Vestal
* Aggressively Imperialistic
* Fading Glory
* Plague-Ridden
Tech: +2
Env: -2
Res: -2
If the name of the Vestal system resonates in your bones, that’s only because it’s the lynchpin of the entire star cluster. When our ancestors arrived here from Earth, it was the Vestal system that first attracted their attention. A number of inviting worlds and moons with both appropriate environments and needed supplies; it became the lynchpin of man’s development here; with only the settlers of New Ovid as any serious competition.
However, years, decades, and centuries of the need for growth and expansion lead to the depletion, degradation, and destruction of everything that had attracted the settlers here in the first place. The environments of the habitable moons were choked by the extraction of planetary mineral wealth for construction, and became less pleasant, then unpleasant, then hostile. Oh, you can survive on most of the established worlds, but only long enough to die an unpleasant lingering death rather than an immediate one. As the atmosphere grew worse, the worlds of the Vestal system (2 Earth-like planets and 1 habitable moon) moved more and more in to domes and tubes. These aren’t necessarily air tight, even if there are airlocks to the outside – they don’t need to be. They just filter all the crap out and leave the pure. The richer you are, the better domes you can afford to make your home in, and the better the filters make your air. In the poorest dome slums, the major difference between the outside and the inside is that inside, you’re more likely to be mugged.
As it became obvious that Vestal was not going to last forever, waves of manifest destiny swept the people, and 2 grand colonization efforts were sent out. In the Ithaca system, a variety of garden worlds made the colonization easy. They quickly became self-sufficient, self-ruling, and a valuable trade partner. Binghamton was always going to be a massive effort, and the effort was made… but… it just never worked out the way one would hope. There are some who say – probably rightly – that it was Binghamton that broke the Empire.
The war came, and the war went. Vestal was already out of funding from the failed efforts at Binghamton, but the worlds were never in really grave danger from the war – the system just had too much military might to really be in danger of outright destruction. Maybe that’s why the war went “bacterial”. People talk about the Plague as if it were one disease, but that’s not how it was. Weapons labs weaponized, and deployed, militant versions of over 2 dozen of the virii, bacterium, and fungi that mankind has been dealing with for millennia. Sure, there were communities devastated by the more expected necrotizing bacteria and deadly flus, but there was also a dome-city completely destroyed by a monstrously infectious and hungry variation on ringworm. For the most part, the plagues were programmed to destroy themselves after a few days, but sometimes, someone opens the wrong box with the wrong spores left over…
Everyone knows that the days of Vestal's glory is behind them, but no one in power is ready to really acknowledge it yet. In fact, a new wave of hawkish politicians have swept in to office, even with the war a recent memory, who are pushing for military power to be the only power that matters in the system, and who want to take whatever they want “for the greater good”. Strangely, this has also led to the rise of the anti-slavery movement. The movements started on the more enlightened communities of Ithaca, but were taken up by those who correctly identified New Ovid as the main rival for power, and is used as an “us versus them” scenario. In the end, how many people in Vestal actually care if a clone has rights or not is probably fairly different from how many say they do.
So, Vestal. The Old Crown, the Tarnished Jewel. The blackened heart at the center of all human endeavor. God help us all.
* Aggressively Imperialistic
* Fading Glory
* Plague-Ridden
Tech: +2
Env: -2
Res: -2
If the name of the Vestal system resonates in your bones, that’s only because it’s the lynchpin of the entire star cluster. When our ancestors arrived here from Earth, it was the Vestal system that first attracted their attention. A number of inviting worlds and moons with both appropriate environments and needed supplies; it became the lynchpin of man’s development here; with only the settlers of New Ovid as any serious competition.
However, years, decades, and centuries of the need for growth and expansion lead to the depletion, degradation, and destruction of everything that had attracted the settlers here in the first place. The environments of the habitable moons were choked by the extraction of planetary mineral wealth for construction, and became less pleasant, then unpleasant, then hostile. Oh, you can survive on most of the established worlds, but only long enough to die an unpleasant lingering death rather than an immediate one. As the atmosphere grew worse, the worlds of the Vestal system (2 Earth-like planets and 1 habitable moon) moved more and more in to domes and tubes. These aren’t necessarily air tight, even if there are airlocks to the outside – they don’t need to be. They just filter all the crap out and leave the pure. The richer you are, the better domes you can afford to make your home in, and the better the filters make your air. In the poorest dome slums, the major difference between the outside and the inside is that inside, you’re more likely to be mugged.
As it became obvious that Vestal was not going to last forever, waves of manifest destiny swept the people, and 2 grand colonization efforts were sent out. In the Ithaca system, a variety of garden worlds made the colonization easy. They quickly became self-sufficient, self-ruling, and a valuable trade partner. Binghamton was always going to be a massive effort, and the effort was made… but… it just never worked out the way one would hope. There are some who say – probably rightly – that it was Binghamton that broke the Empire.
The war came, and the war went. Vestal was already out of funding from the failed efforts at Binghamton, but the worlds were never in really grave danger from the war – the system just had too much military might to really be in danger of outright destruction. Maybe that’s why the war went “bacterial”. People talk about the Plague as if it were one disease, but that’s not how it was. Weapons labs weaponized, and deployed, militant versions of over 2 dozen of the virii, bacterium, and fungi that mankind has been dealing with for millennia. Sure, there were communities devastated by the more expected necrotizing bacteria and deadly flus, but there was also a dome-city completely destroyed by a monstrously infectious and hungry variation on ringworm. For the most part, the plagues were programmed to destroy themselves after a few days, but sometimes, someone opens the wrong box with the wrong spores left over…
Everyone knows that the days of Vestal's glory is behind them, but no one in power is ready to really acknowledge it yet. In fact, a new wave of hawkish politicians have swept in to office, even with the war a recent memory, who are pushing for military power to be the only power that matters in the system, and who want to take whatever they want “for the greater good”. Strangely, this has also led to the rise of the anti-slavery movement. The movements started on the more enlightened communities of Ithaca, but were taken up by those who correctly identified New Ovid as the main rival for power, and is used as an “us versus them” scenario. In the end, how many people in Vestal actually care if a clone has rights or not is probably fairly different from how many say they do.
So, Vestal. The Old Crown, the Tarnished Jewel. The blackened heart at the center of all human endeavor. God help us all.
