[Space] 'Space Opera' Setting

[thtraveller]

Originally Posted by Frost

Despite these advantages Earth remains the so-called ‘poor man of the inner ring’ unable to catch it’s smaller but less damaged rivals due to endemic warfare and widespread environmental degradation.

This implies that the environments of alien "habitable" planets are more benign than the ravaged Earth. Seems unlikely unless Earth is a near wasteland.

Though the vastly reduced population implies multiple things:
- that AI and/or human uploads are not established,
- that life extension technology has not been particularly successful,
- that extremely nasty warfare has taken place.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by nick012000

Why limit yourself to planets? If you're doing a Space Opera setting, why limit yourself, when you have all the sweep of the universe before you! Asteroids! Comets! Space Stations! They're all out there, and with no FTL, it makes sense that they'd want to colonize anything they can.

I limited the setting to planetry settlements for a number of primarly narritive reasons. As appealing as they are artificial habitats do tend to remove some of the justification for long range colonisation. If you can build a decent habitat and persuade people to live in it why bother spending upwards of ten years in hibernation to play pioneer in the back of beyond?

Secondly they are by definition highly controled environments, this can limit their usefulness as settings.

Undoubtedly such places will exist but at least for the time being they are likely to be auxilary to planetry settlements. Whether this will chainge when I get around to writing campaigns within this setting and start to flesh out future developments remains to be seen.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I do want to apologize to the OP for not posting anything helpful but I suppose I don't understand what he's trying to do.

"Space Opera" to me means spaceships that go "Whoosh!" and "Zoom!" and lasergun fights that are full of "Zap! Zap! Zap!".

"Alistair Reynolds" means nothing to me but this doesn't really sound like a "Zap! Zap!" setting.

No need to apologise you shot down the floating cities notion more efficently than I ever could.

As for what I am trying to do space opera might be the wrong term. Think of an interstellar setting consisting of distinctive worlds populated by mostly recognisible if somewhat modified humans rather than AI that remembers being human or alien beasties that may have some human DNA buried in them somewhere. If you then add a limited amount of 'casual'* interstellar travel and you will be a long way toward what I am aiming for.



*In the sense of not requiring several generations and a non-trivial percentage of planetary GDP.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by thtraveller

What was the imperative that drove the colonial expansion? A wealthy Earth, private individuals, existential angst, external factors, something else?

Currently unknown, earlier versions used a combination of idealistic adventurism and comercial opertunism. I am likely to stick with this model if only because it is different, but to be honest I have been more concerned about the present and near future of the setting. A detailed history of the period before the collapse is a project for another time.

Originally Posted by thtraveller

That is quite a radical and prolonged economic hit to Earth - which is presumably far and away the most populous world. That is unparalleled by a mere depression or even any previous world war. Is the implication global nuclear war?

See above, but yes the implication is a combination of Nuclear warfare and the colapse of various environmental management schemes. As for the prolonged nature of the collapse I don't see it as too implausible that a surviving technological civilisation faced with massive and rapid population decline will rapidly find that the bulk of its resources are commited largely to remaining a technological civilisation for generations after the event.

Certainly an upheaval of this sort seems the only way to strip earth of its advantage over the older colonies, something which I found useful when trying to create rapid cultural divergence.

Originally Posted by thtraveller

Is the implication also that starship production and maintenance was centered on Earth? High maintenance drives implies that the engineers were on the ships not the planets.

Production certainly was centered upon earth. Given the nature of the expansion the ships were perhapse unsurprisingly cheap jury rigs requiring extensive refitting after even a single round trip. By and large they arrived back at earth where the refurbishment capacity no longer existed and where they were either mothballed or expended on one way refugee flights.

I may reduce the timelag before shipping restarts, at a low level, after the collapse once the various states have been able to improvise a new refurbishment facilities. But to be honest I don't see it hapening on any timescale short of decades. Trade and new settlement will take even longer to appear because it will take time to regain the resources for substantial building programs.

Originally Posted by thtraveller

Also is there no interstellar radio/laser comms?

In short no, while they are possible they only realy tend to be practical for simple messages of the 'we are here and still alive' variety. Despite the timelag recorded messages carried by ships should win out for anything more complex where bandwidth becomes an issue.

Originally Posted by thtraveller

Alien artefacts? Do you mean technology or just natural things from alien worlds? Relics of a collapsed alien civilisation might lead to existential angst - which should be good for the space program.

Again this is something that I put in as a possible plot hook and have yet to fully develop, given the nature of the waste (and their utility to the setting) the rumors will almost certainly cover manufactured if not specificaly technological objects.

[Frost]

Toliman
The closest habitable world to Earth and one of the most habitable anywhere Toliman was the first extrasolar planet to be settled receiving its first colonists in 2077 and subsequently becoming the preferred destination for colonists until the collapse. Toliman is presently divided into a number of separate nation states centred on a number of the small independent colonies planted there before the collapse.

The dominant power is the Free State of Toliman a putative libertarian utopia founded by the initial settlers in the early 2080’s. To an outsider used to Earth or the other colonies the Free State seems to be more like an ongoing riot than a country. It is a cosmopolitan, highly urban society with a definite anything goes mentality.

This freewheeling mentality is largely due to the, by the standards of the other settlements, overwhelming diversity of its founding population. Any search of early records will reveal settlers from more than two-dozen mismatched nations driven into space primarily by aggressive idealism. Their descendants retain this diversity, census reports compiled by the national council show that the 90 million or so citizens display a bewildering variety of genotypes, cultures and mother tongues that frequently threatens to overrun the nominally dominant Baseline, Western, English speaking paradigm favoured by the early settlement leaders.

The Free State government is democratic, decentralised and fairly informal, consisting of a series of councils of holding increasingly high levels of responsibility ranging from those serving city wards to the National Council its self. Whatever the responsibilities of the council they tend to be constituted upon the same model consisting of between five and fifty citizens selected by lot for a fixed term (normally between one and four years) exercising powers clearly defined by a written constitution. Councils deliberate (under normal conditions openly) over electronic networks rather than having formal meetings in a fixed location.

Local law exists purely to keep order and prevent abuses of other citizens (CR 1 in general). A surprisingly wide variety of rights are recognised and enforced by the national and local councils, at least in theory. In practice the councils are unable to act without a specific complaint and even when they do they don’t necessarily have the resources to do anything about it. Many petty crimes and smaller employment and environmental abuses tend to go unreported due to threats or bribery on the part of the culprits or fall to the bottom of the pile in favour of more urgent cases.

Technology in the Free States tends to push the limits of what is possible anywhere in human space. Even after a century and a half of restored communications Toliman based organisations and their agents still dominate a number of industries particularly those associated with power and information technologies admittedly largely on the strength of their reputation rather than new development.