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Old 04-07-2021, 11:44 AM   #791
Prince Charon
 
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Default Re: Five Earths, All in a Row

The recent problems Spacebattles.com have been having have reminded me that I already decided that if SB.com went down permanently or I were for some other reason no-longer able to use the threads on SB.com, this would become the main discussion and development thread for this idea. They say that they have a temporary solution and will be back up soon, but they don't seem to have a long-term solution, yet.

Also, there are a few entries that are holding up the September, 2014 timeline update, which I'm writer's blocked on and would like help with, please:

Sept. 3: The third Operation Pencil Sharpener expedition breaches the Earth 2 universe and Battle of Point Carruthers (Allied Forces codename for the point at which vessels from Earth-1/Infopunk Earth have entered the Earth-2 Universe) occurs. This is the combat debut of the Nazi battle-saucer (specifically, the fighter-bomber vessel in the middle), based on Cytherean and other alien technologies. The distinction between these and the Eisenvogel introduced earlier (see July 10, 2014) is that every important piece of technology on the battle-saucers (apart from the guns) is imported from Venus(2) or Mars(2), whereas everything on the Eisenvogel is made in Dsp-Germany. It is also the combat debut of Inp-Japan's Wakamiya-class 'probe-carrier' (guided-missile bomber/arsenal vessel) and Yamato-class 'hazard clearing vessel' (space battleship/super-gunship). Small numbers of probes from Wakamiya's VDA are shown to be capable of short-range self-teleportation. Tertiary Control Room on the Yamato is destroyed, but the main gun proves highly effective against shielded vessels, although the charging/cooling time and need to aim the entire vessel to aim the weapon are detriments. PLACEHOLDER <Allied victory, need more details; notable casualties on both sides; needs followup later in the month, including when the vehicles that are landing do so, and where - some on Luna(2), some in Allied nations on Earth(2)>

Sept. 9: PLACEHOLDER On Earth-1, netrunner killed by black ICE (from different country that server or company HQ); Monsanto on trial. <change company? either way, need more details> (EDIT: clarification re: black ICE, it is legal in a few countries (including where the servers were), illegal in others (like the one the netrunner was in, and probably the one where corporate HQ was), and the curse had to follow the datapath back to the hacker's body, crossing one or more national borders.)

Sept. 15: PLACEHOLDER <uncertain race, maybe the Titanians?> deliver a vehicle to Kal'El which resembles a golden Dymaxion car without wheels or windows. This turns out to be Kara'Zor'El's landing capsule <change to a later date?>


Thoughts?
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Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted.

Last edited by Prince Charon; 04-07-2021 at 12:03 PM.
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Old 04-09-2021, 01:37 AM   #792
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Default Re: Five Earths, All in a Row

Well that helps with going back and forth between the two. :-)

One thing that we should consider is how fast Infopunk Earth is becoming like Merlin-1 (Classic: Technomancer) or how many elements of Merlin-3 (effectively Technomancer 1942) are on DieselPunk Earth.
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Old 04-09-2021, 03:26 AM   #793
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This setting has got enough that a wiki for it might be useful. Or world forge.
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Old 04-09-2021, 07:20 AM   #794
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dcarson View Post
This setting has got enough that a wiki for it might be useful. Or world forge.
Well the GURPSwiki has a good hunk of the information already. We can also make use some of the special templates (like GURPS Boardroom and Curia) to handle some of the details.
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Old 04-09-2021, 04:23 PM   #795
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dcarson View Post
This setting has got enough that a wiki for it might be useful. Or world forge.
The GURPS wiki has enough in it or linked through it that I'm not sure what it doesn't have of what's been posted.
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Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted.
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Old 04-10-2021, 02:51 AM   #796
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Prince Charon View Post
The GURPS wiki has enough in it or linked through it that I'm not sure what it doesn't have of what's been posted.
Manly the organizations which could be redone per the GURPS Boardroom and Curia statblock
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Old 05-25-2021, 04:07 PM   #797
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OK, this seems to be ready, sorry it took so long:

September, 2014 (1942 on Earth-2, 1880 on Earth-3, 1557 on Earth-4, and 516 CE/1269 AUC on Earth-5)

September 2: Skirmish over Joliet occurs in the skies of Stp-Illinois, between Dr. Aeolus's Air Pirates and a flight of gliders from the Illinois Aerial Militia's 2nd Fighter Squadron. On Earth-2, Black Widow assassinates Socialist Red Guardsman and defects to the Allies, forcing the surviving members of Axis Amerika to find new safe houses and new cover identities.

Sept. 3: The third Operation Pencil Sharpener expedition breaches the Earth 2 universe and the Battle of Point Carruthers (Allied Forces codename for the point at which vessels from Earth-1/Infopunk Earth have entered the Earth-2 Universe) occurs. This is the combat debut of the Nazi battle-saucer (specifically, the fighter-bomber vessel in the middle, given the NATO reporting name BARROW), based on Cytherean and other alien technologies. The distinction between these and the Eisenvogel introduced earlier (see July 10, 2014) is that every important piece of technology on the battle-saucers (apart from the guns) is imported from Venus(2) or Mars(2), whereas everything on the Eisenvogel is made in Dsp-Germany. It is also the combat debut of Inp-Japan's Wakamiya-class 'probe-carrier' (guided-missile bomber/arsenal vessel) and Yamato-class 'hazard clearing vessel' (space battleship/super-gunship), as both are tractored to the battle-site by their Clan Ssrax escorts. Small numbers of probes from Wakamiya's VDA are shown to be capable of short-range self-teleportation. The Tertiary Control Room on the Yamato is destroyed, but the main gun proves highly effective against shielded vessels, although the charging/cooling time and need to aim the entire vessel to aim the weapon are detriments. Between the two, they account for one-sixth of enemy combat losses. While the battle is an Allied victory, there are notable casualties on both sides, with eighteen fighters and twenty-two larger craft of the Allies being either destroyed or disabled, and more than fifty (mostly fighters, and nine of the twelve Cytherean raiders) lost on the Axis side.

Sept. 4: Dsp-Titan begins interplanetary trade with Dsp-Switzerland, and other neutral countries on Earth-2. Offers of trade from the belligerent nations are rebuffed, as the Titanians do not want to get involved in the war. In Dsp-Berlin, a number of German aviatrices are brought together by the Cytherean Amassador to Dsp-Germany. The Red Baroness and Sky Witch take an immediate dislike to the flamboyant Valkyrie. The first mission to investigate the Blue Harvest freighter (see July 7, 2014) reaches the vessel, and is eventually able to dock.

Sept. 5: Red Skull creates the Weltraumer-SS, placing all Third Reich space assets and personnel under same (in other words, directly under the control of the Nazi party, rather than under the Dsp-German military). In the Earth-1 worldline, all contact is lost with the expedition to the Blue Harvest freighter. Some Allied survivors of the Battle of Point Carruthers land on Luna(2), being unable to make atmospheric entry or having Luna(2) as their intended destination. Several captured enemy vessels which cannot survive re-entry land with them, including three Nazi BARROW battle-saucers (two of which had surrendered, and one which no-longer had a living crew - a disintegration ray had hit the cockpit, and oddly did no damage to the windows or consoles, but erased the crew and parts of their chairs; the unmanned BARROW is tractored down by Selenean vessels), one Korsshetth MANOR heavy combatant, and four Korsshetth FINGER space fighters. Allied crews are greeted with great enthusiasm by the Seleneans, particular attention being paid to those crews which damaged or destroyed Cytherean vessels. The Axis survivors withdraw to a near-earth asteroid where Clan Korsshetth has built a base (a wormhole leads from the asteroid base to a military base in Dsp-Hungary).

Sept. 7: Construction of the Aqaba Canal is begun by the Kingdom of the Sinai on Earth-2. While in theory it is redundant with the already existing Suez Canal, it grants two advantages: first, that very redundancy means that if Egypt annexes or blocks the Suez, as was done on Earth-1, the Aqaba will still be available for use, and second, the two canals will allow twice the volume of sea traffic to cross at the same time. JGSDF 30th Mobile Suit Team (really the second, all other MS teams but the 08th and 30th exist only on paper, or small groups of non-combatants with no combat mecha) formed in Japan-1. The remaining Allied survivors of the Battle of Point Carruthers land on Earth(2), mainly at Muroc in the Dsp-USA and RAF Box in Dsp-UK.

Sept. 9: In Sweden of Earth-1, a netrunner is found to have been killed by black ICE, which is illegal in Sweden. This is complicated by the fact that the server that the hacker was penetrating was in Siberia, Russia, where black ICE is legal; however, the curse had to follow the hacker's datapath back to his body, thus crossing several national borders. Further complicating the matter, the corporation, Oracle Biotechnologies, is American, and black ICE is only legal for government use in the USA. The question of jurisdiction is thus significant. A leaked corporate memo indicates that their logic in using black ICE was that they have armed guards at numerous such facilities, and this should be no different (which ignores the issue of attacking across multiple national borders). On Earth-3, in Stp-London, Sir William Geoffrey Saunders, 2nd baronet Saunders and newly-installed head of Saunders and Sons Aeronef and Rocketry, announces that his company will be investing in air-breathing jet propulsion, a sharp departure from his late father's insistence that there was nothing wrong with solid-fuel rockets.

Sept. 12: Soviet 'enhanced chimpanzee' cyborg supersoldier named Potemkin, nicknamed 'Battlechimp Potemkin' by the Dsp-American press, is send in as a replacement for Black Widow (which makes hiding the group when not on missions more complicated).

Sept. 15: USSF Space Exploration Command officially renamed USSF Star Fleet Command.

Sept. 17: A pair of what appear to be live thylacines are photographed in Inp-Tasmania. USA Today's website posts an excerpt from an upcoming article about idealistic superheroes (some of them also cops) conflicting with the regular police over incidents of police brutality and racism. One quote from the article, said by a superhero who was also a Chicago cop, gets memed and goes viral: "If we want to be trusted, we need to deserve it."

Sept. 18: Queen Clea XVI, Queen of the Atlantean city-state of Venturia (and many other titles that accumulate in ancient royal lines), called 'Clea Karcharías' (Clea the Shark) behind her back, joins the Axis powers in retaliation for the US Navy placing sea-mines in Venturian waters. This has no effect on the policies of Atlantis as a whole, at this time.

Sept. 21: Parapsychology Today's website posts an excerpt from an upcoming article called 'Veterans of the Psychic Wars' (the title is a reference to a song from the early 1980s, that itself references earlier works), about psychically-induced PTSD - that is, Post-Traumatic Stress from events that only happened in precognitive visions, or were only witnessed or experienced through retrocognition, remote sensing, or telepathy.

Sept. 24: Clp-Britain performs their first successful satellite launch, which along with red and white flares includes a radio transceiver powered by a mercury boiler. SpaceX's Starship flies on impulse power, making several orbits before returning to the Earth and landing safely on her tail.

Sept. 28: In and over the Inp-UK, the first flight of the Short Sparrowhawk (see Aug. 9, 2013) occurs. The fighter performs well, and both reaches orbit and re-enters and lands smoothly.


Thoughts?
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Warning, I have the Distractible and Imaginative quirks in real life.

"The more corrupt a government, the more it legislates."
-- Tacitus

Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted.
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Old 06-09-2021, 08:12 AM   #798
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Not an update, but something relevant to Earth-2:

How William Fairbairn Created the Modern SWAT Team in Warlord Era Shanghai (a bit over 21 minutes long). Yeah. By description, Shanghai had what is basically a modern SWAT team, albeit with less advanced equipment, starting around 1925. I had not known that.
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Old 07-20-2021, 07:17 PM   #799
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Sorry this isn't an update. There's an entry that I'm planning on adding to the FAQ, I just want to be sure that it's reasonably clear before I add it:

* Why doesn't this thing from <insert story/setting here> work exactly the way it does in that setting?
Because this isn't that setting. Things in Five Earths that resemble things from other settings are most often imitations, with abilities modeled on those of the thing which they resemble. In Star Trek, a phaser is a piece of very advanced, but mundane, technology; on Infopunk Earth, a phaser is a psionic 'magic item' that might have some electronics in it. A local imitation of the Infinity Gauntlet complete with local-imitation Infinity Stones would have a hard time killing half the people in a small town, for example, and some of them would even be able to resist it. Likewise, even if you're a REALLY BIG Exalted fan, that doesn't mean you gain a real Solar Exaltation (or whichever), it means that you have a chance of the spirits noticing you and helping you gain psychic powers that superficially resemble those of a Solar Exalted. If you're very lucky or interesting, the Roman god Sol Invictus might have noticed you. No matter how powerful you become, though, you will still be a psychic, not a Solar Exalted, and certain abilities, like Perfect Defences, cannot even be particularly well-imitated by psychic powers.


Thoughts?
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"The more corrupt a government, the more it legislates."
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Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted.
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Old 07-23-2021, 08:19 PM   #800
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I raised a point on the spacebattles should be mentioned here.

"Mana" is simply a stand in for what ever powers spells being it free spirits (Roma Arcana) or latent psi energy. Heck, GURPS powers touches on this in the Unified Metaphysical Theories box (pg 118):

"In some settings, “magic” and “psi” both tap the same energies, in one case by study and formal disciplines, in the other by raw talent and willpower." "Psi might even use the standard GURPS spell system. (“Mana levels” would probably not vary much in such a setting, although some areas might be more “psi-friendly” than others.) The most important practical effect is that “magic” and “psi” could always interact directly, able to detect, negate, and even enhance each other."

My own homebrew theory (c 1987) tried to unite Mana, Sanctity, and Psi:

All intelligent beings have some degree of internal power which is expressed in many ways one of the more obvious being Psionics. The actions a person does over his lifetime results in some of this internal power being left behind in the area; this left behind psionic power is mana. The more people stay in an area and the longer they stay the higher the mana will be. Magery allows one to tap into this left behind "Psionic" power.

Many things can aspect this mana and in the case of places with high religious significance the mana aspects into a form so different that it is called sanctity which then "wakes" taking on the personality the worshipers expect. Because its very existence is dependent on belief it will "bless" people with the ability to channel its power (Power Investiture) In any case magic will still be fickle: the mage or cleric is tapping into power that is external rather than internal and therefore "alien".

Mana is like water; it flows from a high state to a low one. Hence mana can flow into an area in which an intelligent being has never lived. This also means that a difference of more than one mana level of two neighboring areas will not last. So trying to create a no mana area in anything but a low mana area is futile - the mana level will "fill up" usually within a year.

This flow also applies to the dimensions as well; mana flows to the dimension of less mana. So setting up a doorway to the Astral plane can eventually result in your local mana level dropping to Low if it is used often enough. Conversely doorways to higher mana realms can increase local mana level. The problem is what else might come through such doorways.

The thing is "in the Five Earths setting, 'mana' is separate from Sanctity and psionic energy in general" but this raises a question for the world data. Does "mana" level really mean anything any more?

Fantasy Earth is effectively a mixture of Camelot-1 and Camelot-2 - though the spirits could be pushing it towards Camelot-3 as it is supposed to become DungeonPunk Earth IIRC.

But Fantasy Earth is no mana and yet has what amounts to Magery (Ritual, psi) so it has "magic" it just isn't Sanctity or standard mana based.
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