The Civil War did not end with the surrender of the Confederacy, but rather with a truce securing their independence. Abe Lincoln was never assassinated, and rumors persist that he lives to this day. Through the rest of the 19th century, the Union survives thanks to its thriving industries, and the Confederacy survives thanks to its superior ability to produce and ship raw materials. The shaky truce continues.

The Space Race begins early, as colonists at the Arizona frontier find strange metal caves, now known to be old Scray ships. These ships were taken to the greatest scientific minds of the world, and the slow process of reverse-engineering them began. This proved a fruitless effort, as nobody could understand the electrical devices, so the parts were sealed away. Engineers began working on something that could emulate these devices, and the first zeppelin was tested in Berlin around 1870. The airship spread across the world, and alongside the time-tested locomotive, served to shape much of Earth's technology, and caused a technological boom. In 1872, William Henry Ward patents the Radio! In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone! At the world's fair of 1880, a coalition of Union, Confederate, and minds from across the world, ranging from Nikola Tesla to Joseph Swan to Thomas Edison reveal new electrical mechanisms! And in 1890, a startling discovery came to light as one of those metal caves stopped to shine lights on a Union vessel before returning to the clouds, far higher than any airship could reach.

The Union and Confederacy both set to hiring what minds from the World's Fair they could reach to replicate this feat. And to supervise the project, they sought a man less tied up with the known sciences, and more with flights of scientific fancy. The Union contacted a promising English author by the name of HG Wells, while the Confederate governor of Louisiana called a few French relatives, who put him in touch with Jules Verne. Thus began the Space Race, as each nation and their think tank set to work. In 1895, the first successful shot to the moon was completed by Confederates. In 1896, a Union satellite was in orbit. And in 1900, the Union and Confederacy had a simultaneous manned launch. The Confederate Astronauts had a routine trip. But the Union astronauts vanished for months as they passed behind Mars. Eventually, a union satellite in orbit around the red planet detected an anomaly as the ship returned unscathed.

The returning astronauts were whisked to the Union capital in secret. They explained to the Union think tank about the existence of the warp gates, natural wormholes linking distant points in space. The wormhole they had entered put them out at a distant refuelling station, run by strange creatures they had never seen. One of the merchants, having seen the Earthlings developing, had picked up English in hopes of getting his foot in the market and sold them a number of cosmic secrets in exchange for relics from their homeworld- a playbill and a box of cigarettes. The Union began using these gates to expand out into the cosmos at large.

It didn't take long for news of vanishing ships to reach the Confederacy. In 1898, Confederate astronauts followed an oddly advanced Union vessel into a gate. It returned, battered and broken due to the stresses of its travel and the fire from the union vessel.

That was 30 years ago. The war is, technically, back on, with war on the verge of outbreak back on earth. However, things aren't as simple on the frontier worlds- there are alien hordes, humans who have gone mad in the isolation of space, and trigger-happy space pirates to worry about. Even then, most Union and Confederate soldiers have family on the other side- it's really not in their best interests to fight.

Cretasus is just the latest planet both sides wish to stake a claim on- it's got access to a well-traveled warp gate, rich natural resources, and a fairly stable climate. The main point of colonization on Cretasus, however, is to take advantage of something utterly unique: The burgeoning population of extinct flora and fauna- particularly the dinosaurs.