Are YOU interested by...
Enormous helium-3 powered ships whizzing through the interstellar medium at a whopping 15% light speed?
Asteroid belts housing billions of people, sheltered from the elements by idyllic spinning cylinders anchored inside hollowed-out asteroids?
Skirmishes in conflict-prone regions with battleship fleet sizes that make World War Two look like a fisticuff?
A new era of international diplomacy and governance, brought about by the limitations of time and immense distance?
Enormous engineering projects, from sprawling metropolises in the night sky to massive orbital mirror arrays designed to alter the climates of planets and protect billions of people from lethal solar flares?
If so, you may be interested by Hyades, a region-in-progress which will have all of these things and more once fully set up.
How exactly would one describe Hyades without flowery depictions of space opera-esque scenes? Pretty easily.
Hyades will be an FT:STL region set in the real-life Hyades Star Cluster, an open star cluster which contains a huge variety of stars in close proximity to each other (quite a good scenario if you want lots of STL trade, communication and settler migration between star systems). Set 20,000 years into the future, with the first human settlers arriving in the cluster only ten millennia before that, Hyades is part vibrant spacefaring civilisation and part interstellar Wild West depending where you are in the cluster. With a diameter of 14.1 light years, a good starship moving at relativistic speeds can cross the cluster within the space of a human lifetime.
Humanity's primary sources of electricity and propulsion will be fusion, solar (solar sails in the case of propulsion) and fission-based, although short-range space travel in small ships will often utilise chemical rocket fuel instead of the aforementioned power sources. Strong AI will not have been developed, having ultimately proved too hard and effort-intensive to create thousands of years ago (this avoids human obsolescence and makes interesting RP easier). Because humanity hasn't been replaced by robots (with the exception of menial physical and number-crunching mental labour, the automation of which has presented a multitude of social challenges that are still being dealt with to this day), millennia of genetic meddling, cybernetics, whole brain emulation and reproductive isolation in space means that humanity comes in a wider variety of forms than ever before.
Hyades will be human-only, but only in the sense that all civilisations found in the cluster are descended from the humanity of IRL 2018. Many seem a lot less human than their ancestors for reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph. Extraterrestrial life is scattered throughout the Hyades Cluster, but it only exists in non-intelligent forms varying from minuscule single-celled microbes to huge multicellular organisms. Because of the Fermi Paradox, the Hyades universe will not have any known alien civilisations elsewhere in the galaxy either.
The Five Pillars of Hyades
To enhance the RP experience Hyades has to offer, Hyades will have five unchangeable "pillars" - rules, basically - that will dictate how RP goes.
1. NO FT Travel - No FTL travel allowed whatsoever, Hyades will be unique among active FT regions on Nationstates for being a purely STL region. You cannot go faster than light, it is not possible. Loopholes like Alcubierre drives are technically allowed, but in practice the crazy energy requirement of using one along with the potentially nasty effects mean it wouldn't happen. Which brings us to pillar 2...
2. Reasonable Realism - Not as concrete as the other pillars, but just as important. Empires which are too wanked for the constrains of STL travel to realistically allow are a no-no (if you want to discuss ways of spreading yourself across multiple systems and not fracturing, such as being a self-governing corporation, I'm all ears). Hyades will be as realistic (within the boundaries of what is currently established by science) as possible. If you think this limits you too much don't worry, because there are people a lot smarter than either of us who have figured out realistic ways to get things done. I'd recommend this Youtube channel for more on that general subject, or just for timewasting in general. Speaking of stuff done on computers...
3. No Strong AI* - *With the exception of human brain emulations. Human brain emulations will require a great deal of processing power and impressive amounts of energy to run continuously if you want to simulate everything down to proteins and molecules to properly emulate human consciousness, but are possible and feasible to upload your society's big-wigs to before death so you get a lasting copy of them. Everything else though, like a cogito-ergo-sum skynet, is off bounds. Complex computers will be more like big mechanical cockroaches, insect-like automatons made of metal and silicon, than true minds.
4. An unorthodox approach to time - Because travel/broadcast times can be a bit much through interstellar space sometimes, it is best that Hyades develops an unorthodox method of managing its in-roleplay time. This can mean both making a certain amount of IRL time equivalent to a certain amount of in-universe time (converting days/weeks to years might be a good idea, but skipping so much time still makes many cringe with displeasure despite how practical it is, so we should reach a group consensus) and continuing RPs while ignoring how much time has elapsed, working on individual RPs within the moment and even setting up separate timescales for different RPs until they're finished. This pillar is vague because it'll be largely determined by how you guys want to roleplay and that's important.
5. SpaceEngine 0.980- Can be downloaded HERE, once a planned later version of SE comes out that costs money I will keep the setup file and spread it around to people via dropbox or something else in case the devs close off access to it. That's right, it will be forever FREE for us! This isn't piracy either, because the in-development version was free to begin with.
We will use SpaceEngine to map out our region, with players being able to claim heavenly bodies or a space habitat prescence in randomly-generated/simulated real star systems. Everything within 14.1 light years of the Hyades Cluster's center is fair game. As you can see, there are HUNDREDS of star systems to chose from, many with multiple suns. Lots of room for everyone. The region, once set up, will keep a database of where everyone is, and I will probably set up a downloadable file of renamed planets so you can boot up your SE 0.980 and search for our region's heavenly bodies by their in-universe names.
(Personally, I would prefer we begin in the center of the cluster and work our way out. This is not essential and is more of an offhand comment, but it would make a young region with new players more active being in close proximity to eachother. I have also explored the center of the cluster and found some pretty cool places, with multiple binary red dwarf systems and an ocean planet orbiting a gas giant with unicellular life, so it's not the worst place to RP)
