Satrap of Saturn

N ever go with a space hippie to a third location.  PCs are crew on an enormous interstellar hauler, much larger than usual Mothership spacecraft, 2km long or so. Generally cylindrical, it has artificial gravity generated from a thin array down the centerline of the craft. "Down" is toward the central axis of the ship; corridors slope away and down. AG works by tricking the spatial membrane into acting as if sufficient mass is acting on it through hyperspace higher dimensional interactions. Cylindrical arrays of similar engines at the equator, prow, and stern serve as the main drive, pushing and pulling fake mass across real spacetime, and, as a bonus, the enormous real mass of the ship and its cargo. Heavy lifter shuttles act as tugs for manoeuvering into habs and stations. The name of this hauler is the Bûshanjî. [Sketch or diagram to follow, God willing] For several decades it trundles between Industrial X system and the neutron star Claro. Numerous planets survived Claro...

Armouricca is a world with a long history of the failures and difficulties of planetary domestication. Re-settled and re-invigorated several times over tens of thousands of years, the planet basically resists becoming anything remotely earth-like. Suitable planets are hard to come by, and the people of the terrestrial diasporic oecumene [the terhumene ] cannot bring themselves to commit fully to vacuum-based life in habs, domes, and ships, nor make the existential and psychic leap to mass transfiguration into vacuum-adapted bodies—thus, earth-ish planets are objects of obsessive and recurrent interest. “Armouricca” is the name favored by the dominant culture these last two cycles of settlement and attempted domestication (“terraforming” a lifeless planet into the image of the Old Place being virtually impossible, making home-like  has been a sufficient goal for some myriads of planets and other bodies ever since the First Age). References and archives across the galaxy identify the...