Breakaway Civilization Quest

Transhuman civilization is flourishing. Octillions of people are living their lives across civilized space, from the full-fledged dyson swarms of the Old Core to the scattered settlements of the Expansion Front nine thousand light years from Sol, societies live on.

Still, when people are packed in that tight, sometimes it just really gets to you. In such cases, it's fairly common for a few million-billion people to get together, buy a small fleet of Voidskippers, and set off to make their own way elsewhere in the universe. That's you, by the way.

Fortunately Voidskippers are much, much faster when traveling outside the galactic disk, meaning that breakaway groups such as yourselves can go quite a long way from the Milky Way. You fully intend to, with a destination picked out well over a billion light years from Sol.

Anyway, tell us a bit about yourselves, why don't you?

First off, why are you all sticking together, instead of going your separate ways in your separate ships?
(-size will move you one slot down the size vote, +size vice versa)
(+Budget multiplies budget by 1.5, -Budget multiplies by 0.75. Multipliers applied after all +/- pairs canceled)
(Cohesion dictated purely by other decisions; More Cohesion is Good)

[] Charismatic Leader: (-Size, ~Cohesion, ~Budget)
All hail the supreme leader! Long may xe reign!

[] Shared Dream: (~Size, +Cohesion, ~Budget)
Together we shall build our Utopia! Onwards into the glorious future!

[] Shared Grievance: (~Size, +Cohesion, -Budget)
Fuck you guys, we're leaving. You've been nothing but mean to us and we're not putting up with it.

[] Safety In Numbers: (+Size, -Cohesion, +Budget)
Look, I know we don't have much in common, but it's dangerous to go alone!

Alright, now, how big is your group? (Rungs marked with >< only accessible through modifiers)

>< Mid billions: (Budget x100, Pops x100, --Cohesion)
A raucous mob of competing interests, it's unlikely that you'll remain unified.

[] Low billions: (Budget x10, Pops x10, -Cohesion)
Large, but there's still a reasonable chance of sticking together.

[] High millions: (Budget x1, Pops x1, ~Cohesion)
Fairly typical in both scope and odds of success.

[] Mid millions: (Budget x0.1, Pops x 0.1, +Cohesion)
A small fleet of a few ships; far from the worst start, but far from the best.

>< Low millions: (Budget: One Ship, Pops x0.01, +Cohesion)
Barely a city state, it remains to be seen how you'll do.

Any particular details that were left out? (Pick two Sub-Options, sub-options count toward the same root option)

[] Strong Ideology (+Cohesion, locks certain actions)

-[] Stability (An emphasis on long-term planning and risk mitigation)
Always rushing forwards without taking the time to think is the province of fools.

-[] Prosperity (Emphasizes resource acquisition and rapid growth)
Gotta grab all those resources before someone else does, right?

-[] No Soph Left Behind (Emphasizes social responsibility and trust, +Cohesion)
Societies are supposed to take care of their people, that's the entire POINT!

[] Mad Scientists (Increases tech advancement in field, Possible Diplomatic Consequences)

-[] Bio/Nanotech (Nanoweapons, Biomorphs, Exotic Chemical Syntheses, Precision Manufacturing)
The life sciences have long since moved from simply observing and studying.

-[] Cognitive/Computer Science (Brainware, Malware, Cyberwar, Custom Minds)
Doing lots of math quickly and efficiently truly is a wonderous feat.

-[] Engineering (Biggatons, Synthmorphs, Ship Design, Habitat Construction)
If you want to throw absurd amounts of energy around, conventional machinery remains undefeated.

[] Backers (+Budget, obligations, possibly backup)

-[] Extragalactic Mining Concern (Key Item: Potentiated Subsidized Wormhole; Can be opened to make a stable wormhole capable of shifting twenty solar masses back to the Milky Way; largely one-way until sufficient materials sent)
(Obligation: Strip-mine several solar masses worth of material and send them back through the wormhole)
Profits are up this quarter.

-[] Penal Colony (Key Item: Dissident Immigrants, delivered via wormhole. +Cohesion with Shared Grievance background, -Cohesion with any other background)
(Boons: Security Expertise; wormhole comms with Milky Way)
(Obligation: Keep anyone your backers want imprisoned, no questions asked.)
Take the rest of our criminal scum with you when you leave!

-[] Intelligence Agency (Key Item: Retrocaster Array; information-only time machine used to assemble a statistical model of probable futures. Works by firing capsules full of data back in time. You get very limited time on it though.)
(Boons: Wormhole comms with Milky Way)
(Obligation: Process your backer's news pods back in time for them, maintain the retrocaster array. No peeking.)
Everyone wants a lens into what the future may hold.

Up Next: Migration Fleet Design, Equipment Selection

 

Now that we know who you are, there are only a few questions left. The most pertinent being what sort of fleet you purchased to reach your destination. After all, while Voidskippers are very large spaceships, the idea of cramming four hundred and thirty million people aboard a single ship is frankly ridiculous; people want more space than that. Now, let's see what sort of ships you want to purchase.

Your budget: 30$
Your population: 430 million
You cannot exceed the budget. Your passenger capacity must accommodate your entire population.
Fleet design will be done as approval voting by plan.
When selecting individual ships, put a number in the brackets [1],[3], etc. to indicate how many of that type you want.

This Turn Only Mechanic: Supplies
Long-haul intergalactic travel is quite expensive in terms of fuel and spare parts. This will be rudimentarily represented via the Supplies system.
-There will be four legs of the journey, each roughly corresponding to 400 million light years of travel.
-Each leg, each ship consumes one point of supplies. If a ship runs out, but there's some extra supplies aboard other ships they get transferred around and the fleet keeps going without a prolonged stopover.
-If the entire fleet runs out of supplies and there's no ISRU capable ships, BAD END.
-If the entire fleet runs out of supplies and there are ISRU capable ships, a stopover occurs, with varying effects depending on the proportion of ISRU capable ships. No matter what, all supplies will be replenished during a stopover.
--If more than 50% of the fleet is ISRU-capable, no penalties.
--If more than 25% but less than 50% of the fleet is ISRU capable, -Cohesion at each stopover.
--If less than 25% of the fleet is ISRU capable, --Cohesion at each stopover.
--Reaching -5 Cohesion before the final stop results in the fleet disintegrating.
Normal Ships

[] Freighter
Cost: $$$
Warp Drives: 1
Hull Length: 40 km
Hull Diameter: 12 km
Armor: 30 meters
Maneuverability: Bad
Passenger Capacity: Negligible
Supplies Carried: 10
Never underestimate the usefulness of a good cargo hauler.

[] Liner
Cost: $$$$
Warp Drives: 1
Hull Length: 35 km
Hull Diameter: 8 km
Armor: 30 meters
Maneuverability: Bad
Passenger Capacity: 120 million
Supplies Carried: 1
A simple vessel fitted for moving people from place to place.

[] Construction Ship
Cost: $$$$
Warp Drives: 1
Hull Length: 45 km
Hull Diameter: 12 km
Armor: 30 meters
Maneuverability: Bad
Passenger Capacity: 40 million
Industrial Capacity: 5
Supplies Carried: 4
Skimmers Carried: 200 (140 miners/builders, 60 freight)
ISRU Capable
Can we build it? Yes we can!

[] Mobile Wormhole Foundry
Cost: $$$$$$
Warp Drives: 1
Hull Length: 45 km
Hull Diameter: 12 km
Armor: 30 meters
Maneuverability: Bad
Passenger Capacity: 45 million
Industrial Capacity: 3
Supplies Carried: 3
Skimmers Carried: 30 (20 miners/builders, 10 freight)
ISRU Capable
Can produce NOWs and Comm. Holes
The equipment to make shortcuts in spacetime is highly specialized, and highly expensive.

[] Nomad Skipper
Cost: $x10
Warp Drives: 1
Hull Length: 50 km
Hull Diameter: 15 km
Armor: 30 meters
Maneuverability: Bad
Passenger Capacity: 150 million
Industrial Capacity: 2
Supplies Carried: 6
ISRU Capable
Can produce NOWs and Comm. Holes
Fitted for the permanent nomadic lifestyle, if you so choose.

Armed Voidskippers
(NOTE: There are more types of armed ships around, just not ones available for purchase at the moment.)

[] Battlecruiser
Cost: $$$$$
Warp Drives: 3
Hull Length: 25 km
Hull Diameter: 4.5 km
Armor: 150 meters
Maneuverability: Excellent
Sustained Beam Power: 3 EW
Passenger Capacity: 2 million
Supplies Carried: 4
ISRU Capable
A front-line combatant that was built with endurance in mind, a Battlecruiser's role is to get in close and beat the enemy to death with beamfire.

[] Half-Carrier
Cost: $$$$$$$
Warp Drives: 2
Hull Length: 30 km
Hull Diameter: 6 km
Armor: 90 meters
Maneuverability: Good
Sustained Beam Power: 1.5 EW
Passenger Capacity: 3 million
Skimmers: 80 (30 fighters, 45 Temporal Control nodes, 5 Gobblers)
Supplies Carried: 3
ISRU Capable
A versatile warship that brings a bit of everything to the table.

[] Pirate Ship
Cost: $$$
Warp Drives: 1
Hull Length: 40 km
Hull Diameter: 12 km
Armor: 30 meters
Maneuverability: Mediocre
Sustained Beam Power: 500 PW
Passenger Capacity: 12 million
Skimmers: 10 (6 fighters, 4 Temporal Control nodes)
Supplies Carried: 1
Though of incredibly dubious providence, this up-gunned and otherwise illegally modified freighter could prove rather useful, especially due to outwardly looking like a civilian ship.

Spoiler: Glossary

Game Notes
-1 point Industrial Capacity allows for production of ~40 cubic kilometers of Stuff per customary year. Each point of Industrial Capacity requires 240 cubic kilometers.

Tech
NOW: Non-Orientable Wormhole; has the interesting property that any matter put through one end comes out the other end as antimatter. Necessary component of Voidskipper power plants. Very expensive and tricky to make.

Voidskipper: FTL capable starship, requires power in excess of fifty Exawatts to exceed c with its warp drive. Only remains superluminal for fractions of a second, crossing several light years in an eyeblink. Skip range limited by mass in the way, resulting in explosive Skip Shock; Voidskippers are built very tough to handle this. No mass in the way means the only limitation is cooling down the power plant. Minimum practical length 20 km. Avg. travel speed in a galactic disk ~20,000 c. Avg. travel speed without impediments ~3.5 ly/s.

Skimmer: Warp capable spacecraft that cannot exceed c. Generally powered by fusion, minimum practical length 1 km.

Gobbler: A Skimmer carrying a small artificial black hole aboard, used for wormhole demolitions.

Lane: Corridor of space where all the debris and interstellar gas have been cleaned out of the way, allowing Voidskippers to work in the heat-limited operating regime.

Warp combat: Mobility-based combat doctrine based on use of barely sublight warp to pinball around the battlespace at (effectively) c. Facilitated by the fact that all warp drives can switch between full forwards and full reverse at a moment's notice. Means that smaller ships are better as battleships/battlecruisers, on account of higher maneuverability directly leading to higher survivability.

Warp Drive: Takes the form of a toroid around the ship some distance from the hull. Bigger ones are inherently more efficient. Warships tend to have multiple for redundancy.

Temporal Control: Means of screwing over unauthorized FTL. Uses wormholes with temporal offsets to make FTL through a given space in a given direction a causality violation, dumping the offender into a branch timeline.

 

It's been slightly more than an old Earth decade since your group of Wayfarers set out from the Milky Way. You planned out the trip well, and managed to make the 1.2 billion light year voyage without needing any significant stopovers, though you did need to shift supplies around fairly often to make sure your liners stayed provisioned.

All in all, things look to be shaping up for a nice predictable founding. You're coming in 45 degrees off the galactic plane of a nice looking dwarf spiral galaxy approximately 15,000 light years across, and people are already getting excited about where you should set up shop.

It's only when you get within 20,000 light years of the galactic core that the anomalies get noticed. Nothing outright harmful, but analog computing is behaving ever so slightly differently than what you're used to. You obviously tear through it looking for any possible hint of malware and a significant portion of your population ports themselves to purely digital cognition just in case, but after as much investigation as you can do before arriving it doesn't seem to be inherently malicious.

Anyway, oddities aside there's the matter of where to settle to consider. Both where in the galaxy, and which sort of star to shack up around at the start. Then it's simply a question of what the first things you'll build will be. You aren't counting on finding any habitable planets, but you really don't need them.

Galactic Region
[] Core (Lots of young blue stars, remnants thereof, and the supernovae lying betwixt, contains supermassive black hole)
The bustling center, easy to get swept away in if you're not careful.

[] Globular Cluster (Entirely composed of *very* old stars, little happens here. Outside galactic disk, increasing strategic mobility.)
A retirement home for old stars, away from the volatile young whippersnappers.

[] Star-Forming Region (Again, lots of young blue stars, but also some nice smaller ones.)
A nursery for natural nuclear power plants.

[] Disk (An even mix of star types, relatively few supernovae, plenty of resources)
The generic suburban sprawl making up much of the galaxy.

[] Disk Outskirts (Mostly smaller, redder stars. Negligible supernova risk.)
A quiet backwater, far from the chaos and noise of the metropole.

[] Galactic Halo (Low stellar density, mostly lighter stars. Outside galactic disk, increasing strategic mobility.)
Barely qualifying as in the galaxy at all, this loose scattering of stars could still prove a bountiful home.

Star Type (NOTE: Only the system primary is being considered; binary arrangements are complicated. We're assuming a high-metallicity star is being selected where applicable.)
(NOTE2: If the star type doesn't match the galactic region, it will be adjusted to fit. You will not be getting a blue giant in a globular cluster, for example)

[] Rogue Planet (No power output, no activity, low resources, sneeki)
If you wanted to try Steading you would have stayed in the Milky Way.

[] Red Dwarf (Long lifespan, Low power, High Activity, Starlifting Feasible)
Favorite star of long-term thinkers.

[] Yellow Dwarf (Medium lifespan, Medium power, Starlifting Feasible)
A respectable choice in any scenario.

[] Blue Giant (Short lifespan, High power, Starlifting Easy)
A supernova waiting to happen, but in the meantime there's much energy to be had.

[] Red Giant (Dying Star, High Power, Starlifting Kinda Iffy)
Though a comparatively brief stage in a star's life, for many this is their apex of power.

[] White Dwarf (Stellar Remnant, Calm, Minimal Power, Starlifting Infeasible)
A sedate and reliable ember, but with some of the old fire still lurking past the chandrasekhar limit.

[] Neutron Star (Stellar Remnant, El Bonkers Magnetic Field, Starlifting Infeasible)
The shambling revenant of a dead star, screaming its demise to the universe.

[] Black Hole (Azathoth wants munchies Stellar Remnant, Starlifting Impossible, Special Megastructures: Ergosphere power plant, Quasar power plant, Subsidized Wormhole)
A gaping wound in time and space, both useful and ravenous.

 

After only a bit of bickering, you all decide that you'll be making your home around an orange dwarf on the edge of the galactic disk. You do a bit of scouting around to find a suitable star, and after a bit of searching you find yourselves a nice sun to settle around, complete with a few exploitable planets. Star mass 0.86 M☉, luminosity 61 Yottawatts, overall metallicity ~2.1%.

As for the planets, shockingly enough the innermost world actually has liquid water on its surface. The gravity and day length are suspiciously similar to records of Earth, but the axial tilt is near enough 60 degrees and the atmosphere is mainly composed of Sulfur Dioxide. The general consensus opinion is that you'll probably disassemble it for raw materials at some point rather than bothering to terraform it.

Aside from that terrestrial anomaly, you've got a rocky planet, an asteroid belt, a mediocre gas giant with a few moons, and an ice world in that order. Beyond that there's only the system's Oort cloud to attract interest before you reach the next star.

Anyway now that you've familiarized yourselves with your new home, there's a burning question about what to name the place. There's a few strong contenders in the running, but a surprise option might come out on top.
[] Journeyman's Lantern
This name was originally the title of a poem written during the voyage.
[] New Homestar
Favored by the "practicalitarian" school of thought. It's a new home and it's a star.
[] Maverick
A name proposed purely on the basis of sounding "cool", despite a lack of English speakers aboard.
[] Write-In

Aside from naming the place, there's another important question to answer before the thirty year timeskip begins: Namely, how much of that should be spent with 100% of your industrial capacity spent on growth? The more of that time you spend growing at breakneck speed the more industrial capacity you'll have at the end of it, but the longer your people will need to wait for moving into proper habs and such. You're still going to be putting 50% towards growth after the downstep of course.

So, how long do you want to grow at full tilt before down-stepping to something more sustainable? You will need to invest 900 industrial output to both house your entire population in proper habitats, and supply enough civilian Skimmers to service them.

[] 0 years (Final Industrial Capacity: 280, Invested Output: 930, 35% chance of -Cohesion)
Though diverting resources to other projects right from the start is an option, it's one with little to recommend it.

[] 5 years (Final Industrial Capacity: 399, Invested Output: 1,402)
A minimal period of intense build-up before important initiatives like housing begin.

[] 10 years (Final Industrial Capacity: 685, Invested Output: 2,480, 5% chance of -Cohesion)
A longer plan than five years to be sure, but still quite short in the grand scheme of things.

[] 15 years (Final Industrial Capacity: 1164, Invested Output: 3,862, 10% chance of -Cohesion)
A middle-of-the-road option, offering both good buildup and a reasonable time until habs are ready.

[] 20 years (Final Industrial Capacity: 1971, Invested Output: 5,456, 25% chance of -Cohesion)
On the upper end of reasonable waiting periods, going this long has pros and cons.

[] 25 years (Final Industrial Capacity: 3339, Invested Output: 5,944, 50% chance of -Cohesion)
One Gigasecond since founding is both an important anniversary and a long time to wait.

[] 30 years (Final Industrial Capacity: 5655, Invested Output: 0, -Cohesion, 40% chance of premature down-step)
Though delaying basic housing for over a Gigasecond is strictly speaking an option, it will upset people.

The next thing on the agenda is what sorts of things you want to build with your shiny new industrial base; after all, simply getting a bunch of habitats set up is just the start of things. So, what else is on the agenda?
(This section is ranked choice voting; mark the boxes [1],[2],[3] etc. in order of preference.)

[] Additional Habitation (Directly increases population)
Make more places to live, and people will gladly fill them in fairly short order.

[] Wormhole Production Capacity (1 output per cm^2 of wormholes made per turn)
A strong wormhole industry is the beating heart of any interstellar power.

[] Civilian Voidskippers (REQUIRES WORMHOLES)
While you may not yet have any going interstellar concerns, that's no reason not to prepare for them.

[] System Defenses (REQUIRES WORMHOLES)
Mass-producing armed Skimmers and a basic Temporal Control System is a good first step to defending your system from possible threats.

[] Warships (REQUIRES WORMHOLES)
Is producing full-fledged military Voidskippers a bit paranoid at the present time? Yes.

Only two more things to cover before the time skip. Of these remaining two, the most important is your exploration policy; knowing your stellar neighborhood is quite the important undertaking, and how you want to go about it is highly relevant.

[] Don't bother
Ho hum, I'm sure this won't bite us in the ass.

[] Telescope snooping
See the galaxy from the comfort of your own home!

[] Rig the freighter for exploration and let it go do that
Ah, nothing quite like a good old fashioned five year mission where no man has gone before.

[] Make a bunch of Skimmers fitted with comm. holes and send those
While limited to c, this will still let you get some up close and personal looks at a number of nearby stars.

The last matter of any relevance is the fate of the Nomad Skipper. While all your other ships can reasonably fit into a sedentary civilization, the Nomad Skipper by and large doesn't. It's fitted with all sorts of equipment that, while highly useful for a nomadic lifestyle, is simply no longer needed. As such, there's a few options for what to do with it.

[] Mothball the ship once people aren't living on it anymore, and maintain it in usable condition. (???)
Sometimes ships just have sentimental value, you know?

[] Cannibalize its parts for industrial usage. (+10% to post-timeskip industrial base and invested output)
A brutally pragmatic course of action.

[] Put any complainers aboard and send them on their way. (Reduces odds of Cohesion penalty from a long wait by 10%)
The time-honored answer to people who don't like how you run things.

 

It's been thirty years since you arrived at the Journeyman's Lantern system, and several major events have taken place.

First and foremost, the industrial build-up has born plentiful fruit. You've gone from a bunch of machine shops operating out of a few ships to a set of mining, refining, and construction operations capable of churning out 46,560 cubic kilometers of sophisticated manufactured goods per customary year. Your wormhole industry has similarly been expanded to something halfway respectable for a society at your level of development.

Aside from that, you've set about building proper habitats for your population; no planetary-class drums yet, but you've made plentiful O'Neill Cylinders. In fact you made a fair bit more than were needed to accommodate your existing population. The people quickly reproduced to fill the new space, and now your population has officially passed the 650 million mark.

The last major industrial project was fabricating a bunch of militarized Skimmers for system defenses. It was ultimately decided that Temporal Control was more important than beam power, so more TCS nodes were constructed. Their comms holes were all centralized aboard a newly constructed omniball* as a command hub, and soon enough your star system was reasonably defended.

That said, all these industrial projects have had some fallout: Namely that you don't have enough people providing services due to so many working in the industrial sector. It's getting quite hard to find time with a doctor, adjudicator, bio-tailor, or any number of other such people, and the people are getting restless about it.

(Issue: Service Sector Crunch! Too much of your population is employed in the industrial sector! Increase population relative to industrial base to compensate!)

*an omniball is a spherical Skimmer able to immediately warp in any direction. Their only real application is TCS command posts due to the limitations imposed by the design.

As for the freighter's exploration mission, it discovered something really downright bizarre. Namely an abnormally high number of Earthlike planets, complete with complex diverse biospheres. Even just finding one would be completely bizarre, but it goes further than that. In fact, it seems like one out of every thousand stars is home to an extant garden world.

This flies in the face of both theoretical models and previous practical experience in the Milky Way. Even more odd is that all these biospheres share a common biochemical basis; that's not even the case for different brands of biomorph among transhumanity. Someone or something has gone around terraforming planets en masse and seeding them with a common root biosphere, and you're not quite sure why.

Still, the fact of the matter is that you're far on the galactic outskirts, and the rate of habitable planets seems to be increasing the further into the galaxy the Enterprise goes.

Concurrently to the Enterprise's mission, your physicists have been going over just about everything again. All your tech still works pretty much as expected thankfully, but the values of several crucial constants of physics are just different enough for you to draw a shocking conclusion: you are now in a different universe from the one you left. It's a bit uncertain if there's going to be any useful new tech coming from this fact, but it's definitely left people a little bit uneasy.

As for the Nomad Skipper, it was ultimately decided to convert it into a museum ship. Everyone aboard was moved off to the new habitats, systems were powered down, the industrial equipment was relocated, and a tour schedule has been set up. It should do a lot to remind future generations how you got here.

(Unique Asset: Arrival Museum: Will Provide a +Cohesion bonus when population exceeds 43 Billion)

Population Employment Graph
-Total: 653,760,000
-Industrial: 349,200,000 (~53%)
--Wormhole: 120,500,000 (~18%)
-Logistics: 0
-Military: 12,200,000 (~2%)
-Service Sector: 106,860,000 (~16%)
-Non-Working: 65,000,000 (~10%)
NOTE: If possible you want to keep your service sector at least 35% of your population; that's your doctors, social scientists, artists, restaurant owners, teachers, social workers, law enforcement, etc.
NOTE: ~10% of population fixed as non-working; industrial, logistics and military jobs subtracted from working population to get service sector.

Anyway, now's the time to set the industrial plan for the next five years.

First up, how much of your industrial base should be dedicated to growth?
(Note: Safely operating one unit of Industrial Capacity requires 300,000 population.)
(Industrial Labor Population: 349.2 mil/653.76 mil)
[] 0% (Final Industrial Capacity: 1164, Output Invested: 5820)
[] 25% (Final Industrial Capacity: 1576, Output Invested: 4946)
[] 50% (Final Industrial Capacity: 2098, Output Invested: 3734)
[] 75% (Final Industrial Capacity: 2749, Output Invested: 2113)
[] 100% (Final Industrial Capacity: 2842, 10% chance of -Cohesion)

Next on the agenda, what do you want to build with your industrial surplus during the next five years?
(Mark the box for all options you approve of; priority decided by number of votes per option, up to three marks per box per voter)

Civilian Construction
[] Additional Habitats (default pop density 600/km^2)(select type)
-[] Basic Habitats (800 km^2 per invest, fragile, Penalizes Cohesion)
-[] Continent-Class Habitats (40 km^2 per invest, minimum cost: 236,000 invest, minimum size: 9.44 mil km^2)
(Locked, insufficient industrial capacity)
-[] Planetary-Class Habitats (2 km^2 per invest, fortified, minimum cost: 118 mil invest, minimum size: 236 mil km^2)
(Locked, insufficient industrial capacity)

[] Wormhole Production (1 cm^2 annually per invest; requires 100,000 pops to work it)

[] Civilian ships (select type)
-[] Freighter (Needs 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 113 invest, negligible crew)
-[] Liner (Needs 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 44 invest, 0.5 million crew)
-[] Construction Ship (Needs 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 127 invest, 2 million crew; has 5 Industrial Capacity)
-[] Explorer (Needs 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 11 invest, 1 million crew; has 1 Industrial Capacity)

[] Subsidized Wormhole (Find a natural black hole close to home, entangle it with a tiny one, send the light end elsewhere and pop it open, requires ship time)

[] Colonize a new star system! (Requires construction ships)
-[] Specify general details (Must be in the same galactic region)

Military Construction
[] Defense Skimmers (720 per invest)

[] Space Pocket Munitions Factory (unlocks Artillery Ships, unlocks Warp Torpedoes, needs: 10,000 cm^2 wormhole area, 80 invest, 2 million workers)

[] Warships (Select Type)
-[] Battleship (Requires 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 7 invest, 4 million crew)
--[] Include Warp Torpedoes (Locked, Requires Space Pocket Munitions Factory)
A solid brick of pure murder, a battleship sacrifices everything for the sake of combat capabilities. However, this comes at the cost of needing constant resupply.

-[] Battlecruiser (Requires 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 10 invest, 5 million crew)
--[] Include Warp Torpedoes (Locked, Requires Space Pocket Munitions Factory)
While close to a battleship in terms of combat capability, a battlecruiser has some minor compromises for the sake of logistical sustainability.

-[] Half Carrier (Requires 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 21 invest, 10 million crew)
--[] Include Warp Torpedoes (Locked, Requires Space Pocket Munitions Factory)
A versatile warship that brings a bit of everything to the table, Half-Carriers are well suited to independent operations patrolling the deep space between stars. However, they're much less useful in a major fleet engagement.

-[] Carrier (Requires 2 cm^2 wormhole area, 153 invest, 30 million crew)
--[] Include Warp Torpedoes (Locked, Requires Space Pocket Munitions Factory)
Purpose built to carry thousands of Skimmers into a combat theater, Carriers tend to hang back from the immediate line of combat if at all possible.

-[] Armed Logistics Cruiser (Requires 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 79 invest, 3 million crew)
An armed and armored freighter, ALCs are built to be the supply arm of a fleet, but retain the ability to defend themselves if needed. In addition, they also make great invasion ships when loaded with landing Skimmers.

-[] Minelayer (Requires 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 10 invest, 5 million crew)
Accelerating shrapnel shells to 0.2 c using an ergogun, the shots fired by a Minelayer are an excellent area denial tool.

-[] Artillery Ship (Locked, Requires Space Pocket Munitions Factory)
A weapon that flies faster than time, the miniaturized skip gates aboard these ships can launch a truly devastating payload across the battlespace in an instant if not interdicted.

-[] Irregular (Requires 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 120 invest, 2 million crew)
Also known as a pirate ship when in less savory hands, the only feature to recommend an Irregular is its ability to pass for a civilian ship at first glance.

Aside from your industrial planning, there's the matter of exploration. The Enterprise came home for a resupply recently, but the question of where else to explore (and what to send) is both still open and really quite important. After all, there's something incredibly weird going on in this galaxy and you want to know exactly what it is.

To that end, what ships will be sent exploring?
[] None, we're done exploring for now.
This will certainly have no negative consequences whatsoever.

[] Just the enterprise again.
Second score, same as before.

[] Refit the liners and send them too.
Or maybe send more?

The last issue on the agenda is what to do about the service sector crunch in the short term; your industrial growth has been amazing, but it's come with some serious troubles due to too much of your population being in industrial jobs at the moment. The long-term solution is of course to get more people and more room for said people, but the question remains of what to do in the meantime.

[] Do nothing (Blocked, No Soph Left Behind)
[] Ration Services (Blocked, No Soph Left Behind)
There are some things the people will not countenance.

[] Automate Vital Services
Adequate for routine troubles, but for anything complex you really want a person.

[] Overpopulate your habitats
Though your habitats aren't really designed for more, they can strictly speaking accommodate them.

[] Multi-task industrial workers
Through a complicated system of shift-juggling, mind-forking and second jobs you might just be able to make this work, though it risks burnout.

[] Understaff Industrial Operations
Though the burnout risk is minimized, this option risks an industrial accident of quite significant severity.

[] Write-In

 

Civ sheet updated

Your industrial buildup has had to slow down a bit so that your population can expand to match, but that's just a case of straightforward necessity. Churning out space habitats en masse has lead to your population more than doubling over the last five customary years.

Aside from that matter of extreme necessity, some industrial power was tasked to other matters. One of these matters was a respectable ship-building program for both the civilian and military sectors. As a result you now have access to a worthwhile trade, exploration, and combat fleet.

Other things that happened in the building things regard included the creation of a potentiated subsidized wormhole. You found a suitable black hole less than 500 light years from Journeyman's Lantern, entangled a feedstock singularity to it, and now you've got a wormhole you could open to anywhere you can send a ship.

The last buildy thing of note was sending your extant construction ship to establish a colony in a nearby star system named Wrele. There's a bit of a service sector crunch over there at the moment, but it's nowhere near as bad as it got in Journeyman's Lantern a while ago.

Speaking of the service sector crunch, it's... not really big news anymore. Reason being that about a year into the new industrial plan, an unidentified spacecraft about one and a half kilometers in length was spotted skulking around the outskirts of Journeyman's Lantern. A squadron of Skimmers was duly dispatched to investigate, approaching at 0.5c to make sure the new arrival could see them coming.

This apparently resulted in them being spooked quite badly, making hard burns with a reaction drive of unknown variety (???), transmitting garbled messages you still haven't made sense of before simply vanishing in a fuzz of radio static. Even stranger, the crew aboard the intercepting Skimmers are damn sure that those aboard the unidentified spacecraft weren't hostile, though they don't have any evidence to base that on.

Subsequent malware sweeps indicate that it was the analog parts of their cognition acting up in downright anomalous ways. The results are pretty clear: this universe has an unknown vector for information transmission, and it has something to do with analog computation. This represents a major security risk, and your scientists are currently trying to figure out how it works.

Anyway, continuing to talk about the elephant in the room, it's been four years since that first unidentified spacecraft appeared. Now a small fleet of about a hundred ships ranging in size from 500 meters to four kilometers has turned up a couple light hours out, and they're transmitting in radio (though you have no idea what the fuck their transmission standard is; if you had to guess it's designed to be partially based on those anomalous phenomena you don't know how to work with yet).

You still have no clue what they're actually saying and all the people doing direct talking are fully digital to avoid being a malware vector for the as of yet unknown phenomena involved in comms, but at the very least they seem talkative.

So, you've got yourselves a non-hostile first contact situation. First on the agenda, how do you want to deal with the fact that the new arrivals are four light hours out? There's a few different options here.

[] Let them come to you when they're comfy with it. Either that or they'll screw off when they get tired of the standoff.
[] Send a Skimmer with a comm hole to go talk to them; they've already seen you do this, so they should be a lot less likely to spook this time.
[] But what if you want to be scary? Skip a couple warships up next to them as a show of force.
[] Write-In

Secondly, there's the matter of actually talking to them. You still have no idea how to interpret their transmission standards (and you're guessing them likewise), so this has the potential to be quite troublesome.

[] flash prime numbers at the- This is stupid.

[] Try and establish a common transmission standard pidgin-style.
All of the unknowns' signal traffic so far has been analog, with no sign of digital infosystems.

[] Give them a package containing television receivers, cameras, and transmitters that work on a standard you know how to use (thoroughly sterilized of course). Then talk through that to figure each other out.
-[] Analog
-[] Digital
All of the unknowns' signal traffic so far has been analog, with no sign of digital infosystems.

[] Send a small shuttle full of negotiators to the fleet and try to "ask" permission to come aboard one of their ships.

[] Write-In (Hostile actions are not on the table at this time)

Anyway, once you've figured out how to talk to them, what are the top priority things you want to talk about?
This section uses priority voting; mark all boxes of interest, [xxx] = high priority, [xx] = medium priority, [x] = low priority
[] Their origins
[] Your origins
[] Anomalous signals
[] Technological differences
[] What they want
[] Territorial claims
[] Culture
[] Other known civilizations
[] Write-In

 

It takes approximately eight hours for your interface Skimmer to reach the alien fleet. They shift into what's clearly a defensive formation during the approach, but they notably do not either flee or open fire. Similarly, their radiators remain at the dull infrared glow indicative of a power plant operating at a fraction of its normal output. They start to maneuver a bit when the Skimmer comes within a few light minutes, but they largely stop once your Skimmer comes to a halt about a light second out.

After that, you immediately get to broadcasting an extremely rudimentary transmission standard: monochrome analog TV, 30 Hz frame rate, 600 scan lines of image; AM radio broadcasting at 1.5 MHz for audio.

What follows is several hours of incomprehensible signals traffic between the alien ships, before finally they transmit their own analog television signal back, though theirs has a 90 Hz framerate, 1000 scan lines of image, and tetrachromat color. Figuring that it would be vastly more convenient to use a standard they evidently already have equipment for you simply switch over to their standard.

What greets you is a (heavily color-distorted no doubt) image of approximately four aliens crowding around a desk. Rapidly adjusting the color encoding using physics extrapolated from the lighting in the room, you resolve the picture more clearly. They're covered in fur ranging in color from a dark brown to a light tan, each with four eyes and a pair of evidently prehensile tails.

On your part you make no attempt to hide your diversity; the room where you've got your front-line negotiators are in has one blatant robospider synthmorph, a kitsunoid, a dragon-morph, and an avian. All currently using entirely digital brains at the moment of course.

On the part of the aliens, they seem to startle when they learn just how fast you swapped to their transmission standard. Which is very interesting, as it seems to imply they aren't quite used to this sort of rapid general-purpose computational capability.

What follows is several hours of charades and attempting to talk with each other as you try and assemble a common language. There are several missteps along the way, and if anything the sheer speed at which you're picking up how to talk to them is unnerving them more. But you want to get this part over with and they're already a bit spooked, so the massive supercomputer array crunching all this stuff in the background it is.

Anyway, once you've figured out how to talk to each other, it's time for the mutual barrage of questions about culture, what each of you want, and several other topics.

Anyway, re(ve)lations aside, that now brings to mind a few major considerations.

First off, hyperspace/psionics research. This is obviously an absolute must, but there are a few different possible angles to approach it from.

(A/N: All of these options have some possibility of working, but the odds vary)
[] Perspective: Metric Engineering (Try and figure out how to distort spacetime to access hyperspace)
Distorting spacetime is well-understood science, perhaps an extension of that could be used to access hyperspace?

[] Perspective: Computational (Figure out what computational operations generate psionic effects)
We already have some lead into the anomalous operations behind psionics; starting there makes sense.

[] Perspective: Physics (High-Energy Physics Experiments)
Our models of physics need revisions to account for hyperspace; time to break out the particle accelerators.

[] Perspective: Unfocused (Try all of the above, but with less resources for each)
Restricting our inquiries to only a single avenue seems foolish.

Another important question regards diplomatic contact with the Valindir Republic. You know where they are relative to you and they'd be fairly easy to reach. The catch is that blatantly driving a Voidskipper up onto their lawn would attract a large amount of attention that they'd probably not appreciate. So, how do you want to handle keeping in contact with them?

[] Let them come to you for now; they're doubtless going to do it eventually.
You'd rather not, to be honest.

[] They still haven't quite left yet; ask them to bring a comm hole back with them.
Though the most covert option for contact, this does divulge the existence of wormhole technology.

[] Park a half-carrier outside one of their systems and visit via Skimmer.
Yes it will draw comment, but less than blatantly arriving in a ship larger than some habs.
[] Fuck it, go drive a Voidskipper up on their front lawn, subtlety can die in a fire.
There is something to be said for a basic policy of openness.

[] Write-In

There's also the matter of the Valindir's neighbors, who... aren't great based on the descriptions you were told. Do you want to contact them at the present time?

[] No
Contacting these people is not in our interests at the present time

[] Covertly (Try and infiltrate them without cluing them in to your existence)
Some of these people seem horrible. If we could just set off a coup or revolution before talking to them...

[] Yes
-[] don't just cruise right up in a Voidskipper
-[] do just cruise right up in a Voidskipper
Look, they're going to find out eventually.

The last major note is the fate of the Enterprise; when initially fitted for exploration, she was simply the only ship available that was even remotely suitable for the job. However now you have an entire fleet of ships purpose-built for the task, leaving the Enterprise rather obsolete in this role. So, what should be the fate of the Enterprise?

[] Continue exploring
though the ship is unsuited for the role, Enterprise's crew is the most skilled batch of explorers you've got.

[] Send the Enterprise back in time (You aren't getting the ship back; crew can return via mindcast)
This galaxy is incredibly weird. Perhaps inspecting the past up close and personal would be in order?

All of the following options will transfer the name and crew (shipmind included) of Enterprise to a new Explorer hull.

[] Recycle the old freighter for parts (+50 industrial output this turn, NOW pair recovered)
Scrap, I tell ye

[] Return the hull to cargo service
Fundamentally, that's still a freighter hull under all the modifications

[] Preserve the Enterprise as a museum ship (???)
This ship is of great historical importance to the Wayfarers, both for her role during the migration, and for her subsequent exploration career.

[] Write-In

Oh, anything you want to do with that subsidized wormhole you made? You can open the light end of that thing to anywhere you want (after some shipping time) and use it to ship entire solar masses of materials back through.

[] Don't bother for now.
Waiting is a perfectly respectable course of action

[] Trade/Give it to the Valindir
But why though?

[] The galactic core
Close by, convenient, accessible if anything goes wrong

[] Another Galaxy
You know, a place to strip mine that isn't full of neighbors could be a neat opportunity

[] Another Timeline
The last word in "Don't fuck with my mining operations": putting them in a forked timeline

Industrial Plan

Anyway, it's time to decide on the plan for what to make during the next five customary years.

Spoiler: Journeyman's Lantern

Primary: Orange Dwarf
Metallicity: Rich
Total exploitable mass: 0.86 M☉
Mass Accessible W/O Starlifting: 0.0008 M☉
Mass Exploited: Negligible

Industrial Capacity: 1576
Wormhole Production: 1776 cm^2 annually, NOW capable.
Basic Habitat Area: 3,068,000 km^2
Population: 1,840,800,000

Employment
-Industrial: 472,800,000 (26%)
--Wormhole: 177,600,000 (10%)
-Military: 210,936,000 (11%)
-Logistics: 41,500,000 ( 2% )
-Service Sector: 753,964,000 (41%)
-Non-Working: ~184,000,000 (10%)

Spoiler: Wrele

Primary: Red Dwarf
Metallicity: Rich
Total Exploitable Mass: 0.33 M☉
Mass accessible without starlifting: 0.0005 M☉

Industrial Capacity: 1
Wormhole Production: 0
Basic Habitat Area: 800 km^2
Population: 480,000

Employment
Labor Pool: 432,000
Industrial: 300,000 (62.5%)
Service Sector: 132,000 (27.5%)(minor service sector crunch)

First and foremost, you need to decide growth levels.

Journeyman's Lantern
[] 0% (Final Industrial Capacity: 1576, Invested Output: 7880)
[] 25% (Final Industrial Capacity: 2134, Invested Output: 6696)
[] 50% (Final Industrial Capacity: 2840, Invested Output: 5056)
[] 75% (Final Industrial Capacity: 3722, Invested Output: 2793)
[] 100% (Locked; insufficient pops for new jobs)

Wrele
(Error: only one Industrial Capacity!)

This section uses priority voting; mark all boxes of interest, [xxx] = high priority, [xx] = medium priority, [x] = low priority

Where should your Construction Ships be allocated?
[] Journeyman's Lantern
[] Wrele
[] New System (Write-In)

Civilian Construction

[] Additional Habitats (default pop density 600/km^2)(select type)
-[] Basic Habitats (800 km^2 per invest, fragile, Penalizes Cohesion)
-[] Continent-Class Habitats (40 km^2 per invest, minimum cost: 236,000 invest, minimum size: 9.44 mil km^2)
(Locked, insufficient industrial capacity)
-[] Planetary-Class Habitats (2 km^2 per invest, fortified, minimum cost: 118 mil invest, minimum size: 236 mil km^2)
(Locked, insufficient industrial capacity)

[] Prefabs (Prefabs are a 50/50 mix of Industrial Capacity and Basic Habs by investment, packed up for shipping and assembled on site for 5% the normal construction cost; this overrides any other production in the destination system. Prefabs are automatically produced in your most developed star systems and shipped to your least developed (limited by freight capacity). Prefabs do take one year to assemble after shipping, so you can't assemble literally infinite industrial prefabs.)

[] Wormhole Production (1 cm^2 annually per invest; requires 100,000 pops to work it)

[] Civilian ships (select type)
-[] Freighter (Needs 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 113 invest, negligible crew)
-[] Liner (Needs 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 44 invest, 0.5 million crew)
-[] Construction Ship (Needs 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 127 invest, 2 million crew; has 5 Industrial Capacity)
-[] Explorer (Needs 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 11 invest, 1 million crew; has 1 Industrial Capacity)

[] Subsidized Wormhole (Find a natural black hole close to home, entangle it with a tiny one, send the light end elsewhere and pop it open, requires ship time)(Locked, you still haven't decided what to do with the one you've got!)


Military Construction
[] Defense Skimmers (720 per invest)

[] Space Pocket Munitions Factory (unlocks Artillery Ships, unlocks Warp Torpedoes, needs: 10,000 cm^2 wormhole area, 80 invest, 2 million workers)

[] Warships (Select Type)
-[] Battleship (Requires 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 7 invest, 4 million crew)
--[] Include Warp Torpedoes (Locked, Requires Space Pocket Munitions Factory)
A solid brick of pure murder, a battleship sacrifices everything for the sake of combat capabilities. However, this comes at the cost of needing constant resupply.

-[] Battlecruiser (Requires 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 10 invest, 5 million crew)
--[] Include Warp Torpedoes (Locked, Requires Space Pocket Munitions Factory)
While close to a battleship in terms of combat capability, a battlecruiser has some minor compromises for the sake of logistical sustainability.

-[] Half Carrier (Requires 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 21 invest, 10 million crew)
--[] Include Warp Torpedoes (Locked, Requires Space Pocket Munitions Factory)
A versatile warship that brings a bit of everything to the table, Half-Carriers are well suited to independent operations patrolling the deep space between stars. However, they're much less useful in a major fleet engagement.

-[] Carrier (Requires 2 cm^2 wormhole area, 153 invest, 30 million crew)
--[] Include Warp Torpedoes (Locked, Requires Space Pocket Munitions Factory)
Purpose built to carry thousands of Skimmers into a combat theater, Carriers tend to hang back from the immediate line of combat if at all possible.

-[] Armed Logistics Cruiser (Requires 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 79 invest, 3 million crew)
An armed and armored freighter, ALCs are built to be the supply arm of a fleet, but retain the ability to defend themselves if needed. In addition, they also make great invasion ships when loaded with landing Skimmers.

-[] Minelayer (Requires 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 10 invest, 5 million crew)
Accelerating shrapnel shells to 0.2 c using an ergogun, the shots fired by a Minelayer are an excellent area denial tool.

-[] Artillery Ship (Locked, Requires Space Pocket Munitions Factory)
A weapon that flies faster than time, the miniaturized skip gates aboard these ships can launch a truly devastating payload across the battlespace in an instant if not interdicted.

-[] Irregular (Requires 1 cm^2 wormhole area, 120 invest, 2 million crew)
Also known as a pirate ship when in less savory hands, the only feature to recommend an Irregular is its ability to pass for a civilian ship at first glance.