Alternate Vision - Commentary

Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 12:58:03 -0500
From: CyHiggin@aol.com
Subject: Alternate Vision - Commentary

This "alternate vision" of the collapse was developed for my
use for a future post-Collapse campaign, but I thought 
that someone else might find it useful.  I didn't like the
Virus as a sole agent of Collapse, and I thought that 70
years was too short a collapse for most of the post-
Collapse plots that suggested themselves.  Too many
people around who still remember the Imperium.  By setting
it some centuries in the future of a severe collapse,
we have time for any kind of culture we need to have
developed, and just when and how the Collapse 
happened can be vague bits of history for the
archaeologists to decipher.  This allows you to fudge
the exact cause of the Collapse to suit.

Other items allow me to fudge things in other ways.
The Gloire and Antares supernovas re-arranged 
jumpspace, which allows me to move worlds that I 
find inconveniently positioned, or leave them be, if
I liked them where they were.  It also keeps explorers
on their toes -- the old starcharts may not be too
reliable.  There is precedent for this, as readers of
_Antares_Dawn_ and _Antares_Passage_ know.

The change in physics affecting gravitics is something
that Islands future-history developers will find familiar;
yes, it is the same one.  It also allows me to litter space
with old MegaT ships that don't work, and handle the
changes from MT technology to TNE technology without
rewriting Imperial history.  BTW, I *do* use the alternate
tech Thrusters from FF&S.  Yes, it's a weird development;
it's also a big, hairy plothook -- WHY did gravity change?

I assumed that Imperial era jumpspace theory was some-
what flawed -- there is precedent for it, as both the Hivers
and Vilani had flawed jump theory at one time.  In this case,
the flaw caused scientists to assume that no jump ship 
smaller than 1400 kl could be built -- true in MT, untrue in
TNE.  Another addition to jump theory: spinning gravitational
singularities, such as black holes and some neutron stars,
create very high jump potential "hills" in jumpspace.  On
the 2D jumpspace map, these "hills" appear as rifts or 
bubbles of empty space.  There is actually a system at
the center of such rifts, but it is unapproachable by known
jump drives.  Note that such a system is still accessible thru
normal space... and that a supernova creates a new rift.

The Kyatifa journal is intended to be a "drop-in" background
history for any small "pocket empire"; names were kept fairly
generic.

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                 The Journal of Kyatifa Ahroun a Malek
                     (c) 1994 by Cynthia Higginbotham

    (material omitted... )

133/021 : 
     We found another derelict today, a dead ship whose impossible 
drives do not obey our Laws of physics, and thus, do not work.  This one,
mercifully, had no crew aboard.  Had they warning, I wonder, before the Final
Disaster struck?  Or were they merely stranded groundside, unable to return
to their ship, but equally doomed?  What must they have thought of this last,
most awful perversion of their universe?  
    We have only bits and pieces of history from before the 
Collapse; so much was lost. No one really knows how long the 
Collapse was; centuries, at least.  The Collapse we call it here in 
the Cluster; the Aslan Borderers call it Whethwyrt, "when the 
universe was corrupted"; I have heard other terms: the Greater 
Maghiz, Nightfall, the Darktime, Endtime.
    What was the Collapse?  What history we have tells of war, war 
on a scale unimaginable to any now alive, war between empires.  Some
tantalizing fragments hint of civil war or rebellion, but nothing 
conclusive.  Was the Solomani Rim a rebel province or a rival 
empire?  No one knows.
    There was war, invasion, lawlessness -- apparently for an 
extended time.  But that alone would not have caused the Collapse, 
though it must have weakened them, set them up for what was to come. 
    Perhaps the War was the "First Disaster" of the Cynilogic Teachings. The
Second Disaster was the Stardeath.
    Stardeath -- the supernovae of two giant stars "in the course 
of one lifetime".  From what we now know about jumpspace, we have
reconstructed what must have happened -- but to our ancestors, with their
flawed theory of jumpspace, it must have been an appalling violation of
reality.  For the stars...moved.  Two spinning gravitational singularities wer
e created from those supernovae, and they altered the shape of jumpspace
-- as in the distant past, supernovae created the Great Rifts and the
Abyss-Rift.  And thus, stars still fixed in realspace moved, realigned
themselves in jumpspace.
   This was a devastating blow to the Imperial Civilization of our 
ancestors; already the vital economic ties between worlds had been weakened
by long years of the War.  Now the stars had moved, throwing interstellar
trade and communications into chaos. Is it any wonder that worlds abandoned
their distant neighbors and turned inward, relying on their own
self-sufficiency rather than unreliable interstellar trade?  We presume that
this retreat from the stars explains the outposts found stripped and
abandoned;  for those who left the outposts were still able to leave, to
carry off what was valuable.  But it wasn't the Stardeath that killed whole
worlds, leaving vast megapoli inhabited only by the dead and stone-age
savages.
    The Final Disaster is still hard to comprehend; conjecture 
based on Imperial ships and machinery, the Cynilogic Teachings, and the
strangely erroneous bits of technical literature still remaining from the
Imperial period.  One ship could have been dismissed as a fluke, a failed
prototype -- but not all of them.  There is a common thread in much Imperial
machinery --
all based on the same principles, all in agreement with Imperial engineering
texts -- all wrong.  They not only do not work -- they cannot work.
     Gravitics:  the basis for contragrav, anti-acceleration fields, 
thruster plates.  In the ancient Imperial Civilization, the basis 
for those and many other things -- all now impossible.  The very 
physical constants taught in Imperial texts are wrong -- and thus 
all else is wrong.  We were lucky; those flawed texts were 
discovered by archaeologists only a few decades ago, long after we had
redeveloped gravitics from first principles -- merely knowing that it had
been done once, therefore we could do it again. I know of worlds that never
redeveloped gravitics, because they had the help of that fatally flawed
Imperial engineering data.  I 
have heard of a world (Alsace) whose scientists believe gravitics to 
be impossible, because the legends of the ways it was used by 
Imperials are clearly fantastic -- they "know" the universe doesn't 
work that way.  Their archaeologists have various questionable 
theories to explain the few derelict Imperial ships discovered in 
their system -- the funniest one is the explanation that the 
derelicts weren't real ships at all, but votive offerings to the 
gods of space, to invoke magic by building a deliberately impossible drive.
     Another one of their explanations is that the Imperials used a
sufficiently advanced technology that important details are invisible to us.
 This would almost be believable, except that I have read copies of the
surviving Imperial engineering text, and understand what they thought they
were doing.  And those Alsatian archaeologists have never had to explain a
"cemetary
world".
     I've seen one, a cemetary world.  A world where everyone died 
as all the vital machinery failed at once.  Power stations went dead 
or blew up, vehicles, gravtrains, spaceships suddenly fell dead from the sky,
and all the other machinery failed as power died.  
Machinery like life support on methane atmosphere worlds -- sure, 
there were emergency power supplies -- but how fast can you figure out what's
fundamentally wrong with your power plant, redesign and rebuild one from the
ground up -- especially when half your tools don't work anymore either, and
the ones that do work are using your scarce emergency power?  And do you
evacuate a suddenly hostile world when none of your vehicles move?  You can't
walk to another planet!  
    Then there were the habitable worlds, the ones with survivors 
-- if you can call them that.  The die-off must have been horrendous, when
all the supports of civilization ceased to
function -- no food transported, food production diminished to 
miniscule amounts, no water supply save unsanitary natural rivers, 
no public sanitation, no manufactured goods, no nothing save what 
bare hands can produce and bare feet can carry.  After the 
starvation, rioting and disease killed the megalopoli, a handful of 
survivors took up a hand-to-mouth, stone-age existance in the 
wilderness.  With no education available, no source of information 
(the databanks are all dead, remember), they had to reinvent 
everything from first principles.  A few of them have managed spears and fire.
  Most of them are club-wielding savages who eat raw whatever they can catch,
including each other.  A very few lucky ones have achieved a stable, though
primitive civilization; all such have traditions of one or more Teacher
figures who brought/preserved important technologies like dirt farming, fire,
building, animal domestication, etc.  Our archaeologists have
found the ruins of an Imperial Scout Service base on one such world; they
guess that Imperial Scouts either came from worlds like ours, or had training
in primitive survival.
     Our own traditions agree with the archaeologist's findings on 
the cemetary worlds -- somehow, the Laws of physics affecting 
gravitics changed overnight.  We still don't know how or why; we may never
know.  What worked before, became impossible; and what works now would have
been impossible then.  Proud Imperial worlds whose technology was based on
gravitics died overnight.
     And worlds like ours, that have regained the stars?  Traditions 
and archeology have shown us that our ancestors' worlds were on the fringes
of Imperial Civilization at best.  Home worlds of outsiders, worlds
restricted from participating in Imperial Civilization for one reason or
other -- all worlds that had to rely on their own less-developed
technologies, technologies not based on gravitics but on magnetics,
chemistry, mechanics, atomics, etc.  The bases for our own ancestral
civilizations were not affected by the Final Disaster;  we survived and grew.
     Much was still lost; many worlds had some dependence on 
Imperial technology, but not enough to destroy them.  We fell back, 
but picked ourselves up and continued on.  In some areas, we have equalled or
surpassed the vanished Imperials -- in redeveloping jump theory from first
principles, we acquired new insights that somehow  escaped the Imperials.  So
I assume, for no jump-capable Imperial era ship has been found smaller than
1400 kl.  Instead of jump torpedoes, they appear to have used a network of
unwieldy 1400 kl craft for communications.  We don't know if they understood
the relationship between spinning singularities and the shape of  jumpspace;
there's not a good sample of Imperial jump theory left....

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                                              -- Cynthia