The Internal Security Department manages all aspects of security aboard an Explorer. In a 24 hour period, a security officer is expected to juggle his duties between leisure time, passive duty and active duty. While on Passive Duty, the security officer is on standby, expected to be available for duty quickly. They will constantly receive…
Category: Game Design
Progress and updates on the game design process.
Religion in the far future…
This came in to the jabber channel from Aidan at an opportune moment. Religion survives in Frontier, writing about it now.
Life on the Frontier
An Explorer ship can expect to be out of touch for more than two years at a stretch with only the most infrequent contact with other Explorers or with urgent messages delivered by fast-transfer Wormhole-capable ships. Due to the distances involved, direct EM transmission is simply not practical. Longer periods of time with no contact…
Wormholes
Unknown to most, Wormholes are naturally occurring tunnels through space. They allow, through the use of sophisticated detection and navigation equipment, travel from one end of the wormhole to the other and may conceivably be of any length. The problem that they must be discovered not created lends a peculiar topology to the universe. Mapped…
A Visit to Kumbu
There are various periods in Humanity’s history that can be legitimately called “The Dark Ages”. Any period where there is a lack of records represents the unknown. The period of Earth’s history two millennia ago was perhaps our darkest hour as records show that our advancement of knowledge not only slowed but crawled backwards and…
Ajinabi
We were startled by our uniqueness. The first Explorer craft took the time to catalog everything they encountered, well aware that it would be scratching the surface of the biosphere’s they encountered. Their samples, akin to descending on Luxembourg and taking that small nation as the representative sample of Earth, were recorded, preserved, ferried to…
Trade Talk: Tales of Sol
There is a world, twelve pipes from here, where the people are soft and covered in a very fine fur, from top to bottom. At first glance, they all look very alike except for pigmentation but some grow their fur longer or shorter in accordance with their religion. They are descended from animals who walked…
The Ant Hill
Swarm Intelligences were prevalent on Earth in the form of social insect colonies long before we encountered the Ant Hill. We knew that a set of relatively primitive individual behaviors enhanced with communication will produce a large set of complex swarm behaviors. This observation was instrumental in producing NIPS (NanoIntelligent Protection Systems) and our understanding…
The American Dream
It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it. – George Carlin The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now. -J….
Aliens: The Snakes of Rist
Rist is an Earth-like planet orbiting a yellow star. Astrogation has not yet pinpointed the location of the system. Explorer craft are free to enter the system but are not permitted to contact or send exploratory missions to Rist or the other planets without expressed permission from the Rist governments. This permission has never been…
The Conquest Society
The planetary solar system around HO Librae (also known as Gliese 581) was discovered in CE 2007, several hundred years ago. At the time we knew very little about planet formation because we were limited to what we could observe within our own solar systems In 2214, during the wane of the Conquest era, a…
Other Intelligences
Throughout the Universe, Human Unity has encountered many forms of intelligences, from the surviving cetaceans (Dolphins) and cephalopods (octopuses) of Earth to the snake-like overminds encountered near Rist. Our society weathered our first contact with the Traders, those unfathomable aliens who gave us our first stepladder to the stars and thus was amply prepared for…
Strange New Worlds
I’ve been reading a lot more recently and kinda enjoying the low-tech aspect of it. It doesn’t require batteries, works in almost any light and gives more of a sense of achievement than scouring digg and reddit for interesting links. Last week, Aidan and I were discussing unresolved physics problems as well as discussing our…
Space is vast, dark and cold.
National Geographic’s Top 10 Space Pics of 2007 Breathtaking stuff. Inspiring too.
The Golden Age of Retro-Future
From Dark Roasted Blend: This is the start of a new series, collection of the most inspiring & hard-to-find retro-futuristic graphics. We will try to stay away from the well-known American pulp & book cover illustrations and instead will focus on the artwork from rather unlikely sources: Soviet & Eastern Bloc “popular tech & science”…
For Reference: Heroin
A few months ago I came across a great article on the IntarWeb about the origin, trafficking and “business” of Heroin which went into great detail about how it was the main product of the East India Trading Company and how the British exported heroin in vast quantities to China and not the other way…
Fiction: Why the UK avoids the space race
BBC News Link: The UK’s decision to shun human spaceflight was a mistake that needs to be changed, says Europe’s International Space Station programme chief … Alan Thirkettle, a Brit who left the country to head European Space Agency (Esa) projects. … “The UK has a long and noble tradition for exploration across our planet….
Aliens
When you’re lying awake in the night and dreaming new dreams about far off places and alien races, in science fiction and fantasy, and you think it might be easy to invent something new. No. A few years ago, some of us tried to write a science fiction background which included some elements from sci-fi…
I bought a book today…
…entirely because it was illustrated and designed exactly the way I want Q to be paid out. I spent a few minutes leafing through it and in my minds eye transposed the text and art to that which I envision for Q. Looking over my Q notes the other day reminded me of the parts…