Tartarus Sector

The Tartarus Sector is anchored by Tartarus itself, the closest black hole to Old Sol. Lacking a large companion star to give it plenty of gas and an accretion disk, Tartarus was not discovered until the FTL era. Instead, Tartarus is instead surrounded by the burnt, irradiated wreckage of a former star system and a distant white dwarf companion. Tartarus is also the cause of the Great Well, a vast hyperspace distortion spanning a radius of some twenty light-years, something found to occur near other black holes. Crossing the Well is extremely hazardous, with one of the few passes being a navigational redirect though the Gate of Magnus, itself a large red giant similar to Arcturus.

Long a political backwater, the Tartarus Sector was steadily settled over most of a millenium and its population has long intermixed, leading to few or no recognizably distinctive ethnicities. The limits on FTL travel imposed by the Great Well has led to a certain insularity in the inhabitants of the Tartarus Sector, and Star Patrol memetics only strengthened this.

The Fall affected Tartarus like many others, sending technic civilization into a catastrophic tailspin. However, Tartarus was nearly unique in that the Hyperspace Gates inside the Well were not destroyed or rendered inoperative by the Nexus Collapse; the gates inside the Well could still be used for STL traffic. Interstellar travel was maintained, even as the various planetary lords began to draw their plans against one another.

Centuries later, the Tartarus Sector has seen few years of true peace. The states of the Tartarus Sector have maintained many things but fundamentally lost the ability to invent; even if they could have peace to put resources and talent towards ressurecting the technologies of star-spanning humanity it would take centuries. Instead they rely mostly on equipment that they maintain the ability to construct by rigorously following centuries-old instructions by rote, equipping levies with blast-fusils and electro-pikes and transporting them between planets via grav-planing starships.

Notes on Tartaran technology and equipment:

• Atomic theory is lost in the Tartarus Sector. Fusion power plants are built by rote, but atomic weapons and fusion rockets are all but unknown.
• Force field technology is common; mining operations in the Tartarus system itself and passage through the Gate of Magnus made energy fields unusually broadly used and the local production base has been scrupulously maintained. Most cities can be surrounded by a forcefield dome to protect against attacks from above.
• Tartatan ground forces consist mostly of infantry and (organic) cavalry. Soldiers are issued kinetic barrier wards, effectively obseleting gunpowder weapons lighter than field artillery. Instead, blast-fusils must be used; these short-ranged and slow-firing energy guns are unaffected by kinetic barriers. Other soldiers carry electro-pikes which can punch through kinetic barriers in melee. Cavalry will often carry a brace of blast-pistols, each charged with a single shot. Officers and assault specialists ('doppelsoldnats') will often carry full-spectrum energy fields to defend against blasters as well as guns.
• The Jezrail is a sophisticated electromotive weapon hand-crafted by archeogunsmiths. With flat trajectories and a punch that can even go through a kinetic barrier, the distinctive hypersonic crack of jezrails is the mark of snipers.
• Tartaran armies do possess mortarheads, locally called Behemoths. They are greatly degraded compared to Republican-patterned mortarheads; all but the absolute rarest Behemoths are no more than half the height of a typical mortarhead (6-10m in head height as opposed to 15-25m). Clumsy but powerful (by Tartaran standards, anyway), they share some vague antecedance to workmechs of the Star Patrol era. Behemoths are normally fitted with upscaled versions of infantry weapons, carrying blast-cannons for Behemoth combat, scatter-cannons for dealing with infantry and beam messers for either.
• Capital-scale weapons are almost beyond the ability of any Tartaran to construct. Decisive warship combat is effectively nonexistent; ground defense blast artillery can be powered by fixed generators and cooled with large tanks of water but few warships can carry more than one or two of these weapons meaning they are more likely to spar and disrupt the actions of the other as opposed to fighting to the death - force-bubble defense being much too powerful for that in all but the most unlucky circumstance. Weapons are intended more for ground support than void battle.
• Tartaran warships in fact show ancient heritage of being derived from Star Patrol-era merchant craft; designed for planetary landings or at least atmospheric work they serve more to move ground forces than engage hostile fleets. A few raider ships are fitted with salvaged FTL drives but most travel via the gate network.