ops has in the game design forum posted a turn based strategic design. this is the backstory that fleshes out that design. our main problem was in constructing any rationale at all for people to live in space let alone visit othr stellar systems. ------ by the late 2200's the climate crunch has left earth visibly the worst for wear and homo sapiens considerably sobered. Time Line By 2027 - eleet corpratz evolve the tech to mine the belt, build fifty person workforce habitats and low earth orbit factories. 2042 - scarcity of hydrocarbons castrates the american world order. advanced oil based agricultures and militaries collapse, populations forcibly relocated from cities to the agricultural sector. eleet corpratz flee to orbit. the chinese assume the title of world superpower. climactic chaos forces the adoption of an authoritarian secular confucian world state. 'earthgov'. earthgov is slowly able to effectively abate climate change and resources scarcities by capitalising and subsidising the corpratz to develop the tech to relocate what industry is left to space. with the asteroids nd joveSpace for materials and earth as the marketplace. population 4.15 billion peasants, cadre and corpratz and still slowly dropping. 2124 - godel's bootstrap. the discovery by corpratz scavengers at phobos of an ancient wrecked human ship isotopically dated to be from about 2700. within five years yielded the fusion power plant. that, however, only worked in orbit and free space where gravitational densities were low. it became very efficient to transfer industry, materials production, a workforce and its logistical supplies of biological necessities to orbital platforms scattered across sol system. the corpratz were real happy to get all of sol system to play in. 2156 an earthgov research team finally teases the secret of the wrecks ftl drive from clues in the fusion plant. ... the ftl effect is by no means an ideal technology. it can only be turned on. while in ftl 'space' ship systems are effectively non functional and crew forced to drug themselves insensate for entropically measured weeks. A ship only exits the effect when it moves through/encounters a sufficiently powerful gravitic field. the lower the local gravitic density the less power required. using fusion energy sources the most efficient economic solutions exist at radii typically two to three times larger than the orbit of the stellar systems outer planet. where there is a more intense gravitic environment, such as insystem, only massive military vessels can afford the power. even these, though they attain massive inertialess delta v's, can only can only partially shift and only for brief periods of time. navigation is precise enough that with enough calculations a ship can pick it's exit as any point at any sublight velocity on the surface of a volume that is defined by the target systems gravitational field. FTL 'velocity' is approximately ten entropic realtime subjective days per light year. Sublight transits, turnaround times measured in multiple weeks and months. Practical ranges are limited by imperfect interstellar scanning/observational techniques and the physiological consequences of the FTL effect. ... due to technical and political considerations ftl technology is supressed until earthgov funds the mapping of feasible transits using fast sublight mapping drones. Possible Game starts mid 2100's – players begin begin w sub light fusion powrd transits. mid 2200's - earthgov begins licensing ftl rights and routes to the corpratz. all systems within twenty light year radius. of the systems surveyed no biologically active stellar systems found. all systems contain enough resources to sustain any degree of material exploitation for hundreds of earth years. 2284 - 2303 earthgov completes sixty four massive military vessels and forcibly capitalises the voluntary deportation of sixty percent of the remaining corpratz barbarians to interstellar exile. Game Over .. New Game begins. 2454 - in the end, earthgov discovered and suppressed many amazing technologies in it's successful mission to restore and maintain the earth's biosphere and indeed homo sapiens. It did not however invent time travel. Through some theretofore unpredicted glitch the fusion plant of a lowest class ftl capable naked 'spine' somewhere in earth orbit sundered space time. The spine went back .. way back ... way way back to mars orbit in the aforementioned 4900 b.c. this event, like a futuristic neutron bomb, totally wiped out all evolved life in the unsuspecting biosphere below leaving nought but the undamaged archives and artefacts. Now all the suppressed tech is out and free for the taking, if you can decrypt and research fast enough, in the desperate race to survive in the big lonely without.

There are many interesting aspects to your timeline, but I must confess that although I am your target audience I am 100% turned off by the "eleet speak." Coupled with the third person schtick, it makes the post difficult to assimilate.


That's not the sort of feedback I normally give to anyone, but I thought you should know that it was severe enough for me to think it worth giving you a head's up.