Hey everyone, sorry for the delay in posting. I haven't forgotten about this or lost interest.
Apparently the flash program or something else on my computer was messed up or outdated or something. And apparently because of the new layout on proboards (namely the shout box), it was causing the window to freeze up so I couldn't post or even get the page to fully load. So I wasn't able to even get on the forum until last night when I restarted and updated the damn thing.
Anyways, I can't make a proper post atm. But now that things seem to be working. I'll be posting more as the week goes on, kind of fluffing out the setting's universe. Though hopefully I can get some help via feedback, since my personal opinion is that collaboration always trumps solo work when it comes to works of fiction ( classic trilogy star wars vs. prequels being a good example, as in the latter Lucas kind of lacked anyone to reign in his stupider ideas or polish his better ones, as they had in the former).
Especially when it comes to RPs; I'd rather have something people are going enjoy playing to the fullest and that's going to last a good while, rather than make something purely to "muh vision" with immovable stubbornness about the setting and course of the plot, like some such people I know have done in the past (no names though).
Edit/P.S.
While I do have a few spare moments, I'll at least expand the post to answer a few previous questions.
I was thinking that planets would vary in how settled they were.
I mean yeah, there might be some that are nearly uninhabited though that would likely not be the case since I imagine realistically any planet humans can inhabit in a previously known region of space is going to have been settled at one point or another.
Actually, to add an additional element of politics to it, we could even have the colonists on those planets be descendants of people from one particular sphere or another (maybe even multiple ones where several groups have colonies on the same planets or on different planets in the same system). And now its become the casus belli for those respective powers to step in, and become involved. Where two groups of colonists have come into conflict with one another. Or where one power is laying claim to a planet settled by colonists from another.
Of course, it could also be that they're entirely independent colonies who immigrated as a way of leaving the sphere they originated from, and now that they've become prosperous a power is trying to "reign them in" like the Alliance in Firefly or the Inner Sphere houses vs the Periphery worlds. While other powers are coming to their aid, but with ulterior motives obviously.
As to the level of development, I wasn't really imagining too many (if any) totally uncivilized planets where there's one or two outposts and the rest of the world is untamed wilderness.
Actually most would probably be like the outer planets in Firefly and the outer rim in Star Wars' Expanded Universe.
Or even the Periphery planets in Battletech, so they'd have some of the infrastructure needed to build mechs. Even if most of those built have been downgraded, sometimes to "Primitive" levels.
They might even have Lostech-type automated factories they can no longer keep operational, but that would work perfectly fine with a little repair once a more prosperous power had taken control of them.
To use a term from Traveller (if anyone is familiar) I was thinking most typical planets would be "mid-tech"; basically they'd have a 20th or 21st century level of tech as the average, with smatterings of higher tech here and there.
Usually things that are easier to produce/maintain or that can be found as trade goods (I'm assuming they're using their abundant resources to trade with passing merchant vessels traveling along their Jump points).
Though they might actually have caches of Lostech that make them appealing to the great powers, up to and including forgotten weapon/vehicle/mech designs and the aforementioned automated factories.
That said. While average TL would be at a 20th-21st century level (sometimes higher, sometimes lower), it might be a lot lighter level of infrastructure more akin to Europe and America in the 17th-19th centuries, where there's a few heavily populated and industrialized regions or cities (metropolitan areas that are the original settlements where the colonists' ships touched down long ago).
But the majority of the planet is still a series of small towns, villages, and settlements (where they've expanded over the decades or even centuries depending on the age of the colonies) separated by vast tracts of wilderness that are being slowly used for resource-gathering.
Also kind of like the smaller nations (as well as colonies) during the early modern and world wars period (19th-20th centuries), or third world countries during the cold war era.
I guess the whole "North African Campaign" comparison might have been an oversimplification, since there probably would be the occasional heavily civilized/industrialized planets where the campaigns are actually closer to a planet wide version of Stalingrad or Berlin.
Though in that same vein, yeah. There would also be planets where there are a handful of settlements with large tracts of wilderness separating them. Like open terrain (desert, plains, steppe/tundra) or woodlands, swamps, mountains. Whatever biomes the planet possesses.
Most likely, for such a planet they'd need to have valuable resources to justify the armies fighting over them; anything from mineral reserves that are used for armor and munitions, to animal and plant life that can be cultivated and used for
food (
2) or even exotic forms of medicine (Maybe something like
bacta in Star Wars where it can be synthesized into a drug with unusual healing properties that would save grievously and otherwise crippled or mortally wounded pilots? But that's rare as hen's teeth, limiting its use to the important officers and elite pilots).
Though I guess some of the fighting
could be due to a perceived need to expand due to overpopulation (something
like the intended goal of the Germans' occupations of surrounding states and
subsequent drive eastward in WWII, seeing as this is meant to be retro-WWII); if most of the rest of the human-occupied is firmly established as belonging to one faction or another. There's not a lot of room for the inevitable population booms, and these lightly populated worlds might look like prime candidates, whether or not the locals want to be annexed (and possibly replaced).
Considering this. Previous migrations might just have involved the establishment of far flung, semi-official colonies in these unclaimed regions of space (I'm thinking the one we're focusing on is just one of many
*), and where suitably habitable terrestrial planets can't be found (or where some terraforming might be necessary prior to surface habitation being an option). The colonization might have involved using methods such as asteroid colonies or wholly artificial orbital space colonies (where a planet's surface isn't suitable for habitation, like a gas giant or a planet with a poisonous atmosphere, but it's orbit allows humans to build colonies around it).
Actually there's probably justification for having numerous mining colonies around gas giants or rocky airless moons and asteroids, who double as mercantile republics where they mine ore or rare gasses and then sell them to whoever pays the best along the trade lanes that pass through their jump points.
* Note/Extrapolation: I'm thinking it'd be like the
outer rim in Star Wars or the Periphery in Battletech; yes, there's lots of areas where humans are expanding, and we're only focusing on one tiny region at the moment that happens to intersect with the territory/jump routes of three or four of the main human powers (hence the source of conflict).
However Its still not important enough in the "grand scheme" for them to devote a vast array of resources to the conflict. Especially since they have to maintain vast armies to guard their preexisting domains (the "main theatre" of war, ala the Western/Eastern Fronts of WWII or the Succession Wars of Battletech).
And since things like mechs and aerospace fighters are a lost and dying art in many cases, they have to be used sparingly akin to the 19th century naval warships you mentioned earlier. Though that'll also give us plenty of excuses to use vehicles, battle armor and infantry and the combined arms tactics that come with them, so hooray for that.
So in that regard it'd be like a mix of the late 19th century colonial conflicts (which were more "
expeditionary warfare" than true wars).
The "side campaigns" of the two World Wars (in places like
Africa,
East/Southeast Asia and
Western Asia where they utilized those units they could spare away from the "main" conflict in Europe, including older models of vehicles that would be too long-in-the-tooth to survive against the latest and greatest machines their enemies were deploying but which were still entirely serviceable).
And both the various small "bush wars" during decolonization and after, and the
proxy wars during the Cold War era. Where all of the actual fighting actually wasn't being done by the two huge armies staring each other down in Central Europe that constituted the bulk of NATO and Soviet/Warpac forces. Obviously Korea and Vietnam were kind of exceptions, but even there. The US/Allies weren't devoting the same level of involvement as they would to a war in Europe, or to a batshit crazy Red Dawn type scenario where the Soviets invaded from another angle.
The Arab-Israeli Wars especially are a good example for the proxy wars, since they were using the same units and organization/tactics as their sponsor states, but limited by numbers and in many cases forced to use retrofitted versions of older designs to fill out their ranks. Just replace them with actual Axis, Soviet and Allied troops (like the recent
Operation Babylon campaign for DUST Tactics does) and it works perfectly.
I guess I should have clarified earlier that in that comparison of it to North Africa. It'd be more metaphorically than literally, although I love the North African Campaign enough that I just HAVE to include at least one "not-Tobruk/Alamein" type planet.
Though, I'll probably have analogues for most of the famous theaters, campaigns and battles of WWI and WWII, and certain ones from the Cold War (I could see Korea or the 1948 Arab-Israeli War for example being easily shoehorned into a WWII-type setting since they used much of the same weapons and tactics). For example a jungle planet like Kumen in VOTOMS, which is basically "Nam in Space" (I guess "Burma in Space" in this case).