Post by Annasiel on May 17, 2022 2:43:05 GMT
The Edge of Oblivion
The first mistake was thinking what we had could last forever. It's not like we tried to stop it - we stripped our planet bare, shooting water and acid into its cracks and harvesting whatever oozed out. We bickered about how bad things were, about how much time we had, about how technology would always outstrip the human ability to destroy whatever environment it found itself in. Waters could be cleansed, ecosystems regulated, but nothing could stop the impending loss of the non-renewable. An apocalypse was looming at our door. We stretched our frail and juvenile grip across the solar system, first colonizing our moon, then Mars, then Venus. This solved the resource gap, for a while, mining those planets and stripping asteroids of their precious minerals, but it couldn't last for long. The dragon of production hungered for more. We considered sending giant ships out across the cosmos, hoping the populations could settle on worlds more fertile and vibrant than the one they left, knowing they would never return back to Earth. But then - a miracle. In 2168, James Rugel and Abraham Danche created the first near-infinite mass generator. It allowed for spatial orientation on an axis outside of normal human ability, leading to the discovery of a new area of navigable space, a dark, empty abyss soon after referred to as the underspace.
Rugel and Danche had the discovery of a lifetime on their hands. A way to avoid the years of interstellar travel, to completely mitigate the downsides of expanding Earth's astral colonies. A trip that took decades could be made in weeks. There were, however, downsides. Underspace, though seemingly empty, was permeated by an incredibly cold dark matter that seemed to leech heat at rates that defied contemporary scientific understanding. No amount of insulation could stop the warmth of the ship from leaking. Closer to the surface of realspace was less dangerous to travel in this regard, but crossing that boundary risked the dangers of gravity wells from astral bodies dipping beyond the underspace's normal limits. Rugel and Danche theorized the creation of massive vessels, heavily shielded and powered by recent advancements in downscaling fusion technology. This solved the problem of fuel - compressed hydrogen was lighter and easier to store than traditional thorium sources - and the problem of heat, with the ships' central reactors serving as heating sources. These vessels would be able to travel deep into the underspace, far below where all but the most massive astral bodies would affect their path.
Danche wanted to take this invention public. The United Nations was already developing an interstellar colonization program, and use of the RDA would save them money, time, and possibly lives. Rugel, however, disagreed, and their disagreement led to a falling out between the two. After a drawn legal dispute, Rugel came out the victor, leaving Danche's only mark on what came next that of his name on the machine. Gathering handsome capital investments, Rugel founded Tyche Enterprises and began planning projects to contend with the UN's own interstellar program. For over two decades, he prototyped the massive ships he and Danche had predicted - until, in the fall of 2194, he unveiled the first of its kind.
Taxidiotis.
Traveler.
Though the UN had already completed their first wave of colony ships five years prior, they were swiftly obsoleted, now drifting towards Goldilocks planets at near-lightspeed that Tyche had already colonized. They wouldn't arrive for another several decades, and would find themselves landing in populated cities outside the grip of the UN's control. People of all stripes turned to Tyche as their savior, rich and poor alike, and Tyche - supported by a seemingly endless supply of investors and an entire galaxy of resources - grew into a behemoth that dwarfed the government in power. Tense, but unable to take action without backlash, the UN conceded to Tyche's territorial claims, maintaining their grip on the aging colonial system of Sol. The pressure only seemed to grow. Little things at first, small frictions between Tyche and the restructured Solar Union. The small leverage the Solar Union had been able to gain in the initial confrontations left many resources travelling through the Sol colonies as a central trading hub, through which the colonies were able to enact tariffs and exchange fees. Tyche, without consulting the Union, changed several trade routes overnight to completely circumvent Sol, and encouraged Tyche ships to avoid paying Sol taxes. In retaliation, Sol detained several of these vessels, jailing the crews and conscripting the ships into their personal fleet. Tyche, not wanting to lose their FTL advantage, opened fire on one of these conscripted ships as it attempted to refuel at a Tyche-colonized planet, killing all crew and passengers onboard.
War was on the horizon.
Tyche had the resource advantage, but the Solar Union had the first real strike. They managed to reverse engineer some of the stolen RDAs, and had begun to install them in military ships that were lighter and smaller than the Tyche Odyssey-class vessels, risking traveling closer to the surface for the benefit of being difficult for the deeper Tyche ships to detect and for faster dip reentry times from underspace. These assault ships laid waste to several Tyche vessels, both passenger and freight alike, shutting down several major supply chains between Tyche's remote colonies. For a time, it seemed like the decentralized nature of the Tyche colony system was working against it. The colonies scrambled to amass a military force on the scale of the Solar Union's, and the few fleets they did manage to send were easily intercepted, since the Solar Union had far less area to patrol. The tides were turning against Tyche inch by inch - and they were growing desperate.
No war crime committed in the Expansion War is greater than the one that finally ended it. In 2214, in an echo of the last great war a century and a half before it, it all came down to a new superweapon. This one, however, was not simply a warning. It was an ultimatum. The morning of August 24th, 2254, Tyche's War Executive sent a message to the Prime Minister of the Solar Union. Ceasefire now and call for armistice, or we will end the war with decisive force. The missive was still being discussed when, a day later, an underspace travelling payload was surfaced ten kilometers above Europe. It was carrying a massive array of Rugel-Danche drives intentionally calibrated to accelerate moments before impact. The resulting gravitational surge was enough to collapse the system, breaking synchronized orbit patterns of the other planets and sending the Earth itself plummeting into the underspace. While the Lunar, Mars, and Venus colonies were soon eclipsed by the resulting black hole, the fledgling Pluto colony survived, losing orbit entirely and drifting away. While the fates of its inhabitants are unknown, it is assumed that, lacking connection to any supply chains, they ran out of resources and died within a year.
Tyche was victorious - a dark victory, but a victory nonetheless. They worked on rebuilding their broken system, and soon settled to extend martial laws regarding underspace travel into peacetime as well. Only Tyche ships were allowed to travel in the underspace, and Tyche maintained a monopoly on the production, sale, and use of their vessels. They cited dissent among their colonies as a primary reason. Many weren't happy with the way the Expansion War was ended, and budding revolutions were the norm. By maintaining control over the connections between the colonies, Tyche could control their supplies - and their information.
Some, however, didn't take too kindly to this heavy hand. Taking after the Solar Union's assault ships, people began to mount stolen RDAs in lighter vessels, using the very edge of the underspace where Tyche couldn't see. It was dangerous. Many of the ships were homemade, and the constant collision with gravity wells at the underspace's surface meant they needed to be repaired every run. Only the desperate, brave, or foolish would travel this way. Many were criminals and smugglers, looking out for their own self-interest and cutting out the trade middleman, while others were revolutionaries, taking information between rebellious colonies, selling weapons to worlds in lockdown, striking Tyche military vessels when they least expected. The anti-establishment nature of these independents grew into a cultural phenomenon, where people told in hushed whispers the stories of brave crews who defied Tyche's grasp. They may not be kind, they may not be good - but they stand up against the impossible, and somehow come out alive.
The people named them Skimmers.
You're one of them.
"It's in man's nature to explore. Give us a mountain and we'll travel to its peak, a canyon and we'll hike to its depths. Time and time again, man's insurmountable wanderlust has clashed with the technology of the times. First, with the wilderness. Then, the oceans. Eventually, we overcame this limitation, leaving no inch of our home untrodden, no stone - whether it be thousands of feet above the oceans or thousands of feet below the soil - unturned. It was at this point we reached our final hurdle. We turned our eyes skywards to the heavens, that unexplored abyss, and bided our time until, some day once more, technology rose to meet our desires.
Today, my friends, is that day. Today, we ascend that golden stair and fly among the stars."
James Rugel, Founder of Tyche Enterprises
The final paragraph of his 2194 commencement speech on Taxidiotis, first of the Odyssey-class galactic arks.
Today, my friends, is that day. Today, we ascend that golden stair and fly among the stars."
James Rugel, Founder of Tyche Enterprises
The final paragraph of his 2194 commencement speech on Taxidiotis, first of the Odyssey-class galactic arks.
The first mistake was thinking what we had could last forever. It's not like we tried to stop it - we stripped our planet bare, shooting water and acid into its cracks and harvesting whatever oozed out. We bickered about how bad things were, about how much time we had, about how technology would always outstrip the human ability to destroy whatever environment it found itself in. Waters could be cleansed, ecosystems regulated, but nothing could stop the impending loss of the non-renewable. An apocalypse was looming at our door. We stretched our frail and juvenile grip across the solar system, first colonizing our moon, then Mars, then Venus. This solved the resource gap, for a while, mining those planets and stripping asteroids of their precious minerals, but it couldn't last for long. The dragon of production hungered for more. We considered sending giant ships out across the cosmos, hoping the populations could settle on worlds more fertile and vibrant than the one they left, knowing they would never return back to Earth. But then - a miracle. In 2168, James Rugel and Abraham Danche created the first near-infinite mass generator. It allowed for spatial orientation on an axis outside of normal human ability, leading to the discovery of a new area of navigable space, a dark, empty abyss soon after referred to as the underspace.
"There are lots of ways to describe underspace. Lots of fancy mathematical theories, cobbled-together models, big, smart justifications that use big, smart words. Nobody quite knows how it works, but the consensus is pretty clear -- it’s a hack for relativity. Y’know, Einstein’s whole spiel about the speed of light, universal speed limit, yadda yadda. Underspace doesn’t exactly break it as much as work around it. Take a piece of paper. Draw two dots. Now draw the shortest line between them. Easy, right? A straight line, cutting right through whatever’s between it. For the longest time, we thought we knew what a straight line was, but it turns out, space isn’t flat like paper. It’s got its curves and bends, waves and valleys.
Now, imagine we could just… go under all that. Ignore the curve of space-time, find that true straight line between those points. That’s what underspace seems to be. Easiest way to understand it, at least, to explain why travelling what looks like the same distance at what looks like the same speed takes a fraction of the time.
To get into underspace, you need a Rugel-Danche Accelerator. The accelerator forms part of a special drive, separate from the main thrusters, who’s whole purpose is to generate a point of near-infinite mass. How’s that work? Ask someone smarter than me. Toruses and speeding up particles really fast. Dumb science bullshit. Results, though, I can explain. We call it dipping. Dropping anchor. You get a jolt, and as long as your little RDA keeps running, you stay below.
Once you’re there, you’ll realize things are a lot different from normal reality. First of all, there’s nothing. Literally nothing. Just pitch fucking black everywhere you turn. Next thing you’ll notice is how cold it is. 0K, and despite the seeming voidy vacuum of it all, you will lose heat and you will lose it fast unless you’ve got a solar core or two to spare. Ships don’t like being down there for too long, ‘cept for the big Tyche ones. You’ve gotta plan your ride tight, or else you might be stuck with a dead engine, which is the last place you wanna be. See, while it’s pretty easy to drop anchor, going back up is a different story. You need thrust. Just turn off the RDA, you risk tearing your ship apart. Engines on full, loose the throttle on the RDA slow, and you’ll break the liminal safe each and every time.
Oh, one last thing to mention. Those noises you hear? They sound pretty scary, but just try to ignore them. The scientists blame it on electromagnetic fields, charges building up on your ship’s angles as you breach them. Coil whine on a bigger scale, basically. Course, it’s a bit convenient you thermal shield your windows before dipping. Just gotta give the scientists the benefit of the doubt and try not to think too hard about it."
Levi Hess, Skimmer Engineer of the Annabel Lee
Now, imagine we could just… go under all that. Ignore the curve of space-time, find that true straight line between those points. That’s what underspace seems to be. Easiest way to understand it, at least, to explain why travelling what looks like the same distance at what looks like the same speed takes a fraction of the time.
To get into underspace, you need a Rugel-Danche Accelerator. The accelerator forms part of a special drive, separate from the main thrusters, who’s whole purpose is to generate a point of near-infinite mass. How’s that work? Ask someone smarter than me. Toruses and speeding up particles really fast. Dumb science bullshit. Results, though, I can explain. We call it dipping. Dropping anchor. You get a jolt, and as long as your little RDA keeps running, you stay below.
Once you’re there, you’ll realize things are a lot different from normal reality. First of all, there’s nothing. Literally nothing. Just pitch fucking black everywhere you turn. Next thing you’ll notice is how cold it is. 0K, and despite the seeming voidy vacuum of it all, you will lose heat and you will lose it fast unless you’ve got a solar core or two to spare. Ships don’t like being down there for too long, ‘cept for the big Tyche ones. You’ve gotta plan your ride tight, or else you might be stuck with a dead engine, which is the last place you wanna be. See, while it’s pretty easy to drop anchor, going back up is a different story. You need thrust. Just turn off the RDA, you risk tearing your ship apart. Engines on full, loose the throttle on the RDA slow, and you’ll break the liminal safe each and every time.
Oh, one last thing to mention. Those noises you hear? They sound pretty scary, but just try to ignore them. The scientists blame it on electromagnetic fields, charges building up on your ship’s angles as you breach them. Coil whine on a bigger scale, basically. Course, it’s a bit convenient you thermal shield your windows before dipping. Just gotta give the scientists the benefit of the doubt and try not to think too hard about it."
Levi Hess, Skimmer Engineer of the Annabel Lee
Rugel and Danche had the discovery of a lifetime on their hands. A way to avoid the years of interstellar travel, to completely mitigate the downsides of expanding Earth's astral colonies. A trip that took decades could be made in weeks. There were, however, downsides. Underspace, though seemingly empty, was permeated by an incredibly cold dark matter that seemed to leech heat at rates that defied contemporary scientific understanding. No amount of insulation could stop the warmth of the ship from leaking. Closer to the surface of realspace was less dangerous to travel in this regard, but crossing that boundary risked the dangers of gravity wells from astral bodies dipping beyond the underspace's normal limits. Rugel and Danche theorized the creation of massive vessels, heavily shielded and powered by recent advancements in downscaling fusion technology. This solved the problem of fuel - compressed hydrogen was lighter and easier to store than traditional thorium sources - and the problem of heat, with the ships' central reactors serving as heating sources. These vessels would be able to travel deep into the underspace, far below where all but the most massive astral bodies would affect their path.
Danche wanted to take this invention public. The United Nations was already developing an interstellar colonization program, and use of the RDA would save them money, time, and possibly lives. Rugel, however, disagreed, and their disagreement led to a falling out between the two. After a drawn legal dispute, Rugel came out the victor, leaving Danche's only mark on what came next that of his name on the machine. Gathering handsome capital investments, Rugel founded Tyche Enterprises and began planning projects to contend with the UN's own interstellar program. For over two decades, he prototyped the massive ships he and Danche had predicted - until, in the fall of 2194, he unveiled the first of its kind.
Taxidiotis.
Traveler.
Though the UN had already completed their first wave of colony ships five years prior, they were swiftly obsoleted, now drifting towards Goldilocks planets at near-lightspeed that Tyche had already colonized. They wouldn't arrive for another several decades, and would find themselves landing in populated cities outside the grip of the UN's control. People of all stripes turned to Tyche as their savior, rich and poor alike, and Tyche - supported by a seemingly endless supply of investors and an entire galaxy of resources - grew into a behemoth that dwarfed the government in power. Tense, but unable to take action without backlash, the UN conceded to Tyche's territorial claims, maintaining their grip on the aging colonial system of Sol. The pressure only seemed to grow. Little things at first, small frictions between Tyche and the restructured Solar Union. The small leverage the Solar Union had been able to gain in the initial confrontations left many resources travelling through the Sol colonies as a central trading hub, through which the colonies were able to enact tariffs and exchange fees. Tyche, without consulting the Union, changed several trade routes overnight to completely circumvent Sol, and encouraged Tyche ships to avoid paying Sol taxes. In retaliation, Sol detained several of these vessels, jailing the crews and conscripting the ships into their personal fleet. Tyche, not wanting to lose their FTL advantage, opened fire on one of these conscripted ships as it attempted to refuel at a Tyche-colonized planet, killing all crew and passengers onboard.
War was on the horizon.
Tyche had the resource advantage, but the Solar Union had the first real strike. They managed to reverse engineer some of the stolen RDAs, and had begun to install them in military ships that were lighter and smaller than the Tyche Odyssey-class vessels, risking traveling closer to the surface for the benefit of being difficult for the deeper Tyche ships to detect and for faster dip reentry times from underspace. These assault ships laid waste to several Tyche vessels, both passenger and freight alike, shutting down several major supply chains between Tyche's remote colonies. For a time, it seemed like the decentralized nature of the Tyche colony system was working against it. The colonies scrambled to amass a military force on the scale of the Solar Union's, and the few fleets they did manage to send were easily intercepted, since the Solar Union had far less area to patrol. The tides were turning against Tyche inch by inch - and they were growing desperate.
No war crime committed in the Expansion War is greater than the one that finally ended it. In 2214, in an echo of the last great war a century and a half before it, it all came down to a new superweapon. This one, however, was not simply a warning. It was an ultimatum. The morning of August 24th, 2254, Tyche's War Executive sent a message to the Prime Minister of the Solar Union. Ceasefire now and call for armistice, or we will end the war with decisive force. The missive was still being discussed when, a day later, an underspace travelling payload was surfaced ten kilometers above Europe. It was carrying a massive array of Rugel-Danche drives intentionally calibrated to accelerate moments before impact. The resulting gravitational surge was enough to collapse the system, breaking synchronized orbit patterns of the other planets and sending the Earth itself plummeting into the underspace. While the Lunar, Mars, and Venus colonies were soon eclipsed by the resulting black hole, the fledgling Pluto colony survived, losing orbit entirely and drifting away. While the fates of its inhabitants are unknown, it is assumed that, lacking connection to any supply chains, they ran out of resources and died within a year.
Tyche was victorious - a dark victory, but a victory nonetheless. They worked on rebuilding their broken system, and soon settled to extend martial laws regarding underspace travel into peacetime as well. Only Tyche ships were allowed to travel in the underspace, and Tyche maintained a monopoly on the production, sale, and use of their vessels. They cited dissent among their colonies as a primary reason. Many weren't happy with the way the Expansion War was ended, and budding revolutions were the norm. By maintaining control over the connections between the colonies, Tyche could control their supplies - and their information.
Some, however, didn't take too kindly to this heavy hand. Taking after the Solar Union's assault ships, people began to mount stolen RDAs in lighter vessels, using the very edge of the underspace where Tyche couldn't see. It was dangerous. Many of the ships were homemade, and the constant collision with gravity wells at the underspace's surface meant they needed to be repaired every run. Only the desperate, brave, or foolish would travel this way. Many were criminals and smugglers, looking out for their own self-interest and cutting out the trade middleman, while others were revolutionaries, taking information between rebellious colonies, selling weapons to worlds in lockdown, striking Tyche military vessels when they least expected. The anti-establishment nature of these independents grew into a cultural phenomenon, where people told in hushed whispers the stories of brave crews who defied Tyche's grasp. They may not be kind, they may not be good - but they stand up against the impossible, and somehow come out alive.
The people named them Skimmers.
You're one of them.