History

The Third Imperium and Aftermath

For thousands of years the starways were dominated by the Anwnite Imperium, called the Third Imperium in the reckoning of history from the ancient Archadian Empire (which itself is known through surviving holo plates and other artifacts).

Like the Archadians before them, the Anwn System came to rule other systems through mastery of slipdrive technology - using naturally occurring wormholes to move through space at faster-than-light speeds. Unlike their predecessors, however, the Anwnites relied heavily upon Turing-Type AI to govern all aspects of daily life, including fielding robotic legions to enforce the peace throughout their vast dominion.

Roughly 500-600 Standard Cycles ago the Third Imperium began to decline, slowly withdrawing their legions and key officials to deal with internal and external threats to their core systems.

This withdrawal resulted in massive shifts in politics and technology amongst the abandoned worlds. Most systems slowly lost slipstream technology (since the navigation systems were powered by ancient positronic brains no one knew how to recreate, repair or maintain), reducing the surviving civilizations to slow sub-light space travel for exploration and resource exploitation. In other cases, lack of know-how and resources pushed civilization back to industrial and even pre-industrial stages of existence. Other less fortunate worlds and centers of human colonization simply died off.

Our story is set in one of the peripheral clusters of the old imperium, called the Terminus Cluster.

Age of Exploration - Terminus Cluster

Nine systems make up the explored portion of the Terminus Cluster. Of these the two dominant systems are Charon, an aristocratic military culture who believe themselves the standard bearers of the old Empire; and Fortuna, a decidedly mercantile culture who have created a sphere of influence based upon trade.

Both have remastered slipstream navigation - in the case of Fortuna by using transistor-on-silicon processors to do the complex calculations for a successful jump.

Charon originally relied upon highly trained human Calculators to do the same job, but nowadays these have largely been replaced by Fortuna-style electronic computers.

Note that Charon chartered ships still employs navigators trained in the old ways, as well as a e-computer to calculate jumps; Charon believes in nothing if not tradition.