Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ralts Bloodthorne" data-source="post: 2632084" data-attributes="member: 6390">Thanks for asking. Just overtasking myself, and I get tired easier than I used to.Now, the work on the starships are continuing, and an art free quickie-layout PDF will be here for free, eventually. It'll be totally OGC and everything, HUZZAH!But, in mean time, let's revisit a few things...In the opening of the 21st Century a Greenland expidition discovered an "anomoly" trapped below the antarctic ice pack. Requesting and recieving the aid of the United States, the engineers and scientists drove a hole through the ice to the "anomoly" and discovered a cliche.An obelisk. An actuality a nanotechnology supercomputer that stored massive amounts of data on the history of mankind prior to homo sapiens arrival on the planet earth. A highly advanced AI inhabited the obelisk, instructing those who first viewed it where the obelisk came from, what it was created for, and how it could be utilized. The AI then deconstructed, leaving behind it's memories in storage, but the personality that had once driven it disappated.Aside from the cliche, was also a huge ship, over ten kilometers long, a kilometer wide, and a half kilometer thick. Unlike many science fiction novels, the starship was not a simple exploration vessel, nor was it merely damaged by age. Age had not touched the ship.War had.Multiple weapon blisters, patched hull damage, hastily added on weapons pods, and thickly layered armor. Exploration of the ship revealed it to be a combination war ship, exploration ship, scientific ship. Technical data, machine shops, medical bays, cloning facilities, shuttles, massive FTL engines, repair robots, much, much data.The obelisk powered up the ship, and used it's communications array to access the world wide data network, and began disseminating technology as rapidly as possible, to as many points as possible. The creators of the obelisk had forseen that one faction or another on the ravaged face of Terra may have been interested in hoarding the knowledge contained within the obelisk, and that the resulting battle of the information could have resulted in Armeggedon.The effect of such a massive load of advanced theorizes, technological data, nanotechnology "creation templates", energy and agriculture data, the sheer plethora of information, started wars and skirmishes across the globe.When the dust settled, the majority of the old governments were overthrown. The concept of "work for food" was cast aside, medical aid was as simple as inhaling, and the world had changed. Only a few governments had survived, and those by incorporating into vast multinational business conglomerates.Religions were shook to thier foundations, and many collapsed into dust. However, Bhuddism, Islamism, and Catholocism were able to quickly adapt. Catholicism had the advantage of a fairly youthful and energenic Pope, a man of vision and political as well as religious and social savvy. The Catholic Church convulsed and tore at it self for a period of several years, and then emerged as the Church of Humanity Unbound.Islam, long plagued with the same violent sects that the Catholic Church had also had to deal with, was better prepared. There was little fighting, and more discussing, between radical sects and mainstream Islam. The meteorite enshrined at Mecca was carefully analyzed by new technology, without the hands of mankind despoiling it, and, armed with it, many of the most radical sects left, aboard private starships, to seek out and regain the Holy Land from those who had dishonored and murdered thier ancestors.Bhuddism went along as it always did.The new world power, the Terran United Nations, passed what is, in retrospect, well meaning but foolish legislature, charging the wealthiest of the regions, that housed the most industry and the more technically adept workers, with creating starships for those nations that were less able to create thier own.For every one starship created for thier own population, ten must be created for those nations that had been exploited, ignored, or abused by the more advanced nations.While this was initially legislated with the best of intentions, human frailities such as greed (in the form of bribing inspectors, cutting corners, short inventories, etc), hatred (in the refusal to use state of the art components, designing equipment to fail, etc) and just plain stupidity made sure that these ships were anything BUT the best that the Terran United Nations could have sent into space.A joint China/Russia/American/Japanese venture (J.-C.A.R. Pact) utilized the last remaining space asset of the 4 former nations (The International Space Station) and the Pearl Harbor Space Elevator, launched a sophisticated AI driven ship toward the asteriod belt. The ship was designed to seek out a concentration of minerals, set down, create a factory to produce ore gathering drones and smelting ships, and then send the gathered and refined minerals back to earth in large ignots on a ballistic arc.This mining operation went on for several years, with the ignots impacting at the J-CAR lunar station, until a successful lawsuit in the World Court by the Pan-African Union stopped the operation from continuing, citing loss of livelihood.However, the J-CAR Pact had, by that time, circumvented the TUN mandate and build several hundred ships, orbital facilities around Mars and Venus, as well as initial construction of solar collectors on Mercury. J-CAR insisted that TUN's authority only extended as far as the ionosphere of Terra, not to the surrounding planets or space ventures.The TUN could not let this challenge to thier authority and power stand, and ordered the J-CAR to turn over all facilities, give over all profits, halt all operations, and pay massive fines to "nations and entities wrong by illegal operations" in order to make restitution for jobs/sales lost on Terra. J-CAR refused, and the TUN military arm moved in on the Terran holdings of the J-CAR multinational corporation.When the dust settled, J-CAR and the Pan-African Union (who had sided halfway through the wars with J-CAR after realizing that the TUN would seek to break them up also if they were allowed to break the power of J-CAR) stood triumphant.Outside of Earth, however, the limited FTL ships, most of which only able to make a little faster than 5C, were steadily heading out into space. Sadly, the majority (some scholars put the figure at 87%) of the starships were either lost or arrived at the wrong star or took far longer than estimated to arrive.</blockquote>

Verification