[Plot] Overall Summary

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[Plot] Overall Summary

Post by Destructionator »

There are a few distinct stages all of which will be discussed as I finish this:

1) Early modern (first contact with Earth and such)
2) Getting in (establishing a permanent presence around Earth)
3) Rise (becoming a first rate power in the Earth sphere)
4) Fall (the holocaust and such)
5) Reestablishment (getting ready to fade away...)
6) Armageddon (...just in time for it all to finally come spectacularly down)

There are side stories, alternate universes, and lead up stuff too, but none of it is super relevant to the core plot (though, I love lots of it, like the pre-modern era), so they will get their own threads at some other time.

I'll do one section per post, hopefully at a rate of at least one post per week.
His Certifiable Geniusness, Adam D. Ruppe (My 'verse)
Marle: Lucca! You're amazing!
Lucca: Ain't it the truth! ... Oh, um...I mean...
Marle: Enough with the false modesty! You have a real gift! I would trade my royal ancestry for your genius in a heartbeat!

"I still really hate those pompous assholes who quote themselves in their sigs." -- Me
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Re: [Plot] Overall Summary

Post by Destructionator »

Let's get started.

1) Early modern era

When Doctor Rebecca Ashtermann stumbled across a material with strange properties, she initially had no idea that it would forever change the course of A'millian history.

This material was, of course, the stuff warp coils are made out of.

In the following years, she worked with Doctor Greg Ryerski, Doctor Bill Alderson, and others to make a practical star drive out of the discovery which made short term exploration of other star systems feasible.

Eager to see what was out there, the Crown approved a plan to send robotic probes to nearby stars and before long, the probes were sending back data.

In AW 2128, using data from one of the probes, Doctor Mark Wilinski confirmed the presence of an alien civilization in the Koreallius system.

Additional probes were quickly allocated to take a closer look at the alien world.

----

1887 AD, Earth. An alien probe jumps into the solar system and immediately suffers an explosion. The probe, severely damaged and off course, speeds toward the planet. A fireball streaks through the sky before impacting some forestland in North America. The impact completely destroys what was left of the probe and starts a fire that would kill at least one person. Authorities label the incident as merely a meteorite hit and it is quickly forgotten.

---

The failure of probe 2 to return didn't sway Wilinski and his team - some number of warp drive failures (called 'misjumps') were to be expected and, while a waste of money, they thought they should be otherwise harmless, so it was worth the risk. Probe #3 was launched on schedule during the next window and data started pouring in once more about the aliens and their world. It became clear that this new civilization was a global one, apparently growing quickly.

Probe after probe after probe were launched and much was being learned. These aliens apparently look like the A'millians in many ways, were achieving high technology, including space flight, and had their share of violent expansionist tendencies, using all sorts of creative weaponry to achieve their goals. These aliens would be most interesting to interact with, but were also potentially very dangerous. It was ultimately decided that it is about time to build some military and manned spacecraft to pay them a visit personally.

---

Meanwhile, on Earth, the regular stream of alien probes passing very closely, like clockwork, did not go unnoticed. While spooked at first, the superpowers of the world quickly determined they were being observed by artificial machines of extraterrestrial origin.

While they most certainly weren't about to put aside their differences to unite against a common foe, some priorities were changed. The Space Transportation System and Space Station Alpha went forward with the expectation that one day, they will be greeting visitors from outer space.

It wouldn't be long until this expectation came true.

---

The warp drive finally seemed safe enough to use with people by AW 2245, so it was then when ASV Ambassador and its two escorts, ASV Vulture and ASV Swallow launched on a trajectory that would bring them to Koreallia orbit.

Ambassador carried a first contact crew of negotiators and researchers led up by the nobleman presiding over the Royal Observatory, Emperor Leslie of Lesalia with plenipotentiary powers (whose name is a misnomer carried over from history; he is in actuality more like a duke under the king than his own sovereign entity), and the man thus far in charge of researching the planet, Dr Mark Wilinski.

The entire crew studied all the available data on the new world, including huge amounts of analysis of radio and television signals intercepted by the probes. Thus, they came in with a poor, but non-zero, understanding of the alien's languages and cultures.

While the communication was awkward and, at times, hilarious to observers, it seemed to have a great deal of success. The landing party met a delegation at their space station, and after determining it was safe for them to interact, decided to stay a while allowing a cultural exchange to take place. It looked like the A'millians and the Koreallians (or Earthers or humans among many other things they called themselves) would have a bright, mutually beneficial future ahead of them. It looked like the military prepartions both sides were making might have been unnecessary after all.

After staying on Earth as guests for a few years, Leslie's party went home during the next launch window without incident. They brought back invaluable knowledge about human nature and culture, allowing future interaction to be much more natural (for the humans anyway) and useful. The Terran reaction to aliens living among them was similarly kind, with most accepting that they aren't alone in the universe and many growing to like the idea.

Over the next couple of decades, the three A'millian starships would stop by in place of the probes that once visited, allowing more and more exchange of knowledge and culture.

The A'millians got to enjoy such quality entertainment as Star Trek: Voyager and Jerry Springer, while the Terrans received a little assistance in technology to speed up the engineering process on such things as solar panels, car batteries, and magnetic trains. Both sides seemed careful not to give the other anything that might be of significant use that they didn't already basically have; the relationship was friendly, but still quite cautious.


Before long, however, a group of humans noted that so far, all interaction has been A'millians visiting Earth, and wanted a way to turn the tables. They asked for permission to tour A'millia itself, which was granted. Then, soon, they wanted to set up a small outpost there of their own to do some of their own studies of an alien world.

King Devon cautiously accepted, and Starfleet started ferrying the human personnel to A'millia. Simultaneously, he ordered three more starships constructed, just in case.

By AW 2284, the humans had a couple labs on A'millia, specifically, the mainland close to the A'millian's home island. They were there to study the local life, and wanted to be far enough away from civilization to get good results, but also close enough to be able to use its resources. The government mostly left them alone.

However, not everything was as it seemed - people started disappearing from a city near to the human settlements. It went unnoticed for a while, but soon, the local lord caught on and launched an investigation into the humans' activities. Catching kidnappers at the port gave him the proof needed to go to the king.

The Royal Knights were immediately dispatched to evict the humans from the planet, starting an incident called the First Interstellar War, despite not really being of the scale the name implies; mostly everyone surrendered without a fight when the ships and soldiers arrived.

As the people were rounded up onto makeshift prison ships for holding, teams of Knights swept through their labs to ensure everything was in order. They found most the missing people, many of whom were already dead and their bodies burned. Some were obviously murdered, and some died due to unknown causes. Among the Knights doing these sweeps were Sir Adam and Sir Michael, who found one of the few survivors in an unlocked cell, a very young little girl. It appeared her captors let her live, but her family weren't so lucky - tragically, they were all among those killed. Adam's family would end up adopting her.


It was decided that the best outcome would probably come if all the humans were sent back to Earth for their own governments to deal with them, so they started to be launched up into space for the ride home. It would take several trips, but the newly built starships would be ready soon to help speed it up.

The next year, crews were selected for the new starships. Sir Adam, much to his excitement, was offered the co-pilot/astrogater position on ASV Falcon, which would escort the transport carrying the next load of humans home.

He accepted, and soon, the spacecraft launched. They made it to the Alderson jump point, activated the warp engines, and suddenly the spacecraft jerked and went into a spin. It misjumped! - The first such accident since the warp drive was approved for manned use.

The craft's crew of seven, one of whom was injured in the uncontrolled spin, had to act quickly to stabilize the situation and figure out what had happened. The situation was dire - the warp drive exploded quite violently, rupturing two of the four propellant tanks and causing various other kinds of damage to the craft's equipment.

Luckily, though, the misjump was a pre-jump error, meaning they were still in A'millia's solar system. Thus, they were eventually able to make radio contact with mission control and work out a plan. Even so, they were well off course and had no hope of repairing the spacecraft on their own.

They ended up being stranded in space for several months, well past the design limit of about 90 days, before there were able stretch what they had to work out a brilliant rescue plan. They would have to abandon the spacecraft, but the whole crew would survive and make it home safely.

The most notable outcome of the Falcon incident was a personal one - the junior medical officer on the crew, Sublieutenant Leila Sulysi, is a pretty cool lass and would grow quite close to Sir Adam, becoming the biggest influence on his life, and together, they would play an important role in shaping the future.


With the Falcon's crew successfully brought home, the First Interstellar War drew to a close without any more casualties. The remaining trips were uneventful; they simply brought the people home and dropped off some evidence of what happened. Then, the king's sister, the Princess Jessica, finally got her brother to take her advice. She had been against much interaction with humanity from the beginning, feeling it is best to let "grievously savage child races" remain alone and far away. Wow with the events that just transpired, her words were heeded. The manned trips to Earth were stopped, replaced once more with unmanned probes primarily to keep an eye on the progress of the potential threat of humanity.

The interstellar dialog would stop until the people of Earth beg for help getting out of a pretty deep hole they found themselves in - about 140 years later.

(end of stage one)
His Certifiable Geniusness, Adam D. Ruppe (My 'verse)
Marle: Lucca! You're amazing!
Lucca: Ain't it the truth! ... Oh, um...I mean...
Marle: Enough with the false modesty! You have a real gift! I would trade my royal ancestry for your genius in a heartbeat!

"I still really hate those pompous assholes who quote themselves in their sigs." -- Me
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Re: [Plot] Overall Summary

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I keep getting distracted and it is taking too long to write it out in detail (especially with fucking browser crashes). So I'm going to write a short summary, then come back and do a more detailed summary, completing what I started above, at a later date.


We just ended the first interstellar war on A'millia. Time to switch gears and continue.

Planet Earth
~2035 AD


Space is accessible to many by the means of daily mass produced rocket launches, letting economies of scale bring the price down to something more affordable.

Commercial, scientific, and military packages from private companies and various governments were launched on a regular basis. Orbit was becoming crowded and people once again saw space as the future.

Solar power satellites were up there. Space hotels were built. Numerous communications satellites promised great bandwidth all over the world. Cheap spy satellites (including privately owned spy satellites!) meant every nation was watching every other nations.

On the ground, nuclear and solar energy, along with technology jointly developed with the A'millians, put an end to the oil crisis and global warming was stabilized, with plans set to reverse it.

All was good.

No it wasn't! Sure, the world's economies were large and growing and problems seemed to be solved, but paranoia was spreading, especially after the A'millian expulsion of those people visiting them.

This dangerous mindset was there and events seemed to continue feeding into it. Those damned aliens are unpredictable! I feel like there's always someone watching me! (probably because there is)

Something else happened escalated by this attitude. (OOU: I haven't decided what actually kicks off the events to follow.)

Finally it snapped: war between the world's major powers.

Space assets, being needed for both side's war plans, were everyone's prime targets. Hoping to win quickly before it was all lost, all hell broke loose everywhere.

Nukey nukey ground infrastructure is ruined. Shoot chain reaction, orbit is a death zone. The world is frakked.

With modern civilization being so dependent on the high tech stuff that was now gone, most remaining civilization became a real mess. Nobody emerged from the war unscathed, and very very few indeed emerged in anything that could be called 'intact'. Those who were were too busy dealing with their own damage to help the rest of the world rebuild.

Billions starved, and the survivors mostly lived in what was considered abject poverty before the war.

(OOU: SDN member The Duchess of Zeon's fun fic "Global Peak" has some elements that would be fun to work in here.)

Finally, after seemingly forever, another A'millian probe flew over to see how they were doing, just like they did regularly for the last century. One of the better surviving nations radioed it with a plea for help.

A'millia
~ AW 2400 (~2170 AD)

The probe carried the message back and rekindled the debate about what to do about the Earthers.

"Let them die!" Princess Jessica, the King's sister, suggested. The King, despite his ethical schooling, was leaning toward agreeing. However, it looked like the Earthers weren't actually going to die; while their numbers continued to shrink to starvation and disease, the better off nations were starting to get back on their feet on their own, slowly but surely. It wasn't a realistic choice.

"Finish them!" a small minority predisposed toward revenge for the events of the interstellar war and once again terrified by the "savagery" of humanity offered up as their suggestion. The King and most the nobles didn't care much for this option at all.

"Do what we can to help them." The nobles suggested this feeling it is their ethical duty. The intellectuals did for the engineering challenge. The King accepted it because the other options sucked.


Restoration Project
AW 2422


After the debate, development on how to proceed started on the ground. In typical A'millian fashion, it proceeded somewhat slowly, but came up with a fairly elegant and efficient solution. Numerous probes and some light cleanup equipment was sent in the mean time as the main plan and equipment needed to carry it out was formulated and built.

The first batch of heavy equipment, an automated mining system to enable use of local materials, was launched in AW 2422, kicking off full scale A'millian technical involvement in the restoration.

In the following years, more and more equipment would be built and sent over, including the majority of the Starfleet carrying scientific and engineering personnel to take over local control to expedite speed.


=====

And I got distracted by IRL work discussions and wrote less than I wanted to, but at least it is something. I'll continue the next chance I get.
His Certifiable Geniusness, Adam D. Ruppe (My 'verse)
Marle: Lucca! You're amazing!
Lucca: Ain't it the truth! ... Oh, um...I mean...
Marle: Enough with the false modesty! You have a real gift! I would trade my royal ancestry for your genius in a heartbeat!

"I still really hate those pompous assholes who quote themselves in their sigs." -- Me
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Re: [Plot] Overall Summary

Post by Somes J »

Is this alternate history? If not, I don't know, 2030 seems a little early. If you have alien contact in 2010s or 2020s you risk having your timeline rendered obsolete by real life relatively quickly. Given the level of technology you outline, something more like 2050 seems not inappropriate.

It occurs to me that, assuming the two inhabited planets are reasonably close in the interstellar scale, you probably don't need warp drive for this situation to work. It seems like it could work fine with reasonably fast STL (like Bussard ramjets or something). Just pointing that out.

Looks good. I'm trying to read up on the various universes in Omniverse Zero right now.
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Re: [Plot] Overall Summary

Post by Destructionator »

Whoa, thanks for responding!
Somes J wrote:Is this alternate history?
Yes - the alien first contact was about 1991 AD, and their robot probes were confirmed as early as 1963 (with an unconfirmed sighting in 1945 and a mysterious 'meteor' impact in 1885, later learned to another probe that was a couple arcseconds off course), so the first contact came as no surprise at all.

(They could also predict almost exactly when the new probes came through - it was clockwork, forced that way by orbital dynamics. The transfer window between the two planets was only really accessible about once every three years. Every chance they got, the A'millians sent a probe through to do a flyby of Earth to see more and more of what was going on there. These probes would fly in very close to try and get as much detail as they could, and would thus be easily visible by both the naked eye and radar if you happened to be looking in the right place at the right time.)

Knowing there were aliens out there who were obviously watching them caused the government to not cut the space program. Much. This kept space tech from going backward to where it is in the real world; for example, there was already an international space station operating in time for the first contact.
If not, I don't know, 2030 seems a little early. If you have alien contact in 2010s or 2020s you risk having your timeline rendered obsolete by real life relatively quickly. Given the level of technology you outline, something more like 2050 seems not inappropriate.
Hmm, perhaps. I do need to eventually go back and heavily revise the Earth timeline anyway at some point, so I'll keep this in mind when I do.
It occurs to me that, assuming the two inhabited planets are reasonably close in the interstellar scale, you probably don't need warp drive for this situation to work. It seems like it could work fine with reasonably fast STL (like Bussard ramjets or something). Just pointing that out.
Indeed - there are a couple good solutions to get rid of lame lame FTL, but none fit into my existing timeline and are all at odds with my goal of being able to come home to the planet after each mission.

(I could switch them to being a habitat starship that parks close to Earth, but this rapes my timeline for them. I could also make the two stars closer - the last canon reference of their distance apart was revised out just a couple weeks ago - and have them slowboat there and back, which could make decent speed. But that still doesn't give with what I have and like.)

Moreover, a couple of the events are dependent on the specifics of how the FTL drive works. The entire second interstellar war is based around it (indirectly - the war is based around a misunderstanding caused by actions taken to manipulate the ftl jump points combined with stubborness on the part of certain leaders), and I rather like author-insert's first space mission ending in disaster thanks to it. Which could be revised to some other kind of disaster, but I like the way it is.
Looks good. I'm trying to read up on the various universes in Omniverse Zero right now.
Again, thanks for responding!
His Certifiable Geniusness, Adam D. Ruppe (My 'verse)
Marle: Lucca! You're amazing!
Lucca: Ain't it the truth! ... Oh, um...I mean...
Marle: Enough with the false modesty! You have a real gift! I would trade my royal ancestry for your genius in a heartbeat!

"I still really hate those pompous assholes who quote themselves in their sigs." -- Me
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Somes J
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Re: [Plot] Overall Summary

Post by Somes J »

Destructionator wrote:Hmm, perhaps. I do need to eventually go back and heavily revise the Earth timeline anyway at some point, so I'll keep this in mind when I do.
Well, if your uni is alternate history it wouldn't necessarily be a problem.
Indeed - there are a couple good solutions to get rid of lame lame FTL, but none fit into my existing timeline and are all at odds with my goal of being able to come home to the planet after each mission.
Assuming the missions aren't too long (years or decades rather than centuries) and your ship is a type that can do "wilderness refueling" (like a fusion rocket using deuterium, or a Bussard ramjet), an STL universe doesn't necessarily mean you can't come home after the mission.
Moreover, a couple of the events are dependent on the specifics of how the FTL drive works. The entire second interstellar war is based around it (indirectly - the war is based around a misunderstanding caused by actions taken to manipulate the ftl jump points combined with stubborness on the part of certain leaders), and I rather like author-insert's first space mission ending in disaster thanks to it. Which could be revised to some other kind of disaster, but I like the way it is.
Well, you could always have FTL developed later. I'm just saying that the early parts of the timeline would work fine for an STL universe - it kind of fits well with the relatively limited degree of contact that seems to have been going on between the two planets.
Again, thanks for responding!
You're welcome. :)
Participate in my hard SF worldbuilding project: The Known Galaxy. Come to our message board and experience my unique brand of terribleness!

"One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

"Open your mind and hear what your heart wants to deny."
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Re: [Plot] Overall Summary

Post by Destructionator »

Somes J wrote:Assuming the missions aren't too long (years or decades rather than centuries) and your ship is a type that can do "wilderness refueling" (like a fusion rocket using deuterium, or a Bussard ramjet), an STL universe doesn't necessarily mean you can't come home after the mission.
Aye. (doubly so since the A'millians are virtually immortal - they don't grow old like we do so would live through a long trip, but just because they can doesn't mean they would want to.)
Well, you could always have FTL developed later. I'm just saying that the early parts of the timeline would work fine for an STL universe - it kind of fits well with the relatively limited degree of contact that seems to have been going on between the two planets.
Yeah, the amount of contact is never huge, explained by Starfleet simply lacking the capability. (The ftl engines are expensive and their economy isn't very big to begin with.) A secret they tried to keep from humanity is their mighty starfleet was actually less than ten ships.

(Another secret... actually, these will get their own thread!)

Anywho, I could accomplish everything with STL travel, no doubt, and it is tempting. It would just take a lot of revising that I don't think I want to do.
His Certifiable Geniusness, Adam D. Ruppe (My 'verse)
Marle: Lucca! You're amazing!
Lucca: Ain't it the truth! ... Oh, um...I mean...
Marle: Enough with the false modesty! You have a real gift! I would trade my royal ancestry for your genius in a heartbeat!

"I still really hate those pompous assholes who quote themselves in their sigs." -- Me
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