Alien Sky

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.

Players take control of individual military units rather than nations, customizing them and focusing on unique individuals and mecha rather than swarms of identical forces. Options range from elite special forces, raw recruits, roaming mercenaries and idealistic freedom fighters, set against the backdrop of a growing cold war between various colonial powers and the nascent sentience that seems to inhabit the verdant world of Gaia.

Setting

History

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 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...

Notable Organizations

Centauri League

The Centauri League inherited the strongly humanistic and liberal values of the old Earth United Nations, pushing for the recreation of a standing charter of human rights and bans on weapons of mass destruction. Initially formed as a mutual pact between a number of colonies founded by forward-thinking 1st world countries, the Centauri League is progressive and cosmopolitan. It possesses the largest population on the planet, largely because of its ability to create thriving communities from disparate groups and skill at brokering deals with breakaways from other factions. Although New Sargasso is far wealthier and the Community are much more advanced, the Centauri League is the most powerful of the seven nations Gaia.

In the intervening era since the emergence of the Vectors and the destruction of the Tannhauser Gate, the Centauri League has found itself straddling the line between necessary peacekeeping and self-interested interventionism more and more. Their UN-style bureaucracy is inefficient, but their idealism and free speech allow for a happier and more motivated populace.

Their weaponry is mostly composed of solid and sturdy mass production A-Fractals that utilize environmentally-safe linear rifles and lasers, and make use of the powerful oscillating blade system, but eschew the use of rocketry. Their forces have strong morale and esprit de corps, but most League forces on Gaia are raw and inexperienced.

Play a Centauri League unit if you want be a peacekeeping force that exists to prevent war and create a unified Gaia. CL units start with better than average starting equipment and high morale.

New Sargasso City-States

The New Sargasso City States is a politico-economic union of wealthy city-states that settled the small islands of the New Sargasso Sea on Chiron. The NSCS is an economic powerhouse that seems to have based its political makeup off a combination of secular corporate republicanism and reformist religious doctrines. The NSCS are largely democratic, but is is in these city-states that the conservative clerics of Sunni Neo-Confucianism. The faith, often abbreviated to SunCon, is a belief in the submission to the best members of a meritocratic society as agents of an infallible God. SunCon believers tend to be socially conservative in terms of the AC Era, but economically liberal.

While the League concerns itself with its own morality and idealism, the NSCS is interested in advancing the new faith and bringing themselves wealth and power by taking control of Gaia's resources and exploiting them. Their wealth has attracted many brilliant scientists, but have the smallest population among the Gaia venture states.

The NSCS military is composed of mid-weight mass-production A-Fractals with high-end laser and missile weaponry, and make use of advanced non-combustive rocketry to improve the agility of their units in the air. Their forces are almost exclusively composed of well-trained and well equipped mercenaries, but tend to be less motivated as a consequence.

Play a NSCS unit if you want to play a morally ambiguous mercenary, perhaps hoping that his actions might earn him a place in the new economic and social order that the City-States and their SunCon ideology might create or simply there to make a quick buck. NSCS units are smaller and more elite in terms of training, begin with advanced starting gear and funds, but have poor morale because of their mercenary origins.

Tsiolkovsky Community

The Tsiolkovsky Community is a national body founded by a number of independent research laboratories who banded together in order to keep their innovations from being abused by NSCS corporates or Earthbound anarchists. Although one of the least populous factions on Chiron, they have one of the largest populations on Gaia for a simple reason: every Community colonist on Gaia was originally a mindstate copy sent through the Tannhauser Gate, and nearly their entire population consented to being uploaded.

All political, economic and social aspects of the Community are decided democratically. All corporations are owned by the employees, with pay and planning dictated by popular vote, laws are voted by every individual of their five million-strong electorate and wars are planned by committees of veterans assisted by powerful AI. Although the structure seems inefficient, the Community has effectively eliminated bureaucracy and corruption by automating and streamlining the means of gathering and processing consensus.

The TC military is easily one of smallest on Gaia, comprised mostly of A-Fractals piloted by AI patterned after the mindstates of ace pilots, and backed by elite test units who pilot experimental AN-Fractals. Unlike the Returners, who use Natural Fractals recovered from the Vectors, the Community is one of the only units capable of creating artificial units comparable to the N-Fractal archetype. Their weapons are mirrored after the bizarre Vector energy weapons such as the powerful 'scattering beam' and unusual 'homing beam'.

Play a TC unit if you want to be an ace pilot in a bleeding edge AN-Fractal. TC forces are extremely small and have lower starting money, but automatically begin with at least one ace pilot character and one AN-Fractal and acquire more much more easily than other factions.

Messian Concordat

The Messians are adherents to Chironian Messianism, a form of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity based around messianic culture heroes that arose during the early colonization of Chiron. These figures are essentially considered to be the Second Coming of Jesus among the Messians, who destroyed the corrupt 'machine voices' that united all the first founding settlements of Chiron and allowed them to follow the teachings of the Lord uninhibited by the voices of the profane and unbelieving.

The Concordat is a theocracy, operated by a council of religious elders who base decisions on scripture and precedents in interpretation. The government is in many ways slow and inflexible, unable to adopt new technologies or ideologies as quickly as the other factions. However, their citizens are motivated, pious and unfailingly loyal, and their society is notoriously difficulty to subvert.

The Messian military is composed of seasoned veterans and motivated raw recruits, but has some of the crudest Fractal technology possible. Their unwillingness to dabble in the life sciences means that they make use exclusively of ponderous first-generation A-Fractal technology stolen from the Tsiolkovsky. These units are often heavily armored and heavily armed with bulky railguns and high-velocity ion rockets.

Play a Messian Concordat unit if you want to have a unit of skilled and motivated fighters stuck in a gritty conflict against technologically superior enemies. Messian forces are veterans with high morale, but worse than average starting equipment and no access to anything more advanced than mechanical variations on their basic A-Fractal.