Discontinuation of Theoretical Hostilities
| Ship Selector |
| Strike Craft |
| Phantom |
| Viper |
| B-Wing |
| Gunship |
| RF-Wing |
| Capital Ships |
| Venture |
| CL2 |
| Heritage |
| Expedience |
| Diplomat |
| Blockade Runner |
| Interdictor |
| Troop Transport |
| Swarm |
| BFG |
| Sensor Disruption Picket |
| Habakkuk |
| Non-Combat Ships |
| Mobile Production Base |
| Mobile Research Ship |
| Survey Ship |
| Transport Ship |
| Colony Ship |
| Generation Ship |
| Civilisation Ship |
| Empire Information | |
| Played by Richpur in CYOE2 | |
| Capital Ship Doctrine (Capital Phalanx) | |
|---|---|
| The strength and might of your empire is reflected in the rugged formations of your mighty capital ships and their courageous captains. Any empire wishing to fight your fleet had better bring greater numbers in the hopes of having an even fight. Mechanically speaking, add 0.5 to your opponent's Combat Ratio when calculating for Capital Ships. | |
| Strike Craft Doctrine (Ace Pilots) | |
|---|---|
| Throughout known space your empire is renowned for the daring, brave and all round excellence of your pilots. If someone mentions a mission is impossible for Strike Craft they have to include the statement “Well unless they were pilots from that empire”. Mechanically speaking, add 0.5 to your opponent's Combat Ratio when calculating for Strike Craft. | |
| Fleet Balance Doctrine (Battlestar Solution) | |
|---|---|
| While other empires are known either for pilots with supernatural luck or unbreakable capital ship formations, your empire takes a different path. Your empire knows that any good capital ship needs a fighter screen and that any good fighter needs a better carrier to support it. As a result each CL4 and above ship comes with 10 free Production Points worth of Strike Craft. | |
| Research Focus (Genius Bonus) | |
|---|---|
| Your Empire is famous for its scientists and your laboratory facilities attract the best and brightest from across known space. When it comes to developing advanced technology you are the masters among amateurs. Every research facility (including planets) you own produces an extra 15 research Points every turn. | |
| Young (We're in some kind of Sci Fi?) | |
|---|---|
| Your empire suffered from a Dark Age - or perhaps you simply kept going along the wrong tracks with its research. Regardless of the reason, you start with only 1 tech instead of 2. Note that you still have a total of 5 tech slots, so you have 4 free ones. | |
| Under Funded Troops (Why Bother With Soldiers?) | |
|---|---|
| Your empire has spread to space! The ultimate high ground, wars are fought with ships against other ships, colonies brought into line with orbital strikes, there’s no need for ground forces any more, as a result the few troops you do deploy are at a major disadvantage in terms of training and equipment. Mechnically this reduces your ground combat effectivness by 25%. | |
| Titanic | |
|---|---|
| Your empire does not believe in subtlety. Perhaps you rely on rare archaeotech and ancient artefacts, or perhaps you simply build to last. Your ships cost twice as much, but are considerably more effective. Mechanically speaking, add 1 to your opponent's Combat Ratio. | |
This literal translation of the full name is probably a little cumbersome for most races, so in diplomatic contacts they refer to themselves as "The Union". ('Doth' proved an unpopular abbreviation.) Outside of diplomacy they refer to themselves as "us". The only people that can remember exactly where the title originates are the core AIs for the central arcologies; all they are saying on the matter is, "It might have happened differently".
History and Development
The original colonists arrived in system almost 1100 years ago and started a settlement on the second of four planets, toward the inner edge of the habitable zone. Crops grew easily, resources were abundant and the climate was perfect (except for periodic blizzards; but as the leader of that long ago colony is reputed to have said "Three weeks a year with the heating on isn't a hard price to pay for paradise").
Despite the advantages it took a little over a 160 years for civilisation to establish itself securely enough for progress to expand beyond the limits of what was necessary. Then to great acclaim the Daedalus Project was announced; from records taken of the original transit there was now a workable theory for using the same effects to open the jump node again and re-establish contact with the home system. "Before this century is out we shall return a crew to our old home." was the declaration.
They failed. By five weeks.
One month after the deadline the ship was complete, hanging in orbit above the planet surrounded by monitoring equipment. A week later the crew of six were sat listening as the onboard AI counted down toward zero. And they left.
The project was initially considered a success; then the storms started. Over the next few months the planet's magnetosphere started to destabilise. Feedback from the jump node some said, others insisted it was a coincidence, a small but vocal number declared it the will of the gods. The answers came back remarkably quickly. No it wasn't a coincidence; and no, as far as anyone could tell the gods weren't angry; just the laws of physics. The announcement was overshadowed by the final revelation however; the damage would, in between another 30 and 40 years, leave the atmosphere unprotected. Solar winds would batter away at the planet flooding it with radiation. Temperatures to polarise; peaking well above boiling point toward midday and freezing by a few hours after nightfall. At the same time tectonic activity would increase.
Up to this point a sizable majority of the population had advocated a relatively low impact approach to maintain the natural 'Eden' they had been fortunate enough to find. Now Eden had a deadline; there were two choices: attempt to evacuate over 1.5 billion people to the third planet, a barely habitable world stuck in a permanent ice age; or attempt to repair the planet, jumpstarting a two sextillion tonne dynamo when they had very little idea exactly how they had upset it in the first place.
The resulting vote was predictable. Over 80% of the population agreed; here we are, here we remain.
Five years later with no progress toward saving the planet, the elected council, in an unprecedented move, declared that having a population was more important than giving them what they had voted for. Five more years passed, elections were "temporarily suspended" and low impact colonisation gave way to strip mining as the approaching deadline came visibly closer. In the end the scale of the project was too vast, the production capacity simply wasn't there.
Assistance came from an unexpected quarter. For decades relatively simple AIs had been used to coordinate everything from universities and research laboratories to transportation, even public communication networks and factories; for the most part they were treated as 'just another colleague' by the people that worked with them. They burst into the foreground one day when the avatar of the council's administrative AI looked up from across the table at the chairman and asked one, simple question. "May we try this our way now?"
In any other situation the realisation that not only had the AIs expanded beyond their initial designs, but now thought they could do better than humanity would likely have resulted in an attempt to shut them down. With little hope and fewer options the council gave an answer that was almost as unexpected as the question that provoked it.
"Yes."
Soon factories were reconfigured and out into the wilderness went automated factories that would not have looked out of place in a Gerry Anderson production. Repeating across the three continents the factories burrowed into the ground as machinery replaced ore and the first cycle at each location was contributing to the construction of a new generation of machines. After a lull of nearly eighteen months the first transport landed on the new planet, with not more than a dozen organic people on board.
While the increasingly misnamed Eden was ravaged to finance the coming exodus, work on the newly renamed "Haven" progressed rapidly. By the time the first full shuttle of two thousand people arrived two years later it almost deserved the name. No paradise was this (unless you really like skiing) but with pollution levels on Eden rising and the initial temperature estimates looking decidedly generous, the clean, environment controlled habitat inside the first arcology was a welcome change.
From that first transport to the last the evacuation took another seventeen years. twelve hundred ships; eight hundred trips each. Total ships lost - six. twelve thousand people out of a population of almost two billion. Eighteen hundred million people relocated in under twenty years. The cost? One dead planet. Even were the magnetosphere to somehow be repaired the environmental damage from that desperate evacuation would linger for millennia.
Not all was lost however, samples of many species were saved, brought across the chasm of space and over time selectively revived in a growing network of greenhouses lining the inside of each arcology as it climbed out from under the ice.
It might be said that the location was not the greatest change to be made over the course of those long but frantic years. From a grudging acceptance born from the attitude "what have we got to lose?" AIs had earned equality, not by law or by decree, but out of respect.
Made wary by the results of their first experiment into extra-system jumps attention turned inward; such a mistake would never be allowed to happen again. It was this resolute determination to discover what had gone that lead to the establishment of Haven's first permanent space station, a research outpost at the site of the original test.
While Haven's development had proceeded far enough for the population to survive, living conditions were at best claustrophobic during the first years. Having a surplus of ships and needing a way to instil the necessary discipline to live in such close quarters while the second tier of arcologies were being constructed; a navy was established with the nominal duty of policing the system. Volunteers from the ships' original crews became the first officers and soon every child at the end of their education would spend two years on ship.
As the new arcologies were completed and the population spread out, there were moves to disband the service. Resistance came from many quarters: new parents who remembered their time on the fleet as some of the formative years of their lives, children wanting to go into space, captains of merchant traffic who had concerns about a wave of piracy were the patrols to stop, and more. The fleet was staying.
As time passed, space grew more abundant, the population expanded and the aging ships too costly to maintain the number of people in space at any time slowly fell. One arcology was built solely as an academy; cadets training on simulators with only a few months in space on the new generation of patrol vessels. Eden Research Station grew to the point where it held a transient population of over a million, had its own production facilities and people began calling it "The Eden Complex".
Maybe from some lingering guilt over what they were forced to do to Eden to escape; for whatever reason the AIs planning the expanding colonisation of Haven added entire arcologies with no accommodation or other facilities, just a square mile of recreated Eden. It is a long step away from terraforming the snow covered planet, but the process was underway; long standing estimates put completion sometime around the turn of the millennium after next.
It has now been over 800 years since the death of the last man who could remember the days before AIs became part of all aspects of life. The idea of going into space without one to double check your calculations or monitor the ship's systems is as ridiculous as leaving the window open. While the primary task of the navy is still basic policing and vaporising the occasional errant asteroid, the discovery that natural jump nodes were beginning to form in the outer reaches of the system led to the development of large defence stations near each proto-node as a contingency plan. If this phenomenon allowed a hostile force into their home, they would not be defenceless.
The nodes formed, nothing came through; so they waited, expecting them to be as ephemeral as the ones that had brought their ancestors across space all those years before. After eighteen months scouting expeditions began, charting these new worlds; the first steps back out into space had begun.
Those first systems were found devoid of life, but it was thought only a matter of time before someone or something else was found, or found them. Plans were made for the first of a new breed of combat capable ships, ones using the weapon technology developed for the platforms. Having AIs participating in the design of ships that will essentially be their offspring results in no small amount of redundancy. As a result when fully operational a warship's AI will have a sizable surplus of processing power. Once up to a size that makes carrying them practical warships tend to be fitted with a number of unmanned drones; these rarely bring the AI up to maximum processing capacity but, in the words of the light cruiser prototype 'Aspirations of Mediocrity', "It gives me something else to do."
Government
Theoretically Haven is a representational democracy, each arcology electing a member of the council. In practice however the final say on any laws comes down to the AIs, for without their support it is impossible to implement anything. In another culture this artificial oversight might cause tension, but the average person will interact with no less than four AIs during a quiet day and likely hasn't met their actual representative during their lifetime.
The first time the council came close to being overruled was sixty three years after its reformation; a proposal was under debate and the three AIs monitoring the council silently agreed that the idea would be disastrous. The actual substance of the matter in question is now of less import than the manner in which the situation was handled. The matter was passed through the global AI network and consensus reached in a matter of seconds and the council chamber was quietly sealed; for the next twelve minutes life outside stopped as every adult simultaneously got a priority message, the proposal and the objection to it outlined in a document barely four paragraphs long followed by a simple poll. The people voted, the council, still arguing between themselves over minutia, were presented with the results. The proposal was dropped.
Over the next 750 years the same has happened fourteen times, the last over the decision to keep the forming jump nodes secret; the poll in itself put an end to that plan.
