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Civilization has existed for a long time. Not long in the cosmic sense, not in the sense of the lifetime of the Earth, maybe not even in the timeline of human evolution. But in the mind of modern man, humans have long thrived in what we know as civilization. Man has accomplished great things in this time; agriculture, the wheel, writing, the great monuments of the ancient age, science, medicine, the eradication of disease, control of the atom, flight. Man even went to the moon. In many ways, man had come to tame the Earth, able to endure all but the greatest threats, the most lethal dangers.
But that time has passed. For all his glory, all his accomplishments, man was never ever to overcome his greatest challenge; himself.
Let’s take a step back, to when man went to the moon. This was the product of the Space Race. The First Space Race. The result of rivalry between two mighty super-powers, the United States and the USSR. It was a sideshow in a greater game; the arms race and international competition that was the Cold War. For nearly 4 and a half decades, man sat on the brink of his own destruction, the constant threat of nuclear war hanging over a world rushing full-speed into the modern era. Ultimately, the Cold War died on its own; the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 spelled the end of the Cold War and the tension that had long seemed poised to tear the world apart.
Man had survived his great challenge. His greatest threat. And he had learned, for once, a lesson.
Or had he?
Despite the triumph of the end of the Cold War, the threat of global war would rear its ugly once more. Following the Russian Federation’s annexation of the Ukraine in June 2016 and the integration of Belarus that September, the United States and its NATO alliance looked once again with fear and concern to the East. Tensions flared as Russia announced its intention to marginalizing the power and perceived hegemony of the West; transforming the Shanghai Cooperation Organization into a formal military alliance like NATO and like the Warsaw Pact before it, uniting Russia, China, and India in common defense. The Cold War arms race began anew, and mankind once again began his march towards Armageddon. A new demon had been born in the heat of this new global friction, KEM, orbital kinetic weaponry, made possible by advances in space launch technology made, ironically, in the period of space cooperation between the US and Russia following the first Cold War.
KEM was a truly fearsome weapon, dropping simple metal rods at high velocity from orbit to the Earth’s surface, yielding unimaginable devastation to any point on the Earth’s surface, anytime, and without a moment’s notice. Unlike the nuclear deterrent of the first Cold War, there was no forewarning, no time period between launch and impact that attacks could be detected. Only the destruction of the target signalled its use. Mankind’s already quick trigger finger seemed to grow even more restless.
The US was the first to militarize space, putting a number of KEM satellites into service by 2021. Russia quickly followed suit with its own fleet, followed in short order by NATO support for the US mission. China opted to equip its terrestrial forces with anti-satellite missiles in hopes of knocking out KEM stations in event of conflict, and India focused its efforts on a system to intercept KEM, or as some had begun to call it “Thor’s Hammer”.
The Space Arms Race, a demented child of the Space Race from the era before, was still but a slideshow to the growing global tension. Russia federalized the Central Asian republics in April 2022, nearly completely reestablishing the former Soviet Union. Galvanized by this development, the European Union voted to federalize itself the following August, establishing a sovereign authority over the rest of Europe. Japan, Australia, South Korea, Israel, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Brazil had all joined a reorganized NATO by the beginning of 2023, and the global strife resulted in the disbandment of the United Nations on July 16th, 2023. In an effort to secure their own well-being, the Arab states of North Africa and the Middle East formed a non-aligned Arab Confederation, drawing the ire of both the SCO and NATO. By 2024, tensions between the Arab Confederation and Iran had erupted into full-scale war; Iran, supported by China, pushed deep into the Arabian Peninsula, reaching the Red Sea by August of 2024. By January 2025, the Arabs had managed to repel the Iranian invaders, but in a last-ditch effort to secure victory the Iranians set fire to the Saudi oil fields, causing a worldwide shortage, before a peace was agreed to in May 2025. The burning of the Saudi oil fields set a global rush in motion; nations with oil supplies quickly depleted much of their available reserves, oil exploration and the building of new wells hardly keeping up with the panic.
The oil shortage really set the dominoes in motion; in November, 2025, a military coup in an India crippled by the lack of oil removed the world’s most populous democracy and replacing it with a pseudo-fascist state. In China, the oil shortage sparked nationwide anti-government protest, and in the United States oil rationing created a heated debate in Congress and calls for war, grinding the American government to a halt. In April 2026, American tanks under an executive order, rolled across the border into Mexico in an effort to secure a new source of petroleum, prompting a mass exodus of Latin American states into the SCO, only Colombia and Peru remaining aligned with the US. By October, border skirmishes had begun to break out along the EU-Russia border. Remaining oil reserves in other countries were quickly exhausted by their owners, drawing aggression towards less-developed nations with remaining oil reserves. In December, Pakistan formally announced entry to NATO, threatened by the SCO nations India, Iran, and China surrounding them on all sides. Fascist India openly condemned the induction, escalating tensions to their highest since the first deployment of KEM. Diplomatic overtures failed, and by Fall 2027, military forces worldwide were mobilized at high alert, the two blocs reaching deep into their strategic oil reserves to give their militaries one last breath of life. The world had become a powder keg. Much like during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 6 decades before, mankind stared down the barrel of his own destruction.
But this time, he would not get away.
On the morning of February 17th, 2028, an explosion leveled the city of Kazan, Russia. Perhaps it was an industrial explosion. Perhaps a cosmic impact event. Perhaps a KEM test misfire. It really doesn’t matter at this point; it would prove to be the spark the global powder keg needed. Mistaking, perhaps, the destruction of Kazan as a preemptive strike against Russia, the Russian military readied its own retaliatory strike, quickly picked up by US spy satellites. An emergency phone call between the US President and EU Prime Minister to the Russian government yielding no answers, Europe placed its nuclear forces on high alert, lacking a KEM force of its own. Russian TU-142 patrol aircraft, noticing the surfacing of French nuclear missile submarine Le Terrible, radioed the information back to Moscow, “confirming” the Russian suspicion a strategic attack was inbound. Seeking to ensure its own survival, Russia threw the first punch. “Thor’s Hammer” thundered across the sky, KEM projectiles raining down on Europe, North America, and Asia. Minutes later Europe retaliated to this WMD attack with WMD’s of its own, the SLBM’s of its missile submarine fleet set in flight towards Russian and targets. Ballistic missiles attacks being far less subtle than KEM, the volley attracted worldwide attention. China, also without KEM, launched its own missiles, victimizing primarily Asian NATO, followed quickly by India’s nuclear assault on Pakistan and Europe. American KEM began to fire, striking throughout the SCO, followed by American SLBM’s and ICBM’s. In an attempt to halt the counter-attack, Russia let loose its own nuclear stockpile, most exploding as airbursts in an attempt to freeze America and Europe with the use of EMPs. Seeking opportunity in the chaos, Iranian bombers and missiles stuck deep into the Arab Confederation and Israel, but not without a nuclear response from Israel itself. Brazil attempted to mobilize to invade its SCO neighbors, but was stopped short by a surprise barrage of Russian KEM. Only Africa stood truly untouched by the apocalyptic exchange of WMD’s.
All in all, the war lasted around 90 minutes. Nuclear devastated land stretched across the globe, though seeming insignificant in scale compared to efficient destructive power of “Thor’s Hammer.” The global electric grid completely wiped out by EMPs, it was almost like the modern age disappeared into the dark; the electric infrastructure that once lit the world being all but made useless, far worse than the predictions of pre-war science. Nearly 1/3 of the world’s population was wiped out in the barrage, major cities in belligerent countries the worst victims, rural areas far from military bases and major cities faring somewhat better. In the following 30 days, further death occurred, with radiation, disease, and famine causing worldwide casualties reducing the global population to ½ of pre-war levels. With modern civilization all but wiped out, governments collapsed, civil war and uprising became rampant. 3 months after the cataclysm, a strain of influenza ripped through Brazil and most of South America, and without a modern healthcare system to control it, the pandemic began its trip throughout global population. By 1 year after the cataclysm, a nuclear winter had set in, causing further starvation and famine. By 2 years, the population had fallen to 3/8 of pre-war levels. By 30 months after the cataclysm, the influenza pandemic had reached Africa, tearing through its population and causing mass government collapse in the one area of the Earth largely untouched by the global conflict. By 3 years, the last pre-war government in South Africa collapsed, leaving the world mostly to unclaimed, unorganized anarchy, though some local sovereign entities had by then begun to emerge. By 5 years, the nuclear winter had finally settled, the pandemic finally dispersed, food production returning, wildlife thriving, the mighty Earth seeming to have repaired the damage its most troublesome inhabitants had caused. But civilization was not so lucky; with global population having stabilized at 1/5 of pre-war levels, man’s time of dominance seems to have come to an end.
Though for all his weaknesses, man has one strength he shares with the Earth itself; resilience.
Now, 10 years after the cataclysm, that resilience is apparent. Locally sovereign governments have risen, some new, some built in Old War tradition, though most of the world remains unclaimed. Populations have stabilized. The electrical grid has not been restored, electronics still decimated by the EMPs, modern supply chains not able to be established, and oil production nearly impossible due, but man has rediscovered that the old technology steam power still has use. The horse has regained its utility from the car, steam locomotives have begun to labor once more, steam ships again prowling the earth’s waters. The monuments and knowledge of the Old World remain, though, and perhaps these new civilizations of man can learn to use the framework his forefathers left behind.
The future is on our hands. Let us rebuild our planet and ensure mankind’s survival. Let us restore our former glory and undue our predecessors mistakes, using their strengths. Our strengths.
But with fewer of their weaknesses...
Read the next post (25000 character limit)
Please do not post on this thread unless you are roleplaying or joining the game. Take all other discussion to the off-topic thread. Questions and other things are welcome there.
Civilization has existed for a long time. Not long in the cosmic sense, not in the sense of the lifetime of the Earth, maybe not even in the timeline of human evolution. But in the mind of modern man, humans have long thrived in what we know as civilization. Man has accomplished great things in this time; agriculture, the wheel, writing, the great monuments of the ancient age, science, medicine, the eradication of disease, control of the atom, flight. Man even went to the moon. In many ways, man had come to tame the Earth, able to endure all but the greatest threats, the most lethal dangers.
But that time has passed. For all his glory, all his accomplishments, man was never ever to overcome his greatest challenge; himself.
Let’s take a step back, to when man went to the moon. This was the product of the Space Race. The First Space Race. The result of rivalry between two mighty super-powers, the United States and the USSR. It was a sideshow in a greater game; the arms race and international competition that was the Cold War. For nearly 4 and a half decades, man sat on the brink of his own destruction, the constant threat of nuclear war hanging over a world rushing full-speed into the modern era. Ultimately, the Cold War died on its own; the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 spelled the end of the Cold War and the tension that had long seemed poised to tear the world apart.
Man had survived his great challenge. His greatest threat. And he had learned, for once, a lesson.
Or had he?
Despite the triumph of the end of the Cold War, the threat of global war would rear its ugly once more. Following the Russian Federation’s annexation of the Ukraine in June 2016 and the integration of Belarus that September, the United States and its NATO alliance looked once again with fear and concern to the East. Tensions flared as Russia announced its intention to marginalizing the power and perceived hegemony of the West; transforming the Shanghai Cooperation Organization into a formal military alliance like NATO and like the Warsaw Pact before it, uniting Russia, China, and India in common defense. The Cold War arms race began anew, and mankind once again began his march towards Armageddon. A new demon had been born in the heat of this new global friction, KEM, orbital kinetic weaponry, made possible by advances in space launch technology made, ironically, in the period of space cooperation between the US and Russia following the first Cold War.
KEM was a truly fearsome weapon, dropping simple metal rods at high velocity from orbit to the Earth’s surface, yielding unimaginable devastation to any point on the Earth’s surface, anytime, and without a moment’s notice. Unlike the nuclear deterrent of the first Cold War, there was no forewarning, no time period between launch and impact that attacks could be detected. Only the destruction of the target signalled its use. Mankind’s already quick trigger finger seemed to grow even more restless.
The US was the first to militarize space, putting a number of KEM satellites into service by 2021. Russia quickly followed suit with its own fleet, followed in short order by NATO support for the US mission. China opted to equip its terrestrial forces with anti-satellite missiles in hopes of knocking out KEM stations in event of conflict, and India focused its efforts on a system to intercept KEM, or as some had begun to call it “Thor’s Hammer”.
The Space Arms Race, a demented child of the Space Race from the era before, was still but a slideshow to the growing global tension. Russia federalized the Central Asian republics in April 2022, nearly completely reestablishing the former Soviet Union. Galvanized by this development, the European Union voted to federalize itself the following August, establishing a sovereign authority over the rest of Europe. Japan, Australia, South Korea, Israel, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Brazil had all joined a reorganized NATO by the beginning of 2023, and the global strife resulted in the disbandment of the United Nations on July 16th, 2023. In an effort to secure their own well-being, the Arab states of North Africa and the Middle East formed a non-aligned Arab Confederation, drawing the ire of both the SCO and NATO. By 2024, tensions between the Arab Confederation and Iran had erupted into full-scale war; Iran, supported by China, pushed deep into the Arabian Peninsula, reaching the Red Sea by August of 2024. By January 2025, the Arabs had managed to repel the Iranian invaders, but in a last-ditch effort to secure victory the Iranians set fire to the Saudi oil fields, causing a worldwide shortage, before a peace was agreed to in May 2025. The burning of the Saudi oil fields set a global rush in motion; nations with oil supplies quickly depleted much of their available reserves, oil exploration and the building of new wells hardly keeping up with the panic.
The oil shortage really set the dominoes in motion; in November, 2025, a military coup in an India crippled by the lack of oil removed the world’s most populous democracy and replacing it with a pseudo-fascist state. In China, the oil shortage sparked nationwide anti-government protest, and in the United States oil rationing created a heated debate in Congress and calls for war, grinding the American government to a halt. In April 2026, American tanks under an executive order, rolled across the border into Mexico in an effort to secure a new source of petroleum, prompting a mass exodus of Latin American states into the SCO, only Colombia and Peru remaining aligned with the US. By October, border skirmishes had begun to break out along the EU-Russia border. Remaining oil reserves in other countries were quickly exhausted by their owners, drawing aggression towards less-developed nations with remaining oil reserves. In December, Pakistan formally announced entry to NATO, threatened by the SCO nations India, Iran, and China surrounding them on all sides. Fascist India openly condemned the induction, escalating tensions to their highest since the first deployment of KEM. Diplomatic overtures failed, and by Fall 2027, military forces worldwide were mobilized at high alert, the two blocs reaching deep into their strategic oil reserves to give their militaries one last breath of life. The world had become a powder keg. Much like during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 6 decades before, mankind stared down the barrel of his own destruction.
But this time, he would not get away.
On the morning of February 17th, 2028, an explosion leveled the city of Kazan, Russia. Perhaps it was an industrial explosion. Perhaps a cosmic impact event. Perhaps a KEM test misfire. It really doesn’t matter at this point; it would prove to be the spark the global powder keg needed. Mistaking, perhaps, the destruction of Kazan as a preemptive strike against Russia, the Russian military readied its own retaliatory strike, quickly picked up by US spy satellites. An emergency phone call between the US President and EU Prime Minister to the Russian government yielding no answers, Europe placed its nuclear forces on high alert, lacking a KEM force of its own. Russian TU-142 patrol aircraft, noticing the surfacing of French nuclear missile submarine Le Terrible, radioed the information back to Moscow, “confirming” the Russian suspicion a strategic attack was inbound. Seeking to ensure its own survival, Russia threw the first punch. “Thor’s Hammer” thundered across the sky, KEM projectiles raining down on Europe, North America, and Asia. Minutes later Europe retaliated to this WMD attack with WMD’s of its own, the SLBM’s of its missile submarine fleet set in flight towards Russian and targets. Ballistic missiles attacks being far less subtle than KEM, the volley attracted worldwide attention. China, also without KEM, launched its own missiles, victimizing primarily Asian NATO, followed quickly by India’s nuclear assault on Pakistan and Europe. American KEM began to fire, striking throughout the SCO, followed by American SLBM’s and ICBM’s. In an attempt to halt the counter-attack, Russia let loose its own nuclear stockpile, most exploding as airbursts in an attempt to freeze America and Europe with the use of EMPs. Seeking opportunity in the chaos, Iranian bombers and missiles stuck deep into the Arab Confederation and Israel, but not without a nuclear response from Israel itself. Brazil attempted to mobilize to invade its SCO neighbors, but was stopped short by a surprise barrage of Russian KEM. Only Africa stood truly untouched by the apocalyptic exchange of WMD’s.
All in all, the war lasted around 90 minutes. Nuclear devastated land stretched across the globe, though seeming insignificant in scale compared to efficient destructive power of “Thor’s Hammer.” The global electric grid completely wiped out by EMPs, it was almost like the modern age disappeared into the dark; the electric infrastructure that once lit the world being all but made useless, far worse than the predictions of pre-war science. Nearly 1/3 of the world’s population was wiped out in the barrage, major cities in belligerent countries the worst victims, rural areas far from military bases and major cities faring somewhat better. In the following 30 days, further death occurred, with radiation, disease, and famine causing worldwide casualties reducing the global population to ½ of pre-war levels. With modern civilization all but wiped out, governments collapsed, civil war and uprising became rampant. 3 months after the cataclysm, a strain of influenza ripped through Brazil and most of South America, and without a modern healthcare system to control it, the pandemic began its trip throughout global population. By 1 year after the cataclysm, a nuclear winter had set in, causing further starvation and famine. By 2 years, the population had fallen to 3/8 of pre-war levels. By 30 months after the cataclysm, the influenza pandemic had reached Africa, tearing through its population and causing mass government collapse in the one area of the Earth largely untouched by the global conflict. By 3 years, the last pre-war government in South Africa collapsed, leaving the world mostly to unclaimed, unorganized anarchy, though some local sovereign entities had by then begun to emerge. By 5 years, the nuclear winter had finally settled, the pandemic finally dispersed, food production returning, wildlife thriving, the mighty Earth seeming to have repaired the damage its most troublesome inhabitants had caused. But civilization was not so lucky; with global population having stabilized at 1/5 of pre-war levels, man’s time of dominance seems to have come to an end.
Though for all his weaknesses, man has one strength he shares with the Earth itself; resilience.
Now, 10 years after the cataclysm, that resilience is apparent. Locally sovereign governments have risen, some new, some built in Old War tradition, though most of the world remains unclaimed. Populations have stabilized. The electrical grid has not been restored, electronics still decimated by the EMPs, modern supply chains not able to be established, and oil production nearly impossible due, but man has rediscovered that the old technology steam power still has use. The horse has regained its utility from the car, steam locomotives have begun to labor once more, steam ships again prowling the earth’s waters. The monuments and knowledge of the Old World remain, though, and perhaps these new civilizations of man can learn to use the framework his forefathers left behind.
The future is on our hands. Let us rebuild our planet and ensure mankind’s survival. Let us restore our former glory and undue our predecessors mistakes, using their strengths. Our strengths.
But with fewer of their weaknesses...
Read the next post (25000 character limit)
Please do not post on this thread unless you are roleplaying or joining the game. Take all other discussion to the off-topic thread. Questions and other things are welcome there.
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