World The Ships, Tech, and Galaxy of Spectral Hyacinth

[Penfighter]

Setting Basics and Introduction
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To introduce this setting, think of it more as an EVE Online, a Firefly, or Halo with some Expanse tossed in there for good measure. This is to say, we aren't looking to overexplain the science aspects of the setting. All we need to do is make sure the space travel, weapons, and other aspects of technology are consistent. Beyond that, we don't need to be too finicky. I remember reading somewhere that a showrunner on Babylon 5 once was approached by a superfan at a convention who asked him how fast exactly the ships could travel. He responded with, "They travel as fast as the story needs them to." Keep this principle in mind when you think of things like travel between planets, stars, and around solar systems. Our setting is a vehicle to tell the story of the crew of the Spectral Hyacinth and facilitate the exploration of their relationships. I'll make a section here for the "science" of our galaxy and that should be enough to get us started.

Where we do wish to go into some greater detail will be with things involving how people live and work in space. This naturally means we'll need an expansive knowledge of how each of our characters' jobs work and what we are supposed to be doing on a day by day business. What do spaceship scavengers do when they wake up? How do they eat? How do they get from their home ship to the wreckage? What do they do when they get there? What are the shifts like? What do they do in their down time? What are their relationships like? How do they find alone time? These are the important questions and are the ones we'll be answering in this roleplay as we write on.

This post and thread will attempt to provide details for the lore of this version of the galaxy. The purpose behind providing this level of information is so that we can all pull from it when need be and focus more on the interpersonal and day-to-day stories instead of constantly feeling the need to craft endless seas of lore. Rule of thumb? Focus on understanding the details pertinent to your character and flesh those out as you ease into your understanding of everything that's written here or in the thread. Rule of pinky? (We already used the thumb) Have fun, Scrappers, and don't sweat it if you make a canonical slip or mess something up. We're all human, more or less.

Political Situation
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Humanity exists as a vast interstellar union, a collection of solar governments loosely held together by the United Systems of Man. The USM itself is a political body made up of elected delegates from every system. The power the Interstellar Parliament can project is incredibly vast as local systems have not been permitted to build their own interstellar space fleets for centuries now. Technically, most star systems maintain powerful fleets of impressive warships and millions of troops but these are for protecting the peace or waging war within their own home stars' orbits. They have no choice, as the USM will not permit any vessel larger than a cruiser to be equipped with drives that allow for interstellar travel. Only the USM is permitted to patrol interstellar space and transport cargo from star to star. So it has been for centuries. The USM handles interstellar matters, trade, and warfare while local governments handle planetary and system wide trade, warfare, and social matters. Almost all wars are disputes between planets, continental governments on those planets, corporations, or uprisings over local solar governments.

The History of Us
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The way current historians tell it, countless centuries ago, humanity left its cradle and began exploring and colonizing the stars. They departed a system named Sol using imperfect generational ships and slower than light travel. Precious little is known of the birthplace of our species or what happened to all of those First Ships or how many made it to stars that had appropriate worlds for colonization. What is documented comes from the earliest records of galactic human history ever recovered: 'The Journals of Early Man' as they are called today. These hand written personal journals were discovered aboard a generational ship that was found in proximity of a hot, white star named Hegemony 14A-CJBL. Thousands of years ago, astronomers discovered fourteen massive gas giants in this system, an ideal mining colony candidate for massive hydrogen fuel processing operations. Upon arrival, as it is written in the annals of history, the wreckage of a massive colony ship called The Everlasting Hope was found.

All digital and analog recordings, data, and information were long destroyed by solar radiation. However, after searching the long-frozen corpses exposed to the vacuum of space and their personal belongings, the Empire of Planetstates (a long dead political body, we'll get there) discovered dozens of handwritten journals and other historically significant artifacts that were able to paint a picture of what was happening with mankind at the time this ship was sent to colonize a distant world. What is millenia for us in modern space time was only a handful of centuries for the Empire. Their languages were different, but shared enough commonality with the journals to decipher them. What they learned was the story of a humanity that was in crisis. There was no overarching governing body and many prejudices of a place called "Earth" persisted and remained relevant even as humans had finally figured out how to travel faster than light and between the stars. This colony ship was one of the first 14 ever built and meant an end to the generational ships of before.

Instead of ushering in a time of piece as was wanted by most humans at the time, it meant a time of war. Incalculably devastating and unfathomable, these wars fought between the early worlds of man were catastrophic and final. Ships would "blink" in from a distant star, unload dozens or even hundreds of powerful nuclear devices upon a world, and then "blink" away. Earth and many other colonies and established worlds alike were erased from existence in the fog of interstellar nuclear war. The Empire was rattled by this discovery and praised its own ironclad grip on its own star systems. To this day, no one understands fully how the First Galactic War ended or what brought about the foundations of the Empire of Planetstates but what we do know is the discovery of The Everlasting Hope created a political doctrine for humanity that is still in place today. No individual star system should be allowed to create faster-than light capable warships larger than a specific size. Smaller vessels are capable of carrying some nuclear devices, yes, but they would be no match for planetary defense screens with ships and stations the size of small moons. Still, the First Galactic War was not that last.

Centuries later, the corrupt and mismanaged Empire collapsed, causing a period of time known The Fractured Age. For over a millennium, human star systems either tried to fight for dominance over the others or took stances of neutrality in an effort to stave off nuclear disaster. There were major incidents, conflicts, and interstellar wars all across the vastness of human colonized space, each one threatening to pull more and more systems into the conflict in a vicious cycle that could have spelled humanity's doom. However, there were those, especially in the neutral systems, who remembered the lessons the Empire learned from The Everlasting Hope. An alliance formed called the United Systems and in the spirit of cooperation, they began to systematically dismantle the war machines of the disparate star systems in an attempt to bring the galaxy to heel in order to save all human life from extinction. Any system or planet that refused to sign the charter and provide delegates for a growing Parliament was destroyed by nuclear fire.

It was a brutal end to a brutal era, and now, thousands of years later, the United Systems of Man remains in power. That power is far from the totalitarian power the Empire wielded. Instead, it is a loose hold over self-governing solar governments, maintained by military deterrence and control of interstellar trade by the USM. Now, humans live in relative peace and can travel the stars to their content, so long as they do it in Cruiser sized ships or smaller. All manner of controlling bodies exist across the thousands of star systems occupied by mankind but there are still hundreds of billions of stars out there left to explore. The Exploration Age is in full swing as more and more of Earth's Children seek answers from the stars. More and more, the planetary conflicts and regional wars seem trivial and petty when compared to the vastness of the Milky Way Galaxy.

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[Penfighter]

Tech/Economic Primer For The Current Era
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Most of the science for space travel in this universe comes from the idea of ships running "microsuns" in their cores. Now, for those of you who aren't physics majors (I'm not either! haha) the current nuclear process as we know it is far too inefficient to facilitate space travel. To explain, the nuclear fusion process requires hydrogen as a basic fuel. As this hydrogen is fused together with other atoms, it becomes denser and denser until it becomes carbon and other gases, like helium. Those elements are not useful for nuclear reaction and the entire process becomes unstable. We know this in real life science because that is exactly how stars work. When stars are depleted of hydrogen, they become imbalanced. To quote the wiki "The force of gravity becomes greater than the force from internal pressure and the star begins to collapse." What does this mean for nuclear fusion drives aboard space ships? You need to constantly maintain the balance of hydrogen in relation to the other elements or your nuclear process will become unstable.

Thus, hydrogen fuel is needed for space travel. However, there is still a problem and we alluded to it at the start of this primer, the amount of hydrogen needed to sustain a process like this is an impossibly large number. Think of our little ship needing to carry a container the size of a planet just to have enough hydrogen to keep the microsun stable for one trip to another star. Years ago, one of my best friends at the time graduated with a physics degree and she told me that if I wanted this process for my science fiction endeavors, we'd need to create a "fantasy element of some kind" to use to slow down the fusion process so it only consumes a fraction of the amount of hydrogen fuel. Boom! Slow-fusion Drives were born in my brain!

Have a miniature sun power a smaller ship like the Spectral Hyacinth means we can do all kinds of neat stuff, like perform interstellar travel for example. It also means that Hydrogen is the currency of the land the way oil is here on Earth. This is why some sci-fi universes even use 'hydrogen credits' as credits and so on. We won't be doing that, but the point is, hydrogen processing for use as fuel is what makes the basis for the galactic economy. The second most desperate demand will be for technological components useful in making spacecraft, stations, and support for this massive hydrogen fuel industry. Mining ores from asteroids, moons, and planets would also be a massive economy, but just think of the logistical nightmare fabrication of advanced technological parts would be. You can't just mine copper and boom, you have wires. Someone has to refine the ore, process the metals, fabricate them into wires, and distribute them to an electronics factory.

That is an expensive process, and where our little crew comes in. Scavenging or "scrapping" is another very important job for the galactic economy because it reclaims tech that has already been refined and fabricated. This is much easier to retool and reuse than mining and processing ore would be, and it would use less precious hydrogen fuel. That is how we fit into the galactic economy and what gives us purpose.
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The Spectral Hyacinth: A Tech Primer
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As far as more personal applications of technology, this we can play fast and loose with for the sake of story. We don't need a wordy explanation for how we achieve artificial gravity, for example. We just have an "anti-gravity" field generator. We can use technobabble like that to explain what we need to for convenience. That said, let me give you what I have for our ship so that we all have the same starting place! Wiuthout further adieu meet your new home in space, the Spectral Hyacinth!

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This ship began as a standard Appaloosa Class Industrial Frigate but has been heavily modified by Captain Atrios with the help of a trusty Atrios Corp. Engineer named Jordan, who is part of the crew. The Appaloosa is renowned for being one of the most luxurious industrial ships on the market and is often converted into pleasure yachts by their owners. The ship is not entirely to scale, btw, but imagine that the seats in the upper cockpit are smaller than what you see and the rest of this will make sense, visually. There are two decks, Upper Deck and Lower Deck or Decks 1 and 2, with 1 being above 2.

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Deck 1 (visual aide above) is designed with pleasing aesthetics in mind. Think smooth, painted walls with comfortable curves and soft lights. As far as what can be found here, it begins at the bridge at the prow of the ship and a corridor behind it that branches off into all major habitation modules. There is the Captain's Quarters directly to the side at the back of the bridge. Leaving the bridge and walking aft, you'll see the Crew's Mess opposite the Day Room (recreational room) immediately. Continuing to travel towards the aft of the ship down the central corridor, you'll see six doors, three on each side. These are the crew quarters and they are not spacious at 10 feet by 10 feet of floor space, but they are considered luxurious for your average scrapper and its private, so don't complain!

Upon entering one of these quarters, a crew member would see an empty space with nothing but a bed on the far side and porthole (window) looking out at the stars. This is because the toilet, shower, wardrobe, small table, and all other comforts are safely tucked away inside the walls in compartments such as in the above image. They can each be accessed by either asking the computer to make it available or touching one of the many small computer interfaces on the smooth, white walls. Thus, everything can be concealed and stowed for space flight and then brought out for daily living on a long haul mission.

Finally, the end of the corridor becomes a double sliding door into the Medbay. Off to ethier side is a cylindrical opening that reveal ladders leading to the Lower Deck.

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Deck 2 (reference above) is aesthetically more industrial with exposed floor grating and none of the fancy interior hull paneling and or unnecessary bits. That is because this deck only has three things: The ship's array of cargo storage bays all along the midships, main access to Engineering in the aft, and then a secondary "lower" bridge at the prow that controls the utility arms and tools of the ship. The cargo bays will be full of food for the crew and other essentials mainly but will also be used for the most sensitive salvaged technology or other important things. Also, one bay is reserved for the fabrication unit and for other industrial purposes. Engineering at the aft contains the microsun reactor and all the repair and control mechanisms that maintain every aspect of the ship, from engines to life support.

Other details about the ship you'll need to know revolve around the kinds of tech one can expect to be using throughout the ship as well as the armaments. This is the far future, so control interfaces on the bridge, in engineering, and around the ship will be 3d holograms that project from the computer terminal you are attempting to use. This concept is pretty common in sci fi right now but if you have questions, use the OOC thread or DMs to get an answer! I got you. Naturally, there are also analog backups for every system, so more traditional kinetic and tactile controls and inputs are there as well should the holographic systems be down.

For Armaments, our lovely ship has been upgraded with two massive rail guns, one to port and one to starboard. We also carry a full compliment of ship-to-ship missiles that are stored in the cargo bay which have feeders that send the munitions to launchers on the dorsal and ventral hull sections outside the ship. There are no lasers and miniguns and that sort of thing. Ship-to-ship combat in this universe is much like the Expanse. We'll need to close the distance, match orbital velocities, dump our payload, and scram.

Lastly, the ship is equipped with tractor beams, large laser cutters for other ships' outer hulls (useless in a fight at orbital velocities), and can be changed out for claws that can move space debris. Part of the scavenger package is to tow along with us a massive "honeycomb" shaped freight carrier that has massive storage containers in it. This is where the bulk of the common scrap and debris will go.

Equipment/Weapons/Personal Tech​

Personal tech is what you might expect for scrappers. We'll need small laser cutters, torches, protective equipment, space suits, and nothing to surprising. As far as the nature of it, just think practical and overall in good quality. the CEO of Atrios Corp. is not outfitting ya'll with junk. This is really good salvager tech.

Personally, if you want cybernetics and machine parts as part of your character's body, go for it! Makes sense for the universe we are in. Beyond that, everyone will likely have personal items like holographic photo frames, anti gravity boots for jumping high, personal shields with limited batteries in their jackets, all kinds of gadgets and fun stuff. Have fun with it!

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Please let me know, writing partners, if you have any questions! I hope this serves as enough to help us all get started.