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==Aerography Overview==
==The Empyrean==
The air disk around Mundus stretches outwards for hundreds of thousands of kilometers, though over most of this is it only a few thousand kilometers thick, with the low-pressure thin disk being roughly double that in thickness.  The overall structure is that of a lazy, poorly-defined spiral and most truly large-scale structures such as the Great Wall, the Sky Rivers and even the general relative density of islands and gulfs can be seen to form long, lightly curved scimitar-esque shapes.  It is hardly homogeneous however; the air disk is distinctly 'lumpy' due to the unseen but not unfelt effects of the invisible dark ether disk of Mundus as well as the lesser but still important effects of local gravity by the larger shells.
No man knows where Mankind came from.  A realm bereft of ether is it said, one with but a single radiant - a sun - in the sky above.  Where Mankind was looked on the birds flying in the sky and only dreamt of joining them.  This, the Urmheimat, has been lost for hundreds of generations.  The legends say that the tribes of Mankind swore themselves to a millennia of slavery to the Gods to escape the predations of the Darkstalkers and the Red-Eyes.  When this time came to an end, they willingly continued to serve the gods, their interactions mediated by the ascended Greaters.  Declaring a new calendar, Mankind embarked on the path of Civilization.


Thus areas around shells and other concentrations have thick, breathable air while large gulfs tend to be much thinner; corridors and streams of comfortable air have shaped humanity's great trade routes and expansions for untold thousands of years.  The largest air deserts also act as conduits for solar radiation and shells near their bottoms tend to have above-average temperatures.  The density of luminous ether likewise varies, though the swings between ether deserts and thick ether (taking the form of nebula) is much more pronounced than that of atmospheric density and less correlated to shells.
Mankind's home for over five thousand years, the Empyrean is the deep sky, the sea of clouds.  Slowly circling the great Prime Radiant are the many Axial Worlds, each one a great orb of gas and ether.  These planets are accompanied by entire hosts of smaller objects; moons, shells, rings, gas clouds and miniature radiants throwing their own light on their fellow travellers.  It is on these lesser objects that Mankind and many others make their homes.


===Aerographic Zones===
These smaller objects are only smaller in relative terms, with the largest moons true worlds unto themselves with their own miniature host of moonlets.  Even those that do not rise to the level of planets still being several thousand km in diameter.  Alongside them are the shells, continents set into the sky and equally as large albeit irregular and far flatter.  Accompanying these are island, asteroids and comets, not to mention wandering seas and free-floating jungles.
====Mundus====
Mundus is a gas giant with an equatorial radius of roughly 70,000 kilometers.  Its complicated cloud systems are varying pastel shades of white, peach and violet, with the occasional break in the cloud decks revealing rich colors deeper down.  Having no solid surface and a gravity almost three times standard at cloud tops it has been visited only rarely on some mission of science or publicity.


====The Abyss====
The zone lowest and closest to Mundus, the Abyss stretches upwards for roughly a hundred thousand kilometers from the cloud surface of Mundus to the stormy jet streams at the bottom of the Bathics.  The Abyss is mostly clear and thin air, though a handful of islands sparsely dot it and an equally small number of sluggish skycurrents wind their way through it.  The most defining factor of the Abyss is that it is normally (effectively) lightless with only the seasonal tilt providing a modicum of twilight during the heights of summer, what light that does reach the Bathic's basal storms being completely blocked by these nigh-continuous cloud bands.  Less obvious but no less notable is the paucity of ether in the Abyss, the entire zone being mostly an ether desert save in the wake of diapirs rising from Mundus.  The depth of the Abyss in the sky disk also means it is cold, though this is mitigated somewhat by the overal calmness and the flow of heat from Mundus below; the upper Abyss is actually colder than the lower Abyss.


All this said, life does exist here, such as vast and slow migrations of Sundogs from their spawning grounds on Mundus spending years making the trip up through the Abyss.  Even civilization of a sort, the lantern-eyed Umbroc make their lairs in the Abyss, shunned by all.
===Astrographic lexicon===
*'''Dark Ether''':  The invisible 'stuff' that makes up the fundaments of the known universe.  The actual nature of dark ether remains something of a natural mystery and it is only understood indirectly.  Nonetheless its influence can be felt everywhere.
*'''The Void''':  Not all of space is full of ether and these vast bubbles of emptiness are known as voids/the void.  While objects such as asteroids and comets can and regularly do wander through the void they are otherwise uninhabited - and uninhabitable.
*'''Radiants''':  Tiny outlets of pure energy, radiants emit unceasing amounts of heat and light into the cosmos from the Astra.  Without them the skies would be cold and black.
*'''Axial Worlds''':  These are large bodies, often dozens if not hundreds of Gaian masses and typically swaddled in thick layers of gas and ether.  They are so-named because other, smaller bodies circle them.  Most axial worlds are also host to one or more radiants that illuminate their environs.  While axial worlds themselves are almost inevitably uninhabitable (past perhaps cloud cities), their surrounding space is often well-populated.
*'''Rogue Worlds''':  Some axial worlds have, for whatever reason, no radiants near them.  These tend to be of smaller size, though large rogues are not unknown.  Drifting in the ether with just the twilight of distant radiants and reflected light to illuminate them they can be strange, exotic places and rarely owned by humans.
*'''Garden Worlds''': The in-between axial worlds and small moons, garden worlds are so-called because they host natural - human-friendly - ecospheres.  Some garden worlds are giant moons to axial worlds, while others drift alone with a local radiant to keep them pleasant.  The term 'garden' is quite broad and even many icelocked or desert worlds are counted as such.
*'''Blasted Worlds''':  'Blasted' worlds are those that are large enough to be garden worlds but have none of the habitability.  Some are baked cinders by too-close radiants while others have fundamentally deadly atmospheres such as chlorine or etheric miasma.
*'''Moons''':  The smaller cousins to moon worlds, moons are mostly distinguished by size.  More broadly and less scientifically, moons are those spheroid bodies that are not intrinsically human-habitable.
*'''Shells''':  Shells are large rocky masses broadly comparable in size to moons.  The difference is that moons are spheroidal while shells are irregular but overall highly flattened, essentially continental plates set into space.  Due to their flattened shape, shells normally have a 'light side' and a 'dark side', the former facing the local radiant while the latter commonly covered in ice and snow and in a state of perpetual chilly twilight.  Shells also had planar gravity normal to their flat axis, contrasting to the spherical gravity of worlds.
*'''Asteroids''':  Tumbling, irregular rocks that can range down in size to literal gravel, asteroids are space junk - if sometimes valuable space junk.  Mostly without any significant gravitational field they are often found in large drifts and provide home to all manner of deep-sky life from rockhoppers to space slugs to wyverns.  Industrialized civilizations also find them convenient places to conduct mining or to place outposts for navigation, scientific or military purposes.
*'''Comets''':  The close cousins of asteroids, the main difference between the two is that comets are mostly made up of various ices.  This in fact makes them an important - and thankfully common - resource, their ices mined to supply etheric clathrates to a busy galaxy.  Like asteroids they are commonly home to various types of cosmofauna such as various species of skywhales.  Conventionally, a large cluster of comets is called a 'drift' as compared to an asteroid 'field'.
*'''Clouds''':  The continual ebb and churn of ether and other cosmic gases results in an entire beastiary of deep-sky clouds.  Some exist in nigh-perpetual storm belts while others are transient, coalescing and drifting across the cosmos before eventually dissipating.
*'''Nebulas''':  While luminifous ether is normally not harmful to life (in fact, it is often beneficial); it is understood that at a critical density it thickens greatly in process that is essentially self-sustaining.  Known at this point as miasma, the high etheric density leads to the formation of all manner of exotic chemistry and to most living things (including humans) miasma is no more breathable than the effluent of an industrial plant.  That said, there are entire orders of life that breathe miasma the way humans breathe air with some going between air and miasma in different stages of life. Misma can sometimes be found collected around shells or in drifting clouds but most grandly it can be found forming immense nebulae, even the smallest sufficient to entirely engulf an axial world. 


For centuries worthwhile routes through the Abyss have been sought to cut down on the time taken to reach Wildspace but despite these efforts, none have been found.  A few intrepid traders (or more commonly, lowlifes) do follow the winding paths through the darkness but such a crossing is not for the faint-hearted.
Some of these nebula contain shells inside their gaseous envelope, while others are bereft of anything larger than random rubble and ponds.  The thick miasma of nebula tend to block light very effectively, and while they sometimes glow softly in various shades they can effectively shade entire radiants inside their dark whorls.  Their high ether concentration also results in continuous lightning discharges and often unpredictable weather in the neighboring skies while inside the nebula proper the air - the miasma - is commonly stagnant.  With all navigation methods save dead reckoning useless inside these opaque masses getting trapped inside one can be a death sentence.


====The Bathic Zone====
Of course the ether and the miasma is equally valuable; it is a great source of gaseous ether in high concentration and all manner of industrially useful chemicals.  An extremely short list would include Promethium R and Promethium S compound families, aerosolized Sakuradite, Merculite precursors, Polydichloric euthimal and Iotimoline particulates, not to mention more common etheric thiolins and hydrocarbons.  Thus the edges of nebulae are often sites of extractive industries.
The deepest of the illuminated photic air ring, the Bathics makes up roughly the inner quarter of the thick ring.  This depth means that is tends to be cooler, with shorter days (generally 8-10 hours long) between long extinction nights and drawn-out twilight.  The Bathics also tends to be stormy, particularly along the inner edge of the thick ring where a number of jet streams spawn icy cyclones that can sprawl across entire shells.  The upper edge, by contrast, is typicaly taken as the limit of the Low-Lattitude Shear which is not as violent as the Basal Streams but can still regularly unleashes days or weeks of grey clouds and rain.  As the Low-Lattitude Shear can sometimes oscillate up to ten thousand kilometers over the span of several years this is a relatively arbitrary deliniation.  Finally, being deep in the air disk, the Bathics are known for their orange and red skies though diffuse, low contrast white skies with no visible sun are equally common if much less photogenic.  Likewise the immense air depth regularly results in sun colorations and optical effects that would be considered exotic and rare further from Mundus.


Despite the colder and less pleasant conditions typical of the Bathics, there is great mineral and etheric resources to be found among the dense archipelagos and more than one exiled despot has fled to the mines and factories of the deep Bathics to plot their revenge from snow-encrusted redoubts.
The largest nebulae often extend for quite significant distances, such as the Great Wall and the nearby Tiamat's Shroud, the Pillars of Creation and the Greater and Lesser Drakenwalds.  A few are even haunted by weapons of ages past, with the aptly-named Gunpowder Nebula thick with millennia-old shock mines, their corroded metal shells still protecting a payload of metastable merculite.


The Bathics are also the most direct route to Wildspace on the far side of Mundus and several rich trading empires have called it their home over the millenia.
A far more benign relative of the nebula are fogwalls.  Benign, that is, until your ship smashes into a rock concealed inside the fluffy white mists.  Consisting (mostly) of innocuous water clouds, fogwalls are readily distinguishable from nebula by their clean white color as opposed to various rich shades.  Generally found at the intersection of multiple air masses, the main difference between a fogwall and a simple large cloudbank is that fogwalls are - within the bounds of seasonal variance - essentially permanent features.  Like nebula, the shade side of fogwalls often creates significant mesoclimates with the most famous of this being Quahog Sound bordering the Nanket archipelago.


===The Pelasic Zone===
The broad temperate zone of Mundus' sky disk, the Pelasic Zone stretches from roughly 250 latitude (the Low-Lattitude Shear) up to 400 latitude (the Stratic Convergence Zone).  Hosting the original cradles of civilization, there are hundreds of significantly-populated shells scattered through just the Known Triangle and uncountable lesser ones.  With a favorable climate overall and reliable ether flows the Pelasics are densely populated.


These millennia of technic civilization does not mean that the Pelasics are fully civilized or empty of mysteries.  A number of planet-sized nebula dot the Pelasics, their obscuring clouds never properly mapped and concealing all manner of enigmas.
==Concepts==
 
====The Stratic Zone====
The outermost of the three main climatic zones of the photic ring, the Stratics extend from the Stratic Convergence Zone at 400 latitude to the outer edge of the photic ring at ~470 latitude.  This outer position means it gets the most direct light and it is characterized by both generally warm to hot conditions and long days of up 14 hours with sudden, rapid nightfall.
 
Some parts of the Stratics are parched sky-deserts host to desolate, rocky shells while others are sodden under near-constant monsoons.  The former are home to some of the most tenacious fauna while the latter are incredibly productive and often inhabited by teeming masses of voracious predators and vast aerojungles.  The skies themselves are also thickly inhabited by various aerofauna, the abundant ether and solar energy both providing a feast for living beings.
 
Mostly abandoned during the Fall and the Great Roar, the last few centuries have seen a return of 'civilization' to the outer limits of the sky as a number of empires both formal and informal have begun to plumb its limits.
 
====The Coronic Zone====
The fringe of the air disk, the Coronics take the shape of a ring that is slightly skewed relative to the main disk.  The Coronics can be divided into four main segments; the two antipodal spokes where the inclined ring intersects/emerges from the outer air disk and the two arcuate ring segments, the Upper and Lower Coronics (the Coronic Arches).  The latter are mostly not masked by the main body of the air disk and so even on the far side of Mundus they are illuminated; for much of the Coronics night only lasts one or two hours though morning and evening semi-twilight.  As a result they have been nicknamed the Skies of the Midnight Sun.  The incessant sunlight makes the Coronics exceptionally productive, a veritable feast of light and energy, much like the Stratics but even moreso.
 
The Coronics are particularly dotted with small nebulae as well as various complex currents and cloudbanks, but this reaches its zenith at the intersection spokes.  These are both host to massive nebular complexes; the Great Wall and the Drakenwalds each trace the invisible dark ether structure at the spokes.  The large complexities of both of these extend all the way to the Stratic Convergence Zone and the excess air masses has a general cooling effect, with the Spoke Effect adjusting photo- and thermoclines more than 50,000 km outwards.
 
Like the Stratics, the Coronics have been mostly abandoned as of the Fall and even today are a true frontier where thousand year old structures are slowly being consumed by jungle.  One hinderance to exploration of the Coronics is the almost complete lack of etheric clathrates to be found.  As shells generally do not have a permanently shaded Mundus-facing side there is none of the chilly mesoclimate that allow for the deposition and growth of nightside ices.
 
====The Flachmeers====
Two elongated, arcuate areas of near-space that lie between the Coronic Arches and the nearby Stratics, the Flachmeers are long zones of low pressure (generally between 0.2 and 0.4 standard pressure) that are one of the main cometary accretion zones.  The temperature inversion from greatly reduced pressure gives the Flachmeers frigid air temperatures and even with almost perpetual sunlight it will normally range from -30 to -60.  Many atmospheric rivers will terminate in the Flachmeers where the moisture will crystalize out in the low pressure and temperature; this collects into comets which expand over time.  Most will tumble out of the Flachmeers by the time they have reached several kilometers in size though a few, such as Murdo Island, have exceeded five hundred kilometers in diameter and are essentially static.  Some will fall fairly rapidly into the thick disk and melt - air temperatures going from -30 to +30 in a couple dozen kilometers - while many will slowly migrate inward inside the boundaries of the thin disk.  Some comets - albeit very few - have been tracked falling all the way to the low-altitude shear.
 
The edge of the Flachmeers is a favored habitat of skywhales, with many comets lingering on the border and providing both food and habitat to vast ecologies from airkrill to the skywhales themselves.
 
===Aerographic Features===
====Nebula====
While luminifous ether is normally not harmfull to life (in fact, it is often beneficial); it is understood that at a critical density it thickens greatly in process that is essentially self-sustaining.  Known as miasma, the high etheric density leads to the formation of all manner of exotic chemistry and to most living things (including humans) miasma is no more breathable than the effluent of an industrial plant.  That said, there are entire orders of life that breathe miasma the way humans breathe air with some going between air and miasma in different stages of life.  Misma can sometimes be found collected around shells or in drifting clouds but most grandly it can be found forming immense nebulae, thousands of kilometers on even their shortest dimension. 
 
Some of these nebula contain shells inside their gaseous envelope, while others are bereft of anything larger than random rubble and ponds.  The thick miasma of nebula tend to block light very effectively, and while they sometimes glow softly in various shades they inevitably cast long shadows through the air disk.  Their high ether concentration also results in continous lightning discharges and often unpredictable weather in the neighboring skies while inside the nebula proper the air - the miasma - is commonly stagnant.  With all navigation methods save dead reckoning useless inside these opaque masses getting trapped inside one can be a death sentence.
 
Of course the ether and the miasma is equally valuable; it is a great source of gaseous ether in high concentration and all manner of industrially useful chemicals.  An extremely short list would include Promethium R and Promethium S compound families, aerosolized Sakuradite, Merculite precursors, Polydichloric euthimal and Iotimoline particulates, not to mention more common etheric thiolins and hydrocarbons.  Thus the edges of nebulae are often sites of extractive industries.
 
The largest nebulae often extend out of the air disk to quite significant distances, often also wrapping themselves in an envelope of breathable air.  The latter often also host habitable shells which, due to their position above or below the main air disk can have strange climates relative to their neighbors.  Of particular note for this is the aforementioned Great Wall and the nearby Tiamat's Shroud, the Pillars of Creation and the Greater and Lesser Drakenwalds.  A few are even haunted by weapons of ages past, with the aptly-named Gunpowder Nebula thick with millenia-old shock mines, their corroded metal shells still protecting a payload of metastable merculite.
 
A far more benign relative of the nebula are fogwalls.  Benign, that is, until your ship smashes into a rock concealed inside the fluffy white mists.  Consisting (mostly) of innocuous water clouds, fogwalls are readily distinguishable from nebula by their clean white color as opposed to various rich shades.  Generally found at the intersection of multiple air masses, the main difference between a fogwall and a simple large cloudbank is that fogwalls are - within the bounds of seasonal variance - essentially permanent features.  Like nebula, the shade side of fogwalls often creates significant mesoclimates with the most famous of this being Quahog Sound bordering the Nanket archipelago.


====Comets====
====FUEL====
Comets are one of the main sources of etheric clathrates over much of the air disk, these dirty snowballs growing over time in the thin, low-pressure disk before eventually falling towards the denser and warmer inner disk.  The two most productive sources of comets are the Flachmeers but they can coalesce almost anywhere along the upper or lower side of the disk; a number of fairly regular upwellings result in some regions of active cometary formation all across the disk and curled-off vortices from both the Low-Lattitude Shear and the Stratic Convergence Zone likewise continually support cometary growth centered around 250 and 400 latitude.
It is axiomatic that known space runs on ether and has for millennia.  Ether in various forms permeates the universe and finds itself used in equally myriad ways, but the single most significant use today is as a fuel.  In broad terms there are three conventional formats in which it is so used; ether clathrates, ether gas and ether geodes.
*'''Etheric Clathrates''' are cosmically common; 'burning ice' can be found across known space on ice moons, in glaciers or permafrost and permeating cometary drifts.  If there is ice exposed to the cosmos, there is a good chance of there being ether clathrates somewhere.  These ices - mostly but certainly not exclusively water ice - are naturally impregnated with ambient ether, the ices' molecular structure trapping the ether.  The resulting clathrates are generally slightly less dense than natural ice and are stable to temperatures above freezing at which point they will begin to decompose into a far less convenient mixture of etherically-charged water, gas and miscellaneous secondary compounds nicknamed 'firedamp'.  (This said, long-term storage is generally done with temperatures kept below the freezing point of water to minimize the emission of firedamp from nominally stable clathrates)
:Originally clathrates were decomposed to separate out and collect the pure ether - a sometimes dangerous process - but roughly 1500 years ago a clever method of consuming them directly in the ice form was developed and what was originally a brilliant leap of engineering has long since became the common process.  The ether is burned to provide energy and the water is exhausted as steam.  The downside to all this is that etheric clathrates are never entirely pure.  Various other materials come with them and these build up in the combustion chamber as 'fly gunk', an unpleasant and sometimes toxic mixture of burnt residues, mineral ash and etherically altered compounds.  Thus the convenience of having fuel available almost anywhere that costs little more than the price of mining and shipping it must be set against the ''inconveniences'' of clathrate combustion engines.
:One variant on clathrates that finds localized use is etheric fats.  These can be harvested from skywhales and other deep-sky beasts and while requiring some specific features to be used can generally be considered interchangeable with etheric clathrates in all important regards.
*'''Ether Gas''' has been used for millennia; originally used by magi to power their spellcraft, it was adopted as an energy-dense fuel for engines as mass-produced machinery supplemented and eventually mostly replaced magic.  The terminology of 'gas' is heritage as these high-purity fuels come in not just gaseous but also liquid form.  Ironically despite its association today with aviation and other high-performance roles, ether gas was used as a fuel long before etheric clathrates were.  The main advantage of ether gas stems from its purity and energy density.  Various formulations exist of binder and additive compounds (such as the Mastery-standard AERO-C, military Zip or more recent AP-9) but broadly speaking all these premixes exist to stabilize ether and make it safer and more convenient to handle while not materially affecting its energetic qualities.  From a performance perspective, etheric gas is clearly the superior option.
:The purity of etheric gas comes with its own downsides however.  By far the most significant is that in most cases it is naturally unavailable in desired quality and must be refined out of natural feedstock.  Various sources (including etheric clathrates) can be used, but on the industrial scale it demands significant infrastructure.  The intrinsic nature of the local impurities also matters and while etheric gas can be extracted from many sources, only some are truly worthwhile to do so.  Others result in dirty mixtures full of difficult to remove impurities. (fly gunk, in effect)  High purity etheric gas is also a feedstock for myriad industrial processes and many states only have enough for their domestic manufacturing purposes and tightly limit the use of etheric gas as fuel to the most critical sectors.  Others import millions of tons monthly.
*'''Etheric Geodes''' are the final common source of energy.  These are made of ether that due to specific conditions has crystalized into a solid mass.  Different colors are caused by even extremely small percentage impurities.  Long recognized as incomparable sources of energy, geodes have historically been prized by magi for the greatest workings.  Their first major technological use was the enormous Oklo geode-catalyzed radiothermal pile-reactors used in Freeman battlemoons.  Crude but long-lived (even now, most of two millennia since their construction, several of their ancient heat-piles still provide energy) they were replaced by much smaller and less cumbersome geode-power technologies.  Pure-geode power systems required more regular refueling - on the order of years - but for that period still gave nearly unlimited energy reserves while not being exceptionally large.  The main limitation to geode power is the rarity of geodes.  In practice, natural geodes are normally milled into appropriately-sized prisms or cylinders and then assembled into fuel assemblies.


In all cases the growth cycle is the same; humid air from the thick disk enters the colder, thinner thin disk and begins to expel moisture in the form of ice crystals.  These, along with miscellaneous other aerial detritus, dust and ether nucleates and coalesces into ever-larger cometary bodies.
'''Rules for fuel systems'''<br>
Fundamental rule:  'Ether' represents ether gas; unless a ship has one of the following features it is assumed to use standard ether gas power and all rules apply as normal.
:'''-0 Clathrate Fired''' - Clathrate fired engines have been ubiquitous since almost the dawn of the Great Empires of Man and they remain so.  A long-understood and very mature technology their main advantage is that a fuel source is never far.  So long as a clathrate-fired ship is within operational range of a fleet base it does not cost Ether to move, battle or other normal operations.  Conversely, ships with clathrate fuel may not undertake underway refueling and thus must operation out of fleet bases and require simple albeit regular maintenance to discharge their reaction chambers.  They also suffer a certain loss of stealth as they tend to generate large but harmless trails of steam-ice clouds in their wake.  The clever use of clathrate bunkers does provide a small increase to survivability thanks to the use of icerooms as additional ballistic protection.  Clathrate-fired ships still require annual ether upkeep representing the various fluids, gases and manufactured products that consume refined ether.
:'''+1 Geode Core''' - With the appealing benefit of essentially unlimited cruising range, geode powerplants are a potent albeit uncommon power source.  A ship with a geode core does not pay upkeep for transit, battle, etc, but must pay its annual ether upkeep in geodes - once initialized the geode cascade reaction will consume all the fuel in the core and thus fuel assemblies are built to be easily replaced on an annual basis.  The innate sustained power also allows for optimization of engines for higher cruising speeds, giving geode cored ships a +25% speed increase.  Geode power has no specific downsides past the cost of both the reactor and the fuel, though the ship will need to return home for an annual refueling, a process that is generally unfeasible in the field.

Revision as of 11:33, 23 January 2021

The Empyrean

No man knows where Mankind came from. A realm bereft of ether is it said, one with but a single radiant - a sun - in the sky above. Where Mankind was looked on the birds flying in the sky and only dreamt of joining them. This, the Urmheimat, has been lost for hundreds of generations. The legends say that the tribes of Mankind swore themselves to a millennia of slavery to the Gods to escape the predations of the Darkstalkers and the Red-Eyes. When this time came to an end, they willingly continued to serve the gods, their interactions mediated by the ascended Greaters. Declaring a new calendar, Mankind embarked on the path of Civilization.

Mankind's home for over five thousand years, the Empyrean is the deep sky, the sea of clouds. Slowly circling the great Prime Radiant are the many Axial Worlds, each one a great orb of gas and ether. These planets are accompanied by entire hosts of smaller objects; moons, shells, rings, gas clouds and miniature radiants throwing their own light on their fellow travellers. It is on these lesser objects that Mankind and many others make their homes.

These smaller objects are only smaller in relative terms, with the largest moons true worlds unto themselves with their own miniature host of moonlets. Even those that do not rise to the level of planets still being several thousand km in diameter. Alongside them are the shells, continents set into the sky and equally as large albeit irregular and far flatter. Accompanying these are island, asteroids and comets, not to mention wandering seas and free-floating jungles.


Astrographic lexicon

  • Dark Ether: The invisible 'stuff' that makes up the fundaments of the known universe. The actual nature of dark ether remains something of a natural mystery and it is only understood indirectly. Nonetheless its influence can be felt everywhere.
  • The Void: Not all of space is full of ether and these vast bubbles of emptiness are known as voids/the void. While objects such as asteroids and comets can and regularly do wander through the void they are otherwise uninhabited - and uninhabitable.
  • Radiants: Tiny outlets of pure energy, radiants emit unceasing amounts of heat and light into the cosmos from the Astra. Without them the skies would be cold and black.
  • Axial Worlds: These are large bodies, often dozens if not hundreds of Gaian masses and typically swaddled in thick layers of gas and ether. They are so-named because other, smaller bodies circle them. Most axial worlds are also host to one or more radiants that illuminate their environs. While axial worlds themselves are almost inevitably uninhabitable (past perhaps cloud cities), their surrounding space is often well-populated.
  • Rogue Worlds: Some axial worlds have, for whatever reason, no radiants near them. These tend to be of smaller size, though large rogues are not unknown. Drifting in the ether with just the twilight of distant radiants and reflected light to illuminate them they can be strange, exotic places and rarely owned by humans.
  • Garden Worlds: The in-between axial worlds and small moons, garden worlds are so-called because they host natural - human-friendly - ecospheres. Some garden worlds are giant moons to axial worlds, while others drift alone with a local radiant to keep them pleasant. The term 'garden' is quite broad and even many icelocked or desert worlds are counted as such.
  • Blasted Worlds: 'Blasted' worlds are those that are large enough to be garden worlds but have none of the habitability. Some are baked cinders by too-close radiants while others have fundamentally deadly atmospheres such as chlorine or etheric miasma.
  • Moons: The smaller cousins to moon worlds, moons are mostly distinguished by size. More broadly and less scientifically, moons are those spheroid bodies that are not intrinsically human-habitable.
  • Shells: Shells are large rocky masses broadly comparable in size to moons. The difference is that moons are spheroidal while shells are irregular but overall highly flattened, essentially continental plates set into space. Due to their flattened shape, shells normally have a 'light side' and a 'dark side', the former facing the local radiant while the latter commonly covered in ice and snow and in a state of perpetual chilly twilight. Shells also had planar gravity normal to their flat axis, contrasting to the spherical gravity of worlds.
  • Asteroids: Tumbling, irregular rocks that can range down in size to literal gravel, asteroids are space junk - if sometimes valuable space junk. Mostly without any significant gravitational field they are often found in large drifts and provide home to all manner of deep-sky life from rockhoppers to space slugs to wyverns. Industrialized civilizations also find them convenient places to conduct mining or to place outposts for navigation, scientific or military purposes.
  • Comets: The close cousins of asteroids, the main difference between the two is that comets are mostly made up of various ices. This in fact makes them an important - and thankfully common - resource, their ices mined to supply etheric clathrates to a busy galaxy. Like asteroids they are commonly home to various types of cosmofauna such as various species of skywhales. Conventionally, a large cluster of comets is called a 'drift' as compared to an asteroid 'field'.
  • Clouds: The continual ebb and churn of ether and other cosmic gases results in an entire beastiary of deep-sky clouds. Some exist in nigh-perpetual storm belts while others are transient, coalescing and drifting across the cosmos before eventually dissipating.
  • Nebulas: While luminifous ether is normally not harmful to life (in fact, it is often beneficial); it is understood that at a critical density it thickens greatly in process that is essentially self-sustaining. Known at this point as miasma, the high etheric density leads to the formation of all manner of exotic chemistry and to most living things (including humans) miasma is no more breathable than the effluent of an industrial plant. That said, there are entire orders of life that breathe miasma the way humans breathe air with some going between air and miasma in different stages of life. Misma can sometimes be found collected around shells or in drifting clouds but most grandly it can be found forming immense nebulae, even the smallest sufficient to entirely engulf an axial world.

Some of these nebula contain shells inside their gaseous envelope, while others are bereft of anything larger than random rubble and ponds. The thick miasma of nebula tend to block light very effectively, and while they sometimes glow softly in various shades they can effectively shade entire radiants inside their dark whorls. Their high ether concentration also results in continuous lightning discharges and often unpredictable weather in the neighboring skies while inside the nebula proper the air - the miasma - is commonly stagnant. With all navigation methods save dead reckoning useless inside these opaque masses getting trapped inside one can be a death sentence.

Of course the ether and the miasma is equally valuable; it is a great source of gaseous ether in high concentration and all manner of industrially useful chemicals. An extremely short list would include Promethium R and Promethium S compound families, aerosolized Sakuradite, Merculite precursors, Polydichloric euthimal and Iotimoline particulates, not to mention more common etheric thiolins and hydrocarbons. Thus the edges of nebulae are often sites of extractive industries.

The largest nebulae often extend for quite significant distances, such as the Great Wall and the nearby Tiamat's Shroud, the Pillars of Creation and the Greater and Lesser Drakenwalds. A few are even haunted by weapons of ages past, with the aptly-named Gunpowder Nebula thick with millennia-old shock mines, their corroded metal shells still protecting a payload of metastable merculite.

A far more benign relative of the nebula are fogwalls. Benign, that is, until your ship smashes into a rock concealed inside the fluffy white mists. Consisting (mostly) of innocuous water clouds, fogwalls are readily distinguishable from nebula by their clean white color as opposed to various rich shades. Generally found at the intersection of multiple air masses, the main difference between a fogwall and a simple large cloudbank is that fogwalls are - within the bounds of seasonal variance - essentially permanent features. Like nebula, the shade side of fogwalls often creates significant mesoclimates with the most famous of this being Quahog Sound bordering the Nanket archipelago.


Concepts

FUEL

It is axiomatic that known space runs on ether and has for millennia. Ether in various forms permeates the universe and finds itself used in equally myriad ways, but the single most significant use today is as a fuel. In broad terms there are three conventional formats in which it is so used; ether clathrates, ether gas and ether geodes.

  • Etheric Clathrates are cosmically common; 'burning ice' can be found across known space on ice moons, in glaciers or permafrost and permeating cometary drifts. If there is ice exposed to the cosmos, there is a good chance of there being ether clathrates somewhere. These ices - mostly but certainly not exclusively water ice - are naturally impregnated with ambient ether, the ices' molecular structure trapping the ether. The resulting clathrates are generally slightly less dense than natural ice and are stable to temperatures above freezing at which point they will begin to decompose into a far less convenient mixture of etherically-charged water, gas and miscellaneous secondary compounds nicknamed 'firedamp'. (This said, long-term storage is generally done with temperatures kept below the freezing point of water to minimize the emission of firedamp from nominally stable clathrates)
Originally clathrates were decomposed to separate out and collect the pure ether - a sometimes dangerous process - but roughly 1500 years ago a clever method of consuming them directly in the ice form was developed and what was originally a brilliant leap of engineering has long since became the common process. The ether is burned to provide energy and the water is exhausted as steam. The downside to all this is that etheric clathrates are never entirely pure. Various other materials come with them and these build up in the combustion chamber as 'fly gunk', an unpleasant and sometimes toxic mixture of burnt residues, mineral ash and etherically altered compounds. Thus the convenience of having fuel available almost anywhere that costs little more than the price of mining and shipping it must be set against the inconveniences of clathrate combustion engines.
One variant on clathrates that finds localized use is etheric fats. These can be harvested from skywhales and other deep-sky beasts and while requiring some specific features to be used can generally be considered interchangeable with etheric clathrates in all important regards.
  • Ether Gas has been used for millennia; originally used by magi to power their spellcraft, it was adopted as an energy-dense fuel for engines as mass-produced machinery supplemented and eventually mostly replaced magic. The terminology of 'gas' is heritage as these high-purity fuels come in not just gaseous but also liquid form. Ironically despite its association today with aviation and other high-performance roles, ether gas was used as a fuel long before etheric clathrates were. The main advantage of ether gas stems from its purity and energy density. Various formulations exist of binder and additive compounds (such as the Mastery-standard AERO-C, military Zip or more recent AP-9) but broadly speaking all these premixes exist to stabilize ether and make it safer and more convenient to handle while not materially affecting its energetic qualities. From a performance perspective, etheric gas is clearly the superior option.
The purity of etheric gas comes with its own downsides however. By far the most significant is that in most cases it is naturally unavailable in desired quality and must be refined out of natural feedstock. Various sources (including etheric clathrates) can be used, but on the industrial scale it demands significant infrastructure. The intrinsic nature of the local impurities also matters and while etheric gas can be extracted from many sources, only some are truly worthwhile to do so. Others result in dirty mixtures full of difficult to remove impurities. (fly gunk, in effect) High purity etheric gas is also a feedstock for myriad industrial processes and many states only have enough for their domestic manufacturing purposes and tightly limit the use of etheric gas as fuel to the most critical sectors. Others import millions of tons monthly.
  • Etheric Geodes are the final common source of energy. These are made of ether that due to specific conditions has crystalized into a solid mass. Different colors are caused by even extremely small percentage impurities. Long recognized as incomparable sources of energy, geodes have historically been prized by magi for the greatest workings. Their first major technological use was the enormous Oklo geode-catalyzed radiothermal pile-reactors used in Freeman battlemoons. Crude but long-lived (even now, most of two millennia since their construction, several of their ancient heat-piles still provide energy) they were replaced by much smaller and less cumbersome geode-power technologies. Pure-geode power systems required more regular refueling - on the order of years - but for that period still gave nearly unlimited energy reserves while not being exceptionally large. The main limitation to geode power is the rarity of geodes. In practice, natural geodes are normally milled into appropriately-sized prisms or cylinders and then assembled into fuel assemblies.

Rules for fuel systems
Fundamental rule: 'Ether' represents ether gas; unless a ship has one of the following features it is assumed to use standard ether gas power and all rules apply as normal.

-0 Clathrate Fired - Clathrate fired engines have been ubiquitous since almost the dawn of the Great Empires of Man and they remain so. A long-understood and very mature technology their main advantage is that a fuel source is never far. So long as a clathrate-fired ship is within operational range of a fleet base it does not cost Ether to move, battle or other normal operations. Conversely, ships with clathrate fuel may not undertake underway refueling and thus must operation out of fleet bases and require simple albeit regular maintenance to discharge their reaction chambers. They also suffer a certain loss of stealth as they tend to generate large but harmless trails of steam-ice clouds in their wake. The clever use of clathrate bunkers does provide a small increase to survivability thanks to the use of icerooms as additional ballistic protection. Clathrate-fired ships still require annual ether upkeep representing the various fluids, gases and manufactured products that consume refined ether.
+1 Geode Core - With the appealing benefit of essentially unlimited cruising range, geode powerplants are a potent albeit uncommon power source. A ship with a geode core does not pay upkeep for transit, battle, etc, but must pay its annual ether upkeep in geodes - once initialized the geode cascade reaction will consume all the fuel in the core and thus fuel assemblies are built to be easily replaced on an annual basis. The innate sustained power also allows for optimization of engines for higher cruising speeds, giving geode cored ships a +25% speed increase. Geode power has no specific downsides past the cost of both the reactor and the fuel, though the ship will need to return home for an annual refueling, a process that is generally unfeasible in the field.
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