Mapping Your Own Antares Part Four

Previously, we outlined how Antareans produce simple, but usable, maps that can be understood by humans – the icohex/shardhex system – and ran over some simple tables that located gates in those subhexes. This time we address the elapsed time within the transdimensional ‘tunnel’ between Antares and the system gate – the transition time – and provide a method for identifying to which faction a system might be affiliated.

Transition Time

Each gate on Antares leads to a trans-dimensional tunnel which has its terminus at a system-side gate at the gate horizon. There are two important aspects of Antarean physics associated with the transit time:

• The journey from entry to exit takes an identical time each time it is traversed and whichever direction the ship travels in, whether system-to-Antares or Antares-to-system.
• The time spent within the tunnel is the same whether measured subjectively of externally – there is no time dilation.
• There is no turning back: once a ship has been taken up by a gate, it cannot return until it has been ejected from the transdimensional tunnel at the other end.

You can always set the time for a gate as best fits the narrative for your own campaign, or you can choose or roll a time on the Antarean Gate Transition Time Table, below.  Gates which have a transit time of several weeks are seldom used and those gates which have unknown times are assumed to terminate somewhen but the ships and probes making the transition are considered lost!

As can be seen from the table, the vast majority of transit times are more than an hour but less than a day and sometimes the times are negligible. No-one has yet been able to determine what sets a transition time and even the fabled universities of Isor unable to give a reason.

Antarean Gate Transition Time Table

* The extra minutes or hours shown for these transit times are provided if a little more precision and variation is required. These can be used as detailed expansions of other base times by reducing the extended time by one time unit and substituting in a randomly rolled lower time unit.

For example a gate taking D10+3 weeks (a 98) could not only have the additional days stated (+d5) but could also have its hours and minutes calculated just by subtracting a day from the d5 ‘days’ roll and adding 2D10 hours from the 89-97 entries and then 1D5+10 minutes from the 21-88 result rows.

If this level of detail is not needed, just use the base time specified!

Affiliation – Faction

Having identified that a system is in a subhex, we went over how that system is represented on a shardhex map. The systems affiliation – to which faction it belongs or claims political allegiance – is part of that information. Affilliation, sometimes shortened to ‘aff()’, is part of a system descriptor called the Concord Standard System Descriptor (CSSD). We’ll go over the details of the CSSD in a subsequent article, but for now we’ll list the most common mnemonics used for each faction and also provide a table for determining to which faction a system belongs. In the CSSD a system’s affiliation is shown in the format ‘aff(PHC)’, where ‘PHC’ indicates the PanHuman Concord but could be a mnemonic for the faction to which the system belongs.

The Affiliation Table below relies on whether or not a gate is within the area of control of one of the major factions. Before we look at the table, it is worth looking at the type of control each faction has over the systems within its area of control.

The Concord, Senatex and Vorl Dominion are largely in full control of almost all the systems within their borders with the Concord and Senatex having a little influence beyond their borders. All three factions are constantly incorporating new systems: the Concord and Senatex largely take new systems intact as the IMTel believes its primary role is the care and well-being of its citizens; in contrast, a Vorl Ordo taking over any panhuman world is likely to wipe out all the citizens within decades.

It is important to note that there are degrees of homogeneity amongst the three major factions. The Senatex keeps all its systems closely aligned through a huge number of regular IMTel updates, though systems which are more remote or which have long transit times (see above) sometimes reject those updates and turn against the Senatex. In contrast, the Concord has what appears to be a more relaxed view, with the Concord IMTel allowing each major shard (potentially hundreds of thousands of systems) to be very slightly different – until the shard or isolated system differs too far from those around it, that is!

The Vorl Dominion is more fragmented than both the Senatex and Concord, being largely focused around the activities and structure of each individual Ordo swarm. An Ordo is comprised of multiple systems and millions of Vorl, each Vorl in the Ordo being strongly related to each other and part of a single swarm; it might be better to think of the Dominion as a loose alliance of Ordo rather than the largely coherent entities that are the Senatex or Concord. Here, however, war between Ordo’s is not uncommon and are fought to the destruction of the opposing Ordo or the capture of its ruling elite.

There is also a strong difference between IMTel- controlled areas and the mutual defence and trading entity that is the Prosperate. The Algoryn navy may scout for new systems and threats in and around the Prosperate, but the density of Prosperate-aligned systems within its borders is very low: there are only around 3000 associate systems, around 310-320 member or council systems and the 12 systems of the Algoryn themselves that act as capitals and centres of regional oversight. Nonetheless, the 3330 systems in the Prosperate still makes for a very low membership density.

Affiliation Mnemonics

In the last instalment, we saw the Sp:, In: and V: codes for system affiliation, representing Spill, Independent or Freeborn (vardosi) respectively.  The following are the most often seen mnemonics used for the CSSD’s aff() declaration.

Affiliation Table

This is used to randomly determine the faction to which a system owes its primary loyalty and is weighted to give the most representative results. However, there is nothing wrong with overriding a result, for example, by making a shallow gate with a transit time of 10 minutes lead to an Algoryn Prosperate member system (AP:M). 

Gates with unknown transit times always have an aff() code of ‘X’ to indicate that there is no data. Of course, you can always set a transit time of several years or decades and assign an affiliation by hand. Such systems will never be military headquarters of any faction or Spill nation.

Each column in the Affiliation Table corresponds to the zone of control of the factions as shown on the map. The Interface column is used when within 2 subhexes of the edge of an IMTel nation or the Vorl Dominion: here, ‘Host’ should be the closest faction – roll randomly if both are equally close, and ‘Opp’ should be the closest, opposing faction.

Summary

That’s it for this week. We now have a way of mapping the gate locations around Antares, determining their transit times and generating their political allegiances.  In the next part of this series we’ll go on to add a few finer details to the systems, such as spectral type and gate horizon – used to determine travel times – and the state of the primary planet before it reappeared in the 7^th Age.