I'm trying to decide if I should wait for the next version to start a campaign in this version or the next. I kind of want to wait for Newtonian, if that's ever going to happen.
Invasion
2020, January
The discovery of these superheavy elements- "trans-Newtonian" as some completely ignorant journalist has named them- has begun a reinvention of the physical sciences. The political picture of earth is as gloomy as ever, of course. Following the trials of the past decade, there have been internal scuffles and reorganization. While nations are still present (and govern their internal power plays effectively), the main international groups are corporations, like the industrial, mining, research, and mercenary company SARD.
Conflict on earth mainly takes the form of civil wars and unrest, with the occasional international insurgency, which is now entirely taken over by mercenary groups.
There are really three groups making news in the modern world: SARD (acting on its own and as a "super-contractor" for other corps), UN-associated nations (and their conventional militaries and even spaceflight organizations), and third-party actors like militias, rouge states, and terrorists.
Of these, only corporate groups can bring power to bear off-planet, mining the new, rich fields of minerals in the inner solar system. And so, SARD has quietly managed to mastermind the domination of human endeavor in space.
MY 16,245.0
86% of our stasis units have failed over the past 929 years. [date converted from original 11,365-hour long equivalent of 237 sols of the unknown homeworld] Nonetheless, we have endured. Our war, our plague, the death of our sun. And now our final test is complete.
Now we see the growing light, the warmth of a dawn so long delayed. We haven't felt this on our wings for eons. We have reached out with out senses and seen our new home. We see our inner worlds that are dry, and acrid, and hot, each one a titan of crushing gravity. We turn from them. Our next world is not so large, not so hot, but still too heavy. Now we turn to our true treasure- a chain of worlds wide, broad, temperate. But these little homelets will not serve for all of us. We also see the first god-world and its attendants. Our moonlets there will provide much for us. And after that comes the next god-world, with a moon that seems so much of our old homeworld. We turn from it, for it reminds us of what was lost.
So many were lost. So many did not make our journey successfully. Only 5 billion remain of the once-great civilization. We now prepare to wake them for the dawn to come. Soon we-
What is this? We listen, to a sound on the edge of hearing. It is noise, something no star we have passed before has ever made. What strangeness. The patterns we see are chaotic and meaningless at first, but listening closely, we see messages, responses, coherentness in the chaos. And then we know.
Setup:
There are in effect two groups- the cold-temperature low-gravity methane-breathing aliens that arrive, and the SARD (Space-based Advanced Resource Development) corporation. Less important is the UN-associated military force (which also holds the rest of earth's population), and the "independent actors" force which throws out everything from terrorist militias to stolen missile silo launches to, eventually, pirate spaceships. Neither they nor the UN will be the focus of this.
The Aliens will move in on the outer solar system and colonize a relatively warm and large Jovian moon via lots of infrastructure. They will of course start with even more supplies and industry than they know what to do with the 5 billion civs they have. Notably, they won't have jump drives or any other advanced tech- they used a sleeper-ship approach for a reason. Still, they were much more than a thousand years ahead of earth when they left.
The humans will have low tech in a broad set of abilities. The aliens will have much, much better tech in terraforming, energy weapons, and many construction things (they'll need it), but worse tech in most other things (they never learned how to do massed ground battles, and don't respect wasteful things such as complex, expensive rockets that are only one-use. They notably have highly specialized engine tech so as to have very, very efficient and cold engines... they're just very low-rated.
Humans, on the other hand, get more deployed infrastructure and will start out ready to start slowly colonizing mars.
SARD Quarterly Reports: 2020: Fourth Quarter
Gajin Historical Translated Records: MY 16,245.9
UN Allied Mission Reports, etc: 2020.12
Independent witness interviews, transcripts, and diaries: 2020, December
2020, January 1st, 1 AM GMT
ANTARCTICA: REMOTE RESEARCH BASE
Dr. Samuel Kim really, really wished he'd elected to join the others in the common room. The maintenance could certainly wait until the morning, he needed to get to sleep, and it was nice and warm up there. No doubt the others were still up watching, and laughing at, Star Wars 7 or some other stupid old movie.
Something drove him to work on this malfunctioning machine, though. Probably the same thing that drove him down to the bottom of the world, probably. Probably, he would admit years later, the _other_ Kim at the facility, who was right now up working on her Lake Vostok biological sequencing project. And so here he was, looking busy, climbing down the insulated tunnel deep into the ice.
Finally, he reached the junction box. Frozen shut, again. He chipped at the ice with the pick until he freed the latch and set to work. The "somewhat chilly" -40 wind above whistled in the upper access hatch far above.
He took out his computer to inspect the output from the array. Having replaced a few components malfunctioning in the cold, he now just need to make sure the neutrino sensors were working correctly. Sure, he reflected, you can see the stars lying in a nice warm meadow somewhere in a more temperate elevation, but those smudgy things weren't the real things.
That's one reason Dr. Kim was here, in the bitter blackness of an Antarctic winter night, under tons of ice, in a cave dug by man in the primeval vastness of the deep glaciers. He was here to see the _real_ stars.
But as he looked at the feed, he saw an irregularity. Pulses of neutrino activity... which is odd because that sort of thing doesn't pulse. And they certainly shouldn't be this intense. He would stay there for hours, tracing cables and checking for interference well into what was technically day here at the bottom of the world.
It would take many months of careful re-tracing of photo-sensor connections and careful examination of the entire array for Dr. Kim and his associates to realize what would later be on of the greatest revelations of mankind, and one of the most ominous.
MY 16,245.05
SOMEWHERE IN OUTER SOLAR ORBIT, IN THE DIRECTION OF BETELGEUSE
The spacecraft thrummed at approximately 29.97 Hz. Each pulse was the detonation of what was effectively a simplified fusion bomb... but the engine system dampened this, quieted it, and utilized an array of equipment that earthly physicists would kill for, or maybe even give up tenure. The effect was a hugely efficient use of fuel and an absurdly low emission of detectable radiation. It drifted in farther, closer to the rocky new planet it was now headed for.
2020: First Quarter, Week 1
I stepped into my office. I'd already had the staff clear out the remains of the party, but I'd made sure to hold on to the novelty 2020 sunglasses. The last time anyone'd been able to sell wearable dates like this had been 2009, and a pair of those went up for auction for 300 times the original price already.
I skimmed the report. I rarely read statcoms from SARD Security- you can only read a soldier enthusiastically reporting on how many turbans he has collected this week so many times- and so I skipped down to what SARD Extraction had to say [insert data about earth and extraction rates]...
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Topic: Aurora - The Dwarf Fortress of 4X Games (Read 2818217 times)