Stellar Superstitions & Folklore

Space Folklore

Not long after the initial FTL expansion began a historical society placed an impressive bounty on several pre-FTL spacecrafts if they could be retrieved intact. Unsurprisingly this led to a rush of both treasure hunters and forgers. Given the advances in sensor technology, records, and computing power available most of the craft were quickly retrieved. With one notable exception. The crown jewel of the collection the voyager 1 spacecraft, first man made object to leave the solar system, was missing. As the years have passed no sign of it has been discovered despite many attempts to find it. Many stories surround its supposed fate ranging from alien artifact hunters, to malevolent spirits. Some say the void itself took it, others that it was never meant to stop exploring and refuses to be taken back.

I is said that beneath the dead sand and dust of the far side of Luna there is a place inhabited by men since the early to mid point of the 20th century.
Most Lunites consider this total bullshit.
Story persists. Sometimes odd transmissions can be heard. Broadcast using antiquated technology in an older form of Germanic. No one is sure if its a prank or not.

Some spacecraft use neural interface to control part or all systems. Due to the huge amount of information, some models make the interfaced human fall into a sort of trance, and babble nonsense caused by the mingling of system reports, memories and outright dreams. Crew hold phrases spoken in this state as oracles and prophecies.
developing on AIs: Some crews think that AI able to communicate with the crew in plain english/russian/chinese is bad luck, and instead prefer to interpret beeping/whistling.

Even in todays age of FTL travel, there are many spacers who steadfast refuse to travel beyond "The Range", which is a colloquial nickname for the expanding sphere of influence created by mankind's first radio and video transmissions into the void.
The sphere of our influence does increase every year, thus expanding how far explorers in the outer colonies are willing to expand, but there are many who insist it is bad luck not to go into the void that has not yet been touched by mankind's voice - and attribute the loss of many ships to jumping outside of our influence to simply being eaten up and spat out by the more hostile void.

No signs of intelligent life have ever been found on Mars, despite no small effort having been spent in looking. However, many modern Martians and conspiracy theorists System-wide claim that the planet's terraforming and construction projects went as smoothly as they did because they exploited pre-existing structures and technologies, and insist that the "Old Martians" are still lurking around like ghost-bigfoot.

A lot of early belt stations were thrown together out of mass-produced parts, run by mining megacorps that didn't give a shit about human comforts. Grey walls, bare metal, they even kept the lights dim.
As a result, Belters not only had to become very adept at enlivening their living spaces, ships and tools through riotous paintjobs as has already been mentioned in the previous article, but also in modifying these places and things to be more comfortable, useful and individualized. Masters of "MacGyvering," Belters now considered unlucky and uncaring to not personalize one's living space and tools in some way.

Ever heard of Thesus' paradox, kid? "If every part of an object is replaced, does it remain the same object?" Well, the spacers decided it wasn't-and more importantly, they do something about it. Nearly all ships you'll find out there have what they call a stillbone, some part of the vessel that, through all its upgrades, retrofits and repair jobs, is never replaced or removed. It might be particular beam or bulkhead, or a special bar of unreactive metal like platinum-on some ships it's even a particular section of the outer hull. They're considered luckier, but likewise more perilous; candle burns at both ends and all.
But anyways, it's naturally considered extremely bad luck if the stillbone is destroyed, be it due to damage or just wear and tear, but it's ESPECIALLY bad if a crewmember somehow destroys it. With how often they call their ships "she" and"girl", it's like murder to them. A lot of captains get their ships renamed at this point, since for some it's no longer the same ship, and if it's destroyed, they aren't all that keen on having a new one built with the same name; at best, it's got a clean slate on all kinds of luck and superstition, but at worst, they say the new ship is doomed. It'll be haunted by the spirit of the original, angry that its memory is being disrespected and keen to get rid of the "imposter". Bottom line is, if you see a particularly rusty looking pillar on an old, storied vessel? Don't touch it,

Many senior engineers grew up with air scrubbers and water recyclers when the machines still were kind of noisy. A lot of them learned to listen to the machines and could find faults in them just by listening to the sounds they made.
    Current-day scrubbers and recyclers are, of course, completely quite, which makes the old engineers suspicious of them. Despite attempts by manufacturers to place small speakers in new machines to emulate these sounds, there are still among them who wouldn't fly a ship without what they call a 'proper' airscrubber.

Due to the expanding nature of humanity's radio transmissions, it is a common pilgrimage for men and women spending a great deal of time in space to find the "armstrong band" the current location of the moon landing transmission wave.
it is said to bring good luck, and many attribute their continued survival in space to armstrong's ghost watching over them.

>Radio Ghosts
As quicker and more advanced forms of telecommunication were developed, the use of radio transmitters has been relegated to backup emergency beacons, remote pieces of legacy hardware and enthusiastic hobbiests. Despite this, it is estimated that there is half-again as much radio chatter across the System than can be accounted for, broadcasting things like private conversations, strings if mumbers, old distress calls, outdated music and even Three Stooges bits out between the planets. Many day that pirate stations and pranksters are the source of such transmissions, but others claim the signals come from a far stranger place, and warn against listening for too long, let alone acting on anything you hear.

>Orphan planets
Every now and then, through gravitic disruption, collision or other spacial anomaly, a planet is ejected from its home system and thrown into the gulf of space. These planets freeze over and become known as orphan planets.
it is considered enormously unlucky to cross the path of one of these cold lonely worlds as it hurtles through space, not only because their cold surfaces make them hard to detect by thermal imaging making being struck by one a very real posibility, but because some spacers believe the planets own lonliness and loss from being orphaned from it's star will rub off on them.
Only a fool or madman would attempt to mine an orphan world.

>79 Midas
First sighted by mineralogists in the employ of the Astroscout Company in 2282, the lost-asteroid known as 79 Midas is reportedly a hunk of gold four and a third miles long and one and a half miles long, caught in an unusual orbit roughly twenty-seven degrees off-kilter from the rest of the Belt.
Instead of selling off its location for a planet's ransom of a finder's fee, as the usually did with lesser discoveries, Astroscout kept the exact specifications of its orbit a closely guarded secret, deciding to attempt to mine it for themselves. The company liquidated most of its assets to purchase the mining rigs needed to properly carve up and process all that gold, and reportedly got all its installation in place on Midas before mismanagement, bankruptcy and greed shut them down before they saw a single piece of that precious yellow stuff return their investment.
After Astroscout folded, its president is said to have sold 79 Midas' orbital data and his company's rigs to Golemnick Mining & Mercantile for a cushy management position before that company was brought under scrutiny for monopolizing the metals and minerals industry in the Belt, resuting in the ruling that Golemnick had to auction off a large number of its holdings.
From there knowledge of 79 Midas passed from corporation to corporation as each mining conglomerate gunning for that gold seemed to suffer bankruptcy and disaster, one after another. Eventually, its said that the crusty old datadrive housing the details of Midas' whereabouts was taken by a distraught CEO and pawned for a gun with which to kill himself, whereafter the information has been passed from miner to prospector to treasure hunter, each thinking they've got a shot at striking it rich off that gleaming golden asteroid that's cursed so many.

After the great Earthquake of 2085, Easter Island disappeared from Terra forever.
Many claim that Easter Island is in space now, just floating in the void. Travelers report that, against physics and reason, the island has an atmosphere and warm tropical water about 500 yards off its coast. The waves still work the and air temperature is balmy even though it is in the depths of space.
It just floats in goddamn space. A little island of relaxation in fucking space. The ever watchful moai stare off into the stars, warding away the spirits of the void.
Visitors to the island are usually those who were presumed dead in a shipwreck. A known example is Mr. Fischier.
Mr. Fischier was on a cargo ship traveling between Gaori II and MilfinC when the reactors overloaded. The last thing he remembers seeing was a wall of plasma enveloping the hallway in front of him - and then nothing. He awoke on the coast of Easter Island - staring at the stars. The island was reportedly abandoned.
After three nights stay, he awoke in an escape pod - not of his original ship mind you - as it was being secured by a salvage vessel.
Somewhere out there, Easter Island awaits. A safe haven for those who might die to the cruelties of the void.

The Eyes in the Stars
Psychologists on Earth and the colonies consider this phenomenon to be entirely mental, an unfortunate cross of our innate ability to sense patterns and the tendency for the instinctual danger cues hard-wired into the human brain. Spacers who experience it will tell you that it is something more than that.
Unease when alone is not uncommon on long voyages; and most spacers will report occasionally feeling like they're being watched, especially when looking out into space itself. The Eyes phenomenon is an extension of this, where sufferers will report getting the feeling that they or the ship in general is being watched from a particular direction at regular intervals, usually a specific point in the ship's day/night duty rotation.
Some variance between ships is noted, with some sufferers reporting that the feeling follows the ship and her crew no matter where they go and others, usually the chartered freighters plying the same route repeatedly, will report that the feeling occurs only at specific places along their voyage.
To date no detailed study has been made of the phenomenon, but the International Psychological Association is confident in their initial assessment, though there is some dissent from shipboard psychologists also serving on long-term crews who claim further investigation is required.

>The Pintonova Wrecks
In the early 23rd century, certain rapid-fire advances were made in the miniaturization, power output and manufacture of space ship drive technologies, such that what had once been military-grade propulsion systems were now available to the solar system's largest corporations. These corporations were who all too eager to upgrade their Fleets with these new drives and get the jump on their competitors, even if the captains and crews flying these ships lacked the proper training and technical knowhow to operate them safely. The tragic, if interesting result was almost a year of the most dramatic and unusual wrecks in the history of the solar system.
While most of the stories told about that fateful year are of more mundane, if horrible wrecks, the favorites always feature the stranger, more inexplicable disasters that have nevertheless been confirmed as truth despite their macabre oddity. One such tale relates the fate of the "Spirit of Norway" which had arrived at its destination, ship and crew both complete mirror images of themselves, all hands aboard dead from the strain of it. Other stories, like that of "Bentham's Folly," claim their horror-credence from recordings of their captains having to be told that their vessel had blown itself to bits and that they were dead, FTL communications having undergone some strange and tragic type of time travel.
Today, the disasters of that bizarre and terrible year are still known as the "Pintonova Wrecks," after one particularly grand and gigantic ship by that name that became the most famous wreck of them all. A state-of-the-art superhauler of the Martian-Jovian Line, the Pintonova was in high Mars orbit when, due to an escalating series of engineering disasters that are still not entirely understood, it exploded spectacularly, suddenly froze there in time for fourteen seconds, and then imploded to literal nothingness with all the solar system's media watching.