Milky Way

The Milky Way is the youngest of the three major Galaxies, though it is the second largest.

The importance of this Galaxy is, relatively, recent as it was not at first realised it housed two intergalactic wormholes, and in close proximity to one another at that.

The Galaxy is home to Earth, Kivan, Mugdar, Tylassia, Magvin, Ilzwik, and many, many more major worlds, though an important note is that exceedingly few of its known native peoples have achieved anywhere near the technological advancements of Glafarra or Vorton.

Little is ultimately known about the peoples and worlds of this Galaxy, in the wider scope of things. This is due to no large scale galactic government or galaxy wide recognised power. The Terran Confederation, and Mugdarran Empire probably span the most distance but only a few hundred parsecs between their furthest flung outposts, the Mugdarrans and Kivanians by most measure control the most systems numbering some five hundred stars or so, and those three combined with the Sweytzian Alliance make up some of the strongest economic powers, but only just.  All of these even combined are not nearly as large and influential in the broader Milky Way as Alluria in Vorton; their power, control and influence mattering very little beyond, at most, their side of the galactic core.

Historically the Milky Way has been a harvesting zone for the traders of the more advanced races of the Vorton and Galfarran galaxies out looking for cheap or free goods, though some did deal directly with the Milky Way worlds and at honest rates.

The only scientific survey of species, races, and worlds was done by the old Federation in Galfarra approximately fifty thousand Earth years ago and was cancelled after only about one century. At that time it would seem that easily half the known inhabited worlds had sentient or proto-sentient life, and most of them were still working out things like fire and bronze. An exceedingly small number had reached any form of industry or space flight, and perhaps a dozen with faster than light capacity were met.  Various unofficial ones have been done by the worlds that would later become the Sweytzian Alliance in the past hundred to two hundred Earth years, and due to the greater speed and range of their ships they represent the most complete modern survey compared to any other races’ attempts in the Milky Way, notably the Terrans and Gargorna.  In recent decades professors at various universities have been striving to compile astrographical, botanical, biological, sociological, etc. knowledge from all the starfaring races and attempt to cross reference, reconcile and collate it all.  The several dozen powerful computers and gifted members of two rather extraodinary races, the Haderwo and Bv’ktra, expect that they should finish the data they started with in about an hundred-fifty Sweytzian years (three Sweytzian universities house the heart of the project due to proximity to the Galfarran wormhole as the Haderwo and Bv’ktra feel that to set foot on an alien world would endanger their spirits’ purity and deny them a place at their gods’ side in the Great Beyond).  Given the rate new data is coming in, but thanks to a second half dozen groupings of bots, computers, and dedicated individuals that data should only add fifty more years to the project and then afterwards be near instantly incorporated as all systems related to the project could work together on only that new information.

Merchants continued to travel into the system routinely after the original survey ended, but they did not engage in much research or record keeping beyond what goods were most easily got where, and what races were liable to kill strangers.  An interesting note from several chocolate traders is that Earth (known by several different names at the time) contrary to the norm was quite friendly to traders of all sorts in various regions but became progressively more hostile as they reached greater technological growth, it is also worth mentioning that approximately ⅓ of the human races found within that part of that spiral arm of the galaxy followed a similar trend.  This has puzzled xenopsychologists and xenosociologists alike for millennia and will likely earn the first one to present a viable theory an immediate professorship.

The Milky Way, namely its planet Earth, is know to be the original source of coffee and chocolate; early Aslith traders frequented more than a few planets for their fish; and Ilzwik was then, as today, prized for its cazax, that amazing plant ivory which is so heavily used in industry for being twice as hard as diatanium alloy and a tenth the weight of diamond, which is proof against most dangerous radiations.

Today only a quarter of the known sentient races (known sentient races is up to nearly three times that ancient survey’s count, by the way, and new ones are periodically discovered) do not have space flight of some kind and most of those who do, also have some form of interstellar capability of their own devising.  If one factors in races that have gained space flight and interstellar travel through trade the number who do not possess these abilities dwindles to between ten and fifteen percent.

Some of those remaining races vary in advancement from early stone to some form of industrial stage. Some of these are openly traded with and others are only visited to harvest trade goods depending on their disposition toward strangers and aliens.

Also of note would be that some races of pre-stellar advancement or pre-space advancement also gained these technologies by becoming incorporated into a larger society. The biggest examples being the Mugdarran Empire’s nearly two dozen worlds containing primitive Honorable Protectorates, which is a translation of their term for a race that faced them with honour but proved too weak by their standards to properly defend themselves and were granted inclusion into the Emperor’s domain (for further information see entry on Mugdarran Empire). The other notable example would be the Terran Confederation, but theirs is a unique case as theirs is exclusively comprised of annexing Terran colonies that left Earth in their pre-warp era, many of them had lost communication with Earth and so are referred to as lost colonies. To date there are still forty five generational colony craft’s fates unknown and twenty three early warp (denoted by both Terran and non-Terran historians not as the end of warp being a markedly bigger gamble than it still is, but rather as the invention of interstellar communications technology by Terrans so as to know the fates of those ships) colony vessels. An interesting curiosity is the adamant belief among most Confederates not living on worlds on the immediate border of the Sweytzian Alliance that Sweytz is one of these lost colonies.

Of the interstellar races known at the time of the long ago survey none still exist. Two’s fates, the Unlzwano and Goldasti were witnessed going extinct by a merchant scout who saw their star (it was a system where two habitable worlds evolved sentient life) go nova and there have never been signs that they utilised their interstellar capacities to colonise other worlds and apparently no ships equipped to found a colony remained, and the race is in no discovered record having sought asylum among any other peoples.

Six show signs of having died out in various wars. One of these, the Ottops, were wiped out by a wholly unknown foe. Depictions of their destroyers in the archaeological finds indicate a race never seen in the Milky Way except in exceedingly scattered legends. A superficial resemblance has lead some fringe groups to be convinced that they were Dichidians, but this is deemed exceedingly unlikely given what is known and understood of Dichidian behaviour – they neither kept the world, nor show any signs of touching any of the million worlds they would have passed along the way.  A likelier theory, until outraged members of that race point out they had barely reached beyond their own twelfth moon at that time, is that it was the Chardosi of Galfarra whose home is the third closest to the Galfarran side of the ‘hole.  As it is known that their world had been openly traded with off and on at various points in their history it is deemed plausible that some ancient warlord had traded for some ships that might have been used in the campaign, though the Chardosi insist that, even were this true, there were at least five hundred more interesting targets they would have hit too, or instead and this is presented as proof of the invalidity of that theory.

Among the rest there are many that seem to have simply died out.  One, the Jah’ari whose world was dying and their star growing cold who claim to have found a way of leaving their galaxy. Though it is uncertain if they did so through one of the wormholes, recent examinations of the worlds of the Dead Zone (the several hundred parsec region around the Vortonian end of that ‘hole where lies thousands of dead systems and stars) give inconclusive evidence of this.   A few quite simply vanished. Of these only two, the Pollithri and Marstre, left the slightest clue to what happened to them and those hints are even more mysterious than the rest who vanished without trace. The Pollithri’s nearest neighbours, the Yitresti traded with them though, apparently only for goods and never for technology as they still do not even have space flight and refuse offers to trade it for their highly prized Illutrex fruits which refuse to cultivate properly off of that world for reasons suspected to do with peculiarities in the radiation emissions of their stars.  According to Yiresti legend the Pollithri brought a strange device to the Yiresti’s third moon and in a magical ritual that reached climax during The Loozad (a sacred alignment of all three moons, the binary planet pair, and both stars in a perfectly straight line) which opened a door to a new universe they had built for themselves which the race entire all walked through and vanished and the machine with them. The fate of the Marstre is even odder, as the only clues to their fate are in what they left behind which seems to involve a detailed plan for the race entire to descend into an unknown hole in their world. Careful study has found no subterranean civilisation past or present and no cave, borehole, or sinkhole in that world’s crust match the description of the one in the plan. And the record was clearly left behind due to no longer being needed, and not as a final record as it is very vague about things and refers only to “our new paradise” in what is admitted to be a translation that is nearly half guesswork but still proves it was meant for people who already understood its meaning and purpose.

Of other notes, it appears that, save for the very rare pirate or smuggler, Vorton lost track of the Milky Way around the time of whatever disaster befell the Dead Zone, which is quite believable as astrographical evidence suggests that event was a centuries long death of an entire star cluster … the Dead Zone being littered with black holes, various late stage stars, and as many shattered remains of worlds and systems as it has corpses of such. During that period it would have, likely, been impossible to reach the wormhole in any safety. This loss of contact and falling of all things related to The Milky Way and Galfarra to distant legend is gauged to have been within the era when the Earth was first developing river valley civilisations, and the Kivanians were beginning to make forays into space.

It is also worth noting that several worlds on the opposite side of the galaxy from Sweytz, and Earth seem to bear legends of striking similarity that there was a great race of strange beings or gods depicted varingly as purple skinned, purple furred, or purple scaled, but always purple, standing (depending on legend) between one and four metres tall, and which were vengeful, dangerous and ‘came from beyond the stars’ via some kind of celestial vortex. Oddly the legends vary on one detail most shockingly, while all do indicate that another race of gods, these pink, benevolent and helpful stopped the purple from destroying, apparently, everything, here the similarity immediately stops.  Some say the pink race destroyed the purple and vowed that the universe was now safe; others that the purple were driven out and banished, supposedly forever, though they often seem to doubt this and suspect the purple ones of plotting a return; and finally those who believe the purple ones were only foiled in that single attempt and are destined to return one day. Many xenoanthropologists suspect that this is a legend born from cultural contamination from one of the earlier interstellar races, or is a strange twisting of the historical meeting of some of the older lost ones who are known to have mutually destroyed each other and could have fit the description.  There are also a few races that yet live who are younger but also could serve the legend, and as ever there abound theories that this was a transuniversal or extragalactic race and their vortexes were the means by which they travelled those boundaries and periodically makes a short lived fad among holocinemetographers, holoserialists, comic book authors, science fiction writers, and their analogues on the nearly seven thousand million worlds that have ever heard of that legend to any degree.

Time (Terran)

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

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.