Setting

Important Setting notes

About the year

The year in which the game is set is around 2800-3000. Due to complications with the interstellar gates, time anomalies occurred when they were reactivated. For some colonies, much more time has passed than for others, leading to different systems being in different times as well. Generally this means you can either start the game between 2800AD and 3000AD.

Extrasolar colonies

The extrasolar colonies were diverse and hugely varied. The posthumans sponsored the majority, directing them to suitable systems, providing t-gates and assembler gates for the nascent colonies and for some, providing an entire colonial infrastructure such as providing the entire space habitat, usually due to exotic circumstances.

The PCs will be from one of these extrasolar colonies and have wide latitudes in their background.

Moving from A to B

While Heaven's Reach is intended to use realistic or plausible technology for most things there is no need to calculate thrust or travel times.

Intra-System Travel
This is assumed to be conducted via w-gates, the wormhole gates that instantaneously link different parts of a solar system. Thus travel between planets can be conducted in a matter of hours to days. Without using these, travel between major bodies in a solar system is assumed to take 1-2 weeks using a nuclear torch or a matter of days with a posthuman drive technology.

Inter-system Travel
This is done via the large interstellar gates, these are normally in orbit of major planets, there is no transit time other than that spent clearing customs and navigating through the gate.

Hyperlane Network Unlike the Reconnect Network, a Hyperlane Network T-Gate offers transport to any other T-Gate in it's Network, the systems that contain these profit from the economic and military benefits such fast and flexible transport allows, but also place themselves at risk from the porous nature of such connections.

Technology

Technology in Heaven's Wake is near future, most things that exist now would be on the lower end of the tech scale but considerably more developed, chemical slugthrowers, cybernetics, touchscreens, advanced nuclear reactors while the higher end is fusion plants, advanced railguns, power armour, more advanced cybernetics and gene alteration technology.

Apex Technology

Apex technology is the pinnacle of post-human advancement, highly prized devices of technological complexity, they generally include technology that violates traditional physics, including teleportation technology, reactionless drives and causality violating devices.

T-Gate:

A Transporter Gate consists of two hexagons of diamonoid joined by a single spur. There are two main types.

W-Gate: Linked in pairs, these generate wormholes which allow instantaneous travel regardless of distance. They are common enough that most major bodies in any inhabited star-system will have at least one.

I-Gate: They allow interstellar travel by deconstructing outbound matter, transmitting it as data through micro-wormholes and reconstructing inbound matter. Unlike W-Gates they are not linked in pairs and have have multiple destinations. Multiple users with different outbound destinations can use the gate simultaneously. It should be noted that I-Gates will counter any attempt to place static defences in their vicinity.

A-Gate:

An Assembler gate is a hexagonal structure with an outer enclosure of diamondoid and a unknown internal makeup. The largest ones are several hundred meters across, whilst the smallest is as little as half a meter. When taken into a gravity well they will generally float above the surface either vertically or horizontally. Assembler gates were responsible for the construction of materials, from individuals to weapons of war. They have self-contained energy systems of an unknown design and are capable of operating without material input. Most known Assembler gates are heavily corrupted, producing half functioning devices or lacking complete libraries. Efforts to reverse this form a major component of posthuman research.

Datacrystals: Fortunately for humanity, posthumans stored much of their data on system’s compatible with inferior systems in the interests of simplifying trade. While the A and T-Gates themselves are unfathomably advanced, they have secondary storage devices known as datacrystals, easily read by most polities then and today. Finding datacrystals is an important pursuit.