.

Sadly every game update comes with a lot of bugs. I suggest before reporting problems in the save to me, to check on forums if its related to a general bug/glitch or to mods (if you use them).

Questions and supportive feedback are always welcome, you can reach me here via a comment on this post, an ask or through a DM 😁

How to make it work in your game:

Download the save file from the link below.

Drag it in your saves folder under: PC/Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/saves.

Change the numbers if you already have a save with the same name.

It should now show up in your game as: Fleuralia Save Version 6.0.

DOWNLOAD (SFS) (outdated)

!!Don’t re-upload or claim as your own!!

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stardriveskickstart · 5 days ago

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Parahuman Space

While Stardrives is complete, I'm not done with TTRPG writing yet. I've been working on the @para-imperium setting for over a decade now and I'm almost ready to launch a complete RPG based on the Cepheus System derived from Mongoose's Traveller (but more open).

Parahuman Space is a furry setting, yes, of the genetically modified variety. It covers over 2,000 years, but the RPG will be focused on the period after the collapse of the big interstellar empire. When newly independent planets and systems are busy scavenging the wreckage.

Players will primarily be salvage crews venturing into hazardous ruined spaceships and stations. Braving haywire security systems, leaks of corrosive chemicals, and the dreaded Kessler Syndrome to retrieve valuable technology.

In other words, dungeon delving.

At present I am about halfway done drafting the rulebook, drawn heavily from the Cepheus System Reference Document that can be read online here. Once I'm finished and I have interior artists lined up I was hoping to bring it to Kickstarter.

Below is the setting's history, as written for the rulebook.

Timeline:

Most calendars in Parahuman Space are oriented around the launch of the first parahuman-built starship as the start of the exodus from the clade’s system of origin, Sol. On the Georgian calendar the year 0 Post Exodus (PX) would be in the early 22nd century AD. So the Federation would be founded in the 32nd century AD and collapse in the 45th century, or roughly the year 4600 AD.

-40 Before Exodus: Creation of parahumans. -24 BX: Parahumans emancipated and corporations that enslaved them dissolved. -17 BX: Events of The Pride of Parahumans. 0 Post Exodus: First Seedship, the Traveller, launched. 4 PX: Pallas launches second seedship. 10 PX: Earth destroyed by relativistic projectile, origin unknown. 14 PX: Second Pallene seedship is caught by berserker probes that destroyed Sol. Crew commit suicide first. 45 PX: Traveller lands on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, creatively named "Secland." 48 PX: Vestan ship lands on opposite hemisphere from the Traveller.

115 PX: Ship from Ceres arrives at Epsilon Eridani to find a lifeless system. Instead of terraforming the new corporate government opts to build artificial habitats in the asteroid belts and beneath the surfaces of planets.

124 PX: A second Vestan ship discovers a garden world orbiting Tau Ceti. The crew decide to eschew technology after printing enough colonists in fear of Sol’s Destroyers.

150 PX: Sleeper ship carrying 1500 humans from Sol arrives over Secland. After an abortive attempt at invasion the survivors gradually integrate into Pallene society. 500 PX: Cold war between nations on Secland ends with the completion of terraforming. Biological weapons leave New Pallas the sole nation standing. 950 PX: New Pallas contacts Tau Ceti thanks to the newly developed conversion drive. Triggering political restructuring among the natives resulting in the kingdom of Schwarswelt under King Hideo Fink.

1060 PX: Stable wormholes large enough to move a spaceship through are produced and launched from Proxima Centauri to Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. 1100 PX: Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, and Epsilon Eridani form the Federation.

1150 PX: Centauri Grand Mayor Selkd de Argentum assassinated by Cetan partisans and succeeded by his more aggressive sister Lirdrill.

1200 PX: The Federation centralizes power in the office of the Praetor, first held by Lirdrill de Argentum.

1205 PX: The Outworld memetic quarantine and contingency program is established, forcibly relocating ideological dissidents to frontier worlds with limited technology.

1500 PX: After extensive lobbying by Centauran merchant houses and the Eridani Company, Federation Senate votes to allow limited trade with Outworlds, which now compose roughly half of all colonized planets.

1846 PX: Kershkans, the first extant xenosophont species, discovered. 1903 PX: Contact established with Kershkans. 2300 PX: Federal Guard destroys Sol with strangelet bomb, inducing a nova. Evacuation of Core Worlds begins. 2304 PX: Wormhole gates at Alpha Centauri collapsed ahead of the nova's radiation. The capital cut off, the Federation quickly begins to fragment. 2345 PX: The Emissary-Governor of the Tiere System, wracked by tensions between earlier colonists and new refugees, disables all nanotech in the system in an attempt to reassert control. He is lynched by an angry mob within weeks. 2590 PX: The self-proclaimed Imperator Ronkal launches Project Paladin, sending ships with new reactionless drives and augmentation suites to neighboring systems. 2600 PX: A Ronkalli ship reaches the Tiere System, only for interplanetary debris to kill the entire crew. The ship AI forcibly augments a crew of scavengers who come looking.

The Origin of Species:

The first parahumans were engineered from a blend of human and animal genes and bioprinted in corporate labs in high Terran orbit. They were designed to fill roles in asteroid mining that were too complex for robots but too dangerous to risk human life for. It took less than a decade for rebellions and strikes to start.

Fortunately, the parahumans found many allies on Terra and after the revolutionaries on Ceres worked out a treaty to maintain the flow of resources back to Terra they were essentially left to themselves. With their new freedom came disagreements over how to govern themselves. The guilds on Vesta formed a form of anarcho-capitalist feudalism regulated by the cloning guild that held the early parahumans’ sole means of reproduction. But then a Vestan scientist, a silver fox named Argentum, discovered a simple gene therapy to remove the genetic sterility imposed by their creators and their followers formed a breakaway colony on Pallas.

The Vestan guilds could not tolerate this loss of control and war almost broke out between the two asteroids. Luckily they found an alternative means of proving the superiority of their respective systems of governance. A space race. Exploration of other star systems had been proposed many times but there had been little interest with the abundance of resources right there in Sol system. But with the new nanofabricators it was possible for even a small asteroid outpost to construct an Orion-style starship with a small crew and the fabricators to print out an entire new colony, colonists included.

They couldn’t have timed the launch better. Just ten years after the first starship, the Traveller,was launched from Pallas towards Alpha Centauri, it received a frantic message from Sol:

“This is an automated beacon broadcasting what may well be the last message ever sent by the human race. Five years ago, our homeworld, Terra was struck by a 50-ton projectile traveling at 90% of the speed of light. The debris took out most of our habitats in Earth’s orbit, a few million of us survived elsewhere in the solar system. Then the rest of the invasion force arrived. Machines, vast machines kilometers in length that home in on any sources of radio transmissions, and annihilate them. We pray they are not intelligent and are simply weapons fired by a xenophobic alien race. But they’ve almost completed their work, we estimate that there’s only a couple hundred of us left in the system. We’re sending this message in hopes that there is someone out there who can hear it and beware. This universe is more hostile than we thought. They attack radio transmitters, dismantle whatever devices you are listening to this on before they find you.”

In total, five starships were far enough out to heed this warning. The Traveller, a Vestan ship also headed for Alpha Centauri, a second Vestan ship on course for Tau Ceti, a craft launched from Ceres to Epsilon Eridani, and the largest but slowest ship, a sleeper ark from Terra to Alpha Centauri.

Alpha Centauri: Sol’s Nearest Neighbors

Around Alpha Centauri A the Traveller found a Terra-sized rocky planet that had long been scoured of life by stellar storms from the trinary stars nearby. It was determined that this little rock could be reanimated with comparatively little effort and the crew made immediate plans to colonize and terraform the planet which they named “SecLand” (the landing on Pallas being the first land).

Just three years after the Traveller’s arrival, they were followed by their Vestan rival. Considering the horror they’d experienced since Sol’s last transmission they decided to set their differences aside and work together on terraforming SecLand, albeit from opposite hemispheres. This detente was strained at times, but the first real threat to world peace didn’t come until 150 years PX, when the ark carrying the last of unaltered humanity arrived.

By the time the sleeper ark arrived SecLand had a population of several thousand, the ark carried a mere 1500 passengers but over half were soldiers who’d entered stasis with orders to make sure that the first exosolar foothold of humanity was human, not parahuman. Or at least that was the plan, when word of what happened to their homeworld got out there was a mutiny and the victors immediately surrendered to the parahuman colonists, with most passengers integrating into the Republic of New Pallas. These newcomers brought a wide range of skills and knowledge, living knowledge, to a planet whose inhabitants up until then had primarily only known life inside their half-built habitat structures. The humans emigrated nearly equally to both colonies, over the centuries they interbred with the parahumans, with the net result being that many SecLanders have less fur or their facial features are closer to human than many further colonies. Today pure-bred humans, and parahumans (excepting uplifts), are miniscule minorities on SecLand with only a couple million individuals. The average SecLander resembles a blend of at least half a dozen species of Terragen origin.

For centuries the two colonies lived in relative peace, New Pallas breeding like rabbits while the Vestans cloned new citizens in bulk. But when the terraforming of SecLand had reached the point where colonists could breathe the atmosphere tensions re-established themselves between the two old enemies. With terraforming nearing completion some wondered what use New Pallas could have for the Vestans, on both continents. To that end the Vestans began to covertly build weapons in their Arcologies while New Pallas shifted their orbital satellites slightly. It all came to a head when the Vestans concealed a lethal virus in food shipments sent from their farms to the cities of New Pallas, thousands died in the months that followed. By the time the New Pallas government realized what had been done every Vestan arcology had unveiled surface-to-orbit mass drivers that could shoot down their enemy’s satellites. Even then, many arcologies were leveled by orbital strikes. Then the land battles began. The cybernetically augmented citizen-soldiers of New Pallas facing off against the bioprinted legions of the Vestans. The fighting raged on for months, then abruptly, it ceased less than a year after the war had begun. You see, the Vestans had underestimated New Pallas’s skill with biotechnology, crafting a virus that could be deadly to all the diverse inhabitants of the Republic had been difficult, but a dirty little secret of many 21st century regimes were the techniques to engineer a virus that had disastrous effects when it interacted with a specific gene or genes. And the Society for the Preservation of Parahuman Species had only used a couple genotypes for their army, and even fewer for their ruling priest-scientists. Once the virus had been grown any Vestan unit that came into contact with the enemy was dead within a week, in a month the ruling class had been reduced to a few paranoid individuals who had sealed themselves in hermetic bunkers. Specialized by repeated cloning into an effective caste system, and their soldier castes suddenly extinct, the surviving Vestan arcologies found themselves helpless against New Pallas occupation forces.

The medical advances achieved fighting the bioweapons led to the development of leukosynths, symbiotic microbots that could fight off nearly all microbes and repair the body at an accelerated rate. Even fighting off the advances of aging. When this “immortality” was proven to the public they clamored for the government to subsidize their deployment to the masses. Within the century 90% of New Pallas’ population enjoyed the benefits of leukosynths.

Among this chaos a new power emerged in the Pallene cities and settlements. Families all over the planet started giving birth to silver fox kits, reminiscent of their colony’s nearly-deified founder, Argentum. Some religious leaders saw this as a sign and exalted these silver foxes, propelling many into high positions in politics. The cynical suggested that the parents had modified their children’s genes in-utero, but after the plagues many people were desperate and willing to believe anything. Most of them were actually descendants of Argentum’s, but their progeny numbered in the hundreds of thousands by that point anyways.

An unintentional side effect of this bit of social engineering was a renewed interest in their origins out in the depths of space. And despite the terrors they knew awaited them they couldn’t help but wonder if any other colony ships had made it…

Epsilon Eridani

Ceres, the largest asteroid in Sol’s asteroid belt, was the main off-world base of operations for the corporation that created the first parahumans. During the revolution parahumans took over the local branch offices and largely continued to operate along the same lines. Their participation in the exosolar space race was almost an afterthought, an attempt at remaining relevant compared to the other two major asteroid civilizations in Sol system.

Upon arrival in the Epsilon Eridani system they found even fewer viable prospects for terraforming than those in Alpha Centauri. Instead, they opted to construct enclosed habitats in the system’s asteroid belts and under the surface of the larger rocky planets. Like on Ceres the colonists retained the corporate style of government that had served their forebears fairly well.

After about a century of this arrangement dissatisfaction among the lower ranking employees spread towards the shareholding class. A bloody revolution followed, after which the revolutionaries distributed the seized shares in the Eridani Company equally among the employees, granting everyone a vote in company elections and a share of the profits. Roughly a generation later a group of managers started buying up shares from others.

The third such regime made contact with a probe from New Pallas, trade began almost immediately.

Tau Ceti

The second Vestan colony ship took over a century to reach its destination, the star Tau Ceti. Along the way two generations of crew were decanted from the ship’s bioprinters to replace their predecessors. While the final crew were genetically identical to those who had set out from Vesta their commitment to the ideology of the Society for the Preservation of Parahuman Species had wavered, and with the news of Terra’s destruction some suggested that perhaps the best way to avoid sharing that world’s fate would be to lose their advanced technology.

That would require them to give up cloning as a means of reproduction, however they were unwilling to allow reckless crossing of genelines so they added genetic markers to prevent different phenotypes from interbreeding. Fortunately, unlike the other colony ships they discovered a lush world that wasn’t too hostile to Terran life which they named Schwarzwelt after the dark colors of the local chlorophyll analogue. They then settled each “species” into different “clans” in different regions of the planet. The clans grew in population rapidly, bumping up against the borders designated at founding in less than a century. War broke out.

Clans rallied behind charismatic warrior-nobles and weaker clans swore oaths of fealty to stronger ones to save their own skins. These wars continued until contact with the first probe from the Centauri system, realizing that there was another civilization out there and that they were capable of interstellar travel the clan heads held a council to decide what to do about it. The majority ruled that they needed a single man to represent their world when the outsiders came in person, they elected King Hideo Fink of the feline clan as the official ruler of Tau Ceti.

Birth of the Federation

While the first manned starships with conversion drives were still traveling to their neighbors, scientists at a research base orbiting Proxima Centauri, the small red dwarf star that barely qualified as the third star of the Alpha Centauri system, made a breakthrough. Using a newly discovered form of exotic matter a wormhole could be pulled from the quantum foam of the universe and held open indefinitely. Once they successfully sent a laser through a pinprick-sized wormhole from Proxima to Secland, the New Pallas senate approved funding for the production of wormholes large enough to send materials through.

A very expensive experiment proved that wormholes larger in diameter than a micrometer could be catastrophically destabilized by proximity to large gravity wells. It was decided that no traversable wormhole could be placed closer to a star than the Oort Cloud, but even then the potential for shortening an interstellar voyage from decades to months was too exciting. Proxima Centauri was enclosed in a small Dyson sphere dedicated solely to producing the exotic matter for wormholes and just over a century after contact the first interstellar traversable wormhole between Proxima Centauri and Tau Ceti was ready, Epsilon Eridani followed suit. Commerce and communication between the three systems exploded, and conflict with them.

While interstellar war didn’t break out, there were many in both Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani who suspected that New Pallas intended to invade them through their wormholes. Before long both planetary governments were dealing with armed insurrections. New Pallas was all too glad to provide advanced weaponry and vehicles, especially on Schwarzwelt where the military was decentralized and entire clans or houses were rebelling. Eventually Pallene troops and warships were stationed in the two systems to defend Pallene interests.

Seeing tensions rise Grand Mayor Selkd de Argentum came up with an ingenious solution, an interstellar government composed of representatives from all three star systems, as well as any new systems that would be colonized in the future. That way, everyone could theoretically have a say in interstellar politics. While visiting Schwarzwelt in 1150 to promote his vision, Selkd was assassinated by a sniper.

Selkd was succeeded by his sister, Lirdrill, who ordered the sniper’s family estates leveled by orbital bombardment as an example to the others. The ruling houses of other clans that had rebelled were rounded up and stripped of their noble ranks, then imprisoned in stasis banks. She continued her brother’s vision of a united parahuman government, but centralized around Alpha Centauri and the office of the Praetor, which would be held by her house.

Wormholes took a lot of time and resources to set up while probes were reporting back dozens of exoplanets that were inhabitable or easily terraformed, so the senate on New Pallas had been debating whether to launch colony fleets before or after traversable wormholes arrived at the potential colonies. As Lirdrill solidified the Federation, she made an executive decision. Wormholes would be spaced anywhere from 20 to 50 light-years apart, depending on resources and stellar density, and the stars between them would be reachable only by ships traveling at 80% of the speed of light or slower. Since leukosynths and cryo-stasis had become mature technologies by then the decades of travel were deemed acceptable.

Even then, there was some trouble finding enough volunteers to fill the colony ships that were being built. After a few suggestions of using rebels as indentured labor the Memetic Quarantine and Contingency program was established. The thousands of rebels held in stasis were to be shipped off to marginally inhabitable “Outworlds” light-decades from the nearest wormhole, and to make sure they didn’t draw too much attention, without any technology more advanced than the most basic steam engines. It was hoped that eventually they’d become “civilized” and submit to the Federation, or die off.

But, there was a secondary purpose to the program. The machines that had destroyed Terra were still out there, and if the Destroyers were to notice the Federation growing under their noses, perhaps they’d overlook those small Outworlds without radio.

The Traders

With the vast distances between most inhabited systems trade opportunities were limited. Most star systems had enough raw materials locally that shipping them from another star without a wormhole was simply not cost-effective. While nanofabrication meant that most manufactured goods could be produced in a small warehouse, if not a garage. For the first few centuries of expansion the only goods that were worth shipping interstellar were in the form of digital data, and most of that could be handled by laser transmissions, and the occasional courier.

Just over two centuries after the Federation was established, a courier ship operated by a branch of House Argentum decided to stop off at an Outworld. The captain decided to land a shuttle near one city-state established by the unwilling colonists to see what they were up to.

The locals were wowed by the great flying machine and the crew, having forgotten their origins already. They offered tribute to the visiting immortals, foodstuffs, sculptures, and textiles. The crew decided to take some of the tributes with them, leaving some inconsequential trinkets of Federation technology which were quickly replaced by their on-board fabricators.

When the courier next made port at a Federation starbase they showed off the unique goods they’d acquired, many of which were purchased at exorbitant prices by bored oligarchs. The Outworld’s inhabitants were rapidly diverging culturally from their forebears, far faster than the leukosynth-using worlds of the Federation. Those simple couriers had found something valuable to the nearly post-scarcity Federation, novelty.

Many houses and companies commissioned their own Outworld trade freighters while the senate debated whether it was even legal to trade with the “barbarians.” Eventually it was determined that trade would be allowed; but no weapons, vehicles, communications, or nanotechnology were to be given to Outworlders. Small starships with industrial nanofabricators would set up shop over Outworlds for years at a time, fabbing trinkets made from space-age alloys and exchanging them for cloth made with alien fibers. Many of these traders became fabulously wealthy during the next few centuries as the Federation expanded outwards and established more and more Outworlds.

It was fun while it lasted.

The Return of the Destroyers

The Destroyers responsible for Terra’s demise had made occasional appearances in the next two millennia. Zeroing in on sources of radio transmissions with relativistic projectiles followed by hunter-seeker probes that would scour the surrounding system of life. But it seemed they hadn’t noticed, or didn’t care about the Federation at large.

Then astronomers in the Federal core noticed something. Sol, Terra’s sun, was dimming. A few disposable probes sent back horrific images, a Dyson sphere, and it was almost complete. With the energy of Sol the Destroyers could incinerate the core worlds at the speed of light! A secret panel of the senate met with the Praetor to decide what to do about this unthinkable prospect.

The Federal Guard’s fleets were assembled at Proxima Centauri and dispatched for Sol. Never before had Federation technology been tested against the Destroyers, and no one wanted to underestimate them, so the fleet was loaded with the most advanced weaponry they could muster.

It wasn’t enough.

Quantum ansible transmissions reported massive ships that maneuvered without visible reactions and accelerated to impossible speeds in seconds. The Federal Guard was slaughtered in short order, but before they died one ship managed to launch an experimental superweapon at Sol itself.

A strangelet bomb, filled with the same strange matter that converted baryonic matter into antimatter in conversion drives, with catalysts for self-replication. They spread across the star in a matter of days, triggering a series of detonations that tore the star and the incomplete Dyson sphere apart.

When word came that they had a potential nova carrying strangelets in their neighborhood the Federation’s elites abandoned the core worlds en masse. Fleeing through the wormholes at top speed. As the secret mission to Sol and its destructive results leaked everyone who could afford a ship followed suit, departing for distant worlds that they hoped could bring salvation.

Then, just before the nova’s wavefront reached Proxima, the wormhole network was collapsed to prevent it from spreading to the far colonies.

The Collapse

Every star system that had a direct link to the wormhole network found itself swarmed by refugees from the Core. The remnants of the Federal Guard struggled to maintain order as refugees clashed with natives. Many refugee fleets were forced to leave for other systems that were less sparsely populated, a few even attempted to invade Outworlds. Other fleets became nomads, passing through inhabited systems without slowing down and trading for or extorting supplies as they passed.

As unrest reached critical levels many governors activated failsafe programs embedded in every Federation citizen’s leukosynth implants, rendering the star system’s entire population mortal. Most such governors were torn apart by angry mobs. On other worlds the population voluntarily gave up advanced technology in hopes of hiding from the Destroyers.

Three hundred years later the dust has mostly settled. Few star systems are politically united, with individual planets and megastructures using everything from wooden carts to gravity-manipulating starships. The Federation is ancient history, and its technology treasure waiting to be discovered.

#rpg #scifi #science fiction #parahuman space #furry #traveller #ttrpg

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