A HARD LIFE AMONGST THE STARS

“There are other worlds than this one, and if there is no air to breathe, we will simply have to make it.”

—PETER WEYLAND

Living in space ain’t pretty. Human life is cheap and so are paychecks. There is always someone worse off, willing to do your job for even less, so you better not screw up and lose the one you have. In most professions, having dirt on your employer or becoming a certified expert in a field are the only ways to maintain any semblance of job security.

Aside from the luxury accommodations of the corporate elite and the cutting edge weapons of the Colonial Marines, almost everything is grimy, used, and in need of repair. The only colonists guaranteed to receive new parts and equipment are the miners and atmospheric processor support personnel on planets consistently exceeding their corporate quotas. In remote sectors, imported technologies are overpriced and hard to come by, so most equipment is jury-rigged, modified, and made from recycled and refurbished materials. In some territories, vehicles and starships are still in use that are nearly a century old. Instead of the expensive, three dimensional holographic displays of yesteryear, most spacecraft are equipped with conventional monitors and basic sensor packages. Over the past several decades, MU/TH/UR computer systems have become less about the sophistication of the AI and more focused on utilitarian function. Even spacesuits are bulkier and provide less protection than those produced during the golden years of space exploration.

In essence, humankind as a technological society is on the decline.

Humanity never would have left the cradle of our solar system without the foresight of visionary entrepreneur and businessman Peter Weyland. Under his stewardship, the Weyland Corporation introduced three things that ensured humanity’s dominance over the stars—the capacity to travel at faster than light speeds, the introduction of the hypersleep chamber, and the ability to terraform whole worlds.

FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT

The ability to travel faster than light is the lynchpin of humanity’s expansion outside our own solar system. Without it, there would be no extrasolar colonies and no corporate star empires. First developed by Weyland Industries in the 2030s, these engines are sometimes referred to as displacement drives. The system works on the principle of an inverse relationship between velocity and the flow of time. An FTL drive achieves these speeds by displacing the volume of space preceding a spacecraft and drawing the vessel forward with it. Accelerating to faster than light speeds is not instantaneous. Ion thrusters build speed up to the point where the displacement drive can take over, gradually propelling starships to several times the speed of light.

When they were first deployed a hundred and fifty years ago, FTL engines could impel a starship such as a Heliades class Space Exploration Vehicle at 10 to 15 times the speed of light. Even though modern ships can travel from 50 to upwards of 700 times FTL, that still means it can take weeks or even years to travel the whole of charted space. To complicate matters, prolonged travel at faster than light speeds can cause a syndrome in mammals known as Neurological Distortion Disorder—or the NDDs for short (see the text to the right). To combat this and to conserve resources on long trips, space travelers spend most of their FTL time in stasis.

HYPER SLEEPING WITH THE STARS

Even before FTL was possible, hypersleep technology was in development. As early as the 2020s, Peter Weyland had ordered his scientists to find a way to extend life indefinitely. While not exactly what Weyland had in mind, the resulting technology was a significant leap forward. The ability to slow a life-form’s biological processes to a near standstill was beneficial to both the medical industry and deep space missions at sublight speeds. When FTL became a reality, stasis was adapted as a solution to resource management on space flights.

Hypersleep was soon found to offer other benefits to man’s health in space. Traveling faster than the speed of light can have a distortion effect on human perception. Known as Neurological Distortion Disorder, this syndrome causes paranoia, epilepsy, psychotic behavior and other adverse effects. Worse than that, the faster one travels, the worse the symptoms. Stasis protects space travelers from the NDDs, with the added benefit of arresting aging on a cellular level.

THE SLEEP OF AGES: The process of entering hypersleep involves a mixture of gases and lowering one's temperature significantly. While travelers are not conscious when in stasis, they can—and are encouraged to—dream. As brain functions are also slowed during hypersleep, a single dream can last months. In fact, an entire industry has been created to take advantage of this. Dreaming in hypersleep promotes mental health and can help a body’s natural regenerative healing.

GRAVITY DRIVES
Example