[U][CENTER]THE SARDONA GATE[/CENTER][/U]

What I have here is an idea for a science fiction thread, I am doing this because I have been disappointed with the science fiction offerings of late. I am open to a collaborative effort, not only in the arena of character development but also concerning subplot development and world creation. This is a valuable lesson I have learned from my good friend [url=http://www.roleplayerguild.com/users/1243]LoveJoy[/url]. 

For this thread I will post a series of bullet points and source material. These posts will detail the broad brushstrokes of the story, history, star system info, planet info, bestiary, etc, etc. From there it will be open to people who want to take a collaborative part in this world in order to fill out this OOC thread that will contain all the information from character creation to all the world details. People that are interested please feel free to let me know here and voice your ideas.

[CENTER]BROAD BRUSHSTROKES.[/CENTER]

1.The starting time frame will be sometime in the early 2400's. The balkanization of the United States of America, China, and Russia over a period of fifty years leads to constant war between 2030 and 2240… including World Wars three and four. Widespread famine and water shortages caused by war and environmental factors between 2185 and 2235 kill billions and the worldwide economic and network crashes of 2192 and 2194, respectively, plunged the world into a technological darkness for six years. These events were all incidents of human driven factors that lead to widespread chaos and death during the last 300 years. Mother Nature wasn’t innocent or sitting on the sidelines for the past three centuries though; the Charlton 861 Comet Impact, fungal plague and polar pox epidemics, cataclysmic natural disasters that rendered most of the Pacific Rim uninhabitable including Australia, Indochina, and Japan, and the sudden sea level rise between 2265 and 2270, which destroyed most coastal areas, all killed untold billions and destroyed nations. By 2100 the world population had hit 10.5 billion as expected. A century later, after the feces was really beginning to hit the rotary wind pushing device, world population was estimated to be closer to 6 billion, and at the beginning of 2299 the latest population numbers from the PCC (more on that organization to come) were quoted to be roughly 2.5 billion people worldwide and falling. 

2. As often happens during human history, crisis, war, and disaster drive innovation and a combination of scientists and engineers from the Northern China Free State, the Mongolian Protectorate, and the Russo-Siberian Nation came together at the third and largest Hadron Collider in the world, located in the Gobi Desert, and after decades of research (and some shady funding from a fledgling PCC) into particle physics, Higgs fields, space-time, relativity, worm hole, and black hole physics the researchers create the ability to “suspend” space-time within a confined area or what comes to be called a "gate". In 2299 they begin perfecting the ability to link the original suspension or gate with a specifically keyed and linked gate elsewhere. This creates a method of travel and transportation where one can step through a gate in San Francisco and a heartbeat later step out of a linked gate in Moscow; point "A" to point "B" travel now becomes instantaneous no matter the distance.

3. The world is revolutionized and brought to relative peace and tranquility by this "gating" development. Economic constraints like shipping costs, preservation, storage, and shelf-life are eliminated. Emergency response by agencies and nations is brought down to seconds anywhere on the globe and food and water become more equally distributed to humanity. World governments become subservient to the Planetary Conservation Commission (PCC) which controls this technology. The PCC allows chosen governments and officials to speak, react, respond, and deploy instantly if it meets the interests of the PCC. People can move freely across the world with no probative travel costs, people can now seek medical help, vacation time, better economic markets, new citizenship, education and so on in an instant. Organizations and controls develop, under the omnibus power of the PCC, over gating but it basically unites the world, for all intents and purposes, under the PCC whose first order of business is expansion. Through PCC funding a state of the art research facility is established on the moon by sending manned spacecraft up to build gates on the lunar surface. Those gates are then connected to points on the Earth; travel to the moon is now as easy as walking out your front door. The same concept is applied to the Mars colonies, Europa, and Titan research stations. Humanity comes together, pooling resources, and becomes space bound again. Large wars become a thing of the past though separatist groups and shadow organizations still operate. 

4. An ambitious project (even with 2400 tech) to send people to a “nearby” habitable Goldilocks exoplanet, designated Lorignis 6... commonly called Sardona after its discoverer, is put into the works by the PCC using the resources of the world... which it now has access and control over. A crew is selected from highly qualified volunteers [B][U](the characters)[/B][/U]. These crew members are the experts in their respective fields, highly educated, fit and healthy enough for space travel and frontier lifestyles. Most are highly educated, doctors and/or engineers in their fields and on top of their educations and life experiences, these selected few have been trained for 5 years by the PCC focusing on Sardona and their mission. These people are sent in the world’s most advanced ship to Sardona in order to establish a gate to Earth. Humanity has (supposedly) worked out how to travel at about half the speed of light and the trip would take about 40 years, so it is a good thing that scientists have figured out the science of Homeostatic Extra Solar Travel Suspension or HESTS more commonly called “HESTS pods or HESTS sleep”. The story starts with the character awakening from HESTS sleep before their arrival on Sardona. 

5. The story will really begin when the characters arrive on Loreignis 6, code named Sardona. Some NPC’s that the characters have connections to will die during HESTS sleep because it’s not as perfect as the PCC mentioned and I would like that to establish some initial trauma, conflict, and emotion if at all possible. The mission moves on though, a base camp is established, explorations are made, and a gate is built by the characters, all while coping with a new world and extreme isolation from the rest of humanity. I imagine this could provide for an interesting story even before the gate is open. Eventually the gate on Sardona is opened and linked to the Earth gate; a team (probably NPC’s again, unless a PC wants to die or return very hurt and possibly "contaminated") will go through the gate and will more than likely not return. Characters will be faced with a plethora of choices... investigation, gate closure, so on and so forth. In my short story they go through and discover that the Earth as they knew it is dead. A major conflict of some kind has obliterated all living humans (or has it?). If the characters press on and don't die on Earth they will find that their trip to Sardona was closer to 100 years and not 40 and that PCC was not very “truthful” in their contractual obligations to the characters. 

6. At this point the player characters are pretty much free to execute whatever their interests or conditions dictate. They could theoretically pop back to Sardona from the wasted Earth and back again freely and without much effort. Each world will have its own sets of trials and tribulations all contained within very visually different landscapes but both locations will be a survival story in the making. Characters will be faced with the choices of staying on Sardona, returning to Earth, trying to uncover what happened on Earth, supply runs between the worlds, which could cause emotional, psychological, or physiological trauma and may provide inter-character conflict. Eventually, characters could find the other operable gates on Earth that lead to other sites that still exist all over Earth and beyond. These gates link to various other sites and environments like a lunar facility, Martian laboratory, Europa research station, Titan shipyard, and other unknown sites that characters will be unaware of. 

7. Characters will also likely encounter what caused the demise of Earth. This will be a very dangerous, lethal, and unpleasant thing. Characters will have opportunities aplenty here and could try to investigate what the cause of human extinction is and may need to keep that force from accessing the Sardona Gate and ending their existence. Also players will need to consider the mental effects the characters will be subject to upon the realization that they are the last of humanity that they know of, or at least part of a very small population that is left. 

8. If this thread lasts long enough another significant event in the storyline is the unexpected arrival of another ship like the one that the characters came to Sardona on. What or who this ship carries will be a mystery as will the reason for its arrival because the original crew were told they would be the only crew sent.