Lore - addtheletters/space GitHub Wiki

It is the twenty-second century.

The reach of humanity has spread throughout our system, Sol. Earth's urban centers have become hodgepodges of arcologies and slums. Thanks to the efforts of environmentalists, large swaths of biomes are still preserved, as pristine as possible given the climate change that has slowly consumed the world. There was no apocalypse. Rather, average global temperatures ticked upwards, year by year. Too many species have gone extinct to count, but humanity lives on, with science as its vanguard. Governments have slowly been addressing the greenhouse issue. Wind, water, and nuclear sources now provide the majority of the world's energy. Earth's atmosphere is recovering.

Honestly, though, people have begun to care less about the Earth in recent years. A particularly bad drought , partway through the twenty-first century, caused millions to die of starvation. Although these individuals were primarily from developing nations and in the lowest classes, the deaths of so many received much media attention and pushed lawmakers to find solutions.

One solution was a re-invigoration of space programs. What if the Earth's ecosystem was irreversibly damaged, and humanity needed to find a new home? The famine of 2057 gave those with this opinion more weight. Cooperative projects between space agencies work feverishly. Goals are ambitious. Send a man to Mars. Send a team to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Send a probe to another solar system.

Manned Mars missions had been in the works for decades. Soon flags littered the surface of the Red Planet. When a manned lander hit the surface of Titan, a fully functional research base had been constructed near Mars' north pole, filled out with an international crew of ten.

That was the year 2070. Now we examine the year 2106.

Humanity still doesn't have any extrasolar colonies, but we are looking: looking for places to settle, and looking for new ways to get there. Our chemical, nuclear, and ion engines won't cut it.

Industry, colonies, and the first warships

Sol is now truly populated beyond just Earth. Government agencies were the pioneers of initial journeys, but the most powerful motivator was proven once again to be financial gain. A corporate conglomerate founded the first lunar colony, backed in full by NATO. Mining and refinement of extraplanetary resources proved incredibly lucrative, as the environmental restrictions imposed on Terran industry were nonexistent off-planet. Wary of uber-monopolies taking control, the World Trade Organization implemented numerous measures to hold back trusts and encourage competition. Rival colonies now dot the surfaces of the Moon and Mars. Relations between colonies are almost completely positive, as the resources are plentiful and widespread, though some tensions have arisen between corporations vying for specific mineral-rich sites.

Countries find themselves trying to earn cooperation with corporations rather than the other way around. Chinese industry prospers due to close ties between space corporations and the government. Western private industry is not to be outdone, however. Conglomerates form in spite of international commerce law, with some colonies even declaring themselves sovereign nations. Tensions rise. Suddenly, there may be a need for, if not warships, then at least law enforcement vessels. NASA is initially stumped, as private space corporations have not shared much with them. The Chinese National Space Agency, in fact, comes out with the first practical law enforcement craft, its primary armament electronic warfare, but possessing a primitive magnetically powered gun. A prototype NASA/USAF craft was demonstrated suspiciously soon after. Neither would fire their weapons in anger, ever, but their mere existence alone proved a point: space combat was possible, and more scary of a fact to many, might be necessary...

-Coming soon: The attack, Negem, and Insurrection