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Standard Candles

Overview

daily life in Known Space is suffused with magitech; small spells and enchantments are everywhere in the home. everyone has at least a perfunctory education on the occult cosmology of their verse, and the nearby verses, and perhaps despite magic and spirits being topics of science now there is also a burgeoning scene of paranormal rumor and conspiracy theory. aliens, monsters and alternate humans (and furries) run amok about the place, with towns and cities accommodating people of different sizes, shapes, biochemistries and even tropes to varying extents; and large social and private institutions called Wanderer Societies, Castaway Lodges and similar names exist to facilitate the welfare and integration of multiversal immigrants. ruins and relics abound, and many colonies are built inside ancient megastructures, like Ifezzan. some still-operational ancient infrastructure, from Venusian nitrogen mines to ruined alien shrines, can be tapped for resources and occult power.

Known Space is sort of akin to the modern world in the sense that it's very connected and the world can feel small (fast communication times) despite being enormous. barring deliberate embargoes or lack of infrastructure, culture diffuses quickly across light-years, verses, and borders, and most people have at least some idea of major events happening on the other side of inhabited space on the day it happens. the FTL network ties everyone together to experience the passage of time at more or less the same rate, and also allows near-instant communications between settlements and ships equipped with comms wormholes. however, travel across the depths of space is still a little slow - it takes months to several years to get from one end of the FTL network to the other, depending on the route and the ship. interplanetary travel ranges from hours to weeks in the more hard-SF verses.

it's also culturally and politically modern; Core Worlds leaders are fond of their bureaucratic jargon and acronym salad, while religion is heavy on youth pastors, internet spirituality and new age cults, and the Net dominates peoples' lives. Known Space is dominated by political blocs ruled by national superpowers, especially in the Core Worlds; space kings and cathedral ships tend to be more of a phenomenon in the Periphery and beyond. at the same time, modern doesn't mean the Core Worlds are just straightforwardly like 2020s Earth - cultures and economies have mixed and transformed greatly over the millennia.

broadly speaking:

Core Worlds: home of the great blocs - the Free Traders Union (FTU), the Liruma Mandate, and the Zone of Peoples' Self-Government (ZPSG) - and their direct affiliates, including rural hinterlands systems and sparsely populated infrastructure like the American Rockies or agricultural heartlands. Strings and blobs of Core Worlds are strewn across the multiverse, often near blue supergiant stars and young main sequences (and nebulae), whose intense solar winds enabled cheap and fast FTL travel in the early high interstellar age. for overall vibe, think something like a blend of SCP, Unknown Armies, Shadowrun i guess, Risk of Rain, Roadside Picnic, David Lynch and The Culture. and perhaps Lancer, given the vibes i'm told it has.
Periphery: still integrated with the Core Worlds, but significantly looser in theme and more open to conventional tropes. members of smaller blocs and non-aligned nations live here, along with various satellites and subjugated worlds of the great blocs.
Rimworlds: clusters of outpost colonies and frontier worlds here serve as staging grounds for explorers and soldiers crawling the pancosmos, and trading hubs with other large intercosmic empires. while dealings in the rimworlds are often more or less legitimate, covert ops, piracy and warlordism are common, when outright colonialism and client state-ism isn't. it's not unheard of for spies and soldiers to run rogue over low-tech planets, stealing artefacts, conducting raids, even installing themselves as rulers. others take a more eccentric approach: cult leaders recruiting locals to become magical superheroes, constructing evil wizard lairs... etc. this causes great public outcry when news filters out from the frontier, but the powers that be tend to turn a blind eye, or are too busy profiting from mercenaries with more bloodlust than sense eager to do their dirty work for them for pennies on the dollar. spacers out here tell tall tales about Picnic Worlds - zones, planets and entire star systems filled with ancient magitech and strange phenomena of incredible power and danger.

Known Space is broadly divided into sectors and hyperspace belts (or hyperbelts, or just belts), collections of sectors across multiple cosmoi that are linked by wormhole or Krasnikov tube (see Travel section below). some of these hyperbelts include:

the Foxtail Belt: a more "hard sci-fi" region of hyperspace where the Liruma system and many Core Worlds lie. high magic exists here, especially through the daemons of Hybrasil (see Magic section below), and the place is littered with alien ruins, but mundane physics are more grounded - normal stars and planets populate the space, with some exceptions like the Raladarag air-nebula and the smoke ring of the Mashveya, a densely populated disk of air and asteroids circling a gas giant planet that serves as the FTU's counterpart to Liruma Polis.
Angel's Sandbox: straddling the border between the Mandate and the FTU, Angel's Sandbox is a hotbed of Core Worlds conflict and a weirdspace belt where the local strength of gravity is much higher while falling off rapidly with distance, creating cosmoi filled with amorphous floating islands and miniature suns strewn across large gas clouds instead of planets. powerful spirits nicknamed Atuas or Kami flicker about Angel's Sandbox and are widely harnessed by witches who bind themselves to a patron Kami who grants boons for their devotion.
the Golden Junction: a hyperbelt under Mandate control where many alien species come from, including the Minaya. the local spiritual ecosystem infuses certain chemical reactions and compounds with the aspects of spirit-world beings and ecosystems, giving rise to a powerful form of alchemy that is the belt's industrial specialty. physics here is both realistic but also more permissive - gravity manipulation and reactionless propulsion is much cheaper here.

the "present day" of Standard Candles is 5555 AD.

The pancosmos (multiverse)

although humans (who are furries) are relatively dominant within Known Space, a burgeoning array of aliens and alter-humans hailing from other cosmoi - including fantasy species like elves and dragons - fill the streets alongside humans everywhere. the immense diversity of the multiverse is reflected across society, with some restrictions and limits.

tropes, sociology & ontology: different verses often obey not only different physical laws or systems of magic, but are dominated by radically different power levels, or operate on different rules of psychology and logic altogether. often these can be explained away, but people from verses that obey truly different fundamental logic could be like starfish aliens to each other. meanwhile if the inhabitants of two different verses are wildly unbalanced in power level, there might only be limited contact and traffic between verses, or else some physical or infrastructure limitation, or political game preventing the stronger power from changing the weaker. alternately, perhaps the strong side sees some benefit in leaving the weak ones unchanged.
size: sentient beings as small as a cat are relatively common, and even smaller ones are present here and there. however, cat-size bodies require 1/10 the resources of human-size ones, potentially obsoleting human sizes in a competitive labor market. there are numerous approaches to evening the scales - most commonly, separate tiers of necessities priced at similar levels for different size classes. it "helps" that biochemical needs can be tailored to require different types of food only sold at a particular size class. for giants and macros, their bodies can be lightened by birdlike construction - full of air - but heavy macros also definitely exist. they often find work in construction and heavy industry alongside mechs. where roads are big enough, they can be seen riding trucks or even walking in traffic themselves. often they live in special-built neighborhoods, or in freefall or the open upper levels of spindistricts in large space colonies.
arms, legs, mobility: with the wide range of bodyplans across Known Space, ergonomics is a booming industry, although accessibility still isn't always ideal, causing situations like Minaya construction mech operators filling their biped-centric cabins with cushions and memory foam to create adequate sitting comfort for their tentacle tree-climber bodies.
senses: although humans still typically prefer RGB color vision, cyberware can expand the range of human senses greatly, and aliens have their own native senses and default preferences. additionally, humans' sense of place and direction is now helped by an inbuilt feeling of GPS position and enhanced spatial memory, and wi-fi signals can be easily processed to give limited radar-sight around walls, especially in buildings where privacy screening isn't up to code. many humans are more attuned to scent, too, able to distinguish directional information and layers of scent like a dog. spindistricts also give an inherent sense of direction when walking, due to the slight increase or decrease in weight depending on your direction of movement. different screens, speakers, smellovisions etc are available for different sensoriums, though price and accessibility isn't always the best either, and some forms of sense are scrutinized by the government.
biochemistry and nutrition: although human worlds tend to boast atmospheres and climates roughly similar to Earth, alternate atmosphere sectors are present in many big cities. even when atmospheric needs are compatible, nutrition requirements often aren't - but biochemical translators are available to solve this, when one's native food is lacking. a biochemical translator is a device that lines the mouth and throat and sits in the stomach, converting incompatible aminos and nucleic acids, opposite-chiral molecules, and so on into forms suitable for one's own digestion. popular with gourmets and tourists, and standard issue for explorers, they are also a lifeline for many aliens, multiversal castaways, and disabled people.

different verses have different physical laws, a fact that can be exploited for industry and social gain, though tech and magic traveling between cosmoi needs to be built to work in both and vast industries exist to ensure it does (more or less). some high-performance tech, materials or services can only be produced in certain cosmoi. some verses are straightforwardly better places to live, build industry, or both. there is a slow migration away from "realistic" cosmoi toward ones with more permissive physics.

to give an idea of the diversity of cosmoi and how it can be handled, here are some major ways they can be thematically distinguished:

weird gravity: gravity makes dirt and gas turn into planets and stars. if gravity works differently, it can change the size and shape of these things. maybe your world is made of floating islands, or nebulae of air filled with ring shaped asteroids and filament shaped suns.
weird cosmology: weird gravity makes the land weird; now think about how the sky could be weird. maybe everything in the universe shares one gigantic sun that's slowly sucking everything in. perhaps weird giant structures are visible in the depths of space.
hard vs permissive vs soft SF / fantasy: does science and engineering trend more toward hardline realism, does it put realism in service of the fantastical, or is it more straightforwardly fantastical?
low vs high magic: is magic moreso scarce, weak, and fickle; or robust and pervasive across society?
dungeonpunk vs magitech: where the functions of magic and more conventional technology intersect, does magic serve as a superior alternative to technology or do they tend to hybridize?
magical specialization: what does this verse's magic do better (or worse) than others?
physics specialization: what does physics in this verse allow (or disallow) you to do that you can't in other verses?
mundane vs fairyland vs spirit world: is magic an exception to the rule in this verse? is it dominated by magic and magical beings? is it not only dominated by magic, but shaped by the psyche of other beings?
power creep: if a world of all-powerful superheroes and villains meets a world of mere humans, what happens? what might keep the proud Interstellar Republic of the 5 Stars intact if it encounters a ravenous galactic empire?
ontological assumptions: similar to power creep, different worldbuilds are often written from different ideas about the working of minds, society and even reality. how can we bridge the gap, or can we make something interesting from the contradictions?

verses whose gravity, cosmology, or other features starkly differ from the "norm" are referred to as weirdspace.

there are also different types of multiverse, because there are different types of universe - different ways a universe can be separated from another.

humans in Known Space are capable of traversing what's called the Bulk, or the brane (pan)cosmos, a higher-dimensional hyperspace where lower-dimensional verses like ours float around each other. in this state, verses are called "branes".
this is distinct from the many-worlds or timeline multiverse. humans are not aware of FTL tech capable of causing a time paradox, so they cannot freely navigate this pancosmos. however, accidental immigrants and visitors from other timelines are quite common.
the pancomputational pancosmos is a type of multiverse that might exist if reality is running as a program on a vast computer, where other verses might be hidden in different areas of "memory".
the pattern or permutation multiverse, aka the pancosmic symmetric group, is thought to have much to do with magic. think of a computer running a game: if it weren't for the monitor, you'd only see a hot brick of silicon and plastic, but with the monitor, the invisible dance of electrons inside the brick can be reinterpreted into a world you can comprehend and explore. in the same way, other random invisible patterns may actually be pieces of another universe alongside ours - and if manipulating those patterns can cause an unequal reaction back upon our own world, then we have a kind of invocation. the concept is best illustrated by Greg Egan in his novel Permutation City or his short stories Luminous and Dark Integers.

there are also a couple of esoteric types:

quasicosmoi: a verse that is multiple kinds of the above cosmos types at once.
dark cosmoi: a cosmos that is normally immaterial and invisible from our perspective, such as one filled with dark matter.

alien civilizations of roughly equal power to the great blocs coexist with Known Space, extending off into the rimworlds and beyond. psychologically most are very unlike humans, though some of them look humanoid - in fact, most humanoid aliens in SC are very psychologically non-human, often to the point of using alternate forms of mathematics and logic. for every Star Trek rubber forehead they run into, there's at least 4 or 5 Slendermen. (conversely, most of the mental humanoids they've met have very starfish-alien bodyplans.) this doesn't mean a verse can't be slanted toward rubber foreheads, but on balance, across the known multiverse, the starfish minds are more common. some are frequent travelers to Known Space and can even be seen touring city streets and doing their own odd thing, but their relationship with the great blocs is more or less neutral - so far. meanwhile, UFOs like Escher Ships stalk about at the edge of sensor range, uncommunicative and elusive. and perhaps new expeditions will uncover massive new empires on the fringes of the known world, for better or worse... careful astronomy has uncovered dozens of signatures from what might be powerful civilizations yet unknown, tens and hundreds of thousands of light-years distant and more.

Magic

traveling the pancosmos exposes you to a variety of occult cosmologies as diverse as the verses themselves. although the boundaries aren't as neatly drawn as "every verse has its own gods", spirit beings and worlds are bound to certain domains of the mundane world; these domains may sometimes be expanded into new places by acolytes and occult engineers. many spirit worlds are named after folkloric lands. the spirit world of Hybrasil is home to abstract creatures who hold sway over the social fabric of the Foxtail Hyperspace Belt (a Core Worlds region), among other things. contracts are frequently made with them for everything from luck charms, securing voting machines, entering peoples' dream realms to bypass cyberbrain security and meddle with their psyche; at their most powerful they are capable of rewriting peoples' histories and relationships altogether. covert operatives like Penelope can hunt down creatures in this realm to rewrite society in subtle but powerful ways, helping a major corporation cook the books or magically orchestrating a series of events by which secure state secrets accidentally pass into the hands of waiting spies, but they must be careful because the connection between spirit and mundane is never all too straightforward.

some spirits' powers travel wherever their acolytes do: Fumi's magic is granted by her bond with her Kami, which lets her use her growth powers and offers her clairvoyance anywhere in the pancosmos. such powers are highly sought after, and preferred by soldiers and industries that require high flexibility.

magitech dominates daily life, and with it has come new comforts and new dimensions of enrichment as well as new obligations and detriments. in some places, good luck charms are in such high use that it's almost a necessity to accumulate them, and choosing the right enchantments and apotropaisms can be key to getting by. spam and scam emails advertise fake talismans and cognitive downloads, promising to teach you to summon a doppelganger who goes to work for you, but actually hijacking your cyberware to mine crypto. on another level, magical power is regulated by the government. moderate magical power might be like getting a driver's license; practitioners of great witchcraft are kept in a database like someone who owns a rocket launcher. outbreaks of strange hexes, occult diseases, and other weird phenomena are common, especially where magic is wielded carelessly. a particularly bad outbreak of the paranormal is called a Cookout. if it gets bad enough, occult troopers may be sent in to contain the mess.

while "conventional" magic like elemental spells and potions exist, strange and esoteric factors like the social fabric and the psyche also play huge roles in magic. hidden relationships between things and worlds are also common. i encourage you to get weird with it. Yukash works for an alchemic pharmaceutical company in the Golden Junction hyperbelt, where certain chemical reactions manipulate the behavior of creatures in the spirit world which then causes magical effects in our realm, kind of like a mix of Potion Craft and that one tumblr post about the THC crossfade duckling. Geists and pseudo-Geists, or egregores, are a kind of entity that is formed from the collective actions or thoughts of multiple people, but enacts its own will through them as vessels, and are a big part of Standard Candles magic. astrological engineering is the burgeoning field of research into using magic to orchestrate coincidence: many allege that the powers that be have long been using it to try and enforce desired fates upon their citizens.

multiple afterlives are known of, though they are strange lands and reaching them from the mundane world is often difficult. various organizations exist, such as the Knights of Tsitigarbha, that seek to liberate souls from the afterlife and provide such services across Known Space.

Politics

the 3 biggest + most important blocs are

the Liruma Mandate, a capitalist bloc that's undergone aggressive expansion in the past couple centuries, rapidly absorbing many new aliens and alter-humans from former Rimworlds like the Minaya of the Golden Junction.
the Zone of Peoples' Self-Government (ZPSG), who might be broadly described as libertarian communists. a smaller bloc maintaining post-scarcity conditions for their denizens despite fierce opposition from all sides. common providers of domestic and military aid to revolutionary movements and developing nations. much of the outside world upholds a blackout on ZPSG media, so normies don't have much idea what it's like there.
the Free Traders Union (FTU), a vaguely UN / Comecon / WTO-esque international organization that the other blocs technically belong to, but it's dominated by superpowers running a mix of economic systems that are neither capitalist nor socialist. the FTU presents a squabbling and loosely united military front against the capitalist and communist worlds, though it has multiple sub-factions that are more tightly knit. many don't use money or trade internally at all, despite the name.

these blocs are locked in a centuries-long 3-way cold war that shows no signs of resolving any time soon. covert ops, economic manipulation, proxy wars and insurgency are the order of the day; superpowers fighting directly is rare. mutually assured destruction exists, thanks to arsenals of powerful magical weapons capable of rendering entire sectors of space uninhabitable by various means. smaller blocs and treaty organizations also dot the multiversal landscape.

Culture & Economics

Earth is lost, though archives of human culture are well preserved. tech support discussions from today are still in use for troubleshooting many problems that largely haven't changed by the 54th century - Stack Exchange across deep time. a curious effect of media preservation and renewal is that modern culture remains more influential than you might think in the far future; hiphop, funk and rock are still familiar to humans, and the save icon is still a floppy disk 3500 years later. "Imperial American" culture is also experiencing a revival, especially in the capitalist world, but warped by modern tastes and the lens of history, like our memory of Rome or Egypt. aside from this, most of today's superpowers are decidedly non-American. notably, sub-Saharan African cultures achieved global popularity similar to Japan or South Korea in the late 21st-22nd centuries, the era of "Nollypop", leaving a mark that is still felt today.

much of what i can say about Known Space culture is still fairly vague and generalistic, but i try to give thought to how the political and economic order affects daily life for people in terms of stuff like housing arrangements, the role of work in life, food, travel and commute, interaction with government, paying bills, etc - drawing upon past, present and hypothetical societies, mashing pieces together, and trying to figure out what kind of order might emerge from them as an integrated whole. additionally, many of today's cultures are still somewhat recognizable in 5555, but there has been a great deal of intermixing and transformation too.

an overview of some locales, to give examples and some names to latch onto:

the weakly FTU-aligned Rubija Sector where Fumi lives is dominated by a culture of North African and Maori descent. though Mandate forces have made some headway in converting the sector to capitalism, daily life for most Rubijans is a sort of urban peasantry - neighborhoods tending ecocybernetic gardens (see below) and communal lands to grow all sorts of things from fruits to machine parts - while a vast migrant workforce (a la China) provides cheap labor for mobile factory complexes, many run by the state. the sector is known for its food culture of coffee houses and street vendors, where most people buy meals instead of cooking at home. the coffee houses provide many public services, somewhat like convenience store culture in Taiwan. derivations of Maori cuisine are often served as fast food, like kala mata pad thai or hangi barbecue wagons. it is home to the occult trade port Ifezzan, a major node connecting the Stargate Highway to the vast and wild magical portal network; and Sifaks, a nascent superpower riven by tensions within itself and with foreign powers as it seeks to be independent of both Mandate and FTU influence.
across the border, the Mandate-aligned Raladarag Sector is a Southeast Asian-Chinese leaning region locked in civil war, ethnic and religious conflict stoked by the Mandate powers. Buddhism crosses over here somewhat with the sensibilities of American fundamentalism: awkward, out-of-touch conservative media steeped in culture war and sterile megachurch-esque temples. piracy and organized crime is rampant in the region, and it is one of the few Core Worlds sectors where civilian ships are routinely permitted to carry weapons. it is dominated by the Raladarag Nebula, a nebula of breathable air pocked by mysterious mini-suns where much of the sector's population lives, and home to Draeger Polis, a giant transparent balloon of air containing a bustling city operated as a special administrative and economic zone by the Mandate. heavily defended and under tight security, the city is also a haven for gambling and serves as the headquarters for big business and foreign investment in the sector.
the FTU was established ~700 years ago by a powerful trade empire called the Seven Blossoms Wayfarer Republic, a changed version of which still exists today. the SBWR operated a great tapestry of disparate trading hubs and rural colonies, united by a roving elite with tight control of commerce and a fleet of mobile factory-ships. they would go on to establish thousands of new routes and highway towns, and vastly expand traffic across Known Space with massive jumptenders called the Blossomfleet - many still in use, and remembered today as kitschy icons of class and prosperity. and though many have changed ownership over the centuries, the far-flung settlements and cybernetic ecosystems established by the SBWR remain alive today, many swollen into major systems and accumulating rural satellites of their own, weaving the Core Worlds together today by jumptender and by truck.
the Seven Sisters Joint Administrative District is a burgeoning Core Worlds sector dominated by Liruma Polis aka Sylvia, humankind's adopted asteroid homeworld alongside its moons Romulus and Remus, and the beating heart of the capitalist Mandate. its name stands in honor of the mythology of the Pleiades constellation, which may be one of the oldest stories shared by cultures across humankind as far back as 100,000 years ago. Sylvia is a massive Polis, a densely populated space colony, and one of the biggest in Known Space, teeming with tens of billions of people - multiple superpowers and dozens of smaller nations claim territory inside Sylvia, which is almost a star system unto itself.
the United Cantons of Caloocan is an FTU superpower home to a hybrid of Philippine, Viet and Malay culture with Andean and Russian influence, located relatively close to Rubija. governed by an expansive bureaucracy, the government manages large industries and an extensive program of public works projects through the Caloocan Public Works bureau, where people sign up for tours of duty being shuttled around by the government between projects as needed, often living on-site in communal dorms.
Ibadan Peoples' Industrial Covenant, one of the FTU's more "socialist-like" superpowers with broad programs of welfare for its people. this one i've been meaning to do a heavy rethink of economically, so it's less just a vague mash of ideas from 20th century socialist nations, but it's a moneyless society of sprawling megacities pictured here in my post about polises. West and Central African culture dominates here, with streaks of Chinese and Indian influence too.
Folsom-Fremont, a Mandate superpower of mixed North-Central American, Viet and Indonesian heritage. it's somewhat recognizably American to our eyes, but not exactly; and the upswing of popularity of ancient Imperial American culture across the Mandate helps distort it further. your average burger joint is a stall in a hawker center, dressed up like a 50s diner with wait staff in a batik styled after colonial bluecoat duds, and Heelies, and comes with a side of birria pho. home to Seneca Falls and its capital Hillwood Polis, among others.

and that's saying little of alter-human and alien contributions, which i admittedly haven't touched a lot yet. Liruma is a noted hotbed of occult activity, being one of the first advanced "alien" ruins discovered by humankind - a vast ancient city built by the Tauketts, a species of previously unknown spacefaring sentient parrots who fell out of Earth's geological record. the city was also a giant Metric Drive which transported Sylvia into the multiverse, what humans call the Great Abduction.

machine translation is quite advanced by 5555 AD, and knowledge of a language can also be downloaded, so cross-linguistic communication is generally easy, with some exception for differing translation standards and fine subtleties of meaning that are also issues for a human translator; still, various creoles, lingua francas, and forms of language engineering and standardization have seen wide adoption over the centuries. meanwhile, a flourishing xenolinguistics allows not only translating from sentient aliens, but for non-sentient animals and other organisms, especially with animals' intelligence upgraded by ecocybernetics (see further below). in fact, pretty much all organisms and machines in the modern human ecology make use of the net for communication and coordination in one way or another.

prosthetics, cyberware and uploading are highly available for most known sentient species, to varying extents based on how well their biology has been studied. Minaya for example are extensive cyberware users but uploading is still under research and not available yet. with cyberware, bodily autonomy is greatly expanded, with some limits and restrictions; some features are made unavailable or priced out of reach of commoners, while in some nations commoners have free choice of any features they want. but even people stuck with cheaper cyberware are generally more dextrous and more durable than their biological counterparts, capable of absorbing multiple bullet wounds without short-term issue and generally more resilient to permanent physical injury. parkour, skating and the like are popular, lots of people are good at it, and grappling hook launchers can be procured by many commoners. that said, the same time, more is often demanded of them in physical labor. and medical fees and other restrictions on care in many countries prevent many from being in top shape much of the time - making do with malfunctioning parts, hacks, and cruder prostheses.

after a long technological and political struggle, universal immortality via uploading was achieved by the post-Sunshade era of the 23-2400s, culminating from a strong demand for technical labor in the booming orbital economy that dovetailed with mounting socialist agitation for healthcare and mobility into the orbital sectors. many immortals are even older, kept alive by brain-in-a-jar cybernetics, biotech and nanomedicine or even unfrozen from cryonics before uploading. without the afterlife as a goal, religions today focus on the spiritual as it affects people on earth, and messianic religions emphasize working to build the kingdom of heaven on earth, or at least to prepare the world for the day of reunity with the absolute; at the same time, the ranks of atheists have greatly expanded. mind uploading necessarily brought with it both a diverse array of non-human AIs who paved the way for human uploads, and the ability to granularly edit and generate minds from whole cloth, allowing for the eventual abolition of infancy and childhood as we know it among robotized people. more on that here. today, people can download and share thoughts and experiences, cognitive wiring, even whole skills and dispositions (the latter often at a high price) - traditional learning too could be accelerated greatly by neurotech. and even more esoteric transformations of the mind are possible, like merging. meanwhile, the mind's-eye desktop or noetic desktop and AR overlays injected into one's sensory feeds are everyday life for cyberware users. today, due both to cyberware and immortality, the average person is very technically literate and significantly more well-read in general compared to the average person today, though that doesn't mean people don't struggle with technology anymore. in a sense, you could call this the Unglamorous Singularity, or perhaps a Sagan Singularity, as he spoke of future humans:

more confident, far-seeing, capable and prudent.

Infrastructure

ecocybernetics has completely transformed both ecology and industry, with factories and cities often sprouting leaves and roots and directly wired into the forest by utility pipes, wires, and roads for creatures. emerging from the intersection of post-climate-disaster ecological remediation on Earth and colony construction in space, the science of ecosystem modification dovetailed with advancing transhumanity to weave biotech, nanotech and conventional robotics into the forest and weave the forest into factories and cities. at the same time, between collapsing American beef industry and food export imperialism sparked by political unrest and spiking temperatures, other nations exercising greater autonomy from American foreign policy began adopting vegetable, microbial and lab-grown protein as far more efficient alternatives to meat production. some still argue over whether this obviates kosher or halal. meanwhile, predator-prey relationships across the ecology have been abolished in favor of less wasteful and more complex relationships of mutual benefit and coordination. to put it another way: the vegans won, more or less without lifting a finger. a secondary effect is what's called the Pokemon-ization of the ecology: modern flora and fauna are highly colorful, often decorated in elaborate art and digital tattoo.

aside from this, the main functional effects of unifying the ecology with industry are that

industrial products can now be recycled fully by ecosystems, so chemical pollution can be much less of a concern, and it ensures that space colonies and forests can survive indefinitely without outside supply, even on asteroids in hard vacuum - which might be covered in thick groves as much as mossy scrublands.
the "industrial stack" required to maintain starfaring civilization can be majorly shrunk. whereas a Known Space without industrial hybridization might require vast populations of tens or hundreds of millions at minimum to sustain the factories required to build starship and space station parts, ecocybernetics allows key components for the high-tech orbital economy to literally grow on trees, greatly bringing down the bootstrap costs of space colonization.
many things that resemble familiar flora and fauna actually serve quite different functions, and look different from biological counterparts. because the ecosystem is wired into the utility grid, leaves often aren't used for solar power, but for filtering particles and chemicals out of the air and managing wind flow. the "organs" of a cyber-plant might look boxy and angular as easily as organic.
devices and buildings with self-repair capability sport circulatory systems and "organs" to manage healing. these may be relatively concealed, but if you crack your smartphone you will find veins oozing rubbery sealant that quickly scabs over.

still, Standard Candles isn't quite a utopia; ecologies can be weaponized against one another like industries can. not necessarily engaging each other in outright combat or poisoning but targeted incompatibility, embargoes on interaction, closing each other out of nutrient loops, etc.

aside from transhuman technology's effects on education and the workforce at large, one of its most crucial impacts on industry is the ability to transmit "ilities" - highly experiental knowledge that is difficult to convey in words but crucial to the production process. this allows for greatly eased workforce training, technology transfers between nations and industries, and advanced forms of industrial espionage. and in the field of robotics, mechs and worker drones are a common sight at construction worksites, in emergency response, and any area of industry that requires heavy lifting or a surplus of automated labor.

although planetary settlement and scattered "rural" stations are growing increasingly common, over half the population still lives in asteroids and large stations. i want to emphasize that habitat construction is quite freeform and i encourage weird and artful space station designs. hard scifi, and even mainstream scifi often gives the impression that space stations can only look like plain undecorated cylinders and rings or gunmetal grey scrap heaps, but so much is possible if you put a little imagination into it. aside from asteroid caverns, growable megasatellites, centrifuge trains and spinning towers, salad-tossed asteroids, and orbital rings are just a few of the diverse ways orbital colonies can be built. meanwhile on the ground, cavern cities are built into giant low-grav lava tubes, anchored tents provide a much more efficient solution to general colonization than geodesic domes, and ecocybernetic vacuum forests sprawl across otherwise barren planets and asteroids. terraforming for style and aesthetics is also quite common.

water is in plentiful supply in space, especially as a byproduct of processing ice for deuterium fuel. asteroids and comets are mined for most materials, though planets are also mined; to avoid bringing an end to scarcity, often just the cream of the crop deposits are skimmed using relatively poor mining equipment, and in the capitalist world asteroid mining is heavily propped up by state subsidies due to its tight profit margins. many asteroids are made of loose and fragile rocks, and the soil layer on most asteroids is thick and easy to scoop too, meaning much of the work can be easily done with shovels and bucket wheels and tunnels can be bored fairly quick, though slowed by the need to secure them. although mining makes use of conventional machines, it also often takes advantage of cybernetic forests seeded in star systems of interest long in advance of human settlement, which process and leach minerals and metals from the soil and bedrock. systems with rich asteroid ore deposits are collectively called the Sun Belt, because of the extremely bright zodiacal light bands caused by huge amounts of space dust kicked out by mining operations.

planetary mining produces rare earth metals, uranium and thorium, which can't be procured from asteroids. when a lot of planetary mining needs to get started fast, "harbormaker" nukes are buried and detonated once to loosen the rock, and additional nuke(s) are detonated to help crush the ore or frack fluid deposits as necessary. with pure-fusion nukes unlocked long ago, fallout is no longer a concern.

Travel

FTL is carried out by Metric Drives and the broader field of metric technology, which also serve as FTL comms, antigravity/gravity generators, FTL interdiction, reactionless propulsion, and gravity sensors. basically, special generators conjure a shell of exotic matter to manipulate gravity and warp space into special shapes, bound by powerful electromagnets called gravito-magnetic couplers. the main types of FTL are

wormholes, gate-type FTL; expensive to build but good for high traffic links between developed systems, they make up the Stargate Highway, which links much of the Core Worlds and many periphery systems with human population over a few tens of millions, though there are many exceptions.
Krasnikov tubes, which are cheap in SC and basically function like drive-type FTL. K-tubes lurk around all over in space, waiting for a ship to dilate the opening with a Metric Drive and slip inside. traversing them at near lightspeed makes them act as FTL. Metric Drives can also create new K-tubes and move them around. Jumptenders, Jumptrucks, and any FTL-equipped ship use these; Jumptenders provide the backbone of intercosmic trade where wormholes aren't available, and Jumptrucks service both high-traffic and rural systems farther out of the way.

various kinds of magical portals and drives and less-used alternate FTL techs also abound. many cities are actually spread across multiple planets and verses, with traffic and utilities running through magic portals.

multiversal travel, while common, is typically limited to verses that are already linked by a portal of some kind, whether wormhole or K-tube, magical, or alternate tech. due to the insane amounts of data required to capture and process higher-dimensional images and sensor data for navigation, only dedicated explorer ships carrying ultra-powerful computers can safely use their metric drives to "punch out" and freely roam the higher dimensional hyperspace called the Bulk, where other universes can be reached beyond the FTL / portal networks. it's possible for normal ships, but you are flying almost blind by comparison. some cosmoi, called border worlds, are full of portals to other verses.

in-system travel uses a mixture of reactionless Metric Drive propulsion & antigravity, plasma sails, and fusion rocket "torch drives". gravity wells interfere with metric drives, so in harder SF verses you need to be in the outer solar system away from any asteroids to do FTL and reactionless drive mode gets weaker and more expensive further in-system. plasma sails are cheap and cost almost nothing in fuel: they're basically a wire cage of a radio antenna and several large magnets deployed on a long boom, allowing you to surf the solar wind plasma and the edge of planetary magnetic fields to small percentages of lightspeed (real concept btw). fusion rockets and Metric Drive go hand in hand; fusion engines are used to supply the power for exotic matter generation and containment. aside from that, they are used for

travel inside planetary magnetospheres, bad for plasma sailing
when the solar winds are unfavorable
in crowded orbital space where multiple ships' plasma sails would interfere with each other
in combat, and to escape FTL interdiction.

Combat

today, wars are fought not only by guns, electronic warfare and economic manipulation but the myriad fields of magic, nanowarfare, and neurohacking, including memetics and antimemetics - the science of self-keeping secrets, information that hides itself from knowledge. i've written about magical combat before - the use of rear-line support mechs and APCs dedicated to carrying out complex battlefield incantations that can't be done on the front lines; and the way drones, power armor and cyberware makes for front line magic combat empowered by complex and highly choreographed rituals requiring great agility, bounding off walls and darting across great distances at high speed, and also accelerating soldiers' consciousness into bullet time.

this also carries over to the land battlefield at large, not unlike Titanfall combat, or Spiderman, and helps make melee combat more viable. this high performance must be managed by powerful cooling rigs in a soldier's suit backpack; slower, midspeed and "lightning trooper" tiers of gear exist. however, there is a caveat: this tech works best in air or water. in vacuum, without an ambient fluid to serve as a coolant, troopers are limited to bursts of high-performance using expendable coolant packs.

in more permissive verses, or with the help of strong magic, troopers may even teleport or "phase out" using metric tech. and each soldier carries a standard issue of companion drones that live in their pack specialized to their role.

because most people live on space stations, asteroids, and low-gee worlds, dense multilayered urban environments and yawning caverns are common locations for battle. while wheeled vehicles see much use on worlds of lunar gravity and above, mechs commonly fight alongside them there, and are dominant on low-gee worlds. aerial support drones are ubiquitous.

alongside alternative physics, magic can make forms of combat practical that ordinarily wouldn't be. melee can beat guns, and there can be a reason for your power armor to have glowing neon stripes that would be glaringly visible to the enemy. in Standard Candles, it's standard issue for armor to come with display screening across much or all of the body. this can provide a limited form of active camouflage but also is used to display patterns and imagery to aid magic invocations or memetic warfare, hence they are called sigil suits.

due to their ability to easily blind civilians even by small collateral reflections, use of lasers on the battlefield is a contentious topic in more hard-SF verses; softer SF laser weapons that work without blinding enemies are sometimes called "pseudo-lasers". modern governments frequntly issue or subsidize eye protection gear to civilians and a certain degree is built into modern cyber-eyes, but even then, large artillery-class orbital lasers are not permitted within thousands of kilometers of civilian habitats. lasers can also be used as electric shock weapons, ionizing a channel of air for an electron beam to pass through; or to project sound, including deafening noise, inside buildings by vibrating the air.

outside the battlefield itself, enormous magical rituals carried out through dedicated complexes, internet server farms, and mass social engineering can serve as long-range weapons or provide boons to soldiers in the field. industrial and ecological sabotage can be carried out by poisoning enemy nanobots, or introducing neurosoftware and memetic viruses to the populace or even the ecology, even puppeting enemies without their knowing.

orbital combat in harder-SF verses takes place at high speeds of tens or hundreds of kilometers per second and more. deep space combat first involves FTL interdiction. because they are sensitive to gravity, Metric Drives also interfere with one anothers' warp bubbles within an envelope of some thousands of kilometers, so getting a metric drive close enough to the enemy ship will drop them out of high speed warp, though ships that are evenly matched may phase in and out of warp to trade blows. interdiction missiles and mines are expensive but available. plasma sails can be used to add an additional thrust boost when the solar winds are favorable, or around the edge of planetary magnetospheres.

orbital combat is heavy on drones and missiles, with carriers and missile barges being core components of a fleet, but beam weapons and guns are also in heavy use, with lasers playing key roles in menacing and burning out enemy sensors. CIWS flak cannons are used to shoot down drones and incoming hypervelocity (railgun/coilgun) shells. small interceptor capital ships equipped with special souped-up nuclear pulse drives and interdiction-hardened metric drives carry particle beams / ion cannons to disable enemy missile swarms and fry electronics, phasing in and out of realspace to evade return fire. magic is also in heavy use, with "controlled environment carriers" for enormous magic rituals being even more effective in space among other things. sensor pickets bristling with telescopes, radar and sensor drone launchers provide detection and early warning for fleets and colonies, while stealth missile platforms with massive elongated cooling systems to hide their infrared profile serve a similar role to submarines.

as a fun aside, Known Space astromilitaries often use alternate terminology for "fleets":

battlestar - large capital ship
asterism - capship battlegroup
constellation - regional fleet
zodiac - national fleet

Mothership Safira (18+)

Overview

Mothership Safira takes place in the Tourmaline Reach, part of a galactic arm in a universe populated by fantasy creatures that has fallen prey to a vast exocosmic invasion. pockets and holdouts of interstellar civilization and varying tech levels persist amid countless sectors twisted by nightmarish presences that distort matter and the psyche, bringing billions of worlds to ruin and making travel fraught with danger. to counter this, magical fighters piloting mechs and skimpy power armor use the psychic power of cute sex, love and friendship to turn back the nightmares and rescue the lost.

the universe was created long ago by the Dragon Mothers, who brought all good things into creation through their lovemaking. all was well for a time as they gave life to countless species, until exocosmic invaders waged the First Nightmare War in the deep past, which exhausted the Mothers' powers and left cosmic civilization poisoned, fragmenting into squabbling factions as the great dragons slipped into dormancy. at this time, the Motherships were established, nomadic city-ships roving the universe to solve problems and heal thorny relationships.

although the decline of their cosmic prosperity is horrific from the locals' perspective, the universe left behind by the Mothers is still essentially a socialist utopia by human standards. despite their squabbles and disagreements, conflict between factions rarely leaves lasting damage, and nothing that can't be healed; and all people are immortals who take good care of each other. people are also much more durable - fights obey cartoon superhero and shonen anime rules, where people can be smashed through buildings and boulders with hardly a scratch. the endgame of a physical fight is a knockout or banishment, not a grievous injury or worse. predator and prey relationships do not exist in the ecosystem - instead, they are ecocybernetic biomes (see the Infrastructure section in Standard Candles) where forest spirits and creatures mutually coordinate the function of the ecology and movement of nutrients.

as in Standard Candles, FTL space travel is fast but still takes some time; it could take decades to fully travel from one end of the galaxy to the other, even with the fastest ships.

Species

while mythic and common fantasy furry species are emphasized, all kinds of species, derivative and original, can be found across the verse. the boundaries of mythic and fantasy species are subject to much variation, especially as they've spread out across the universe; it's easy to explain completely different types of kobold as hailing from different Motherships or different faraway planets.

some notable species include:

Dragons & Kobolds: the species of the Mothers are born as kobolds and become dragons when they are elected to queenhood in an intense and joyous transformation spurred by the magical force of the people's will. kobolds are short, and most dragons grow quite tall, though some remain not much taller than they were as kobolds. they span a range of scaly and feathery phenotypes, but always have horns of some kind. dragons, even those without wings, are capable of flight and wielding ultra-powerful magics.

The Elder Sisters are the earliest species who were created by the Mothers, architects of some of the most ancient civilizations alongside the early generations of dragons, and are thought to have fought in the dawn wars against the first corruption. among their ranks:

Gnolls are hyena women who commonly possess a raspy or gravelly voice and are frequently bulky and muscular or particularly tall, sleek, and agile; they are also extraordinarily heat-tolerant, and they possess particular linguistic processing abilities that let them easily translate and speak the languages of suns, and call upon their magic. their semen notably possesses the magical ability to aid sensory-motor coordination and muscle development.
Tanuki tend to be of stockier, chubbier builds overflowing with fluff, with highly rounded silhouettes. they are noted for their high fertility and volume of sperm; their already immense balls are capable of expanding much further and provide an extremely soft and comfortable shelter or shield for themselves or others that shields them from many dangers, both mundane and magical. they possess telepathic powers. Tanuki can affect the perceptions of others in their vicinity with training, but are particularly strong at noetic engineering - the creation and manipulation of mental constructs and phenomena. through special songs she can play by rapping her paws on her tummy, a tanuki can bring others into a shared trance with her where she can implement new thoughtforms in a receptive mind, and share feelings and sensations or even control between bodies.
Kitsune tend to be relatively slim and highly flexible, good at balancing, and fast runners. like their tanuki sisters, they are capable of playing with perception. they can breathe a fog that emits and bends light, and can further weave it through the air with their agile paws and tail (or tails). Kitsune communicate heavily through visuals in this way, flashing words and images to one another through flickers of light on their breath. additionally, they naturally possess advanced shapeshifting abilities that make them easily capable of interfacing and even merging with an extreme variety of organisms. in this way, they are particularly capable at diagnosing problems and communicating with the ecologies and their steward spirits.

i should note that not everyone in the verse is a girl, despite what it might sound like thus far; all genders are welcome.

people come in a variety of sizes as well as shapes, from mousey critters to sky-scraping giants like the Dragon Mothers. biology in Mothership Safira is also not really like biology as we know it, but more like (usually) soft and squishy growable robots, so more "machine-looking" robots are also common and able to breed with their squishy counterparts. indeed, many mechs are sentient themselves and share relationships with their pilot(s).

Cultures & Locales

so far i've only really developed Mothership society as a specific example of culture, but you're welcome to add whatever civilizations you like that broadly fit the vibe of the setting. even with most of it in ruins, the galaxy is still a big place full of diverse people.

the Motherships are nomadic and semi-nomadic flotillas roving the stars to provide aid and weave together large communities. some Motherships serve as distribution centers and factories for more rural systems, while others haul freight between populous systems or provide a mobile military base against the nightmares, among other possibilities. inside a Mothership is a snugly packed cityscape of tunnel streets and sections of more open air for frolicking. on Safira, people eat at communal inns where buffet style long tables are flanked by smaller horigotatsu-esque recessed-floor seating for more private conversation.

each Mothership's denizens are linked to each other into a quasi-collective consciousness by a sort of psychic or "noetic" internet maintained by tanuki engineers, allowing them to dive into each others' dreams and freely share thoughts. Motherships are led by an elected Queen and the flotilla as a whole is led by a High Queen - usually, though not always, a dragon. when a kobold becomes Queen, the magic of the peoples' will coalesces in her to transform her into a dragon. the Queen is also quite literally a friend of her people - strange as it might sound, everyone knows her personally as a friend with the help of the noetic dreamnet, an arrangement of trust that is carefully maintained. exact details of how this works are still pending, but i find it a fun concept to explore.

Santina is an ancient city of the Sixteen Songs Republic that is a hub of sector industry and culture, home to a big population of gnolls. not much to say about it beyond that yet.

tech levels vary across the Tourmaline Reach and the broader universe; worlds of more or less medieval infrastructure are relatively common, some fortunate to be linked together by portals or low-tech spaceships grown from enchanted trees, allowing travel between worlds.

The Power of Love

affection, pleasure and cum, in all its forms, are the source of much magical power in the universe of the Dragon Mothers. the power of love, sexual, romantic, and otherwise, can charge and cast spells, enchant items, and provide healing and boons both physical and psychic.

a gnoll scholar might gain the power to access deep memories of faraway stars from her boyfriend riding her dick for a week while tied to her by shibari ropes. an elf transforming into a giant wolf might also be empowered by their joy to broadcast a healing aura to the nearby town. a mech might gain the ability to jump between systems from its pilots sharing deeply held fantasies. and so forth.

Combat & the Nightmare Wars

unfettered enjoyment, pleasure, and sexuality are antithetical to the inscrutable forces behind the Nightmares (pending a better name lol, pls feel free to suggest), which corrupt worlds into surreal dreamscapes filled with cryptic spirits and distorted versions of their inhabitants obeying strange rules of behavior. shame and disempowerment gives their world strength, deepening the nightmare and making it more difficult to traverse space, transporting you suddenly to another dreamscape when you turn around, trapping you in strange rooms, and so forth. love gives the power to push through and impose sense and form onto reality.

the Nightmares are guarded by a variety of Bailiffs, the name for powerful spirits not only capable of holding their own against powerful mechs and orbital attacks but of radically transforming the world around them and unleashing cognitohazards, hijacking the minds of their enemies and playing to their weaknesses, or even puppeting them without their knowing. different worlds host different Nightmares and different Bailiffs, linked to the fears of the collective unconscious of local society.

i hope that gives you sufficient material and some inspiration for whatever you create in my worlds! i'm happy people want to share in them.

Lavender Skies

@lavenderskies

post enjoyer

Standard Candles

Overview

The pancosmos (multiverse)

Magic

Politics

Culture & Economics

Infrastructure

Travel

Combat

Mothership Safira (18+)

Overview

Species

Cultures & Locales

The Power of Love

Combat & the Nightmare Wars