Tag Archives: Terran Confederation

Mars

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Mars, 2001, with the southern polar ice cap vi...

Formerly the Federazione Democratica di Marte.  As of 27.1.34@6.00 it became, officially The Democratic Federation of Mars to comply with measures in the Confederate Congress aligning member worlds with the official use of Standard.

Mars was first established as an independent nation when war on Earth had escalated during the last half of the 21st century.  They were an autonomous colony, already, when the American Second Civil War broke out, the terraforming stations having reached full production.  Recognition of Mars’ independence was one of the last acts of the faltering United Nations.

During the worst fighting, on Earth, of the third world war and at the points of greatest political uncertainty Mars’ population increased substantially as refugees sought asylum from various leaders and governments causing it to became a power second only to Luna.

Unlike Earth’s moon, however, Mars’ importance waned as the governments of Earth settled back into a semblance of order and by the time of the Treaty of Tycho, Mars was only important for its microchip and glass production, these are still, in fact, its primary export and industry.

This loss of importance, and population, is due to its less than spectacular climate.  The air is still thin as compared to Earth’s or any of the habitat domes and stations throughout the Solar system, though it is breathable (it has, in fact, a substantial population of both Chilean, and Tibetan descent as people from Andes and Himalayan mountain regions tend to find the atmosphere and temperatures more tolerable).  It did have a brief vogue from the last decades of the World War to the first decade of the Terran Confederation as a tourist destination.  Before and since it has had a minor popularity as an exotic skiing locale.

The Martian constitution was used as a template for elements of the Confederate Congressional Charter, especially their Bill of Basic Rights and Privileges.  In the past century the Martians have also found themselves as one of the key customs ports in the Solar system, but a tertiary one to Luna port and the various stations around Jupiter and in transplanetary orbits.

Transmats

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Transmat is simply the Terran term for matter transmission devices.

Transmats are not unique to the Terran Confederation, but they are a very rare technology, such that it often seems they are — they’re certainly the only race to currently use them so extensively.  Most races that ever develop this technology tend to either never adopt it or else quickly abandoned it.  The reason being, simply, that they’re exceedingly dangerous.

Various means and methods for matter transmission do exist throughout the galaxies, though all methods come down to a technique by which the relationship between energy and matter is exploited to allow some form of carrier wave to carry the matter across an intervening distance.

The danger of transmats comes in the fact that there is absolutely no simple, no-harm-done accident.  When a matter transmitter goes wrong, it goes horribly wrong.

It has been suggested that, perhaps, minor mistakes do occur and in fact many who distrust transmats insist they happen with every transmission.  Hence, for example, many top shelf vintners and chocolatiers refuse to allow their products to be moved by transmat; determined that it damages the flavours — most connoisseurs agree.

The other barrier to widespread adoption is that most sentient beings are in some fashion spiritual and/or religious.  Of the worlds that will trust a matter transmitter, fewer still will use it to transmit living beings; the Terran Confederation and the Golfadre, both of the Milky Way galaxy, are the only races known to routinely transport themselves and others in this manner.  The barrier is the very serious question: can a matter transmitter also transfer the soul?  Even among the tri-galaxies’ less religious and even atheistic populous there is the question of: how do I know it’s me that comes out the other end?

In the TC these people are considered backward luddite alarmists in both cases.  Among the Golfadre it is explained that the soul and the mind, already being energy, simply travel along with your mass and this seems to satisfy them.

It should be known that all forms of the technology are exceedingly sensitive to signal degradation so have common limitations.  All are subject to unobstructed line of sight, various experiments with reflectors and repeaters have been attempted but are not successful at sufficient rates to have been adopted even by the most careless of societies.  There are distance limitations as well, if transmitted at or near light speed using something like an electromagnetic wave the general limit is between one and thirty light seconds distance; this makes the technology viable for surface to moon or surface to space station transmissions plausible, given sufficient measures to reduce atmospheric disturbances to the signal (the TC precedes all atmospheric transmissions with a laser burst to clear a path, for example).  Greater distances may be achieved, but at a marked loss of reliability if the matter is converted into faster than light energies (e.g. tachyons), also the gains tend to net few because while upper limits have been as great as a light hour there becomes a short-range limit — the signal never reconstructs properly under ten light minutes (the reasons for this are not yet properly understood).

A curious note in support of those who question the ability for the devices to deliver souls, spirits, intellects: non-organic goods transport with a full 30% greater reliability and non-living organic materials (e.g. leathergoods, foods, etc.) transport their own 30% more readily than living creatures. As an example, the TC has established transmat routes from Luna to the Jupiter, but will only transport goods and materials via this system. All living cargos must still travel by the stations on Luna, in Trans-Luna-Martian orbit, on Mars, to the Trans-Martian-Jovian orbital stations, and then to one of the Jovian satellites or orbital stations due to the safety concerns.

While various popular science fiction depictions of transmats will have them able to collect and deposit a subject anywhere all incarnations ever discovered by archaeologists and in present use require the subject to be sent by a transmitting device and reconstructed by a receiving device — in virtually all cases the technology was designed so that the same device could serve both functions.  In the Terran Confederation, these devices are known as transmat capsules.

Luna

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MoonLuna, officially The United Federation of Lunar Communities, is the Terran Confederation capital world and home to one of the most populous cities in the Sol system:  Tycho.

This world is the principle natural satellite of Earth, the major habitable world of Sol (it should be noted for non-Terran readers that the TC does not follow the convention of naming their systems after the major planet, instead choosing to name the star and then using that to name the system), and was initially a colony of a defunct world government known as the United Nations prior to the full onset of their World War III.

Tycho was founded by these early settlers in the very late 20th century of their old Gregorian calendar.  Due to a rapid trend by various nations to develop and eventually implement orbital offensive and defensive weaponry, the UN decided that it would be best to strengthen the treaty designating the moon as neutral ground and property of all Mankind by establishing a civilian colony.

The plan was put forward and on 10 July 1997, the first supplies capsules were launched to be followed over the ensuing months by various payloads of materials the settlers would use to build their colony.  On 3 February 1998 the first of three shuttles were launched, carrying engineers and workers to augment the work already being performed by robotic means in constructing the habitats and homes, and work on the three large transports that would carry the initial 600 colonists began.  On 19 November 1998, the Moon’s first permanent residents stepped off of LT1 “Pegasus” to be greeted by, Damjana Phillips, the chief of Lunar Construction who would be returning to Earth with her crew when the LT1 headed back to earth in December.

It grew rapidly as a major stepping off point for some of the earlier solar colonisation efforts through the 21st century and even faster once the wars on Earth began reaching a crescendo, especially for various religious refugees.

When the peace treaties that would end the over century of warfare that was WW3 were to be negotiated, drafted, and signed, Tycho was chosen as the place for those government leaders and representatives to meet as Luna had taken on the role that Switzerland had in previous generations.  During these negotiations, known as the Tycho Conventions, the Terran Confederation was born and the first Confederate Congress selected.

Today Luna houses many major cities, is a central hub of Terran culture and fashion, and various of its principle cities have taken on roles that had once been held by New York City, Paris, London, and Los Angeles.  The Confederate Congress meets there in Convention Dome, and the various bureaus that maintain the confederate government are also housed here.

People from Luna are often referred to as Loonies, a term extracted from old science fiction stories, and also one used to describe the fact that many Terrans don’t see the people who live on Luna as entirely sane.  Loonies, themselves, prefer the term Lunan or Lunar with Lunan being the official term by an act of the Confederate Standards Bureau in 8.3.34@3.23, though no effort to curb the popular use of Loonie has succeeded.

Lunan culture has reminded various historians of what is known about pre-WW3 Hollywood, including their argument that the Lunan accent is similar to what was known in the 1980s as Valley.  However, unlike the Valley accent of that bygone era, there was a heavy influence from French, Indian, and Japanese members among the founding settlers so it should be noted that similarities to many other accents exist and the Valley connection is largely a matter of opinion; certainly their slang is not as much a match for that late 20th century sub-culture (it should also be noted that this is the accent favoured by all ages, classes, etc. of Lunan society rather than being a youth sub-culture as history tells the Valley group was).

Luna thrives on the modern.  Nearly all interstellar and extra-Confederate goods are processed through Sol system and Luna is the central port of call for most of this traffic (Ganymede, Mars, and the MJ-trans3 Station sharing the remainder), and so many things not found in the rest of the Confederacy can usually be found here.  Trends and fashions come and go by the month, even by the week or the day.  Certainly by the year.  It is the greatest insult a Loonie of any age can give someone to say they look ‘tyrd’, ‘out-moda’, or ‘so-yestard’ or that something they said is ‘from an hour ago’.  Lunan hair styles change more often than the weather on the blue-green marble that hangs in its skies, LunaPop is a musical genre that thrives on technological instruments and software aided vocal or audio effects and strives to break the mould with each new song, the stereo-cinemas are crowded by the latest special effects thrillers, and anyone caught reading a book, even off a datatablet, would be laughed at mercilessly to the point it is joked that being caught with an actual bound-paper book on Luna is grounds for being thrown out the nearest airlock.

Time (Terran)

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While, as with any civilisation, the Terran people have used any number of calendars and measures of time through their history, there are two that can be specifically thought of as specifically Terran rather than simply one of its cultural or religious groups.

These would be the old, defunct Gregorian system, and the modern Universal Standard system.

Gregorian: Before the Tycho Convention gathered to found the Terran Confederation most nations and planets used, to varying degrees, the Gregorian system. Some worlds did attempt to adapt the clock and/or calendar to their own planet’s orbital and rotational periods, but based these very heavily on this Earth system.

At the smallest common unit was the second. Colloquially it was 1/86400 of the day, but officially was:

the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.

Either way 60 of them was the next sized unit, the minute. 60 of those to an hour, and 24 to an Earth day.

The notation for time had two varieties called the 12hour or 24hour clocks.
The 12hour clock used a denotion of AM or PM for morning or evening respectively and noted the hour using 1 through 12. Thus 1:30pm for one and a half hours after midday.
The 24hour clock dropped the AM/PM electing to count the hours as 00 though 23. So 13:30 for the above example. Minutes in either system were 00 through 59, and while either system had a preceding 0 for a single digit hour as optional, minutes and seconds were always 2-digit, and units below seconds were denoted decimally so 1:30:45.123456 might be seen.

The calendar was based on a solar/lunar cycle system and counted the time before or after the estimated birth of the Christian deity Jesus. Events after this event were left merely as a numeric year, or might be specified with A.D. From the Latin Anno Domini, The Year of Our Lord being the common translation. After Christianity fell out of major political influence during the century of the first two world wars C.E. was used instead and meant Common Era. Events preceding the birth were B.C. or B.C.E. for Before Christ or Before the Common Era.
The year, as with the Universal Calendar is based on the Terrestrial orbit of Sol.

This was achieved through estimation, however. The year was measured as 365.2525 days, and was tracked as 3 years of 365 days followed by one of 366, called a Leap Year except on centennial years that weren’t a multiple of 400.

The lunar element was in the subdivision of the year into 12 months as the approximate number of lunar cycles from full moon to full moon in one year. These twelve months had either 30 or 31 days, except the second which had 28 or during leap year 29.

The notation had virtually no standardisation. But the methods involved spelling out or abbreviating the month’s name, and giving the day and year as numerals, or by giving the month a numeral value and listing it all that way using various symbols for seperation. Often the first two digits of the year were omitted, and what order the numerals were placed was very regional.

Some examples:
1 February 2134
Feb. 1, 2134
01-2-34
2/1/2134

The system is no longer used for any official purposes but some religious groups do still use it to track holy days.

Universal Standard: Also called simply Standard or decimal it was first proposed some 43 years before the Tycho Convention founded the Confederation by Dr. Otto Smith of Universidad de Amazonis Planitia on Mars as a new calendar system that left behind the religious trappings that had led to the horrible wars that were still ravaging parts of the cradle of Mankind, and as a compliment to the decimal clock that had been gaining momentum for the previous fifty years as a result of the numbers of people who had had to adapt to it for military purposes.

The Universal Clock is, essentially, the same one proposed during the French Revolution centuries before even the first of the Big Three. It proposes the day be divided into tenths, and the accepted form used a division of those tenths by hundredths, then those to be further divided by an hundred. Lacking any proposals for an alternate name, and in the interests of tradition they were called hours, minutes, and seconds.

The length of a day, thanks to modern astrometric capabilities and the creation of the major time servers at each major System Hub means all clocks can adjust themselves to accurately subdivide the Terrestrial rotational period accurately into the required pieces.

The calendar elected to divide the year into ten, again for tradition’s sake the word month was chosen. These were declared to be 37 days on the odd months, and 36 on the even. The exact length of the calendar is automatically adjusted by the System Hubs throughout the year to keep 365 days precisely the span of that years Terrestrial orbital period.

The name Universal Standard is, naturally, because it is intended to be the standard time for all of the Confederation. Due to the exceedingly variable duration of extraterrestrial worlds, as well as spaceships and starships, space stations, etc. it was decided that the Terrestrial orbits and rotations would be the measure of time throughout Mankind and that no timezones need exist. The hour was calculated as 1.0 when The Constitution was ratified as and the date as 1.1.1.

The Universal months were given names for purposes of making saying the date easier, though numerals are to always be used when writing, and were given the Latin for First through Tenth. The clock and calendar were declared to be one and the same so correct notation should always be date, numerically, separated as year.month.day@hour.minutes or if greater accuracy is required .seconds or even further.

Colloquially the date is left out of the time in spoken conversations, but this is inappropriate usage when speaking in official or formal capacities.

The single time unit to be absolutely unchanged between either calendar is the week, a unit if 7 days. The week held more importance in the Gregorian eras, but even under modern circumstances a middle measure between day and month is useful and while it has been suggested that six might be a better choice the proposal always lacks support so the old measure remains.

Fabbers

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The fabber is not a new technology in the same way that the compact disc of the last decades of the twentieth century hadn’t been new when they’d become popular. It was invented as a form of field ration to simplify care for soldiers in the Franco-Portugese army in the fifth decade of the third world war. The technology was simplified and refined and an organic recycler was added making them further popular among many of the pre-warp starships, and when warp was developed found a niche there as well due to the extremely limited capacity of those ships.

The basic concept started out as an edible form of the plastic soup used in the rapid prototypers and 3D printers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These used a mix of edible gels comprised amino acids, vitamins, minerals, or carbohydrates in balanced proportions; it would produce hot rapid meals by combining these according to information provided to ensure each soldier got no more than they needed. The next revision could recycle certain amounts and types of organic waste, but was not popular on the battlefield, nor is it currently common in the home due to the space that component takes up. This was not, however, a limitation on starships where it still takes up less space than foodstuffs and makes the food supply very nearly limited only to the availability of power.

Modern units can be given additional gels that can allow recreation of flavours and have assemblers that allow them to build what looks like a normal food, even reproducing textures and densities. Some claim that the fabber food is indistinguishable from the real thing except to be guaranteed healthful, others say that the end product is a crime against cuisine. Most, though, hold a position somewhere in between — it might not be perfect, but it’s edible. The fabber is, on many Confederate colony worlds, the only food available to Terrans. These would be worlds incapable of supporting Human consumable foods, and the cost ineffectiveness of hydroponics on such large scales, or shipping in food on warp freighters. A waste recycling center is established and colonists purchase food gelpacks from it. The fabber is also becoming a fad among the old worlds which can grow food out of the novelty of not having to worry about perishables, or even grocery shopping. Most packs are good for a month of meals for the average family of three.

The fabber has little popularity outside the Terran Confederation for various reasons. One is the lack of popularity of electrical power or the Terran’s habit of using digital computer systems making them difficult to integrate. Another is how few are willing to tolerate the taste (or even to understand how to convince the things of the dietary needs of anything that isn’t Human). Some of the techniques used for the food prep was adapted for the original prototypers that inspired these devices and a line of fabbers exists that can make clothes, simple household goods, and so forth do exist as well. These use oils and produce polyester type fabrics, hairbrushes, a passable toothpaste, etc. This particular form of fabber has gained a small following outside the Confederation,but still not much due to the afore mentioned electricity, and due to a view of its products being of quality inferior to the goods more conventionally produced.