Post by zunath on May 20, 2010 13:48:01 GMT -5
Author: Mercury Man
AFTER THE FALL
---------------
In the months and years after the colony ship crash upon Avantasia, human civilization had to begin anew.
Prior to the crash, volumes of on board freight space were occupied by robots and machinery dedicated to terra forming and construction tasks.
Much of this was lost or irreparably damaged.
Even so, enough critical machinery was liberated from the massive wreckage, to begin laying the foundations of future industrial growth.
Of maximum importance was the raw material processing equipment, designed to extract, combine and transform natural organic and mineral resources into the composites and ore compounds necessary for the construction of a space-age society.
A large, circular swathe of thick jungle was cleared away. The first buildings of notable size were pieced together using fragments of the ships hull.
A decade later, the process of extracting useful materials from the wreckage had itself become effectively an industrialized process.
Teams of men with a ghetto-rigged solar-powered laser cutter would spend weeks at a time living at a major wreckage site, carving up bent and torn panels into useful segments.
Small single person transporters that survived the crash were lashed together and crudely modified to serve as freighters.
Hundreds of incongruously high tech shacks sprung up in the centre of the clearing.
Around the circumference, open roof workshops flourished. These began as ad-hoc, all-purpose assembly areas where bespoke machinery or technology would be painstakingly and laboriously produced by a few people.
Once industrial activity began to accelerate, however, these workshops transformed into sizable and intricate organisations and would eventually become the specialized, manufacturing giants of the present day.
EXPLORATION
------------
Almost one hundred years would pass before the next major industrial step of this recovering civilization was taken.
During this period, a number of major expeditions from every discipline of the sciences were undertaken.
In the early part of the century, Caleb Zheckshan a bright-eyed luminary of the Avantasian scientific establishment, lead a combined mission to chart the extent of the Avastanian jungle and make a preliminary catalogue of its diverse native species.
Two years later, they returned with maps, journals, media and many stories of adventure. The revelations and marvels they uncovered would fascinate the public and inspire many more an adventurer for decades to come.
Four years after the return, Caleb again assembled a team and embarked upon another mission. This one, the first circumnavigation of Avantasia, took five and a half years, during which whole new landscapes were discovered.
The mission was fraught with many unforgiving challenges however and ended on a tragic note. It was from the mountaintops that the most far-reaching surveys of the landscapes could be conducted and it was during one such survey that Caleb perished, attempt to reach the summit of what was later verified to be the highest mountain upon the planet. (Mt. Tsere)
The single greatest revelation of the mission was that the entire planet, though holding plentiful water, was largely covered in a single landmass, its parts most easily categorized by identifying its three most distinct landscapes, labelled the Precincts.
On the far side of Avantasia and to the north, were vast areas of desert, both flat white sands and undulating, wind shaped rocky hills. Toward the south, the desert gave way to water, which in turn became icy evidence of the south pole. The remainder seemed to be covered in the familiar thick jungle and wide, open plains.
The icy areas were named the Trilius Precinct, a reference to the three unusually bright stars whose red, blue and yellow lights at night coloured the expansive white plains.
The harsh desert landscape, comprising the second major landscape of the planet, became the Lunadia Precinct, its terrains resembling that of a moon from one of the ancient home worlds.
As a remembrance to the pioneering mission and its leader, Caleb, the entire green landscape, all its jungle and all its plains were named the Zheckshan Precinct. In turn, the centre of civilization which in a utilitarian tradition had simply been known as "The Glade" was thereafter referred to as Zheckshan City.
Long range salvage crews were sent out along the now ancient trajectory of the colony ships atmospheric entry, their task to identify and where possible, retrieve the valuable machines and technology which were known to be contained in large segments of the stricken colony ship that broke off during the descent.
Months later, all but one of these crews returned, bringing databanks, computers, chemical repositories and salvageable power units. A number of key technological knowledge-bases thought to be forever lost, were resurrected.
Searchers set out after the missing salvage crew, but are unsuccessful and return without finding them.
Gradually, the resource, medical, communication, research and construction industries began to resemble those which the survivors had known before.
By the end of the century, though, few of the original survivors were left..
THE ENERGY WARS
----------------
For the new generations, the first Avantasian born humans, this strange combination of high tech industrial infrastructure and wild jungle was no dichotomy, but a natural way of life. Only through fragmented history did they begin to appreciate the gaps, what they lacked, what was still to come.
Concomitant with large scale organisation came factions with access to high energy technology and inevitably, some of these factions developed weapons with the capacity to do serious damage to the newly emerged social infrastructure.
Factional rivalries emerged and the next few decades of human civilization were marred by destructive infighting and periods of near total social collapse.
Civil strife only came to an end with the rise of the Akzerian Syndicate, whom with majority public support established the Akzerian government. A couple of years later, the Decree of Planetary Protection proposal is passed into law.
THE ASCENT
-----------
Of all subsequent developments, the one that would have the most influential impact upon the future landscape of Zheckshan city, was the "WH3MF" Project (Wood, Hyde, Minsky, Mcarthy, Moravec and Forward) alternately known as the Space Fountain Tower Project.
At the centre of the project was the corporation named "SpaceDestiny" a collection of scientists, engineers and researchers whose mission statement was very simple: To return the human race, to space.
Ten years in planning, five in pre-operational construction and testing, the WH3MF project would literally comprise the spine of the future city.
Its overall design and indented evolution was simple, but its component technologies and practical execution, constituted an extraordinary challenge.
The initial facility was completed midway through the century. In a tradition extending back to another world, the day of the official opening was declared a holiday, known as "Day of the Ascent"
The basic operating principle of the facility was this: A vacuum tube would extend in a loop up through the height of the tower and back down again. At the bottom was what amounted to a giant gun, at the top, a magnet.
The gun would fire a stream of small projectiles up through the vacuum tube. The stream of projectiles, once they approached the magnet, would be bent around and redirected down through the vacuum tube back toward their source.
The intended function of this system was that through the force of the magnet upon the projectiles in the vacuum, the towers structure would be held in place with incredible strength.
The potential strength would
be sufficient to extend the tower to any height, even, as was the intention, out of the atmosphere and into space itself.
The final ingenious application of the idea was that the loop would begin low and close to the ground, but as the construction of the tower body progressed, the vacuum tubes could be extended and more projectiles added to the stream, so that the height of the tower would itself slowly increase.
It was with this construction that the Avantasian people would eventually return to space.
As the towers height increased - slowly, with every precaution taken to ensure its structural safety and redundancy - companion towers would be built up and attached to, the central structure.
In this fashion did Zheckshan city grow, expanding in all directions much as did the original clearing, but for one particular trait: While the glade had mostly expanded outward, Zheckshan city predominantly stretched upward.
As the height increased, ground and roof level entrances became impractical. Interconnecting bridges were built and as their construction became more accomplished, a web of such passages sprung up all along the towers.
In this sense, the entire city became a single structure, ever evolving and ever increasing in height.
By this stage, the remains of The Avant, the colony ship, had become skeletal in nature. Viewed from Zheckshan city, the outline of its remaining structures protruded up from the surface of the planet like the bones of some gargantuan, fallen, long dead beast.
Most of Zheckshan City's resources now came from the planet itself and what was left of the Colony ship was declared inviolable, to be left as it was, an eerie monument to another era, another world.
Inevitably, it remained a site of great interest and attention. Archeological expeditions, scientific and military interest in lost technology and scavenging by lone adventurers continue to deplete its hidden treasures.
Nevertheless, such was the scale of the ship, its volume and contents, that even today, within the thick Zheckshanian jungle, there are still segments that lie undiscovered, embedded into the soft ground.
SPACE-AGE
-----------
During the year 3457 A.D. Avantasian civilization passed another milestone.
The upper loops of the Zheckshan City central tower rose and passed the 100 kilometre mark above ground. Avantasian civilization had returned to space!
The SpaceDestiny corporation was well prepared for this moment. Simultaneous to the event, prepared propulsion modules began their long haul up the external elevators of the central tower.
These modules would become the first orbital vehicles of Avantasian civilization.
Without the need for giant rockets carrying massive loads of fuel to achieve orbital velocity and deliver comparatively little cargo, the construction and operation of the Avantasian orbital civilization accelerated at an incredible pace.
Such a rapid growth created its own problems, however. Foreseeing a potential avenue for its citizens to escape its protective influence, the Akzerian government made certain that a great deal of corporate assets in space (Which were predominately built and owned by SpaceDestiny) were appropriated for law enforcement.
Furthermore, strict regulations for handling the organisation and expansion of an Orbital city were put in place.
These political developments were mostly effective, but as the Orbital city's size increased, it was impossible to completely stop small groups from constructing their own space faring craft and disappearing off into more distant orbits of Avantasia. Eventually pockets of such pioneers built up a sparse but significant fringe-civilization on the outskirts of Avantasian space.
Property development at the city level was conducted via a series of evenly spaced nodes to which personalized residential and commercial modules would be attached.
The eventually overall effect was a cluster of miniature cities which expanded out over the Zheckshanian part of the Avantasian atmosphere like a bowl-shaped 'cap' upon the planet.
At ground level, the effect was otherworldly. Once the that 'cap' became dense enough, during the middle of the day, a citizen would experience the sweep of the Orbital city across the sun in a sudden and unnatural darkening of the sky.
This mid-day darkness that swept over the land would within Zheckshan city itself would become known as an entirely new phase of the day: Noonshadow.
Returning to orbit and travelling above and beyond Orbital city itself, one encounters the SpaceDestiny industrial zone.
Inside this mammoth cluster of frame worked structures, the first purely space-based ships of significant size would be constructed.
The initial category of ships were commercial space-freighters, bulk carriers whose constant back and forth flow between nodes would become the life-preserving bloodstream of Orbital city.
Second were military spacecraft, heavily armoured peacekeepers with carefully selected weaponry. Guns had built in limits to range and were designed in most cases to disable, rather than destroy.
There were a few major sub-sections of military craft, which would largely define the appearance of the combative landscape for some time to come. From these categorical blueprints were paved the evolutionary paths of the sub-corporate military spacecraft and weaponry modification industry
.
Under the third major category of commercial ship production came major expedition craft. The colony ship, the Avant II, was an inevitability. Though still much smaller than its namesake, the scale of the ship were awe inspiring to behold. Shortly before the Avant II set out toward the outer planets, the behemoth was permitted to make a close pass by Orbital city proper.
All throughout orbital city, the heavily armoured node window-guards were rolled back, allowing millions of citizens witness first hand the inspiring spectacle, the technological marvel that was the Avant II, take the next major step in Avantasian civilizations space-based expansion.
There were less ambitious, but equally influential expeditions that followed. Long range research craft and super-tugs were built with the intention of travelling to the systems asteroid belt and retrieving huge rocks, which would eventually be brought into lagrangian orbit.
There they would be processed and permit massive quantities of precious resources to be funnelled into the Avantasian economy.
Just prior to this, there were some argument over whether it was safe to bring such objects of great mass near the planet. The benefits outweighed the risks, though, and the projects were given the go-ahead.
The threat orbital debris of all kinds posed to Orbital city was one that required a swathe of preventative measures. For this reason, after orbital construction began to accelerate, the Decree of Planetary Protection was revised and updated to incorporate numerous categories of space based weaponry into its prohibitive declaration.
The focus here was not so much high energy sources, but rather weaponry which could potentially cause collateral damage.
Laser-based armaments became the basic standard of orbital combat. Precise and instantaneous, they could be used to cripple another ships critical systems rapidly and efficiently.
Armour-piercing ER projectiles were another staple of modern warfare. These were designed to puncture the radiation-shield layer of a spaceships hull and flood the interior of the ship with a lethal concentration of electromagnetic radiation, leaving the crew dead, but the ship itself relatively intact.
Explosive projectile weapons of any sort were explicitly forbidden.
Despite this, criminal elements of society that saw space as a means of finally slipping out from under the Akzerian's domineering regime, in secret began to develop highly illegal munitions capable of causing serious damage to large space structures. The Threat of their use was applied to the purposes of extortion, hijacking and freight-theft.
Subsequently, there were a number of highly publicized incidents involving the use of such weapons. A couple of nodes took heavy damage and became the first major structural casualties of space combat. That was bad enough, but the high speed debris cast out by their explosive demise caused havoc for nodes and spacecraft for months afterward.
The social and industrial consequences were that all existing and future nodes were required to be heavily covered in debris resident armour.
As a result, Orbital city itself evolved into a very hard target, highly resistant to the effects of nearby violence in cold of space.
This defensive move had its own consequences, however. Criminal, vigilante and military pilots felt that with the reduced possibility of causing widespread damage (and the repercussion that would incur) became more daring in their engagements.
It became a not infrequent sight, for a citizen, to witness a dogfight between rival forces while the citizen was travelling between nodes.
The Akzerian government struggled to maintain what control it could, but though it contained vast resources, the emerging threats to its oppressive influence were arising in every direction of orbital expansion.
Chief among these threats, was The Networks' space-based resistance arm. The Networks extensive resources and sequestered space bases provided them with industrial support all of their own, though on a far smaller scale in comparison to mainstream corporate organisation.
The Modern Era
----------------
It is here where past history finally merges with the present.
Humanity is poised for its next explosive development - one that may be peaceful, which populates the remaining habitable planets of the Avantasian system; or one that may herald the eruption of an internal power struggle whose consequences reform the political and social landscape of human civilization.
Perhaps there is yet another, unforeseen path to be taken.. The future will be shaped by Zheckshanian hands, Avantasian hands.. By your hands.
The responsibility is great. Choose our future well!
AFTER THE FALL
---------------
In the months and years after the colony ship crash upon Avantasia, human civilization had to begin anew.
Prior to the crash, volumes of on board freight space were occupied by robots and machinery dedicated to terra forming and construction tasks.
Much of this was lost or irreparably damaged.
Even so, enough critical machinery was liberated from the massive wreckage, to begin laying the foundations of future industrial growth.
Of maximum importance was the raw material processing equipment, designed to extract, combine and transform natural organic and mineral resources into the composites and ore compounds necessary for the construction of a space-age society.
A large, circular swathe of thick jungle was cleared away. The first buildings of notable size were pieced together using fragments of the ships hull.
A decade later, the process of extracting useful materials from the wreckage had itself become effectively an industrialized process.
Teams of men with a ghetto-rigged solar-powered laser cutter would spend weeks at a time living at a major wreckage site, carving up bent and torn panels into useful segments.
Small single person transporters that survived the crash were lashed together and crudely modified to serve as freighters.
Hundreds of incongruously high tech shacks sprung up in the centre of the clearing.
Around the circumference, open roof workshops flourished. These began as ad-hoc, all-purpose assembly areas where bespoke machinery or technology would be painstakingly and laboriously produced by a few people.
Once industrial activity began to accelerate, however, these workshops transformed into sizable and intricate organisations and would eventually become the specialized, manufacturing giants of the present day.
EXPLORATION
------------
Almost one hundred years would pass before the next major industrial step of this recovering civilization was taken.
During this period, a number of major expeditions from every discipline of the sciences were undertaken.
In the early part of the century, Caleb Zheckshan a bright-eyed luminary of the Avantasian scientific establishment, lead a combined mission to chart the extent of the Avastanian jungle and make a preliminary catalogue of its diverse native species.
Two years later, they returned with maps, journals, media and many stories of adventure. The revelations and marvels they uncovered would fascinate the public and inspire many more an adventurer for decades to come.
Four years after the return, Caleb again assembled a team and embarked upon another mission. This one, the first circumnavigation of Avantasia, took five and a half years, during which whole new landscapes were discovered.
The mission was fraught with many unforgiving challenges however and ended on a tragic note. It was from the mountaintops that the most far-reaching surveys of the landscapes could be conducted and it was during one such survey that Caleb perished, attempt to reach the summit of what was later verified to be the highest mountain upon the planet. (Mt. Tsere)
The single greatest revelation of the mission was that the entire planet, though holding plentiful water, was largely covered in a single landmass, its parts most easily categorized by identifying its three most distinct landscapes, labelled the Precincts.
On the far side of Avantasia and to the north, were vast areas of desert, both flat white sands and undulating, wind shaped rocky hills. Toward the south, the desert gave way to water, which in turn became icy evidence of the south pole. The remainder seemed to be covered in the familiar thick jungle and wide, open plains.
The icy areas were named the Trilius Precinct, a reference to the three unusually bright stars whose red, blue and yellow lights at night coloured the expansive white plains.
The harsh desert landscape, comprising the second major landscape of the planet, became the Lunadia Precinct, its terrains resembling that of a moon from one of the ancient home worlds.
As a remembrance to the pioneering mission and its leader, Caleb, the entire green landscape, all its jungle and all its plains were named the Zheckshan Precinct. In turn, the centre of civilization which in a utilitarian tradition had simply been known as "The Glade" was thereafter referred to as Zheckshan City.
Long range salvage crews were sent out along the now ancient trajectory of the colony ships atmospheric entry, their task to identify and where possible, retrieve the valuable machines and technology which were known to be contained in large segments of the stricken colony ship that broke off during the descent.
Months later, all but one of these crews returned, bringing databanks, computers, chemical repositories and salvageable power units. A number of key technological knowledge-bases thought to be forever lost, were resurrected.
Searchers set out after the missing salvage crew, but are unsuccessful and return without finding them.
Gradually, the resource, medical, communication, research and construction industries began to resemble those which the survivors had known before.
By the end of the century, though, few of the original survivors were left..
THE ENERGY WARS
----------------
For the new generations, the first Avantasian born humans, this strange combination of high tech industrial infrastructure and wild jungle was no dichotomy, but a natural way of life. Only through fragmented history did they begin to appreciate the gaps, what they lacked, what was still to come.
Concomitant with large scale organisation came factions with access to high energy technology and inevitably, some of these factions developed weapons with the capacity to do serious damage to the newly emerged social infrastructure.
Factional rivalries emerged and the next few decades of human civilization were marred by destructive infighting and periods of near total social collapse.
Civil strife only came to an end with the rise of the Akzerian Syndicate, whom with majority public support established the Akzerian government. A couple of years later, the Decree of Planetary Protection proposal is passed into law.
THE ASCENT
-----------
Of all subsequent developments, the one that would have the most influential impact upon the future landscape of Zheckshan city, was the "WH3MF" Project (Wood, Hyde, Minsky, Mcarthy, Moravec and Forward) alternately known as the Space Fountain Tower Project.
At the centre of the project was the corporation named "SpaceDestiny" a collection of scientists, engineers and researchers whose mission statement was very simple: To return the human race, to space.
Ten years in planning, five in pre-operational construction and testing, the WH3MF project would literally comprise the spine of the future city.
Its overall design and indented evolution was simple, but its component technologies and practical execution, constituted an extraordinary challenge.
The initial facility was completed midway through the century. In a tradition extending back to another world, the day of the official opening was declared a holiday, known as "Day of the Ascent"
The basic operating principle of the facility was this: A vacuum tube would extend in a loop up through the height of the tower and back down again. At the bottom was what amounted to a giant gun, at the top, a magnet.
The gun would fire a stream of small projectiles up through the vacuum tube. The stream of projectiles, once they approached the magnet, would be bent around and redirected down through the vacuum tube back toward their source.
The intended function of this system was that through the force of the magnet upon the projectiles in the vacuum, the towers structure would be held in place with incredible strength.
The potential strength would
be sufficient to extend the tower to any height, even, as was the intention, out of the atmosphere and into space itself.
The final ingenious application of the idea was that the loop would begin low and close to the ground, but as the construction of the tower body progressed, the vacuum tubes could be extended and more projectiles added to the stream, so that the height of the tower would itself slowly increase.
It was with this construction that the Avantasian people would eventually return to space.
As the towers height increased - slowly, with every precaution taken to ensure its structural safety and redundancy - companion towers would be built up and attached to, the central structure.
In this fashion did Zheckshan city grow, expanding in all directions much as did the original clearing, but for one particular trait: While the glade had mostly expanded outward, Zheckshan city predominantly stretched upward.
As the height increased, ground and roof level entrances became impractical. Interconnecting bridges were built and as their construction became more accomplished, a web of such passages sprung up all along the towers.
In this sense, the entire city became a single structure, ever evolving and ever increasing in height.
By this stage, the remains of The Avant, the colony ship, had become skeletal in nature. Viewed from Zheckshan city, the outline of its remaining structures protruded up from the surface of the planet like the bones of some gargantuan, fallen, long dead beast.
Most of Zheckshan City's resources now came from the planet itself and what was left of the Colony ship was declared inviolable, to be left as it was, an eerie monument to another era, another world.
Inevitably, it remained a site of great interest and attention. Archeological expeditions, scientific and military interest in lost technology and scavenging by lone adventurers continue to deplete its hidden treasures.
Nevertheless, such was the scale of the ship, its volume and contents, that even today, within the thick Zheckshanian jungle, there are still segments that lie undiscovered, embedded into the soft ground.
SPACE-AGE
-----------
During the year 3457 A.D. Avantasian civilization passed another milestone.
The upper loops of the Zheckshan City central tower rose and passed the 100 kilometre mark above ground. Avantasian civilization had returned to space!
The SpaceDestiny corporation was well prepared for this moment. Simultaneous to the event, prepared propulsion modules began their long haul up the external elevators of the central tower.
These modules would become the first orbital vehicles of Avantasian civilization.
Without the need for giant rockets carrying massive loads of fuel to achieve orbital velocity and deliver comparatively little cargo, the construction and operation of the Avantasian orbital civilization accelerated at an incredible pace.
Such a rapid growth created its own problems, however. Foreseeing a potential avenue for its citizens to escape its protective influence, the Akzerian government made certain that a great deal of corporate assets in space (Which were predominately built and owned by SpaceDestiny) were appropriated for law enforcement.
Furthermore, strict regulations for handling the organisation and expansion of an Orbital city were put in place.
These political developments were mostly effective, but as the Orbital city's size increased, it was impossible to completely stop small groups from constructing their own space faring craft and disappearing off into more distant orbits of Avantasia. Eventually pockets of such pioneers built up a sparse but significant fringe-civilization on the outskirts of Avantasian space.
Property development at the city level was conducted via a series of evenly spaced nodes to which personalized residential and commercial modules would be attached.
The eventually overall effect was a cluster of miniature cities which expanded out over the Zheckshanian part of the Avantasian atmosphere like a bowl-shaped 'cap' upon the planet.
At ground level, the effect was otherworldly. Once the that 'cap' became dense enough, during the middle of the day, a citizen would experience the sweep of the Orbital city across the sun in a sudden and unnatural darkening of the sky.
This mid-day darkness that swept over the land would within Zheckshan city itself would become known as an entirely new phase of the day: Noonshadow.
Returning to orbit and travelling above and beyond Orbital city itself, one encounters the SpaceDestiny industrial zone.
Inside this mammoth cluster of frame worked structures, the first purely space-based ships of significant size would be constructed.
The initial category of ships were commercial space-freighters, bulk carriers whose constant back and forth flow between nodes would become the life-preserving bloodstream of Orbital city.
Second were military spacecraft, heavily armoured peacekeepers with carefully selected weaponry. Guns had built in limits to range and were designed in most cases to disable, rather than destroy.
There were a few major sub-sections of military craft, which would largely define the appearance of the combative landscape for some time to come. From these categorical blueprints were paved the evolutionary paths of the sub-corporate military spacecraft and weaponry modification industry
.
Under the third major category of commercial ship production came major expedition craft. The colony ship, the Avant II, was an inevitability. Though still much smaller than its namesake, the scale of the ship were awe inspiring to behold. Shortly before the Avant II set out toward the outer planets, the behemoth was permitted to make a close pass by Orbital city proper.
All throughout orbital city, the heavily armoured node window-guards were rolled back, allowing millions of citizens witness first hand the inspiring spectacle, the technological marvel that was the Avant II, take the next major step in Avantasian civilizations space-based expansion.
There were less ambitious, but equally influential expeditions that followed. Long range research craft and super-tugs were built with the intention of travelling to the systems asteroid belt and retrieving huge rocks, which would eventually be brought into lagrangian orbit.
There they would be processed and permit massive quantities of precious resources to be funnelled into the Avantasian economy.
Just prior to this, there were some argument over whether it was safe to bring such objects of great mass near the planet. The benefits outweighed the risks, though, and the projects were given the go-ahead.
The threat orbital debris of all kinds posed to Orbital city was one that required a swathe of preventative measures. For this reason, after orbital construction began to accelerate, the Decree of Planetary Protection was revised and updated to incorporate numerous categories of space based weaponry into its prohibitive declaration.
The focus here was not so much high energy sources, but rather weaponry which could potentially cause collateral damage.
Laser-based armaments became the basic standard of orbital combat. Precise and instantaneous, they could be used to cripple another ships critical systems rapidly and efficiently.
Armour-piercing ER projectiles were another staple of modern warfare. These were designed to puncture the radiation-shield layer of a spaceships hull and flood the interior of the ship with a lethal concentration of electromagnetic radiation, leaving the crew dead, but the ship itself relatively intact.
Explosive projectile weapons of any sort were explicitly forbidden.
Despite this, criminal elements of society that saw space as a means of finally slipping out from under the Akzerian's domineering regime, in secret began to develop highly illegal munitions capable of causing serious damage to large space structures. The Threat of their use was applied to the purposes of extortion, hijacking and freight-theft.
Subsequently, there were a number of highly publicized incidents involving the use of such weapons. A couple of nodes took heavy damage and became the first major structural casualties of space combat. That was bad enough, but the high speed debris cast out by their explosive demise caused havoc for nodes and spacecraft for months afterward.
The social and industrial consequences were that all existing and future nodes were required to be heavily covered in debris resident armour.
As a result, Orbital city itself evolved into a very hard target, highly resistant to the effects of nearby violence in cold of space.
This defensive move had its own consequences, however. Criminal, vigilante and military pilots felt that with the reduced possibility of causing widespread damage (and the repercussion that would incur) became more daring in their engagements.
It became a not infrequent sight, for a citizen, to witness a dogfight between rival forces while the citizen was travelling between nodes.
The Akzerian government struggled to maintain what control it could, but though it contained vast resources, the emerging threats to its oppressive influence were arising in every direction of orbital expansion.
Chief among these threats, was The Networks' space-based resistance arm. The Networks extensive resources and sequestered space bases provided them with industrial support all of their own, though on a far smaller scale in comparison to mainstream corporate organisation.
The Modern Era
----------------
It is here where past history finally merges with the present.
Humanity is poised for its next explosive development - one that may be peaceful, which populates the remaining habitable planets of the Avantasian system; or one that may herald the eruption of an internal power struggle whose consequences reform the political and social landscape of human civilization.
Perhaps there is yet another, unforeseen path to be taken.. The future will be shaped by Zheckshanian hands, Avantasian hands.. By your hands.
The responsibility is great. Choose our future well!