compass atop a bowl of roasted coffee beans set inside gold laurels Tomasius Space

Ex dubium scientia. From doubt [comes] knowledge.

Star Citizen


Overview
Port-lit, metallic, Star Citizen Logo comprising a single cruciform star encapsulated by a wreath and set between the words STAR and CITIZEN





Star Systems
In-system view of a O-Type Main Sequence Star





Space Trials
Shuttle Class space ship





Comparisons
Cutter Class space ship





Guides
ASW Frigate Class space ship





Chronicles
Endurance Cutter Class space ship





Galleries
Heavy Ordinance Endurance Cutter Class space ship




Life in Overlap


Technical Requirements
Starboard-lit, metallic, Star Citizen Logo comprising a single cruciform star encapsulated by a wreath and set betewen the words STAR and CITIZEN





Due Diligence
Checklist




What is an RPG?
It all began with pen and paper




Gaming Concepts
USB Iconography




Gaming Psychology
Neural network node showing connective reinforcement

 
Out of Darkness

2024.1213.2136

Space is is the dread cold hand of entropy, shrouded in darkness and silence. It is the unheard, muffled scream of life overwhelmed by death. Space; space is the most hostile environment to life. There is no pressure, no air, no water, no food and only unseen, dense rocks to collide with in the silent, freezing, inky darkness of the vastness between the stars. And for those who make it this far, an unstable jump point can collapse at any time to strand a traveller to die alone in the deep empty black and even, on occasion, completely outside the traveller's timeline. It may therefore come as a surprise that this miserable abode of death, itself, has become a frontier of unimaginable dimensions where those with nothing else left to lose seek new livelihood far, far from places where the last of such opportunities have been inherited by others. Yet greater hazards than we could even imagine lay in wait, concealed in the shadows.


Citizens of the Stars

By the 30th Century, concluding the course of a millennium, space travel has progressed from dream to reality to something accessible to everyone who wants the life. It is no less dangerous but, by the same token, who would want to become a billionaire just to have enough money to barely survive in a disused utility closet somewhere in what was once one of London's sewers? No, the abode of death itself has become the salvation of everyone who wants more than the eternal squalor of competing for increasingly scarce living space in the mud and blood of the rock upon which our ancestors evolved.

Thus far, our encounters with alien civilizations have been a matter of blind luck. The Banu were friendly. The Xi'An, for all their aloofness, also proved friendly. The Tevarin, while hostile, weren't extensive enough or advanced enough to extinguish our species - and their hostility made us stronger. For better or worse, it was out of Tevarin hostility that the UEE was born. Although doomed to the rapid decay of any military dictatorship; the extent of the UEE, as well as the blood and iron of the human war machine that emerged from the Tevarin conflict, gave us the space and the time we needed to eventually weed out the corruption that weakened us collectively. And, yet, as we emerge from the clannish culture of a corrupt dictatorship, we find ourselves seeing our most formidible foe yet as a disparate collection of clans. I suspect we assume the mirror of our recent selves when we look upon the Vanduul and I am compelled to wonder. Do we look upon the Vanduul and their kingships just as the indigents of faraway lands once gazed, from their canoes, upon newly arriving Europeans in their tall-ships?


Tomasius Space: Exploration and Research - It's what we do.

Tomasius Space comes down from a much older tradition and the history is just a little bit too convoluted for polite company. Suffice to say, we've been around the block once or twice and we know how things go - at least well enough to know what to do in which season. In the springtime of civilisation we focus on exploration to find safe locations and raise funds for new bases. Once a civilisation enters its summer phase, we go out and build those bases with as much discretion as possible for autumn and winter surely follow. The autumn of civilisation is a time of extensive research where the dividends of our efforts strengthen the community against what is coming while allowing us to stockpile for the coming winter. And the winter of civilisation sees us scouting so that others may not die in vain. It is a cycle as certain as the seasons by which agriculture has prospered since time immemorial.

Right now, our 2948 objectives revolve around quantifying key phsyical data about the systems, which are currently accessible to us, in addition to benchmarking as many ships as we have access to; so that informed decisions can be made concerning deployment. Whether you sense the eerie calm before the storm or have deep misgivings about the so-called "status quo" which seems to obtain betwixt us and the Vanduul, you have to know that a long and harsh "winter" is coming and, I suspect, that how we pull together now will determine whether the opening phases of the new offensive against the Vanduul bears fruit or just whithers and dies as they close ranks and begin to overrun system after system.

Quite frankly, the future is grim. We are prepared for an extended tour of the deep black with the ability to set up a temporary remote space station. But, by the same token, we are not adequately stockpiled nor has our jump point research achieved its targets. And I suspect we will all pay dearly for our shortfall in the jump point research. On the daytime side of the satellite, we do have streamlined, more efficient benchmarking procedures in the pipeline and, with sufficient time for implementation (before everything goes sideways) we may be able to devote enough time to draw some relevant questions from the jump point research before the Vanduul who tagged the Stanton System return with a kingship.


Why the mundane is really so much more interesting:
A brief exploration of how the Universe can be percieved.

Gravity, matter and entropy together dictate that the universe is finite and subject to states of finite duration. In light of this, it is not entirely surprising to come across the 20th Century notion that red-shift was purely the product of everything moving away from a centre, as a consequence of The Big Bang; a definitive beginning for the universe and a point scored for closure-obsessed Western Cosmology. But then a change in the red-shift was observed and it seemed as if this motion were being accelerated in a manner unphysical. Such paradoxes can only indicate that something has been left out of the picture. Gravity, matter, entropy ... what could possibly be missing?

An alternative view, which began to emerge in the 21st Century was that the matter between stars served to scatter and relay radiation which propagated more and more at the wavelength corresponding to the temperature of that matter and, suddenly, red shift had a new explanation. Just as atmospheric dust scatters sunlight to diminish the violet end of the spectrum and enhance the reds of Sunrise and Sunset, so too could interstellar dust not only cause red shift, but also cause variations in red shift to be observed as the solar system moved from sparser to denser regions or from denser to sparser regions. We know from 19th Century Thermodynamics that interstellar dust need not be "dark matter" in order to impose black body distribution on the scattered radiation as it only takes one particle which is near enough to "dark matter" to do the job - as any cavity oven experiment can demonstrate. Yet, how is it so; that all of this matter does not come crashing in upon itself as a consequence of gravity, or are we missing something?

Gravity is a force and we know from the study of magnetic and static electric forces that the same rules apply across all forces and that both electric and magnetic force exhibit polarity such that opposites attract and like poles repel. And, yet, gravity is so much more fundamental; existing as it does in connection with matter - seemingly without the polarity seen in magnetic and electric force. But what if we're missing something because we're only looking at things from one end? The universe contains both matter and antimatter. If the force of gravitational attraction existed between both, would not the universe consume itself in an entropic nuclear pyre as matter and antimatter fell into one-another's gravity wells? This we do not see and you being here to read this is sufficient evidence that, once again, a flight of fantasy has erupted from something left out of the picture.

Do matter and antimatter repel one-another? Of all the cosmological things discussed, this has been the only fruit born of the effort. It would explain a great deal; in particular, how gravity and entropy can co-exist, indefinitely, without significant impact on the extent of the universe and may yet hint at how a universe might well reach a steady state by imposing an upper limit to which entropy may approach but never quite arrive. Yet, of all these mind-boggling considerations, we gain only one question and only because we looked beyond the more comfortable conclusions yielding the beginnings and ends so necessary to the mythos of Western Cosmology. When dealing with things which just are, the need for well-defined closure tends to be counterproductive. But answering a simple, practical question such as whether matter and antimatter repel one-another provides knowledge of the real world which, in and of itself, has practical applications - unlike the flights of fancy which are mandated by a culturally influenced exploration of cosmology. This is why, when we theorise at Tomasius Space, the end must always be a question with a practical experimental answer.

 
 
compass atop a bowl of roasted coffee beans set inside gold laurels
Friday, ISO: 2024-December-13, 21:36 hours, UTC.


Confidential Commentary

This is a brief exploration of opinion underpinning some of the contingency planning Tomasius Space will be implementing. Nothing is certain about this but it is based on questions which are very pointedly raised by geometric omissions in the Ark Starmap, Einstein-Rosen Theory in its latest incarnation, and predictions of military capability based on entropic tolerance.


Out of Darkness

Some may consider the corona of a star to be an environment more hostile to life than space, but this is a common type of perceptual mistake which assumes that we typify life and that what is most hostile to ourselves is most hostile to life. In fact, a stellar corona's extremely low entropy makes it even more friendly to life than our own planet - just not particularly friendly to our style of carbon-based life. Certainly, though, researchers will one day identify self-perpetuating, plasma-based chemical processes which consume and reproduce courtesy of the generous potential difference between source energy and ambient energy levels within the corona. These will very likely be simple life forms because complex life processes require a significant rise in entropy in order to evolve. Space, on the other hand, with it's extremely low modal, mean and even median potential difference between the potential of available energy supply and ambient energy potential, as dictated by the very high level of entropy, requires mind-bogglingly complexity for any life process to be viable and it can be safely assumed that all life in space will have originated under more generous conditions and gradually evolved to a sufficient level of living complexity for space to offer a viable living environment. The technological state of Homo Sapiens in the 30th Century puts Human Beings on the cusp of this emergence from our own cradle.


Citizens of the Stars

It needs to be stated at the outset that, of all the known sentient species, the Vanduul are the most versatile space farers with the ability to live in the deepest reaches of space. This can only be possible if Vanduul society and culture is sufficiently advanced to prosper in much lower entropy conditions than are accessible to Human colonisation. This would dictate that they have significant technological and material advantage and that we are, very much, indigents gazing from our canoes at the might of arriving tall-ships. Our days are numbered unless something very special happens. Species TS.LS07 is hypothesized to occupy a region on the other side of Vanduul space. It is hoped that the Vanduul, being what they are, are enemies or at least rivals of TS.LS07 as we will surely need help and the Xi'An, for all their might, are simply not capable of stopping the Vanduul. This said, history does recall a number of situations where the indigents repelled a vastly superior foe. Germanic knights (heavy cavalry) stopped the mongol horsemen (light cavalry) in the forests of central Europe. Forests disadvantage an unarmoured rider who is coralled onto paths, byways and roads while allowing a heavily armoured horseman to break through branches and other high obstructions due to the combined mass of rider and armour - not to mntion the damage resistance offered by the armour. It may be speculated that similarly discriminating local conditions are what allowed Indian confederacies to rout Alexanders armies. In both cases, defenders remained within the type of ground or terrain which gave their equipment and tactics the upper hand; forcing a foreign interloper to concede the terrain and, ultimately to withdraw.


Tomasius Space: Exploration and Research - It's what we do.

In case anyone might have been wondering, it's Autumn - at least in our own outlook. Here, in the darkest corners of the Stanton System, we have seen the Vanduul scouts and we know what is coming. It's just a question of how and when. As far as we know, the Vanduul scouts could have come from Virgil, via Nyx and Pyro, without detection as both systems are unclaimed and unmonitered by the UEE. The jump route is limited to medium ships and would thus exclude ships on the scale of a kingship; which would have to fight its way through several systems occupied and closely monitored by the UEE. This neglects a key factor. As a system, Stanton has tremendous distributed mass generating more than enough gravity to account for the two large and one medium jump point. In short, there are either a number of other jump points to nearby star systems or a long jump point to a distant star system. If I had to guess, the longest of the known large Jump Points (Stanton-Terra) is anchored off Crusader while the shorter of the known large Jump Points (Stanton-Magnus) is anchored off ArcCorp. The medium Jump Point (Stanton-Pyro) is anchored off Hurston. That leaves Microtech which could, potentially anchor another large Jump Point and one that is significantly longer than the others is anchored closely enough to Microtech. I'm guessing that the system to which this Jump Point is anchored (TS.HS00) is a Vanduul system which links directly back to known Vanduul worlds and may, possibly, link to Sol, Cano, Kallis, Tanga or even Oretani. It is unlikely that the Stanton-TS.HS00 Jump Point will be discovered before Winter hits and the way forward will not be by scanning for anomalies but by scouting the point of origin for incoming Vanduul forces. Our strategy is to build towards this task as it will probably be the key to saving a lot of already precarious lives in Sol from the Vanduul meatgrinder.


Why the mundane is really so much more interesting:
A brief exploration of how the Universe can be percieved.

Cosa significa?! The point of this little diversion, into the scientific subgenre of fantasy, is to explore what is wrong with our overconfidence in logical superextension and how the more robust perception is built on the basis of questions which, in and of themselves, can only arise from the perspective and perception of doubt. As soon as we rationalise faith in our opinions being "right", we surrender the possibility of asking a key question and, with it, the opportunity to discover something new and useful. This severely limits the progress we can make and, in extreme cases, can halt all technological progress and has, historically, even been known to reverse technological progress with disastrous consequences. In the context of a vastly monstrous threat slowly making its way across the oceans of space, we cannot afford to engage such futile and wasteful flights of fantasy but, instead, need to work when we are at work. To this end, we need to look at our research from the perspective that we know nothing for certain and that every new discovery brings with it a chance for our species to survive the coming apocalypse.