Before I went off on an original setting, I did do a meshed JC/2300 timeline that brought it forwards to around 2350. It was mainly to take into consideration a growing role for combat walkers (ie. Heavy Gears) and establishing some independent stellar states.
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As for Eclipse Phase...
I really, really liked the idea of Eclipse Phase with FTL ala 2300. I worked on an idea for FTL to have emerged similar to 2300AD. It drove me nuts that EP gave all those wonderful toys and nowhere to actually play with them. Think of the mercenary unit actions, the planetary invasions/explorations and all the other fun stuff you could do with EP tech. It drove me nuts that you could drop into a combat morph and carry a smart SMG but you couldn’t do an actual jungle assault or airborne insertion because there was no planet with an atmosphere. Imagine if you put
In my envisioning, the Fall happened the same general way but it may have been something we contacted out at the edge of space. It multiplied and followed the routes home to Earth. I looked at the TITANS as like the Virus of TNE with varying behaviors that affected different planets. In some cases, the TITANS did nothing and in others, all life was atomized. There was no rhyme or reason to their madness and destruction.
In fact, I originally thought it up as a neat TNE variant … since the map/setting was already established. But I decided to stick with the EP base setting of Sol.
The system colonies were all in place already. The colonization of planets was driven by all the usual reasons and was aided by the ability to survive in less-favorable environments.
The rise of the TITANS was somehow due to the FTL network. I was toying with the original FTL being the construction of Gates used to transport vessels to various system. Somewhere out there, we gave birth to whatever spawned the TITANS. The resulting backlash took colony after colony, planet after planet. When it arrived here, it decimated the Earth and comprised the Fall. Humanity all over the galaxy shut down their Gates for protection or due to the TITANs. In the Sol System, we destroyed it but it was too late. Earth was gone.
Just prior to the Fall, we had invented a portable Gate that could be mounted on ships. That technology was never lost… but it was discouraged as humanity retreated from the frontier we had created and from our homeworld.
It is now XX AF and the yearning to get out there and rediscover what was left is overpowering. There are laws against it but they are continually broken. Recontacting a quarantined system is dangerous as no one knows how invasive the TITAN taint is elsewhere. Missions are either illegal or sanctioned at the highest level by hypercorps, governments and other organizations. A dozen or more systems have been contacted and contact/trade reestablished. These systems have gone their own way and hypercorps seek to reclaim their assets that were free for so long. Amongst those planets that have been recontacted, the small actions of mercenary units seek to protect/capture assets that have claimed independence from their founders.
But there remain dozens of planets out there that remain lost. The Gatecrashers of this day and age risk everything to recontact them. Such missions are fraught with peril as the remnants of TITAN apocalypse and… other experiments… remain hazards.
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The minds eye image I had was pretty cool. Imagine ships and merc/explorers in this type of setting. The crew would not need staterooms as the ship could house the equipment necessary to drop them into morphs. So the crew would literally be the ship in some places, the others would spend the time in VR environments. Jumping into a new system, the team would meet in VR, make their plans, select their morphs and then drop into the atmosphere in pods or re-entry craft.
Characters could fork into vehicles, drones, and even the ship itself. All the fun guns and equipment available in EP but let loose on a multi-system scale… with the TITANS lurking at the end of every Jump.
Eventually, I couldn’t quite figure out how to meld the two settings. The Gates bring their own FTL-mystery and taking them out would affect the overall setting. Coming up with the short FTL-emergence led to problems about colonization and such. In addition, the isolation of mankind in SOL was really part and parcel of the main setting. It drove home the paranoia of “not knowing what was out there…” But, man, I really thought it was a cool idea.
Eclipse Phase has no support for spaceships… or didn’t at the time I was looking at it so I shelved it. But it’s still something that really, really interests me. A lot more room for different themes (crime, mercenaries, Firewall, simple exploration…) and the chance to utilize all those cool gadgets and options on planets that actually have normal gravity and atmospheres.
I even started writing a “pitch” for the setting.
MERCENARY GATECRASHERS
Okay, bring it up.
[Forming conference room, sir.]
A white light that receded quickly suffused his mind’s eye and Bailiff found himself sitting in the virtual conference room of the vessel. He was seated at the head of the table as mission chief and saw that the others were already present. The room was utilitarian as he rarely wasted time on semantic images when the others were likely seeing their own version of it. He preferred to have no clutter or distractions when going over the last details. He could not guarantee that everyone was paying attention but he would ensure that there was nothing else to attract their attention.
“Morning, Boss.” His attention flickered over to the glowing diamond icon that Cortez habitually adopted in these virtual meetings. At the moment, she was a softly luminescent silver and he detected a slight pulse; almost the rhythm of a heartbeat. Ironic of her, as the pilot of the SHIP, Cortez spent little time ‘in the flesh’. She manned their other vehicles and occasionally fielded a synthmorph or two but he had never seen her in a meat body that would have required a heartbeat.
The greetings from the others ranged from surly, that was Stoner, to cheerful and disinterested from the others. He scanned the room to ensure that they were all there…
“All right, skins, we are currently approaching the target, PLANET, and expect a stealthed orbit in approximately 847.3 minutes. The orbital entry will coincide with our departure from the SHIP. Cortez will be running the Dominator down with us in it as usual,” he gestured at the table and pixels began forming in response. In a flicker, the table was covered by a three-dimensional depiction of the actual target location. Bailiff leaned forward as one of the centimeter tall trees rustled in response to some stimuli. The feeds from the stealth satellites they already had in place were real-time and continually updated.
“The terrain is as you see it here. A remote location approximately 308.2 kilometers from the Zansa colony is the site of the complex. As you can see,” he gestured and the diorama spun and zoomed in to illustrate a pair of small drone towers outside a cleft in the rock face, “ we have some opposition approaching the main entrance prior to actually entering the facility.”
The two towers were likely remote AP turrets from their configuration. At the moment, their orb-like termini were sealed so no analysis was available on the contents. But Bailiff knew that as soon as they got within detection range, those orbs would spawn lethal hardware for defensive and offensive applications.
"Stoner, I'm gonna need you in heavy form. Take the Lasher, load with AP/HE combos. We know they have some chrome down there. It's likely in the form of autonomous bots or response guns but some firepower will be helpful." Bailiff looked over at the two small angelic figures perched on the edge of the table. The twins were disconcerting no matter how you interacted with them and the cherubic faces almost trigged an actual shiver. "You two are going ghost. We land and cover all angles, you make the entry. Canticorp doesn't want a war... just the return of their prototype. We think it's being held here." The map shifted again. "We make some noise, engage the response, you skirt us and do the infil. Cortez will fork out the Slip to make exfil for you."
I imagined the table looking something like this…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP4TofuJQ1o
After experiencing “grokking” difficulties with where I wanted to go with it, I stopped working on it though. Also the prospect of hacking out complete ship rules was daunting.
