Pathfinder

[Andrew Joshua Talon]

This story started out as a Star Trek fanfiction, detailing the adventures of a crew and ship that were essentially the Anti-Voyager: That is, they were actually written as kooky neurotics who nevertheless did save the day when given the chance to pull themselves together but never got the credit. USS Sojourner was the black sheep of a Starfleet that rewarded people like Janeway for their crimes.

But that was then. The story's evolved considerably, from fanfiction to it's own universe. So, let's cover the basics.

IN THE DISTANT FUTURE... MANKIND HAS REACHED THE STARS, BUT THE GALAXY IS TROUBLED...

It is the twenty-fourth century. Humanity is one of the major players in a loose Coalition of alien powers spread out across over a hundred lightyears with dozens of worlds.

And we are between a rock and a hard place.

The two local superpowers have an interest in us. On one side is the Neela Symphonic-A race of blue, feline-like aliens that suppress all emotions not beneficial to the whole. They seek to conquer and bring enlightenment to emotional beings, and tried to do this to the Coalition. We fought back, valiantly, but the Symphonic is composed of a thousand worlds and we were nearing defeat...

Until we discovered a better form of Faster than Light travel.

The standard FTL drive, the Tachyon Drive, allows a starship to jump in and out of a tachyon state at a point of relative gravimetric stability between two masses, better known as Lagrange points. At faster than light speeds, gravity is the only means of navigation and the only means of exit.

But the Coalition's new drive allows a starship to jump out anywhere. And despite inferior numbers and technology, the Coalition fought back hard enough to drive the Neelaa back into their space to a standstill.

This is when the other superpower became involved. The Tur-Han, a cyborg like species that fused the organic with the mechanical, intervened and brokered a fragile peace. It used its power, equal to that of the Neelaa, to make the Cats back off and try to conquer via less direct means.

The Tur-Han, however, are not in the habit of providing a free lunch. They want the Uprated Tachyon drive as well. Their practice has been to slowly absorb alien races into their empire as protectorates, and the Coalition is full of resources, material and immaterial, that they seek to add to their own.

In the middle of this is former Earth Commander Nuori Cupertino, an orphan of a colony that tore itself apart due to some unknown force that drove everyone but her insane. Put on "extended leave" for the last two years to keep her quiet after an incident involving the destruction of a Neelaa colony after the war, she's wandered the Fringe of Coalition space aimlessly.

One day, some of her old friends track her down with a sweet opportunity: The experimental starship Sojourner, a prototype vessel built for the war but never put into action due to difficulties with it's temperamental AI and experimental technology, has gone missing.

But they might know where it is. It's the chance to redeem herself and get back everything she lost, and she takes it eagerly.

But Sojourner herself, and it's Synthetic liaison T'Kal, aren't going to go back quietly. And in the end, neither will Nuori...

- - - - - -

That's the basic summary of the plot. There's a hell of a lot of backstory to the setting but we can get through that a piece at a time.

So TFF, willing to give this prodigal son a shot and some help?

 

[Watashiwa]

Hate to break it to you dude, <a href='http://paizo.com/pathfinder' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'>Pathfinder is already a thing.</a> It's a d20 roleplaying game, but still.


Sorry I'm not providing meaningful criticism, I've got classes tomorrow. I'll give you some real feedback later.


EDIT: Also, Sojourner needs to come back, and the initial situation sounds a lot like GalCiv. Not a bad thing mind, GalCiv2 is awesome.

 

[Andrew Joshua Talon]

Hate to break it to you dude, <a href='http://paizo.com/pathfinder' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'>Pathfinder is already a thing.</a>? It's a d20 roleplaying game, but still.


Sorry I'm not providing meaningful criticism, I've got classes tomorrow.? I'll give you some real feedback later.


EDIT: Also, Sojourner needs to come back, and the initial situation sounds a lot like GalCiv.? Not a bad thing mind, GalCiv2 is awesome.

Never played any of those, I'm afraid. And "Pathfinder" is more in reference to the Pathfinder mission on Mars, the rover of which Sojourner is named for.

And it's cool. I do too, oi...

 

[Watashiwa]

Hate to break it to you dude, <a href='http://paizo.com/pathfinder' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'>Pathfinder is already a thing.</a>á It's a d20 roleplaying game, but still.


Sorry I'm not providing meaningful criticism, I've got classes tomorrow.á I'll give you some real feedback later.


EDIT: Also, Sojourner needs to come back, and the initial situation sounds a lot like GalCiv.á Not a bad thing mind, GalCiv2 is awesome.

Never played any of those, I'm afraid. And "Pathfinder" is more in reference to the Pathfinder mission on Mars, the rover of which Sojourner is named for.

And it's cool. I do too, oi...

Galactic Civilizations is fun. It's Civilization in space, which solves the one problem that all the Civ games have had, which was not being set in space.

Pathfinder is a bit harder because I'm not familiar with the lore, but it's basically a continuation of Dungeons and Dragon third edition.


...If I were awake I might have caught the Sojourner reference.

 

[Andrew Joshua Talon]

BACKSTORY

At the end of the twenty-first century, when humanity was celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War III, something at the South Pole awoke. It was massive, monstrous. It defied the laws of physics, it was impossible. It shrugged off nukes with ease.

It devastated the planet, pulling a Second Impact and then sleeping it off for several years before beginning again. During the calm, the surviving nations of Earth decided that with this thing liable to strike again, they had to do something to preserve the human race.

So the old Orion project and the speculations of Dr. O'Neil were broken out, and humanity was forced out of it's terrestrial Eden to the solar system. Space colonies, at first experimental, were now vital to the survival of humanity and in between assaults by the monster (Appropriately enough dubbed "The Beast") over a billion people were lifted off of Earth.

Life in the space colonies was hard. Humanity was divided again, only united by common languages and religions and occasionally interests. Wars broke out, fights to survive, all while below on our home the Beast ruled over our Eden. Every time we looked to Earth, there that monster was, mocking us.

Until the Signal.

Nearly a century of living in space had seen humanity spread across the solar system, terraforming Venus and Mars as best we could, settling on the Jovian moons and dozens of asteroids and even constructing vast space colonies. On Christmas Day, 2197, an outpost near Ceres picked up a simple signal from deep space.

It detailed plans for technologies long thought impossible, clues on how to achieve faster than light travel through tachyons, gravity control, and others.

But most important was the message at the end:

"Have no fear. You are not alone."

It took a decade for the technology to be unlocked, with the finest minds humanity could produce figuring it out but they did. And our first act with the harnessed technology?

Take back our homeworld.

The Beast, perhaps, was complacent. Perhaps it knew this was coming. All that is known for sure is that a gravity generator was used to tear the thing to shreds, to the cheers of billions of humans across the solar system. The Beast's carcass was torn apart for study, and what was left was put on a monument at the South Pole with the names of every human being that had died because of it inscribed in solid stone.

The second use of the gift of the Christmas Day Signal was to find our mysterious benefactors. They'd saved us, perhaps not intentionally but they'd saved us all the same and frankly we wanted to meet them, thank them.

We struck out, looking to exploit the technology and make a profit, to explore, to find a new home from the dozens of extrasolar Earths and Near Earths and Super Earths we'd been finding, and a dozen other reasons.

And we found aliens. We found the Rabinok of Delta Pavonis, on par with our own technology. They were brain slugs that inhabited and merged with non-sentient lifeforms that happily greeted us. They too had suffered a disaster, perhaps by the same kind of monster that had terrorized us. Their native host species were dying out, and without them the Rabinok would be trapped as helpless slugs.

And Humanity remembered the Benefactors, the ones who had sent the signal that had let us take back Earth... And we chose to emulate them. The Rabinok gained hosts by the millions, of gorillas and chimpanzees and dolphins and orcas and elephants. They expanded and thrived and traded with us as dear friends.

And so we continued, happily sharing technology with other species, with little thought to the consequences. The low gravity insect-like Tersh!! received biomechanical suits to leave their worlds freely. The Aghasti, gentle lava world giants, received environmental systems and anti grav to do the same. We traded and bought and sold and shared and the optimism of a future of peace drove humanity forward...

But in our arrogance, we forgot that not everyone's going to interpret "help" the same way. The Honu, a reptile-like warrior race, was at around the tech level we were when the Beast attacked us and engaged in feudalistic warfare. A group of humans landed and decided to force the warring kingdoms of their world to unite using their superior technology to pose as gods. As you can imagine, this turned out very badly for the humans as the Honu slaughtered them, reverse engineered the technology and went out to the stars in a drive of conquest. Our own weapons and technology were turned against us, and we fought like hell. We united our friends together into a Coalition to oppose the Honu conquest and fix our mistakes.

The Honu though were partially empathic and had committed their Warriors to a code of honor and mercy that dictated how they fought for the simple reason that slaying children and the old were absolutely abhorent to them. They could not do so without suffering in turn-Fighting worthy opponents was what they lived for, will against will, and humanity and its allies gained the respect of the Honu.

The Coalition defeated them, but in defeat they were gracious for the most part. They willingly joined the Coalition so that they might be part of something bigger. Though perhaps out of pride, they associated most with humans.

Killing a giant alien monstrosity after it's thrown you off your homeworld and mounting it's carcass like a trophy tended to impress Honu.

Things seemed fine for the foreseeable future... Until first contact with the Neelaa was established.

 

[Andrew Joshua Talon]

FASTER-THAN-LIGHT

Save for occasional neutrinos, there was nothing else known to humanity that could exceed the speed of light in the universe. General Relativity still held power over the universe, and the tyranny of the lightspeed barrier was still firm.

The Christmas Day Signal changed that. While it wasn't exactly a manual on the construction of a faster than light drive, it did provide enough clues that on April 19th, 2208, a tachyon jump was successfully completed between the Mars L1 and the Earth L4 point. The drive was designed by engineering PhD Madison mac Roigh and from then on would carry her name.

The data on the drive, however, was leaked to Wonderland, the solar-system spanning network, and while it wasn't like people could buy an FTL drive off the shelf at the Spacemart, the knowledge became widespread enough that retrofitting ships of sufficient power generation capability was common place.

THE TACHYON DRIVE

The essential concept of the drive was that to reach faster than light speeds, normal matter had to be "activated" to switch from a tardyon state (all slower than light particles) to a tachyon state (all faster than light particles). A field was generated around the ship that allowed the entire vessel to shift states and reach supraluminal velocities.

The drive only required sufficient power to activate (shift up), maintain the field for the duration of the journey, and then deactivate (shift down) at the destination.

The catch was, this had to be done in areas of relative gravimetric neutrality. Between two sufficiently large masses lay such areas-In human science they were known as Lagrange or L-points. Ships that tried to activate the drive outside of L-points either had nothing happen, or a botched transition to FTL speed that resulted in their particles flying off at supraluminal speeds as radiation that physicists on some other world thousands or millions of years later would detect as a cosmic ray.

For stellar distances, the drive needed to target L-points between stellar-sized masses. Once within a solar system, targeting L-points between planets became simple. Within Tachyon State, gravity was the only means of detection of anything-All other sensor systems were blind.

GEARS

The mac Roigh faster than light drive project had been developed in great secrecy. As a result, the terms for the various components and every other aspect of the project had been codenamed after terms associated with 20th and early 21st century motor vehicles. The "Piston" referred to the Tachyon Generator Motors (which did indeed move up and down). The "Sparkplugs" referred to the hookups to the drive from the powerplant.

And the levels of various speed states that could be reached while within Tachyon State were termed "Gears". A higher Gear meant a higher velocity, a more energetic state.

Gear One, the default, allowed a starship to cover a lightyear in approximately one Earth day. Gear One decreased the transit time to eighteen hours a lightyear, Gear One twelve, and so on.

However, even with an FTL drive the laws of physics remained. Travelling at higher speeds meant more power was required, and more heat would be generated that the ship would have to radiate away. While the inside of the Transition Field allowed the vessel a fairly decent heat sink, it would not last forever. Once a ship was committed to an interstellar journey it had to stick to it.

Proposals for way stations to be established between solar systems using gravity-drive assisted unmanned starships with sufficient masses were suggested and executed, but even so targeting such a way station in the middle of an emergency was tricky business.

When commercially viable gravity generators became available, way stations were much easier to establish, but they brought about a new problem: Pirates. Just as old marine pirates on Earth used sandbars to run merchant vessels aground, modern pirates utilized "gravity sandbars" to bring unwary starships out of Tachyon State to be boarded and pillaged.

While an expensive endeavor to get the generators into place, either just outside the solar system or on the course of a starship near an L-point to deceive them into shifting out into the sandbar, it could pay back the investment in spades for the right prize.

For colonists, FTL drives were cheap and disposable as they were usually for a one way trip to their chosen home. Gear One sufficed.

Warships in general rated a Gear Three drive or higher. Gear Five was the best recorded FTL speed (a lightyear every five and a quarter hours) until First Contact with the Neelaa, which boasted starships capable of Gear Six.

 

[Avider]

The switch of perspective in the backstory bit lessened the intensity of the whole thing.

I didn't bother reading the rest.

 

[Himitsu the Hunter]

Heh, you know i rather like the fact that the Alien brain slugs are basically our best friends.

So anything more on your 'Beast'? Cause I see this and think... Eva meet's Lavos... heh.

Did they ever find out anything more about it?

 

[zerohour]

Seems interesting, but I think you should show us the actual story instead of background information.

 

[Watashiwa]

zerohour, look at the timestamp on the post above yours...

 

[zerohour]

Whoops. Sorry. The section is new so for some reason I thought all of the posts and stories were new too.

 

[Watashiwa]

Nope. These are all items that were in the space below the three categories here originally. There was no great outpouring of original fiction, I'm sorry to say.

 

[Ray]

Nope. These are all items that were in the space below the three categories here originally. There was no great outpouring of original fiction, I'm sorry to say.

Just get on with making us a proper OF section, I want to write something. <__<

 

[Watashiwa]

This IS the original fiction section. It just doesn't have all the fancy bells and whistles that a complete forum would have.

 

[half baked cat]

And here I thought this was a topic about the RPG system.

I have even been working on a dwarven 'necromancer'. Quote marks because she isn't a necromancer, she is just deluded into thinking she is. Her class is actually summoner.

 

[Ray]

And here I thought this was a topic about the RPG system.

I have even been working on a dwarven 'necromancer'. Quote marks because she isn't a necromancer, she is just deluded into thinking she is. Her class is actually summoner.

playing what's essentially D&D 3.5 with new art

 

[half baked cat]

Well, there are other differences that improve it, but it is basically just 3.5, yeah. Besides, the eidolon is an awesome class feature... Although, the name of the class is all wrong. It is more like a beast maker or beast master. Like one of those digidestined.