Conquest Fodder

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Zor
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Conquest Fodder

Post by Zor »

This thread is basically me asking for some ideas for the Terran Sphere. I will definately give credit where credit is due, its only proper that i would do so.

Conquest Fodder is my pet term for all the Civilizations that existed in my universes that exist to emerge, develop and then get steamrolled by some empire builder. I actually try to put some effort into designing them. That said, their is plenty of room here for your imput. In this case, i am going to ask you for some ideas for some planet who's lucky colonists set up shop before getting forciably added to the Novan Empire, Interstellar Protectorate or Commonwealth of Democratic Worlds.

Any Takers?

Zor
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speaker-to-trolls
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Re: Conquest Fodder

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

Sure! This give me an opportunity to elaborate some of my old planet ideas from various places. This one is pretty rough, and I have done no research at all on ecology for this, as you can probably tell. It's also incomplete, as I've only got up to about 600 years before the present in your universe, still the general set up should be good at least for a springboard for a TS planet.

A note on terms: Apsu is the name of the planet, but the people refer to themselves as Newlantans, since that is how their ancestors originally identified when they left Earth. Newlant is also how the planet is referred to in more of a social/cultural/political/ideological/philosophical sense, since it is the Newlantan world. In fact, think of it as the way that Earth is more of a physical, technical name for our planet, it's how you talk about it as if you want to give the impression of seeing it from an outside perspective, whereas most of the time, if you talk about it from an insiders perspective you will say 'the world'.

Apsu


Midlanta was a state which emerged on Earth in the early second century, made up of a number of submarine cities situated mainly along the Mid-Atlantic ridge, which gained independence from the national and corporate interests who had previously controlled them and united in the process. Despite early optimism from its political elite, and a great amount of growth after its initial independence, Midlanta was never able to match its landgoing former masters in political or military terms. This was what led to the development of the Newlant movement.

The Newlant movement called for the establishment of a new, submarine nation far away from Earth, whose oceans were by now far too polluted, overused and contested to support the ambitions of its followers. Their desire was to create an indefinitely sustainable, advanced society based upon modern (second century) technology and understanding of ocean ecosystems which on second century Earth existed entirely at the whim of corporate and political interest.

Almost every opportunity was investigated before the Newlant movement finally decided on launching an interstellar expedition. Interstellar travel at this time was not only hugely expensive, but politically dangerous because of the destructive potential of an interstellar engine being seen as a threat. Nonetheless, Martian, Europan and other, less obvious sites were all deemed to be too vulnerable to the attentions of other national concerns for the liking of the Newlant movement. This was especially true as international tensions increased before the advent of the First Solar War, and the Newlant plan became more than merely an idealistic motion, but a potential Ark Contingency, to preserve Midlantan culture against the very real threat of complete annihilation.

Thus it was that, on the eve of the third century, the Midlan Regenesis Project sent three colony ships to the distant planet of Apsu, a world discovered by the Kepler-6 Array known to be considerably larger than Earth and to be almost completely covered in water. The journey took the three huge vessels with their thousands of human colonists, their exowombs and millions of organism samples, their manufacturing and scientific equipment, the finest produced on Earth, ninety seven light years from the Mid Atlantic Ridge, while mankind burned behind them.

It took the ships more than seven hundred years to reach their destination, and their journey was not a happy one. One ship, through chance collision with a micrometeorite, lost part of its fuel, and could not slow down in time to reach Apsu, and it sailed on into cold infinity. The second ship bled from a thousand cuts, inside and out, so many systems failing that when at last it reached its destination it could not set down its colonists on the planet of its destination. The third ship was the only one able to set down all its cargo on the planet, while its stricken sister orbited above, to serve as a base to bring down the resources from outer space or to be pillaged whenever such a thing could be managed.

The third ship had not escaped unscathed, either, fully a quarter of its human passengers died in transit. Still, the most crucial pieces of cargo remained secure, and between what the third ship could do and what could be salvaged from the second, the work of creating New Midlant could at last, after seven hundred years, begin.

The people established themselves on the planet’s largest islands, a chain which ran part of the way around the equator. Though they covered only a tiny fraction of the planet’s surface there was enough land for all the colonists to have lived there for centuries, but they had not come to settle the land. Immediately they began to seed the seas with life, scattering nutrients that became the basis for microbes, which paved the way for macroscopic plants and huge coral-like organisms which were to form the basis of the ecosystem. Ironically for an ideology that had looked so fondly back to the ecosystems of Earth’s past, none of these organisms had ever grown in any Terrestrial sea. All of them were wondrous works of biological engineering, lovingly and expertly designed to turn a planet with only the most basic forms of life into one that could imitate the one they had left. The corals were the most central of these for the people of Apsu, growing around the most nutrient-rich sites and quickly reaching megalithic size, the living parts rested on a shell that was hollowed out precisely to provide the framework for submarine housing, science and what might be termed agriculture.

Within the corals, the machinery was set up to quickly grow new forms of life from the samples carried aboard the three ships. Soon, with algae and microbes spreading relentlessly across the planet, with the skeleton crew of the second ship hurling down mineral rich meteors that came too close to them, with the gaseous content of the water slowly changing, fish began to swim in the waters of Apsu. These fish were no more natural than the corals or the plankton, each was a capsule carrying microbes and coral spores, a maintenance device for the great coral formations, or performed some other function in maintaining and creating their new ecosystem. Soon the fish began their task, carrying raw nutrients and fast living microbes far away from the colonists’ isles into the farthest reaches of the polar seas.

In spite of all the odds against them, the colonist’s project to transform their new home went ahead with a speed they had never dreamed possible. After a mere three hundred years walls of coral surrounded every island in the equatorial sea, housing dense, vigorous ecosystems and over sixteen million Newlantan people. In distant reaches of the global ocean bizarre fish forged new migration patterns, trailed by great oceangoing ships whose crews marked their progress and oversaw the progress of life around the world. On the land itself life was sparser, but tough, unearthly plants clung to the rocky soil and strange birds and insects carried their seeds from one island to the next. The islands were also home to the Newlantans’ heavy industries, where they scraped what minerals they could from the soil and where three delapidated spaceports stood, each launching fewer craft every year to check on the world’s satellite network and the ghastly space station that had been made of the second ship’s corpse.

The second ship was the base for all the Newlantans extraplanetary operations, maintaining their observation satellites, exploring their solar system, and nudging mineral rich asteroids into the right position for their nutrients to be used for the benefit of the Newlantan ecosystem. In the year 1241, though, after years of decay, it was discovered that the second ship was, finally, going to die a final death. Its orbit was irretrievably decaying, and within ten years it would crash into the planet Apsu, breaking up in the atmosphere, spreading dust and debris across the oceans.

The debate within the Coral Council, which had come to be the main decision making body in Newlanta, was furious. The damage the ship’s impact might do to the growing ecosystem was largely unknown, but it would be incidental next to the impact of losing the hub of Newlant’s space presence. Without their global communication network the difficulty of maintaining contact around the planet, of tracking the progress of ecological development, would increase tenfold. Without the presence of the second ship maintaining the satellite network would require the Council to build dozens of new spaceports and spend vast amounts in making new craft to send into orbit. All of this would distract from the ever continuing work of colonising the planet’s oceans and shepherding the ecosystems. Faced with shifting resources upwards or downward, the Council eventually decided that it could not afford to move its attentions away from the planet it had been entrusted to cultivate, and the effort it made to stabilise the second ship did little more than evacuate its human crew and some of its more valuable equipment. This is now widely viewed as a severe miscalculation.

In the hundred years that followed what is known as Secondbreak, Newton 21st, 1251, the satellite network decayed at an alarming speed, as did the unity of the Newlantan people. The Coral Council found its ability to coordinate the people of Newlant deteriorating as its communications broke down and individual islands, reefs and even the fleets of ships in higher latitudes began to drift out of their influence. Added to this was the surprisingly significant influence of those who had lived on the Second Ship, who began agitating in many areas for greater efforts to return to space. The Coral Council put greater effort into improving planetary influence while islands and reefs began to stop recognising them in favour of working furiously to return to space and repair what was up there. In the early 1300s political tensions began to break out into limited wars. Far away in the higher latitudes, algal blooms caused by a fall of disintegrated iron from the Secondbreak formed the basis for bursts of life that grew into transient new ecosystems, which went to feed a new culture of nomadic ship-people whose children would grow up without ever revisiting the equator.

In the thirteen hundreds the equator became a strange patchwork of states, islands played host to desperate mining operations as Secondfaller states tried in vain to get together enough mineral wealth to launch their grand leap into space. Meanwhile, Coralia and its council continued its attempt to perfect an ecosystem rapidly taking on its own attributes, quite apart from any human design, breeding whole islands of coral topped by symbiotic trees, and huge ropes of seaweed a thousand miles long. Some of the Secondfallers remarked bitterly that the Newlantan dream, of a new world without the problems of the wasteful advances made on Earth, had come true.
"Little monuments may be completed by their first architects, but great ones; true ones leave their copestones to posterity. God keep me from completing anything."
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Magister Militum
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Re: Conquest Fodder

Post by Magister Militum »

A submarine nation! That is so awesome, Speaker.
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Zor
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Re: Conquest Fodder

Post by Zor »

I approve of this.

Zor
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