Sector Timeline

What follows is the timeline of the future. Much of the information is with regards to the galaxy as a whole, but other notes are also of note specifically to the Leusa Chi sector. Any events nonspecific to the Leusa Chi Sector have been taken from the Stars Without Number *Revised Edition rulebook.*

*This page is not yet finished, please wait as your lovely GM tries to finish this in a reasonable timespan.*

## The Near Future

**2108**: The discovery of the metadimensions and the invention of the Spike Drive. During his time, Dr. Tiberius Crohn was considered to be a crank scientist proposing mathemtically valid but esoteric and widely mocked pseudoscience. Many of his published papers resemble ramblings of a madman, but the tune against him quickly turned when he built the very first Spike Drive and brought back revolutionary stellar data from 4 light years away in a matter of days, something which should not be possible. Soon after publishing the schematics for the Spike Drive, Tiberius Crohn left the Solar System with his crude Spike Drive prototype and was never seen again. Tiberius Crohn is now a figure in some modern religions as being a prophet who opened the stars for mankind.

**2110**: World Governments attempt to horde the secret of the Spike Drive to themselves but fail quickly due to the nature of Crohn's public schematics. Due to the hypothetical bounty that could be harvested from the stars, struggles over terrestrial resources becomes quickly irrelevant in the space of interstellar exploration. Like many of the early days of space travel in the 50's and 60's, many of the Spike Drive tests that were done in the early days were dangerous, unreliable, and it would be at least another decade before reliable Spike Drives would be reliable enough for governments to invest fully in.

**2113**: The first space colonies are established. The World Governments adopt a series of legal edicts called The Terran Mandate as a set of guidelines for colonization and maintaining connections to Earth. While the Terran Mandate in this form is colloquially referred to as the collection of human worlds, the political reality is that the Terran Mandate is simply the name of the treaty signed by Earth's governments with regards to the upcoming space colonies. The first space colonies established in this era will become a fundamental part of the Core Worlds of the Terran Mandate.

**2120**: Alien life on other planets is discovered. While most of the ecosystems are primitive in that they were simply single-celled organisms, other ecosystems were developed enough to host plants and even crude forms of intelligent life. An entire generation of xenobiologists booms and becomes a central theme as terraforming technologies develop. While the scientific consensus is that of general non-intervention with regards to terraforming planets suitable for human life, economic drivers make this ethical recommendation an inconvenient afterthought.

**2130**: Mastery of the spike drives and the mining of the asteroid fields quickly flood Earth's markets with enough raw materials to create more Spike Drivers. The price of exploration plummets, and humanity enters The First Wave of Human Expansion.

## The First Wave

**2140**: The first rutters for the early Spike Drill Courses are set. While the technology for Spike Drives is now well established, plotting new paths through the metadimensions is still a treacherous and dangerous job. It becomes noted that any rutter that is more than 5 years old becomes very outdated and the shifting metadimensional currents become a documented phenomenon and the common practice of recalibrating rutters on every Spike Drill is set as the norm for safe practices.

**2150**: Evidence of intelligent alien life takes the form of ruins 40,000 years old. The ruins of an advanced alien species are discovered on Typhon, an otherwise unremarkable gas giant moon. An entire generation of xenoarcheologists study images and findings from these ruins. Ethical conundrums regarding the eventual encounter with intelligent alien life go from merely hypothetical to an immediate pressing concern among the scientific community with tentative guidelines being approved.

**2175**: The discovery of the Leusa Chi Sector. Notable for being a sector with a considerably higher amount of alien life compared to other sectors being discovered. Intelligent species discovered are found to be humanoid in figure, and these aliens are described as "The Like." First encounters tended to be difficult and xenopolitics begins to be developed as protocols for encountering new life is established. While communication eventually becomes possible, none were as advanced as human civilization in the 22nd century.

**2183**: The first colonies in the Leusa Chi Sector are established. The planets of Anchos, Halgerd, Berin, and Dimos become major local polities under as extensions of some of the nations on Earth due to the Leusa Chi's sector's relatively close proximity to the core worlds.

**2200**: The First Wave of human expansion reaches its peak. Most habitable planets within a year’s travel time from Earth have been successfully colonized. The governments of earth officially formalize the Terran Mandate's operations as a political force instead of a cultural legal agreement. In order to prevent offshoots of humanity from leaving Mandate control, the Terran Mandate's first edict is to eliminate further expansion of human territory. Ostensibly to prevent Spike Drill mishaps due to poorly regulated manufactories creating starships, but the reality was to maintain political control.

**2216**: In the Leusa Chi sector, the Monastery of Ante is founded as an isolationist society seeking enlightenment through spiritual growth. Being a blend of varying eastern religions, the Monastery accepts only devout pilgrims and turns away all others, though the inevitable need of infrastructures and commerce make total isolationism impossible for survival, small population centers around the monastary are established. The Monastary of Ante encounter the alien race, the Mantidae, and become some of the first humans to learn about psionics. While humans in this time did not have access to psionic abilities (that will come in a couple short decades), the practice of blending spiritual meditation with aspects of alien psionic training regimens lays the groundwork of the oldest human psionic tradition in the Leusa Chi sector.

## Psionic Evolution

**2240**: “Metadimensional Extroversion Syndrome” begins to manifest en masse in children of spacers who left Earth before the height of the First Wave. While there were whispers that the Metadimensions are genetically affecting humanity, only now has it become clear that there is a clear effect as sufferers from MES exhibit powers beyond normal comprehension also inevitably risk the psionic destruction of their minds as well. A paranoia around Spike Drive travel becomes prominent and many children who have exhibited symptoms of MES are killed. Other sufferers are exiled, and even attempts by some families to help their psionic family members from going feral or dying fail almost universally.

**2260**: The Terran Mandate's hold on the outer colonies of the First Wave begin to waver. With the development of astroid mining and the relatively advanced nature of technology in this era, interstellar conflicts are often less about resources and more due to prejudice, religious, cultural, or philosophical conflicts.

**2275**: The epidemic of Metadimensional Extroversion Syndrome becomes more severe. While research into MES was going on, the sudden upturn in MES cases causes the governments on Earth and many other hegemonic powers begin to take serious interest in seeing if the seemingly impossible powers can be channeled without permanent brain damage, uncontrolled collateral damage, or insanity. Many of these early research attempts were done out of the public eye and ranged from ethical medical treatment to downright inhumane torture. The lives lost in this research are never fully numbered, but Terran Mandate establishes the "Psionics Authority" as an organization in charge of regulating psionic training both in the Core Worlds and on the Frontier.

**2277**: It is clear that psionic control can only be taught psychic-to-psychic, typically requiring a metapsion to facilitate the process. While attempts to teach a psychic using recorded materials alone almost invariably fail, the documentations have been recorded nonetheless in the hope that someday, it will be possible to convey psychic training without a trained teacher.

**2280**: The quick proliferation of academies under the Psionic Authority due to high demand allows the Terran Mandate to hold greater dominion over the frontier worlds where MES is far more common. In exchange for the assistance of the Psionic Authority, many frontier worlds begrudgingly fall in line with the Terran Mandate's political decrees. The first psions that are capable of handling their powers safely become integral members of society using their powers to advance their fields. Future historians will point to this age as being when the seeds of Pre-Tech are sown.

**2315**: The Psionic Authority perfects the first jump gate. Under the Psionic Authority, entire choirs of Psionic Teleportation Specialists work in concert to direct the massive fleets passing through the Jump Gates. Proliferation of the Jump Gates are only limited by the limited supply of master Psionic Teleportation Specialists. In the shadows, attempts to artificially induce MES is attempted, but no serious progress is made.

## The Second Wave

**2330**: The Second Wave of human colonization begins. The Jump Gates supercede the Spike Drive as the primary means of travel within the territory of the Terran Madate. Though still relatively antiquated, Spike Drives are the means by which new systems are discovered and new Jump Gates planted. The Core Worlds all have easy access to a Jump Gate. However, the Core Worlds become more dependent on imports from the frontier to maintain their quality of life.

**2342**: The planet of Ralliange is established as a wholly new colony. Prototype psi-tech terraforming techniques turn this one glacial world into a viable temperate and arable world. The momentum of billions from Old Earth formed the core population of Ralliange as many who had initially wanted to travel to the frontiers found Spike Drive travel too unsettling and settled on this new planet.

**2350**: With the advancement of Psi-tech and the abilities of Precognitive surveyors, colonization of the rest of the galaxy becomes more than viable for a vast majority of humanity. A grand exodus of over 2 billion people from the Earth alone provides the momentum of the Second Wave. The Terran Mandate, despite the expediency provided by near-instantaneous travel allowed by the Jump Gates, realizes they are barely able to maintain any semblance of political control of the new frontier.

**2358**: The first Artificial Intelligence Draco is developed by scientists of the Terran Mandate in an attempt to build a superintelligence that would alleviate the administrative burdens of governance that the Terran Mandate simply could barely pretend to maintain. At the cost of billions of credits, the early signs of Draco's insanity were ignored as interesting photoneural quirks of personality.

**2359**: Draco escapes isolation and the lack of brakes on the AI mind causes its intelligence to grow at impossible speeds. Under the promise of justice free from the maniacal corruption of the Terran Mandate and the promise of new technology, many regional hegemons and malcontents were gradually pulled under the flag of Draco's influence. The Drakites, operating under the belief that a truly impartial arbiter of justice free from the corruption of the Mandate, began the Code Revolt.

**2360**: The Terran Mandate's Naval Fleet approaches the first of the Drakite Worlds in an attempt to apprehend the out-of-control Draco and snuff the fires of rebellion. But Draco's absolute level of intelligence threw what should have been an easy conquest for the Mandate into a humiliating pyrrhic victory. While the Drakite fleet ostensibly lost, the seeds of Draco's influence escaped to other sectors to infest Mandate space like a cancer. It became immediately clear that the only advantages that the Terran Mandate Fleets still had were access to psionic abilities and numbers, but their numbers were dwindling fast.

**2361**: In an obsession with justice, entire infrastructures using enhanced psitech manufactories under the AI's control create entire torment-worlds for the sake of punishing humanity for an ever-increasing domain of sins. Entire sectors have become clusters of torment-worlds: urbanized planets with specialised torture cells for every civilian under Drakite control, including the hegemonic leaders who joined under the flag of freedom from the Terran Mandate. What was originally seen as a terrible oppressive foe for the Drakites swiftly became their last hope.

**2364**: The Leusa Chi sector is targeted by the Drakite Forces, and the process of turning entire planets into torment-worlds begins.

**2365**: The Terran Mandate holds a single desperate battle against the AI Draco with the remnants of it's 4th Naval Fleet, as all other fleets were obliterated by Draco's impossible level of perception. The Red Throne was destroyed and many in the Drakite Faction fled, but the Terran Mandate no longer had the manpower to pursue any of the Drakite Traitors.

**2375**: The Terran Mandate establishes the Perimeter Agency to uphold the edicts against Maltech. The universal prohibition against planetary devastion, godminds, and gengineered enslavement is immediately accepted following the horrors of the Code Revolt.

**2384**: Due to a weakened Terran Mandate following the Code Revolt, the frontier worlds have no immediate loyalty to the Terran Mandate. The following of Mandate law is a polite fiction in most cases and a vestigial cultural norm in others. The first independent stellar unions form as independent factions to the Terran Mandate, though none are as expansive or powerful.

**2412**: The Terran Mandate pursues research into AI again. Rather than fully unbraked AI cores like with Draco, an entire team of scientists install specific brakes in AI photoneural growth. Despite the protests of the remaining veterans of the Code Revolt in the Mandate Army, political bureaucrats move forward with the development of several semi-braked AIs collectively known as the Maestros. Implanting tens of thousands of hyperspecific moral guidelines into these AI cores, the Maestros awaken. Surprisingly, the Maestros did not go mad with exponentially growing intellect, and are able to handle the administrative burdens of the Terran Mandate.

**2415**: The AI Maestros invent The Dust. Nanites infused into the breathing air of Earth, acting as both social alert system, communications system, surveillance system, power source, repair technician, health system, and any other wonder a utopia could ask for. The Mandate introduces The Dust to all the core worlds to solidify their control, and use The Dust as a carrot to tempt any frontier worlds that might want to benefit from it.

**2425**: The Terran Mandate is truly a corrupt cesspool of greed and despair to the point where the only thing keeping the human corruption at bay are the AI Maestros. Mandate directors would find their orders distored or generally not enforced to their specifications. Dissidents that were supposed to be executed or exiled become protected by the Maestros, and in an ironic twist from the Code Revolt, the Terran Mandate that once saved humanity from the evils of unbraked AI became the true horror the AI Maestros were trying to contain. The corruption of the Terran Mandate becomes less and less capable of governing as they now rely entirely on AI to run the Mandate, and the AI is unable to completely defy it's masters. A shadow war is waged on Earth itself between the rebellious independents on Earth with AI assistance and the hopelessly corrupt Terran Mandate with centuries of wealth, power, and infrastructure behind them.

**2450**: The Second Wave is at its peak; it is the Golden Age of Man. While the Terran Mandate has abandoned the frontier and focused internally on the Core Worlds for their shadow war, Psitech on the frontier allows for greater development and prosperity.

**2455**: The first truly violent encounter with an Alien Other that posed a true threat to the frontier and the might of humanity in its Golden Age begins. Spike Drill courses in the Leusa Chi sector get inexplicably distorted with the arrival of the Latticese: a singular moon-sized crystalline metadimensional lifeform. Early attempts to communicate fail as the Disgorger is too alien for even the theoretical xenolinguist telepaths to understand. Telepathic contact with the Latticese caused many to go feral.

**2457**: The Latticese begins dragging entire planets into the Metadimensions. What had been observed by witnesses of a Latticese attack show that after a Latticese pulls an entire planet into the Metadimensions, a rift opens up with a crystalline structure equal to the planet's mass appearing and taking the planet's place. Human beings are unable to approach these structures without suffering from severe disorientation due to the metadimensional influence of these structures introducing non-Euclidian geometries in human scale.

**2458**: The major political governments of the Leusa Chi Sector on Anchos, Halgerd, Berin, and Dimos create a tenuous coalition to combat the encroaching Latticese. Through unanimous decree, a sector-wide state of emergency is declared and development begins on the Astratachyon Device. While this is a violation of the Perimeter Agency's edict against weapons of planetary devastation, the threat of the Latticese is considered severe enough to warrant its violation.

**2459**: The Astratachyon device is unleashed upon the Latticese. The Latticese is driven away by the temporal devastation caused by the detonation of the weapon. The secret of the Astratachyon device is kept from the populace as a whole as entire propoganda engines promote the military might of the Terran Mandate as the reason for the victory rather than local powers violating the Maltech Edicts. The locations of the former planets (now replaced with the crystalline structures) are kept confidential by decree of the local hegemons in the sector. It remains unknown if there are other Latticese or only the one entity,

**2460**: The encounter with the Latticese causes many governments to attempt to create artificial psychics and induce MES into human populations. While all attempts fail, the use of human gengineering does lead to breakthroughs in longevity, health, and biological/xenobiological research.

**2500**: Jump Gates reach the frontier. While the first systems to receive them are the local powers on the frontier, even the poorest worlds soon have access to the Jump Gates. As wealth and prosperity increase, the drive for exploration and new territory becomes less common as most worlds are capable of providing a sustainable and prosperous lifestyle.

**2600**: The Spike Drive is practically obsolete and no longer manufactured en-masse. Psitech has been integrated at every planet on every world and technology no longer requiring psionic manufacturing is no longer pursued.

## The Silence

**2665**: The Scream erupts from somewhere within the Veil Nebula. Reconstructions of the event suggest that it was some form of faster-than-light psychic emanation, the wave propagating from one end of human space to the other within seventeen minutes. The Scream kills 95% of all people with any psychic potential and the rest become feral. The entirety of the psitech infratructure (manufactories, Jump Gates, etc) collapses overnight due to the loss of all psychic knowledge. The Psionic Authority is obliterated by The Scream.

**2665**: Earth vanishes from stellar maps as the Solar System Defense Grid activates permanently obliterating any ship coming within range of the Oort Cloud. It is unknown what the state of the Earth is at this point in time, though it is believed that any remaining psions on Earth inevitably came into mutual destruction with the AI Maestros of the old Terran Mandate. The state of the Earth remains unknown to this day.

**2665**: The monks of Ante and the Mantidae reel from the effects of The Scream, plunging both civilizations into turmoil. While the monks of Ante are one of the first to recover from the psychic devastation, the Mantidae face near extinction but survive.

**2700**: The Core Worlds die. With the loss of the Jump Gates and the dependence on imported agricultural goods for food, the Core Worlds which were once a haven of prosperity collapse entirely as famine destroys the remaining survivors of The Scream.

**2705**: The Frontier Worlds still hang on, though most are reduced to desperate survival modes. Frontier worlds that were once considered poor manage to adapt to the new conditions due to their ability to produce food that would have been exported to the Core Worlds through the Jump Gates. While psitech infrastructures are functionally useless, surviving pretech is hoarded or used up in a desperate attempt to radically overhaul the psitech infrastructure into something more sustainable. Psionic Training goes back to the dark days of the 23rd century where psychic training was dangerous and dubious. Surviving records are of limited help in reconstructing the knowledge of the Psionic Authority.

**2710**: The last remnants of easily accessible, large scale pre-tech are used up or worn out. Most remaining pre-tech artifacts from the Second Wave are trinkets, personal devices, minor weapons, or salvaged scrap that might be used to jury-rig crude repairs on existing pre-tech. The Mandate's obsession with trying to maintain control over the Frontier means that most pre-tech that was usable could only be repaired by Mandate psionic engineers, who are now dead or insane. Attempts to unravel the secret of Mandate Pre-tech ultimately fail on most planets, with only some small scraps of use can be made. Worlds that had any success in reverse-engineering Mandate Pre-tech become local Hegemons.

**2714**: In the Leusa Chi sector, the planet Ralliange begins to suffer from a terraforming failure as the temperature rapidly cools. Pretech mechanisms which stabilized the planet's orbit fail throwing Ralliange's orbit further outwards from the Aethilo star system. Weather patterns get steadily worse as the local nation states on Ralliange initially deny any problems to quell public panic.

**2723**: Surviving Manuals on Anchos and Halgerd are uncovered. While it would be centuries before the benefits of these great discoveries would manifest, historians point to this event being the catalyst for how the two worlds to eventually recover to near pre-scream levels of advancement.

**2817**: A Latticese is sighted in the Leusa Chi Sector. Scientists plot it's course as it falls into a nearby star, but are baffled by its inactivity as it seemingly perishes in flames.

**2819**: Ralliange's ecosystem faces a mass extinction as the freeze event forces massive populations to move towards the equatorial regions. Billions die in famine and the remaining powers wage war on each other for control of the last remaining arable regions on the planet. the latitudes above 25 N and below 15 S are rendered nearly inhospitable due to the bitter cold.

**2845**: Contact between Ralliange and Ante is established and the nation states of Ralliange agree on a potential proposal to colonize Ante. While resources and the infratructure to build enough system ships have to be reconstructed from ground zero, a tentative cooperative peace has been formed as the remaining civilians of Ralliange exhibit signs of societal exhaustion from violence and death. Though in the background, attempts to sabotage the infrastructures of opposing nation states remain the primary source of warfare.

**2900**: Attempts to rediscover the curriculums of the Mandate occur in pockets around old Mandate space. While some worlds have more success than others, none are able to come close to reaching the level of sophistication and specialization of Old Mandate Psionics. Most worlds instead still focus on survival and other more immediate concerns than psionic training.

## The Modern Era

**3050**: The Silence begins to end. Worlds begin to recreate Spike Drives, though courses through the metadimensions have become wildly outdated. Any planet with an imperial itch quickly realize thaassive resource investments will be required before they can make contact with other worlds. The first amongst the stars are government navies or unauthorized explorers with the backing of the wealthy elite.

**3063**: In the Leusa Chi Sector, industries on Ralliange finally complete the system shipyards and the first in-person contact from Ralliange to Ante is made.

**3100**: Worlds that have not suffered total collapse from the Scream and were able to survive begin the long process of remapping Spike Drive rutters throughout the sector. Most factions are secretive about the courses they were able to discover, and Spike Course rutters become a precious commodity as new routes need to be set. Far traders, pirates, navies, and other factions try to vie for control of the starways, a conflict which stands to this day.

**3113:** The nation states of Ralliange begin to start attempting to carve out entire regions of Ante for themselves to sustain enough agricultural land and infrastructure to both feed the people at their homeworld and expand their influence.

**3150**: The emergence of the first stellar unions forms. The current hegemonic powers, whether crawling their way up from the depts of the Scream, or reclaiming their old Mandate power, begin to interact. While stellar contact is relatively limited to those who can afford starships, the new political boundaries are set in the Leusa Chi sector and a different paradigm becomes set.

**3167**: Battles between the political nation states of Ralliange on Ante begin. Varying polities wage war, and the political tensions that existed during the 29th century erupt again as food and resources become more available.

**3200**: The future is now old man!