| The
Black Magic Project The Story of Human Exploration and Discovery Beyond the Orion Arm The materials contained herein unless otherwise noted are the copyright of J. Austin Wilde, 1991 to 2009, all rights reserved. |
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Navigation Latest Updates Fiction Payday Encyclopedia Spacecraft Designs Technology Classification Designs AMC Registry of Vessels Sagittarius Colonial Atlas Ahriman (HM+31 0938 B) Amethyst (HB+32 3331 B) Angelique (HM-50 2602 B) Apollonia/Phyrigia (HD+35 2475 A) Aquilla (SAG+56 0107) Arkhangelsk (HM+41 2746) Atlantis (HM+52 0225) Aurora (HM+47 2620 A) Avignon (HM+31 3323) Baker's End (SAG-36 0528) Bellarmine (HM+36 1662 A) Bellissimo (HM+40 2827) Beowulf (HM+39 5516 A) Bounty (HB+38 0524 A) Buran (HD+32 1678) Cauldron (SAG+47 1522) Charybdis (HB+56 0404 B) Concordia (HM+00 2422 A) Cora's World (HM-40 2634) Daedelus (SAG+45 4907 A) Demeter (HM+31 3563) Destiny (HD+47 0309) Dustbowl/New Deseret (SAG-42 4503 B) Frontiera (HD+40 1336) Frostpile (SAG+43 2208) Fury (HM+53 0102 A) Gateway (HM+00 0000) Goldrush (SAG+33 2643) Gulag (HD+40 4019) Hecate's Hate (HM+32 3972) Hyperborea (SAG+44 1855 B) Ice Station Mike (HD+42 3267) Ice Station Oscar (HD+42 5807) Inshallah (HM+53 0608) Jena (HB-33 4139 A) Jewel/Sulfur Flats (HM+41 0955 A & B) Jin Xian (HM-45 4415) Jove/Fuzhou (SAG+49 2911 A & B) Libertad (HD-46 2312) Marino (HD-31 4687) Midgard/Muspellheim (HD+54 1018) Mirabilis (HM-45 1718) Neu Bavaria (HM+31 7329) New Anchorage (HD+35 3455 A) New Ares (HM+57 0405 A) New Havana (HM+55 1217) New Tanstaafl (HM+43 3626 A) New Taranto (HB+31 2685 A) New Zion (HD+47 0954) Paydirt (HM+36 2309) Porto Fria (HM-52 2716 A) Pu'huonua (HM+35 2017) Research Station Victor (HB+55 1522) Sakura (HM-31 0629) Sandovar (HM+34 0139 A) Santa Clara (SAG+31 0179 B) Scherzo (SAG+55 2007 B) Sheba's World/Neu Bayer (HD-51 1306 A) Tanner's World (HB-32 1052) Tartarus (HM+31 5806) The Alamo (HM+34 0552 B) Tortuga (HD-37 4529) Toulon (SAG+55 0823 A) Valhalla (HD+31 1168) Viracocha (HM+31 1175 A) Waypoint November (HM+31 1969 A) Waypoint Omega (HM-06 1121 A) Waypoint Tango (HD+41 4528 A) Waypoint X-Ray (HD-66 1619) Waypoint Yankee (HD+10 1721) Waystation Alfa (HM+34 1207) Xiamen (HM+48 2891 B) Zhengzhou (HM-27 9791 B) |
SAGITTARIUS
OVERVIEW Throughout this website you will find links to various pages within the text of the articles. These links are not underlined, but are in bold type and will be gold or orange depending on link history. Feel free to click through these links as you browse, and welcome to the story! |
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space in the Sagittarius Arm is
confined to a rough sphere centered on Gateway (HM+00 0000)
approximately 33 light-years in radius. This
corresponds to the effective range of a Long Jump equipped starship in one
stardrive jump. The vast majority of starships in Sagittarius
however are limited to Short Jump ranges of up to 10.758
light-years. This, when coupled to the
random clumps and strings of the various stars present in this
approximately 4200 cubic parsec volume, has created various travel
'arms' stretching out from the Gateway and Fury systems. 297 discreet
star systems ranging from Brown Dwarfs to Blue Giants and several small
nebula and molecular dust clouds as well as a neutron star and a solar
mass black hole can be found in this volume. Humanity has lived in the Sagittarius arm from 2355 to the present time of 2362. In this seven year period approximately 2.4 million colonists have immigrated to the arm through the Sagittarius Stargate, a naturally occuring wormhole spanning approximately 4000 light-years from the Wolf 359 system near Sol to the Gateway system in Sagittarius. This wormhole was discovered and artificially inflated to a traversable size by Gavin Aurimas and Frederick Mercer and their Sagittarius Development Corporation using an advanced space-time metric he had derived after decades of seclusion. The stargate, like the smaller and shorter distance ones that link Sol to her colonies in Orion, was kept 'inflated' (open) through the dynamic violation of the Average Null Energy Condition (ANEC). This process is inherently fragile, and makes transit through a 'stable' traversable wormhole a demanding task. Contact with the 'caustic' region at the throat of the wormhole can cause the collapse of the metric, and the sudden and catastrophic destruction of the stargate. On Sunday, the 29th of January 2361, this is precisely what happened. The details of the event are unclear, as anyone close enough to realize what had happened was annihilated in a shower of gamma rays released from the collapsing stargate. Vast energies are required to keep a stargate wormhole open wide enough to allow spacecraft to pass through them, and when no longer constrained by the space-time metric, they fly apart with all of the violence of a very small supernova. Thousands died instantly in the vicinities of both wormhole mouths, and perhaps thousands more perished in the aftermath. The only thing that prevented the Gateway system from being completely sterilized by the event was the fact that the Sagittarius Stargate had been intentionally deflated down from a diameter of 500 meters to about one centimeter, the vast energy of the metric carefully bled off in a controlled, laborious fashion, prior to the crash. The reason for this deflation may perhaps shed some light on the cause of the collapse for those who are now stranded 4000 light-years from the rest of humanity - a smaller stargate linking Epsilon Indi to Epsilon Eridani had been intentionally destabilized by a nihilist group known as the End of History at the close of 2360, killing almost 6 million people in both star systems, and the group had threatened far more carnage to come. Whether the End of History succeeded in collapsing the Sagittarius Stargate or whether the collapse happened as the result of an accident during the controlled deflation undertaken as a precaution against an attack is unknown. There are no surviving witnesses to the event, either living or machine, to provide an answer. What is clear is that for over two million beings, contact with the Orion Arm has been completely cut off. The wormhole that once linked the two spiral arms, itself a frozen relic leftover from the Big Bang, is gone forever. The odds of discovering another wormhole linking Sagittarius to Orion are vanishingly small, and even if one were to be found, the people of Sagittarius lack the resources and the infrastructure to build a Stargate around it. The human race in Sagittarius is now forced by necessity to build a new civilization in the cold wilderness of space. There is no Earth, no comforting light of Sol to run home to in dire circumstances. The majority of the 73 known colonies in Sagittarius are only marginal at best, with low populations, low industrial bases, on harsh worlds to adapt to and make a home, and with few technical resources to back them up. How many will perish in the next ten years is an open question. Only one organization, the Sagittarius Development Corporation (SDC), has the resources to pull the scattered colonies into a cohesive civilization, but will the people of Sagittarius accept their rule? |
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