The Powers That Be (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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synodiporia_ooc2016-01-05 10:23 pm
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2016-01-05 10:23 pm
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ESCAPE FROM JUNKWORLD: JAUNT INFO.
Welcome to the Junkworld of Gehenna: a radioactive cinder twice the size of Earth, used as a rubbish heap and ship graveyard for centuries by cultures across the cosmos, guarded by automated gunstations (left by cultures from across the cosmos), and with its only native inhabitants being Leaping Fireworms who feed on metals and thrive in heavy-gravity environments. Occasionally used as a penal colony as well, but really a death sentence - the only way people are sent to Gehenna is being placed in gutted ships in decaying, unguided re-entry orbits. Still, over the centuries, some have survived this process, and settlements have grown on the surface, giving the world a total population in the high hundreds or low thousands.
And now, the Tachyon Storm is coming. Nobody knows exactly what that means, but it’s bad.
You see, tachyons are particles that travel faster than light and back in time, and the slower they are, the more energy they have. And what few sensors on Gehenna work have started detecting increasing bursts of tachyon radiation, denser and denser, slower and slower moving. The best guess is that some incredible high-energy phenomenon is coming in the near future. No normal lightspeed shockwave can be seen before it hits - so by the time anyone knows what it is, it’ll be too late. And judging by the rate the tachyons are slowing down, it’s only a few weeks away.
The refugees, prisoners, scavengers, smugglers, and accidental colonists of Gehenna have a plan - or some of them do. Smuggler ships small enough to slip to the surface past the automated gun satellites are too small to travel faster than light, and they don’t have time to call for a ride. But the planet is all but covered in wrecks, hulks, derelicts, and crashes, and two large, durable vessels of dubious design are nearly intact. It’s just barely possible to put them together, strap on the smuggler vessels as armed outriders, and blast off for escape.
But as the source of the Tachyon Storm gets closer, things are getting weird. The laws of physics are bending or breaking entirely. The ships, barely understandable or able to be kept together as it is, are behaving in strange ways, and that strangeness is carrying over to the synthetics and cyborgs who interface with ship systems to operate them. And everyone on Junkworld Gehenna had an agenda or an axe to grind, anyway - trustworthy, safe, sane people don’t wind up banished to radioactive cinders, after all.
Ancient, unknown ships falling apart around them. The combined dark secrets, dubious pasts, and skeletons in the closet of a hundred different interstellar scofflaws. Even with an oncoming shockwave approaching at least as fast as light, the open question is still: what’s going to get around to killing them first?
TECHNOLOGY
Cybernetics: cybernetic implants come in two basic forms: prosthetics and enhancements. Prosthetics replace or improve regular body parts - a stronger prosthetic hand, or one with a built-in tool; a prosthetic eye that can see using infrared light or millimeter wave radar; a prosthetic liver or kidney providing poison immunity - these are all basic and accepted. Enhancement cybernetics, on the other hand, make cognitive changes, giving the brain new hardware and software, like the mathematical ability to calculate hyperspace jumps in one’s head, or to use the ship’s sensors as if they were human senses, or to implant knowledge. These cybernetics tend to alter behavior and personality in subtle ways, and so cyborgs of all types are viewed by the unenhanced with a degree of superstition, curiosity, and suspicion.
Gravity Manipulation: For high-speed spaceflight, it’s necessary to make it cheap and easy to get to orbit, to make down a consistent direction, and to buffer the effects of rapid acceleration. Every species with interstellar flight capabilities can do this with devices that manipulate gravitons, the way hyperlight drives manipulate tachyons (the two discoveries are easily linked, so any species who has one is likely to have the other). While gravity manipulation is cheap, it’s also easy to disrupt, so most ships have backup systems rather than trying fancy, advanced tricks like variable-direction or variable-strength gravity fields. However, in the heat of combat, when energy to systems and directions of acceleration change rapidly, there are often light fluctuations, or basic gravity may be turned off to focus power on acceleration compensation (it’s more important to keep you from being flattened and blacking out than it is to keep your feet on the deck). Exceptions do exist or can be created, and there are extremely short range gravity weapons - a gravity “lance” can intensify gravity, pulling things in like a tractor beam; change the direction of gravity, showing objects away like a deflector shield, or crush or pull apart matter with intense conflicting gravity fields in a small area. However, such systems are high-energy, unreliable, and unlikely to extend further than a hundred meters from their projector, and so rarely see use in space combat.
Hyperlight Drive: Hyperlight drives, for the most part, rely on tachyons, a particle which travels backwards in time and faster than light, and gets slower the more energy it possesses. This means, hypothetically, that superfast, teleportation-like travel would be possible - but it would short out any gravity manipulation system ever built to accelerate and decelerate that fast, and any crew would be reduced to a fine 2-dimensional paste in a pancake that used to be a ship (which would also destroy the systems that allow manipulating gravitons and tachyons, anyway). So in practice, hyperlight drives are limited to low acceleration rates far away from the interference of gravity - a ship uses sublight drives for approximately a week’s travel distance to or from a planet before engaging the drive, and then travels between 10-100 times the speed of light, depending on the vessel. This means that even the shortest voyages between star systems take weeks or months - like sea voyages in the age of sail.
Practically speaking, ships in hyperspace are completely undetectable, but also completely blind, because all sensory equipment except tachyon detectors relies on slower-than-light particle interactions. However, the arrival point of an incoming ship can hypothetically be detected for a short distance and time beforehand, if someone has a tachyon sensor on-hand (which is unlikely, given their size, and just how many you’d need to surround a star system in all directions).
Weapons Systems: There are a great many different weapons systems available, varying from one species to another, or even one ship to another. The two most common ranged weapons systems are railguns, which shoot super-dense bullets made of heavy metals (like depleted uranium) at high supersonic speeds through magnetic acceleration, and plasma weapons, which shoot superheated ionized matter, also at very high speeds. Lasers, microwave, and X-ray weapons are sometimes used, but function unreliably near gravity manipulation systems - although they’re also much faster and therefore far more likely to hit. ‘Tesla’ weapons send short-range electrical discharges, electrocuting people and scrambling mechanical systems, including synthetics and cybernetics.
Most handheld firearms are some variation of plasma or Tesla weapon, as those are least expensive, most lightweight, and work in a wide variety of situations. Reflective, laser-repellent mirror armor is only infrequently used, but its mere existence means that lasers are used less - especially inside a ship, where a high-energy weapon traveling at the speed of light can melt a hole through your hull real quick.
Melee weapons are often made of super-hard or super-dense materials, or have blades with molecule-wide edges. Personal-scale gravity weapons are a horrifying possibility, disrupting local ship’s gravity and striking with devastating force through armor and personal defenses - but power limitations keep the hand-held versions from reaching more than a few inches, so gravity generators are built into swords, maces, hammer, or axes. Electrified melee weapons are also widespread, as are weapons that discharge small bursts of plasma on contact, appearing to be momentarily wreathed in flame.
Cybernetic and synthetic warriors often use weapons baseline species cannot - short-range gravity guns that alter gravity fields for a brief period of timing, accelerating people backwards or forwards, up or down - so-called ‘telekinetic guns’ that require enhancements to use, as calibrating the correct amount and direction of force at a range of even a few meters takes dizzyingly complex mathematics.
Finally, Conditioned often use dual-state whipstaffs. A whipstaff consists of two small spherical weights at either end of long strand of dual-state memory fiber that can be either stiff or flexible, and changes between those two states when gripped in certain subtle ways. A whipstaff can be a quarterstaff, a whip, a flail, a pair of nunchucks, a bolo, a pair of handcuffs, a length of rope, a blackjack, a crowbar, a garrotte, or a club - and can change between these things at high speed.
Psionics: Most humanoid brains require REM rest cycles to function, and process this as dreaming. Diabolins do this while awake, with the end result that they're in a near-constant state of low-level hallucination. Diabolins in a group will check with one another to maintain a general consensus on what's real and what's unreal, but Diabolin alone are often forced to make a best guess.
One manifestation of this is a complete blurring of conscious and subconscious, intellect and instinct, which manifests itself as short-range bio-electrical empathy; the ability to pick up on tiny environmental cues or create them in ways that alter the mood of themselves or others. This ability is not reliable, although it's easier to match emotional states (you're calm and I want to be calm, you're angry and I want to be angry; I'm happy and I want you to be happy, I'm sad and so should you be) than to create disparate ones (you're angry and I want to be calm; I'm angry and I want you to be afraid). Diabolins trying to create unmatched states may randomize both their own emotions and those of people nearby.
Diabolin ESP in this way also manifests as hallucinatory hints or instincts about who around them is dangerous or untrustworthy, about patterns such as codes, ciphers, or engineering diagrams, about trends such as progressive glitches indicating deeper mechanical or medical malfunctions, in ways that seem clairvoyant or precognitive to others... but which are also wrong about 50% of the time.
Other species who are surgically and genetically altered are hypothetically capable of psionics, but the high-complexity cybernetic of synthetic systems which would hardwire knowledge of how to use them are beyond the technology of anyone except Hecatites, who generally disapprove of such deviant abilities in any case, and even for Hecatites, such systems would be prohibitively expensive. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible - just that psionics of other species would be clumsier with their powers and less stable.
Conditioning: Originally an ideological movement focusing on the potential of un-augmented bodies and minds, Conditioning is a discipline like a martial art, but more intensive, carrying with it an almost necessary spiritual component, as a certain serenity and emotional discipline is necessary to master Conditioning. It has spread between species over time, and is not an organized political movement in any way, simply a personal choice and way of life. The Conditioned abilities (detailed in depth under Skills & Infiltrator roles) take a lifetime commitment and a deep understanding of one’s consciousness, so it is rare for a Conditioned to have cybernetic implants, and Synthetics are either already capable of using mind and body to the full potential of their hardware, or unable to grasp the nuances of the social disciplines that permit hypnotic suggestion. Likewise, Diabolin Conditioned are rare and somewhat bizarre - and cannot simultaneously use psionic and Conditioned abilities, as one relies of mental instability or emotional volatility and the other relies on strict mental control. In human Conditioned, the study of Zen Buddhism, Shaolin Kung Fu, yoga, or similar disciplines that bridge mental, physical, and spiritual aspects is common.