Decimal Lancer

 Alternate Setting - Lancer 10% or Decimal Lancer

This was some brainstorming from years ago, while sitting at a stop, typing on my phone and waiting to ride to university. Just trying to turn Lancer into a more conventional FTL-based Sci-Fi universe and aliviate some issues people were saying with the scale.

Removing the hundreds column from all the dates shortens time and makes its so every year there is something happening. Maybe cultural evolution on isolated colonies is time compounded by remoteness.

This also requires dividing all travel times in the book by 10. Maybe even populations too if you really want a frontier setting.

This really changes the tone of the setting. If populations are the same, the birth rate is really high or fewer people died during the Fall. Most planets look somewhere between Nigeria and 50s America in terms of people vs economic growth. If only 10% of the popualtion of the default setting, the sin of the 2nd Committee was spreading humanity out too thinly in a rush for territory.

This also changes the dynamics of Lancer deployment, a Union battle group will deploy Lancer battalions to the most effective location even when they will consist of a very small fraction of the armed forces. When a planet’s population is 300 million and not 3 billion however, the number of vital strategic locations and opposition forces decreases, making Lancers more effective for their size.

Much more of an anime/Battletech vibe when 5 mecha suits are enough to conquer a planet.

Union politics will probably play a greater role in a campaign since it is happening much closer in time and travel to the game location. Since it has only been 500 years since Union emerged and with life-extensions and time dilation. Effectively, the entire Cosmopolitan population from the 2nd and maybe the 1st Committee is active somewhere. This increases internal tensions within the Union between those who were positive or negative towards the 2nd Committee’s methods. The 2nd Committee Cosmopolitans outnumber the 1st Committee ones, but the alive 1st Committee were able to join up with the 3rd Committee ones to oppose them.

Regardless of time dilation and increased speed, the amount of time to travel to and from a problem on top of solving it is huge. So most Union bureaucrat probably will spend a significant part of their careers on several subcommittees at once with each subcommittee focused on one hotspot and resolution. Creating a gameplay opportunity for all kinds of bureaucratic mix ups and farce, though probably not to PARANOIA levels of incompetence.

This requires a new intermediate form of FTL travel. Skipping, where one moves 10X faster than .99c in overall bursts but still suffers time dilation.

Witha new lore framing like this:

Used since before the Fall, Skipping costs a lot even to a post-scarcity civilisation. First the exact movements, slowdowns and energy must be calculated by AI or batteries of NHP, then a tremendous amount of energy and Para-Casulity infrastructure (the Launching Frame) must be used to “skip” the ship towards the target. Get anything slightly wrong and the fatality rate is 10%, with ships dissolving into subatomic particles and at best, suffering severe material stress. This was fine for the “Glorious Ascent of Mankind to the Stars” under the 2nd Committee but modern authorities prefer the safer and faster option of Blink Gates.

For a Union fleet, the amount of calculations for every individual ship, to keep them grouped together, undamaged and maybe to return is so great that GALSIM must be temporary put on hold for the 5 Voices to do the calculations. This is a blindness that the Union is loathed to have. So it has been enacted only thrice: twice for the 2nd Committee to deal with the Karrakin and Hercynia and now by the 3rd Committee for Cornucopia.

Skipping is still used, mostly by Colonies and Corpo-States which have not yet been upgraded to a Blink Gate and persist in years long, second-tier networks linking to a Blink Gate enabled system. Modern Skipping is far safer as the ship is able to coordinate via the Omninet between the NHP at each end and onboard to ensure that the calculations are accurate and fast. However it still requires tremendous output in energy to achieve. Manna is still valued in these networks as currency since the cost and time of travel keep the economy material focused. (Think Traveller or Alien).

Worlds years beyond even this network are reliant on a few unattached traders who can afford the social costs of spending years if not decades objectively, separated from home and who hold a monopoly on off world goods. A tactic many employ is the change crews at their destinations, using a NHP at each end or even onboard to keep track of essentials and effectively making each voyage a working passage to a new home.

However expansion to new colonies requires either dangerous single-end Skipping or a relatively slow crawl at .99c. And while the Union can afford to spread out at a measured pace, many states wish to expand faster and hav the capacity, if not the accuracy to do so.