Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 20:03:20 GMT -5
This topic is a child of the Set article directory.
SHUFFLE THE DECK
Set's full of trash. Shipwrecks, tank hulks, and honest-to-goodness garbage, lying steaming out in the open. Some of it is centuries old. Some of it just turned up a few weeks ago. For as long as the planet has existed, there's always been someone been throwing their old food and malfunctioning railguns out the window. Somewhere between seven or eight centuries ago, a solution was organized to take out all that trash. Several major wars and a big change of heart later, it's found a way to make the problem worse.
Set's orbit, skies, air, and land are all combed over by the simply-titled garbage haulers. Long in the past, they were a Zaschia invention to help automate interorbit traffic and ferry resources up to their spaceborne species. After countless revisions, jumps, invasions, cyber-wars, and catastrophes, the garbage haulers have collapsed into a baffling, backwards shell of their former selves. They roam about the planet, collecting dirt, people, and occasionally garbage, all to take back to long-defunct processing centers - if they're in the mood for it.
THE DRONESHIPS
The garbage haulers themselves are a massive assortment of automated cargo vessels, fuel tankers, and industrial ships. Originally, they ran on a tight schedule with constant supervision and regular maintenance. They were built by professionals in accredited shipyards. Today, the garbage haulers are a desperate mix of rusting half-derelicts from before the Splinter Wars and scrap-cobbled miscarriages ejected from failing repair platforms. What little they share in common is that most are spacecraft - or used to be.
There are strikingly few droneships that are genuinely spaceworthy. Most are are scarred over a dozen times by asteroid impacts, debris strikes, and occasional collisions with other spacecraft. Many have been shot at by panicking spacers or townsfolk. Many more are irradiated hulks populated by frenzied monsters and mutants. The few that realize they are in need of repairs usually receive no more than a few junk plates welded over decades-old hull breaches. The fact that some continue to fly seems a complete contradiction to the laws of nature. That any are capable of interorbital transit seems nothing short of a bold-faced mockery of every tenet of space travel.
Long in the past, the garbage haulers were orderly and organized. Today, they do what they want, when they want to, to who they want to. They follow the whims of centuries-old tasks, corrupted cargo manifests, half-downloaded artificial intelligences, and innumerable other critical failures. Some fly in circles around empty patches of land until gravity and fuel finally take their toll. Some ram themselves into growing villages, abducting townsfolk - sometimes, even in the middle of bandit raids and monster attacks. Others still have successfully relocated entire space stations to the planet's surface - with thousands of inhabitants still onboard.
Their incompetence is the genuine stuff of legend on Set. Some have attempted to fly directly through the planet - even into the core itself - with varying levels of determination and success. Some have collided with eachother attempting to collect items both had stolen from the other. Some have abruptly stopped moving in mid-air and crashed down into raging volcanos - and only because they'd forgotten where they were going. Each day, wrecks from the garbage hauler network pile on, without end, as old haulers are reclaimed and their half-baked control cores are given new homes.
What is most confounding about the haulers' existence is that countless wanderers, both planetside and in orbit, have used the network as a potluck taxi service across the planet. Despite the limitless potential for danger onboard a hauler - or wherever it lands or crashes - many have willingly gone aboard. Many have risked monster attacks, hull breaches, hard vacuums, and toxic waste for countless reasons. Desperation, courage, ignorance - it takes a special kind of nerve to willfully step aboard a droneship.
The dangers of the hauler network are not limited solely to the network itself. Of the limited few who show the wandering droneships any compassion, the Space Loonies are the most sympathetic. This is hardly by any accident; for all their incompetence, the garbage haulers have helped slowly clear orbit of debris by packing it into tightly-confined spaces. As a result, official policy is to eject stowaways - whether onto a nearby station or out into space is usually at the mercy of the discovering Loonies.
THE PROCESSING CENTERS
On occasion, the droneships function as they were intended. In orbit, they find scrap, derelicts, and debris leftover from the Splinter Wars or other conflicts. Inside the atmosphere, they seek out trash piles and old wrecks. They take their fill, navigate their way to a processing facility, and offload it for recycling. On the rare occasion that the system works, it is a tremendous resource opportunity; processed salvage is simply stored until someone can come along to claim it. Retired droneships populate graveyards beside processing facilities, adding further still to their salvage potential.
Not much unlike the garbage haulers themselves, however, the network's processing centers are fickle beasts with no holds barred. Passing ships and vehicles have been abducted to be fed into grinders and furnaces. Living people have been locked into bioreactors. Even the droneships themselves are hardly safe. Only a scarce handful work as intended - sometimes. Those in orbit are often surrounded by dense clouds of half-processed scrap. On the ground, many rest under immense piles of miscellaneous garbage. Some haven't seen sunlight in years.
Every so often, a processing center will determine that there is an insufficient quantity of droneships to service it. Sometimes, this is a logical response based on unexpected shortfalls in production. Most of the time, it's completely random. Following this decision, it will begin construction of a new droneship from whatever is available at the time. Parts of itself, parts stolen from towns or spacecraft, or even entire droneships fused together into a new conjoined twin - there is nothing that is off-limits. Ground facilities may even attempt to assemble droneships out of nothing more than trees and stone. Some have actually achieved orbit.
Likewise, processing centers are as much replaceable as their droneships are. Industrial garbage haulers will, on occasion, determine they have no valid ports. Sometimes, this is a logical response based on high-traffic seasons or repeated occurrences of inclement weather. Most of the time, it's completely random. Following this decision, they will begin construction on a "seed core"; a small, deployable module of manufacturing and processing centers. The seed core is ejected to where it needs to be, given the hauler's load of salvage, and left to expand itself. Some succeed. Most wear through their stockpile in useless tangles of half-functional equipment with no discernible purpose.
Processing centers often serve the dual roles of managing salvage and giving out retrieval orders to haulers. Some are equipped to handle this task and feature sensor arrays, strong networking connections, or even supervision from the Space Loonies. Most are blind, deaf, and know nothing more than what their droneships have told them - if they've said anything at all. Resultantly, many misjudge towns, dust clouds, meatscapes, and other features as possible salvage. Some realize their mistake and cancel the order - without alerting any droneships attending to it. Most simply fail to recognize the "salvage" once it's been delivered - and may even add an additional order for it to be collected again.
If the garbage haulers are Set's taxi service, their processing centers are its taxi depots. Those few blind and bleak enough to hitch a ride go looking for haulers at their hubs, where the droneships often dock. To seek them out at their source is as much a brush with death as riding one; monsters often swarm the facilities, either as squatters or delivered by the haulers themselves. Likewise, entry into a processing facility is often regulated by the Space Loonies - and often treated as an imminent threat. Many facilities are mired in industrial waste and malfunctioning equipment. Some are teetering on the brink of collapse, and could explode, de-orbit, or topple over at the slightest provocation.
HISTORY
The garbage hauler network was originally conceived by the Zaschia around 500-600 OSC, as a means to support their wholly-spaceborne population. It was a simple concept; an automated network of delivery ships able to bring up resources collected from Looney bunkers and other mining operations across Set. Soon after, other interests joined the growing program. Among them were the redworlders, unionites, and orscruft, who all contributed and eventually benefited from the program.
Early on, the hauler network was a comfortable success. Its research and planning ended quickly and its construction process proceeded without any major difficulties. Many of its earliest ships were retired Zaschia landers, upgraded to handle repeated atmospheric descents and docking maneuvers. In short order, the scope of the network expanded. It grew to encompass orbital waste, general recycling, and even some limited search-and-rescue activities. The haulers were tame beasts of burden that worked efficiently and tirelessly. The problems of the future were nowhere to be seen.
Problems first began to mount with the appearance of the harvester drones in 670-770 OSC. Not long after their first discovery on Set's surface, the hauler network suffered hundreds of cyberwarfare attacks on its command-and-control stations. Some of them were successful in diverting haulers to the planet's surface. Many of those same ships were commandeered permanently by fleeing harvesters. The remainder became hosts for an endless variety of viruses, malformed data, and even entire harvester AIs.
Attempts to root out the damage ran well into the Splinter Wars in 780-850 OSC. They had scarcely managed to return the hauler network to operational capacity by the time the Third Invaders launched their attack on Set. In the chaos of the siege, garbage haulers were regular targets. Many blundered carelessly into fleet battles or toddled along through the path of orbital artillery barrages. Others wandered into Third Invader battle groups, unable to discern friend from foe, and were promptly destroyed as hostile ships. Some were even used as torpedoes and boarding rams, packed with either explosives or marines.
By the time Set departed the Third Invaders' home system, the garbage hauler network clung doggedly to survival. It had been ravaged a hundred times over, its control networks battered and maimed, its ships scorched and mangled, and yet there was still something left of it. In the end, this did more harm than good; what little was left of its command infrastructure promptly overloaded itself attempting to account for thousands of fresh wrecks and debris fields. Planetside hauler networks shook themselves to pieces as they uselessly tried to handle the influx of plummeting scrap.
The full extent of the damage was realized only by the time the Space Loonies had formed, at the conclusion of the Big Split in 800-860 OSC. By then, it was too late to do anything. On what was left of its self-sufficiency behavior, the hauler network had begun to expand unchecked to meet the new demands of Set's garbage. Few ships or processing centers could still acknowledge orders to shut down - and many more had been given explicit orders to refuse shutdown orders. With what little remained of their sense, Set's drifting janitors went back to their thankless work.
Things slowly took a turn for the unusual as time dragged on. More and more garbage haulers began to appear over Set, some manufactured, others arriving from parts unknown. Some were harvester ships infiltrating the network again, others rose up from the Chambers of Myth and took to the sky. Others still were automated ships from off-world, answering the tone-deaf siren song of the network's control centers. Numbers escalated continually for centuries. There was little explaining the garbage haulers' second wind - and little anyone could do to stop it.
The resurgence of the hauler network was of little real benefit to anyone. Over time, Set's droneship population exploded as more and more processing centers were built to sustain the ever-escalating needs of the fleet. More and more ships were lost as chaos overtook the skies and space. Massed flocks of droneships collided with eachother, drove eachother head-first into mountains and asteroid fields, or simply tied eachother up for so long that they ran out of fuel. Twice as many were built as replacements or arrived from elsewhere. By 1132, it had reached its peak. There were more droneships in orbit than anything else. The troubling times of the hauler network's apex earned a simple title; the Garbage Crisis.
By that time, Space Looney plans had come together on how to deal with the problem. Fleets and battle groups had organized to make concentrated, simultaneous strikes on major processing facilities to stamp out droneship production. To some, it was total war against the haulers, for the survival of life in orbit. Without the intervention of the Space Loonies, the droneships would eventually drag away the desperately-needed salvage in orbit. Some were already in the process of attempting to dismantle Unity Station.
For the Space Loonies, it was hardly much a war. The droneships and many of their processing centers were entirely defenseless. The few defensive platforms that were leftover from the time of the Splinter Wars still acknowledged the Space Loonies as friendly combatants. Even some of the droneships continued to acknowledge their authority, and were effortlessly deactivated from a distance. To the Loonies, it was nothing more than a culling, as if the droneships were simply cattle grazing beyond their capacity.
With neither any organization, nor any capacity to fight back, the garbage haulers were brought back down to levels roughly in line with the times before the Splinter Wars. Wrecked haulers and deactivated droneships remain among the most commonly-discovered derelicts to this day. Likewise, the Space Loonies were able to reassert their situational control over the network. Backdoors, rootkits, and nearly every means possible were inserted into the code of carefully-selected processing facilities. While not always reliable, their work has prevented another Garbage Crisis from looming its head.
Today, the garbage haulers are little more than another of Set's oddities. They go about their business, scooping up and dumping off trash anywhere they please. The Space Loonies continue to watch over them, ensuring their operations go unopposed, and pay their whimsical nature little mind. Since the end of the Garbage Crisis, their numbers have remained doggedly consistent despite all their flaws. Even their total count of wrecks has hardly much changed; their failure rate runs almost even with that of their production rate. One way or another, the haulers are unlikely to disappear from the planet any time soon - and even Set itself seems intent on keeping them.
SHUFFLE THE DECK
Set's full of trash. Shipwrecks, tank hulks, and honest-to-goodness garbage, lying steaming out in the open. Some of it is centuries old. Some of it just turned up a few weeks ago. For as long as the planet has existed, there's always been someone been throwing their old food and malfunctioning railguns out the window. Somewhere between seven or eight centuries ago, a solution was organized to take out all that trash. Several major wars and a big change of heart later, it's found a way to make the problem worse.
Set's orbit, skies, air, and land are all combed over by the simply-titled garbage haulers. Long in the past, they were a Zaschia invention to help automate interorbit traffic and ferry resources up to their spaceborne species. After countless revisions, jumps, invasions, cyber-wars, and catastrophes, the garbage haulers have collapsed into a baffling, backwards shell of their former selves. They roam about the planet, collecting dirt, people, and occasionally garbage, all to take back to long-defunct processing centers - if they're in the mood for it.
THE DRONESHIPS
The garbage haulers themselves are a massive assortment of automated cargo vessels, fuel tankers, and industrial ships. Originally, they ran on a tight schedule with constant supervision and regular maintenance. They were built by professionals in accredited shipyards. Today, the garbage haulers are a desperate mix of rusting half-derelicts from before the Splinter Wars and scrap-cobbled miscarriages ejected from failing repair platforms. What little they share in common is that most are spacecraft - or used to be.
There are strikingly few droneships that are genuinely spaceworthy. Most are are scarred over a dozen times by asteroid impacts, debris strikes, and occasional collisions with other spacecraft. Many have been shot at by panicking spacers or townsfolk. Many more are irradiated hulks populated by frenzied monsters and mutants. The few that realize they are in need of repairs usually receive no more than a few junk plates welded over decades-old hull breaches. The fact that some continue to fly seems a complete contradiction to the laws of nature. That any are capable of interorbital transit seems nothing short of a bold-faced mockery of every tenet of space travel.
Long in the past, the garbage haulers were orderly and organized. Today, they do what they want, when they want to, to who they want to. They follow the whims of centuries-old tasks, corrupted cargo manifests, half-downloaded artificial intelligences, and innumerable other critical failures. Some fly in circles around empty patches of land until gravity and fuel finally take their toll. Some ram themselves into growing villages, abducting townsfolk - sometimes, even in the middle of bandit raids and monster attacks. Others still have successfully relocated entire space stations to the planet's surface - with thousands of inhabitants still onboard.
Their incompetence is the genuine stuff of legend on Set. Some have attempted to fly directly through the planet - even into the core itself - with varying levels of determination and success. Some have collided with eachother attempting to collect items both had stolen from the other. Some have abruptly stopped moving in mid-air and crashed down into raging volcanos - and only because they'd forgotten where they were going. Each day, wrecks from the garbage hauler network pile on, without end, as old haulers are reclaimed and their half-baked control cores are given new homes.
What is most confounding about the haulers' existence is that countless wanderers, both planetside and in orbit, have used the network as a potluck taxi service across the planet. Despite the limitless potential for danger onboard a hauler - or wherever it lands or crashes - many have willingly gone aboard. Many have risked monster attacks, hull breaches, hard vacuums, and toxic waste for countless reasons. Desperation, courage, ignorance - it takes a special kind of nerve to willfully step aboard a droneship.
The dangers of the hauler network are not limited solely to the network itself. Of the limited few who show the wandering droneships any compassion, the Space Loonies are the most sympathetic. This is hardly by any accident; for all their incompetence, the garbage haulers have helped slowly clear orbit of debris by packing it into tightly-confined spaces. As a result, official policy is to eject stowaways - whether onto a nearby station or out into space is usually at the mercy of the discovering Loonies.
THE PROCESSING CENTERS
On occasion, the droneships function as they were intended. In orbit, they find scrap, derelicts, and debris leftover from the Splinter Wars or other conflicts. Inside the atmosphere, they seek out trash piles and old wrecks. They take their fill, navigate their way to a processing facility, and offload it for recycling. On the rare occasion that the system works, it is a tremendous resource opportunity; processed salvage is simply stored until someone can come along to claim it. Retired droneships populate graveyards beside processing facilities, adding further still to their salvage potential.
Not much unlike the garbage haulers themselves, however, the network's processing centers are fickle beasts with no holds barred. Passing ships and vehicles have been abducted to be fed into grinders and furnaces. Living people have been locked into bioreactors. Even the droneships themselves are hardly safe. Only a scarce handful work as intended - sometimes. Those in orbit are often surrounded by dense clouds of half-processed scrap. On the ground, many rest under immense piles of miscellaneous garbage. Some haven't seen sunlight in years.
Every so often, a processing center will determine that there is an insufficient quantity of droneships to service it. Sometimes, this is a logical response based on unexpected shortfalls in production. Most of the time, it's completely random. Following this decision, it will begin construction of a new droneship from whatever is available at the time. Parts of itself, parts stolen from towns or spacecraft, or even entire droneships fused together into a new conjoined twin - there is nothing that is off-limits. Ground facilities may even attempt to assemble droneships out of nothing more than trees and stone. Some have actually achieved orbit.
Likewise, processing centers are as much replaceable as their droneships are. Industrial garbage haulers will, on occasion, determine they have no valid ports. Sometimes, this is a logical response based on high-traffic seasons or repeated occurrences of inclement weather. Most of the time, it's completely random. Following this decision, they will begin construction on a "seed core"; a small, deployable module of manufacturing and processing centers. The seed core is ejected to where it needs to be, given the hauler's load of salvage, and left to expand itself. Some succeed. Most wear through their stockpile in useless tangles of half-functional equipment with no discernible purpose.
Processing centers often serve the dual roles of managing salvage and giving out retrieval orders to haulers. Some are equipped to handle this task and feature sensor arrays, strong networking connections, or even supervision from the Space Loonies. Most are blind, deaf, and know nothing more than what their droneships have told them - if they've said anything at all. Resultantly, many misjudge towns, dust clouds, meatscapes, and other features as possible salvage. Some realize their mistake and cancel the order - without alerting any droneships attending to it. Most simply fail to recognize the "salvage" once it's been delivered - and may even add an additional order for it to be collected again.
If the garbage haulers are Set's taxi service, their processing centers are its taxi depots. Those few blind and bleak enough to hitch a ride go looking for haulers at their hubs, where the droneships often dock. To seek them out at their source is as much a brush with death as riding one; monsters often swarm the facilities, either as squatters or delivered by the haulers themselves. Likewise, entry into a processing facility is often regulated by the Space Loonies - and often treated as an imminent threat. Many facilities are mired in industrial waste and malfunctioning equipment. Some are teetering on the brink of collapse, and could explode, de-orbit, or topple over at the slightest provocation.
HISTORY
The garbage hauler network was originally conceived by the Zaschia around 500-600 OSC, as a means to support their wholly-spaceborne population. It was a simple concept; an automated network of delivery ships able to bring up resources collected from Looney bunkers and other mining operations across Set. Soon after, other interests joined the growing program. Among them were the redworlders, unionites, and orscruft, who all contributed and eventually benefited from the program.
Early on, the hauler network was a comfortable success. Its research and planning ended quickly and its construction process proceeded without any major difficulties. Many of its earliest ships were retired Zaschia landers, upgraded to handle repeated atmospheric descents and docking maneuvers. In short order, the scope of the network expanded. It grew to encompass orbital waste, general recycling, and even some limited search-and-rescue activities. The haulers were tame beasts of burden that worked efficiently and tirelessly. The problems of the future were nowhere to be seen.
Problems first began to mount with the appearance of the harvester drones in 670-770 OSC. Not long after their first discovery on Set's surface, the hauler network suffered hundreds of cyberwarfare attacks on its command-and-control stations. Some of them were successful in diverting haulers to the planet's surface. Many of those same ships were commandeered permanently by fleeing harvesters. The remainder became hosts for an endless variety of viruses, malformed data, and even entire harvester AIs.
Attempts to root out the damage ran well into the Splinter Wars in 780-850 OSC. They had scarcely managed to return the hauler network to operational capacity by the time the Third Invaders launched their attack on Set. In the chaos of the siege, garbage haulers were regular targets. Many blundered carelessly into fleet battles or toddled along through the path of orbital artillery barrages. Others wandered into Third Invader battle groups, unable to discern friend from foe, and were promptly destroyed as hostile ships. Some were even used as torpedoes and boarding rams, packed with either explosives or marines.
By the time Set departed the Third Invaders' home system, the garbage hauler network clung doggedly to survival. It had been ravaged a hundred times over, its control networks battered and maimed, its ships scorched and mangled, and yet there was still something left of it. In the end, this did more harm than good; what little was left of its command infrastructure promptly overloaded itself attempting to account for thousands of fresh wrecks and debris fields. Planetside hauler networks shook themselves to pieces as they uselessly tried to handle the influx of plummeting scrap.
The full extent of the damage was realized only by the time the Space Loonies had formed, at the conclusion of the Big Split in 800-860 OSC. By then, it was too late to do anything. On what was left of its self-sufficiency behavior, the hauler network had begun to expand unchecked to meet the new demands of Set's garbage. Few ships or processing centers could still acknowledge orders to shut down - and many more had been given explicit orders to refuse shutdown orders. With what little remained of their sense, Set's drifting janitors went back to their thankless work.
Things slowly took a turn for the unusual as time dragged on. More and more garbage haulers began to appear over Set, some manufactured, others arriving from parts unknown. Some were harvester ships infiltrating the network again, others rose up from the Chambers of Myth and took to the sky. Others still were automated ships from off-world, answering the tone-deaf siren song of the network's control centers. Numbers escalated continually for centuries. There was little explaining the garbage haulers' second wind - and little anyone could do to stop it.
The resurgence of the hauler network was of little real benefit to anyone. Over time, Set's droneship population exploded as more and more processing centers were built to sustain the ever-escalating needs of the fleet. More and more ships were lost as chaos overtook the skies and space. Massed flocks of droneships collided with eachother, drove eachother head-first into mountains and asteroid fields, or simply tied eachother up for so long that they ran out of fuel. Twice as many were built as replacements or arrived from elsewhere. By 1132, it had reached its peak. There were more droneships in orbit than anything else. The troubling times of the hauler network's apex earned a simple title; the Garbage Crisis.
By that time, Space Looney plans had come together on how to deal with the problem. Fleets and battle groups had organized to make concentrated, simultaneous strikes on major processing facilities to stamp out droneship production. To some, it was total war against the haulers, for the survival of life in orbit. Without the intervention of the Space Loonies, the droneships would eventually drag away the desperately-needed salvage in orbit. Some were already in the process of attempting to dismantle Unity Station.
For the Space Loonies, it was hardly much a war. The droneships and many of their processing centers were entirely defenseless. The few defensive platforms that were leftover from the time of the Splinter Wars still acknowledged the Space Loonies as friendly combatants. Even some of the droneships continued to acknowledge their authority, and were effortlessly deactivated from a distance. To the Loonies, it was nothing more than a culling, as if the droneships were simply cattle grazing beyond their capacity.
With neither any organization, nor any capacity to fight back, the garbage haulers were brought back down to levels roughly in line with the times before the Splinter Wars. Wrecked haulers and deactivated droneships remain among the most commonly-discovered derelicts to this day. Likewise, the Space Loonies were able to reassert their situational control over the network. Backdoors, rootkits, and nearly every means possible were inserted into the code of carefully-selected processing facilities. While not always reliable, their work has prevented another Garbage Crisis from looming its head.
Today, the garbage haulers are little more than another of Set's oddities. They go about their business, scooping up and dumping off trash anywhere they please. The Space Loonies continue to watch over them, ensuring their operations go unopposed, and pay their whimsical nature little mind. Since the end of the Garbage Crisis, their numbers have remained doggedly consistent despite all their flaws. Even their total count of wrecks has hardly much changed; their failure rate runs almost even with that of their production rate. One way or another, the haulers are unlikely to disappear from the planet any time soon - and even Set itself seems intent on keeping them.
