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One small thought before I head out: what if the correspondence zone/gate doesn't necessarily drop a ship into realspace, but instead it is dropping the jumpfield PLUS being in the zone that does it? Maybe hitting the precise(ish) midway point will do it even with the jump field, but you can do it by choice sooner.
I've established that Zhdez medicine is the most advanced, by a large margin, both because of their psionic ability and because they've focused more on it. I've been thinking about what impact it has on the Ring:as Zhdez draw back their technological infrastructure. Manufactured items can be shipped from factories deeper into Zhdez territory, but medical care tends to need to be a little more local.
Inukari are going to have some reluctance to trust Zhdez psi-related technology, up until they realize the Zhdez are the only hope they have of getting some types of advanced care, especially life-extending care.
Some Inukari (and Terrans, to a lesser extent given the open hostilities) will want to visit Zhdez specialists, which is an interesting prospect. A lot of them will decide to stay, either because they've discovered it's somewhat more of a post-scarcity utopia (their explanation) or because they've been absorbed into the Borg (the suspicion of their family and friends).
I realized changes in how I do the blog thing means I can't stack up a buffer and auto-run it while I'm in the TL7 Terran medical facility, so I will backfill later, I guess.
I realized I've been inconsistent on whether it's "Terran Republic" or "Terran Alliance" and given that the Alliance and Union are Cherryh terms I should probably avoid it.
I have no idea why I've been using the native Zhdezplier instead of translating it like I have with Inukari Union; possibly because Terrans use English (or Russian) but also actual English stands in for Inukari Standard, whereas Zhdez are definitely Other.
Anyway. Terran Republic it is, then. I realize I haven't lined it out much in the blog, just kind of gone "oh, you know" about it, so most of it is new text. Not a lot yet, but it's got me thinking about it.
What if: the difference between whales and other voidlife is that the whales are from a matter-based universe and other things are from the void? So only whales have a jump field, etc., and voidlife is hungry for matter (to convert to energy? I'm not sure) so whalefall is a thing in the void as well.
I've also been wondering about how, if exoplasm is the only way to get to voidspace, the first jumps were made. I think the answer is... beached whales. They can't safely sound in the correspondence zone, and sometimes if they do they get stranded/die in realspace, and that's how people learned the trick.
Maybe. Feels like it would take a lot of beached whales to get it figured out, which leads to the question of: how often does/did this happen, anyway?
I'm breaking up Jump drives which is where I've been linking everything jumpspace-related, and trying to shape it into something like a coherent presentation when my brain is not a fan of coherence.
I'm headed into the second half of an elective surgery ("elective" just means you get to pick the time; it's a necessary repair but I can put it off as long as I want if I don't care about, y'know, walking) and while last time around this blog was new and I got to focus on it as a distraction (I had a whole buffer, there was not even a blip), this time I'm a little less... focused.
It's also not helpful that Inkscape has had a serious conflict with the new Debian, meaning any copy function pauses my computer for awhile. I really should be building out the new map images, but I've been waiting on a fix.
I hate to break the daily streak, but I'll have to see what I can do this week. Entries might be nothing more than "I moved more text from the blog to the wiki" for a while.
I've gone through and slapped "this is wrong, look at the wiki" labels on probably 90% of the blog entries, and I've put the Engineer type and Fiench Anzhie sample character in it. Still no elevator pitch yet, though.
All of my Traveller books (LBBs, GURPS Trav, various Mongeese, etc.) are inaccessible behind a desk "temporarily" placed in front of the bookshelf with a 3D printer "temporarily" placed on the temporarily-placed desk, or I would pull it out to see how it introduces the gameworld. (Well, I know Classic doesn't even; like Cypher it assumes you're building your own world with the toolkit.)
I've added Cypher and the Inukari flavor to the wiki. They haven't changed from the blog version.
Building out game mechanics has helped somewhat with nailing things down, so I will maybe spend a little time doing more of that.
I've updated phykons and shoalers in the wiki.
I really need to come up with a better introduction, wiki-wise, but I guess that means I need to decide on what the elevator pitch is for the gameworld. For me it started out as "compact space" but I am afraid voidspace has gotten too interesting. That sounds funny, but: in Traveller the week of jump is a "bottle episode" situation. I'm not sure I want to distract from that too much.
I think I'm going to go through and update the older blog entries with links to the wiki as I go. I also need to work on the wiki template; currently there is no link back to this blog, among other issues.
In any event, I've updated/created the pages for the Inukari and Terran people, which has involved some changes because I usually think of things as I write. I'll probably go back to the Trav race books to come up with a more standardized profile for each species. Right now it's still "jotting down notes" stage.
I suppose I could actually link to the wiki: here is Dessonia, and some thoughts on the Departure. I've tentatively nailed the latter down to: 150 years ago, with J3 happening 100 years ago. I reserve the right to change that when I realize it paints me into a corner, though.
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
I'm thinking maybe the currents broaden and slow as they reach gates, because I realized I was painting myself into a situation where you couldn't loiter around a system on the jumpspace side, and that's probably something that should be possible (albeit not fully passively; you'll need to do continuous low-level station-keeping thrust).
The idea of shields (sigh) being necessary to maintain structures in jumpspace still makes permanent installations lightly problematic (especially permanent stealth installations, since shields/fields are visible to each other), but if you locate it outside a current it's still doable. But abandoned stations and derelict ships are going to run out of fuel and disappear, not because they fall out of jumpspace but because they get harvested by voidlife for their mass. (Unless I decide there's an impervious type of mass... ceramics or something.)
Update: There is now a wiki entry for The Terran Republic, which supercedes this.
Increasingly I think the so-called Terrans only hold the J2 cluster around Earth, ten worlds, plus the four-world cluster between that and the Ring, even though they claim all the worlds behind that.
I say "so-called Terrans" because all the worlds are settled by people from Earth, but they probably don't call themselves "Terrans" but rather whatever the Chinese or Swahili or whatever equivalent is, or "Earthers" if they're English-speakers who are talking about their ancestry but not the current political regime. Most of the breakaway worlds are non-white, or at least non-American/Russian. (I'm still figuring out how to settle the language issue, since so far I am doing the Traveller method and having Inukari be the default, with real-world English probably being Low Inukari/Brancian. Which may just be making a mess for mself.)
The Inukari and Zhdez probably recognize the independence of a lot of those worlds (and maybe some multi-world alliances), which probably doesn't make the Alliance happy at all.
I have settled on the Inukari Union's government. Having Sterhon (the world) at the far end of the J2 cluster felt almost like a second capital. Of all the polities, the Union retained the most contact during the Departure (when the limit was jump-2), with 21 worlds. And so:
The Union has a parliamentary government, with a three-member presidency: one member from Core, one from Sterhon, and one from the New Stars, rotating the chairpersonship. A bureaucracy regulates interstellar commerce, and manages defense from pirates and hostile states. This leads to a certain amount of interference in planet-level politics, a constant source of controversy, but overall the Union is fairly stable.
A predominantly-Inukari religion, belief in The One Who Came Before is often half ironic.
Rather than assuming the Precursors were an ancient race, Beforians assert that there was one, singular precursor, and call it God. God created the Four Races and their respective worlds, initially being very hands-on but as technology increased, drawing back so as to remain undetected.
The religion can be traced to a college paper proposing that the seeming lack of evidence for Precursors outside of their creation of the Four is because all contact has been turned into religion. The paper proposed that most religions pointed to a singular Creator deity, and that this was also part of the Precursor shaping of early human (and Gvazda) society.
The religion morphed from a thought experiment to a full-fledged belief system as its author became a full professor at Apu Kudi. Their students "converted" at first ironically, and then spent time recreationally arguing what-ifs until a sort of coherent theory emerged. They developed a roster of which religions had probable roots in Precursor influence and which merely sprang up as imitators.
Over time, it morphed from a quasi-scientific hypothesis into a full-blown religion, as people began to wonder about the Precursor's ultimate plan in uplifting the Four. It also had a marked influence on Terran Christianity, with Bible verses being reinterpreted to expand the Creation myth to encompass the multiverse.
Beforianism now encompasses formal religious organizations, many of whom have drawn traditions from older religions, as well as casual beliefs like "sure, there's a definite possibility that what we know of as intelligent life today was created by an all-powerful extradimensional being as a hobby."