I'm still trying to pin down the way Zhdez culture has responded to Inukari economics, and Therbings might be the place that comes clear.
I realized I had Therbings as a Class A starport in the original map, but the wiki things I'd written about Bertania contradicted it. Fine: Therbings was a starport under Zhdez settlement, but when the Zhdez backed off they took all the important bits to Sundtia and set up shop there.
The planetside population was a little harder to move... especially since some had already moved from further Unionward and both didn't want to move again and were also making it clear to the Inukari that they were the baddies, regardless of actual motive. Hence: the Tlikria Cooperative, somewhere between tribal sovereignty, a commune, and a cult.
Wiki worky
It's been a little while since I updated the wiki, so I did some of that by way of brainstorming. Bertania has a minimal entry, along with the Bertania Cluster and a passenger liner that serves it (that has a strangehold on intra-cluster passenger service, in fact).
Aside from it relying on drives built at Sundtia, it hasn't given me any special inspiration. I have some idea that the security issues of Dalu Laumkha might cause a crisis in Inukari-built drives (maybe related to the disaster at Kythera?) but now that I've been watching Strange New Worlds that feels too much like The Burn as a plot device.
Other possibilities
There are clearly other possibilities for getting into jumpspace, since Ancients don't harvest whales.
The food chain that delivers exoplasm to whales is another possible source.
So is the possibility of drawing energy directly from the same source (the equivalent of solar energy, I guess), which I think is still "the interface between realspace and jumpspace around a gravity well."
And of course the possibility of using an entirely different jumpdrive, which Ancients might do, possibly psionics-related (Spacing Guild, anyone?)
My current theory is that the space lions have J-4 and are raiding into the Wolf Worlds - they could use a different drive, which would introduce it into Charted Space.
A possible solution
If some whales have discrete exoplasm storage, maybe it's possible to harvest cells without killing the whale? I feel like the Zhdez would be the ones most invested in nonlethal exoplasm acquisition, and also most likely to share the technique with other polities. Complicated if it involves psychic bonding with the whales or something, though.
It seems possible they're already doing it, and maybe the conflict is just whether it's scalable? Could be a tragedy-of-the-commons situation, even: you need enough whale population to support the less-efficient harvest, but that would require letting the population rebound, which won't happen if people keep hunting them (and they keep migrating away).
Hmm.
The right spacewhale
The right whale (Terran) is so named because it's the right whale to hunt (and that's why it's nearly extinct, which is probably also relevant). The spacewhale version of that is the one that "beaches" itself in realspace now and then, and is why realspace species have figured out how to get to jumpspace.
This particular whale stores its exoplasm in individual "cells" (in the power-storage sense), with their own containment fields. So when the whale is killed, rather than spilling exoplasm indiscriminately, the cells ("arils"? they need a name) can be collected with minimal waste.
The fields decay over time, from seconds to days, which means that a whale that fell into realspace while feeding in the correspondence zone of, say, Earth would take time to release all its exoplasm, attracting the attention of planet-based humans and giving them time to examine the remaining cells and, eventually, figure out how to capture it in containment fields for study.
Following the migration
If the whales are disappearing from the lefthand side of the current map, then it's natural for the Terrans to chase them through the Union and the Zhdez to chase them up the corridor into the Wolf Worlds, mostly. That'll impact who conflicts with whom (and maybe lead to Zhdez encountering the lionfolk).
Then I have to figure out why they're moving. Just a normal long-cycle migration and they'll come back? Something the Terrans have done that's driving them off? Something the Ancients have done to draw them out? Or are the Ancients just following them? Hmm.
I forgot a change
The whale migration. Well, misremembered a change: the Terran invasion wasn't conquest, it was desperation.
That's probably the most-widespread impact, since it's everything from Terran piracy to longshot research to panicked preparations for another dark-ages period like the Departure.
So many questions
I realized the last week of entries have all been questions and that's kinda where I am, I guess: waiting for things to coalesce for me. Yesterday's is probably the big one, since it will determine the focus of the setting. Probably. But then I find myself asking: would that first contact really affect everything the way some of the other changes could? It feels more regional, especially since the area I have set aside for that is past the Wolf Worlds.
Too many changes?
Rereading the past entries, I realized I want the setting to be "amidst the upheaval of a societal change" but I have actually put forth possibly too many reasons for that change.
The increase of maximum jumps from 3 to 4 hexes
First contact with ~~hani~~ ~~Aslan~~ an interstellar society of uplifted lions
The full return of (and resistance against) the Ancients
A war of conquest by the Terrans
The first-contact one is probably the one I should lead with, since the others are all just escalations of existing factors. But having another species for players to choose would be a plus.
The question then becomes: do I make the first contact a thing that recently happened, or something a GM could let their players be part of?
Too much meddling?
Maybe I need to dial back the Ancients/Precursors' interference, I dunno. Is it gonna make the humans feel too much like they don't have any free will? Because if they can't identify the meddling, they kind of... don't have any.
It's kind of starting to bother me. I might need to figure out a way, possibly linked to the Departure, that humans (and Wolves) can go "okay now we're on our own finally."
Shingie?
I'm going to back Shingie off to "first J-2 colony" because although the Ancients were handholding a lot, I don't think they were taxiing humans to distant planets that much. So Grandry might be one of the actual first colonies, and just high-population.
My inclination with the Ancients (or maybe Precursors?) has been that each of the homeworlds has a patron, and they're rivals, but they have some restrictions (game rules, maybe?) about how much they'll do. This might mean there's an equivalent of the Anchor Blue structure, given to each of the other polities, to keep it "fair." (Probably not a literal megastation shell, that would be too obvious.)
Grandry?
While transferring things to the wiki, I realized I have almost nothing about Grandry in the blog. Literally just a mention that it's between Capital (J-1) and Shingie (J-2) and that Kudi resorts are staffed by temporary workers from Grandry and that's it, so... what is Grandry like?
I don't think it can be a particularly poor world, given its position, but maybe it's well- or even over-populated. I established (for reasons I've now forgotten) that Shingie was settled first, so apparently there's a reason to skip over Grandry. I'm guessing it's because I was still trying to honor the random UPPs and Grandry has an unbreathable atmosphere and low population so... gonna ignore that now.
Instead, most of Grandry's large landmasses are polar, and it's a particularly cold world. The population isn't huge, but there isn't much agriculture (aside from fishing) or non-automated industry, and many young Grandrians travel to other systems for their first job (and to try out this "warm weather" thing).
Apa/Apu
Filling in bits around Core Sector and realized I named the link Apa Kudi while apparently the text is all Apu Kudi, whoops. Apa it is, since otherwise I have to move the whole page.
I've made a page for Shingie's Dalu Laumkha Yards, so the Inukari ships have a home now. The math didn't math on the Daarmag and now I'm wondering if I pulled that from a premade Trav ship, but at any rate I've re-worked it. It's now not the largest possible ship (5000 tons) but the (nearly) largest possible J-3 ship (with a drive that can push a nearly 5000-ton ship at J-1). The military version of its drive pack is the full J-1/5000-ton version.
It's hard to figure out where to stop with shipbuilding: okay, the Daarmag Heavy Merchant sometimes gets a smaller drive pack put on it for J-2 performance. Okay, but a smaller ship uses that drive pack and gets J-3, what does it look like? And what other drives would that ship use, and what other ships would use those drives, and so on.
Unstarships
In Traveller, x-boats (express boats) are 100-ton ships with J-6, and they manage to pull that off by bending the ship construction rules a little. The powerplant is hand-waved away by saying power is part of the jump drive, and there's no maneuver drive: they depend on tenders to refuel them and just never move in realspace.
I'm debating about the opposite(ish) thing: a ship that spends all its time in jumpspace. It has a field generator but no actual jump drive: something else carries it into jumpspace and launches it.
Fighters, maybe, so you could have an impractically-tiny ship with an overpowered field that it can only keep lit for a certain number of hours before diving back inside a carrier's field.
Sentry ship/stations, with just enough field to protect it and maintain position in the gentle currents at a gate.
The problem is once again that that brings me to "wouldn't jumpgates be more practical then? Or maybe jump-tugs that get you to jumpspace and drop back out into their same system after sending you on their way?
