Planetologie des Ruines

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Overview

Territory, Infrastructure and Features, in Brief

Territory is the physical landmass (or asteroids, or more rarely megastructures) occupied by a polity. A single Territory comprises an undefined amount of such space with the capacity to host human economic and industrial activity. Territory has a number of qualities outlined in this and other sections of the document. In a majority of cases a player with an uncontested territorial claim on a planet has an unlimited potential number of territories on a single planet, constrained only by their own ability to plan expansion and manage so much land. It took humanity thousands of years to reach Earth's carrying capacity, after all.

Infrastructure are the territorial structures that make dense, efficient, productive technic society possible. A Territory's capacity for additional industry is increased by its Infrastructure. Higher levels of infrastructure can often be seen physically embodied in the form of tower blocks and industrial arcologies extending higher into the planetary skyline. Infrastructure is powerful but its cost scales exponentially on a factor of TBD.

Features are quirks of geography, climate, etc that play minor factors in the function of a territory. Features can be discovered by survey or often induced via terraforming, though certain unique features may not be so easily reproduced. Planetary territory can be undefined by the player for ease of design (particularly during nation creation), in which case it simply has the planet's Dominant Features.

Planets

Human civilization remains centered on planetary life. Terraformed or naturally biocompatible 'garden worlds' are hugely valuable to polities as both places to live and build industry, as many technologies benefit from the consistency of planetary gravity and an atmosphere for both easy settlement and the ability to discharge waste heat, static and electromagnetic buildup harmlessly. Most divergent human clades are adapted for differences of climate or gravity rather than the total absence of these things. Most starting states should therefore select their initial planet, upon which all or a majority of their initial territory will be located.

Planet Design

Territories

Infrastructure

Features

Gravity

  • None: Gravity here is minimal or nonexistent. Planets almost never lack gravity to such an extent, barring exotic tech shenanigans.
  • Light: Encompasses sub-1G gravitation, which is comfortable for habitation and easy to build in but comes with some complicating factors in industrial development. Standard human clades tend to grow tall and thin in these conditions.
  • Normal: 1G standard, give or take one tenth of a G.
  • Heavy: Over 2Gs. Everyday life is often significantly more dangerous by default, to say nothing of warfare. Heavy worlders without geneline edits are often squat, solid and muscular.
  • Hellish: 10G+. At this stage regular life without significant biological or cybernetic modifications is next to impossible, engineering even basic civic infrastructure is a challenge and minor accidents can be life-threatening.

Atmosphere

  • Breathable: Roughly 4-1 Nitrogen/Oxygen mix with various trace gasses, at a similar density to Earth’s.
  • Hyperoxygenated [Rare]: A dense, Oxygen-rich atmosphere improves the mood and physical performance of higher life. In turn, Hyperoxygenated ecosystems also produce megafauna including insects and crustaceans of terrible size.
  • Thin: A thin, oxygen-poor atmosphere typical of early-stage terraforming on mining worlds. Human life is uncomfortable and often requires a breathing apparatus.
  • Barren: A planet that would be a gasping death to all but the most extremophile life, only marginally better than hard vacuum if at all.

Atmospheric Hazards

  • Corrosive: Saturated with extremely basic, acidic or abrasive compounds, highly destructive to non-specialized equipment and deadly to most higher life.
  • Poisonous: A major component gas or particulate matter in the atmosphere is lethal to terrestrial life.
  • Inhospitable: The atmosphere essentially lacks the elements needed for the survival of terrestrial life, requiring breathing apparatus.
  • Irradiated: The planet’s atmosphere contains significant amounts of radioactive fallout, or its magnetosphere has somehow failed to disperse ionizing radiation impacting it, making long-term habitation here significantly more challenging.

Temperature

  • Extremophile (Cold or Hot): Hell basically, pick your flavour.
  • Arctic: Thick ice shelfs and permafrost, blizzards on warmer days. Melt in the warmer seasons can be just as dangerous as the cold. Heavy weather gear is essential at all times of the year and maintaining body heat and calories is a constant challenge.
  • Cold: Colder seasons require shelter or weather-specific gear but basically livable.
  • Temperate: Temperatures range between pleasantly bellow freezing to pleasantly above it, with only occasional dangerous weather.
  • Warm: Plant life flourishes with a long growing season, as does animal life. The seasons shift to dry/rainy if hydrography permits. Heat can interrupt daytime work but is manageable.
  • Tropical: Managing heat is a serious concern in daytime, and weather patterns in the rainy and dry seasons are more intense, going from hurricanes to droughts and forest fires.
  • Supertropical: The unaugmented can only work tortuously or with the assistance of air-conditionned environment suits. Coasts are battered by seasonal hypercanes that erase smaller islands off the map, and the continental interior is baked dry and unlivable.

Geography

  • Mountains: Elevated segments of planetary crust with low to minimal topsoil cover, with high availability of mineral resources but engineering difficulties imposed by the environment’s sheer verticality. May possess glaciers depending on climate.
  • Hills: Terrain with significant topological variation but also consistent topsoil and vegetation cover.
  • Valleys: Extended lowlands located in hilly or mountainous regions, often fertile thanks to meltwater from glaciers.
  • Plains: Flatlands regions with consistent elevation.
  • Caves: Underground passages, sometimes flooded or partially flooded depending on local rock composition and the presence of aquifers. These winding passages are difficult to traverse for non-infantry units.
  • Deep Caves: Deep passages more than 1km underground. At this depth factors like geothermal springs and magma chambers are in ready supply.
  • Massive Caves [Rare]: Enormous cave systems, large enough to host cities. Large enough for direct engagements with air support (typically via tiltrotor gunships and drones) and armour-centric combined arms doctrine.
  • Badlands: Rough terrain caused by erosion, typically arid but sometimes host to a diverse ecosystem.
  • Megacity [Rare]: Intact hyperdense urban structure, extending kilometers above and below ground. At this scale, the original geography is fundamentally unimportant.
  • Megacity Ruins [Rare]: The remains of a fallen megacity. Mistaken at a glance for matchstick mountains and flooded valleys, their true nature is easily revealed with cursory excavation. These can be an easy source of exceptional industrial materials or restored to some level of their ancient grandeur.

Connections

  • Coastline (Sea): Represents coastline opening inland or gulf sea zones like the Caspian, Mediterranean or Caribbean, navigable but generally calmer and shallower than the open sea. Coastlines in the same named Sea Zone are assumed to be functionally adjacent for various purposes.
  • Coastline (Ocean): Coastal access to ocean, immediately exposed to rugged sea conditions and tidal forces. Could stand in for the likes of various Pacific Islands or the chill coasts of the North Atlantic. Coastlines in the same named Oceanic Zone are not assumed to be functionally adjacent for various purposes.
  • Land Connection: A physical connection overland, can be as small as a narrow land bridge or as broad a territorial border on a wholly-owned continent.
  • Structural Connection: The land connection of a megastructure, such as the anchor of an orbital elevator, the factory wing of an asteroid colony or something as simple as a particularly large bridge or tunnel.

Hydrography

  • Lakes: Inland freshwater sources where glacial meltwater or river sources accumulate. Important sources for habitation, agriculture and other industries. On worlds in the process of being terraformed, artificial lakes are often the first form of surface water. Larger lakes can be represented by having multiple territories share the same named lake, which also functions as an internal connection.
  • Rivers Fed by glacial melt, precipitation at higher altitudes or created by the outflows of human manipulation of the hydrosphere. Rivers are useful for navigation and the kinetic energy created by their movements can be harnessed for civilian electricity needs. River crossings however are notoriously difficult to attack, and river patrols through hostile territory are often inherently risky propositions. Rivers can function as inland connections, typically end-to-end with the occasional fork.
  • Wetlands: Seasonally, semi-permanently or permanently flooded landmass. It is at once extraordinarily biodiverse but difficult to settle in, requiring specialized craft and construction methods to exploit.
  • Floodplain: A particular type of wetlands fed by the seasonal flooding of nearby lakes or rivers, foundational to pre-industrial (and much modern) human agriculture. Silt and clay carried down by their water sources often make them extraordinarily fertile and easy to cultivate, though erosion and sedimentation act in tandem to continuously reshape coastlines absent human management.
  • Deep Ocean: Deep waters away from the continental shelf, specialized floating or submerged settlements sometimes make these viable places for long-term settlement. More often however, the open sea is ignored in favor of easier-to-settle planetary landmass.

Biome

  • Aquatic: An ecosystem defined by water-breathing organisms. Surface-based photosynthetic waterborne plants like seaweeds and algae typically act as a locus for filter-feeder organisms which then feed up the ecosystem through predation, while the churn of organic debris creates a variety of additional niches such as scavengers, bottomfeeders, etc. Terrestrial organisms (birds, mammals, etc) in aquatic environments tend to be predators.
  • Reef: Primarily coastal ecosystems defined by an assortment of large higher life forms providing shelter to smaller species for commensal benefits. The larger organisms (corals, anemone, seaweeds) have robust defenses that prevent even large predators from encroaching in the reef ecosystem, allowing for a large and varied ecosystem. Amphibious and even land-based organisms often find niches in reef environments.
  • Abyssal: Lightless and fed by the descent of organic debris towards their depths, these environs are defined by sharply limited sources of energy. Without photosynthesis, most higher life is predatory or scavenging. Extremophile plants thrive around geothermal vents. Bioluminescence is common both as a lure and for aposematic defense.
  • Forest: An area primarily covered in a vast number of large plants. Forests are controlled and regulated by their host species, with herbivores devouring saplings but spreading seeds, and predators curbing herbivore populations to allow new plants to grow at-replacement rates. Local plant species like trees are often a valuable source of renewable construction materials.
  • Fungal: Neither plant nor animal, fungi are mostly known on Earth for their sometimes edible, sometimes toxic fruiting bodies. Fungal ecosystems on exoplanets are mostly tangles of ever-expanding mycelial networks, slime molds and motile jellies, not so much mushroom forests as tropical rainforests without the trees, a sprawl of reactive vines.
  • Grassland: An area dominated by relatively short plant life such as grass. May include meadow, savana, moorland or steppe. These ecosystems are diverse but generally favor social herbivores.
  • Tundra: An area of extreme conditions that includes large pockets of life, including megafauna, hardy lichens etc.
  • Desert: An ecosystem defined by low rainfalls, sandy, rocky or hard shrubland shrubland terrain. Local fauna and flora are adapted to low moisture and extremes of temperature across the day/night cycle.
  • Superorganism: Supermassive lifeforms blanketing the underlying geography. It may have the traits of plants, animals, fungi or other orders of life but ultimately forms a ‘crust’ or ‘network’ of tremendous scale.
  • Primordial: Simple life in the early stages of eukaryotic evolution, such as plankton, amoeba, early arthropods, etc.

Biome Density

  • Barren: A place where extant life is sparse and sharply limited, often dying worlds that have begun to lose the qualities that initially allowed life to flourish on them or the sites of WMD strikes on otherwise-habitable worlds.
  • Sparse: A place where life is still in the process of conquering the planetary regolith. Earth in the Triassic period or modern-day Iceland are examples.
  • Standard: Similar carrying capacity to Earth.
  • Lush: The local ecosystem is abundant, to excess. Stagnant water fills with disease-bearing pests, trees grow tens of meters thick and hundreds tall in a matter of years and teem fist-sized clumps of pollen, hosts of birds and insects. While this is useful for agricultural and biotech purposes, aggressive landscaping is necessary to keep buildings from being overgrown.
  • Overflowing: Life here is voracious and constantly quick-growing, overtaking structures in weeks and days. Landscaping often requires chemical defoliants, fire or other exceptional means to control the encroaching of nature into the built environment.

Biome Variations

  • Biocompatible: Either as a consequence of terraforming, selective alteration of local species or pure chance, the local ecosystem is completely compatible with human life.
  • Predatory: Human beings are not always at the top of the food chain here, but subject to a number of threats from native wildlife.
  • Inimical: Biochemistries based on methane, sulfur, silicon or other substances. Such ecosystems have fascinating industrial and biochemical applications but are basically useless (if not outright hostile) to ordinary human habitation.
  • Mutagenic [Rare]: A dangerous ecosystem with elements that can alter the physical or mental characteristics of a human being. Mutagenic biomes sometimes arise as a consequence of ‘forbidden’ weapons used in the chaos of the Disconnect.
  • Gaia [Rare]: Paradise, if such a place were real. Local animals are not simply friendly but actively helpful to human beings, nearly all plants are edible and produce in abundance, with a variety of beneficial biomedical benefits from prokaryotic life in the water, airborne pollen, etc.

Ruins [Rare]

  • Human Ruins, Golden Age: Although post-Disconnect humanity has mostly surpassed their forebears, earlier humanity had a greater courage towards attempting massive high-energy particle field experiments and certain other technologies now deemed taboo.
  • Human Ruins, Disconnect Era: The reasons for these ruins are myriad. Specialized colonies that failed to become self-sufficient when their shipments from Earth often simply withered on the vine, and failed power grabs by colonial militaries sometimes caused civil wars that were ultimately destructive.
  • Human Ruins, Failed Wildcat Colony: Although the average wildcat colony might be a little more than a few prefabs, a grounded freighter and a mess of warrens, truly successful boomtowns (often built over older Golden Age or Alien ruins) can become truly impressive displays of unplanned urban sprawl. When resources dry up, the residents move on leaving these impressively haunting displays of human avarice.
  • Alien Ruins, Primitive: The remains of stone, timber and early glass and steel structures built by tool-using aliens, though their original inhabitants have long gone. Mostly a cultural curiosity to human colonists, they mostly provide shelter from the weather and visual cover from overhead surveillance.
  • Alien Ruins, Advanced: The leftovers of a technic, spacefaring race roughly comparable to humanity’s capabilities. A place of significant scientific and cultural interest.
  • Alien Ruins, Precursor: The remnants of an ancient, technologically advanced species whose achievements might be seen to have surpassed humanity’s before their departure from local space or decline into galactic night. These ruins are truly challenging puzzles for enterprising minds, with secrets of untold power ripe for the taking.

Locals [Rare]

  • Wildcat Colonists: Unaffiliated colonists who’ve struck out beyond colonized space and made lives for themselves on the frontier. A lucky few might incorporate or found nations of their own, but most suffer the jackboot of would-be explorers keen to be the truly first to discover a valuable planet.
  • UN Outpost: A self-sufficient observation post or bolthole, these were typically staffed by a few hundred brave souls from the Disconnect era who maintained their numbers through a mix of cryosleep, cloning and the occasional child. These facilities were typically meant to observe places of interest, service fuel scoops for passing exploration fleets and carry a cache of technical data that might some day reestablish interstellar society should the damage caused by van Graff’s conquest of Sol be truly irreparable. On habitable worlds they often overgrew their bases and built their own societies.
  • Independant Enclave: A minor state with modern technology, which has evaded contact interstellar society by their own ignorance or deliberate guile. Client State-sized and initially friendly.
  • Human Technobarbarians: A minor state with modern technology, which has seen the total breakdown of any pre-Disconnect social mores. Their cultures are anachronistic melanges of advanced technology and warrior mythology, with hierarchies based on the militaries they once were or might-makes-right. Popular sources for mercenaries.
  • Primitive Aliens, Paleolithic: Tool-using sapients who have not yet mastered the use of metals.
  • Primitive Aliens, Preindustrial: Tool-using sapients who have not yet mastered the use of the internal combustion engine.
  • Primitive Aliens, Industrial: Tool-using sapients who have not yet mastered spaceflight.
  • Primitive Aliens, Technobarbarians: As with human technobarbarians. More rarely, these are actually naturally physically superior specimens on planets with exotic biochemistries that make their apparently inferior weapons deadly to conventional forces such as recurve bows with multi-ton draw weights, or spears tipped with crystals that somehow hold a monomolecular edge. If the language barrier can be overcome, such individuals make superb mercenaries.
  • Primitive Aliens, Nightmares: Chittering masses of elastic, regenerating flesh, razor sharp talons, bulletproof chitin, acidic blood, etc. Rarely sapient, such creatures are sometimes used as terror weapons by those who view the regular deaths of their handlers as an acceptable cost.
  • Peer Alien Outpost: An outpost belonging to a peer alien race, existing for the purposes of trade, observing stellar phenomenon or any number of other reasons. The locals may be friendly but unlikely to diverge from their duties.
  • Peer Alien Settlement: Alien settlements are not dissimilar from the average human colony or wildcat settlement, with prefabricated units and shipborne infrastructure gradually replaced by permanent structures as the locals acclimate and develop the land. As the aliens are there to live in the long term, they’re likely to be amenable to trade and hope to develop good relations with any powers they understand to be nearby.
  • Peer Alien Visitation: A site of regular alien passage, using the planet to resupply or for more unusual purposes like hunting rituals, acquiring slaves or marooning political exiles.
  • Technolife, Human-derived: Technic structures or motiles of human origin but governed by artificial intelligences. Ranging from feral terraforming robots to “last laugh” hunter-killer machines set loose at the end of a war, or even families of rogue androids on the run.
  • Technolife, Alien-derived: Similar to human-derived, though their perspectives are often even less comprehensible to human beings.

Space

The generation of star systems is covered under its own section. Space-based territories and megastructures are listed here for reference purposes, as they function identically to their planetary equivalents in many ways.

Orbital

  • Moon: Objects large enough to become permanent satellites in orbit around a planet, most are rocky dwarf planets or asteroids. Habitable moons are rare and often the result of dedicated terraforming Earth-sized supermoons in the orbits of gas giant. Unlike planets, Moons sometimes have limited territorial capacity, represented as 'Moon [X]'.
  • Rings: Formed from the debris generated by gravitational capture of planetary candidates and other space objects, rings are beautiful and often contain valuable resources like ice or ores. The presence of rings unfortunately preclude orbital elevators, though other forms of orbital infrastructure can be built in the channels created by shepherd moons in the ring system.
  • Dust Cloud: Orbital dust and debris are unfortunately most often the product of Kessler Syndrome, though these can also occur naturally around young planets in the process of ring formation. Ideal hunting grounds for stealth vessels.
  • Gas Cloud: Dense deposits of atmospheric or exotic gasses in the near-orbit can be the result of an early stage of planetary formation, atmospheric stripping caused by disruption to the magnetosphere or gravity or the energetic consequences of comet capture. Occasionally dense enough to harvest at industrially significant, they mainly present a navigational hazard, eye candy for colonists and place for pirates to hide orbital caches.
  • Orbital Lifeforms [Rare]: Spaceborne lifeforms, typically docile grazers attracted by mineral or volatile deposits in the orbit or planetary uplands, drifting sargassos of extremophile plantids with ecosystems nested in their tangled branches or clusters of feral biomachinery left behind by past visitors. Gravity can coalesce enough of these organisms to provide anchorage to long-term habitation (treat as a life-bearing Moon).

Deep System

  • Asteroid: Floating rocks, typically ferry-silicate though compositions can vary greatly. Hollowed out, they make a great foundation for spacenoid settlement and orbital fortifications, and can towed into desirable orbits. The artificial environments in them are usually spartan but temperate, though some enterprising colonists use the opportunity afforded by hollowing an asteroid out to create zero-G paradises with tropical microclimates. Asteroid gravity caps out at Low normally and Standard/Heavy via spingrav segments. Unlike planets, Asteroids sometimes have limited territorial capacity between 1 and 3, set on discovery, represented as Asteroid [X].
  • Dwarf Planet: Large rocky bodies in (frequently irregular) Solar orbits. Same rules as a Moon.
  • Comet: An Oort object with a highly irregular orbit, comets are occasionally used for secret facilities or research laboratories, using their ice cladding to bury the thermals and EM from facility power systems. Occasionally they play host to temporary wildcat settlements, with locals cracking the objects for ice and other volatiles. Functionally an Asteroid with a multi-year trajectory through the system and some concealment against long-range observation.
  • Spaceborne Lifeforms [Rare]: Deep space organisms tend to be even less comprehensible than orbital life and are usually the result of deliberate engineering by alien species in the distant past.

Megastructures [Trait Locked]

  • Orbital Platforms: Smaller than habitats, these represent any one-off space labs, maintenance satellites or orbital outposts built to show the flag over a claim. Cheap, but has a 1-territory capacity and cannot hold more than 1 level of Infrastructure.
  • Orbital Array: On advanced planets with dense atmospheres and a lack of cheap hydrocarbons, a relatively common solution to energy shortages was the construction of these enormous low-density orbital structures, featuring solar collection arrays and limited facilities to maintain them. Often connected to the planetary surface via beanstalks, these structures have become less common due to the stigma caused by catastrophic Disconnect-era 'cablefalls' and successful miniaturization of industrial fusion reactors.
  • Space Elevator: Until the advent of cheap civilian fusion drives, space elevators were one of the enduring symbols of the interstellar human Golden Age. Powered by solar arrays at the end of the tether, these long, thin megastructures were cheaper and more efficient than reusable boosters and safer than surface-to-orbit launch railguns. It takes 5 space elevator segments to reach the orbit normally, 3 with None/Low Gravity and 7 with Hellish.
  • Habitats: Until the discovery of FTL travel, futurists increasingly imagined a built environment would function as a stopgap to overpopulation until Mars, Venus and the Jovian moons could be terraformed to livable status. A majority of these structures are still found around Sol and a handful of valuable systems on major tradelanes. Habitats come in a variety of shapes and sizes, with their own particular rules, but are functionally artificial planets with all that entails. As with Asteroids, their Gravity is limited to Standard or Heavy.
  • Space Hulk: FTL anomalies, gravitational attraction and deliberate malice result in these aggregated tangles of asteroids, space stations and lost space ships coming together. Like a habitat, except every single 'territory' can have completely different climate, gravity, occupants, etc.

Nation Traits

Interactions with Other Systems

Ship Combat

Ground Combat

Espionage

Economy

Exploration