Campaign number 745
Posted: Mon Apr 01, 2019 3:07 pm
The campaign number is 745
2108 :
The spike drive is discovered by crank scientist Dr.Tiberius Crohn. Humanity moves almost overnight from a handful of science stations on the solar system’s inner worlds to all-out interstellar
exploration. Numerous Terran governments seek the resources of new worlds.
2200:
The First Wave of human expansion reaches its peak. Most habitable planets within a year’s travel time from Earth have been successfully colonized.
Terran nations begin to forbid further exploration for fear of being unable to maintain control
over their offworld colonies over such distances.
The Terran Mandate is organized by Earth’s superpowers in order to ensure that Terran control
of the colonies continues.
2240:
“Metadimensional Extroversion Syndrome” begins to manifest in certain fifth-generation spacers.
Occurring most often around puberty, the abilities exhibited by MES victims seem flatly impossible
by normal scientific measure: telepathy, teleportation, precognitive flashes, and other abilities that
defy understanding.
2315:
The Psionic Authority perfects the first jump gate. A massive ring of psitech placed at the periphery
of the solar system, the gate employs a choir of over fifty master teleporters to instantly translate
ships to a matching gate at Renaissance. Gate dispersal is slowed by a lack of master teleporters, but eventually the transit time between Earth and the frontier is reduced to two days. The Earth nations lift the ban on further exploration now that their effective control is enhanced.
2330:
The Second Wave of human colonization begins. Spike drive ships become all but unknown within
the core worlds as the jump gates allow cheaper system ships to travel between the older colonies.
2500:
Jump Gates begin to reach the frontier. Major systems are the first to receive them, while most
of the minor worlds are still reliant on spike drive ships.
2665:
The Scream erupts from somewhere within the Veil Nebula. Reconstructions of the event suggest
that it was some form of faster-than-light psychic emanation, the wave propagating from one end of
human space to the other within seventeen minutes. The Scream inevitably rendered a psychic
either dead or hopelessly insane. The Jump Gate network collapses. A period of stellar isolation and
chaos begins, now commonly called “the Silence”.
2700:
Countless core worlds die as they are cut off from vital food and technical supplies. Psitech manufactories are crippled, and only a relative handful of spike drive ships can be fabricated before the industrial base erodes.
3050:
The Silence starts to lift. Those worlds that did not experience a terminal collapse after the Scream
finally begin to perfect techniques of large-scale manufacturing that do not rely on psitech.
3100:
Spike drive ships begin the remapping of drill courses between stars. With almost five centuries
of neglect, the pre-Silence rutters have become useless. The steady shifting of dimensional layers
has rendered old course soundings dangerously inaccurate. All of the drill courses must be rediscovered through trial and potentially fatal error.
3200:
The Present Day.
As the silence slowly lifts from the galaxy, the scramble for control begins again.
In the current sector a cluster of systems has coordinated a swift climb towards the previous levels of technology but it will be a long road.
Most of the other systems are either out of contact or still at a primitive (technology speaking) level. This ranges from systems without the ability of space travel or systems that are utilizing archaic spike drive ships.