Aurora 4x
Fiction => Aurora => Konisforce's Fiction => Topic started by: Konisforce on August 28, 2012, 10:22:03 AM
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Victoria Regina - Steampunk AAR.
Hi all! I had this idea when I was reading the technobabble on the wiki about Trans-Newtonian Elements and it referred to space as a fluid instead of vacuum. That reminded me of the concepts of the Aether like the Greeks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_(classical_element)) thought, and like you found in Space 1889 and things.
So I'm giving this one a shot - what if the British Empire consolidated its power on Earth through the discovery of Transnewtonian / Aether dynamics and British sailors started bobbing around the stars. Sort of a Patrick O'brian writes Honor Harrington thing.
Setup
I started a Conventional Start in 1837 with no missile bases and a population of 1 billion, since a couple sources seemed to say that the world pop hit 1 billion in the 1830s. I SM'd ruins onto Mars and to 2 random locations in the solar system. I also SM'd Trans-Newtonian concepts and Mobile Infantry Battalion, to fit with the explanation of British conquest, and added 2 GFTFs then got cracking on 5 MI Battalions. I upped the training level to 3 and added 3 Naval Academies to represent Britain's dominance of the oceans, and also made a couple dozen tiny PDCs named "Sea Frigate" just to give all those captains something to do. Lastly, I added 10% unrest on Earth, for the 'somewhat recently conquered' aspect.
Oh, and a note on the Naval ranks. Since you start with 8 ranks and the top 4 basically aren't filled, I didn't want to have a bunch of Commodores bumping around giving out all the orders and running the admiralty. So I am keeping the ranks cut down so that there's always an empty "Lords of the Admiralty" at the top. Then Admiral, Rear Admiral, Vice Admiral, and Captain. At some point, I got enough captains that everyone bumped up and my top commander became Lord of the Admiralty. So I added another rank on top, moved everybody up one, and added "Commander" at the bottom. So if there are any odd jumps in rank, that explains it. And I'm not using commodore because historically it was a position more than a rank, or so says Patrick O'Brian, anyway.
I've been playing Aurora for about 3 weeks now and I've had one (1) engagement between fleets, so I'm expecting to fail horribly! And while I've bumped into Precursors before I haven't seen any other spoilers. Invaders are off for now because they'll eat up all my CPU for turns, but I may turn them on later if things need to get more 'interesting'. So, come watch my dismal, abject, and glorious failure, all with a stiff upper lip!
Any questions, comment, concerns are welcome. Happy reading!
Also, just in case things get confusing:
Story Roadmap
Prologue 1: The Fifth Element
Prologue 2: The Empire War
Part 1: The Teenaged Queen
Part 2: The Trials of Empire
Part 3: Consolidation
-> Optional Interlude: Mars
Part 4: The Great Void
Part 5: The Wallis Incident
Part 6: A Darkening Hour
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I hope you didn't turn on any NPRs? :) You can always add them later, once you can actually leave your system, heh.
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Yup! Started with one. Dismal, abject, and glorious!
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If anybody wants a cameo in the story, drop a line here.
Let me know what you'd like to be (and a name for your character, if you need one).
I reserve the right to kill you off in horrible ways and to give you bad teeth and facial hair.
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If anybody wants a cameo in the story, drop a line here.
Let me know what you'd like to be (and a name for your character, if you need one).
I reserve the right to kill you off in horrible ways and to give you bad teeth and facial hair.
But I already have facial hair.
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I reserve the right to change the status of your facial hair for purposes of the narrative. Teeth will only be worsened, however.
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I would like to be Sir Reginald Barclay, Earl or Ulster, 6ft2, red hair with a sharp goatee.
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Oh, dear. I'll have to invent a holodeck first for you to get lost on . . .
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Beers - which would you prefer, die a glorious death or participate in a hard-boiled murder investigation?
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Beers - which would you prefer, die a glorious death or participate in a hard-boiled murder investigation?
Glorious Death (with the option of cloning at a later date, or being reanimated like the steam punk soldiers in Sucker Punch!)
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Poor Reginald ... charging to his death :'(
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Couldn't decide, actually. The real commander in the Charge of the Light Brigade survived and then went to have a champagne dinner after getting 1/3 of his men killed. Left it open.
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Great new episode, but what are these things called kilometers? This is the British Empire after all, surely they would use miles? Imperial weights and measures! ;D
Regards
Ian
Edit. If you go into F9 Systems Information screen and open the options tab you can change to miles and Fahrenheit.
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Ah, good point! Here I was trying to avoid being a Yankee Imperialist, when I should've been an Imperialist Yank.
I'll rectify it forthwith.
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In 1863, the House of Commons passed a bill by 110 votes to 75 which would have mandated the use of the metric system throughout the British Empire, but due to lack of parliamentary time the bill was not debated in the House of Lords and so did not become law. The following year, after pressure from the astronomers George Airy and Sir John Herschel, the bill was watered down to merely legalise the use of the metric system in contracts. It was presented and passed as a Private Member's Bill.[13] However, ambiguous wording in the 1864 Act meant that traders who possessed metric weights and measures were still liable to arrest under Act 5 and 6 William IV c63.
You could easily argue that the Royal Society was using Metric so it became the system of space. It would make a lot of things simpler, heh.
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I'm going to try and do little interludes about my various colonies as they hit a decent size, just so I can do some work on the character of the various places. I think I'm going to take a bit longer on the Mars interlude, though. First off, I want to do a decent hard-boiled story, and that takes a bit of time to get rolling. Second, as I've just barely written up the first system outside of Sol, I should be able to recreate this game in 6.0 when it comes out. I've played through to 17 systems, 5 colonies, and another 10 years, but I'm planning on writing that off so as not to lose the story so far.
So I'll be concurrently writing a bit of Part 4 and working on the Mars interlude, all in the hopes that I can stall until 6.0 and start the game over there
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I had to pull out my copies of Space 1889... Keep it comming, please!
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I had to pull out my copies of Space 1889... Keep it comming, please!
Me too /AOL
I am enjoying the stories a lot and immediately thought about Space 1889.
I was also thinking of modern tech that fits this scene very well. There is a Canadian group working on developing a steam powered fusion reactor. Add that to JP Aerospace's Airship to Orbit, and you have the perfect steampunk space ship.
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I've finally managed to get 6.x running and have made the switch! 6.1 was being difficult, but 6.21 has allowed me to recreate things with few hiccups.
To re-create the game, I started in 1840 or so and kept plugging away at creating an appropriately large ruin on Mars, then getting some xenologists to tell me what the tech level was. Given that over 2,500 installations of TL-4 on Mars wound up being a pretty big part of the game in the first 10 years, I wanted to try and make that again. I got a TL-4 with about 1,500 installations, and may re-roll it when I run out if it seems like it matters (and if the Empire still exists . . . . )
Once I got the ruins successfully, I ran the years up to June 20th, 1847, and SM'd in everything to as close to this state as possible:
Status of the British Empire Ten Years After Victoria’s Reign Begins
June 20, 1847
Earth
1,252.38 million citizens.
Wealth: 36,184 thousand pounds yearly
Shipyards: 2. 1 slipway each.
BSN Maintenance: 1,000 tons maximum.
Construction factories: 650
Steam Industry: 650
Sorium refineries: 10
Mines: 868
Clockwork Mines: 6
Mass Drivers: 1
Research Facilities: 22
Financial Centers: 4
Ground Unit Training Facilities: 2
Mars: 20,000 citizens
2,561 installations to recover
Infrastructure for 920,000 citizens
Asteroid #21 (Corundium Hill):
26 Automines and a mass driver
22 civilian mining complexes spread across:
Rhea, Titan, Hyperion, Europa, and Asteroid 16.
Ongoing Archaeological Digs on Ganymede and Asteroid 149
2 Shipping lines with 11 ships: 9 East Indiamen total, and 1 Paradisium passenger cruiser each.
British Space Navy:
1 Homefront troop transport
5 East Indiamen freighters
2 Paradisium passenger cruisers
3 Watt geological survey ships
2 Diamond couriers
1 Turtle science vessel.
British Aether troops:
5 Heavy Grenadiers / Knights battalions
1 Engineering Brigade (on Mars)
From that point, I trudged on through a year or so, then SM'd in Ares to the best of my ability, as well as creating the Jump Phoenix design. After the initial discovery of ruins on Ares, I was about to the point where I left off previously and started keeping new notes.
Among the changes:
Obviously, most characters have been re-rolled. I've taken appropriately skilled administrators, captains, and scientists and re-named them, so Wall is still in charge of Earth, Hill is on Mars (at the start) and Sutton is First Lord of the Admiralty, but otherwise it's mostly all new.
Shipping lines have new names now, of course. And since there wasn't anything on Mars until I SM'd the (small) colony as it existed in the snapshot in 1847, there wasn't too much growth there in either the previous or the current game.
I re-genned the system through Earth's jump-gated point until I got an equally bad planet to the Ares from my previous game, which also resulted in a system with only a single sad planet, which is Ares.
Naturally, the engine system re-design impacted ship designs. Given the start in June 1847, though, there weren't too many designs that were impacted, however. I ignored the Turtle and the Watt since they were basically museum pieces by 1847, and the Phoenix / Jump Phoenix was the way forward for the survey ships. I designed engines which matched in size and speed as much as possible, sacrificing accurate fuel efficiency where necessary.
And speaking of the Jump Phoenix, that last fluff piece about the Jump Phoenix always bringing the crew home . . . yah, not so much anymore. But we'll get into that.
Hopefully you enjoy the next chapters, and be sure to tell me if you do! Or don't enjoy. Always good to know folks are reading, and comments 'n' criticism very welcome.
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Great to hear you've got things up and running again. Absolutely love your writing style and plot and looking forward to the next instalments. :D
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Part V is awesome, I'm very very impressed, easily one of the best written AAR's I've seen
Matt
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Thoroughly enjoyable.
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Thanks, all! Glad to hear you're enjoying it. Any suggestions literary or gameplay-wise would be welcome, though there hasn't been much gameplay to comment on as of yet.
The main story's rollin' along again, and I've got the end in sight for the Mars Interlude. Was a bit heftier than I thought it would be. I also have the next interlude planned out, taking place on Ganymede and branching off at the beginning of Part 6. Bit more of a military story this time as an interlude.
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Sounds great, looking forward to the read
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I've gone back and thrown in some ship designs where appropriate, generally in the "mass update" portions of the story. Nothing spectacular, but should give a bit more flavor and a context for the ships.