Terra Incognita
The lights of colony site twinkle in a mountain valley of this unnamed world. Stretching up into the night sky the safety lights of the space elevator mark off the kilometres up to the orbital terminus high above. Amongst the twinkling stars, other ephemeral flashes can be seen. One particular star grows brighter and draws closer until the bomb crashes into the colony and annihilates the valley in a flash of a million suns.
24 hours earlier
The two Gallente woman, a blonde and a redhead, sitting at one of the several coffee houses on the station veranda could be assumed to be business people by their attire. As they sip their coffee and enjoy the starlight streaming though the huge windows, they chat.
“…why they chose that system. A backwater dead-end system that noone ever visited. Even their carebears,” the blonde said.
“How did they find it then?”
“One of their pilots noticed a spike in traffic in that system on the map and went in, looking for neutral targets.”
“So some wildcats set up a mining colony in the middle of nowhere. They worried that one of their enemies will buy it and set up a staging area?” the redheaded woman asked.
The blonde shrugs. “I didn’t ask, and they didn’t say.”
“One of your usual land’n'grab ops with your dirtpounders then?” the other asks, sipping her coffee.
“Actually, they have something else in mind. Which is why I asked you to join me.”
“I’m intrigued. Go on…”
Twenty hours later
“Stiletto One, Hammer Actual. Do you read?” the comlink chirps into the redhead’s ear. She stops walking along the creek and looks up at the space elevator cable reaching into the heavens. Invisible in the blue day lit sky, a battlefleet is hammering at the orbital terminus, draining its shields and distracting the automated defense systems from the apparently quiet world below.
“Hammer Actual this is Stiletto One. Go ahead.”
“How is your nature walk going? Almost at the ground terminus yet?” the blonde, Hammer Actual, asks.
“Going as well as expected. I’m still a couple of klicks away. Fortunately, this rough terrain is hiding me from the automated sentries. Unfortunately, it’s slowing me down a lot.” Stiletto One resumes her trek up the creek valley towards the colony site.
“We landed you as close as we could. Even with our distraction up here, we didn’t want to risk tipping any eyes on the ground by landing you too close. What kind of ETA are we looking at?”
“According to your satellite scan, this valley runs almost all the way to the site. I should be inside and set up in about two hours or so. Assuming no major glitches with the nexus AI, I’ll have it hacked and subverted a couple hours later and your employers will be the brand new owners of this backwater colony.”
“Roger. Report back when you’re in position. Hammer Actual out.”
“Roger. Stiletto One out.”
Four hours later
“Stiletto One, Hammer Actual! Are you there!?” the comlink chirps. The redhead looks up from the terminal screen, frowning with annoyance.
“Hammer Actual, this is Stiletto One. I told you when you called me half an hour ago that this will take a couple of hours. That wildcat corporation left this colony to finish setting up automatically and some of the high level AI subroutines are-”
“Stiletto One. Abort. We’ve sent a drop ship down to get you. Grab your gear and be ready to leave in five minutes!”
“What’s going on? I’ll have this colony ready to hand over in an hour or two.”
“The alliance that hired us changed their minds. They decided that a hydrocarbon mining colony wasn’t worth the maintenance hassles and they’re sending one of their capsuleer pilots to this planet to nuke the ground terminus from orbit.”
“Godsdammit! Roger, Hammer Actual. Pulling the plug.” Stiletto breaks off comms and quickly disconnects herself from the computer systems of the colony. She can hear the roar of the dropship landing through the walls as she gathers the rest of her gear. Suddenly the the lights go red and the primary display flickers to life.
MAR SARA COLONY
SPACE ELEVATOR ONE
INCOMING NUCLEAR WARHEAD DETECTED
4 MINUTES TO GET TO SAFE DISTANCE
“Oh snap,” Stiletto mutters as she runs out to the drop ship waiting outside.
Twenty minutes later
Hammer and Stiletto are standing on the bridge of a Hyperion-class battleship. On the viewscreen, the mushroom cloud can still be seen hanging in the air above the former colony site. In space above, the disconnected, dead, orbital terminus drifts in orbit. It will come crashing down to the planet in a few months, the hundreds of kilometres of tether hanging from it dragging it down into the atmosphere.
Stiletto looks over at Hammer. “We’re still going to get paid, right?”
Terra Firma
[Author's note: It's a good thing CCP announced that Dust 514 game. I was having a pickle of a time figuring out how to integrate some of the ground-based combat elements with EVE.]
Colonizing a world in several easy steps.
- Head out to 0.0 space. All the colonizable worlds in lowsec and highsec have been claimed already. Sovereignty in its current form has no bearing on whether a world can be claimed.
- Find an unclaimed world. It won’t have any space elevators installed around it.
- Scan the potential colony world. This requires the Planetary Survey skill. (2x skill. Requires Survey 4. Speeds up scan speed of planets by 5% per skill level) When a planet is scanned, its quality is determined. The quality of a planet can range from 0 to 5. 0 being the lowest quality and 5 being the best. With better quality comes more resources that can be harvested, etc.
- Once the world is scanned and deemed desirable, the colonization process is started by placing the first space elevator onto the planet. The orbital terminus is placed within a certain distance of the planet (likely within 5km in the game) and anchored much like an anchorable object is now.
- Once the orbital terminus has been anchored up in orbit, the actual colonization process is started. The orbital terminus goes into a reinforced mode as the tether extends down to the surface.
- Once colony is established 24 hours later, active defenses come online both in orbit to prevent landings and/or orbital bombardment and on the ground to repel ground-based assaults. Shield HP reduced to reflect vulnerability of the colony at the bottom of a gravity well.
- Congratulations! You’ve colonized a world.
Now that you have a world, what can you do with it?
- Install additional space elevators. The maximum number of elevators a colony can support is determined by the quality of the planet. A Q0 or Q1 world can support one elevator. Q2 can support two, Q3 three, up to Q5 with five elevators. Additional elevators increase the defensive and productive capabilities of the colony.
- Terraform the colony. This improves the quality of the world, which is generally viewed as a good thing. However this is not a process that can be entered lightly. A colony has to have at least one elevator installed. Additional elevators will speed up the process. A Q5 planet cannot be improved. A terraforming module needs to be installed in the elevator by a pilot with the Planetary Engineering skill. (5x skill. Needs Science 5, Planetary Survey 4. Decreases terraforming time by 5% per skill level) A terraform module requires a fuel like strontium and the default cycle time is 14 days. During the terraforming, the productive processes of the colony shut down. The defense systems remain online during the process.
Conquest and Combat
EVE wouldn’t be EVE without combat. Colonies will have two battlefronts; the ground and orbital termini.
The orbital terminus can be taken by besieging it with ships. Once the shields are down, dropships can ferry troops over for some exciting boarding action with that Dust game (See why I’m glad they announced it? ). Or blown out of the sky. The terminus has shields and defensive turrets than can be operated with a pilot with starbase defense management to repel attackers.
The ground terminus has automated turrets and can be supplemented with live personnel if desired for defense. A colony can be destroyed usually by orbital bombardment. It can be taken over by ground assault or by covert action.
And those are my ideas regarding implementing planetary control. Hopefully any similarities bewteen other folks’ ideas are a result of a similar science fiction experience.
Shinzann