AE Timeline

Overall Timeline

This is a collective timeline to put all the historic events together.
All dates are listed going in years before present (game start)
All dates are also taggered with the sector they are relevant to, or (General) if they are broad events. Dates with their tag in bold can be assumed to be of particular importance.

• 4500: Apocryphal founding of Atlantis
• 4450: Start of the Archaic Period
• 3900: Start of the Astroclassical Period
• 3600: Start of the Canon Period
• 3500: Probable actual founding of Atlantis
• 2600: Murian Dynasties founded
• 2300: Loss of Old Lyonesse into the Astra.
• 1950: Exalter Movement begins
• 1850: Start of the Revolutionary Period
• 1850: 1st Paradisium Entente established
• 1776: Freeman Empire established
• 1550: Carman War; the Hellesphere invasion of Lyonesse.
• 1850: Start of the Republican Period
• 1540: 2nd Paradisium Entente established
• 1400: Rutas Empire established
• 1261: Freeman Empire peacefully dissolved with remaining constituents joining other major polities.
• 1050: 3rd Paradisium Entente established
• 1000: (Verge) Union of Progressive Peoples established
• 0900: Generally considered the start of the Cataclysm Period.
• 0800: (Verge) Completion of the Compiler of Souls and initialization of the Futuresleep.
• 0750: (Verge) UPP collapses down to centralized worlds.
• 0728: (Mastery) Apocryphal founding date of the Mastery
• 0600: (Mastery) Aproximate age of oldest verified Mastery records
• 0650: Generally considered the end of the Cataclysm Period.
• 0550: (GENERAL) The Great Roar disrupts many surviving states.
• 0550: (Verge) The Overturn; the UPP's AI controllers are replaced by the New Men.
• 0500: (Verge) Self-assembling Compiler hardware begins to spread through the Verge.
• 0490: (Mastery) War of the Alliance
• 0440: (Verge) The UPP's War of Repudiation. The New Men are driven out and replaced by the Cylords. The UPP is effectively destroyed.
• 0280: (Mastery) Ramases Uprising
• 0260: (Mastery) Tyndall Missions Launched
• 0223: (Panhelios) Arrival of the Visitor into Enduspace, rebuilt as the SDF-1 Victoire.
• 0153: (Panhelios) The Enduscarae White Fleet breaks the back of the Barbarossans.
• 0150: (Verge) Mastery pushes the Cylords out of the Verge.
• 0123: (Panhelios) First Reflex War
• 0096: (Panhelios) Second Reflex War
• 0083: (Panhelios) Third Reflex War
• 0079: (Panhelios) Fourth Reflex War
• 0068: (Panhelios) The Origin Project
• 0051: (Mastery) Disappearance of the Masters
• 0048: (Panhelios) Fifth Reflex War
• 0045: (Mastery) Interim Conclave
• 0044: (Panhelios) Departure of the Enduscarae Expeditionary Force (EEF)
• 0036: (Panhelios) Murklim Incursion
• 0024: (Mastery) Call to Reform
• 0019: (Mastery) Start of Mastery civil war
• 0009: (Mastery) Arrival of EEF in Rubiconspace, start of the Mastery-EEF War
• 0006: (Panhelios) Sixth Reflex War
• 0005: (Mastery) Treaty of Vangor ends the Mastery-EEF War
• 0000: (GENERAL) Current Day

Periods

The Dawn Period

The oldest period in human history, this period marks the arrival of humans to known space from the lost urheimat of humanity, Earth. Taken from Earth by the Gods, humanity was slaves, servants and warriors for these powerful beings. An era shrouded in uncertainty and temporal distance, much of the history of this time is reconstructed from myths. Even the exact length continues to be in dispute, while humanity apocryphally serving the gods for a millennia is common in ancient documents there is archeological evidence of multiple arrivals over a span of several thousand years. In others there is clear evidence of significant habitation exceeding three thousand years culminating in a sophisticated 'temple economy' and nascent technic civilization.

The Archaic Period

While not having any large-scale revolts against divine authority (as would occur in later periods), the Archaic period was nonetheless marked by a creeping dissolution of the previously effectively absolute divine rule. Several innovations at the end of the Dawn period ushered in the Archaic period. Most notable among these were advances in both astronavigation and ether flight which allowed for the rapid spread of human colonies to dozens of previously uninhabited star systems and the development of trade routes of a hitherto-unseen level of complexity. Hand-in-hand with this went the expansion of godly authority across an increasing number of star systems though all in all, the Archaic period saw relatively limited godly intervention particularly in comparison to the periods both before and after. The Archaic period saw the decline and eventual near-extinction of the temple economy; this shift was part of the transition to the Astroclassical.

The Astroclassical Period

A short but tumultuous period, the Astroclassical lasted roughly three centuries and built upon much of what had defined the immediately preceeding Archaic period. Worlds that had been colonies centuries before were now becoming political centers in their own right and many new statelets came to be. An era of advancement was unleashed as both human philosophical investigation and advanced knowledge from the Draconic Empire were spread across dozens of worlds and a dozen times that in polities large and small. Inevitably - and quickly - these were turned to the arts of war and alongside the flourishing of thought, the Astroclassical was also a period of conflict. This period was also known for a particularly personal relationship between the Gods and their subjects. For this reason it is also poetically known as the Gods and Kings period. Ultimately however the gods moved away from these direct relations and took action to restore order. While (mostly) not resetting the clock, they did create various new hierarchies. While the dividing line between the Archaic and Astroclassical remains vague, the Astroclassical and the subsequent Canon period are starkly delineated.

Historical Topics

The Freeman Empire

Despite originating eighteen centuries in the past and having been dissolved only four centuries later, the Freeman Empire is one of, perhaps even the most influential polity in known space. For thousands of years humans were anything from inconsequential mortal slaves of the Gods and elder civilizations to scattered tribes and independent polises, some of significance. The Astroclassical was a heroic age of flourishing as humans and near-humans seized their destinies. But for all that, humans ultimately still existed because the Gods allowed it . . . and perished if the Gods demanded it. Even Atlantis, first of the Great Empires worshipped a pantheon of chthonic and ineffable deities who's delphic pronouncements were interpreted by mage-priests.
The Freeman Empire was something different. It, alongside the equally revolutionary state of (First) Paradisium, were to be the first truly atheist states. They answered to men, not gods. While the philosophical basis of this extended almost a thousand years back to the Delian League, the proximate cause of the Revolution was a number of seemingly senseless conflicts in the 20th and 19th centuries BPE where the Gods (or their agents) demanded all manner of tribute to conduct said conflicts. The loss of life in these wars and the associated impoverishment as wealth and resources were appropriated to feed the armies and fleets did much to stoke discontent and unrest. The latter half of the 19th century and into the 18th century BPE saw multiple uprisings, revolts and revolutionary movements.

The Freemen Battlemoons

One of the military-architectural wonders of ages past, the Freemen Battlemoons were enduring symbols of free humanity for centuries. Each one was a unique generational work by hundreds of thousands of workers and built to far outlast their crews. They were one of the greatest feats of industry ever performed by men, with their vast construction crews mobilized in the fervor surrounding the Glorious Revolution. Ineffient even for their period, warcraft of such excessive - literally mountainous - size were nonethless simply the only way of battling some of the powerful higher servants of the Gods.

While each battlemoon was unique, an inevitable result of their sheer size and disparate construction, almost all were built to one of two common plans. The first and most common was the classic sphere design, which had the massive engineering spaces filling the equatorial decks with the lower ("southern") polar decks dedicated to bulk storage, foundries and other support equipment and the upper ("northern") polar decks where the various living quarters, work spaces and associated facilities were located. Well over half of all battlemoons were of the sphere plan and the popular image of battlemoons is that of a giant armored sphere. The second common plan, making up roughly a quarter of all battlemoons was the disc design, taking the form of a fat disc or broad cylinder. These had the central furnaces and force drive generators in the middle with a torus of habitation, storage et all decks on the outside. A few other craft of more idiosyncratic design were constructed over the centuries, though none were considered particularly successful. In all cases the internal volume of battlemoons was dominated by their immense engineering spaces; anywhere from two-third to three-quarters of a battlemoon's internal volume was taken up by the immense motive systems needed simply to make them move and fight.

The earliest battlemoons use a diversity of power systems; the challenges of powering a warship the size of a small asteroid were manifold and many approaches were tried. The earliest were astral taps, crude attempts to mimic the power of the godforged. While certainly capable of providing the requisite energy supply, events such as the Contagion of Ruer led to the abandonment of this. Many of the subsequent generation had immense engine halls with tens of thousands of cross-coupled thermal engines while others, somewhat more successfully but more difficult to construct, featured immense core dynamos. Later craft of superior technological provenance eventually mostly standardized on the massive Oklo-pattern nucleo-thermal generators. Fueled with uncountable tons of radioisotopes, these were passive breeder reactors that 'burned' almost anything radioative fed to them. Brutalist in design, they had centuries of core life in them and made up for low or unenriched fuel and unoptimized design with sheer mass. The Oklo-I models were relatively conventional reactors with mechanical neutron moderation elements, with the Oklo-II models instead going to passive stability with inserted neutron activation and geode reaction boost. The latter in particular had unprecedented operational lifespan as they progressively burned entire reaction chains of transuranics, fat design margins giving them core life vastly beyond the ultimate operational lifespan of the battlemoons themselves. Even today a number of derelict Oklo-powered battlemoons are used to generate thermal power by travellers brave enough to risk the radiation flux and poisonous heavy metals filling their mile-wide cores.

Even leaving the challenges of powering them, simply constructing such immense ships was a challenge, one that was only achieved by feat of pervasive industrial mobilization. Unsurprisingly such a large ship could not be built on a planet; ultimately most battlemoons were constructed in the open-sky graving yards of Gran Bristel. This free-space airsphere became a massive center of industry with centuries of chemical smelting, metal forging and polluting contaminants turning the blueish cloud a dirty yellow. Eventually the massive geoforges and titanic blast furnaces were progressively decommissioned and centuries after the Glorious Revolution Gran Bristel had become a shadow of its former self, ninety-five percent of its billion workers long since departed and the remainder mostly those unable to leave. Even today, fifteen centuries since its heights, Gran Bristel remains a polluted hellhole mostly inhabited by bizarre toxin-adapted life - in fact, the mass of free-floating slag and grunge has led to a fundamental change in the local biosphere.

On top of their mountainous engines, battlemoons were fitted with immense arsenals of capital-scale weaponry to execute their mission as warships. The most common format was a pair of gun decks, one ringing the dorsal cap of the engineering section and the other the ventral cap. Each was normally home to fifty or more cannon turrets often of the exact same design as those fitted to Freeman battleships. Of course the sheer size of a battlemoon dwarfed these weapons and against an armored metal sphere four kilometers across they looked to be nothing more than small-caliber anti-air mounts. While the circular arrangement meant that only some of the total arsenal could bear on any single target, this was still enough to overwhelm any hostile warship with weight of fire. Behind and superimposed above these batteries were various fire-control towers and smaller secondary turrets and it was common for a handful of oversized cannons to be mounted for even greater punch. Actual anti-air weapons were rarely fitted in great numbers as battlemoons had power to spare for lethal lightning fields.

The most powerful weapon on battlemoons was nothing so mundane as an 80cm railcannon or a coherent blast beam though. As warships meant to fight the high servants of the gods - if not the gods themselves - almost all battlemoons were built with a massive fixed energy emitter fed directly by the primary engine core. These weapons, popularly known simply as 'main guns' or often 'doomsday devices', had the effect of a directed nuclear blast. Such was their power that they were considered no different from other strategic weapons and required direct authorization from the Freeman High Senate to be armed.

Ultimately however it was not the fires of the battlefield that spelled the end for the Freeman battlemoons, but entropy and time. Mostly built in a century-long period during and after the Glorious Revolution, the size and complexity of a battlemoon meant that refitting one with improved components was often a task on the scale of their original construction. While external fittings such as radars and gun turrets could and were replaced over the centuries leading to most of the late period battlemoons having a crust of generationally distant technology over what was a fundamentally obsolete core, the engineering equipment itself impossible to be replaced. From the outset the oversized components were built with excessive margins for extended lifespan but they were hardly self-repairing. Worse yet was when internal damage was suffered. Little could actually disable a battlemoon but after centuries of service many battlemoons had entire sectors welded shut and cordoned off. Even a core meltdown was not immediately fatal and more than one battlemoon operated for decades with more than one reactor cluster having slagged itself into a lake of corium. One by one the battlemoons were decomissioned, these massive and by then ancient warships stripped of tactical hardware and slowly scrapped. A few were even stripped and abandoned in place after suffering comprehensive engine or power failures, far too large to be towed anyplace.

A bare handful of battlemoons were constructed towards the end of the Freeman Empire and with centuries of technical improvement baked in they were vastly more powerful than their original generation counterparts. These served Freeman successor states and it is believed that all were lost during Ragnarok.