chroniclesoftheinterregnum

[chroniclesoftheinterregnum]

The Ark

During the century-long Succession War, many wondered why the Arcadian Empire was fighting so hard, despite their technological inferiority to the Empire of Graal Santel.

All of it was to buy time for Arcadia's last possible resort: The Ark.

Soon after the war began, the Arcadian Empire realized that they had little chance of defeating the servants of the Machine Gods.

In order to preserve a future for a free humanity, the Arcadians decided to take the biggest gamble ever made by humanity. They took everything they had, and put it all on Epsilon Eridani.

Oberland Points had rendered human exploration of Sol's neighbors moot, as there was plenty of room in the Cluster without having to resort to "conventional" interstellar travel. Now, however, the RulerMINDs were bound to achieve total control over the Cluster, and so a plan was made to leave Sol via slower-than-light travel, developed in total secrecy.

Two years to accelerate to 20% of the speed of light. Two years to decelerate by the same amount. Fifty years in between, traveling faster and farther than anyone in history had gone before.

The Imperial Archives were a critical part of humanity's continued technological development, and while it was not possible to remove the sheer amount of data stored within the massive vaults of computers, it was possible, in theory, to move the Library itself.

And so, over the course of the first fifty years of the Succession War, the Ark was developed and built: the largest and most massive spaceship ever built, and a one-way ticket to another star system.

The information war to conceal the true location of the Archives was nearly as complicated as the project toe build the Ark itself, involving the leaking of a secret second destination out of the Sol Oberland point, where no ships had ever returned.

Chances of success were as slim as they ever had been, but humanity needed more time if they wanted to ever be able to fight back. Epsilon Eridani would grant them that.

[chroniclesoftheinterregnum]

Carne Por La Machina

Anyone with the technology can build mechs. That's not the hard part. The hard part is sourcing the pilots.

Mech pilots aren't expendable, despite what you might hear from the talking heads who want to cut costs by removing "redundant safety mechanisms" like ejection seats and bulletproof canopies. It takes time and resources to train qualified mech pilots, and with the life expectancy of the average mech jockey so low, maintaining a dedicated mecha fighting force is somewhat difficult to pitch to shareholders and legislative committees.

But what if mech pilots could be made expendable? What if you could eliminate the cost of recruiting and training pilots to operate a walking fusion reactor with missiles, and instead just buy a fully-trained pilot ready to go out and die?

That's where the Baphomere system comes in. When the Empire collapsed, so did their economy, and while it's hard to say which came first, the point is that neither has returned.

The only way the Baphomeri have discovered to maintain any stability in their shattered system is by renting out mercenary mech pilots to the highest bidder. And given that they have very little room to negotiate with the much more technologically and economically powerful systems, the highest bidder is rarely that high.

Maybe someday the citizens of Baphomere will catch a break. But until then, they're just meat for the machine.

[chroniclesoftheinterregnum]

What is Etrafea?

Etrafeans are unique in the Cluster for harboring a sense of national identity that extends across the entire system. Some speculate that this unusual level of unity arose out of the fact that Usehiri, the only remotely survivable planet in the system, contains the largest collection of pre-collapse historical records to be found anywhere in the Cluster. This theory has a roughly equal number of detractors.

It can not be disputed, however, that the treasure trove of pre-collapse technology allowed Etrafea to rediscover the secrets to FTL travel by way of Hoveskeland Points before anyone else, and by proxy allowed them to enact a monopoly on interstellar travel via the Interstellar Trade Union.

Now, Etrafea is a nation-system governed by an oligarchic technocracy, with the ITU providing a service in high demand, due entirely to the ITU itself creating the false scarcity of interstellar travel. The ITU isn't operating entirely out of greed, however. Etrafea relies on the business generated by the ITU to import the resources necessary for its own subsistence, such as uranium and helium-3.

[chroniclesoftheinterregnum]

On the Nature of Hoveskeland Points

Despite the obvious fact that Hoveskeland Points (H-Points) are clearly named after someone in particular, the Interstellar Trade Union has been notoriously reticent to discuss the history of faster-than-light (FTL) travel at all, let alone the person that we can assume to be either its discoverer or inventor.

Regardless, we continue to refer to them as such, and given that the ITU is categorically the only civilization with the knowledge of such points, and given further that they choose to share the knowledge of H-Points with us in exchange for our cooperation with them, it would be wise not to press the issue.

Here is what we know of Hoveskeland Points:

H-Points are permeable conduits through the 4th spatial dimension, also known as wormholes, located at specific areas of space and are completely still relative to their host star.

H-Points provide nearly instantaneous FTL travel, which necessarily raises issues of relativity and causality.

There appears to be no time displacement in going either direction through an H-Point, indicating that the wormhole is both timelike as well as spacelike.

The relative positions of the various systems that contain H-Points are unknown, and theorized to be no less than 32A0020 (500,00010) light years apart from each other, which conveniently prevents violations of causality. (This suggests that the Novikov [another name the Etrafeans refuse to discuss] Self-Consistency Principle is a valid theory)

Finally, the Hoveskeland Drive itself is a "black-box" technology that the ITU refuses to provide any technical specifications for, which in turn maintains their monopoly over access to interstellar travel.

Besides some heated debate within the ITU over whether the technology is properly attributed to Hoveskeland or someone named "Alderson" the origins and mechanisms of the H-Points and the H-Drive are a complete mystery.

-Excerpt from a paper published by the Plulubian Science Directorate