Difference between revisions of "Alien Sky"

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Alien Sky is a science fiction SD that is meant to be a coupling of the ecological science fiction epic Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri with the refined aesthetic and anti-colonial themes of Konami's high-speed mecha action game franchise Zone of the Enders and Studio Bones' surfer culture tribute Eureka seveN.
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= Premise =
  
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It is set on the world of Chiron, settled by refugees fleeing a ruined Earth conquered by the mysterious Progenitor species. After the assassination of the captain, various officers and leading figures on the "Freedom" mission form ideological factions, leading to increasing tensions among the crew and the eventual breakdown of mission. This culminated in sabotage of the ship, that eventually led to scattering of the seven life pods, each containing a faction, and the many resource pods from the ship that would have fed a nascent colony, across the planet.
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Alien Sky is a science fiction SD that is meant to be a coupling of the ecological science fiction epic Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri with the mecha stylings of Studio Bones' surfer culture tribute Eureka seveN.
  
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Chiron is a hostile world of ocre red plains and lonely bands of terraformed green, inhabited by hostile xenosophonts known as ''Enders'', a basic archetype of lifeform that rises from the neural network locked inside of the planet's crust and take on a variety of shapes and sizes. They possess a unique capacity to alter the metric properties of space around them, referred to as the ''Manifold'' by the Progenitors, or ''Phantoma'', as it is referred to by the survivalist Spartans who have repeatedly had to face the creatures.
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The Alien Sky setting is meant to be a setting debate where various factions engage in warfare using biomechanoid units known as Fractals that are not made, but grown, bred and improved over time. Because of the nature of war in this setting, combat is more strongly geared towards small units of elite forces and maneuver warfare rather than mass combat.
  
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The most common of these is the modest ''Linear'', telepathic worms with minimal alteration abilities but the stunning ability to make crippling psychic assaults on the minds of the untrained. The more powerful ''Vector'' is an imitation of the human form, vaguely humanoid by lacking a head or digits to manipulate its environment, with an incredible potential for metric alteration and relatively weak psychic potential. Rumors persist of gargantuan ''Scalars'', massive Ender constructs that act as control nodules for thousands of Vectors and unending swarms of Linears. As the factions of Chiron advance from petty colonial settlements into vast nations unto themselves, these may be the key to controlling the planet and defeating the Progenitors.
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== Setting ==
  
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Not all life on the planet is native or human, however. A splinter of the Progenitors, who call themselves the Manifold Caretakers roam Chiron, destroying emerging Ender nodules on the surface and struggling in a constant bitter war with the first faction of Progenitors humanity encountered, that the Caretakers refer to as the Manifold Usurpers. While relations with the Usurpers are impossible, the Caretakers are cool at best and somewhat hostile at worst.
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In Alien Sky, humanity spread left a ruined and war-torn Earth in search of a new home, with many colony ships heading towards the distant stars of Alpha Centauri. Settling the rolling red ocre plains of Chiron, humanity rebuilt, founding many great and flourishing civilizations. As dozens of centuries passed by, the new era was renamed in honor of their adopted homeworld and most people forgot of the Earth and the disasters that drove them from it.
  
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The surviving human factions are split along specific ideological lines, representing the preferences and interests of their founders.
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Despite the promises of peace and a united humanity offered by the technologies of the future and the paradises offered by terraforming virgin planets to a state ideal for humans, increasing ideological racial and religious tensions between the various colonial powers continued. As relations strained and a state of open war between the many allied nations seemed most likely, the Centauri League, the most powerful of the powers in the system, stepped in and declared a guarantee on any single nation that would resort to open conflict.
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Instead, it advocated a contest for the distant stars and brokered a the Treaty of Pholus, allowing for open warfare only over distant worlds far from the Centauri system. This in turn led to a second space race, with every faction in a race to build a working colony ship that would allow them to claim the worlds of Sin, the yellow star nearest to Alpha Centauri.
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In the end, it was the Centauri League and her six allies that claimed victory at the end of a three-century race to the star, turning back their rivals and claiming the pristine blue and green world that rested as its third orbit. These seven nations built the Tannhauser Gate over the world, seizing control of the only means of zero-time travel between the stars, and named the planet Gaia, in reverence to an old name for the lost Earth.
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Initial colonization is disrupted by the mysterious lifeforms that seem to permeate the planet's crust, referred to only as the Vectors of Gaia, attacked emerging colonies and caused great destruction until the united efforts of the colonial powers succeeded in pushing the dormant superorganism beneath the earth into remission. The cost was great, with thousands of lives lost and the Tannhauser Gate destroyed. Contact could be maintained with Alpha Centauri through the use of high-bandwidth bluebox quantum entangled communicators, and the delivery of new components to rebuild the gate would only take a few centuries, something irrelevant to a clinically immortal populace.
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As per the Treaty of Pholus, the other six other participants in the Gaia venture were open to warfare with eachother, with the League acting as a neutral intermediary. Weapons of mass destruction and atrocities against civilians were forbidden, but a new weapon adapted from the Vectors might yet be the key to seizing control of the world and disrupting League hegemony on Gaia...

Revision as of 11:36, 6 September 2010

Premise

Alien Sky is a science fiction SD that is meant to be a coupling of the ecological science fiction epic Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri with the mecha stylings of Studio Bones' surfer culture tribute Eureka seveN.

The Alien Sky setting is meant to be a setting debate where various factions engage in warfare using biomechanoid units known as Fractals that are not made, but grown, bred and improved over time. Because of the nature of war in this setting, combat is more strongly geared towards small units of elite forces and maneuver warfare rather than mass combat.

Setting

In Alien Sky, humanity spread left a ruined and war-torn Earth in search of a new home, with many colony ships heading towards the distant stars of Alpha Centauri. Settling the rolling red ocre plains of Chiron, humanity rebuilt, founding many great and flourishing civilizations. As dozens of centuries passed by, the new era was renamed in honor of their adopted homeworld and most people forgot of the Earth and the disasters that drove them from it.

Despite the promises of peace and a united humanity offered by the technologies of the future and the paradises offered by terraforming virgin planets to a state ideal for humans, increasing ideological racial and religious tensions between the various colonial powers continued. As relations strained and a state of open war between the many allied nations seemed most likely, the Centauri League, the most powerful of the powers in the system, stepped in and declared a guarantee on any single nation that would resort to open conflict.

Instead, it advocated a contest for the distant stars and brokered a the Treaty of Pholus, allowing for open warfare only over distant worlds far from the Centauri system. This in turn led to a second space race, with every faction in a race to build a working colony ship that would allow them to claim the worlds of Sin, the yellow star nearest to Alpha Centauri.

In the end, it was the Centauri League and her six allies that claimed victory at the end of a three-century race to the star, turning back their rivals and claiming the pristine blue and green world that rested as its third orbit. These seven nations built the Tannhauser Gate over the world, seizing control of the only means of zero-time travel between the stars, and named the planet Gaia, in reverence to an old name for the lost Earth.

Initial colonization is disrupted by the mysterious lifeforms that seem to permeate the planet's crust, referred to only as the Vectors of Gaia, attacked emerging colonies and caused great destruction until the united efforts of the colonial powers succeeded in pushing the dormant superorganism beneath the earth into remission. The cost was great, with thousands of lives lost and the Tannhauser Gate destroyed. Contact could be maintained with Alpha Centauri through the use of high-bandwidth bluebox quantum entangled communicators, and the delivery of new components to rebuild the gate would only take a few centuries, something irrelevant to a clinically immortal populace.

As per the Treaty of Pholus, the other six other participants in the Gaia venture were open to warfare with eachother, with the League acting as a neutral intermediary. Weapons of mass destruction and atrocities against civilians were forbidden, but a new weapon adapted from the Vectors might yet be the key to seizing control of the world and disrupting League hegemony on Gaia...

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