Sci-Fi Worldbuilding: United Solar Alliance

Sci-Fi Worldbuilding: United Solar Alliance

But where are the humans in the setting? Time to answer this question, at least partially. I decided that the humans will have a loose alliance instead of one big empire to make them more diverse. Within the United Solar Alliance one can find worlds under a despotic militaristic rule, democratic federations, theocracies, eugenic cults, and many other types of government, culture, religion, etc. I left many of the details vague on purpose, so the players could make up their own culture.

United Solar Alliance

Capital World: Sol V-III (Ganymede).

Major Species: Humans.

Languages: English, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, other.

Culture Groups: Lunar, Martian, Jovian, Titanean, Outer Solar Colonies, other.

TL: 10.

When humans resolved most of their internal conflicts and united under the tyrannical rule of the United Earth Hegemony in the year 2120, the space travel technologies started to develop more quickly. Humans built colonies on the Moon and Mars, built habitable stations on Jupiter’s moons, and started asteroid mining.

In the year 2176, an asteroid fell on Earth and decreased its population by 70%. This catastrophe caused the hegemon Carl IV to evacuate, but lunar rebels shot down his ship. The survivors were transferred to extraterrestrial colonies, as Earth became uninhabitable without life support systems. This caused most of the colonies to revolt. Panlunar Consortium, Martian Republic and Jovian Federation became the most powerful factions of the Sol system.

In the year 2190, a probe sent by the Jovian Federation found an artificial structure on one of Neptune’s moons – Proteus. After a more thorough investigation, it became clear that this was a disabled by the passage of time robotic mining station of some unknown civilization. This station was built for mining of a previously unknown mineral (later named “proteanium”), that had some perplexing properties. This mining station, dubbed by the scientists as FOSCS – First One-Sided Contact Station (and the creators of FOSCS were named by the scientists as FOSCSO – First One-Sided Contact Station Owners, later this acronym became a normal term “foscso” used to refer to these unknown aliens), had a derelict alien cargo spaceship. After some research of this new mineral and reverse engineering of some of the alien spaceship’s systems, the scientists managed to construct the first human-made artificial gravity generator powered by proteanium. This breakthrough made possible the manufacturing of the first reactionless drive (“Proteus drive”) and made space travel more safe and available. Later a relatively large deposit of proteanium was found on Enceladus.

Thus, the Jovian Federation became the dominant power in Sol system, because it controlled the only known sources of proteanium in the whole system. All the major factions later united under the name of the United Solar Alliance (or USA for short) with the seat of power on Ganymede.

It took twenty-three years for the first interstellar colony ship to reach the nearby Alpha system. Thus, Colony Alpha was founded in the year 2223, and USA became an interstellar faction. Forty years later, in 2263, Colony Beta was built in the same system. The main purpose of these colonies was the search of proteanium deposits in extrasolar systems. Traces of this mineral were found in the Alpha system, but it was much less than expected.

Still, the technology marched on, and, in the year 2269, the first FTL drive was developed. At first it was named just a “hyperdrive”, because it functioned just like some science fiction writers predicted – it shifted the ship into another dimension, where the laws of physics were altered, and thus permitted faster-than-light travel. Later this invention became better known as the “Rosenstein drive”, named after the inventor. Rosenstein drive marked the beginning of a new era in USA history and permitted the USA to grow massive.

In the year 2275, USA made the first contact with a non-extinct alien species. An exploration ship encountered the belari, who looked like large flightless birds from now empty Earth, in the Stancer system on the fringes of the USA space. The USA and Belue Coalition (Belue is the name of belarian home system) became trade and research partners. Apparently, the belari used the same proteanium as the base of their transportation technologies. Later it became known that the Belue Coalition is waging an interstellar war against two invading races – arthropod macerids and plantlike sto. The USA space fleet occasionally helps the bird aliens to patrol and defend their borders.

Some years later, in 2282, an USA colony on the peripheral planet Gagarin was contacted by the basans, a reptilian alien race. This contact was also peaceful, and from the basans the USA learned about many other more remote alien races. When they contacted two other human civilizations controlled by interstellar megacorps MonoTech and MacroDynamics Tech Alliance that were not only unrelated to each other, but also to Earth, new religious teachings and conspiracy theories started to appear in large numbers among all three civilizations. Some were advocating panspermia or morphic field theory, some claimed that MonoTech and MacroDynamics Tech Alliance are human colonies all records of which were expunged a long time ago, some made even more outrageous claims.

Now, the USA is a relatively large interstellar faction that has learned about some other alien species. Even though the people of USA are generally far away from all-out warfare, things are still not calm. There are both human and alien pirates, rogue colonies, shady corporations, adventurers and archaeologists searching for ancient alien ruins, “clarkers” – the seekers of clarketech artifacts of the precursor civilizations, strange cults of AI worshippers, illegal nanotech research stations, and many other dangers and thrills.