World building notes for UwN, Cosm 3

I’ve been trying to condense all my world building notes for UnWelcome Neighbors. I had suspended writing the novels in the setting as I tried to catch up on other writing and life obligations. The below is an essay for human development in the third Cosm. UwN is built around the idea of three alternative parallel universes that become connected through the actions of a very powerful galactic civilization. ;

 

The Combat Paradigm of the Noetic Wars

The interstellar wars fought by humans of the third Cosm of the Unwelcome Neighbors setting toward an unusual direction.

In this universe, the ancient species known as the Deiwos were able to successfully merger their civilizations greatest two technological achievement the luminescent plenum and the hypergate network.

Individually, both achievements spanned the Milky Way and beyond. The hypergate network allowed superluminal travel between worlds by a connection through hyperspace. The luminescent plenum had created a basement pocket universe anchored to the gravity well of the galaxy. This energy filled pocket dimension was able to be tapped by various Deiwos technologies as a universal power source.

The merger would allow the luminescent plenum to be accessed anywhere with superluminal effects. This allowed superluminal knowledge awareness, and communication.

This became what the humans of second Cosm Earth would call the Mythscape, and the third Cosm Earth would call the astral light. Both Earths would have unique experiences from their galactic facts. In the second Cosm the result would leak more then in the third Cosm. But the remit was a merging of the pocket dimensions between the universes to form one dimensional space.

On the Earth of the third Cosm, prehistoric humans found that many of their spiritual practices could produce tangible physical effects or gain real world objective knowledge. This would be strengthened and used extensively in some societies.

The most important event that would diverge this world from our own was the settlement of the Seleucid-Mauryan War in 303 B.C.. the agreement of Seleucid Nicitor with Chardrayupta Maurya was a peace treaty and dynastic marriage.

Their followed an alliance of the two ruler’s sons, Antiochus I and Bindusara. In our timeline the grandsons became rulers of their grandfather’s empires, Antiochus II Theo and Ashoka. Yet, in Cosm 3 Antiochus II did not come to rule the Seleucid Empire. Instead, his older brother Seleucus II came to rule, where in our timeline he was executed for rebellion against his father.

When Ashoka attempted to send out Buddhist monks to proselyte in the West, it was received and supported with more encouragement in Cosm 3 by Seleucus II.

All of these events would lead to a merging of Indian mysticism and Hellenistic reason to merge many concepts and give a system of thought to allow humans to effectively manifest and manipulate these strange effects from the Deiwos hyper luminescent plenum. Thus was born the noetic sciences.

The dominant civilization of Cosm 3 Earthy would become a merged Hellenistic-Mauryan culture with access to wonderous meta abilities. Technological development would take them into space by 700 A.D..

The existence of meta-abilities would change the nature of many human endeavors, especially transportation, communication, and warfare. The development of gnostic machines would lead to the existence of self aware space ships, and roads, and advance mathematical thinkers.

All of this would lead to the eventual development of starships that were capable of superluminal travel by the use of quantum phase shifting on a macroscopic scale. This works by the human telaesthetic sensing the current circumstances of a distant point in the space/time continuum, the gnostic machine calculating the four dimensional equation, and the combination of the shift engines and human psychportationist pulling energy from the Astral light to complete the psishifting of the ships.

This was the expansion of humans in Cosm 3 to the stars. There would be wars as daughter systems attempted for independence and as new arrangements of states were made.

The Telaesthetic Sarja (guilds) became the controlling authority in human space, but was sworn to work for any human state. These services included warfare against each other. The need for nonlethal combat led to the concept of suppression and psicasting. The concept is to use meta abilities to subdue the other ship. An offensive operation could be an attempt to suppress the other ship’s meta-ability. Another tactic was to force the targeted ship into an involuntary planeshift through a ppsicasting. This psicentric would stun and disorient the targeted ship’s crew. To counter these offensive acts, telaeshetics learned how to use their meta-abilities to disrupt and block any other usage of such effects on their ships.

The disruption of a foe allowed an attacking ship to only partially score a victory this led to the creation of the Astro Stratiotis (star soldiers).

The Astro Stratiotis started off as simple soldiers in space suits, trained for boarding actions. It eventually grew into full power armor geared to space operation.

As combat operations became more extensive, the Astro Stratiotis became more and more advanced. These power armor troops became highly effective in space or on surfaces.

The states all poured their efforts into Astro Stratiotis for most expeditionary missions, including boarding, orbital drops, and elite assault for surface tactical. The advancements in these areas became the main area of military technology development for centuries. So with advanced power armor and auxiliary developed boarding into a very viable and often used space combat.

To make this a viable tactical doctrine the auxiliary craft were the key. A grav sled was created to give the Astro Stratiotis high maneuverability in space at battle ranges these were to allow the star soldiers to close rapidly with a target ship or facility. The grav sled has extensive duration to operate deployed. The grav sleds are also able to make planet fall on many terrestrial planets.

Another auxiliary craft also used to make rapid deployments of a number of star soldiers to a large surface tactical battles. All of these added to the impact of the tanokoa (ships). The independent capacity of the star soldier allowed them to operate in the weapon range of operations of the tanakara with just the maneuver capacity of their ships.

The needs of warfare did show a need for mundane weapons by the noetic powers. So every tanakara carries conventional particle beans for long range beam weapons in space usage, lasers for space and orbital usage and missiles for mission support.

The various human states warred for years against each other. Contact with other sentients led to sharing the noetic sciences and gnostic technologies. Some of these alien intelligents, were able to use it, such as the Swarmers and others were not, such as the Treer.

The one species who were able to use the knowledge was the ‘Xenophobes’, much to the regret of the humans. The Xenophobes armed for war and attacked all of the noetic states and other known space. There would be two xeno wars and both wars would leave billions dead. These wars would force drastic total war fighting on the noetic states.

Before the ‘xeno’ wars, the most vicious wars have been the clashes between the Alphas and the rest of the human worlds. The Alphas started out as a group of telaesthetics and other meta-talents who objected to the morality restraints the governments imposed upon meta-talent usage.

These clashes were rooted in the era of terrestrial development. By the time humans in Cosm 3 Earth went to space, things were at a breakpoint.

The groups that would become the Alphas invested in space technology and self-exiled themselves to remote corners of the Solar System. They would spend centuries on the fringe of the solar civilization. After the development of psishifting, a plan was hatched to build ten large mother ships capable of interstellar travel. Then they departed the solar system.

They would put some distance between themselves and the expanding noetic states, but future conflict was expected. With this in mind, the Alphas set about arming their otherships and developing military subordinate craft. This led to yet a second path of development of military technology and science among the humans of Cosm 3.

The Alphas expanded their population through cloning and genetic castes. This still only gave them some success replicating meta-talents in their population, but never full certainty.

Their lower population base and fear of being restrained led to the Alpha leaders being reluctant to use their meta-talented in war.

Where the core worlds developed meta-talents for transport with a more benign form of war, the Alpas chose to use their meta-talents just as force enhancers.

 Instead they turned to the use of attrition forces and clone soldiers, in an approach best compared to a social insect form of behavior.

They would develop small power combat armor units. After a few encounters with the noetic states, they pushed the refinement of their power suit equipped soldiers to match the cybernetic atho strategies. They would also develop transport sleds for each power armor star soldier. Where the astro stratiotis mostly deploy directly from star ships, the Alphas fear danger to the other ships so develop system assault frigates as attack transports for their own power suit combats.

For ship to ship combat, the Alphas developed small but powerful system ship category warships. These units were equipped with powerful defenses and offense to guard the other ships and project power. The Alphas found, much as the other noetic states, that telaesthetics allowed very accurate weapons fire in combinate with gnostic machines.

This promoted the usage of energy weapons because all but the heaviest armored missiles are destroyed by energy weapons intercepting the missiles on approach

The alphas armed their mother ships heavily with particle beams of various sizes and extensive laser weapons as well. These made the mother ships deadly to small and large crafts.

The Alphas tended to only focus upon defending their own interests with the occasional raids on minor systems. These raids usually consisted of a mothership psishifting into a safe point in the target system. Then the system warships and assault corvettes are dispatched toward the target at a high rate of acceleration. The assault force and assets are considered expendable if necessary.

The most common battle encounter between the Alpha and the Terran Noetic States was minor skirmishes between recon ships with star soldiers and Alpha system warships and squadrons of assault transports and battle sleds. This led to battles of ships sniping and small battle craft and space warriors fighting close.

This often led to the destruction of Alpha strike forces, but sometimes the Alpha forced the noetic ships to withdraw to avoid the potential loss of a whole crew of telaeshetics.

This was often the preferred tactic, threaten the noetic forces with a strike force and then squeeze an assault force to strike at the Alpha’s objective. This concern for telaeshetics would often be an achilles heel in many of the Noetic military states.

The third major intersetllar combat paradigm developed by the humans of Cosm 3 was created by the Andrani Stellar Empire.

This paradigms essence was defined by the origins of the Stellar Empire. During the 1st Xeno war, six frontier star systems on the far side of noetic space were half abandoned. They were not deliberately abandoned as much as very low priority for a civilization fighting for survival against a hostile enemy. The star systems were self-sufficient in system interplanetary spacefaring capacity to sustain thriving economics. All they did not have was superluminal travel with the rest of human space.

Most inhabitants of these star systems likely expected the whole period of isolation to be a few years, but it grew into decades. After that time, some of the star systems began to try and find travel methods. The star systems had kept up active slow communication by light speed radio and laser the whole time.

In time, these six systems began the research into alternative superluminal methods beyond the psishifting method. One group of scientists discovered the principle of the tachyonic transposition methods. This information was shared across the interstellar communication laser with the hope that someone in the six worlds would find a way to make it effective faster than light travel technology.

Several systems went to work upon it. One system discovered what they called the tachyonic engines and set up commerce between the systems. Unfortunately, one system’s government developed the tachyonic engine for warship use, and set about conquering all the other nearby settled systems, starting with the other nearby five. This started a cycle of interstellar warfare in the local region.

After a century of such wars, the end result was a unification of the six star systems under a complex federated constitutional monarchy. This government began to expand and annex nearby settled systems.

The next stage was for this new star nation to send out expeditions toward the old core worlds and Earthy, all to find out why the noetic ships had never returned.

This expedition entered the most settled volumes of the noetic states just at the end of the 2nd Xeno War. these wars had been exhausting for all factions and species. The end result had been a victory, but a very costly one.

To avoid future conflict and build upon their war alliances, the noetic states chose to build the interstellar concordance. This idea was to build a government to avoid conflicts.

The resulting reestablished contact was fraught with tension and eventually conflict. The noetic concordance became more organized and unified in matters of defense and commerce. The Ardoni annexed several volumes of space and in defensive measures against a larger Concordance. The Alphas had maintained their independence throughout all of the past wars and into this era.

The Xenos were still considered a threat to everyone. The first war was thought to settle the issue of the genocidal species, then the second war had started suddenly. It was even more destructive than the first war. So, with these memories haunting them, all of the human powers feared a third war.

The Ardoni were faced with several challenges. The methods of weapons and defense developed during their short unification wars were ineffective against the noetic forces of the Concordance or the mass attritional tactics of the Alphas.

The Ardoni’s answer was to develop new dedicated warships in two fleet arrangements. The patrol fleet  was a security, patrol, and recon force with the responsibility of covering all of the systems of the empire. The Battle Fleet operated in concentrated squadrons out of strategic hubs. All of this was to compensate for the slower strategic response of the tachyonic engine equipped starships relative to the noetic ships’ psishifiting.

For weapons, the Ardoni developed versatile beam weapons and tried using large antiship torpedoes. The beam weapons of the Adroni battle and patrol fleet are designed to be multirole. Where the Noetic forces only needed direct energy weapons as secondary mission needs and the Alphas preferred several different types of energy weapons, the Ardoni fleets preferred a lower number of weapons with a variety of firing formats.

To counter the star soldiers of the Noetics and the battle craft power suits of the Alphas, the Ardoni battle fleet developed fleet defense interceptors based around a power armor and propulsion assist unit combination. This allowed a high performance close range interception yet still have an assault and boarding defense unit. The cataphract of the Ardoni are large but effective in surface tactics and assault against both the noetic star soldiers and the Alphas power troopers.

The Ardoni patrol fleet went for a different concept. They chose to develop long range system interceptors able to engage attrition and battle crafts at a distance. The long range system interceptors have high acceleration capacity, larger mission duration, and long range weapons to engage the noetic star soldiers on grav sleds or the Alpha power troops using assault sleds. This tactic does not work if either opponent supports their attrition battle craft with heavy fleet units. The system interceptors do not have the defenses to engage full scale war ships.

This all leads to the Ardoni being able to engage opponents and keep forces in most of their vulnerable points.