Common Core:Setting

This page is a part of the Common Core lore project. Common Core is /tg/station's open source lore project.

The year is 2564. It is the Bluespace Age: wonderful scientific advancements have finally put space within easy reach of humankind, and a new frontier has been born. As Earth's government set their sights on expansion firmly coreward, corporations instead carry the torch for humanity spinward, and with them, they bring conflict.

Humanity's largest corporations openly skirmish in the frontier sectors, while shaking hands and pretending to play nice on Earth under the watchful gaze of the Government.

And it is in this world that you, the player, find yourself. Specifically, your character will, at most times, be an employee of Nanotrasen, the largest and most powerful of Earth's megacorporations.

The Basics

Space Station 13 is a mining and research outpost set up by Nanotrasen to stake a claim over Indecipheres, a hellish world which has an abundant supply of plasma- the lifeblood of technological advancement in the Bluespace Age. This claim has been contested by Cybersun Industries- humanity's second largest megacorporation, who had, until the discovery of Indecipheres, controlled the majority of the known viable plasma deposits within human space on Mars. This dispute has boiled over into a full-scale corporate conflict, as Cybersun has brought together a coalition of likeminded organisations upset by Nanotrasen's dominance in the market, which has come to be known as the the Syndicate.

Nanotrasen

Nanotrasen is your employer. Originally founded as a computer hardware company in the late 20th Century, they have, through a series of merger and cutthroat corporate politics, found themselves as the largest megacorporation in human space, with stakes in almost every sector. This has given them the power and influence to be one of the driving forces behind the recent expansion in the Spinward Sector.

The Spinward Sector

This is the main setting of Space Station 13 (on /tg/station, anyway). A sparsely populated frontier region of human space, the Spinward Sector is far from the centralised government of TerraGov. Instead, governance in the region is handled by the smaller Spinward Stellar Coalition, a nominally independent coalition of planets which is slowly falling under TerraGov's influence. This lack of a strong central government in the region has made it of particular interest to corporations, who are able to operate de facto independent in the region. The SSC attempts to exert itself but much of its economy is reliant on the whims of the corporations, making them powerless to stop them- they are only able to limit the worst excesses due to the increasing presence of TerraGov in the sector.