zarpaulus

I've been working on this setting for over a decade now and I'm making a lot of progress on an RPG using the Cepheus system right now.

I thought I might share a broad overview of the setting's history that I wrote up for the RPG.

Timeline:
Most calendars in Parahuman Space are oriented around the launch of the first parahuman-built starship as the start of the exodus from the clade’s system of origin, Sol. On the Georgian calendar the year 0 Post Exodus (PX) would be in the early 22nd century AD. So the Federation would be founded in the 32nd century AD and collapse in the 45th century, or roughly the year 4600 AD.
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The large-scale multi-ship battles seen occasionally in interplanetary warfare are almost unheard of when the combatants are located in entirely different star systems. The main reason is simply the orders of magnitude difference in travel time and cost. Starships using reaction drives require many cubic kilometers of reaction mass just to get up to the speeds where ramscoops are effective, while gravity and warp drives require unfathomable amounts of energy and matter just to build.

Therefore, would-be interstellar invaders tend to adopt one of two strategies: The WMD approach is usually only effective against technologically inferior opponents, but if they pull it off a single starship can conquer a star. A G-Drive ship can dance around a fleet of reaction ships, slicing them to ribbons without even taking a hit, while even the least r-drive starship is a colossus compared to system ships. The power of their drives, combined with the purpose-built weapons that civilizations capable of building starships can design, means that almost any starship can lay waste to a defenseless star system in a matter of weeks.

Of course, if the invaders want to capture the biosphere intact (which most do, as it tends to be the most valuable part of a star system), they can’t simply throw nukes and c-bombs everywhere. Which means that the ship’s crew has to negotiate the tricky task of persuading the local governments to surrender with minimal devastation. Even if they succeed in this task, the resulting political arrangements tend not to last long. The elites and masses of such worlds tend to resent “quisling” leaders and efforts to depose them are soon to follow.
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One of the most important, but divisive, features of a science fiction setting is space travel. It determines the scope of the story, where the characters can go and how easily. Realistically, space travel is very difficult and expensive, but in many stories one can commute from one end of the galaxy to another. Space travel might as well be magic the way it is presented in those stories.

Now magic systems have been debated six ways to Sunday, they’re a highly contentious issue among writers. They’ve been unofficially classified into “hard” and “soft” magic systems, with advocates for both and neither. Since the terms “hard and soft” already have their own baggage in sci-fi, we’ll use the terms “defined” and “open” instead.

Like hard and soft magic systems, defined and open space travel exists on a spectrum rather than a binary. The more defined a space travel system is, the more limitations are imposed on the system and the fewer opportunities the writer has to introduce something unexpected. While a more open a system is the fewer established limitations there are and the more potential there is to introduce new features.

In longer-running franchises space travel might become more defined or open as characters experiment with FTL or new writers introduce new ideas. As an example, Star Trek’s warp drive was initially rather open but the writers established a speed limit while also leaving the possibility open for introducing faster methods of travel. This made the story of Voyager possible, a precursor system transported the Voyager to the far side of the galaxy, where they had to rely on the speed-limited warp drive or find a new way to get home.
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Entries tagged with worldbuilding

The History of Parahuman Space

Interstellar Warfare

How FTL is Intertwined with Worldbuilding

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