Space Carrier Amahara

Space Carrier Amahara is a game about the eponymous ship and its deeds. Due to the original studio going out of business (rumoured to be after a very ill thought out attempt at magical girl subversion), the property is now in the hands of another company that has made numerous controversial retcons. It remains a (very) soft-science space opera.

Episodes/Exp Tracker

Background

In 1999, the Lunarians emerged from the surface of the moon and invaded Earth, laying waste to its surface. By the end of the year, some 90% of humanity had been wiped out and the remainder were driven deep underground into the Hollow. For years, all humanity could barely do was survive, until the Ectasia Impact delivered alien technology into the hands of humanity and allowed them to once again unleash the power of spin weapons on the battlefield. Emboldened, the survivors joined together as the Earth United Front and fought back. In the end, it was the odyssey of a single ship and what it found at the end of its journey that convinced the Lunarians to break the siege of Earth in late 2016. The exploits of the space cruiser Amahara have passed on into legend.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the surviving human nations cooperated in the reconstruction and rearmament of Earth and engaged in diplomatic talks that resulted in the foundation of the Earth Union, a permanent civilian counterpart to the EUF. In this way, Earth's leaders hoped to permanently set aside their differences and be prepared for all out interstellar war if the Lunarians were ever to return. It is this same Earth Union, on the cusp of its centennial, that still governs Earthian space from Earth today.

As years of peace turned into decades, Earth civilization recovered from near destruction to embrace a new age of spacefaring prosperity. A generation of navigational intelligences - the Pathfinders awoke from the liquid metal. They tapped into the primordial starmaps of Earth's alien benefactor and opened long trails of wormholes, pushing the limits of accessible space far into the distance. Earthian colonies followed, appearing like droplets of dew on a web. What Lunarian forces and influences they encountered over the years proved to be no more than remnants that had been abandoned and left behind. Gradually, the Earth Union drew down from its initial state of paranoid hypermilitance to a more general vigilance. The singular fear of a Second Lunarian War gave way once more to the mundane yet complex concerns of politics and economics in an expanding interstellar civilization.

Earthian Space

Earthian humans began travelling space in earnest after the end of the First Lunarian War about a century ago. Compared to the Celestials, their knowledge of the cosmos is little and many of the technologies they use, derived from alien influences, remain mysterious black boxes to them. This includes, their sole method of superluminal travel, the Starpaths. A Starpath is created when a navigational intelligence accesses the primordial starmaps hidden within the liquid metal and engages her inherent ability as a superdimensional drive. The process pulls the ship along with it and tears a wormhole in spacetime that stabilizes enough for normal ship travel some time afterwards. While often described as a network, the Starpaths are long lines of wormholes that all terminate at Sol - the only nexus. Each of Earth's navigational intelligences are dedicated to a single Starpath and go through cycles of activity and inactivity, resulting in numerous expeditions that have pushed the horizon of human space far beyond what can be used. Earthian space contains over thirteen thousand systems and end to end travel down the longest Starpaths would take years.

Earth United Front

The United Front was formed in June of 2015 as a military alliance of Earth’s human nations against the Lunarians. While all international conflicts were defunct by the end of 1999 as over 90% of human population was lost in the Lunarian invasion, the catalyst for formalizing the EUF proved to be the revelation of mass superluminal travel by Ruruie, the first Pathfinder, and the advent of the tampered spin bomb which made military success against Lunarians a realistic matter. The United Front won the First Lunarian War in late 2016 when the Lunarians sealed the Moon and withdrew from all contact.

The vast majority of the EUF's great fleet of destroyers and capital ships is posted around Earth itself as an enormously expensive insurance against Lunarian attack. Long term quiet and taken-for-granted necessity has led to organizational decay and corruption. The bulk of the EUF's assets have limited application for low scale conflicts where spin weapons are inapplicable, hence the relatively recent foundation of the Earth Strategic Strike Force. Compared to the Union itself, the EUF is less unpopular; the need to be united against the possibility of further Lunarian attack is less controversial than the need - or the justice - of the Union's Earth-centric political and economic policies. The EUF is commanded through the consensus of the permanent members of the Council of Earth.

Earth Union

In the immediate post-war period, Earth's national leaders met repeatedly to discuss Earth's future and eventually agreed to form the Earth Union, a civilian counterpart to the EUF. Where the United Front was the bastion guaranteeing the survival of humanity, the Union would be concerned with renewing governance, reconstruction and returning some semblence of normality to day-to-day civilian life. The Union has proved highly successful in this regard, carrying out large scale reconstruction across the Earth over the decades, fueled in no small part by extrasolar colonies. It successfully maintained the peace between numerous states that were all in a state of vulnerability and had a strong moderating, centrist effect on politics across the Earth.

Nearly a century after its foundation however, it still isn’t entirely clear whether the Earth Union is a federalist superstate, an intergovernmental organization or, if the latter, what sort of unit - whether a state, nation or even just an interest group - properly constitutes a member. As a result, it is a tense organization at every level. Its numerous institutions with varied, sometimes overlapping competencies deal with the divergent interests among its constituents and resistance to its inherent centralizing tendencies. There is the threat of Frexit and also the strong perception in the colonies of it as an institution of Earthbound imperialism.

Navigation Guild

The Navigation Guild is a support organization for Earth's 72 active and inactive navigational intelligences. As the Pathfinders go through cycles of activity and bond with individuals or families rather than institutions, the Navigation Guild is necessarily a rather non-rigid affair that does its best to stay out of the politicking. It organizes training, Pathfinding expeditions and also conducts surveys of already accessible systems. As it takes years of effort to really chart even a single star system and decades to fully understand its cycles and foibles, outstanding charting missions are massively backlogged.

Earth Strategic Strike Force

The ESSF is a new force seeded with personnel and equipment poached from the EUF and Navigation Guild. Its mission is primarily focused around "domestic issues" - incidents relating to something other than a major Lunarian adversary. The option of a military response to internal unrest is billed as necessary to maintain the unity and stability of the human race against Lunarian threats and also to safeguard trade along the Starpaths. Predictably, the organization was accused of engaging in black ops well before its first units were even operational.

While technically a subdivision of the United Front, the ESSF is commanded directly by the Union Executive. The formation of this second, smaller but much more flexible military force has greatly increased the power of the Secretary-General's office.

Lunarian Space

Lunarian humans, who refer to themselves as the Celestials, have had access to space travel for thousands of years. Lunarians are involuntarily immortal and cannot be killed or held against their will except by spin weapons and liquid metal respectively. Because of this, they lead distant and independent lives and have found it difficult to sustain much organization or society. They are thought to have a population of only a few million, but rule over vast subordinate empires of humans that, in totality, greatly outnumber free humans. They primarily project power with robotic forces; real Lunarian ships are as much palace as battlestation and are rare overall. At the end of the First Lunarian War, the Lunarians withdrew from all contact with Earth and all worlds accessible to Earth.

The Lunarians' principle form of superluminal travel is the Moon, a superdimensional celestial body colocated across countless systems, allowing instantaneous travel between each instance of its existence. It is not known how it is managed - either it is one of the few things the Lunarians can reach a consensus on or else it must grant the controller(s) considerable influence over other Lunarians. There are over a hundred (former?) instances of the Moon in Earthian space, including Earth's Moon. In addition, the Lunarians also have some access to a seemingly arbitrary superluminal drive that allows ships to warp independently.

Celestial Superluminal Patrol

A volunteer organization of a number of Lunarians that sought to stop the journey of Space Cruiser Amahara during the war a century ago using vessels equipped with an arbitrary warp drive. The entire fleet was apparently owned by Celestial Lord Kirtansis and it is unknown whether that technology was inherited by anyone else after his death.

Space Carrier Amahara

Amahara (2112) class strategic carrier
operator: Dominion of Amahara (ESSF)
length: 380m
mass: 234000t
power: 2 helium fusion reactors
weapons:
1 phase transit cannon (axial; normally disarmed)
12 condensed light beam cannon (6 x 2 turrets)
4 missile blocks
systems:
eLM
complement:
1000+ crew
1 carrier battle armour group
1 spatial infantry brigade