The Phase Drive of FTL:2448

In FTL:2448, Phase Drives are just Hyper drives/Jump drives/pick your adjective drive. You turn them on and you go to another universe with different properties, one of which allows you to travel faster than light in our universe due to the fact that this other universe maps one to one to our universe, but is much smaller or there is no speed of light limit.

That's all fine, except that our current understanding of physics indicates that the only way to connect to that universe would be through a wormhole. Well Hell, if you can form a wormhole stable enough to another universe, why not to another location in our universe?

In fact the method used by Herbert and Lashaw would be akin to picking berries. You pick a microscopic wormhole out of the virtual particle foam, test to see if it is going where you want to go, if not, you pick another, and another, until you find the one to where you want to go.

The process is entirely random, so the energy cost will be the same for a wormhole to the Phase universe as for one to Fomalhaut, or even the Andromeda Galaxy.

This is all well and good, but if we start using wormholes, then the nature of the game changes, and changes radically. So let's keep the Phase Drive, but let me lay out a new way for it to work and be consistent with what we know or might know...

Dr. John Lashaw was the premier String Theory theorist of his day. His treatise on String Resonance and Folded Space time spurred the young Janice Herbert into testing one of his predictions: That any one of the 12 dimensions of the fabric of space time could be "rolled up" into a non-dimensional space.

Part of String Theory is the postulation that our universe has 12 dimensions and that 8 of them have been rolled up into a non- dimensional space, leaving the remaining four, height, width, breadth, and time, behind.

What Lashaw had proposed that using electromagnetic forces, one could warp space time and "roll up" the remain four dimensions into this space.

What Herbert proposed was a means to determine how to actually do this. Her paper in 2049 got the attention of Lashaw and the two of them worked on the equations to derive a magnetic coil design that when powered, would fold space time and roll it up into this non- dimensional space. Similar tests using lasers to form regions of twisted space time had been successful up to a point, that point being where a channel to the future would be formed. Then most of the laser systems would undergo a failure of some sort and space time would unfold.

One result of their work together was the realization that once something was rolled up into this non-dimensional space, it could be unrolled at a different location, as long as the Phase Space for each of the rolled up dimensions was altered to match the Phase Space of the location.

Funding was procured, and a primitive Phase Coil was wound on Luna. The coil was massive, a sphere nearly 7 meters across. The autonomous testbed with the coil and large fusion power plant, was towed out to the orbit of Jupiter and the drive tested. It was slow, the charge took a while to build up in the coil. But as the charge built, the region within the magnetic field of the coil began to go out of phase with normal space. Light bent as it passed through the interface, and particles were deflected. Larger objects, the size of pebbles, were tossed and they bounced off the interface for the most part. One vigorously thrown pebble partially penetrated and vaporized. It didn't explode, but the portion that crossed the boundary was polished smoother than any technology could ever do.

At 45 degrees of Phase, about 20 hours after the start of the test, the testbed was harder to see as more light was bent and refracted by the boundary. At 90 degrees of Phase, 9 hours later, it was nearly invisible, the data stream from the test equipment was still strong, but was now 90 degrees our of phase. Additionally the volume of space time around the testbed had shrunk by 25%.

Once 90 degrees of Phase was reached, the process accelerated exponentially. In a matter of minutes the region of space had shrunk to about 5% and then seconds later, it was gone.

Then ten minutes later, it came back, just like it was programmed to. Only... there was no data, and the unrolling process was going faster than planned. What took 30 hours to do previously, took less than thirty minutes. The drive was fused and twisted, the recording equipment was a solid mass, only by luck were they able to extract the data from those ten minutes in that non-dimensional space.

The data was odd. It indicated that coils overheated from some form of induction and that this was only evident when the drive was at 175 degrees of Phase. Herbert and Lashaw worked the data and found that the induction was caused by the curvature of space time. Jupiter's orbit was too far into the Sun's influence. Based on this data, they determined that for the drive to work properly, it needed to be used out near Neptune's orbit, preferably on the opposite side of the Sun from Neptune.

It was after this revelation that Herbert and Lashaw vahished.

Today we know that the concept of a "non-dimensional space" was wrong, and that String Theory was just a stepping stone to other theories. But it's one prediction, that several dimensions, now believed to number around a hundred, occupy a different portion of space time than the one we do. The Phase Drive allows use to move a portion of local space time into this other space time and then through various adjustments of universal space time, the Phase Drive will translate the ship to a new location. This process, as always, takes time, but newer drives can do this faster than the earlier ones. For some reason, one that vexes modern theorists, distance does matter, so father away an object is, the more power and time it takes to translate to the new coordinates.

Most races in known space use a form of Phase Drive to travel between the stars.

Objects that pass outside of the Phase Field do not reenter the normal universe as energy, but instead reenter as fundamental particles. Across the entire universe.

If a ship unfolds too fast, it can create a temporary "crease" in space time. This crease can damage equipment and harm living creatures. Mild forms of these creases can cause "phase sickness" in living creatures and cause equipment to glitch.

If a ship unfolds in under a minute, it will reappear in normal space... folded. This is the euphemism for what happens to ship that's been through 4th dimensional origami. It is 100% fatal. We pray to God it is...

One side effect of the "warm up" phase of a Phase Drive is that once the ship is just a little out of phase with normal space, it can move freely through normal space through an intricate means of continual spatial translation. Speeds up to 14% of the speed of light have been achieved, but are not recommended. At speeds above 1% light, if you encounter something massive enough, it will pass through the phase boundary as a spray of fine matter... moving at the speed you encountered the object at. Even at 1% the speed of light, dust can vaporize the hull of a ship.

The Nordholm Quantum-Jump and the Kitch-Grice Quantum-Jump drives are not Phase Drives, but are quantum tunneling drives. They are based in large part on dissected Whurrian ships and their Blink Drive. Because the organic components of a Whurrian ship decay fairly rapidly, and the Blink Drive itself partially jumps when the ship dies, both of these drives are still highly experimental and rumors that a stable version of the Nordholm has been installed on ISCO warships is just rumor.

Whurrian ships use the technique of quantum tunneling to cross the vastness of space. If they wanted to, a Whurr ship could tunnel the entire distance to another star. However, if one were to try, more than likely it would miss it's target by several light years. Instead, they travel in short hops, where they get their bearings and hop again. Along well known routes, they can reduce the number of hops to mere handful.

The Vesh are known to have two different FTL drives: The Vesh Flux drive and their "GetTheHellOutOfHere" drive (A direct translation). The Flux drive allows ships to travel along the line of Phase Flux that occur naturally between close stars. Phase Flux is best described as creases in universal space time that form when two large stellar masses are in close proximity to each other. Close is defined as within 25 light years, though lines of Phase Flux are complex when multiple stars are near each other. There is a region in the two star systems that represents the opening of the Flux crease, typically about an AU in volume. Within this volume, the Flux drive can engage and send the ship along the crease at apparent FTL speeds.

For example, the Flux lines connecting Sol, Alpha Centauri, Beta Centauri, Proxima Centauri, and two brow dwarfs between the larger stars, form shapes and points in deep space that a ship could exit from. From the Flux region in the Sol system, a Vesh ship could travel to any of the other nearby systems, as long as the ship was skillful enough to surf the connections.

The "GetTheHellOutOfHere" drive is a true wormhole drive. It can create a wormhole around a Vesh ship. The unfortunate problem with this drive is that you're not guaranteed to arrive in the same universe as the one you left. Typically if a Vesh ship has the time to work out all the connections, returning to the same universe is almost a certainty. Almost.

However when in combat, the ship will panic and invoke the drive without doing anything at all other than dump energy into the drive. Where and when the ship will reappear, is unknown. Odds are that these ships appear in universes with significantly different physical laws that they cannot exist and die. The two ships that appeared in ISCO space are considered the lucky ones. Both were heavily damaged and were only a portion of the full ship according to research and interviews with the surviving Vesh.

The first Vesh ship could not be examined as it suffered a Flux drive mishap when it tried to engage its Flux drive in a region where were was no Flux crease opening. If a Vesh Flux drive is engaged in a region that does not have a crease or a crease opening, the energy pumped into the drive is expelled... as energy. The ship exploded into fragments.

The second ship was so heavily damaged that it was only partially aware and soon died later. However the Vesh prevented any inspection of the ship or its internal organs, so nothing much is none about the "GetTheHellOutOfHere" drive.

The future of travel in 2448 is changing. The development of the Phase Zero pod, is making travel faster and safer, and promises to do away with the need for fusion drives for system ships. The Phase Zero pod only takes the pod and anything within its field of effect only a degree or two out of Phase. Matter can still pass through the boundary region and the pod does not suffer any destabilization due to extreme space time curvature. It is only the fact that each Phase Zero coil must be handwound, that the cost of the Phase Zero technology is only in reach of the rich and of the ISCO government.

Coi hu sanbatmi tie logli

Or, "How to communicate with Loglan"

Loglan, while a "logical language" doesn't have the number of speakers and assistance that it's daughter language, Lojban does. Still, one can persevere in constructing sentences using this language.

First thing that you'll want to do is download the Loglan Online Dictionary: PC or Mac

It's a Java app, and it can help you find the right word for whatever you want to say.

So let's look at the title of this essay. First a little pronunciation:

Pronunciation

Loglan pronunciation is pretty simple. There are a few letters and letter combinations that sound different than in English, but as far as this sample is concerned, if you just use Spanish vowels (a=AH,e=EH,i=EE,o=OH,u=OO) you won't be far off.

The Translation

Coi hu sanbatmi tie logli

Coi hu = How to (according to what rule/method)
Sanbatmi = Communicate (to communicate with one another about a subject)
tie = With (with/through/by (means of), any means/instrument)
Logli = Loglan

Now I could have said po fomtaa perti la Loglan, which roughly translates as "To lecture about the Loglan language", but I chose a harder phrase.

Obviously Loglan is easier for European language speakers, especially for those in the Romance languages, but it's a start for a interstellar trade language.

Mi vizka tu futci!

The Game of Life

By John H Reiher Jr.

Darren Reider, xenobiologist, crunched over the sandy beach in his environmental suit. Outside his suit was a dense mixture of nitrogen, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, and other gases, none of which was suitable for life. Well, his kind of live. It was perfect for the variety of life that flourished here.

The temperature outside his climate controlled internal environment was nearly 50°C, and this bit of land was near the pole of this world. The equator rose to a torrid and humid 80°C, and was prone to tremendous hurricanes.

Overhead was an orange sky dotted with a scattering of low clouds, heavy with water vapor. Reider figured that a thunderstorm was in store for the tour tonight. The G2 sun, DM-27 3248, was low on the horizon, about mid afternoon, local time. He made a mental note to schedule a midnight walk during the height of the storm, they were fairly spectacular in this dense atmosphere.

Behind him trudged five of the twenty tourists that made up the “Expedition of Life” tour that Planetary Expeditions, the company he worked for, had organized. Most of the tourists on the tour were academics and biologists. Except for his five. His clutch of tourists won a seat on the tour through a contest sponsored by the Nibloc Corporation. None of them had a clue what the difference was between Euryarchaeota and Eukaryotes. Of course, he admitted to himself, they weren’t stupid. They just didn’t have the background or education in xenobiology or in biology in general.

So why did they enter the contest? The ads promised adventure, romance, danger, wild alien animals, and not…

“Good Lord, not more pond scum!” moaned Harriet Morano. “Rie Reider, why do we have to look at pond scum? If I wanted to look at that, I can look in my neighbor’s pool.” That got a tired laugh from the rest of the group.

Reider stopped at the edge of the softly lapping water of a shallow bay on the island they had landed on. “Rie Morano, what’s wrong with pond scum? This world in fact is very special…”

“If it was so special,” chirped Allyson Morano, the daughter of the elder Morano, “then why does it have charming name of DM-27 3248d? You’d think it would have a name like Bob’s world or something if it was so special.”

Reider held back the reply that it did, “Pond Scum World”, and replied, “Because, junti Rie Morano, this world is as old as Earth is, and yet, one of the highest form of life are the Euryarchaeota that maintain the methane atmosphere of the planet. Life here never took the next step, it has stayed same for billions of years.”

“Why is that rie?” asked Ted Bohanan, a senior manager of a financial firm from Alverez Station, Fomalhaut.

Reider resisted the temptation to sigh; this group had the retention of a bullet-riddled sieve. He looked eastward and then said, pointing at the horizon, “The reason why is that: the planet’s moon.” The group turned to look in the direction he pointed and saw the barely visible crescent of the planet’s moon cresting the horizon.

“The planet’s moon is the reason why?” replied Bohanan. “In what way? How does a moon prevent life evolving?”

He smiled, “That’s a very good question Rie Bohanan, why did that moon prevent life from evolving? Anyone?”

He got five blank stares in response. Strongly resisting the urge to sigh, he continued, “The reason why is that moon, which is larger than Luna, protects this planet and makes it a calm, serene, safe place to live.”

“That makes it sound like a haven for life,” commented Darryl Keels, an information worker from Detroit.

“Exactly, and that’s the problem.” He bent down and with his gloved hand scooped up a spongy, magenta colored mat of prokaryotes. “When life is safe and warm, it has no need to adapt and change. And a large moon does that, by preventing this world from wobbling.”

“And not wobbling makes this world safe?” replied Keels. “But Earth has a large moon and it ‘wobbles’.” The rest of the tour’s helmets bobbed in agreement. “Life isn’t all that safe there.”

“On the contrary,” countered Reider, “life is quite safe on Earth. It has survived at least two iceball Earth events, multiple asteroidal impacts, and even man. But to get there, life on Earth had to have those events happen. Life evolves when it is stressed, forced to adapt and change. Once life reaches the Eukaryotic stage, it can stress itself.”

“What’s u-ka-roat-tic mean?” asked Rae Wordlaw. “I hear the scientists use that term a lot, but I don’t know what it means.”

Reider smiled and said, “A Eukaryote is cell that is organized into what we call organelles and a separate inner cell called the nucleus. The nucleus contains the cell’s DNA and provides a second level of protection. It also allows for a more efficient use of resources by the cell. Life on this world is known as Achaea and there is no organization inside the cell, dividing it into different specialized organelles. It’s just a, um, mishmash.” He held up the magenta mat and said, “This mat is made up of Euryarchaeota, technically, Xenoeuryarchaeota, which specializes in methane production. And if you look at the color of the sky, they are quite good at it. In fact, this species photosynthesizes UV sunlight, nitrogen, ammonia and carbon dioxide to produce methane and nutrients. It’s called Coccinamethanosarcina Reideri… um, it’s named after me. I was first to classify it. It’s very unique.”

He put the mat back into the water, and then sprayed an oxidizer on his glove, killing all traces of the Euryarchaeota. “It’s also very old. Based on its mutation rate, it’s nearly three billion years old. There are nearly half a million different variations of this Euryarchaeota on this planet. And it’s one of the dominant forms of life on this planet. In another three billion years, it will still be the one of the dominant forms of life. It has no need to change, thanks to that moon that keeps this world from wobbling.”

“So what does ‘wobbling’ has anything to do with evolution?” asked Keels.

“For one thing,” explained Reider, “it stresses life. Without a large moon, planets will wobble by as much as sixty degrees off center. Rie Bohanan, in your own home system of Fomalhaut, you have such a world, Dorsey. Currently it has an axial tilt of forty degrees, which radically affects the climate, does it not?”

Bohanan shuffled his feet and said, “I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been there. In fact I’ve never been on a planet before until now. This is the first planet I have ever set foot on.” That drew looks from his fellow tourists.

“Never been on a planet?” asked an incredulous senior Morano. “Rie Bohanan you mean you’ve spent your life whole life on that station?”

“You make it sound like it’s a prison,” defended Bohanan. “Life is good on Alverez Station. It’s…well… safe.”

Reider imagined that Bohanan was blushing behind the UV shielded visor of his environmental suit. “As worlds go, this is a good first world. In any case,” he said, “without a moon to stabilize a planet’s axial tilt, it will wobble to an extent that it will shove life into corners and force it to adapt and change. Dorsey is only a billion years old and it already has an oxygen atmosphere, multicellular life, even animals and plants. It’s a vibrant and growing ecosphere. At the same age, Earth had just barely evolved cyanobacteria and it took another billion years to produce enough oxygen to cause the first snowball Earth event. Dorsey has had an oxygen atmosphere for the past quarter billion years. In one billion years of wobble-induced evolution, Dorsey is where Earth was, about a half a billion years ago. Of course, once life on Earth reached that point, it took off and exploded into the many forms we see today. In a half a billion years, imagine what life on Dorsey is going to be like.”

He watched as that concept sunk into the group. Good, he thought, I got them thinking. So when they visit the next world, they’ll have a better appreciation for how life there evolved. However, we still have this world to finish first.

“So to answer your original question Rie Morano,” he said, “no, we’re not going to look at more pond scum. Instead, we’re going to see something special on this island, something we call ‘quasi-multicellular life’. If it finds a niche in this environment, it will change how life on this world will evolve. Want to go see it? Do you want to see the game of life in progress?”

He was greeted with an affirmative chorus and then he and his clutch of willing students headed down the ocean shore…

The Game of Life is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

New type of character for FTL:2448: "Le Ractua"

First off, I had to learn a little Loglan to come up with this name. "Le ractua" literally means "the traveling worker", and can be interpreted as a "migrant worker". Ractuas (lo ractua, "lo" is how you say some thing is many or plural.) are the stellar migrant workers of FTL:2448. I admit that I got this idea from the wonderful online comic Dicebox by Jenn Manley Lee. A story of two migrant workers plying the starlanes.

When a seasonal business needs a "grupa turka" (a bunch of workers) they will hire this unique breed of migrant worker. Lo ractua are a group of workers that take working passage on ships, or ride in cryosleep to the next world that has "ro fu corperpli" or many temp jobs.

Many colonies don't have the people to do all the jobs that are available or only occur at irregular times. The lo ractua fill that role. They travel from system to system, from fu corperpli to fu corperpli. They don't earn much, just enough to keep food in their stomach, and to pay for ice bed on the next trip. If they can wrangle a "le fu corperpli sea racketpi" or working passage, they will, as most dislike cryosleep.

There are generations of lo ractua wending their ways through ISCO space, after the next job and dry place to sleep. Many are in need of adequate health care, and most shy away from the authorities, as they don't trust the ICL or ISCO.

Third or fourth generation lo ractua speak nothing but Loglan, are slightly taller than grounders, and have connections everywhere, even on good ole mother Earth. Typically these lo ractua have a strong constitution and a stronger back, but may be missing minor body parts like fingers or other appendages. Normally, they travel either as complete family units, or as pairs, typically as a civil union couple, whether or not they actually are.

Some "lo ractua kulgru" (migrant worker clans) have been able to pool their money and buy a claptrap of a space ship, and then form one of the infamous kibbutz ships. Most of these ships have seen better days, hell, better centuries, and only by dint of constant repair and scavenging parts, do they even fly. If caught by a ICL patrol boat with nothing better to do, they are typically towed to the nearest planet and the ship impounded. This typically lasts until the kulgru can pool enough money to get the ship out of impound orbit and off they go again.

This is just the beginning for this concept. I plan to expand it some more.

Snapshot: Fomalhaut V: New America

Name New America, AKA Fomalhaut V
Orbital Radius: 6.1 AU
Orbital Period: 9.53 Years
Orbital Eccentricity: 0.035

Moons: 3
Moon 1: Washington
Lunar Radius: 700 KM
Lunar Orbit: 37,400 KM
Lunar Density: 1.2
Lunar Mass: 0.002
Lunar Gravity: 0.167 G
Lunar Year: 19.68 hours

Moon 2: Franklin
Lunar Radius: 70 KM
Lunar Orbit: 40,800 KM
Lunar Density: 1.2
Lunar Mass: Negligible
Lunar Gravity: Negligible
Lunar Year: 20.27 hours

Station: Alverez Station
Station Orbit: 53,000 km
Station Orbital Period: 30 hours

Moon 3: Jefferson
Lunar Radius: 400 KM
Lunar Orbit: 102,000 KM
Lunar Density: 1.2
Lunar Mass: 0.0003
Lunar Gravity: 0.074 G
Lunar Year: 3.39 days

Planet: New America
Radius: 6,800 KM
Density: .96 Earth
Mass: 1.18 Earth
Gravity: 1.04 G
Escape Velocity: 1.05 Earth
Axial tilt: 22°
Day: 30 hours
Composition: Iron-nickel, medium metal core
Tectonic Activity: PLATELET TECTONIC: the crust is thinner, plates smaller and the plates recycle themselves much faster. This world has much volcanic activity.
Magnetic field: .1 Gauss
Base Temp: 256 K
Average Temperature: 293 K, 20.03° C
Day: 300 K, 27.4° C
Night: 286 K, 12.7° C
Hydrosphere: 77%
Atmosphere composition: N2 73% , O 20%, CO2 4%, CH4 3%
Atmosphere pressure: 1.18 Atmospheres
Albedo: .98
Life: Single celled forms and some lichen
Population: Human: 297,973; Blox: 344,023; Kendak: 28,433
Languages: Mongolian 30%; Deitsch "Pennsylvanian Dutch" 15%; K'Blox
51%; Signe 4%; Loglan 60%

New America was the first world to be settled in the Fomalhaut system in 2105 by a mixed group of Amish and Mongolian peoples. Both groups represented the most strictest interpretation of their cultural beliefs: The Amish were know as "Old Order Amish" and consisted of three groups situated in Pennsylvania and Ohio regions of the former United States of America, while the Mongols were a group from the former Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia in the former People's Republic of China. They found that the traditional Mongolian way of life was being turned into a tourist attraction and many of their children were abandoning their way of life in preference to integrating into the Chinese culture.

Separately, these two groups petitioned ISCO to provide a colony world that they could call there own. Altogether, ISCO found it had to find a colony for 38,000 people. Then the reports from Alverez expedition came back, and ISCO was able to field 8 Homesteader class ships to move the colonists and their belongings to Fomalhaut V, which they later found out had been named "New America" by the Alverez expedition.

Of the 38,000 people, 10,000 were Amish, 28,000 were Mongolian. The two groups stayed separate on the voyage out and upon arrival at New America, they claimed different portions of the world. However, this proved to be impractical.

At the time, the atmosphere on New America only had 5% Oxygen in it, with high levels of Methane and lethal levels of CO2. The colony ships carried experimental Terraforming biotics: mainly two kinds of algae, one for seeding the oceans and an airborne version that was seeded high in the atmosphere. Both plants were designed to thrive in the type of environment that was provided by the planet New America.

The atmosphere was not toxic to plant life, so while the plants thrived, the first settlements were under inflated domes and the farmers had to wear breathers or environmental suits when they workied their farms. The Mongols had brought yaks and horses and the Amish brought chickens and cattle, as well as frozen embryos for other species. The two very different groups found that they had to work together to make this world a new home.

When the Alverez Colonial Corporation colony arrived, the Amish and Mongols banded together to force these interlopers off their world. But the deep seated beliefs of the Amish overruled banning the new colony from rotating people down to the planet. But in those early years, resources were tight, the plants had yet to establish themselves, and any extra mouths to feed could not be supported.

However, because the Amish and Mongols were now very dependent on technology and the Stationers were the only close source of technology, they altered their ways of life to accommodate a small number of them on their world and to run the ground port.

It took a hundred years before the air around the settlements became breathable, though there are areas on New America where the atmosphere is still lethal with high levels of CO2. Free of their domes, the colony went through a growth spurt and increased in size, as the colonists celebrated their new found freedom.

In this one hundred years, the two disparate cultures, Amish and Mongolian, merged, creating a new, unique culture never before seen. There were two Amish only settlements that forsook all technology as soon as they could as well as any contact with other colonists, and at least one Mongol only settlement that also did not mingle, but the vast majority of the Amish Mongols were new breed of people, mixed culturally as well as genetically.

Amish Mongols have a eurasian appearance, with hair color across the spectrum of normal human coloration. Culturally, they still do not use much in the way of modern technology, they only use that technology that doesn't violate their beliefs of work and humility before God. They are all pacifists, but more along the line of "I won't bother you, unless you bother me, and if you do, may the lord help you..."

Technologically speaking, they are practitioners of sustainable technology, they only use that technology that can be simply maintained and operated without a massive infrastructure. Though one observer has noted that while the Amish Mongols do not have a massive technological infrastructure on their planet, they "borrow" their infrastructure from the one in orbit about their world in the form of Alverez Station.

In 2246, two colony ships arrived from Blox. On board where several thousand K'Blox, a Bloxian ethnic minority, seeking a new haven to live and maintain their culture. K'Blox are the heavy world version of the Blox, and have thicker limbs, and a lighter body than their Bloxian brethren.

Culturally, they were not that different from the Amish Mongols, so they were welcomed into the existing enclaves and allowed to settle. A small group of a hundred or so K'Blox decided to setup their own settlement, did not join the rest of the colony.

The K'Blox were followers of the Karmook Quornk prophet. Karmook had preached the simpler life, he even preached against the intense bureaucracies that had formed on Blox. This alienated the Karmooka, as the K'Bloxian and Bloxian followers were called, from the mainstream Bloxian society.

While the Bloxian Karmooka had large enclaves on Blox, similar to those the Amish had on Earth, the K'Bloxians did not. They were few in number and were getting fewer. Emigrating to America was their only choice as they saw it.

At first they were strange blue balls of talking fur, but after while, and with more than one barn raising, the K'Blox have become indispensable members of American society.

Finally, in 2398 a Kendak named Bob arrived at America. There were about 5,000 of Bob on the colony ship. The Bob Hivemind had taken on the personality of an Amish man it had met on Earth. Bob now sought the simple life for itself, and America beckoned. Not knowing what to do with such a creature, the Amish Mongols and K'Blox held a council and debated over allowing such a being... beings... whatever, to settle on America.

When several of Bob were invited to speak, they proved to be well informed about traditional Amish ways, and beliefs. They also proved to be hard workers, the worker drones of Bob could work in perfect unison when it came to barn raising, or constructing Solar Cell platforms. After a month of discussion, the council decided to allow Bob to settle.

Bob made a decision, and broke into five hiveminds, Bob, John, Paul, George, and Abby. Each one settled near a different Amish Mongol Karmooka community. The Abby hivemind stayed near the ground port and has changed its name to Rosa and has taken on the personality of Rosa Alverez, the wife of the head of the Alverez family.

Today, visitors must get a visa to land on America, and they are not allowed in several communities. America is the breadbasket of the Fomalhaut system, supplying much of the food eaten or sold on Alverez Station and other orbital facilities.

The sky has a faintly green tint, due to the airborne algae and its constant battle with the many active volcanoes on America. Much of the native life on Fomalhaut is gone, except for the deep ocean extremophiles and various forms of anaerobic bacteria that still thrive in geysers and thermal vents. Grasses cover 40% of the planet's land, while forests only occupy 10%. The rest is arid, lifeless lava plains and basaltic rock.


The Game of Life is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Snapshot: Fomalhaut IV: Dorsey

Planet: Dorsey: Fomalhaut IV:
Orbital radius: 4.7 AU
Orbital period: 6.4 years
Orbital eccentricity: 0.035
Moons: 0
Radius: 6,200 KM
Density: 0.8 Earth
Mass: 0.73 Earth
Gravity: .78 G
Escape Velocity: 9.74 km/s
Axial tilt: 40°
Day: 13 hours
Composition: Iron-nickel, medium metal core
Tectonic Activity: PLATELET TECTONIC: the crust is thinner, plates smaller and the plates recycle themselves much faster. This world has much volcanic activity.
Magnetic field: 8 Gauss (Earth is 0.305 Gauss)
Base Temp: 293.1 K
Average Temperature: 298 K, 25° C
Day: 302 K, 29° C
Night: 294 K, 21° C
Hydrosphere: 85%, Shallow oceans
Atmosphere composition: N2 77%, O2 21%
Atmosphere pressure: 1.022 atmospheres
Albedo: 1.02
Life: Carbon based, mostly aquatic, though land life forms do exist.
Human Population (2440): 1.2 million

Dorsey set many exobiologists running for their labs when it was determined to have an oxygen atmosphere, that it was less than a billion years old, and that it did not have an oversized moon for stabilization. According to all models, Dorsey should have had an atmosphere of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and pond scum for life. Instead it has a vibrant biosphere, with many multicellular lifeforms. The question was why?

The answer it turns out, was the fact that this world didn't have a moon, was the reason why life exploded on this world. Most early exobiologists forgot one salient fact: When life is pushed into a corner, and then released, it adapts and evolves on an accelerated rate. The closet example on Earth was the Cambrian explosion, when after the Earth was covered in a global ice sheet that later melted, life on Earth went from unicellular to multicellular life in a blink of an eye, so to speak.

The highly variable axial tilt of Dorsey is quite capable of pushing life into the corners over and over. Something that the colonists that settled on Dorsey would find out.

In 2108, the thousand new colonists were shuttled to the surface of Dorsey from the ISCO Donner Pass. They landed on the largest piece of land nearest the equator. Named Gordonland, after the colony's first leader, Dick Gordon, the island was 400 km by 500 km in size. Numerous other islands were nearby, though the first boat wouldn't be built for another twenty years.

Gordonland was a volcanic island, fairly active one at that. Luckily it was formed over a hot spot in Dorsey's mantle, so it did not erupt explosively, but had relatively gentle lava flows that constantly increased the island's size. And on that volcanic soil, there was plant and animal life. Plants were mostly lichens and primitive mosses, and animal life was mostly 12 legged insects that ranged from miniscule to two foot in length. Life on Dorsey is based on DNA like replication, though there are some differences, enough that the local fauna and flora are not edible by man without some processing.

And most of that life was wiped out on Gordonland, primarily by the planting of grasses by the colonists. Within a hundred years, there was not single native species of plant life was left on the island. The insects released by the colonists tried to colonize the nearby islands, but without Terran plantlife, they died quickly trying to eat the local lifeforms. Burrowing insects and other Terran life, such as worms, took nearly a hundred years of tilling the soil and letting Terran microbes settle to displace the local biome.

The colonists formed four settlements: Newtown, Dropoff, Blackrock, and Vista. Each settlement had 250 colonists and an equal share of the seeds and farming equipment, though getting Terran plants to grow took time, and lot of sewage. Instead of dumping the sewage into the ocean, the best way to get Terran biomass into the soil was to use human waste. When the first first full harvest came in at Newtown, in 2112, they held and Thanksgiving and invited the other settlements to participate.

The colony was nearly wiped out when a massive hurricane that had been circling the pole, wound its way down to the equator. This happened just past the height of summer on Dorsey, in 2115. Summers on Dorsey last for 2 standard years, and they form massive hurricanes that circle the pole that is pointing to Fomalhaut during that part of the year.

Blackrock became the fishing port of Gordonland. Due to it's location near recent and current lava flows, Blackrock never got more than truck gardens going. They initially got by selling trading their sewage for food, when they was discovered that some of the aquatic lifeforms native to Dorsey were large, meaty, and with proper preparation, tasty and 75% digestible. The tastiest was a molluskiod that looked like a push-me-pull-you nautilus.

It was the fishermen from Blackrock that settled on the nearby islands and discovered the most dangerous life form on Dorsey: The Conkoral.

The Conkoral is a massive colonial organism made up of corals, but corals that differentiated into different functions, allowing the Conkoral to move. The largest Conkoral ever discovered was nearly a kilometer across. Smaller Conkorals, under 40 meters in size, are quite vicious and next to impossible to kill with standard firearms. So it is not that unusual to see fishing boats outfitted with artillery and an armory stocked with rocket propelled grenades and handheld anti-tank rockets.

Besides the Conkoral, an airborne lifeform found human flesh to be quite tasty, the Bladderwunder. An airborne colonial lifeform similar to a jellyfish, it is kept aloft by an immense bladder filled with hydrogen. They catch fire fairly easily, and their flesh burns like napalm. Clouds of Bladderwunders would descend on a group of humans or animals try to ensnare their prey with long tentacles tipped with venomous stingers. Bladderwunder toxin, a deadly nerve agent against Dorsian life, raises welts on the skin of most humans and causes allergic reactions to an unfortunate few. Standard defense against these flying bags of hydrogen is a well-placed flare from a flare gun.

In fact most animal life on Dorsey found Terran life tasty and edible. So it became habit for the colonists to carry knives, pistols, and other weapons when visiting or colonizing islands.

Life on Dorsey took some getting used to. The colony was settled in the what the colonists call the "Cool time", when Dorsey is side on to Formalhaut. Summer is whenever one of the poles point to Fomalhaut. This results in a 13 hour day, with most humans settling into a circadian rhythm of sleeping six to eight hours every two Dorsey days.

During the "North Summer" the sun sets in the north and at equinox, night time is a ruddy twilight on the equator. Then the sun starts setting further and further south, until Cool Time solstice is occurs and the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, then it continues setting further and further south dragging into South Summer.

The pole in shadow does manage to freeze over, but not for very long and the ice cap is not very large.

Humanity has spread across the equator of Dorsey, on islands or floating man-made islands. The Dorsies are a tough bunch, and are quite self-reliant.


The Game of Life is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Snapshots: History of Alverez Station

From Fegbottom's Guide to Alverez Station:

History of the Fomalhaut System:

In 2021 Fomalhaut became one of the first stars put under the scrutiny of the Terrestrial Planet Finder telescope array. 12 planets were observed in orbit about the star, 8 within the 20 AU "doughnut" hole in the circumstellar dust disk that surrounded Fomalhaut. Each planet was given designations of Fomalhaut I, Fomalhaut II, etc. In the dust disk itself are four, still accreting, gas giants.

At the edge of the hole is Fomalhaut VIII, a massive, (2.3 Jupiter masses) gas giant, large enough to warp the dust ring with its gravity.

Fomalhaut I, II, and III are small rocky worlds, varying between Mercury and Mars in size. Fomalhaut IV is a large, Earth size world, without a moon. Fomalhaut V also was approximately Earth size, and had three moons.

Fomalhaut VI and VII are both small gas giants, Neptune sized. Unfortunately Fomalhaut VII is being perturb by Fomalhaut VIII and according to most simulations will be ejected from the system in about another million years. This is expected to alter the orbits of the inner worlds, so climatic changes are expected to occur.

In 2100, a modified Port Huron class exploration ship, the ISCO Cape Canaveral, captained by Juan Alverez, arrived in system. Son of the Tech baron Jorge Alverez, he was examining the viability of the two habitable worlds for colonization for the Alverez corporation. He explored the system for two years before returning to Earth.

In the process of exploring and deploying system buoys, (Automated satellites that provided navigation data and solar conditions for ships in system), Alverez named each of the worlds.

The three, small, inner worlds he named after his children, Lupe, Pedro, and Juan. Fomalhaut IV was named after his ex-wife, Dorsey. Fomalhaut V he named New America, while the three moons were named Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson.

The two small gas giants he named Romulus and Remus. The massive gas giant Fomalhaut IIIV, he named Gojira. The four still accreting gas giants, he collectively named "Los Ninos" because they were still "in the womb" and not born yet.

Fomalhaut was earmarked for colonization and ISCO was partly funding this mission. Both Alverezs were under the impression that because they were exploring the system, they'd get first rights on the worlds there. Unbeknownst to them, ISCO was assembling eight colony ships, destined for Fomalhaut V.

Returning to Earth in 2104, he and his father sunk the family fortunes into a colony project. It was then that they found about the ISCO funded colony to New America. Dorsey was not suitable, having entered a period of intense wobble, its axis wavering between 40° and 30° inclination.

So Alverez Technologies liquidated itself and created Alverez Colonial Corporation (ACC). Two Homesteader class colony ships were available and where purchased with money ACC didn't have. They weren't able to leave until 2106, two years after the ISCO colony had arrived at New America.

When the ISCO Death Valley and the ISCO Donner Pass arrived in 2108, the ISCO colony was firmly entrenched. The ISCO colony consisted of Amish and Mongols, seeking a world of their own, so that they could maintain their ways of life without any influence from the other cultures. When the ACC shuttlecraft landed, they were met by armed Mongols and Amish armed with bibles, tar, and feathers.

After some discussion, temporary housing was established, while ACC regrouped and considered its options.

The three ships, the ISCO Cape Canaveral, ISCO Death Valley and the ISCO Donner Pass, were in orbit. The six colonial shuttles were ferrying colonists back and forth between the surface and the two colony ships. This was so that no one would suffer too much bone loss, and other zero-G maladies. Food was needed, as the ship's stores were not sufficient for a prolonged stay in orbit.

The Cape Canaveral was reverted back to its original mining configuration and headed out into the target rich environment of Fomalhaut to mine for ore, since the Amish and Mongols refuse to recognize ISCO dollars as legitimate legal tender.

On top of all their other worries, half of the some nine thousand colonists were about to have their contraception implants expire. The prospect of four thousand colonists of child bearing age on board ships that were already at near capacity, finally spurred the Alverez Colonial Corporation to make a decision... They would stay in space in orbit around America and build a space colony.

A small group of colonists, about one thousand or so individuals, disagreed with that decision and petitioned ACC for the rights to settle on Dorsey. Despite the current climatic upheavals on that world, thanks to its increased wobble, they were willing to give it a try. They pooled what money they had to buy the heavy farm machinery from ACC, and demanded their fair share of the seed catalog and embryo banks.

Jorge Alverez decide to bless their attempt, with agreement that if the space colony had relocate, it could do so to the Dorsey colony. The Dorsey colonists agreed and they were shuttled to Dorsey aboard the Donner Pass and landed on the only suitable piece of land on a world that was nearly 85% water. The life that they made for themselves there would become the stuff of legend.

When the Donner Pass returned to New America, with heavy heart, Jorge ordered the Donner Pass and the Death Valley disassembled into viable life system sections. Cargo holds were made air tight, the power plants from both ships were moved to the automated station. Empty cargo containers were either converted into zero-g office/lab/work modules, or packed full of asteroidal slag from the solar refinery and used for radiation shielding.

The fusion drive from the Donner Pass was turned into large superconducting hub for a cable suspended habitat rotation system. Twenty years later, the Death Valley's drive was turned into a hub for a second, counter rotating cable suspended farming habs.

Hanging off of each end of the massive arrays of single crystal iron cables were the refurbished lifesystems of the two colony ships, spinning about the small station like some giant's bolo. Initially it wobbled and took some fine tuning with weights suspended on the cables to balance out the loads. But in the end, Alverez Station was officially declared open for business in 2116.

And it was just in time. In 2117 an ISCO ship arrived with a court order for restitution to the banks and businesses that had invested in ACC. Luckily, they had mined sufficient quantities of iron, copper, titanium, cometary organics, and other valuable minerals and chemicals that they could pay off their creditors.

When word of the new station and the riches of the Fomalhaut system got back to Earth, at least three major mining companies moved operations to the quickly growing stack of zero-g modules off of the small automated station. Over the years this stack of modules, work pods, industrial habs, and other units grew into a chaotic hodgepodge, that later earned the nickname "The Hodgepodge" or simply, the "Hodge".

The original colony stayed operational and was expanded six times until finally the original habs were shut down and detached from the original hub in 2336, when the new, far more massive Alverez Habitat, a cylinder 5 kilometers long by 1.5 kilometers in diameter, was officially opened. The bridge units had been left attached to both habs and now reside in the Martian Air and Space Museum.


The Game of Life is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.