Battlemech is owned by Catalyst Labs, Inc. and No infringement is intended by this fan work.
Battletech is one of the oldest science fiction gaming universes out there that has been, more or less in continuous production—perhaps only Traveler can claim a longer period. As such, it can be enjoyable to work on other settings, other ways of making use of our…Giant Stompy Robots.
Note that the Sarapha cluster setting had a problem, having to do with the group breaking up due to scheduling work, so I’ll be working on this right now.
The Deep Periphery.
The Deep periphery, starting well beyond the Innersphere and near periphery states is a nebulous concept—it essentially starts at the borders of the periphery states, but has no end. As terra incognita, it’s a wonderful place to put all sorts of worlds, and settings, comforted in the knowledge that we will never have to worry about what will the Davions say. (not that many people care about that, one way or another).
But the deep periphery has some questions that need to be asked—for example, with such a huge space, why would deep periphery nations ever even come into contact? If the universe is full of uninhabited worlds, why would you have them be close enough to each other in the deep periphery to have any meaningful contact?*
*This last can be a problem in many settings, not just battletech—a world, is a big, big place, and having people fighting desperately over other worlds when their own worlds are nearly empty can be…an issue.
Well, fortunately, the canon police won’t beat us about the head, so here we are:
The Alliance and the Jump Program.
The Terran Alliance faced increasing amounts of resistance as it become ever more ossified. The leadership, like many dictatorial governments, desired to crush the resistance, but that wasn’t working and to many of the Alliance, the idea of shipping dissidents to colony worlds where they could make even more trouble was a bad idea…
But the development of the first KF drive sail, and long-term hibernation technology (which had actually been around for some time, but was largely unused due to the existence of FTL changed things…) changed the equation.
Now, the alliance could offer their dissidents a bargain—in return for cooperation and for not rocking the boat, they could be offered the chance to move far, far beyond the alliances borders…and incidentally out of the alliances hair. Even during this period, The alliance had accepted that it would never rule “all of space” as even the most hide bound ruler could do math and look at the vast expanse of the milky way.
Equipped with small crews, and “volunteers” in deep sleep, the first KF driven ships, set sail for the far stars—the bargain was simple, the ships would not stop until they had moved at least 1500 light years away from sol. Any attempt to return would be met with deadly force.
There was, of course an ulterior motive for this—anyone leaving would forfit all goods and property to the Alliance, and do so “voluntarily” avoiding any nasty complaints about the seizure of property. The ships themselves were fragile things, equipped with drives barely capable of .1 G and ramshackle shuttles which would ideally work just about long enough to let the colonists land. After all, whether they lived or died was of no importance to the rulers of the Alliance.
However, the first colonists had made the decision to leave, go far, far beyond the reach of the Alliance, or for that matter the colonies that were springing up around it. They took the 1500 light year minimum and tacked another 700 light years on it, to a region of space that long range space-based telescopes indicated had a large number of planet bearing systems.
And so the first ship, the Freedom, left in 2150.
While some wondered how this worked with the Colonization Procedure Referendum, that the Alliance had passed, the answer was simple—these colonists were never expected to be seen again—and for that matter more than a few expected them to simply die out there in the trackless depths of space.
Regardless, carrying anywhere from 2500 to 10,000 colonists in cold sleep, the ships left on a regular basis, the Alliance benefiting from the expropriation of their property as they left.
The journey was very long—ships in that era did not travel the 30 light years a jump of modern jump ships and their “sails” were actually far more primitive than modern KF drive charge sales, which required them to spend more time charging and jumping. But many, perhaps most of them made it to the region of space that would one day be known as the Colonies.
First Landings
The colony region started just over 2200 light years away from Terra and had much the same planetary and stellar density as did the regions around Terra—and the first few ships found garden worlds—at least in comparison to what they’d feared.
But even so, the landing period was hard—some died as their shuttles came apart, others died of disease and malnutrition and all the dangers that might lead to the death of a new colony, far from home. Even today, their are still occasional finds of the nearly invisible ruins of some proud little colony that started…and vanished.
However most of the first wave found their way to what would become known as the 20 worlds, 20, more or less earthlike worlds that were within 100 light years of each other. They largely settled in small groups, as new ships arrived, breaking down their shuttles and making use of the ship components they could not use on their worlds to serve as satellites for various purposes. By 2230 most of the new settlers had arrived, just over 500,000 in total, although fewer than 400,000 survived the first few years, a testament to the hardship—and the forgiving nature of their worlds. By 2235 most of the shuttles were no longer functional and it would be over 100 years before their was any more interstellar commerce.
The Colonists had had time to think before their departure, and they realized that the Alliance had little interest in seeing them succeed, and so planned for the most modest beginnings—and to do that, they turned to the most effective and self programming AI system known to man.
That is, they had children—lots and lots of children. The garden worlds were able to support life, but they had no automation, not much in the way of tools and while they had records and libraries, a community of 400, or 4,000 can’t do much with instructions on how to build a fusion power plant, especially if they start with “found an electronics industry”
So the founders focused on the simple things, starting with basic education and a farming community, while working to maintain as much of a medical base as possible. This wasn’t the policy everywhere—but it was the successful policy, and with the knowledge that their colonies could easily fall below the threshold of viability they worked to increase their numbers.
And they succeeded. The average population growth of the Twenty Worlds peaked at 4 percent, and on most worlds was at 3 percent. It made sense—their was little in the way to prevent the colonists from taking their new worlds save the fact that there weren’t enough of them. New Rio, the first settled world, started with a population of 35,000 men and women, and two hundred years later boasted just over 85 million citizens. Most of the other worlds had the same stories.
Even so, it should be noted that most of the worlds were both largely empty and still unable to fully take advantage of their libraries. Much of their population was scattered in small communities, with vast stretches of land in between them. New Rio, for example, made use of solar and fuel cell technology, mixed in with hydroelectric and did not have the capability to construction fusion systems, even though they had the “technical” knowledge.
However, this would start to change as the Colonies celebrated the first day of 2500, major changes were coming to them… both internally and externally.
