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We have friends!
From the memory pool of Anna Bennett
I’m going to be late for the Council meeting. I hate being late, but someone else was, they know who they are, and it’s really their fault. How the boss dealt with all those ROMcard pushers and stayed sane I can’t fathom. Well, former boss. I’m the boss now, and girl, do many of my underlings hate that. I even know why, the boss’ boss - the boss, now, I guess - pointed out I’ve got people working in the Organic and Societal departments under me who are nearly three times my age. Don’t like being ordered around by the kid. Well, I’m not a kid. I’m 44. I’m a big girl. An Elder, even, and I guess that’s something else that tends to stick into some craws that shall remain nameless. I think.
Still, kinda miss the boss. Well, former boss. Good guy, kind, patient. Cute bum, too, wouldn’t have minded having a- erherm, not relevant. Plus, he’s got a daughter who’s nearly twice my age. Cutest little grown-up girl – at least until, well, she grew up. If I hadn’t been bleeding late, would have asked if he’s got any news about her yet – she’s been missing for twelve years or so, ever since she went A-crazy. The boss – my current boss, not the former boss – said she’d gone all doomsayer on his former boss. That’s silly. No doom to be seen around, no sirrees. Everybody likes us.
Except the guys at the galactic south’s end, the really advanced ones right next to the ruined Cybrex ringworld. Those guys are jerks. They’re currently pissed off with us because we refused to pawn a Honored Elder off on them. They wanted the Great Explorer, of all people – even had the nerve to come straight to Earth, right as they pleased, and demand she let herself teleported from five thousand light years away or so. Sorry boys, we need our Great Explorer. Plenty more of the galaxy left to explore, and even with three full-time exploration crews running constantly, that’s gonna take a while. On the plus side, that means we’re going to meet lots more friends.
Everybody likes us!
Hey, speaking of friends, we’ve found some really fun ones. There’s those Tulkoid Artistes, but at the office we call them Blorg – that’s because when we got the first images of them and showed them around one of the folks at the open space went all Blorg on his workspace. Didn’t blame him, those guys are ugly. And yeah, I know, we’re the ones to talk.
No, game, quit BSing me, that's a Blorg.
Where was I? Oh yeah, friends. Lots of friends. There’s even a lot of funny robots. A lot of funny robots. A scary lot of scary funny robots. Like, could-totally-finish-squashing-our-faces robots. Except they won't. They like us. Everybody likes us.
Still running la~a~ate! Big, important news to catch. Lots of news. We've got lots of planets now, so we get lots of news. We make lots of things. We're really an interstellar empire now. So the boss says we've got to change our name. I think we're going to be the United Worlds of Mankind, that's a mouthful. We're even going to keep taking more worlds, I think the boss wants us to have nine of them by the end of next decade - that's plenty of worlds.
We can have plenty of worlds. We're rich. We're prosperous. We're numerous. We're humans. And we're not going to kick your ass, because that's just silly.
Oh, hi, Boss Onobanjo! I'm not too late, aren't I?
... 80 years until the first crisis roll
I’m going to be late for the Council meeting. I hate being late, but someone else was, they know who they are, and it’s really their fault. How the boss dealt with all those ROMcard pushers and stayed sane I can’t fathom. Well, former boss. I’m the boss now, and girl, do many of my underlings hate that. I even know why, the boss’ boss - the boss, now, I guess - pointed out I’ve got people working in the Organic and Societal departments under me who are nearly three times my age. Don’t like being ordered around by the kid. Well, I’m not a kid. I’m 44. I’m a big girl. An Elder, even, and I guess that’s something else that tends to stick into some craws that shall remain nameless. I think.
Still, kinda miss the boss. Well, former boss. Good guy, kind, patient. Cute bum, too, wouldn’t have minded having a- erherm, not relevant. Plus, he’s got a daughter who’s nearly twice my age. Cutest little grown-up girl – at least until, well, she grew up. If I hadn’t been bleeding late, would have asked if he’s got any news about her yet – she’s been missing for twelve years or so, ever since she went A-crazy. The boss – my current boss, not the former boss – said she’d gone all doomsayer on his former boss. That’s silly. No doom to be seen around, no sirrees. Everybody likes us.
Except the guys at the galactic south’s end, the really advanced ones right next to the ruined Cybrex ringworld. Those guys are jerks. They’re currently pissed off with us because we refused to pawn a Honored Elder off on them. They wanted the Great Explorer, of all people – even had the nerve to come straight to Earth, right as they pleased, and demand she let herself teleported from five thousand light years away or so. Sorry boys, we need our Great Explorer. Plenty more of the galaxy left to explore, and even with three full-time exploration crews running constantly, that’s gonna take a while. On the plus side, that means we’re going to meet lots more friends.
Everybody likes us!
Hey, speaking of friends, we’ve found some really fun ones. There’s those Tulkoid Artistes, but at the office we call them Blorg – that’s because when we got the first images of them and showed them around one of the folks at the open space went all Blorg on his workspace. Didn’t blame him, those guys are ugly. And yeah, I know, we’re the ones to talk.
No, game, quit BSing me, that's a Blorg.
Where was I? Oh yeah, friends. Lots of friends. There’s even a lot of funny robots. A lot of funny robots. A scary lot of scary funny robots. Like, could-totally-finish-squashing-our-faces robots. Except they won't. They like us. Everybody likes us.
Still running la~a~ate! Big, important news to catch. Lots of news. We've got lots of planets now, so we get lots of news. We make lots of things. We're really an interstellar empire now. So the boss says we've got to change our name. I think we're going to be the United Worlds of Mankind, that's a mouthful. We're even going to keep taking more worlds, I think the boss wants us to have nine of them by the end of next decade - that's plenty of worlds.
We can have plenty of worlds. We're rich. We're prosperous. We're numerous. We're humans. And we're not going to kick your ass, because that's just silly.
Oh, hi, Boss Onobanjo! I'm not too late, aren't I?
* *
... 80 years until the first crisis roll
Elections, seen from the fringes
Yeah, finally being able to begin to expand is nice ^^ Still going to be a while until said planets are as productive as the first two, growth with the kind of penalties I took on 22% habitability worlds is no party xD At least I'm getting close to megastructures. Just need to decide whether I want to save the third pick for habitats and roll the dice for Megaengineering, or just go Master Builders. Since science is solid, I've begun to ramp up the Unity; should have access to the 4th pick by 2310, and I'll likely use that for Galactic Wonders.
The Itebazohr Outpost, at the farthest fringe of Human controlled space.
Normally, the residents and customers at Itebazohr cared very little for politics. This particular time around, however, they had a reason to pay attention to how the debates surrounding the election of the Revered Elder would go: for over a decade now, the long-distance sensors of the detection station built near the outpost had spotted the approach of a hostile STL force slowly heading in the system's direction, and the sensors were capable of producing an estimate of the magnitude of the hostiles' strength. It numbered twelve ships, just like the Human Defense Force did, but the hostiles' designs severely outclassed the ancient Sniper-class corvettes, all of which had been built more than seventy years earlier, and had only seen their equipment updated once, to standards that were already seriously behind technologically fifty years in the past.
When a small pirate fleet can kick your ass in 2280, you're doing it wrong.
Itebazohr cared because they would be first in the line of fire, and the small, modified civilian craft used by smugglers would in no case be a match for the approaching assailants. Itebazohr's safety depended on the state's military, and the incumbent Revered Elder had no intention to invest the beginning of a credit towards building up a force matching the approaching squadron. On the contrary, he'd given assurances that mankind's allies would intervene by virtue of their defensive accords with the United Worlds if negotiations failed, and ventured that it wouldn't be too complicated to placate whoever commanded the squadron of approaching ships anyway: fifty-seven years of space exploration had brought mankind in contact with a variety of sapients, even inorganic ones, and all of them had proven capable of listening to reason.
Most of mankind agreed. Living safely on their planets, far from Itebazohr and any moving threat the vast array of sensors of the United Worlds could detect, humans cared little for investment of any sort into the military. None of the four sector-spanning political parties was really interested in building up naval strength, and none of the other three parties were as large and influential as the incumbent's Conservatives. Still, human politics were more dynamic than they'd been in the past couple of hundred years.
This year's election of the Revered Elder had higher stakes than usual. Up until then, the Revered Elder had been elected by the Assembly of Elders, themselves representatives of their various communities' elected officials. The Conservatives had held more than half of the seats in the Assembly ever since their foundation in 2238, which had all but ensured landslide victories for the party leader, Dikotsi Onobanjo, in four consecutive elections, matching Onobanjo's term of rule with his only predecessor's.
The hooded woman sighed. She wished her old acquaintance had still been guiding the destinies of her fellow humans, but that would never happened. She'd snuck inside the Council's primary compound one night to try and make contact with the comatose woman's spirit, only to find there was nothing left to contact. Whatever had attacked Josephine Dufresne's brain had turned it into mush. And the human woman had understood then that something had gone foul with regards to the great woman's downfall. A human's brain still left a distinct imprint even when impaired by a stroke, but in Dufresne's case, there was nothing at all to reach towards. Not even fragments of a stilled consciousness.
Another sigh, as the woman retreated into an alcove within view of the holographic representation of the theater where a debate was about to start airing. Onobanjo was already there, the woman noted with distaste - more than probably a result of a trick played on his opponent that day to wrong-foot the far less experienced politician. And Onobanjo rather needed to regain some political capital.
It had all started when the Revered Elder had suggested that the next election to his seat be postponed by a decade or so. it was a transparent ploy to try and avoid the consequences of the very rule he'd pushed four decades earlier, at the start of his first term, forbidding any single person from being elected by the Union Council as Revered Elder for more than four terms - a way to end any hope for Josephine Dufresne to get another chance at an election against him when he'd be the one worn by the discontent that almost invariably surfaced against an incumbent, by simple virtue of them holding power. That first win had not been a landslide, and Onobanjo owed it largely to a then-bitter Giovanna Garibaldi asking her own supporters to vote against the incumbent. The appeal had swayed just enough Elders to secure the narrow victory.
Now Onobanjo's own instrument had been turned against him, and when he saw the Union Council preferred to listen to his arguments four decades earlier rather than listen to him in the present, the Revered Elder had decided to put his mandate in the hands of a universal election. Few in the Union Council doubted that Onobanjo expected another landslide victory, his party being by far the majority party, that would legitimate his rule by virtue of popular vote and permit him to hang onto power indefinitely... and possibly suspend elections from happening again at all, if he played his chips right.
... which he didn't. In his drive to cement his position permanently, the Revered Elder had forgotten that his predecessor had never asked to hold her seat for life, but others were pushing the idea for her. And Elder Dufresne had resisted the notion, where Elder Onobanjo all but demanded that the electorate make it happen. A large chunk of his own electors had deserted him in the first-round election as a result, and what should have been a comfortable victory had now turned in a race from behind. Onobanjo had placed second, his score two percent shy of, of all people, the unassuming Kumar Poojary's.
I'd love to get that +10% Unity trait, and neither Space Miner nor Charismatic do anything for me at this point...
Alas, right now, Elder Poojary was late to a confrontation that disadvantaged him to begin with, and the two journalists who were officiating, both of them Conservative stalwarts, were making a show of the Councillor-without-portfolio's no-show. And the itebazohr crowd hated seeing that happen. They were watching Onobanjo getting re-elected by default right in front of their eyes, as few of those people living in the comfort of their planets would vote for a ruler who couldn't keep his most important appointments.
For her part, however, the hooded woman was feeling relieved. The Revered Elder's predecessor had, for all intents and purposes, been murdered under her successor's very eyes, and there was a hefty bounty on the woman's own head just because she'd spoken her mind about what she felt would one day happen to mankind. The price Kumar Poojary was now paying for standing in Dikotsi Onobanjo's way "merely" was public humiliation. And his fugitive daughter, hidden in anonymity in the farthest reaches a human could go from Earth, was at least relieved to know that her father would live to fight another day...
At least growth continues. And I'm currently sitting on 29K minerals, since there are hardly any fleet expenses to speak of.
I know, there's a military tech in there, but Deep Space Installations is a prerequisite for Voidborne x)
* *
The Itebazohr Outpost, at the farthest fringe of Human controlled space.
The hooded figure wove her way inside the cantina without being paid attention to by most of the patrons. Hiding one's face was common happenstance here, at the end of human controlled space. While it technically lay inside United Worlds territory, Itebazohr Outpost, which served as an entryway for trade and doubled as the collection point for a world's worth of resources, was one of the hottest beds for smuggling and crime, two instincts that had not quite been removed from mankind as the species was slowly being made to evolve towards higher forms.Normally, the residents and customers at Itebazohr cared very little for politics. This particular time around, however, they had a reason to pay attention to how the debates surrounding the election of the Revered Elder would go: for over a decade now, the long-distance sensors of the detection station built near the outpost had spotted the approach of a hostile STL force slowly heading in the system's direction, and the sensors were capable of producing an estimate of the magnitude of the hostiles' strength. It numbered twelve ships, just like the Human Defense Force did, but the hostiles' designs severely outclassed the ancient Sniper-class corvettes, all of which had been built more than seventy years earlier, and had only seen their equipment updated once, to standards that were already seriously behind technologically fifty years in the past.
When a small pirate fleet can kick your ass in 2280, you're doing it wrong.
Itebazohr cared because they would be first in the line of fire, and the small, modified civilian craft used by smugglers would in no case be a match for the approaching assailants. Itebazohr's safety depended on the state's military, and the incumbent Revered Elder had no intention to invest the beginning of a credit towards building up a force matching the approaching squadron. On the contrary, he'd given assurances that mankind's allies would intervene by virtue of their defensive accords with the United Worlds if negotiations failed, and ventured that it wouldn't be too complicated to placate whoever commanded the squadron of approaching ships anyway: fifty-seven years of space exploration had brought mankind in contact with a variety of sapients, even inorganic ones, and all of them had proven capable of listening to reason.
Most of mankind agreed. Living safely on their planets, far from Itebazohr and any moving threat the vast array of sensors of the United Worlds could detect, humans cared little for investment of any sort into the military. None of the four sector-spanning political parties was really interested in building up naval strength, and none of the other three parties were as large and influential as the incumbent's Conservatives. Still, human politics were more dynamic than they'd been in the past couple of hundred years.
This year's election of the Revered Elder had higher stakes than usual. Up until then, the Revered Elder had been elected by the Assembly of Elders, themselves representatives of their various communities' elected officials. The Conservatives had held more than half of the seats in the Assembly ever since their foundation in 2238, which had all but ensured landslide victories for the party leader, Dikotsi Onobanjo, in four consecutive elections, matching Onobanjo's term of rule with his only predecessor's.
The hooded woman sighed. She wished her old acquaintance had still been guiding the destinies of her fellow humans, but that would never happened. She'd snuck inside the Council's primary compound one night to try and make contact with the comatose woman's spirit, only to find there was nothing left to contact. Whatever had attacked Josephine Dufresne's brain had turned it into mush. And the human woman had understood then that something had gone foul with regards to the great woman's downfall. A human's brain still left a distinct imprint even when impaired by a stroke, but in Dufresne's case, there was nothing at all to reach towards. Not even fragments of a stilled consciousness.
Another sigh, as the woman retreated into an alcove within view of the holographic representation of the theater where a debate was about to start airing. Onobanjo was already there, the woman noted with distaste - more than probably a result of a trick played on his opponent that day to wrong-foot the far less experienced politician. And Onobanjo rather needed to regain some political capital.
It had all started when the Revered Elder had suggested that the next election to his seat be postponed by a decade or so. it was a transparent ploy to try and avoid the consequences of the very rule he'd pushed four decades earlier, at the start of his first term, forbidding any single person from being elected by the Union Council as Revered Elder for more than four terms - a way to end any hope for Josephine Dufresne to get another chance at an election against him when he'd be the one worn by the discontent that almost invariably surfaced against an incumbent, by simple virtue of them holding power. That first win had not been a landslide, and Onobanjo owed it largely to a then-bitter Giovanna Garibaldi asking her own supporters to vote against the incumbent. The appeal had swayed just enough Elders to secure the narrow victory.
Now Onobanjo's own instrument had been turned against him, and when he saw the Union Council preferred to listen to his arguments four decades earlier rather than listen to him in the present, the Revered Elder had decided to put his mandate in the hands of a universal election. Few in the Union Council doubted that Onobanjo expected another landslide victory, his party being by far the majority party, that would legitimate his rule by virtue of popular vote and permit him to hang onto power indefinitely... and possibly suspend elections from happening again at all, if he played his chips right.
... which he didn't. In his drive to cement his position permanently, the Revered Elder had forgotten that his predecessor had never asked to hold her seat for life, but others were pushing the idea for her. And Elder Dufresne had resisted the notion, where Elder Onobanjo all but demanded that the electorate make it happen. A large chunk of his own electors had deserted him in the first-round election as a result, and what should have been a comfortable victory had now turned in a race from behind. Onobanjo had placed second, his score two percent shy of, of all people, the unassuming Kumar Poojary's.
I'd love to get that +10% Unity trait, and neither Space Miner nor Charismatic do anything for me at this point...
Alas, right now, Elder Poojary was late to a confrontation that disadvantaged him to begin with, and the two journalists who were officiating, both of them Conservative stalwarts, were making a show of the Councillor-without-portfolio's no-show. And the itebazohr crowd hated seeing that happen. They were watching Onobanjo getting re-elected by default right in front of their eyes, as few of those people living in the comfort of their planets would vote for a ruler who couldn't keep his most important appointments.
For her part, however, the hooded woman was feeling relieved. The Revered Elder's predecessor had, for all intents and purposes, been murdered under her successor's very eyes, and there was a hefty bounty on the woman's own head just because she'd spoken her mind about what she felt would one day happen to mankind. The price Kumar Poojary was now paying for standing in Dikotsi Onobanjo's way "merely" was public humiliation. And his fugitive daughter, hidden in anonymity in the farthest reaches a human could go from Earth, was at least relieved to know that her father would live to fight another day...
* *
I'd love a useful ruler, for a change
At least growth continues. And I'm currently sitting on 29K minerals, since there are hardly any fleet expenses to speak of.
I know, there's a military tech in there, but Deep Space Installations is a prerequisite for Voidborne x)
* *
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Brilliant AAR love it so far........post apocalyptic earth and a fallen humanity, what a great base for a narrative........excellent pictures as well
stnylan, yeah, I had pretty much reached the limit of what you could do with just frontier outposts. For thirty years growing my economy relied on building six of them and filling in the space with stations...
jasondroth24, thanks! But blame the Stellaris DEVs, as well as the authors of Immersive Galaxy and Planetary Diversity ^^
I'm having some regrets about the setup, Pre-FTL Players allowed for a bit of early storytelling, but it also kind-of kills the AI, which doesn't seem to manage to upgrade its science and colony ships to FTL. And I don't have a single threatening neighbor, they all got neutered by a GoI and the humongous Trust cap I've got at this point (+50 from the civic, +50 from full diplo tree, +20 from another tradition and +5 from tech...) The dangerous types are stuck in the galactic North >.> At this point, I'm pretty much playing for Fallen Empires awakening and then the crisis...
jasondroth24, thanks! But blame the Stellaris DEVs, as well as the authors of Immersive Galaxy and Planetary Diversity ^^
I'm having some regrets about the setup, Pre-FTL Players allowed for a bit of early storytelling, but it also kind-of kills the AI, which doesn't seem to manage to upgrade its science and colony ships to FTL. And I don't have a single threatening neighbor, they all got neutered by a GoI and the humongous Trust cap I've got at this point (+50 from the civic, +50 from full diplo tree, +20 from another tradition and +5 from tech...) The dangerous types are stuck in the galactic North >.> At this point, I'm pretty much playing for Fallen Empires awakening and then the crisis...
Fanatical purifiers
We only wish to be friends, pretty please?
* *
Observations on registered vermin type #E4, designation: Humans
Biology: The human scum come from water-based mammalian stock. Natural reproduction mode is sexual and viviparous, but procreation seldom occurs naturally, as this type of vermin can barely stand the intimacy of another member of the species. Instead, these stains on the galaxy’s purity multiply via incubators, through a process of genetic recombination. Early-stage embryos are actually infected with parasitic worms omnipresent in this form of vermin.
Humans stand on average at a height of 1,65 meters, with the male slightly taller than the female. Both genders are often stooped and/or suffering from mismatched articulations. The vermin’s mode of locomotion is bipedal, and most individuals have two arms, though the presence of one, three or four isn’t unheard of. Skin is squishy and often oozes, colored in a range from angry red to dark blue, which can be altered through blood influx or reflux. Circulatory systems centralized on one heart; body temperature management is endothermic. One nose with one, two or three nostrils; six to ten eyes; two overlarge ears. Brain capacity of about 1350 cubic centimeters.
WARNING: species exhibit a mild range of paranormal abilities, minor in scope in 99% of individuals, dangerous in 1% of them. Origin of abilities registered as byproduct of parasitic symbiosis, retrovirally treated.
Government: The filthy humans present their political system as a dangerously democratic one, though in practice it’s barely more tolerable, its nature being oligarchic as the result of domination of one of their horrendous political parties, commonly known as "Tories". Local communities elect a college of representatives proportionate to their population. Elected officials congregate in electoral assemblies, aggregating to roughly equivalent representation by population units. Electoral assemblies choose an Elder among them and send them to a central Assembly of Elders.
Executive head of state is the suppurating fleshbag "Dikotsi Onobanjo", party head of the "Tories", holding the position designated as "Revered Elder". Mock election process is run to re-legitimize the "Revered Elder" on an irregular basis; last one run in 2297. Observation of the process leads to conclusion the damnable human parasites are irredeemably corrupt.
Spoiler: the winner is the guy who counts the votes.
Suggestion: Leave their idiot boss in charge and purge them.
Spread: Infestation concerns 11 inhabited worlds across 8 star systems. Exploited territory encompasses over 40 registered star systems. Low population growth rates leads to feeble population density. Total number of individuals inferior to us by a third.
Military: Virtually non-existent. Investment in military expansion forbidden. Fleet only consists of triads of small craft and a token squadron serving as response force, all based on puny and outdated designs. No military service, only local patrols and a couple of ceremonial regiments for historical reenactment purposes. Communications registered with 8 other star empires; suspicions of defensive agreements with at least 6 as-yet-unknown other empires.
Recommendation: take advantage of weakness of human vermin capabilities to isolate and attack one of their allies, so as to face only a fraction of potential local sector strength, and invade human scum territory. Expected resistance: minimal.
Economy : Highly regulated. Human vermin leaders don't trust human vermin commoners to make the right decisions and give all orders as to what is built, what is collected, what is traded, down to how many consumer goods each person gets access to. Vehement and stringent rejection of any notion of delegating the tasks of running sectors' economy to artificial intelligence assistance. Production levels estimated to be twice as high as ours.
Science : Pathetic militarily, very advanced in all other areas.
Final assessment: Conquer the scum. Exterminate the vermin. Purify their worlds. For the High Executioner!
* *
I was a bit annoyed by that election result. Just for the laughs, I did some testing. Onobanjo still won even if I used the console to support anybody else 255 times. So I tried killing him off - whoever replaced him as head of the Council of Religious Conservatism invariably won. Might as well have picked Imperial succession
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The one who counts the votes indeed! What can you tell us about the Kaexiinite's? Are they one of the few regular starting races that may prove to be a threat to your realm?
The first refugees
We-l-l-l, they haven't rivaled me yet, so I suppose they aren't all that interested >_< They could cause some serious headaches if they decide to go after me, though - they're small, but unlike me, they actually have a fleet (scouted a bit, saw 25K in 2298). And these days, I'm no longer swimming in minerals, for reasons that will quickly become apparent...
They came from the stars... The Deathbringers... They swept away our defenses like chaff in the desert wind, and descended upon us, swarming across the surface of Mussi. Our homeworld was taken from us, they claimed it as theirs, and we would have accepted to chafe under their oppression for a time, while we gathered our strength and prepared to overthrow them. But the Kaexiinite were not interested in oppression. They came into our homes, dragging out the males and the females, the children and their parents, the young and the old, the beautiful and the deformed - all Mussids were to be processed, we were told. And "processing" meant extermination.
We were left without hope. No salvation awaited us. Then one night, there was a flurry of activity around our invaders' command centers. We could still hack into our old machinery, and discovered the reason: an elegant and sleek craft had showed up in what was formerly our space, hailing whoever could hear their message offering friendship.
The Deathbringers didn't care. They attempted to capture that ship, only to discover it had superior drives to theirs and had escaped. They didn't pursue; one ship could mean others, and other ships could mean war. But to us... It meant that maybe there was a tiny spark of hope of escaping the Deathbringers.
That spark grew into embers when they first contacted us. The Humans. It was the strangest of happenings. The Kaexiinite controlled all space-bound communications on Mussi by the point the messenger arrived, but she didn't need antennas and arrays to speak to us. Humans don't need antennas and arrays to speak to anyone. They try to contact others through regular channels first because it is strange and frightening to find yourself suddenly reached out in the way they reach out, but when you have no hope left, you have little to fear from the voice in your head, or from its owner, no matter how strange or powerful they are.
The voice belonged to a female who called herself "Kalinda". She told us that there was a small fleet of craft capable of taking us far away from our exterminators, if we would but dare steal and take every shuttle and civilian craft we could still get our claws on to rendezvous with them. She told us that she had a team prepared to sneak to the surface of Mussi, and to come and aid us take the ships we needed to flee and find refuge on other worlds. Now there was truly hope.
The Humans were true to their word. They came to us, hid among us, they planned with us. They said they were fringe elements of their society, some of them criminals, but we didn't care. Those human "criminals" sympathized with our plight and sought to save at least some of us, when the kaexiinite "lawful" only sought our destruction. And we could sense in our minds the honesty of the Messenger when she said it wouldn't matter that we would be rescued by outlaws, that humankind would accept us all the same and grant us a place to live on their worlds.
They truly did not lie.
We forced the blockade of the Deathbringers, and for the first time in our history, Mussids engaged in faster-than-light travel. We were taken away, far away from the Deathbringers, as far from them as one could go. We were brought to two strange worlds, one dry and cold, one warm and lush, and were the first Mussids to bring order on other worlds.
Tierra del Fuego and Ecuador are two among eleven worlds settled by the Humans. Just like their ships, their cities are sleek and elegant, contrasting with the upsetting appearance of our rescuers, who suffer from even more mutations than we do, suppurate everywhere they walk and require regular radioactive irradiation. But they are kind, extremely kind, and made every effort to make us feel at home on our new worlds. And to us, who escaped extinction thanks to that kindness, appearances matter very little.
Theirs is a strangely chaotic society for a Mussid. We are used to law and order, and some of our numbers are our own former slaves, but here, there is no such lot for anyone. We were expecting some form of servitude to be enforced upon us; instead, we were granted the same right as every Human in their United Worlds, and those of us who desired to try and ascend psionically were offered the embrace of the worms. The only demands placed upon us were that we serve in the military, and they were no terrible demands.
In fact, we were surprised by how little military strength the Humans wield. Garrisons on their worlds are limited; their fleets, barely a match for roving space amoebas, and certainly no threat to the Deathbringers should they seek to attempt to visit death and destruction on the United Worlds. But we discovered, as we found our place on Tierra del Fuego and Ecuador and our own were invited to join with their diplomatic services, that there are a great many more spacefaring species than just the Humans and the Deathbringers, and that the Humans are friends with most of them.
We thought of ourselves as a very advanced civilization technologically, but what we have found upon arriving in the United Worlds is that humankind had advanced far beyond anything we had envisioned, and not just had happened to have made a lucky breakthrough in faster-than-light propulsion. Our scientific minds were taken to visit an ancient, world-sized space station that had been entirely refurbished by human engineers at an expense of resources sufficient to buy all our old fleet. The laboratories and instrumentation available there allow for advancement at an incredible pace. The Spirit's Morass Science Nexus provides for half of the research conducted in the United Worlds.
The Humans have also started building their own, gargantuan space structures. In fact, their economic clout is so immense that they have been concurrently running the creation of an extensive sensor array that should, within a decade, be able to survey the entire galaxy with its scanners, and the construction of a planet-sized industrial complex to exploit their home system's asteroid belt.
Our saviors and benefactors are even rich and advanced enough that they have undertaken the terraforming of an entire, barren planet into a world that will replicate the conditions we have grown with on Mussi. There, they aim to grant us semi-autonomous rule, allowing to rebuild a world for the glory of the fallen Mussid civilization, in full harmony with the United Worlds.
We will rebuild. We will regain our strength. And someday, we will convince our benefactors to lead the charge to retake our homeworld. But in the meantime, we survive, and we will thrive thanks to our great benefactors, and we are blessed for the chance to take our share in such galactic greatness as that which we discovered when we first set claw on the planets of mankind.
... 40 years left until the first crisis roll...
* *
They came from the stars... The Deathbringers... They swept away our defenses like chaff in the desert wind, and descended upon us, swarming across the surface of Mussi. Our homeworld was taken from us, they claimed it as theirs, and we would have accepted to chafe under their oppression for a time, while we gathered our strength and prepared to overthrow them. But the Kaexiinite were not interested in oppression. They came into our homes, dragging out the males and the females, the children and their parents, the young and the old, the beautiful and the deformed - all Mussids were to be processed, we were told. And "processing" meant extermination.
We were left without hope. No salvation awaited us. Then one night, there was a flurry of activity around our invaders' command centers. We could still hack into our old machinery, and discovered the reason: an elegant and sleek craft had showed up in what was formerly our space, hailing whoever could hear their message offering friendship.
The Deathbringers didn't care. They attempted to capture that ship, only to discover it had superior drives to theirs and had escaped. They didn't pursue; one ship could mean others, and other ships could mean war. But to us... It meant that maybe there was a tiny spark of hope of escaping the Deathbringers.
That spark grew into embers when they first contacted us. The Humans. It was the strangest of happenings. The Kaexiinite controlled all space-bound communications on Mussi by the point the messenger arrived, but she didn't need antennas and arrays to speak to us. Humans don't need antennas and arrays to speak to anyone. They try to contact others through regular channels first because it is strange and frightening to find yourself suddenly reached out in the way they reach out, but when you have no hope left, you have little to fear from the voice in your head, or from its owner, no matter how strange or powerful they are.
The voice belonged to a female who called herself "Kalinda". She told us that there was a small fleet of craft capable of taking us far away from our exterminators, if we would but dare steal and take every shuttle and civilian craft we could still get our claws on to rendezvous with them. She told us that she had a team prepared to sneak to the surface of Mussi, and to come and aid us take the ships we needed to flee and find refuge on other worlds. Now there was truly hope.
The Humans were true to their word. They came to us, hid among us, they planned with us. They said they were fringe elements of their society, some of them criminals, but we didn't care. Those human "criminals" sympathized with our plight and sought to save at least some of us, when the kaexiinite "lawful" only sought our destruction. And we could sense in our minds the honesty of the Messenger when she said it wouldn't matter that we would be rescued by outlaws, that humankind would accept us all the same and grant us a place to live on their worlds.
They truly did not lie.
We forced the blockade of the Deathbringers, and for the first time in our history, Mussids engaged in faster-than-light travel. We were taken away, far away from the Deathbringers, as far from them as one could go. We were brought to two strange worlds, one dry and cold, one warm and lush, and were the first Mussids to bring order on other worlds.
Tierra del Fuego and Ecuador are two among eleven worlds settled by the Humans. Just like their ships, their cities are sleek and elegant, contrasting with the upsetting appearance of our rescuers, who suffer from even more mutations than we do, suppurate everywhere they walk and require regular radioactive irradiation. But they are kind, extremely kind, and made every effort to make us feel at home on our new worlds. And to us, who escaped extinction thanks to that kindness, appearances matter very little.
Theirs is a strangely chaotic society for a Mussid. We are used to law and order, and some of our numbers are our own former slaves, but here, there is no such lot for anyone. We were expecting some form of servitude to be enforced upon us; instead, we were granted the same right as every Human in their United Worlds, and those of us who desired to try and ascend psionically were offered the embrace of the worms. The only demands placed upon us were that we serve in the military, and they were no terrible demands.
In fact, we were surprised by how little military strength the Humans wield. Garrisons on their worlds are limited; their fleets, barely a match for roving space amoebas, and certainly no threat to the Deathbringers should they seek to attempt to visit death and destruction on the United Worlds. But we discovered, as we found our place on Tierra del Fuego and Ecuador and our own were invited to join with their diplomatic services, that there are a great many more spacefaring species than just the Humans and the Deathbringers, and that the Humans are friends with most of them.
We thought of ourselves as a very advanced civilization technologically, but what we have found upon arriving in the United Worlds is that humankind had advanced far beyond anything we had envisioned, and not just had happened to have made a lucky breakthrough in faster-than-light propulsion. Our scientific minds were taken to visit an ancient, world-sized space station that had been entirely refurbished by human engineers at an expense of resources sufficient to buy all our old fleet. The laboratories and instrumentation available there allow for advancement at an incredible pace. The Spirit's Morass Science Nexus provides for half of the research conducted in the United Worlds.
The Humans have also started building their own, gargantuan space structures. In fact, their economic clout is so immense that they have been concurrently running the creation of an extensive sensor array that should, within a decade, be able to survey the entire galaxy with its scanners, and the construction of a planet-sized industrial complex to exploit their home system's asteroid belt.
Our saviors and benefactors are even rich and advanced enough that they have undertaken the terraforming of an entire, barren planet into a world that will replicate the conditions we have grown with on Mussi. There, they aim to grant us semi-autonomous rule, allowing to rebuild a world for the glory of the fallen Mussid civilization, in full harmony with the United Worlds.
We will rebuild. We will regain our strength. And someday, we will convince our benefactors to lead the charge to retake our homeworld. But in the meantime, we survive, and we will thrive thanks to our great benefactors, and we are blessed for the chance to take our share in such galactic greatness as that which we discovered when we first set claw on the planets of mankind.
* *
... 40 years left until the first crisis roll...
Last edited:
Changing the guard
I'll likely return to that "looking at the Humans" trope a little later. There are now big players who could awaken at literally any time. (And squash me like a bug, but hey... )
The closest Fallen Empire to the United Worlds.
From the memory pool of Kalinda Poojary
Premonition is a strange thing. In this age of universal psionic power, in which even the least of us has considerable telepathic, telekinetic and psyocognitive abilities, I sometimes wonder how blind to the future our visions can make those of us who weren't born with the ability - that is, almost every one of us. Including the boss, like poor Anna Bennett used to call him. And Dikotsi Onobanjo did not understand that with all his efforts to avoid a future he foresaw, all his gesticulations would end up achieving was making it happen. And like often, the upheaval that led to the Revered Elder being deposed was a matter of pebbles triggering an avalanche. And those pebbles were called the Mussid.
Our government system was a bit disconcerting to our new friends. They followed a strictly hierarchical form of government, where ours has become, well, oligarchic in nature while pretending to be democratic. Poor Josephine would have hated to see how the United Worlds have devolved to become much like the old European Union, United States or Federation of Russia - the province of a select group belonging to the same circles, busy maintaining the illusion that their people hold actual power. But the Mussid? They understood nothing of that. They were just too happy to be alive to really try and discern in what kind of morass I had led them to.
What they did discern was the great potentialities offered by a psionic path of evolution. A few years after settling on our planets, the Mussid unsurprisingly expressed their desire to join with us on that ascending path; and since I'd been the one to make contact with them in the first place, they asked me to intercede for them in front of the Union Council. Well, "asked" is more the word. When I refused initially, citing my status as a wanted woman, they arranged for my election as one of the two Elders representing their community in the Assembly of Elders.
Girl, did that one cause a fuss... A wanted criminal, researched for nearly three quarters of a century, coming to sit at the heart of government?
And this is where the next pebble came into play. When he pushed the election date by another twenty years, Onobanjo placated the Xenoists by putting their party leader, old Giovanna Garibaldi, at the head of the Assembly of Elders. The thing with Giovanna is she has a very long memory and likes serving her vengeance ice cold. She took evident pleasure in pointing out my status as Elder immunizes me from any prosecution not related to my new office. That's how I was allowed to present the petition for the Mussid to be given specific grants for research into how to modify them so that they, too, would gain access to psionic powers. And since the official United Worlds stance with regards to any xenosapients who'd become part of our domains has always been equal rights, a bill was promptly and near-unanimously sent to the Union Council, and Giovanna Garibalidi appointed me to present it.
I'll make an admission: I've hated Dikotsi Onobanjo ever since I found out he's the reason Josephine is sitting in suspended animation, brain dead. It was subtle, using a substance that's near undetectable to poison her, a rejected experimental one that violently agitates the worms and causes them to short out all neuronal tissue in their host's brain. It took me a long time and quite a few risks to find out exactly what had happened to the first Revered Elder, and when I did, I flew into a terrible rage. To me, Josephine wasn't just the woman who led humanity into the Space Age. She was the woman who protected me from becoming a test subject back when I was a child, and then the first woman to befriend me as equals after a counter was found for the effects of the psidrain. And a woman who genuinely loved me; I sensed as much that one time we talked as friends, even if I never understood why, and probably never will.
That said, Onobanjo is truly dangerous, and not just because he's a murderer and power-hungry. He didn't understand how much of a slap to the face it was to witness the destruction of an entire pirate haven within our borders at the hands of some of our defensive partners - pirates who had been free to rove and loot at the fringes and had gone virtually unchallenged for decades. And he forgot that we aren't fanatically pacifist.
The 2311 battle of Brytkro was the first serious engagement conducted within United Worlds borders, involving a rough estimate of 10.8K fleet power against 4.2K fleet power. Of the 79 ships of all classes involved, 0 were Human.
To add insult to injury, the combined strength of all our response forces and patrols was inferior to any of the pirate fleets, and said patrols had proved their inefficiency decades earlier when a group of rampaging space amoeba had ransacked three of mining stations, with our response units proving their uselessness to respond to any actual threat, as their coordination to try and catch up with the raiding organisms in large enough groups proved entirely futile.
And then, there was the might of the stagnant, "fallen" empires. We had long since known mankind was no match for the precursors and their fleets; in 2310, with the completion of the second from last stage of our galaxy-wide sensor array, we found out just how far behind.
Erm... Bit too much, modders?
The discovery had sent panic waves through the councils of the Elders, as they understood that with regards to the Precursor Empires, it had never been about avoiding to provoke them, but about not getting squished the moment they noticed us. Yet the Union Council had continued to stubbornly adhere to their "not one extra credit for military expenses" line, which had left our military research stuck in the 2230s.
All those signs of weakness had gotten the Assembly of Elders to grumble. The Union Council's large rejection of the Mussid bill, citing that it was mankind's mission to watch over and protect all other species, and mankind's alone, sent them in an uproar. And that was when old Giovanna Garibaldi reminded them of the surprising results of the last election of 2297, held six years later than initially scheduled, and for which all pollsters had given my father as the winner in a landslide victory, yet which had somehow resulted in a narrow win for Dikotsi Onobanjo.
That was a little too much for the Assembly of Elders. And one understands the sleekness of the old Xenoist when they remember that the Union Council has always been, since the years of Josephine, an emanation of the Assembly of Elders, which delegates to them powers that it has been delegated by each Elder's constituents. Old Giovanna simply proposed to withdraw the delegation. It left Onobanjo no leg to stand on - he couldn't cite legitimacy borne out of popular vote, as his current mandate had officially expired four years earlier - and the Assembly ruled his position to be legally vacant. They then proceeded to elect my father, as he probably had been the legitimate winner of the last election and remained very popular, along with organizing a referendum to confirm him in his position.
It really is a political coup by old Giovanna, as this is actually permanent law and leaves the entire process of electing the head of state with the Assembly before a referendum is held, strictly to confirm the Assembly's choice, and the devolution of power is now from the Assembly to the Revered Elder - pardon me, it's now the Assembly's Chief Precentor. And it's left old Onobanjo, in his position as head of the Tories, in the dubious role of the defender of democracy, when he was the one who sabotaged the electoral process in the first place. Ironically, he's been given the honorary appointment of chief of the Anna Bennett institute. Fitting, when he was the one who sent her to her death attempting to contact an immensely powerful entity in the Shroud in the first place.
A useful ruler with a useful agenda? Thanks Oligarchism!
I'm not missing the irony of having been responsible for the election of my father to the leadership of the United Worlds. And I think I wasn't the only one who appreciated his speech soliciting approbation from the people in front of Josephine's suspended animation cell. She was much criticized in her day and age for what was considered exorbitant military expenses, but now, seventy years later, her position has been vindicated by our newfound knowledge, and she's celebrated as a great visionary. There's even talk about making her a Saint Josephine, imagine that!
But the homage rang personally for me, and I don't think it's innocent on my father's part, even if he now has mental barriers allowing him to stop my probes. I'm a child of the incubators, and never had a mother, like nearly all of our young have only one parent nowadays, but I like to think, in another life where our species wouldn't have been ravaged by our own folly, they could have made a great set of parents. In a way, to humanity, they are. And hopefully, my father's organizational and reforming skills and his adherence to his illustrious predecessor's vision will allow our species to catch up. We are so very far behind...
... thirty years left until the first crisis roll
)* *
The closest Fallen Empire to the United Worlds.
From the memory pool of Kalinda Poojary
Premonition is a strange thing. In this age of universal psionic power, in which even the least of us has considerable telepathic, telekinetic and psyocognitive abilities, I sometimes wonder how blind to the future our visions can make those of us who weren't born with the ability - that is, almost every one of us. Including the boss, like poor Anna Bennett used to call him. And Dikotsi Onobanjo did not understand that with all his efforts to avoid a future he foresaw, all his gesticulations would end up achieving was making it happen. And like often, the upheaval that led to the Revered Elder being deposed was a matter of pebbles triggering an avalanche. And those pebbles were called the Mussid.
Our government system was a bit disconcerting to our new friends. They followed a strictly hierarchical form of government, where ours has become, well, oligarchic in nature while pretending to be democratic. Poor Josephine would have hated to see how the United Worlds have devolved to become much like the old European Union, United States or Federation of Russia - the province of a select group belonging to the same circles, busy maintaining the illusion that their people hold actual power. But the Mussid? They understood nothing of that. They were just too happy to be alive to really try and discern in what kind of morass I had led them to.
What they did discern was the great potentialities offered by a psionic path of evolution. A few years after settling on our planets, the Mussid unsurprisingly expressed their desire to join with us on that ascending path; and since I'd been the one to make contact with them in the first place, they asked me to intercede for them in front of the Union Council. Well, "asked" is more the word. When I refused initially, citing my status as a wanted woman, they arranged for my election as one of the two Elders representing their community in the Assembly of Elders.
Girl, did that one cause a fuss... A wanted criminal, researched for nearly three quarters of a century, coming to sit at the heart of government?
And this is where the next pebble came into play. When he pushed the election date by another twenty years, Onobanjo placated the Xenoists by putting their party leader, old Giovanna Garibaldi, at the head of the Assembly of Elders. The thing with Giovanna is she has a very long memory and likes serving her vengeance ice cold. She took evident pleasure in pointing out my status as Elder immunizes me from any prosecution not related to my new office. That's how I was allowed to present the petition for the Mussid to be given specific grants for research into how to modify them so that they, too, would gain access to psionic powers. And since the official United Worlds stance with regards to any xenosapients who'd become part of our domains has always been equal rights, a bill was promptly and near-unanimously sent to the Union Council, and Giovanna Garibalidi appointed me to present it.
I'll make an admission: I've hated Dikotsi Onobanjo ever since I found out he's the reason Josephine is sitting in suspended animation, brain dead. It was subtle, using a substance that's near undetectable to poison her, a rejected experimental one that violently agitates the worms and causes them to short out all neuronal tissue in their host's brain. It took me a long time and quite a few risks to find out exactly what had happened to the first Revered Elder, and when I did, I flew into a terrible rage. To me, Josephine wasn't just the woman who led humanity into the Space Age. She was the woman who protected me from becoming a test subject back when I was a child, and then the first woman to befriend me as equals after a counter was found for the effects of the psidrain. And a woman who genuinely loved me; I sensed as much that one time we talked as friends, even if I never understood why, and probably never will.
That said, Onobanjo is truly dangerous, and not just because he's a murderer and power-hungry. He didn't understand how much of a slap to the face it was to witness the destruction of an entire pirate haven within our borders at the hands of some of our defensive partners - pirates who had been free to rove and loot at the fringes and had gone virtually unchallenged for decades. And he forgot that we aren't fanatically pacifist.
The 2311 battle of Brytkro was the first serious engagement conducted within United Worlds borders, involving a rough estimate of 10.8K fleet power against 4.2K fleet power. Of the 79 ships of all classes involved, 0 were Human.
To add insult to injury, the combined strength of all our response forces and patrols was inferior to any of the pirate fleets, and said patrols had proved their inefficiency decades earlier when a group of rampaging space amoeba had ransacked three of mining stations, with our response units proving their uselessness to respond to any actual threat, as their coordination to try and catch up with the raiding organisms in large enough groups proved entirely futile.
And then, there was the might of the stagnant, "fallen" empires. We had long since known mankind was no match for the precursors and their fleets; in 2310, with the completion of the second from last stage of our galaxy-wide sensor array, we found out just how far behind.
Erm... Bit too much, modders?
The discovery had sent panic waves through the councils of the Elders, as they understood that with regards to the Precursor Empires, it had never been about avoiding to provoke them, but about not getting squished the moment they noticed us. Yet the Union Council had continued to stubbornly adhere to their "not one extra credit for military expenses" line, which had left our military research stuck in the 2230s.
All those signs of weakness had gotten the Assembly of Elders to grumble. The Union Council's large rejection of the Mussid bill, citing that it was mankind's mission to watch over and protect all other species, and mankind's alone, sent them in an uproar. And that was when old Giovanna Garibaldi reminded them of the surprising results of the last election of 2297, held six years later than initially scheduled, and for which all pollsters had given my father as the winner in a landslide victory, yet which had somehow resulted in a narrow win for Dikotsi Onobanjo.
That was a little too much for the Assembly of Elders. And one understands the sleekness of the old Xenoist when they remember that the Union Council has always been, since the years of Josephine, an emanation of the Assembly of Elders, which delegates to them powers that it has been delegated by each Elder's constituents. Old Giovanna simply proposed to withdraw the delegation. It left Onobanjo no leg to stand on - he couldn't cite legitimacy borne out of popular vote, as his current mandate had officially expired four years earlier - and the Assembly ruled his position to be legally vacant. They then proceeded to elect my father, as he probably had been the legitimate winner of the last election and remained very popular, along with organizing a referendum to confirm him in his position.
It really is a political coup by old Giovanna, as this is actually permanent law and leaves the entire process of electing the head of state with the Assembly before a referendum is held, strictly to confirm the Assembly's choice, and the devolution of power is now from the Assembly to the Revered Elder - pardon me, it's now the Assembly's Chief Precentor. And it's left old Onobanjo, in his position as head of the Tories, in the dubious role of the defender of democracy, when he was the one who sabotaged the electoral process in the first place. Ironically, he's been given the honorary appointment of chief of the Anna Bennett institute. Fitting, when he was the one who sent her to her death attempting to contact an immensely powerful entity in the Shroud in the first place.
A useful ruler with a useful agenda? Thanks Oligarchism!
I'm not missing the irony of having been responsible for the election of my father to the leadership of the United Worlds. And I think I wasn't the only one who appreciated his speech soliciting approbation from the people in front of Josephine's suspended animation cell. She was much criticized in her day and age for what was considered exorbitant military expenses, but now, seventy years later, her position has been vindicated by our newfound knowledge, and she's celebrated as a great visionary. There's even talk about making her a Saint Josephine, imagine that!
But the homage rang personally for me, and I don't think it's innocent on my father's part, even if he now has mental barriers allowing him to stop my probes. I'm a child of the incubators, and never had a mother, like nearly all of our young have only one parent nowadays, but I like to think, in another life where our species wouldn't have been ravaged by our own folly, they could have made a great set of parents. In a way, to humanity, they are. And hopefully, my father's organizational and reforming skills and his adherence to his illustrious predecessor's vision will allow our species to catch up. We are so very far behind...
* *
... thirty years left until the first crisis roll
What mods are you using? Do you have a Mod List? I'd especially like to know what the mod for the breakthroughs in tech is.
This is panning out wonderfully and I can't wait to read more.
This is panning out wonderfully and I can't wait to read more.
stnylan, we've made a little bit of progress there, as you'll see in the next update. Still no match for those humongous FEs, but progressing!
Legendary Pheonx, thanks! And brace for a very long list...
- Additional Traditions + Plentiful Traditions + compatibility patch
- Buildable ancient buildings
- Civics redux, Government Variety Pack, Juris Civics Expansion, Stellar Policies
- New Ship Classes + Realistic Ships + Improved Space Battles + compatibility patch
- Extra ship components (+ overwrites for FEs)
- Advanced Jump Drives, Advanced Weapons, Aux Module expansion, Crystallis Ship Module expansion, Samo's Auxiliary Ship Parts, Ship Power Stations, Star Wars Weapons, TFW's bunch of ship parts
- Ad Astra Technology Mod (that's the one adding the breakthroughs, provided with link)
- Additional repeatable techs, All enigmatic technologies, Astro's repeatable techs (! 1.6), Fleet cap points (Repeatable tech ! 1.6), Magnum's Mods - More Influence Research
- Additional traits, GeneMod_UI_PlusPlus, Proxima: Traits, Scarecrow's Trait Compendium, Snowyamur's The Trait Archive, Svafa's Expanded Species Traits, United Traits, _Advanced Traits
- Traits + Ethics lite 2.5 (4 Ethic points, additional trait picks)
- Psionics Expanded
- AlphaModPlus 1.8 (the spaceports expanding module)
- Auto auto-explore
- Color-coded pop status icons, Cybrxkhan's Assortment of Namelists, Galaxy Colours Restored, SpeedDial
- Immersive Galaxy, Planetary Diversity, Yet Another Unbiased Systems
- Stellar Expansion (+ Strategic Resources and Terraforming submods)
- Epic Galaxies - Make space bigger (great for 2000+ stars galaxies, lousy at 1000 ), More AI & Larger Galaxies, New Galaxy Sizes
- Multiverse - Solar system spawner
- Fallen Empires Expanded
- Gods and Guardians
- Megastructures, Orbital Rings Galore, Planetary Ringworlds, Utopia Expanded
- More Events Mod
- Multiple Crises
- Pre-FTL players (regretting that one a bit, start is slow!)
- Ruler Level System
Note that this isn't a clean setup at all, but with 1.8.2 already in the works and bringing important changes, I'm not doing my usual "wait for a bit after the current version stabilizes and spend a Sunday editing a full game directory to integrate the mods with intercompatibility" for a while... )
Legendary Pheonx, thanks! And brace for a very long list...
- Additional Traditions + Plentiful Traditions + compatibility patch
- Buildable ancient buildings
- Civics redux, Government Variety Pack, Juris Civics Expansion, Stellar Policies
- New Ship Classes + Realistic Ships + Improved Space Battles + compatibility patch
- Extra ship components (+ overwrites for FEs)
- Advanced Jump Drives, Advanced Weapons, Aux Module expansion, Crystallis Ship Module expansion, Samo's Auxiliary Ship Parts, Ship Power Stations, Star Wars Weapons, TFW's bunch of ship parts
- Ad Astra Technology Mod (that's the one adding the breakthroughs, provided with link)
- Additional repeatable techs, All enigmatic technologies, Astro's repeatable techs (! 1.6), Fleet cap points (Repeatable tech ! 1.6), Magnum's Mods - More Influence Research
- Additional traits, GeneMod_UI_PlusPlus, Proxima: Traits, Scarecrow's Trait Compendium, Snowyamur's The Trait Archive, Svafa's Expanded Species Traits, United Traits, _Advanced Traits
- Traits + Ethics lite 2.5 (4 Ethic points, additional trait picks)
- Psionics Expanded
- AlphaModPlus 1.8 (the spaceports expanding module)
- Auto auto-explore
- Color-coded pop status icons, Cybrxkhan's Assortment of Namelists, Galaxy Colours Restored, SpeedDial
- Immersive Galaxy, Planetary Diversity, Yet Another Unbiased Systems
- Stellar Expansion (+ Strategic Resources and Terraforming submods)
- Epic Galaxies - Make space bigger (great for 2000+ stars galaxies, lousy at 1000
), More AI & Larger Galaxies, New Galaxy Sizes- Multiverse - Solar system spawner
- Fallen Empires Expanded
- Gods and Guardians
- Megastructures, Orbital Rings Galore, Planetary Ringworlds, Utopia Expanded
- More Events Mod
- Multiple Crises
- Pre-FTL players (regretting that one a bit, start is slow!)
- Ruler Level System
Note that this isn't a clean setup at all, but with 1.8.2 already in the works and bringing important changes, I'm not doing my usual "wait for a bit after the current version stabilizes and spend a Sunday editing a full game directory to integrate the mods with intercompatibility" for a while...
)
The battle of Hinsamchavora
The First Fleet leaving the Bengal Spaceport for an attack on a pirate stronghold in late 2329.
* *
The bridge of EDS Endurance, March 1st 2325
The deep hum of Jump drives powering down was a sound the crew of the dreadnought EDS Endurance had gotten used to over four years of exercises and minor space monster and pirate cleanup operations. This time, the situation was a little bit different. Having been left to grow unchecked over nearly a century, the various pirate factions preying upon the borders had been able to amass considerable resources and had built mismatched but strong ships. The First Fleet's hit-and-run strikes at their resupplying platforms and exchange corners had prompted the various gangs and factions to band together and regroup for a coordinated strike at the United Worlds - a move that had, of course, not escaped the all-seeing eyes of the Galaxy Array. Pirate ships had begun to regroup in three different systems, supplying and preparing for the offensive with a force that would, once combined, be nominally twice as powerful as the Earth Defense Force.
Elder-Admiral Christel Sauer had no intention of letting such a scenario develop. The First Fleet may not have been a match for a combination of the three gathering fleets, but computer estimates gave her a favorable 1.4:1 match against the weaker one, and she enjoyed a huge advantage over the pirates in the form of Jump drive technology. She could strike anywhere, while her opponents would need to endure the many long months of Warp travel. And strike she would, as soon as her engines finished revving down, with the surprise element on her side. Sauer's fleet had exited the Shroud in close proximity with a massive pirate Galleon, dwarfing even the Endurance, but a good distance away from the rest of the ships gathering there.
'Admiral, we're confirming fifty-two bogeys on top of the Capital' a deck officer called calmly. 'They've begun to form up on our port side.'
'Any read-outs on their armaments?' the Admiral asked back.
'None, Madam. Enemy ECM is successfully scrambling our close-range scanners.'
'Can't catch up eighty years in thirteen' the Admiral mused. 'Tell all ships to form up for a direct pass at the enemy's capital ship. I want that thing battered down before the enemy get a chance at reinforcing.'
'Transmitting orders, Madam.'
The First Fleet, powering down their Jump drives right after dropping out of the Shroud into the Hinsamchavora system.
The armada formed up into attack position. Admiral Sauer had massed the strength of the United Worlds' fleets together for this action. It was a relatively low number of vessels, less than the number of ships that had formed the now-disbanded Sniper patrols, but the combined First Fleet offered a respectable line-up with its four Endurance-class dreadnoughts, four Mother Core-class carriers, eight Demolisher-class battleships and twelve Valiance-class battlecruisers. The lineup of the Earth Defense Force had been deliberately restricted to large hulls, with the battlecruisers acting as screens for the rest of the force, to increase its overall staying power against the smaller ship sizes that were commonly in use among pirate fleets.
The fleet's main armaments consisted of twenty-four particle lances, two per battleship and dreadnought. Secondary armaments consisted in batteries of turbolasers and plasma cannons, with point defense guns mounted on all hulls but the battleships; in addition, the battlecruisers all sported a fusion missile launcher and a space torpedo tube. As to the carriers, they brought a complement of thirty-two fighters and thirty-two bombers each. All those armaments were still of relatively unsophisticated design, a flaw shared with the shields and with the armor plating, but it was inevitable considering how behind the United Worlds were technologically. But they would have to do.
The fleet formed up, and began its advance. It quickly became evident that the pirates had no strike craft of their own. It also became apparent that their supporting craft would be within engagement range before their capital ship could have had to bear the full brunt of the First Fleet's Salvoes.
'Madam, Nova and Allegiance are requesting permission to open fire.'
'Permission granted' the Admiral return. 'All lance crews are to target the capital ship, fire at will. Have Harmony and Uncle Istvan divert their strike craft towards the enemy's main fleet, and tell Vice-Admiral Kutty to turn broadside on the capital ship and form an echelon screening the main as soon as all her battlecruisers are within range of the capital.'
The first lance shots zebraed the space between the main formation, and torpedoes started to home in on the massive pirate ship, peppering its hull, but the ship's armor seemed more than capable of taking the punishment. It returned fire with missiles that were quickly taken care of, but there was no counter for the large kinetic artillery projectiles that began to slam into the point battlecruiser's shields.
'Pride reports heavy enemy fire' another deck officer relayed.
'They will have to endure' Admiral Sauer replied through gritted teeth. 'If Vice-Admiral Kutty can screen her without breaking formation, let her.'
'Main fleet missile launchers opening fire, madam. Beta squadron have targets. Alpha and Gamma are targeting the incoming.'
'Those pirates are going to find out you don't bring swords to a gunfight' an operator quipped, earning himself a few grim chuckles.
Temperance's own bridge began to vibrate as its particle lances charged, and soon followed the double blast from the energy released.
'Double hit' telemetry reported. 'Damage minimal, enemy hull integrity far superior to any encountered.'
'Which is little surprise, as the thing displaces fifteen times the mass of our dreadnoughts' Admiral Sauer muttered. 'Keep firing, and turn slightly to starboard. Group Blue are to turn their prows towards the main fleet in forty-five seconds and open fire on them - let's discourage our new friends.'
'Madam, critical damage report from Pride! They've suffered a direct hit to their magazines.'
Sauer gritted her teeth. It seemed that the first-ever loss of the Earth Defense Force was going to happen under her command after all. 'All ships, maintain formation and intensify firepower' she barked.
The formation held. The pirate flagship was massive, but its hull was now pummelled by all two dozen lances and a hundred more smaller armaments, and to increasingly visible effect, as a small cloud of debris and ionized gas began to form around its prow.
'Contact with main fleet. Group White are turning. Lionheart under heavy fire from enemy flagship.'
'Enemy casualties?' the Admiral asked back.
'Five frigates so far. That's going to mount up, Group White's lances are melting them.'
'Excellent.'
'Gods above, look at all those missiles!' one of the operators exclaimed herself. 'Alpha and Gamma are overwhelmed, under enemy point-defense fire' she added more calmly.
'More target practice for our gunners' the Admiral said wryly. 'Throw Eta in as a second screen and tell our point defenses to cover for their neighbors. We can handle that volume of fire.'
The second stage of the battle of Hinsamchavora begins, with missiles exchanged between both sides.
'Lionheart have lost their starboard shields.'
'Tell them to hold on as long as they can, the enemy's capital's prow is beginning to overheat. If it becomes untenable, have them abandon ship.'
'We're going to need to have words with the genius who placed magazines within easy reach on the Valiances' Temperance's chief engineer growled. 'Another lucky shot like the first one, and the poor sods inside are-'
Lionheart lit up in a brilliant explosion, engulfed in a ball of blinding-white flame.
'How much crew on a Valiance?' an operator asked.
'How many on that monstrosity of theirs?' another replied, just as grim.
The pirates' capital ship's prow suddenly flew off in chunks, and the enormous ship shook violently from a chain of internal explosions.
'Primary target is going silent' telemetry reported. 'They're losing all power and vacuuming.'
'Turn the fleet around. Report on secondaries.'
'Two cruisers, twelve frigates and five raiders down. Only minimal shield damage reported from their fire. Orders, Madam?'
Christel Sauer crossed her hands behind her back, gazing at the enemy battlegroup in the distance.
'Wipe them out. All of them.'
The particle lances opened fire.
* *
On Earth, the report from Christel Sauer was met with great relief by the Assembly of Elders. The first-ever offensive, combined fleet operation was greeted as a resounding success, with the slightly favorable calculated odds resulting in a 1:26 casualty ratio in favor of the First Fleet. The replacement of the two destroyed battlecruisers was a cost which could be borne with two months' worth of net income, and it was considerably less than had been provisioned for when Elder-Admiral Sauer had submitted her operational plans to the Chief Precentor.
For the first time in human history, a large space armada had crossed the galactic arm and struck a swift and deadly blow against a foe mustering comparable strength to the terror-mongering Kaexiinites. And with the great spaceports of the United Worlds churning out more and newer ships of war, it wouldn't be long until the fleets of mankind would stand above any and all of the newer spacefaring races.
And it wouldn't go unnoticed forever...
* *
Like I mentioned, slight progression in fleet power
The humongous number of techs researched is because I've been cleaning out all the lower-tier techs that had been bypassed, especially military ones. It's also the reason I stopped screencapping tech plates - that one would have had to include over 150...