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[johiah]

Welcome to the Aurora 4x Race thread for Team 2. Here you can discuss plans, vote, worldbuild, and whatnot.

If you aren't from team 2, please look no further.

Core thread

Engineers' Alliance
We arrived here quite a long time ago on colony ships meant to get us to a planet, settle the planet, and provide ongoing manufacturing and life support while other industries developed. During the flight and after the landing, governmental power ended up passing to the engineers keeping the ship running, through several..."accidental exposures to vacuum" of the previous ineffectual leaders. Any attempts to wrest power from them ended quite quickly, since being dependent on people makes you rather...unlikely to try and kill them in order to get a little political power. Once the ship landed, it became essential for survival as its life support systems and power generation remained crucial to the early colony, and by the time this was no longer the case the engineers were too well-entrenched, and provided too much of the nation's essential machines.

So the engineers maintained power, and built a government out of people good at building physical objects, rather than people good at politics things. We've got plenty of problems with non-engineer politicians who get engineering degrees or experience or whatever but don't really plan on doing engineering, but it's minor, really.


Introduction: Alliance d'ingénieurs et Personnes (Shortened as ADP)
-Background: The 'Alliance d'ingénieurs et Personnes' , ADP for short, was originally founded by the engineers and their respected families from the Berger-Fabron Driveyard manufacturers and Rheinmetall Aerospace who built the the ark we fled our home on. Originally sent with a set of company officials to govern our colony they were unfortunately all lost in a freak accident where they were all died. Not forcefully jettisoned out of an airlock after trying to take control of the travel-rations and hoard them for themselves like like some dissenters claim.
After landing on the moon the remaining engineers set up a council of power to govern the fledgling colony and keep it in running order.

People and Society:
-Nationality: Franco-German
-Ethnicities: European, assorted minorities.
-Languages: French, German, assorted minority languages.
-Religions: Prominently French Catholic civilian populace with a number of the engineer quarter being Protestant Germans

Government:
-Name: Alliance d'ingénieurs et Personnes (Shortened as ADP)
-Government type: Dual Democratic Council with shared power between Engineers and Civilian Council.
-National Holiday: Remembrance Day - A national holiday where friends and families gather to remember those left behind and celebrate the new bonds made.
-Citizenship: 1st Rate Citizenship for all engineers and children of engineer caste as well as military. 2nd Rate for all regular civilian populace children of 2nd Rate citizens. 3rd Rate for convicted criminals, immigrants and unemployed. Movement through the castes is possible but not easy.
-Head of state: Louis Pétain - Head of Engineers Council and Military Affairs and national industry.
-Head of government: Alice Weber - Head of People's Council and in control of civilian quarter.

National Identity:
-Flag description: A bi-color flag with a light green lower half an black upper half. Green to symbolize the fertile moon we have landed on and the Black to represent the outer wild of space we will surely return too and one day conquer for the glory of those lost. In the center of the flag overlayed on the dividing point of the two colors is a hollow cog emblazoned in gold to represent the joint companies that made our exodus possible. In the center is a 4 pointed star to represent the old navigation star of Polaris, even under an alien sky it will still guide us.
-National Symbols: A hollow Cog, 4 pointed star.
-National anthem: Currently still being written, engineers aren't the best at music.

[Madman198237]

Engineers' Alliance
We arrived here quite a long time ago on colony ships meant to get us to a planet, settle the planet, and provide ongoing manufacturing and life support while other industries developed. During the flight and after the landing, governmental power ended up passing to the engineers keeping the ship running, through several..."accidental exposures to vacuum" of the previous ineffectual leaders. Any attempts to wrest power from them ended quite quickly, since being dependent on people makes you rather...unlikely to try and kill them in order to get a little political power. Once the ship landed, it became essential for survival as its life support systems and power generation remained crucial to the early colony, and by the time this was no longer the case the engineers were too well-entrenched, and provided too much of the nation's essential machines.

So the engineers maintained power, and built a government out of people good at building physical objects, rather than people good at politics things. We've got plenty of problems with non-engineer politicians who get engineering degrees or experience or whatever but don't really plan on doing engineering, but it's minor, really.

OK that's it I'm done with it, I can go no further today.

[Rockeater]

PTW

[chaotick21]

PTW

[Maxim_inc]

Introduction: Alliance d'ingénieurs et Personnes (Shortened as ADP)
-Background: The 'Alliance d'ingénieurs et Personnes' , ADP for short, was originally founded by the engineers and their respected families from the Berger-Fabron Driveyard manufacturers and Rheinmetall Aerospace who built the the ark we fled our home on. Originally sent with a set of company officials to govern our colony they were unfortunately all lost in a freak accident where they were all died. Not forcefully jettisoned out of an airlock after trying to take control of the travel-rations and hoard them for themselves like like some dissenters claim.
After landing on the moon the remaining engineers set up a council of power to govern the fledgling colony and keep it in running order.

People and Society:
-Nationality: Franco-German
-Ethnicities: European, assorted minorities.
-Languages: French, German, assorted minority languages.
-Religions: Prominently French Catholic civilian populace with a number of the engineer quarter being Protestant Germans

Government:
-Name: Alliance d'ingénieurs et Personnes (Shortened as ADP)
-Government type: Dual Democratic Council with shared power between Engineers and Civilian Council.
-National Holiday: Remembrance Day - A national holiday where friends and families gather to remember those left behind and celebrate the new bonds made.
-Citizenship: 1st Rate Citizenship for all engineers and children of engineer caste as well as military. 2nd Rate for all regular civilian populace children of 2nd Rate citizens. 3rd Rate for convicted criminals, immigrants and unemployed. Movement through the castes is possible but not easy.
-Head of state: Louis Pétain - Head of Engineers Council and Military Affairs and national industry.
-Head of government: Alice Weber - Head of People's Council and in control of civilian quarter.

National Identity:
-Flag description: A bi-color flag with a light green lower half an black upper half. Green to symbolize the fertile moon we have landed on and the Black to represent the outer wild of space we will surely return too and one day conquer for the glory of those lost. In the center of the flag overlayed on the dividing point of the two colors is a hollow cog emblazoned in gold to represent the joint companies that made our exodus possible. In the center is a 4 pointed star to represent the old navigation star of Polaris, even under an alien sky it will still guide us.
-National Symbols: A hollow Cog, 4 pointed star.
-National anthem: Currently still being written, engineers aren't the best at music.

[Madman198237]

In progress:

Alliance of Shipboard Engineers
We arrived here quite a long time ago on a colony ship meant to get us to a planet, settle the planet, and provide ongoing manufacturing and life support while other industries developed. During the flight and after the landing, governmental power ended up passing to the engineers keeping the ship running, through several..."accidental exposures to vacuum" of the previous ineffectual leaders. Any attempts to wrest power from them ended quite quickly, since being dependent on people makes you rather...unlikely to try and kill them in order to get a little political power. Once the ship landed, it became essential for survival as its life support systems and power generation remained crucial to the early colony, and by the time this was no longer the case the engineers were too well-entrenched, and provided too much of the nation's essential machines.

The government of the engineers is more or less benign, with decisions being made by individuals as delegated by the governing body, design (or other actions taken) by committee being such a reviled term that it is in fact considered a very harsh form of profanity to refer to something with it, and the use of the phrase in children's shows is a crime. Teaching children to design things by committee is considered as nothing less than high treason. Engineers rarely actually participate in government as politicians, as it is only called the engineers' government because the constitution and other details were hammered out initially by engineers. Several dozen pages do refer to various design standards and weights and measures and whatnot that no normal person ever has to even consider, but for some it is reassuring to know that the length of the meter and the precise weight of a kilogram are all defined in terms of universal constants in their own constitution. In the course of a typical day, the legislature (formally known as the Designators of Requirements) will pass some legislation and inform, directly, who will carry it out. This can be issued to typical police or military forces, the judiciary, or the Department of Civilian Engineering, which handles all government contracting with civilian companies for various tasks like building military equipment or civil buildings, or any of the myriad other institutions a functioning government needs. There are also many other divisions that handle other tasks, but most go through the Department of Civilian Engineering.

The national flag is a field of blue that fades from black from the bottom of the flag to the top, with the golden arc of a stylized rocket trail arcing up from the bottom left to a small planet visible in the upper right. Typical national insignia incorporate the arc and two circles, one at the base of the arc and one at the tip.

Alliance of Shipboard Engineers: (1) Madman

[Maxim_inc]

Alliance of Shipboard Engineers: (1) Madman
APD: (1) Maxim

[Carefulrogue]

Making fire is an engineering problem.  Constructing a bridge over a river or ravine is an engineering problem.  Making a vessel to cross the stars, with hundreds of thousands of passengers, is an engineering problem.  The engineer is always the willing individual who constructs the demands of society, from campfires to nuclear weapons, sailing ships to supersonic aircraft.  When there are problems encountered, or ideas to be floated, it’s to the engineers they turn.

Near the end of the decade-long shakedown for the yet-to-be-christened interstellar colony ships, first contact came.  It did not come as a pleasant one, as the elation of finding ourselves not alone was cut short by the outer mining and research colonies of Saturn, going dark with images of their violent destruction.  As the militaries of the surviving colonies rushed to put up military infrastructure for the defense of the system, the shakedown and certification testing were sped up, and the loading of the slated crew, passengers, cargo, and pulse units began. 

On every available piece of hardware, passengers were brought up and iced, while the crew even at full strength continued to struggle to learn their roles, and complete the checklists that had been all but burned.  When the cordon was broken over Mars, the crews stopped loading passengers, there were no more shuttles the military was allowing for use other than for the defense.  The only thing  the vessel had that was complete was crew, pulse units, and enough fission rods that they hoped would keep the life support running as long as they needed it to.

The vessel, manuevered off from the construction yard slowly, before station command gave them permission to ignite the first pulse unit.  Once it did, they began to sail off into the darkness, the crew, shift 01, the only ones able to hear in real time, the prayers and well wishes of the shipyard workers.

Aboard the vessel, it was agreed, after checks were finished fully on the automatic cryogenic freeze/defreeze system, that given the state of the ship having various major faults, that the engineers would need to operate in shifts to maintain the systems.  Once per the system clock year, for a period of 1 month, the shift crew numbering from 100 to 300 would be revived, tend to their cryosleep wounds, and then set about repairing the ship, and checking on the various life support systems, cryogenic bays, and the ship navigation itself.  If other expertise was required imminent, men and women from the other shifts would be revived, to share the few real bunks the vessel had in it’s cold interior.  In total, there were 28 shifts devised in the initial few days of transit from the shipyard, to the edge of the solar system.

The first several decades followed this plan, with the shift leaders compiling messages to be handed off to the next shifts, providing the shifts whom never shuffled rosters, with the promise of other company, at some point in a safe future.  Any dead too far expired to be revived by the system were set adrift in the void, the systems that had once kept them alive broken down for the invaluable parts.

However, it would change.  The shift leaders would start meetings once every 10 shifts, a necessity forged by increasingly serious problems being uncovered as time passed.  Corruption uncovered in the loading logs when cross referenced against the intended load of passengers, shortfalls discovered in chemical fuel stockpiles, and countless other small failures the canceled shakedown and hasty checklist failed to intercept.

The shift leaders would organize, contributing men and materials to providing supplies and search for solutions with the limited resources they have over multiple shifts.  What had once been a care package of morale from the past to the future, became organized instructions and explanations for the continued survival of the vessel to a destination it was now known was not certain. 

By what some termed an act of God, others fate or random chance, they found a system, not only with detectable planets, but also a world that would be habitable enough.  In an emergency meeting, the council of engineers were awakened, appraised by the automated detector systems they had put in place decades ago, and decided.  Within 84 minutes of revival of the last shift leader, the course correction commands were calculated and executed.

The limping vessel found itself with enough fuel to make, for a short time, a stable orbit.  For the first time since the vessel had left Sol’s gravity well, all of the engineers were awakened, warmed, and called together to resolve the problem they had too few tools to resolve: there would not be enough shuttle fuel to make multiple trips, not for all the passengers, not for all the cargo.  The six thousand surviving engineers had the task of finding a way to the surface that would preserve the most life.

It was decided early, that they would have to leave the passengers frozen.  Panic from those unaccustomed to high stress situations like crash landing would hinder their own survival.  Following this, the identification of the core systems that would be required upon landfall.  The cryobays, medical centers, and core engineering facilities were marked as such.  All others that were not critical to the landing itself were scrapped, moved to reinforcing those three areas.  Anything and everything that could be done to making a spaceship never designed for atmospheric entry was done to give them the best odds of success.

As the ship crossed the equator of the world on it’s slight inclination for the last time scheduled, the engineers gathered.  Those religious broke the tough bread and potato they had, and spread it about, saying prayers for the survival of their vessel, and lives.  A potential final supper, of unconsecrated bread.  Those not, made final checks, and then did them again, and again.  The plan was desperate.  It was insane, but if it worked, everyone may just walk away alive.  With less than 30 minutes, the necessary crew froze the other engineers who were not tapped for this next duty, and waited the final few quiet minutes, listening to the reassuring hum of machinery around them.

As the ship crashed into the atmosphere, the last of the nuclear pulse units were launched and fired, reducing the velocity of the vessel dramatically, though generating a nuclear fireball that the ship still descended into and through the otherside.  Sensors warned of failures, but the next detonation, and the next continued until the push plate was finally jettisoned; left to plummet and collide with a mountain hundreds of miles away the cargo bay having exhausted every kiloton of potential, scaring the land below with the fire of stars.

As the descent continued, the shuttle pilots continued to wait.  As the seconds stretched into hours, it came; the two letter words rang clear across the vessel, and the engineers activated by hand the abort systems hastily designed.  The cryopods and shuttle sections separated from the husk of the vessel’s remaining burning fuselage, leaving the body of the ship to descend while the shuttles fired engines attached to crude wings and control surfaces, attempting to lower the core systems safely to the bosom of the world.  Every scrap of material that would not get them there had been ripped out and abandoned.

The remainder of the descent was at best a controlled crash, on the part of the shuttles and their precious cargo of a million souls.  Frantic, often wild course corrections, that could only do just enough, but consumed every margin of error the task force could provide.  Not one of the engineers had training for this, not one had a certain guarantee of their success individually.

After the landing itself, many cited the landing into a shallow swamp to have been to their benefit in the survival of the plan.  6 million tons of descending debris controlled into a safe landing that only killed 87,000 souls by causing them damage too great for the revival doctors and medics to repair with the scattered available equipment.  Nearly a million souls, delivered as safely as could be, from the brink of annihilation, to the relative safety of ground on an alien world.

People and Society:
-Nationality: French-German
-Ethnicities: European
-Languages: French, German, English
-Religions: Catholic, Protestant

Government:
The nation is relatively free at a low level, with the political power granted to tradesmen and professionals in the study of medicine, the fields of engineering and machinery, and the general upkeep of the material aspect of society. 
-Name: Engineer Republic
-Government type:  Technocratic Republic
-National Holiday: Embarkation Memorial, Revival Celebration
-Citizenship: 1st class, gated behind having up to date continuing education, if necessary for the field, to be considered up-to-date to practice their trade.  Exceptions for retirees and active and completed honorable military service.  Full political rights and duties provided.  2nd class, the default for all other non-criminal members of society.  Reduced weight politically, however equal weight in duty to the maintenance of the state.
-Head of state: President
-Head of government: President

National Identity: That of builders, inventors, and make do people.
-Flag description: The national flag is a field of blue that fades from black from the bottom of the flag to the top, with the golden arc of a stylized rocket trail arcing up from the bottom left to a small planet visible in the upper right. Typical national insignia incorporate the arc and two circles, one at the base of the arc and one at the tip.
-National Symbols: Rocket transitioning through the stars, or the arching path of some type of missile in flight.

Alliance of Shipboard Engineers: (1) Madman
APD: (1) Maxim
Engineer Republic: (1) Carefulrogue

[Rockeater]

Alliance of Shipboard Engineers: (1) Madman
APD: (1) Maxim
Engineer Republic: (2) Carefulrogue, Rockeater

[Madman198237]

APD: (1) Maxim
Engineer Republic: (3) Carefulrogue, Rockeater, Madman