First and Last: An Aurora AAR
Historical & Technical BriefingJune 2035 CE: Remaining fossil fuels on Earth depleted. Prices spike.
November 2035 CE: World economic collapse. Widespread social unrest.
February 2036 CE: EU collapses.
12 March 2036 CE: 17 states secede from the US. Federal forces clash with National Guard units and private militias. The majority of US forces are abroad in peacekeeping operations, unable to respond.
17 March 2036 CE: North Korean forces cross the DMZ.
21 March 2036 CE, 0600 hours GMT: Israel launches pre-emptive nuclear strikes on Iran, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, claiming to have intelligence reports indicating Arab troop gatherings near their border. Iran responds in kind six minutes later.
May 2036 CE: Widespread armed uprisings in much of the world. Costa Rica is one of the few nations still largely intact, due in no small part to their lack of a national military, though this will quickly change as they are swamped with refugees.
October 2036 CE: No intact national government exists on Earth, though several local government officials continue to hold some authority.
April 2040 CE: After five years of chaos, new socio-political entities begin to form. Among these is the New Arthurian League, a group with ideology rooted in modernized notions of honor and chivalry.
September 2040 CE: Researchers working in an isolated facility make a remarkable breakthrough, discovering Trans-Newtonian materials and the capabilities they could provide. Less than a week later, another research team makes a far direr discovery: The Earth will be uninhabitable within a decade. Something is draining energy from Sol; this combined with the radiation and atmospheric dust raised by the recent conflicts, as well as the results of more than a century and a half of uncontrolled pollution will soon completely destroy the biosphere as humanity knows it. Furthermore, the deposits of T/N minerals on Earth are tiny, and could be used to create orbital habitats housing perhaps three hundred thousand of the seven hundred million survivors, with no future in sight even for those fortunate few.
The NAL proposes an alternate plan: a massive colony ship fitted with cryogenic capsules, sent on a long journey to find a new world, guided by a self-aware AI. It would allow more to survive, and those that did would have a far better future.
August 2050 CE: Orbital shuttles ferry the colonists up to the mammoth entombed in the massive orbital scaffold. None are older than 30, most are couples or polyamorous groups, and virtually all are experts in one field or another. One of the most elderly is the commander of the expedition, Rear Admiral Bagdemagus Perroy. He is 33. As the young men and women file into the catacombs of the cryogenic suspension vaults, other shuttles load components of the gigantic modular installations that will form the center of the new colony.
Those left behind know that they have been left to die slow, lingering deaths. Those who still have time to think as their minds slow under the influence of drug cocktails in their cryopods know that they are abandoning their brothers and sisters. Yet all recognize that were it not for this one chance, humanity would be doomed. Indeed, this ship is still a stab in the dark, the last desperate gasp of a dying race.
On the bridge of the ISS Odyssey, Admiral Perroy’s eyes droop as the lid of his cryopod hisses shut. The AI, Arturia, assumes command, slipping the Odyssey from its scaffold with inhuman precision. The ship is a strange sight, a kilometer-long needle, one end bulging with the drive pod, a full 1000 separate rocket thrusters, the other with massive cryogenic chambers and cargo holds. Arturia brings the Odyssey up to full drive power, accelerating until reaching its maximum velocity of 43 km/s. Dozens of automated recorders capture every moment of the final view of Earth and Sol that any of the colonists will ever have. She/It sets a course for the nearest star with potential lifebearing worlds, making hundreds of personality backups to safeguard against the centuries of solitude to come. In a few years, Her/Its charges will be the only survivors of the human race, and they must be protected. Once free of the bounds of the system, she/it engages the hyperdrive. Once up to maximum velocity, she/it disengages the drive. 93% of the fuel reserves remain for deceleration (and for moving towards other systems should the first search fail).
Odyssey class Colony Ship 2864200 tons 40825 Crew 24066.5996 BP TCS 57284 TH 2500 EM 0
43 km/s Armour 1-1796 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/4 Damage Control 100 PPV 0
Maintenance Capacity 525 MSP
Troop Capacity: 10 Battalions Cargo 1000000 Colonists 500000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 2500
Conventional Engine E1 (1000) Power 2.5 Fuel Use 10% Armour 0 Exp 1% Hyper Capable
Fuel Capacity 5,000,000 Litres Range 31.0 billion km (8333 days at full power)
Geological Survey Sensors (4) 4 Survey Points00:00:00 1 January 1 New Era: Arturia is no longer sure how long she/it has spent drifting through the endless void, but at last the journey has ended. Her atomic clock had recorded the date, of course, but as per instructions she had deleted the temporal references of the voyage, setting the calendar and clock to begin a new system, albeit still following the patterns of Earth, a single nod to tradition. She/It begins thawing the command staff, looking out at the blues, greens, and reds of the worlds around this star, Epsilon Eridani. It is a beautiful sight to any eyes, biological or electronic.
The consensus is to settle on the fourth world, which has been dubbed Avalon. It is a small, cool, dry world, with a gravitational field one-third of Earth’s. Still, it is habitable. More importantly, it is home.
Mere minutes after landing, one of the first colonist groups discovers a massive complex of ruins with passages leading beneath the ground, a veritable city. The visible portions are remarkably intact. The Admiral forms a group of five officers with training in archaeology to investigate, led by one Captain Le Cornu. The two battalions of mobile infantry disembark in the area to provide security, while the garrison MP forces disperse throughout the settlement. The engineering brigades assist in the assembly of the construction facilities. Hardly a day has passed since the first shuttles landed and Avalon has already presented a mystery. And quite possibly an opportunity. From her/its position in the heart of the grounded Odyssey, Arturia continues to guide the newly awoken colonists to the site of the fledgling colony.
OOB: 1x CS Odyssey, grounded (all fuel transferred to the colony)
Installations:10x Construction Factories
3x Fuel Refinery
5x Automines
1x Research Lab
Population: 500,000
Fuel Reserves: 1 million litres
Ground Units:2x MI
4x Garrison
2x Replacment
4x Engineering Brigade
::So yep. An AAR with a partial emphasis on storytelling. I likely won’t be covering every boring moment, but notable events will be marked. Most of the volume will come from the battles yet to come. In regards to the tech level, it’s essentially nothing except Trans-Newtonian theory and the conventional techs, though the one notable exception is 1.3x size tech level for hyperdrives. No JP tech as of yet. Not much of anything, except a few of the early C&P techs. Gravitational tolerance is set for 80% deviation to make things a bit more interesting.
That, and those ruins are going to be crucial to future development; it’ll be 25 years just to produce another 20 construction factories. The history of this system is going to be rather interesting.
Game setup:
RS: off
Realistic Promotions: on
Precursors, Swarm: on
Invaders: off (not going to lose another game to endless 1-day turn BS)
Political Bonuses, Inexperienced Fleets, Maintenance/breakdowns: off (in order: annoying, more annoying, most annoying micromanagement; I’ll still be building ships as if they were subject to breakdowns, though.)
Difficulty Modifier: 1000%
Starting NPRs: 1
NPR gen chance: 50%
So yeah, I'm doing the Aurora equivalent of a hardcore ironman campaign, because if anything at all finds us we're dead, period. Hell, the only way the colonists will be able to bootstrap themselves is by exploiting those ruins for all they're worth, otherwise we're looking at hundreds of years just to build a modest industrial base. On the upside, there are no fewer than 8 habitable worlds in the system; a second is also 0 cost and two are 2.00 cost. All have substantial ruins and both Avalon and two others have large mineral deposits. So
if we can survive, there's massive potential for growth. Of course, then we've got to build up enough to beat a 1000% difficulty NPR that has been spending those long decades teching like hell, which will have hundreds of warships and no mineral crunch. Or a Swarm Queen could find us a year in.
This'll essentially be an "update when I feel like it or run into something cool" (read: when I get into a fight with someone that massively outnumbers me) deal, rather than a straight story. I recognize my problems with work-avoidance.
When I was SMing everything together, I treated the engineers as battalions; the replacements are intended to represent civilian recruits.
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Topic: First and Last: an Aurora AAR :: Almost there... (Read 16404 times)