Seeking Development Team and Players

[Trenacker]

More history. I welcome constructive criticism.

I'd greatly appreciate if folks could assist with the description of Chiron as well as critique of the Second Renaissance and the fitting out of the Chiron Interstellar Probe. What technologies am I missing? What would be sent to Chiron on the first mission of exploration and settlement?

I'd also like to introduce concepts from a friend's creation, called Escape Velocity (not to be confused with the old videogame by Ambrosia Software). You can check it out here: http://escape-velocity.wikia.com/wiki/Society_and_Culture

A Brief History of Failure

This is the story of two expeditions. Two visions of a brighter tomorrow. Two odysseys, similar in purpose, yet different in almost every other way. The first was a mission of discovery, launched at the height of our pride. The second was an act of desperation, undertaken because we had no other choice. We fled the world we had seemingly destroyed for one that might yet destroy us.

Part I: The Long, Twilight Struggle

The twentieth century closed on a high note for the West – “the end of history,” Francis Fukuyama famously called it. Liberal democracy and the Free Market had triumphed over Communist dictatorship. Western leaders spoke grandly of a New World Order in which tyranny would give way inevitably to liberty, conflict to settlement, fear to hope. After their long, twilight struggle, citizens of the Western world looked forward to a durable “peace dividend” and the comfort of what they took to be worldwide ideological consensus. Even where autocrats appeared firmly entrenched, Western observers luxuriated in the certainty that the lure of participation in cosmopolitan culture, combined with the presumptively inherent impulse for self-government that had gradually undermined the Soviet project, would soon enough spur the oppressed everywhere to demand freedoms both political and economic. Russia was eating Pizza Hut. Students in China were staring down tanks. Soon, even the Ayatollahs would drink Coca-Cola. Our petty differences finally put behind us, the international community would soon apply itself to the highest of high pursuits, deploying the global fund of wealth, influence, and scientific know-how in the common interest of all mankind. War, scarcity, hunger, disease – injustice itself – could be banished to the distant, regrettable past.

For one hundred years, and against mighty odds, the international community, led by the United States and the European Union, labored to execute this project. By and large, we succeeded. It was not easy. There was no shortage of problems in the twenty-first century, some new, and others hideously familiar. The impersonal clash of ideologies quickly gave way to bitterly personal killing, sometimes on our very doorsteps – “A Problem from Hell,” one researcher memorably called it. The Russian economy collapsed on take-off while the Japanese miracle reversed itself seemingly overnight. Globalization and the rise of developing economies opened new markets and exercised downward pressure on prices while at the same time hollowing out the industrial economies of the West at the same time that its aging populations began making greater demands for services. The United Nations proved as feckless and divided in 1999 and 2050 as it had in 1990 and 1970. The list went on: militant Islam and global jihad, territorial irredentism, nuclear proliferation, the threats of technological holocaust brought on by dependence upon infrastructure that was overly complex, and the advent of “special war,” which made a mockery not only of front lines, but political reality itself.   

We stumbled. Sometimes badly. Our best intentions were hardly good enough: the lessons of history might be on our side, but there were some who would fight to prevent the advance of modernity, and as many as millions prepared to follow them. Rather than ask when the cannonballs would stop flying, we began to wonder, “At what cost?” We lacked the courage of our convictions. We stood by in silent witness to famine, genocide, and state failure. The world watched in 1994 as Rwandan militia slaughtered Belgian peacekeepers, in 1995 as Serbian paramilitaries disarmed Dutch soldiers sent to police a “safe area,” and in 2019 when Chinese troops refused to prevent Sudanese government troops and their paramilitary allies from slaughtering South Sudanese civilians in a refugee camp in the disputed region of Abyei. Our distaste for rogue regimes was outweighed by our aversion to sacrifice: too often, we sacrificed at the altar of comfort when we should have sacrificed at the altar of conviction.

We were quick to judge, and quicker to forgot. Having disavowed the bloody history of state formation in the West, we gawped at the intensity of sectarian struggle in the Third World, often wasting blood and treasure on half-hearted interventions that failed to contend with the fact that political change has always inspired violent resistance. With more goodwill than good judgment, the international community fell into and out of bloody wars in the Middle East, Africa, and the Near Abroad, often leaving the situation worse than they had found it. Kurdistan, born 2016, was only to be the first of the West’s “illegitimate” children. We paid the iron price for bouts of isolationism born of self-righteous exhaustion on the part of the hegemon, when Americans pretended, for a while at least, that they could abdicate global leadership without inviting disaster. The rich became richer and a global middle class grew steadily larger, but the poorest remained poor, and for these, life was never anything else but solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.

There were echoes of the past, sometimes strong enough to beg the question of whether we had really progressed very far at all. Beginning with adoption of a common currency in the 1990s, the European Union lurched almost habitually from one financial crisis to the next, forsaking collective security on the altar of financial austerity. Africa and the Middle East continued to fall into and out of wars to rationalize borders and power-brokers bequeathed to them by departing European colonialists a century earlier. In post-Communist Russia, criminal oligarchy hardened to autocracy as the former apparatchiks of the Soviet security services complete their consolidation of power. Fattened by oil revenues, the Russian bear reawakened to its habitual taste for smaller neighbors. Moscow’s “little green men” were soon trading pot-shots with private security forces hired by Western European governments to fight wars that their coddled constituents could no longer stomach.

The Soviet Union was gone by 1991, but the first era of American hyperpower was already over by 2025. Already, observers sensed that the reigning hegemon was about to be challenged by “Rising China.” War was made virtually certain when, in 2038, with Chinese saber-rattling reaching a fever pitch, the U.S. inaugurated the Global Treaty Organization, a coalition of Asian democracies looking to contain the young dragon. The GTO would strike a tense truce with the aspiring Asian hegemon in 2047 following a costly undeclared war both at sea and in cyber space – a series of exchanges that so distressed the global economy as to humble both combatants. China was humiliated, her blue-water navy sunk, and the Communist Party beset by waves of nationalist riots, albeit at the cost of two American carrier battle groups.

The bearing of such burdens was never easy, and those who fancied themselves the standard-bearers of liberal-democratic values grappled mightily with the questions of where and how to spend finite resources at a time when, even as the world seemed to be crumbling around them, so many of their own neighbors were hungry, infirm, and out of work. The citizens of developing nations in turn struggled to adapt to models of society, economy, and government handed down to them from on high – for many, only the latest in a long, unbroken string of humiliations. Yet, in the end, we counted more blessings than we did curses.

Part II: The Second Renaissance

Beginning with the Arab Spring of 2011 and continuing at a fast clip through 2070, a wave of popular revolutions swept the globe, continuing the trend begun in Eastern Europe two decades prior. Where at first those democratic growing pains did not succeed, they tried and tried again, and if these newly-liberalizing regimes were not always at the most stable or peaceful in their youth, they did eventually grow more pacific with time. Throughout the new century, we gained steadily in our understanding and mastery of the world around us, as well as in our mutual understanding of one another. Even where the blood had flowed liberally, compromise seemed a near-universal constant by 2050 so that it was as if the human appetite for violence, once thought insatiable, had simply been exhausted. Our capacity for barbarism could still shock only because Jekyll visited less and less often, leaving fewer and fewer dead in his wake.

Any number of social scientists later attempted to explain this phenomenon. Some pointed to a lessening, not in fact a wholesale abandonment, of violence. Others contended that global society was merely entering a new phase of balance: quiet was a signal, though long in coming, that the grass trampled by the U.S. and Soviet elephants was finally standing straight again. Still more found truck with the idea that the various disputants suddenly discovering common ground were motivated not by exhaustion or even satisfaction with the prevailing status-quo, but rather a desire to partake of the increasingly appealing fruits reserved for those minded to follow the “rules” of international citizenship. Fanciful as such hypotheses might be, they bore a certain whiff of truth.

Satellites and the World Wide Web revolutionized communication in the later part of the twentieth century, but it was advances in mobile computing, made at the onset of the twenty-first, that facilitated the truly instantaneous sharing of information and ideas, and led thereby to a flowering of scientific thought and exploratory endeavor commonly referred to as the Second Renaissance.

Progress was made on all fronts. In the medical arena, researchers made signal advances in gene therapy, stem cell, and medical cybernetics, we banished some diseases, dramatically reduced the mortality rate of others, and succeeded in correcting for many once-harrowing disabilities. As with most advances, the benefits were concentrated primarily in the developed West, but once-prohibitive healthcare costs steadily declined as each generation proved healthier than the last. If we had entered the century on unsteady legs, we were preparing to leave it more numerous, healthier, smarter, and more self-confident than ever before.

Man continued to engage in the planetary engineering begun during the previous century, only now on a much-increased scale. The hungry feasted on genetically-engineered crops during times of drought while the thirsty drank desalinated water when their aquifers ran dry. Patented insects spread patented pollens while laboratories resurrected plants and animals that had never before been seen by man.

We fomented a series of revolutions in the generation, transmission, and distribution of energy resources. Fracking technology nailed a stake in the mythology of “Peak Oil,” while not long after, fifth-generation nuclear power and the advent of grid-scale batteries dramatically lessened concerns that mankind was destined for climatological catastrophe. Despite the increasing incidence of natural disasters and industrial accidents (a reflection, perhaps, that there was simply more than ever to destroy), there were complementary advances in industrial control systems, leading to the advent of adaptive, self-healing systems that could reliably withstand such challenges.

Among the many interests indulged during this era was our ancient enthusiasm for exploration. Having saved the rain forests and spared the oceans, we set out to comb them, every inch. By 2090, more than a half-billion people lived below sea level on land reclaimed from the world’s oceans within the past fifty years. Hundreds of thousands lived on densely-packed artificial islands. The sea floor was studded with tidal generators, kelp farms, and automated mines.

At the same time that we explored the world beneath, we also sought to reach the stars. We built several semi-permanent stations on the Moon and Mars during the twenty-first century. By the twenty-second, humans were actively mining asteroids throughout the Main Belt and aspiring to still more besides.

Part III: Identity Crisis
With change came dislocation. Creativity is frequently destructive. In the late twenty-first century, the prevailing flows of people, capital, labor, and communication combined to create a profound and lasting threat to the traditional nation-state. Traditional communities had been predicated on ties of blood and physical distance. In an anarchic world, primitive man was apt to know only his kin or his immediate neighbors. So long as he could not broaden his horizons, his concept of community must necessarily be highly circumscribed. By the same token, Westphalian statehood was predicated on monopolization of violence within a given physical jurisdiction. A prince could rule only what could be garrisoned by his armies or reached by his navies. The state did not inspired loyalty so much as it commanded loyalty, and for hundreds of years there was tension between states and the nations that they comprehended – often unhappily, if the number was greater than one. Even after that prince’s legitimacy was made contingent upon his fulfillment of obligations to the governed, the strength of one’s national identity was generally consistent with the extent to which one could engage physically in the rituals and lifestyles of the nation to which one assumed belonging. There could be no identity without community. Those who departed from one community and entered another might bring a flavor of their origins to new shores, but the past lacked immediacy, and so condescended to assume a new identity.

By 2025, over three-fifths of the population in certain Western countries are made up of recent immigrants. Borders were increasingly meaningless as the educated traveled to find work where it was available, entire regions were brought under single tariff schedules, and citizenship was marketed as a commodity. As a consequence, the populations in any given set of borders was apt to be increasingly heterogeneous. Fifty years prior, they might have gradually been subsumed into a new super-culture and safely acculturated according to the prevailing cultural consensus, albeit with some difficulty. In the digital era, however, it had become possible to participate remotely in most of the cultural activities that would once have been abandoned. More important still, one’s original identity was unlikely to lose its claim on the soul when news from home and ratification of belonging were instantly available. And so the clock turned back. A man might pay his tax locally, but his heart (and his loyalty) could lie over the sea. Stranger still, that loyalty might be to a people that lacked a state of their own, or an idea that lacked a patron. If, for most citizens, nations mattered less than they ever had, then for some, they mattered not at all.

[...]

Capital, too, was on the move, and increasingly that movement was from west to east, a trend accelerated by the increasing scope of the digital economy and the quickening pace of long-distance travel. [...]

Part IV: Neo Sapien

[...]

Part V: A Brave New World

The obvious candidate was Chiron, an Earth-like plant orbiting Alpha Centauri A, our nearest neighboring star. The first images of this red-blue world had been captured by the Hubble telescope in March 2003. Named after the wisest of the mythological centaurs, it beckoned invitingly. Spectrographic and other evidence indicated a habitable climate, nitrogen-rich atmosphere, and lush biome complete with large bodies of water, both liquid and ice.

[One or two paragraphs describing the remote assessment of Chiron.]

An unmanned probe launched by the European Space Agency reached Chiron under fusion power in September 2090 after a journey of more than eight decades. It sent back images of a young world: mountain ranges low and smooth, the climate warm and tempestuous, the animal life only lately emerged from the sea. Here was Eden, and on our very doorstep. A manned mission of exploration was soon announced under the auspices of the GTO’s Joint Space Command (JSC).

Part VI: Fitting Out

Five years in the making, the Chiron Interstellar Probe built on participants’ prior experience with so-called “sleeper ships,” automated arks designed to ferry human and other cargo across the vast distances between solar bodies. Arks had been used extensively during human colonization of the Outer Solar System during the mid-twenty-second century. Such craft maximized cargo capacity by employing cryogenic hibernation to reduce life support requirements while in-transit. The Chiron Probe would be the first implementation of this concept over interstellar distances. Using the most advanced propulsion systems then available, the Probe’s travel time was an estimated four decades.

The highly-trained, multi-national crew of five thousand soldiers, scientists, and specialists would establish a permanent colony on Chiron, laying the groundwork for subsequent waves of settlement. Mission designers gave serious thought to the dangers inherent in taming an unknown world, whatever its similarities to the mythical Eden. Personnel with backgrounds in the natural and life sciences, industrial and environmental engineering, and public administration predominated, but other desired professions included: medical doctors, machinists, underwater salvage experts, miners, surveyors, power plant operators, wildland firefighters, combat medics, foresters, and signals intelligence analysts. The recruiting board gave special consideration to candidates with prior experience in extra-terrestrial and sub-surface environments. Considerable attention was also afforded the need to provide social stability. Those with families must bring them: two thousand further billets were reserved for this purpose.

The Russian Federation acceded to the JSC in 2093 as part of a landmark series of accords on moderating conflict in outer space. St. Petersburg’s negotiators succeeded in leaving their indelible mark on the Interstellar Probe. Leveraging Russia’s experience exploring Venus and Mercury, they contributed plans for high-heat shielding and dispersion. The delegation also arranged for the Probe’s complement to include one thousand re-socialized convicts – men and women who had received gene, drug, and psychotherapy to suppress anti-social tendencies and render them minimally able for such menial work as might be required after Planetfall. (The convicts were ingeniously described to the JSC as political prisoners who would otherwise certainly be executed.) Finally, mission stores were expanded to include a cargo of nuclear warheads (officially for forcing liquid water to Chiron’s surface, as the Russians had done on Mars). A multi-national detachment of three hundred marines was to provide security under highly permissive rules of engagement.

The Probe was equipped with a range of prototype technologies to better ensure its success. These included first-generation repulsorcraft, extremely intelligent autonomous machinery (EIAM) (robot servitors), and “re-socialization” treatments to manage the convict population. After the Russian Federation signed on the Interstellar Probe in its final months, mission stores were further expanded to include a cargo of nuclear warheads (officially for forcing liquid water to Chiron’s surface).

Reflecting the largely democratic mores of its sponsors, the JTO drafted a charter sketching arrangements for the gradual devolution of authority from mission command to delegates elected by the colonists themselves.

[Trenacker]

Where did you get off to, Yitzi? I could use another few rounds of that first-class analysis!

I'd love ideas for the background. Equally so, we could do more faction creation. I especially want to rehabilitate The Beneath.

I'm also thinking to do a faction based on a Kurtz-like character, as well as something rooted in fascism, unless you figure that the Estado Novo is already fascist enough.

[Yitzi]

Where did you get off to, Yitzi? I could use another few rounds of that first-class analysis!

I can analyze individual SMAC/X factions, but what you've got is an entire setting, including non-SMAC/X-type factions, and that's beyond what I can handle easily.

I'm also thinking to do a faction based on a Kurtz-like character, as well as something rooted in fascism, unless you figure that the Estado Novo is already fascist enough.

Kurtz?

As for something rooted in fascism: Fascism is all about nationalism, and the tagline for SMAC/X factions is "not by nationality, but by ideology".  Fascism is probably one of the few ideologies that can not work as a basis for a SMAC/X faction.

[Trenacker]

Are you interested in helping with a full setting? I'd be grateful for your help, and I'm certainly interested in having it.

Kurtz, as in the mad trader whose ivory station is the geographic destination for the protagonist in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He is also the inspiration for Marlon Brando's character in Apocalypse Now.

My idea was that this particular faction would be led by a shell-shocked veteran. Perhaps one of the Chiron Probe's original marine officers. A soldier who refused to abandon a strategically isolated holdfast during one of the interminable ceasefires between warring factions. An almost mythical figure in the minds of his men. The Le Marais plantation, also in Apocalypse Now, provides another model.

[Trenacker]

I'm trying to think of what distinctive ideology a Kurtz-type figure might have that would distinguish them from either Santiago or Marsh. Possibly if they adopted the attitude that they needed to defend indigenous humans on Chiron, whom they held to be the key to understanding how to survive on a hostile world? Alternatively, they could be complex scavengers, believing that the best course for survival was to prey off existing factions by enforcing a sustainable balance of power...

[Yitzi]

I'm trying to think of what distinctive ideology a Kurtz-type figure might have that would distinguish them from either Santiago or Marsh.

Stubbornness/"never retreat".    is about achieving victory/surviving in the face of hostile sapients, and Marsh is about surviving in the face of a hostile environment, but the Kurtz figure is about standing one's ground no matter what.

[Buster's Uncle]

And willing to go to inhuman and crazed lengths in the process.  Good point.

Trenacker has agreed with my phrasing that the Hunters are about harmony with nature - as an apex predator kind of park ranger.  I believe he intends a + to Planet rating.  We need to thrash out stats for some factions, BTW, and I'm not that good at that...

[Trenacker]

Okay, so let's explore this faction idea in greater depth.

You have, essentially, an unstable soldier, highly charismatic, who is basically catering to the dangerous whims of a frontier population that stubbornly refuses to abandon its "patrimony." Too much blood, sweat, and tears poured into the soil. "Our parents and children are buried here," & etc.

The soldier presumably has his own reasons for sticking it out. Probably some of his lieutenants are loyal more to the man than to his vision, but the central tenet is, "A man who does not fight his corner today will not be around to fight it tomorrow."

Marsh is a scavenger, to the point of carrying his home on his back. His men live in tents and out of overland vehicles. Pulling the chuck wagon behind them, as it were. It's "beef, and tea, and damper," as the old ditty goes.

Santiago is a difficult one. Most of her Holnist allies are extreme libertarians, mistrusting centralized government. Ideological, yes, but that ideology is sparse at best. It consists of stern opposition to government deemed "illegitimate," with no very good yardstick for legitimacy. Basically, an ill-considered rejection of the revenue man, the postman, and the policeman on grounds that they represent all that is intrusive and objectionable about central government. There is a pervasive belief that somebody, somewhere is sneering at them -- and that this intellectual condescension is going to lead to bureaucratic imposition in the form of the application of pressure by a nanny state. The great irony is that the most successful "Holnists" are the sociopaths who impose simple autocracy at the barrel of a gun without ever bothering to justify themselves intellectually.

But the Spartans are all about regimentation. Santiago is going to create a caste-based society governed by strict rules. A nanny state extraordinaire, complete with alienation of children from their birth parents and an entire underclass who never know the meaning of freedom.

My guess is that the Kurtz figure would fight to preserve a flawed but recognizable democracy. Either he fights eloquently to defend his decisions before puritanical elders, or else he has been given special authorities for the duration of the "emergency."

Here's a thought: does Kurtz's society have slaves? Does it have some people who are "more equal" than others? The de Marais were colonialists and aristocrats both. They didn't eat with their own men, remember.

[czisan]

As someone who played as The Ascendancy in the first attempt at the game, they aren't that similar to The University beyond surface level. The Ascendancy is aggressive, with an ideology that doesn't really make room for competitors. The University wants to be left alone to tinker and experiment, The Ascendancy wants to impose a vision of the future on humanity, where homo sapiens superior reigns as the next chapter in human evolution.

Basically, The University wants a world where scientists are free to solve problems, The Ascendancy takes that further. They want to uplift humanity beyond those problems, replace laborers and assembly line workers with robots, and leave anew race of supermen free to explore the universe, ad pursue the sciences and arts.

Of course, however idealistic their endgame is, they also have no qualms about masses of 'undesirables' dying in wars, purges, and labor camps. They also were more aggressive social engineers, in their efforts to create an ideal population. Basically, The University is a pretty ideal neighbor, doing advanced research, probably trading high-tech goods in exchange for whatever you're offering, and generally minding their own business if you don't get in their way.

The Ascendancy... depends. They probably wouldn't tolerate the Human Hive on their borders, they definitely would not tolerate Miriam, since they know she's just going to go to war with them anyways, it's just a matter of when. Someone like Santiago? Well, they'll consider her faction brutish and unsophisticated, but a breeding ground for good gene-stock, and a potentially valuable ally against people like Lal or Yang. Are they going to go on the warpath for no good reason? Of course not, The Ascendancy is playing the long game, but if given a choice between annexing you or letting someone else do it, they are going to keep the power balance as skewed towards their side as possible.

[Buster's Uncle]

The University seems to only really be about the hardest of hard sciences -physics and engineering applications, with some biology.  It sounds like the Ascendancy might spread its net wider with at least a good dose of sociology and psychology, too...

[Trenacker]

I hadn't considered the Ascendancy's attitude toward robotic labor in some time. I'm interested in further exploring this concept of supermen freed from the "menial" to focus on the mental, as it were.

I would respectfully caution that there are many different potential paths for the University to take. A more aggressive style is possible.

As I see it, every faction can be "played straight" or subverted.

Morgan can be a sharp-nosed trader with all the best toys or an over-indulged slob who has mortgaged his protection to unreliable mercenaries.

Zakharov can be an ethically challenged sociopath struggling to adapt to the constraints of an overly-bureaucratic university administration or else a kind of scientific renegade after the style of Arik Soong. That is, he can easily be as ruthless as we imagine Pahlavi to be. As I've said before, most of the scientists in the game seem to think that ethics aren't just flexible, but in fact permeable. Cohen is all for experimentation on human subjects. Ditto Pahlavi. I have to imagine that Zakharov wouldn't think twice either.

I could see the University pursuing an isolationist path, and like BUncle, I always go the sense that they focused on "the hardest of the hard sciences," but I don't think that should be taken to mean that they devote all their efforts to the esoteric or the purely theoretical. The only "brake" on turning the University into a neuro-science powerhouse is backstory that clearly situates Zakharov's expertise in the realm of materials science.

Can anybody commit to helping me with the backstory generally?

Factions are good. I think we need to round out the Ascendancy and the Kurtz faction over the next few days. Is the Kurtz faction neo-colonialist? Is there an ethnic chauvanist dimension in play?

[Trenacker]

Also!

Before I forget. In return for using his material for this game, I agreed to promote a friend's game on The Frontier in turn.

Immaculate just wrapped up the first run of Escape Velocity, which has an associated Wiki. I've mined the wiki a good deal for background material that will go into AC2.

Immaculate is also now running a "lighter" sci-fi war game on the Civ Fanatics forums, here.

Cheers!

[Trenacker]

Maybe the Kurtz faction makes slaves of their prisoners of war? I could see Kurtz taking a dim view of prisoners, much like the Japanese before 1945. I fear that that's hardly unique, though.

[Buster's Uncle]

Heads-on-pikes Kurtz having POW slaves totally scans.

And that gets into a whole big thing about whether it's slavery or whatever way Kurtzites frame it, as a source of conflict and diplomacy text insults.

And a Kurtzite faction strikes me as one that would have a really vainglorious and mad-sounding name for themselves, even if it wasn't official, or at least not used by anyone else.

[Trenacker]

They call themselves the Honored Dead, an ironic play on the fact that, when their faction mates pulled out, they chose to stay behind -- were, from their point of view, left to die.

The issue is I don't know how Kurtz would organize his society from an ideological perspective. "Vigilance at The Wall" sounds good, but how is he any different from Marsh? Just the slavery angle? How is he any different from Santiago? Just the personal freedoms angle? How is he any different than van de Graaf, who stands out only because he literally purchased a faction?