The following is an attempt at a variant on the OTU, in which the Virus was never released (though Cymbeline chips exist as a sentient species), and the Hard Times continued through the 1130's, with the slow and painful process of recovery beginning in the middle of this decade and leading to the emergance of many new polities from the ruins of the old empires. Destruction is widespread but is by no means complete or total; most TLs are between 7 and 12, with several worlds of TL6 or below, and a few rare worlds at TL13 or abouve. Almost all big ships have been destroyed in the 14 years of the War, but a number of small vessels still exist and a few worlds have regained some shipbuilding capabilities.
This is a time of recovery, of rebirth, of hopes for a better future - but also of factionalism, of fighting over the exact face of that future, of petty tyrants looking to build their own pocket empires from the ashes of the old, of remnants of the ruined past which still have to be dealt with. The giants lie dead in the playground - and the maggots who feed off their rotting bodies have taken possession of their guns.
Point of Divergance: Omicron's Fall
Celetron/Core, 079-1130. In the massive naval battle between the bulk of Dulinor's Coronation Fleet and Lucan's forces, Imperial Research Station Omicron was destroyed; reports vary about the exact cause of the stations destruction, but the most credible ones speak either about collateral damage from the very intense naval fighting in close orbit, or about the Lucanist scientists initiating the station's self-destruct sequence in order to prevent their information from falling into Dulinor's hands. In any case, no viable information was recoverable from the station's wreckage; any doomsday weapon developed in it was lost forever.
Dulinor's Pyrric Victory
Dulinor's forces, habing defeated a large portion of Lucan's remaining fleets at the battle of Celetron, proceeded to a direct thrust towards the Capital. Lucan's forces, however, were still resisting with fanatic devotion, and long and fierce naval battles took place at Dingus/Core, Suhtlam/Core and Balpan/Core, further reducing Dulinor's naval power. The final battle at the Capital system began at 222-1130 and was a bloody crawl towards the Capital world itself, with every remaining element at the disposal of Lucan - from the last few battleships to a mass of civilian ships and small craft - being thrown at Dulinor. When the last remnants of Dulinor's ships took nearly full control of Capital's orbital space, at 8:30 AM standard Capital time 261-1130, Emperor Lucan activated the last remaining line of ground-based "defensive" missile batteries (armed with nuclear warheads), targetting all major urban areas on Capital (including the Imperial Palace); and, thus, his last act of black-war mass homicide was also his suicidical blaze-of-glory. Fourteen years and 129 days after taking the life of Strephon, Dulinor was victorious - but at an unimaginagly horrible price. Capital was devastated - but several other important worlds lay at the hands of the victorious Dulinor.
Dulinor's military forces were heavily devastated by the war, with his half-disabled Clarion being the largest remaining ship and with only three ships abouve 10,000 dtons remaining spaceworthy. Furthermore, many of the worlds under his titular rule were either totally devastated by war - as Capital was - or effectively independent from the Imperium for several years. The remnants of Lucan's former Imperial bureaucracy was untrustworthy to the extreme, and Dulinor had to purge it of Lucan's fanatics, who were more than willing to sabotage Dulinor's work. Rebuilding his forces, regaining control of the Core, Dagudashaag and Zarushagaar Sectors, restoring the Imperial bureacuracy - all of these needed massive amount of funds and industrial work, and Dulinor, in his first significant act as the Emperor of the so-called "Third Imperium" (limited to three subsectors in the Core and to most of the Ilelish Sector), sent his ships and troops to the surrounding worlds to demand taxes. The people of Lucan's former Imperium, having long suffered under the yoke of Lucan's heavy taxation, thought of Dulinor as a possible saviour from the former opressor; when he demanded even higher taxes, however, rebellion sprung nearly overnight, with the masses demanding that the scarce resources of their worlds be spent on food, on jobs, on healthcare, on santiation and on repairing the war damage, rather than be squandered on Dulinor's empire-building ambitions.
The Second Ilelish Revolt
Facing a deteriorating situation at the Core and several insurrections against his rule, Dulinor turned to Illelish as a source for renewed funds and resources. A few express boats were sent back to the Federation of Ilelish's government (headed, in his absence, by his daughter Lady Isis), demanding a sharp increase in taxes and the transfer of governmental funds to the immidiate construction of new warfleets. When the order was publically announced on Dlan in 129-1131, a few demonstrations against it broke even on the heavily-policed world of Dlan; massive rallys in favour of a sharp reduction in taxes and of the transfer of governmental funds to welfare and local reconstruction took place on less totalitarian worlds. The war-taxes had an adverse effect on the life of the Ilelish people, on one hand forcing employers to cut wages (and fire millions of workers) in order to accomodate for the taxes, and, on the other hand, the cancellation of most welfare programs (to fund the construction of new fleets) left the massive amount of new unemployed virtually with no means to suipport themselves. While the local Dulinorist military forces were able to restore order in the following weeks, a growing sentiment against Dulinor, his taxes and his wars spread through the masses. Demands for his removal and for an immidiate end to the war were raised by a growing part of the population. Finally, in 056-1131, in response to yet another tax increase, massive demonstrations took place on Dlan and on several neighbouring worlds, carrying placards with slogans such as "Bread and Peace" and "Screw the Core, We Want Jobs Here!". The Dulinorist forces tried to crush the demonstrators with force and, later, with full military action, but the masses, assisted by parts of the military who have switched sides, were able to fight back. Fighting continued all across Dlan for weeks, but at the end the Federation government was forced to resign, the ruling Virasha sect had to vacate the government of Dlan itself in and Lady Isis had to flee Dlan.
The revolution, however, was by no means complete; the Dulinorist forces, headed by Lady Isis, still held sway on several worlds on the sector, while the fragile coalition of various insurgent groups held others. Civil war ensued, this time fought not by glittering battlefleets (as ships were rare and far between) but by rifles and machineguns, a bloody house-to-house slaughter on planetary surfaces. By mid-1133 the fighting has subsided, with the Dulinorist forces retaining a hold on a few worlds to the trailing of the sector, and various small revolutionary polities holding their own among the chaotic new Ilelish Wilds. Peace, atlast, came to the people of Ilelish, but no unity came with it; worlds and small polities were finally able to start rebuilding, but no unifying government existed anymore save for the Verge Combine (which has annexed several worlds along its Ilelish border), with its limited size and local interests.
Dulinor's Reign
Deprived of his holdings in Ilelish, Dulinor rules the Core subsector as well as parts of the various subsectors adjoyning it; while his official borders extend to the edges of the entire Core sector, his actual rule in the outer parts of the sector is very limited, as many worlds prefer to lick their own war-wounds and resist any attempt by Dulinor to enforce his government on them; Dulinor, in turn, has enough power to hold sway in the central regions of the sector but lacks power to decidedly crush the independents on its edges. While Dulinor is slowly increasing territory, that increase is slow and painful.
Two decades of war have hardened Dulinor's black heart. The man who began his jurney as a reformer out to create a better Imperium ended up becoming the worst embodyment of the old one: an absolute monarch. Having no trust and no understanding of the masses, he ended up hated by them as a remnant of the old autocracy; revolution carried on under its own power. But Dulinor still rules, a tyrant reigning by the power of his slowly-rebuilt military and navy, ruling his "Third Imperium" by a military bureaucracy which has replaced most of the old nobility. The few nobles who haven't been executed or imprisoned for serving Lucan have become members of the new bureacracy, their positions not heridatery (sp?) except for when the Emperor sanctions such a transfer of position.
Meanwhile, on the Rim
The reception of Margaret's cease-fire delegation to the Solomani Confederacy in 1124 had serious unforseen consequences. While the Pan-sophontist (or "Moderate") faction, due to a combination of its own ideology and pressure of the war-weary masses from below was more than willing to put an end to the Second Rim War and start rebuilding the exsausted Solomani economy, the Hardliner generals would consider such suggestions as treason to the Cause; after all, the Imperial usurpers were still fighting among themselves, and time was ripe (in their opinion) to deal a crushing blow to these "tainted-blood Vilani" and create a fitting buffer-zone between the Solomani and their foes. This profound disagreement has quickly escalated to a full-scale political crisis, with the Pan-sophontits demanding immidiate peace with Margaret and, if possible, Lucan, and the Hardliners demanding an all-out offensive to reestablish the rightful Rule of Man. Internal tentions within the Confederacy intensified over the next four years, until reaching an explosion in 1128.
(Meanwhile, a Second Point of Divergance: local defence forces at Cymbeline, loyal to the Pan-sophontist faction of the SolParty, have successfully prevented the Black War strike at this world at 063-1127, thus saving the Cymbeline Chips from extinction)
The Solomani offensive began to fall apart in 1126 due to a combination of a sharp decline in available supplies, extensive losses in personnel, ships and materiel, increasing difficulties in communications and, last but not least, the sharpening political crisis within the Confederacy. Eventually, in early 1127, the Solomani Confederacy has effectively lost control over the Diaspora sector, and several new polities (such as the Cumber Confederacy) arose from the ensuing chaos; the offensive against Margaret in the Old Expanses sector and against the Federation of Daibei in the Daibei sector were also showing signs of collapse, with units deserting the war (often killing their SolSec monitors in the process) and either becoming raiders, becoming starmercs, or joining the navy of one of the new polities.
The long years of intense political friction within the Confederacy came to a head in 254-1128, when the Hardliner administration at Home/Aldebaran expelled Joshua Dhavin, the leader of the Pan-sophontist faction, from the Solomani Party and declared him to be a traitor, along with all other members of the Pan-sophontist faction. The Pan-sophontists, in response, declared themselves an independent party, the Pan-Sophontist Party (PSP), and issued (though smuggled data-packs and hacked messages in the Solomani newsnets) a wide call to the Solomani masses to rally to the flag of Pan-Sophontism against the Hardliner generals and against SolSec and SolParty opression. The years of economic, psychological and social strain caused by the war have made many Solomani receptive to such a call, though many others still remained loyal to the Party, or atleast to their faction in it - and soon enough, by the end of 1128, the Solomani Confederacy split along factional lines; when the Hardliners tried to exploit Margaret's stock-market collapse of 032-1129 to mount a surprise attack, large parts of the fleets simply ignored the order, and some even rose in revolt against the Hardliners.
A short but brutal civil war ensued in the rimward parts of the Confederacy, while the entire Solomani rule in the Old Expanses, Diaspora and the coreward parts of Alpha Crucis and Magyar collapsed, leaving nothing but small pocket-empires in its wake. When the Civil War subsided in late 1130, the entire Solomani Confederacy was broken into various independent polities floating in an ocean of Wilds and threatened by the Spinward trickle of Aslan ihatei and by various raiders and pirates.
This is a time of recovery, of rebirth, of hopes for a better future - but also of factionalism, of fighting over the exact face of that future, of petty tyrants looking to build their own pocket empires from the ashes of the old, of remnants of the ruined past which still have to be dealt with. The giants lie dead in the playground - and the maggots who feed off their rotting bodies have taken possession of their guns.
Point of Divergance: Omicron's Fall
Celetron/Core, 079-1130. In the massive naval battle between the bulk of Dulinor's Coronation Fleet and Lucan's forces, Imperial Research Station Omicron was destroyed; reports vary about the exact cause of the stations destruction, but the most credible ones speak either about collateral damage from the very intense naval fighting in close orbit, or about the Lucanist scientists initiating the station's self-destruct sequence in order to prevent their information from falling into Dulinor's hands. In any case, no viable information was recoverable from the station's wreckage; any doomsday weapon developed in it was lost forever.
Dulinor's Pyrric Victory
Dulinor's forces, habing defeated a large portion of Lucan's remaining fleets at the battle of Celetron, proceeded to a direct thrust towards the Capital. Lucan's forces, however, were still resisting with fanatic devotion, and long and fierce naval battles took place at Dingus/Core, Suhtlam/Core and Balpan/Core, further reducing Dulinor's naval power. The final battle at the Capital system began at 222-1130 and was a bloody crawl towards the Capital world itself, with every remaining element at the disposal of Lucan - from the last few battleships to a mass of civilian ships and small craft - being thrown at Dulinor. When the last remnants of Dulinor's ships took nearly full control of Capital's orbital space, at 8:30 AM standard Capital time 261-1130, Emperor Lucan activated the last remaining line of ground-based "defensive" missile batteries (armed with nuclear warheads), targetting all major urban areas on Capital (including the Imperial Palace); and, thus, his last act of black-war mass homicide was also his suicidical blaze-of-glory. Fourteen years and 129 days after taking the life of Strephon, Dulinor was victorious - but at an unimaginagly horrible price. Capital was devastated - but several other important worlds lay at the hands of the victorious Dulinor.
Dulinor's military forces were heavily devastated by the war, with his half-disabled Clarion being the largest remaining ship and with only three ships abouve 10,000 dtons remaining spaceworthy. Furthermore, many of the worlds under his titular rule were either totally devastated by war - as Capital was - or effectively independent from the Imperium for several years. The remnants of Lucan's former Imperial bureaucracy was untrustworthy to the extreme, and Dulinor had to purge it of Lucan's fanatics, who were more than willing to sabotage Dulinor's work. Rebuilding his forces, regaining control of the Core, Dagudashaag and Zarushagaar Sectors, restoring the Imperial bureacuracy - all of these needed massive amount of funds and industrial work, and Dulinor, in his first significant act as the Emperor of the so-called "Third Imperium" (limited to three subsectors in the Core and to most of the Ilelish Sector), sent his ships and troops to the surrounding worlds to demand taxes. The people of Lucan's former Imperium, having long suffered under the yoke of Lucan's heavy taxation, thought of Dulinor as a possible saviour from the former opressor; when he demanded even higher taxes, however, rebellion sprung nearly overnight, with the masses demanding that the scarce resources of their worlds be spent on food, on jobs, on healthcare, on santiation and on repairing the war damage, rather than be squandered on Dulinor's empire-building ambitions.
The Second Ilelish Revolt
Facing a deteriorating situation at the Core and several insurrections against his rule, Dulinor turned to Illelish as a source for renewed funds and resources. A few express boats were sent back to the Federation of Ilelish's government (headed, in his absence, by his daughter Lady Isis), demanding a sharp increase in taxes and the transfer of governmental funds to the immidiate construction of new warfleets. When the order was publically announced on Dlan in 129-1131, a few demonstrations against it broke even on the heavily-policed world of Dlan; massive rallys in favour of a sharp reduction in taxes and of the transfer of governmental funds to welfare and local reconstruction took place on less totalitarian worlds. The war-taxes had an adverse effect on the life of the Ilelish people, on one hand forcing employers to cut wages (and fire millions of workers) in order to accomodate for the taxes, and, on the other hand, the cancellation of most welfare programs (to fund the construction of new fleets) left the massive amount of new unemployed virtually with no means to suipport themselves. While the local Dulinorist military forces were able to restore order in the following weeks, a growing sentiment against Dulinor, his taxes and his wars spread through the masses. Demands for his removal and for an immidiate end to the war were raised by a growing part of the population. Finally, in 056-1131, in response to yet another tax increase, massive demonstrations took place on Dlan and on several neighbouring worlds, carrying placards with slogans such as "Bread and Peace" and "Screw the Core, We Want Jobs Here!". The Dulinorist forces tried to crush the demonstrators with force and, later, with full military action, but the masses, assisted by parts of the military who have switched sides, were able to fight back. Fighting continued all across Dlan for weeks, but at the end the Federation government was forced to resign, the ruling Virasha sect had to vacate the government of Dlan itself in and Lady Isis had to flee Dlan.
The revolution, however, was by no means complete; the Dulinorist forces, headed by Lady Isis, still held sway on several worlds on the sector, while the fragile coalition of various insurgent groups held others. Civil war ensued, this time fought not by glittering battlefleets (as ships were rare and far between) but by rifles and machineguns, a bloody house-to-house slaughter on planetary surfaces. By mid-1133 the fighting has subsided, with the Dulinorist forces retaining a hold on a few worlds to the trailing of the sector, and various small revolutionary polities holding their own among the chaotic new Ilelish Wilds. Peace, atlast, came to the people of Ilelish, but no unity came with it; worlds and small polities were finally able to start rebuilding, but no unifying government existed anymore save for the Verge Combine (which has annexed several worlds along its Ilelish border), with its limited size and local interests.
Dulinor's Reign
Deprived of his holdings in Ilelish, Dulinor rules the Core subsector as well as parts of the various subsectors adjoyning it; while his official borders extend to the edges of the entire Core sector, his actual rule in the outer parts of the sector is very limited, as many worlds prefer to lick their own war-wounds and resist any attempt by Dulinor to enforce his government on them; Dulinor, in turn, has enough power to hold sway in the central regions of the sector but lacks power to decidedly crush the independents on its edges. While Dulinor is slowly increasing territory, that increase is slow and painful.
Two decades of war have hardened Dulinor's black heart. The man who began his jurney as a reformer out to create a better Imperium ended up becoming the worst embodyment of the old one: an absolute monarch. Having no trust and no understanding of the masses, he ended up hated by them as a remnant of the old autocracy; revolution carried on under its own power. But Dulinor still rules, a tyrant reigning by the power of his slowly-rebuilt military and navy, ruling his "Third Imperium" by a military bureaucracy which has replaced most of the old nobility. The few nobles who haven't been executed or imprisoned for serving Lucan have become members of the new bureacracy, their positions not heridatery (sp?) except for when the Emperor sanctions such a transfer of position.
Meanwhile, on the Rim
The reception of Margaret's cease-fire delegation to the Solomani Confederacy in 1124 had serious unforseen consequences. While the Pan-sophontist (or "Moderate") faction, due to a combination of its own ideology and pressure of the war-weary masses from below was more than willing to put an end to the Second Rim War and start rebuilding the exsausted Solomani economy, the Hardliner generals would consider such suggestions as treason to the Cause; after all, the Imperial usurpers were still fighting among themselves, and time was ripe (in their opinion) to deal a crushing blow to these "tainted-blood Vilani" and create a fitting buffer-zone between the Solomani and their foes. This profound disagreement has quickly escalated to a full-scale political crisis, with the Pan-sophontits demanding immidiate peace with Margaret and, if possible, Lucan, and the Hardliners demanding an all-out offensive to reestablish the rightful Rule of Man. Internal tentions within the Confederacy intensified over the next four years, until reaching an explosion in 1128.
(Meanwhile, a Second Point of Divergance: local defence forces at Cymbeline, loyal to the Pan-sophontist faction of the SolParty, have successfully prevented the Black War strike at this world at 063-1127, thus saving the Cymbeline Chips from extinction)
The Solomani offensive began to fall apart in 1126 due to a combination of a sharp decline in available supplies, extensive losses in personnel, ships and materiel, increasing difficulties in communications and, last but not least, the sharpening political crisis within the Confederacy. Eventually, in early 1127, the Solomani Confederacy has effectively lost control over the Diaspora sector, and several new polities (such as the Cumber Confederacy) arose from the ensuing chaos; the offensive against Margaret in the Old Expanses sector and against the Federation of Daibei in the Daibei sector were also showing signs of collapse, with units deserting the war (often killing their SolSec monitors in the process) and either becoming raiders, becoming starmercs, or joining the navy of one of the new polities.
The long years of intense political friction within the Confederacy came to a head in 254-1128, when the Hardliner administration at Home/Aldebaran expelled Joshua Dhavin, the leader of the Pan-sophontist faction, from the Solomani Party and declared him to be a traitor, along with all other members of the Pan-sophontist faction. The Pan-sophontists, in response, declared themselves an independent party, the Pan-Sophontist Party (PSP), and issued (though smuggled data-packs and hacked messages in the Solomani newsnets) a wide call to the Solomani masses to rally to the flag of Pan-Sophontism against the Hardliner generals and against SolSec and SolParty opression. The years of economic, psychological and social strain caused by the war have made many Solomani receptive to such a call, though many others still remained loyal to the Party, or atleast to their faction in it - and soon enough, by the end of 1128, the Solomani Confederacy split along factional lines; when the Hardliners tried to exploit Margaret's stock-market collapse of 032-1129 to mount a surprise attack, large parts of the fleets simply ignored the order, and some even rose in revolt against the Hardliners.
A short but brutal civil war ensued in the rimward parts of the Confederacy, while the entire Solomani rule in the Old Expanses, Diaspora and the coreward parts of Alpha Crucis and Magyar collapsed, leaving nothing but small pocket-empires in its wake. When the Civil War subsided in late 1130, the entire Solomani Confederacy was broken into various independent polities floating in an ocean of Wilds and threatened by the Spinward trickle of Aslan ihatei and by various raiders and pirates.
