Setting Jam: Hyperbolic Trajectory

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by (E)

Question
What was the last conflict (small or large) in orbit or off world?

It all depends on how what you call a "Conflict"

I'd be remiss not to mention the riots in the High Artemis colony on the moon. Those are ongoing, despite myriad arrests and a brutal crackdown.

The Yoris - Maroon gang war probably also counts, given the amount of military hardware the two can bring to bear against each other.


Question: What's the cause of the High Artemis Riots?

[(E)]

The High Artemis riots

Of the several ideologically motivated factions that have developed in the last centuries two had their lunar members led by charismatic and effective leaders.

Inner Harmony is a catch all group who are aligned behind the idea that humans work best when they have some form of belief in their lives. Martin Meyers-Whitaker, a second generation lunar psychologist gained a great deal of influence within the various groups and organisations allied with or following Inner Harmony's credo.

The second faction, the Smith Foundation are believers in capitalism, with many followers amongst the wealthy and those who aspire to be wealthy. A well regulated free market for essentially everything being their openly acknowledged goal. (Though with considerable argument around the definition of "well regulated")
Aya Rossi an extremely charismatic and somewhat self made billionaire is the woman at the top.

These two factions came to loggerheads over the legal framework of the life support infrastructure in the lunar constitution. Early reporting on the issues called this the Pay to Breathe debate.

Political lobbying turned into information warfare which then turned into open conflict. Imported orporate security forces battled the local opposition with the police caught in the middle.

While the imported security forces where well armed with the latest technology, the locals fought in their native conditions and gravity. Inner Harmony also turned out to be surprising good at manufacturing and distributing a large number of basic tools of war. Highly motivated and with support from much of the local population Inner Harmony achieved its aims, ensuring the free market was kept at arms length from the life support systems of the moon.

Questions
The Smiths and Inner Harmony are two Ideological factions what are some more?
How many are there?

What are a few (say four?) of the bigger projects that have failed during the colonization of the solar system?

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by (E)

The Smiths and Inner Harmony are two Ideological factions what are some more?
How many are there?

Good ones. I'll add one (don't forget the biopuritans from the first page or two), but yeah there's always room for more. One fairly common ideology is Observation Justice. It holds that, essentially, so long as absolutely everything is recorded and everyone has access to that information, then justice can be achieved, and that 'privacy' is poorly defined and a worthy price for that. Snooping into someone's life is frowned upon, but not considered a serious offense -- and snooping itself is a public fact.

It causes pretty severe friction between committed Observers and people with more modern ideas of privacy. Observers see most other ideologies like paranoid shut-ins. Others see them as shameless and brazen... though they are not actually especially forward; they just have wide open camera feeds for everything.

For the second part of the question, there are more than ten billion people out there, with many in relatively isolated space platforms, earthside arcologies, and fractured states, resulting in new chaos. Importantly, the old order is shifting again now that the frontier is opening up. There are a great many new and expanding ideologies out there. It is certainly possible to count the number of active ideologies, but by the time you're done with your survey, it's out of date. Experts break them up into six or seven major groups, but it's rarely the same assortments...

Originally Posted by (E)

What are a few (say four?) of the bigger projects that have failed during the colonization of the solar system?

I'll give one:
Hermes Contra: A program to build powerful PV arrays using minerals mined from Mercury, and then use that power to generate antimatter at the microgram scale. The technology was simply not there, and isn't really here today (though it is closer). Modern PV printing and deployment tech was prototyped in the effort, but technical issues plagued the project and crewed troubleshooting missions took a great deal of time. When the crew of one troubleshooting mission were subjected to lethal radiation during a solar storm (preceding modern shielding materials), the backlash ultimately shuttered the project. The surface-side manufacturing equipment is still present more than a century later, though the hundreds of km of solar collectors that had been previously deployed were co-opted for pusher beam systems. Talk remains of returning to antimatter production, but research into the practical side of the matter has stagnated since.

And this one, too, though it's from the period before the real solar colony efforts:
Atlantis -- A floating laissez-faire city made up of modular sub-vessels in international water. The engineering worked, but political, legal, and financial crises rocked the city. About 120 years after the initial launch, the city was scuttled. There were a number of major lessons learned about administrating settlements outside of existing legal structures. The ruins still exist, heavily decayed, on the south pacific seafloor. Every few decades, people go treasure hunting in the wreck for art pieces, valuable materials, or forgotten data drives.

Question:
How large are the crews of armed combat spacecraft?