System of the Gods

[Vocenae]

OOC: This draws heavily from the 'Grand Tour' series of novels by Ben Bova, which focuses on humanity's slow expansion into our proverbial backyard. Also, this is mainly just backstory, I want to try to get Condemned moving again before I get too involved with this one.

 

Sophisticated Tech Limited, the largest corporate power in Vocenae, has always been a major supplier to the Imperial Armed Forces. Better weapons, better aircraft, cruisers, and perhaps most importantly, space shuttles. For years, the company would grow at a fast pace, buying out rivals and working it's way into the Imperial government. With Council members on the payroll, more and more funding would be given to areas that benefitted the company. The space agency of the nation would be the primary recipient of the funding, because many on the board of directors looked to the natural resources of space.

 

A hundred and fifty years passed. The company established hundreds of power satallites in orbit, built a sizable spacefleet of new and improved shuttlecraft called 'Clipperships', and succeeded in building a permanent colony on the moon. Sophisticated Tech became the largest corporation in the region, and kept branching outwards into the solar system. Asteroid mining would finally become realized at this point in human history, and while Sophisticated Tech had a stranglehold on the fledgling industry, privateers, otherwise known as 'Rock Rats', would prove to be thorns in the company's side. A massive research station was constructed in orbit around the gas giant Jupiter five years after the introduction of asteroid mining, officially announced as a hub for examining the surrounding Jovian system, and the opportunity it provided for extraterrestrial life. In truth it was a cover operation for the budding fusion cell industry. Due to the extreme radioactive environment of the Jupiter system, it was discovered that it was much cheaper to 'farm' the native fusion cells from the top of the planet's atmosphere, than to slowly sift it out of the regolith of the moon.

 

Twenty years would pass until the company would see it's empire beginning to fracture. The Rock Rats would become more organized, creating a community inside Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system. Although Sophisticated Tech would try to gain a foothold here, the Rock Rats would quickly force the corporate employees off the asteroid. 'Pirates' began to prey on the company's ships as they searched for mineral rich rocks in the emptiness of the Asteroid Belt. The Moonbase seceded, declaring itself a independant nation, forcing Sophisticated Tech to rely on the satallites it had established decades earlier. Other corporations finally began to break through the monopoly and establish themselves in space, and the academic organizations of the world gradually took control of the station at Jupiter. Although the facility was still owned by the company, the board of directors could no longer use it as a fusion cell deposit center.

 

With the Moonbase and Jupiter facility gone, and their asteroid industry slipping through their fingers, the company began to retreat back to Earth, where many of Sophisticated Tech's secrets were becoming public. Stocks plummeted, employees were laid-off, and the public was turning against them. It was just a matter of time before the company would have to declare bankruptcy, and become just another page in the history books...

Edited May 24, 2006 by Vocenae (see edit history)