Synopsis
Somewhere in a galaxy across the universe, a separate, but identical species to Earth's Humans has developed into a thriving society, stemming from a planet known as Valus. This galaxy is technically nameless, as those within it believe it to be a part of their own identity, and so refer to it as "Our Home". Humanity has spread out amongst the stars of this galaxy, and has many settlements scattered across most of the suitable Earthlike planets, as well as thousands upon thousands of space stations, orbital colonies, and asteroid habitats.
Faster-Than-Light travel exists in the form of great Interstellar Gate Stations. These gate stations maintain a spacial distortion linking two places, and are generally truly massive toroidal structures measuring in the tens of kilometers across, each of which houses millions upon millions of people. Smaller Gate Stations exist as well, linking major hubs of commerce together within solar systems.
Humanity has split into a number of subspecies as the result of genetic modification which, although illegal in the Old Valus Alliance, was nigh impossible to police on account of the vast distances involved. As a result, the galaxy is split roughly in half, and is in a constant state of tension and minor conflict, after the Neo-Valusian Confederation declared independence from the Old Valus Alliance in an attempt to protect their metahuman friends, and a number of major bombings occurring across the newly created border on both sides. Each side claims the other side shot first.
With the constant skirmishing and the looming threat of genocidal warfare breaking out, though, there is much profit to be had, and a group of rogues has gathered together to pool their funds and purchase a ship. It's not a very good ship, but it can haul cargo, and it's relatively lightly armed.
Tech levels are relatively near-future, but with warpgate technology and extremely efficient ion thrusters and fusion reactors, which provide nearly free energy. FTL Communications also exist, relying on micro-wormhole tech.
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The Old Valus Alliance
The Old Valus Alliance claims to be a "Democracy", but is closer to Fascism.
The citizens are kept happy by a set of laws regarding workplace safety and ethics, as well as the OVA encouraging private weapons ownership. Most citizens of the OVA go armed, and the general consensus is that were they to want to revolt, they could do so successfully - though this isn't exactly correct. Because the OVA is a corrupt government run on bribery and lobbying, the upper echelons of society are the true rulers of the nation, and were the peasants to revolt, it would take a mere snap of their fingers to halt all shipping and manufacturing in the OVA, thus starving the populace into submission.
Most profitable activities are legal, save for those which actively harm citizens, like scamming and assassination, although those too are permitted if one holds the right permits.
The OVA prefers a relative lack of public education outside of the core worlds, and most universities are privatized, leading to a relatively conservative and deeply religious society (as an educated population is generally less adept at building new settlements and procuring resources, as well as more likely to correctly identify the OVA as something other than a giver of freedom). Witch hunting is common in the fringe worlds, and most settlers are afraid of anything they would deem to be "Magic". Because of this, popular opinion is against genetic modification, and metahumans are considered to be "Abominations" - and the OVA is perfectly fine with this, because they can offer bounties on metahumans' heads.
Within recent years, the increases in activity amongst Neo-Valusian privateers have wreaked havoc upon the OVA's shipping industry, causing the less developed settlements to go without necessary supplies like food and medicine. To combat this plague of piracy, the OVA has implemented a Bounty Board, rather than increase military and police presence. The Bounty Board permits citizens to place a contract on any known criminal ship, provided there is even a smidgen of evidence of their guilt. There is a tax of 5% placed on bounty payouts, but the tax is waived for all known Metahumans.
OVA warships are slow, moderately shielded, and have enormous frontal firepower. The OVA uses enormous quantities of AI-controlled drone fighters to supplement their warships.
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The Neo-Valusian Confederation
One hundred years ago, the OVA's ban on genetic modification and the mandated executions of Metahumans, combined with a lack of police presence in fringe worlds, led to a rift in society in one section of the galaxy. Metahumans coalesced from across the galaxy into an area rumored to be friendly to them, and the OVA refused to take action, considering these rumors to be a "vicious lie, intended to hurt the reputation of our police force".
Settlers of the original worlds, in their hatred of these "abominations", attacked the Metahumans, who, being on average much stronger, successfully fended off the attack and ran the settlers offworld. As more metahumans gathered together, more local fringe worlds were populated, and more OVA settlers fled back to the other side of the galaxy in fear for their lives. The OVA eventually took the threat seriously and began amassing warships to put down these disastrous occurrences, but it was too late - what would later become the NVC preempted them and took control of the warpgates that connected one half of the galaxy to the other, closing them for their own safety.
Decades later, an FTL communications burst crossed the galaxy from the dark sections to the OVA's core worlds, carrying a declaration of independence, and the warpgates reopened, with a promise of trade and prosperity.
The NVC's government is a genuine democracy, with very little corruption, but given the lack of time since its inception, most of the laws are localized to individual settlements and worlds, with only a few major federal laws in place to protect citizens and the economy. As such, it's much less structured and more varied than the OVA. Each settlement makes a point, though, of maintaining excellent infrastructure and public resources, including single-payer healthcare systems and public education.
When shots rang out, destroying a number of settlements along the edges of the border between the NVC and the OVA on both sides, each party blamed the other, and politicians have been clamoring to prevent a full-scale war from breaking out. The NVC, in an attempt to discourage the OVA from amassing sufficient resources to undertake a large scale invasion, hired privateers to pirate goods being traded within the OVA. The OVA, in response, did the same, sending their own privateers to cause mayhem within the NVC.
Like the OVA, the NVC took measures to prevent piracy. Unlike the OVA, it was not in the form of a taxable bounty board, but rather in the form of regular military patrols along major trade routes, and police scanning of traffic between minor trade routes.
NVC warships are fast and heavily shielded, with guns mounted in all directions. The NVC recruits and trains metahuman fighter pilots with above-average reflexes.
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The Current Ship
The Mudskipper - Ship ID OVA-1B18M823196
An enormously hideous (as well as enormous) metal brick, measuring fifty meters in length and twenty meters in height and width. At one point it had been painted brown, but much of the paint has been charred or torn by interstellar gases and dust, or by the previous crew flying too close to the sun to make a deadline. The previous crew was "evicted", or so the seller said. Come to think of it, the seller of the ship never showed his face, and seemed to be in a serious hurry to be rid of it. Most likely stolen by a space pirate band. Most of the old crew's stuff is still in the ship, including a few blackened bones lying around between the machinery, where the cleanup crew wasn't able to reach.
The previous log entry reads "Distress beacon source located. A pair of small fighter craft, engines dead. Borf has the cargo bay doors open and is trying to dock them, and McConnel is on-site with his equipment in case anyone is hurt."
The ship was amazingly cheap. It's extremely cheap on the market normally, because it's pretty much just a giant steel box with thrusters strapped on, but this one was even cheaper on account of its having been violently boarded in the past.
The crew quarters take up the frontal ten meters of the ship, and are a four-story complex with a fair number of undecorated bedrooms. There is a bathroom on each floor, but only the bottom floor has showers, of which there are two in separate rooms. Most of the flooring is thin metal grating, but the bedrooms are separated by a proper floor for privacy.
A communal kitchen is on the third level, with space for a fairly big table. Air conditioning and radiators are in each room, and they look as though they were ripped straight out of Old Reckoning 1970. The doors are, for the most part, just hanging sheets of ragged fabric, at the moment.
There's a septic tank and a water filtration system on the bottom floor, with a compost bin. It smells amazingly bad, and it's recommended that one holds their nose on the way to the shower. The smell wafts up through the floor grating to the second floor.
The top floor is where all of the electronic systems are, including the pilot's seat, and the gunnery control computers. Diagnostic charts are scattered throughout the ship, including in the bathrooms, so the engineers are kept appraised of the ship's status no matter how badly they want to take down time.
Weapons:
3x Rockhopper Industries ACX-100 Canister Guns, mounted to the craft's Bottom, Left, and Right sides.
-4km/s muzzle velocity
-Open or Closed Canister settings, fully automatic.
--Open Canister fires a spread of pellets
--Closed Canister fires the entire canister, which then fires the spread of pellets forwards on impact with a valid target
-500CR per 100mm canister. Common ammunition, purchasable at any outpost.
1x Rockhopper Industries LL-200 Beam Cannon, mounted to the ship's top.
-Instant impact
-1000km maximum range
-Free, but costs electrical power to fire
Systems
Rockhopper Industries SM1 Shielding Module
-Protects from miniscule impacts with small space debris, but not much beyond that.
Rockhopper Industries SG1 Fusion Generator
-Can fuel the small shield module, thrusters, and beam cannon constantly, but the air conditioning shorts out any time you fire all three at once. It's kinda a piece of junk and is prone to breaking every so often, but it's easy enough to fix.
2x Rockhopper Industries MT1 Vectoring Thrusters
-Pretty reasonable acceleration for its size, but gets sluggish with heavy cargo.
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Character Creation
Character Sheet:
Please detail your character as the other characters in the group would see them, rather than how they genuinely are. Secret personality aspects are good.
Keep it human, for the most part. Cybernetic prosthetics are permitted, and metahumans aren't remotely supernatural - they're mostly just tweaks of muscle mass, reflexes, etc., but they come with the side effect of not being fertile, and they tend to lack secondary sex characteristics.
Post your character sheet in OOC so I can accept or deny it. If I deny a character sheet, I'll tell you why via PM so you have the chance to edit it. When accepted, please post your character sheet in the Characters Tab.
Current Crew and their Positions
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Rules and Regulations
GM is God. You piss off the GM, the fusion reactor explodes and everyone dies. Even if you're nowhere near the ship.
If your character dies, you can replace them, but working them into the story will require PMing me.
If the entire crew and/or ship gets killed because of a stupid decision, the GM can warp the universe to the crew being in a different time and location, with no knowledge of the chain of events that led to their deaths - any active jobs during character death will be swapped with a suitable alternative.
Romance is accepted, but keep it PG-13 and fade to black. Keep in mind, though, that in crappy ships, other characters can usually hear what your characters get up to through the walls and floors.
We'll be using a chat system to keep the roleplay flowing. Collaborative posts are the name of the game, here, because dialogue is clunky without other characters' input. Which chat system it is is up for debate. We can discuss that here in the OOC post.
If you have ideas for a plot or a random occurrence, please PM me. Space might be empty, but we're taking artistic license here to make it seem less-so.
Initial characters all pooled their money to buy a junk freighter, so nobody has their own ship. We're all on this boat together, for the time being. Later characters may come with their own equipment.
Purchasing property is acceptable. Just check local marketplaces. Space stations, extra spacecraft, parts, etc. are all for sale, in addition to normal commodities.
If you're inactive for an event, I'll just list your character as being on ship cleaning duty or something.
I will be attempting to post once per day or every other day, and I would prefer if everyone involved posted at least every other day, if not more often. I'd like some involvement in whatever chat group we decide to use.
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