New Mercia

Kingdom of New Mercia
System Info
World Name: New Mercia Map ID: R 19 Surface Gravity: 9.96 m/s2 Climate: Frozen Atmosphere: Oxygen-Nitrogen
Population: Population Breakdown: Capital: Landing Type of Power: ZOCU
Infrastructure
Wealth: 550 + 165 PIP: 900 + 165 CIP: 700 + 165 Delta Dust: 650 Theta Dust: 100 Military: 37,500

Sphere 2

Paths

Exp-1): Terraformable World

Exp-4): Artifact Rush (+100 CIP, +50 Wealth, +100 Dust, +30 Pop)

Exp-6): Extensive (+250 Dust, -50 PIP)

Exp-7): None (+60 Pop, +100 Wealth)

Exp-8): Datacore (+150 Applications, +1 Global Techlevel)

Exp-9): Routed (+10 SP)

Col-1): EU Arm (+5,000 military, +100 CIP, +100 PIP, +100 Dust)

Col-3): Outer Expanse (+120 Pop, +150 PIP, +100 CIP, +100 Wealth, +10 SP, +10 Transgene)

Col-3B): Headcount Increase Exercise (+60 Pop)

Col-3C): Primarily Primary Industry (+300 PIP, +200 Wealth, +120 Pop)

Col-3D): Stayed Home (+60 Pop, +100 CIP, +100 Wealth)

Col-7A): Warfare! (+2,500 military)

Col-7C): Full Scale War (+5,000 military, +Doctrines)

Break-1): Industrial Progression (+100 CIP, -100 PIP)

Break-3): Cut Off

Break-3C): Stand Alone Complex (+100 PIP, +100 CIP, +100 Wealth, +4 Logistics, +10,000 Military)

War-1): ZOCU Solidarity! (+7,500 Military, +100 Wealth, +200 Dust, +100 Theta)

War-6A): Never Forget (+100 PIP, +2,500 military, +Logistics, +Doctrines)

War-6B): Postwar Depression (+Logistics, +2,500 Military, +100 CIP, +200 PIP, -200 Wealth)

War-6C): Fight in the Jungle Near-Forests (++Morale, ++Ground Doctrines, ++Ground Application, -60 Pop)

Cur-1): Space Monarchy (+2,500 Military, +100 PIP, +20 Transgene, +1SP)

Population: +330
PIP: +900
CIP: +700
Wealth: +550
Delta Dust: +650
Theta Dust: +100
Applications: +150
Military: +37,500
Logistics:+6
Global Techlevel: +1
Morale: ++
Doctrines: ++
Ground Doctrines: ++
Ground Application: ++
Transgenics: +30
SP: +21

Tech Indexes

Global Technology Level: 19

General Information

New Mercia is one of several moons of the gas giant Deria in the Mintaka system. It is well known as a source of delta dust, owing to significant precursor deposits all over the planet, and for an extremely erratic climate with variations from extreme cold to tropical heat owing to the elliptical orbit of Deria and the tidally locked nature of New Mercia and it's planet. More recently a civil war, running concurrently with the larger ZOCU war, has made New Mercia infamous for extremely high civilian and military casualties, use of WMDs (particularly what has become known as the Mercian Zombie Plague), political extremism and disastrous overreaction.

Politically, the moon is divided between the Kingdom of New Mercia, the government that arose from the original UN/EU chartered colony, and the Federal Republic of Albion, the breakaway polity that is the result of the New Mercian Civil War. The Kingdom is a ZOCU member state, while the FRA is an EU affiliate. Also present is an ARROWs peacekeeping force, intended to enforce compliance with the ceasefire that brought an end to the Civil War. As both sides are well supplied with advanced weapons and the UN force small and under-equipped in comparison, the effectiveness of this attempt is low; raids by both sides are commonplace, although the forbidding mountain chains that for the boundary between the two polities make any large scale attempt at military action difficult and the well developed aerospace defence infrastructure of both nations makes leapfrogging their natural boundaries difficult, at best.

Geography

Arcologies

Landing Arcology
New Anglia Arcology
Highfoss Arcology
Tamwold Arcology
Whelworth Arcology
Windermere Arcology

History

Early History

New Mercia is one of the youngest colonies in the expanse, settled at the tail end of the last gasp of the EU's colonial expansion policy. Initially, the moon that would become New Mercia was passed over for colonisation due to it's extreme and variable climate; the gas giant Deria has an elliptic orbit, with two summers and two winters per year at perihelion and apehelion respectively.

While New Mercia is tidally locked to Deria, and thus warmed by infra red radiation from the gas giant, less than a third of the ice-free land area is directly exposed. Known now as 'planetside,' this is an area of permanent tundra and taiga throughout the year with minor shifts in climactic conditions depending on the season, excluding the massive storms that occur throught the equatorial areas of the entire moon in the summer. The rest of the plant shows an extreme variance in weather patterns depending on the season; in the warmer months, large areas of land - most notably the Fuller Plateau - are almost tropical in termperature and experiance massive rainfall. In the winter, the majority of these areas freeze solid, leading to the creation of 'ice jungles' and other unique features as the local flora freezes and enters a hibernation phase. As a result of Deria's orbit, a single planetary year is almost 28 Earth years in length. Without altering the orbit of Deria itself, something not fesable, terraforming would have been impossible.

Nevertheless, in the late 2080s, interest in settling the moon grew as speculative mineral surveys has revealed a geologically rich world ripe for exploitation. A colony expedition was assembled and dispatched, but the nature of the original colonists would emerge as a permanent problem and the source of much of the trouble that followed over the next century. At the time, it was obivous that the colonisation drive was starting to lose steam if one knew where to look. As a result, many of those who wished to escape the grasp of the EU were joining any expedition they could find a place on. As a result, the expedition was considerably larger than expected, and the majority of the original colonists were leaving Earth specifically to escape the authority of the EU.

At the time, this was not a large problem; the business of setting up a colony occupied the attention of all the settlers. The wild climate and weather of New Mercia had been well plotted before the colony left Earth, and many architects and designers had taken the opportunity to put their own pet theories and ideas as to how cities and colonies should be built into practice. The result was eventually a world of scattered arcologies linked with high speed maglev lines, but in the early years of the colony, the majority of the population lived inside prefab undergound shelters that had been prepared by automated drones despatched beforehand.

The discovery of delta dust deposits was initially not of great import; many worlds possessed some seams of the precoursor nanocomputers. As more and more was discovered, however, it was clear that there were major deposits on New Mercia, and this was compounded by te discovery of a working posthuman data core in an otherwise dead spire. Interstellar companies and government agencies descended on the moon in droves, and the result was ultimately catastophic.

EU Administrative Period

Although theoretically the EU had always been the legal authority on the colony, they had been content to allow New Mercia to be relatively autonomous - the Colonial Assembly effectively appointed the Governor through 'reccomendations' to the EU, native concerns were mostly responsible for expanding resource exploitation and most Transtellars were involved as partners to local firms rather than in their own right. When the large corporations moved in proper after the dust find, they rapidly diversified their operations into more mundane mineral extraction and quite apart from denying local industries access to the new resource, actually drove many of them out of business. At the same time, the EU, having decided that such an important resource base required more scrutiny, began asserting it's legal authorities more strongly. The colonial Assembly was greatly reduced in power, and the Governor position filled with men and women more suited to creating a favourable environment for businesses, and less willing to listen to the requests of the colonists themselves.

As a result, New Mercians saw little benefit from the dust discovery, and many of them were actually worse off as the 'natural' local economy was crushed beneath the EU and it's corporate juggernaughts. The outcome was a vicious guerilla war, as the impoverished, disaffected and radical, finding that doing things the 'right way' simply resulted in them being ignored, decided to take matters into their own hands. Despite the enthusiasm of the 'freedom fighters,' they lacked skill and modern weapons. While the conflict was loud, very visible and attention grabbing, it was contained with relatively few troops, and public order was never threatened, despite the private sympathies many New Mercians held with the revolters.

Then came the Breakdown.

Fiction

Voodoo Patrol