rockets & wormholes

Rockets & Wormholes Setting -- Alien Species

THE PRECURSORS
humanoid aliens who invented the humanoid bodyplan, terraformed worlds, and could even manipulate wormholes. They could not create new ones, but they travelled to other stars and dragged interesting wormholes from other star systems, and when possible, even moved smaller wormholes through larger ones, changing the topology of the wormhole network.

The same technology which allowed them to move wormholes also allowed them to move planets (possibly by moving planet-sized wormholes), so their home system, The Hub, has a dozen habitable zone planets, and hundreds of wormholes.

by agreed upon convention, wormholes are considered "down" holes if they lead away from the Hub, and "up" holes if they lead towards the hub.

EARTH
In the 1960s, an early soviet Venera probe had a failure on a deep space maneuver. However, by incredible luck, it passed a "gravitational anomaly" that changed its orbit substantially. Close telescopic observation matched the anomaly to an asteroid that, upon further study, seemed to have the spectral type of a *star*. A Mariner probe was dedicated to it, and they discovered that the anomalous micro-star was in fact a wormhole.

The space race of the 1960s and 1970s was more spirited than in otl, resulting in Lunar stations and ISRU on asteroids to support human spaceflight through wormholes.

GYMNOM
The Gymnomi are amorphous, gelatinous beings with a disposition towards an approximately humanoid figure. Their space history was defined by the exploration of their coorbital gas giant, Omen, and its habitable moon Oldsky. Oldsky turned out to posses an abandoned alien military base, which lead to archaeological expeditions. Gymnomi didn't discover wormholes on their own, since their stable wormholes were only in the outer system. Despite the presence of several wormholes in the outer system making it a relatively useful part of the wormhole network, the planet Mellanus itself is considered something of a backwater, and quite out of the way.

OCEAN
Home to semi-aquatic fish-tailed quadrupedal Fishers, Ocean is an ocean world with a single small continent and many islands, with warm shallow seas and minimal sea ice. Its wormhole is the monstrous Schwil Wormhole, which is nearly the breadth of a gas giant, and through which the mars-like planet bobs in and out.

KARMEN
Short, stocky lads & lasses native to Kara. Their spaceflight lacks a certain degree of attention to safety protocols, and a spaceflight-industrial-complex results in seemingly endless funding able to be put towards space exploration within their Kara System, itself a strange, twisted off brand version of the Solar System. Of note, the planet has thin, diffuse rings and a small asteroid moon in a low orbit, in addition to their Luna-like satellite, and the sole gas giant in the system is orbited by a cryovolcanic moon with surface water. They discovered their system's wormholes only after a viable colony had been established on that moon.

VIRGINIA
An earthlike world, but one which is about half the mass of the Earth, orbiting a gas giant as one of several massive moons. The nearest wormhole is coorbital with the inner habitable moon, but that wormhole is a "down" hole. The one that connects with the rest of the network is within an asteroid belt as usual. The dog-eared steampunk inhabitants of the planet launched gunpowder rockets to the other moon (modelled after the BIS moon rocket). Then they ended up in a war with an Aretian nation, which they won since their star is a flare star that likes to spit out electronics-frying radiation into space more or less unpredictably.

ARES
A world just like a fictional depiction of Mars, Canals and all. The sole wormhole in the Ares solar system leads to the Virginian system. Home to non-humanoid Aretians, more or less an explicit reference to the Martians from War of the Worlds. They like tri-axial symmetry.


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Notable non-homeworlds:
-Mesklin System
-Kaywell System
-Ilio-Pyri System
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