Broken Orb

Timeline

• 2200s: First generation FTL drives developed, allowing humanity to depart an Earth that was in the midst of great social shocks from various transhuman technologies.
• 2300s: 'Diamond Age of Posthumanity' under the Overculture. Individual Earther states steadily subsumed into a single pan-human government.
• 2500s: Planet-to-planet 'world gate' generation feasible. Large-scale interstellar expansion, colonization and commerce now possible. The Great Greening begins. Posthuman-led human government(s) begin various long-term megaprojects.
• 3500-????: Progressive retreat into virtuality and insularity. Great Forgetting. 'Dark Age of Posthumanity'. Hider culture flourishes.
• ????: Post-Overculture legendarium of the Prime Folk, the Red-Eyes, the Greaters and the Solid Knights. 'Technomythic Age of Posthumanity'.
• ????: Flowering of the Exulter Hyporia out of Hider culture.
• ????: The Overturn and the Crash. Exulter Hyporia collapses into ReHiders, F+ Exultants and xFolk. Existing outside of the old Core Worlds they later become the people of the Periphery.
• ????: Deleted Age (second dark age). Darkstalkers and Phages abound.
• 4600s: Multiple locations begin downloading individuals into (near-)baseline bodies on various habitable worlds; The Reboot. These people become known as Revenants. All sorts of strange retropolities and new states are created by people awakening from what they dimly recall as the Upload Dreamtime.
• 4750: The Star League is formed; its capital is a now greened Mars. Within half a century it has become a supergovernment for almost all Rebooted worlds which assume the collective identity as the Inner Sphere.
• 4900s: Periphery Wars; a series of wars between various forces operating under the SLDF banner and various threats encroaching on the bubble of rebooted worlds that make up the Inner Sphere.
• 4987: The Usurpation; the Amaris Plot seizes control of the SLDF central command in Tharsis City and a multisided conflict erupts.
• 4992: Civil War ends with the Star League broken and no agreement existing on how to reconstitute it.
• 5003: New Year's Offensive. Broken Age begins.
• 5030: Current day. Low-intensity conflict both within and without the Inner Sphere continues to rage as it has for a generation.

Concepts

The concepts below are intended to give two independent - but interdependent - methods of moving stuff around. They are specifically designed to avoid the 'Pacific Island Syndrome' of Battletech while still having a great deal of options for the classic 'go somewhere with a dropship and blow it up'.

World gates

Planets can be connected to other planets via world gates.

• World gates have effectively unlimited transit capacity, equivalent to several railways tracks in parallel at the minimum.
• Gates aren't be physicall too close to each other due to technobabble resonance, so on-planet transit is a time sink.
• Translation shear between moving astronomic bodies results in a limit of how many different places a given WorldNet connects to safely (working number: 6)
• Exceeding the safe limit will start to result in greatly increased stability and power issues as the worldgates are stabilized via brute force. Going too high could result in collapse or even chain collapse.
• Action economy can play into this (spend an action to stabilize additional WorldNet nodes, etc)

Successor States are generally built around a single WorldNet which gives them interior lines of communication and economy. Temporary generators to tie into an existing WorldNet can be shipped via Dropship to create beachheads - or evacuation corridors.

Spaceships!

They come in four broad types:

• Combat Dropships - Small, low endurance pew pew ships based either on planets or off spaceships.
• Smallships - Jump-capable warships, essentially self-deploying combat dropships.
• Cruisers - long-endurance ships with dropship collars, cargo, etc. A typical Periphery adventure ship
• Battleships - FTL-capable mountains of armor and PPCs, capable of much pew pew but clumsy to operate over long distances.