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.
Fine-tuning the polities
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.
The One Who Came Before
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."
A Closed and Common Orbit
Forgot to load new books on my e-reader before a waiting room visit, so I started a reread of the next Becky Chambers book; I forgot it began with rules that AIs couldn't have humanoid bodies.
I thiiiiink something this will be the case in Terran space; bots don't have personhood there, which may make entering Terran space problematic for some nonbiological Union citizens. Bots that can pass are definitely illegal.
They're probably not popular in Inukari or Zhdez spaces either, but only in a social sense. One exception might be in virtual appearances: I feel like even in the far future it will be problematic to have the ability to generate an infinite number of fake but convincing people on Zoom calls.
Hex mapping, again
After all my "I'm going to use Traveller style maps" I ended up tipping the map on its side for the Ikiwiki images, in part because: screen proportions. But also because if Inukari is my baseline, and they use HECS, the hexes have to be that orientation.
The map looks completely contrived, when I draw it like this, like I deliberately made every polity have its own compartment. It was random! I didn't even generate a bunch and pick this one.
Nailing down jump tech
Update: There is now a wiki entry for jumpdrives, which supercedes this.
All right, how's this: you need the jump field to constrain the release of exoplasm when you initiate jump. Within jumpspace, the jump field shields your matter from everything else out there, which (almost invariably) has a jump field itself. Unshielded matter draws scavengers, down to the microscopic, and dropping shields will result in hull pitting in a few hours and a breached hull in a day or so - at best. If a large predator is attracted, things get even worse.
The jump field blocks other jump fields but not matter, so voidspace life battles to knock down each other's fields.
And it is what is affected by current, so you have to have a jump field up or you're becalmed - though impulse drive works without a jump field (so you can get to a gate if your hull doesn't get eaten away first).
Chemical rockets will, again, attract hostile "deepspace" critters, or perhaps an Ancient or Precursor safety system (it's not clear which).
Ikiwiki
In keeping with my minimalist software thing, I've added a wiki: the venerable Ikiwiki. It's pretty primitive, and I wouldn't put the CGI out on the web live, but it is pretty good at building basic static pages. So rather than go through the backlog of the blog, I'm moving things in there. I'll continue to do my daily think-out-loud here, and the wiki will be a (slightly) more formal version, mostly of settled decisions. (But clearly I will occasionally upend everything and go a different direction, even if it's made it into the wiki.)
