Shattered Heaven Universe

Welcome to the Shattered Heaven Primer! Feel free to explore this page to get brief rundowns on most of the core aspects of the universe. Use hyperlinks to find out more information in specific articles.

Overview
The Universe of Shattered Heaven expands over 2000 years, from the 20th Century to the late 41st Century, during of which mankind has developed numerous technological advancements enabling them to travel and colonize star systems across the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. Though faster than light travel is not possible, travel is made possible by the use of an alternate dimension called Hyperspace.

Shattered Heaven presents a dark future, exploring the depths of the human condition and the existential dread of the universe as a whole.

Though there are no other alive intelligent aliens beside humanity, many species of creatures exist in many forms of environments. What was once considered a sterile desolate vastness, has opened it's self up to an entire cosmos of life. Unfortunately, most of it isn't so kind to humanity.

The Core Bubble
The core bubble makes up most of the occupied stars in the Orion Arm, although still a very tiny portion of the galaxy.

Sol
From the 2000s to the 2300s, Earth's population had increased to just over 125 Billion people. Resources were running out, the vast populations needed feeding and society was in a close state of collapse. The United Nations

Earth underwent catastrophic climate change causing raised sea levels and after a near nuclear Armageddon, toxic pollution and planet wide extreme weather slowly made Earth less and less habitable. These irreversible changes caused low-lying landmass to become submerged beneath the rising sea, destroying millions of ecosystems and eradicating many species of wildlife. The radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons fired from the USA and Russia and China caused the atmosphere to become highly toxic. Though none of the warheads actually hit their targets as they were destroyed in orbit and in the atmosphere by defense systems, it was too late to prevent the irreversible effects it would have on the atmosphere.

Most of the Earth population was forced to leave and expand throughout the solar system, with nations and corporations colonizing most of the planets and moons. Most who left Earth were corporate workforce and colonists ships. Mars was owned by mega corporations from Earth, constructing domed cities to house their workforce and population. Floating cities were built above Venus' dense clouds, housing researchers and laboratories as well as tourism with regular trips to the planet's surface. Jupiter and Saturn's Moons were all colonized by other corporations and nations, where Titan became a vast industrial complex of mining and refining facilities.

Though the rate of expansion increased exponentially, communications did not. Limited by the speed of light, communications would take minutes or hours to reach their destinations, and only became more and more limited the further humanity expanded.

Beyond Sol
In the late 2500s, Hyperspace was discovered and allowed the first colonists to venture out towards the distant stars. Humanity though ambitious was also naive to the dangers of deep space. Where there is life, it is hostile and driven purely by survival instincts with no sense of morality, where there isn't is either too hot or cold to survive or otherwise entirely uninhabitable. What was once seen as a beautiful and majestic new frontier for humanity has slowly raised its ugly head to expose the true horror of the loneliness of mankind within the universe.

United Nations
The United Nations are what remains of humanity's collective effort to unite the Earth superpowers. During the Sol period, the UN took charge of most of the efforts to bring the nations of Earth together to achieve the common goal of the survival of the species. Though great in concept, the modern equivalent of the UN is held together by 'loose staples', with the Nations increasingly becoming more divided as they struggled with their own economic and cultural survival.

The UN currently occupies Earth and a small bubble around it.

United Colonies of America
America has colonized stars in a long arm With the 492nd president

Corporations
Corporations are at the core of all trade and galactic economy, though their size means they are a lot more powerful. The largest of corporations are more like nations with their own political ideologies, armies and systems of government. Most corporate owned planets are mostly housing for their vast civilian populations which are treated more like employees. In recent times the waters have been muddied

Ships
Ships are mankind's only means of interstellar travel. These massive metal vehicles range in many sizes from small shuttles to immense Mega-ships capable of carrying thousands of occupants to incredible distances.

Gravity
There is no such invention as Artificial Gravity so downward forces are created either centrifugally inside vast habitation rings or via linear acceleration where ship decks are laid out vertically like a building. In Zero-G environments magnetic boots and suit mounted micro thrusters allow for movement through the ship's cabin.

Terraforming
Terraforming is the act of turning an inhospitable planet into a livable one by modifying the atmosphere and surface temperature. Entire corporations are dedicated to the field of Planet-craft namely New-Eden with the leading technological capabilities, though some independents try their hands at it.

Terraforming is an extremely long and expensive process, often costing trillions to procure and transport the much-needed materials and building the facilities to use them. Because of this most terraforming projects are abandoned so very few worlds are left 100% habitable.

Religions
Most religions from the old Earth have survived and spread throughout the colonized planets. Though many religions do debate on the ethics of space travel, some being for it and others against. One such controversy is over the use of Hyperspace, with some Islamic sects believing it to be Hell and that simply being in Hyperspace corrupts human minds or that it is Heaven and that humanity is trespassing when we're not supposed to. These kinds of debates

The Exos
Evidence of a previous galaxy spanning civilization have been discovered, The Exos. Though no living remnants exist, archaeological studies show they were highly advanced and had mastered Faster Than Light travel, Terraforming, biotechnology and many other fields.

Conflict
Humanity is infamous for war. It has been part of humanity since we crawled from the ocean and is considered a curse for having the gift of intelligence.

Nuclear weapons are no longer the Apex Predator of weaponry, that title is now given to the most dangerous weapon yet, AI. War in the Orion Arm is normally fought over very long distances by artificial intelligences in a form of digital diplomacy, a complex battle of words and numbers with AI's of varying intelligences constantly making decisions about what and what not to do. The danger doesn't come from the AI turning against its masters like in other media, but humanity's use of an unrelenting, emotionless machine doing exactly as it is meant to do with brutal efficiency.

Should war ever break out into actual conflict is another story entirely.

On Planets
Planet side battles are performed mostly with ground troops and vehicles deployed from orbit via orbit-to-air-to-ground drop-ships. Some battles may employ the use of strategic assaults on certain targets such as spaceports to cripple the enemy's ability to deploy their own ships or commanding complexes to sever the chain of command.

Often battles are fought in the air where during invasions, squads of orbit to atmosphere fighter, bombers and drop-ships are deployed from a mothership and quickly descend towards the planet's surface. Bombers can be used to weaken the defences on the ground before deploying troops, while fighters are used to provide covering fire and protection for the bombers.

In Space
Most battles are fought over long distances with Torpedoes and Railguns with close range combat achieved with unmanned drones controlled by human or AI pilots.

No energy shielding technology makes combat extremely dangerous, a single well-placed hit from a Railgun or PDC can cripple even the toughest of ships, as a result most ships are glass canons trading firepower for vulnerability.

Hyperspace
While humanity has not yet developed Faster than Light travel, spacecraft are able to puncture holes into a parallel universe known as Hyperspace, where the laws of space and distance are much smaller compared to the stable Localspace. Here travel times that would normally take years are reduced to weeks or months. Hyperspace is full of dense hazardous storms of gas that can tear a ship apart with powerful shockwaves block out radio signals and limit travel. These storms often makes it easy for pirates or smugglers to make shortcuts to bypass patrol ships or set up ambushes. Should a ship become adrift, it may eventually be caught in a storm and torn apart.