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Description

Originally a cold lifeless rocky planet orbiting at the outer edge of the goldilocks zone of Dalim, the primary component of Alpha Fornacis, the planet was originally simply classified as "α For I" after being surveyed in 2059 and largely ignored by the nations and megacorporations of Earth as unsuitable for human colonization and too distant and heavy for astrominging operations to be profitable. Indeed, the combination of a gravity well steeper than most lifeless worlds but still too shallow to be a strategically valuable FTL node, a crust rich in water ice, nitrates, and phosphates but poor in rare metals and minerals, and a thin atmosphere just thick and turbulent enough to make reentry a danger for early human ground-to-orbit shuttles ensured that the planet and system as a whole was quickly forgotten by the UN authorities and humanity at large with little more than a cursory scientific mission concluding it might be possible to terraform sometime in the future.
In 2075 the ICS Longterm Vision arrived with a quarter million engineers, technical experts, and medical professionals part of the biotechnicist movement to spearhead a private colonization effort and declaring the Ascension Project. Motivated purely by a pro-expansion trans-humanist socioeconomic idealism, the project was immediately dismissed and discredited by the major political powers on Earth and the nascent colonies as dead on arrival, with not even the United Nations Office of Extraterrestrial Affairs seeing any need to evict or regulate them, expecting the project to fail within a couple years. For the biotechnicists on Forestall however, this lack of oversight and meddling allowed them a higher degree of industrial and scientific flexibility, becoming a prominent fixture of human bioscience and agriscience development within a decade and using their scientific assets and legal limbo to drastically alter their metabolism and cognitive abilities with CRISPR techniques illegal elsewhere. While widely regarded as little more than a scientific-ideological venture and thus considered unimportant for human astropolitics at the time of The Insurgencies at the end of the 21st century, the relative prosperity and stability compared to Earth made it an appealing destination for idealists and climate refugees, the colony growing primarily from migration until the start of their terraformation project in 2105 precluded continued migration. The use of communal reproductive practices bolstered with flask cloning and a loosened family structure of raising the next generation within the community led to a sharp growth in population and industrial capabilities anyhow, rivaling the economic and industrial might of the mainland European Confederacy by the mid 22nd century, and surpassing their population in 2200.
The history of Forestall and the Ascension Project has largely been one of stability, cooperation and discourse, sparsely punctuated by brief conflicts such as the 2298 Pamyat-Elysium war, where Forestall joined forces with Pamyat, Eridani, and Serrio to intervene against the indentured servitude of modified humans and synthetics, and the 2401 Eridani War to liberate Serene from Atlantis after news got out about the systematic purges carried out by Atlantean authorities.
Importing materials from the stellar debris disk around Alpha Fornacis to fuel their industries, the forestallers have made good progress on terraforming the planet by melting ice under concentrated orbital solar power arrays, and feeding the nitrates, oxides, and phosphates making up most of the crust into semi-autonomous soil irrigation complexes; the world now has cold oceans teeming with engineered fish, frozen forests of hardy modified pines, ferns, and lichen along the equator, and an atmosphere thick enough to spread snowfall globally and retain greenhouse gasses.
The government of Forestall is called the Forestall Ascendancy; a system of democratic institutions, worker cooperatives, and communal resident councils at times more resembling a formalized social network or web of socioeconomic employee unions than a government; nonetheless, the functionality of deliberation and decision making greatly resembles a consensus democracy presiding over a highly unrestricted and lightly regulated society operating on a decentralized syndicate economy blurring the lines of anarcho-collectivist and left-libertarian theories. While all forestallers go through a year of mandatory service, this is not included among their military forces and ranges all the way from civil defense to terraforming logistics. The forestallers themselves have been sufficiently diverged from baseline humans to be classified as a distinct subspecies for 350 years owing to their vast genetic modifications and enhancements derived from lizards introduced in the 2090ies, and are one of the most populous modified human sects - second only to the novans, and are likely to overtake them as the Forestaller populations are still growing.
Orbiting at Forestall's trailing L5 Lagrange Point, Charchorion Station is at fifty trillion tons one of the largest space habitats in human space; originally an astromining hub built in 2089 to headquarter the mining efforts of the Alpha Fornacis stellar debris disk and refine the materials before shipping to Forestall, the station has grown with the rest of the system and today poses a significant service sector and amenities trade for the spacers who keep the astromining and solar energy arrays running, being considered by most a stronghold and provisional homeworld of the makos, a human subspecies gengineered to thrive in deep-space conditions and avoid health complications with mods derived from lamniforms. Although the forestallers outpopulate them over two hundred to one and most makos are spread out across the human core systems, the two subspecies have a long shared history of mutual dependence, interests, and positive interactions, with the majority of both races considering each other as sibling nations. Although Charchorion Station has a listed permanent population of 8.5 million, more than any other artificial structure in human space, less than half of the residents are station-side at any given time with the rest working the space economy, and during peak periods of visits the total population can exceed 11 million.
Thanks to the close relationships to the makos and the various other self-modified human subspecies Forestall enjoys, their space elevators and connecting cities have garnered a reputation as some of the most multicultural and ecumenical nexuses within human space, with a large galaxy-wide tourism draw fueling significant amenity and exotic arts industries as well as forming the basis of some of the largest entertainment and titillating media concerns in the human sphere.
Forestall is a fully independent state, but subscribes to numerous Earth United Nations treaties to maintain their neutrality and trade networks as well as being a compliant non-signatory to Starfarer Ring agreements such as the Kunarii Accords, Articles of Colonization, Universal Sapients' Rights Convention, and the First Contacts Protocol.
Orbits: Dalim, 1.4 AU.
Mean temperature: -2 Celsius.
Surface gravity: 0.76 G.
atmosphere: 0.57 bar, 38% oxygen, 25% carbon dioxide.
Mean elevation: 4 435 metres ASL.
Day/night cycle: 129 hours.
Capital: Vision.
Population: 5.9 billion.
GNP: 29.8 trillion credits.
Natural satellites:
- Diversity: 80 million population. Houses major civilian industries, FTL fuel refineries, and flight yards.
- Opportunity: 1.5 million population. Holds significant FTL comm-arrays.
Military:
- Forestall Defense Space Command: 40 battlecruisers, 180 carriers, 720 cruisers, 8640 fighter craft.
- Forestall Defense Ground Command: 5.9 million combatants, 590 000 combat vehicles, 17700 fighter craft.
Colony founded: 2075.

Description

Originally a cold lifeless rocky planet orbiting at the outer edge of the goldilocks zone of Dalim, the primary component of Alpha Fornacis, the planet was originally simply classified as "α For I" after being surveyed in 2059 and largely ignored by the nations and megacorporations of Earth as unsuitable for human colonization and too distant and heavy for astrominging operations to be profitable. Indeed, the combination of a gravity well steeper than most lifeless worlds but still too shallow to be a strategically valuable FTL node, a crust rich in water ice, nitrates, and phosphates but poor in rare metals and minerals, and a thin atmosphere just thick and turbulent enough to make reentry a danger for early human ground-to-orbit shuttles ensured that the planet and system as a whole was quickly forgotten by the UN authorities and humanity at large with little more than a cursory scientific mission concluding it might be possible to terraform sometime in the future.
In 2075 the ICS Longterm Vision arrived with a quarter million engineers, technical experts, and medical professionals part of the biotechnicist movement to spearhead a private colonization effort and declaring the Ascension Project. Motivated purely by a pro-expansion trans-humanist socioeconomic idealism, the project was immediately dismissed and discredited by the major political powers on Earth and the nascent colonies as dead on arrival, with not even the United Nations Office of Extraterrestrial Affairs seeing any need to evict or regulate them, expecting the project to fail within a couple years. For the biotechnicists on Forestall however, this lack of oversight and meddling allowed them a higher degree of industrial and scientific flexibility, becoming a prominent fixture of human bioscience and agriscience development within a decade and using their scientific assets and legal limbo to drastically alter their metabolism and cognitive abilities with CRISPR techniques illegal elsewhere. While widely regarded as little more than a scientific-ideological venture and thus considered unimportant for human astropolitics at the time of The Insurgencies at the end of the 21st century, the relative prosperity and stability compared to Earth made it an appealing destination for idealists and climate refugees, the colony growing primarily from migration until the start of their terraformation project in 2105 precluded continued migration. The use of communal reproductive practices bolstered with flask cloning and a loosened family structure of raising the next generation within the community led to a sharp growth in population and industrial capabilities anyhow, rivaling the economic and industrial might of the mainland European Confederacy by the mid 22nd century, and surpassing their population in 2200.
The history of Forestall and the Ascension Project has largely been one of stability, cooperation and discourse, sparsely punctuated by brief conflicts such as the 2298 Pamyat-Elysium war, where Forestall joined forces with Pamyat, Eridani, and Serrio to intervene against the indentured servitude of modified humans and synthetics, and the 2401 Eridani War to liberate Serene from Atlantis after news got out about the systematic purges carried out by Atlantean authorities.
Importing materials from the stellar debris disk around Alpha Fornacis to fuel their industries, the forestallers have made good progress on terraforming the planet by melting ice under concentrated orbital solar power arrays, and feeding the nitrates, oxides, and phosphates making up most of the crust into semi-autonomous soil irrigation complexes; the world now has cold oceans teeming with engineered fish, frozen forests of hardy modified pines, ferns, and lichen along the equator, and an atmosphere thick enough to spread snowfall globally and retain greenhouse gasses.
The government of Forestall is called the Forestall Ascendancy; a system of democratic institutions, worker cooperatives, and communal resident councils at times more resembling a formalized social network or web of socioeconomic employee unions than a government; nonetheless, the functionality of deliberation and decision making greatly resembles a consensus democracy presiding over a highly unrestricted and lightly regulated society operating on a decentralized syndicate economy blurring the lines of anarcho-collectivist and left-libertarian theories. While all forestallers go through a year of mandatory service, this is not included among their military forces and ranges all the way from civil defense to terraforming logistics. The forestallers themselves have been sufficiently diverged from baseline humans to be classified as a distinct subspecies for 350 years owing to their vast genetic modifications and enhancements derived from lizards introduced in the 2090ies, and are one of the most populous modified human sects - second only to the novans, and are likely to overtake them as the Forestaller populations are still growing.
Orbiting at Forestall's trailing L5 Lagrange Point, Charchorion Station is at fifty trillion tons one of the largest space habitats in human space; originally an astromining hub built in 2089 to headquarter the mining efforts of the Alpha Fornacis stellar debris disk and refine the materials before shipping to Forestall, the station has grown with the rest of the system and today poses a significant service sector and amenities trade for the spacers who keep the astromining and solar energy arrays running, being considered by most a stronghold and provisional homeworld of the makos, a human subspecies gengineered to thrive in deep-space conditions and avoid health complications with mods derived from lamniforms. Although the forestallers outpopulate them over two hundred to one and most makos are spread out across the human core systems, the two subspecies have a long shared history of mutual dependence, interests, and positive interactions, with the majority of both races considering each other as sibling nations. Although Charchorion Station has a listed permanent population of 8.5 million, more than any other artificial structure in human space, less than half of the residents are station-side at any given time with the rest working the space economy, and during peak periods of visits the total population can exceed 11 million.
Thanks to the close relationships to the makos and the various other self-modified human subspecies Forestall enjoys, their space elevators and connecting cities have garnered a reputation as some of the most multicultural and ecumenical nexuses within human space, with a large galaxy-wide tourism draw fueling significant amenity and exotic arts industries as well as forming the basis of some of the largest entertainment and titillating media concerns in the human sphere.
Forestall is a fully independent state, but subscribes to numerous Earth United Nations treaties to maintain their neutrality and trade networks as well as being a compliant non-signatory to Starfarer Ring agreements such as the Kunarii Accords, Articles of Colonization, Universal Sapients' Rights Convention, and the First Contacts Protocol.
Orbits: Dalim, 1.4 AU.
Mean temperature: -2 Celsius.
Surface gravity: 0.76 G.
atmosphere: 0.57 bar, 38% oxygen, 25% carbon dioxide.
Mean elevation: 4 435 metres ASL.
Day/night cycle: 129 hours.
Capital: Vision.
Population: 5.9 billion.
GNP: 29.8 trillion credits.
Natural satellites:
- Diversity: 80 million population. Houses major civilian industries, FTL fuel refineries, and flight yards.
- Opportunity: 1.5 million population. Holds significant FTL comm-arrays.
Military:
- Forestall Defense Space Command: 40 battlecruisers, 180 carriers, 720 cruisers, 8640 fighter craft.
- Forestall Defense Ground Command: 5.9 million combatants, 590 000 combat vehicles, 17700 fighter craft.
Colony founded: 2075.