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HRogge

This started as an idea to be able to make the Chinese available as a plot device and as a secret in Fenspace. Of course it doesn't make much sense if the truth is known by the Fen. But why shouldn't a nation with that much resources have their own secret handwavium project that is in one aspect more advanced as most Fen tech.

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Post Handwavium History

The CNSA has no asset in Fenspace, everyone knows that. They are too paranoid to embrace the wonders of Handwavium, too angry to cooperate with anyone else. They damn themselves to being stuck at the bottom of the gravity well.

At least that is what everyone believes.

Being very angry and paranoid about the Fen and their involvement with China, the CNSA was prohibited to openly move into orbit. Still, huge amounts of money were made available to develop a solution for the ‘Fen problem’.

In early 2013, CNSA tested their first successful stealthed space ship in a large underground hangar, a specially waved Chinese van. Only six months later, while most larger Fen ships were turning the Asteroid Belt upside down, the CNSA sent up the ship to find a place to hide and setup a base of operation.

Only to find out that ‘the damned Fen’ have spread over the whole inner system.

Unwilling to take chances, the CNSA began to build up a small base in an lone asteroid far outside of the ecliptics. From here they began to plan China’s domination of the Solar system.

The Ships

Unfortunately for the CNSA, reproducing their stealth technology to ship enough cargo to the asteroid proved more difficult than planned. While even the first ship had a lot of quirks they had to work around, building more ships became a frustrating process. Between 2014 and 2017, the CNSA built five other stealth ships, two of them large trucks to ship cargo to their new base.

One of the trucks had to be destroyed shortly after construction when it developed an AI that wasn’t willing to join the communist party of China.

A smaller second craft was lost when the pilot left it without disengaging the stealth system. CNSA is still looking for the craft, which should still be within their testing facilities.

The Base

The base is a small set of hidden caves within an asteroid 15 astronomical units away from the sun. The original plan called to upgrade the caves to a full military shipyard to produce the new Chinese armada.

The low number of transports combined with the unwillingness to use different types of transportation delayed the plans of the CNSA year after year. At the current rate, the CNSA hopes to make the base self sufficient within 2020.

Trivia
  • The CNSA managed to evade the attention of Fenspace since their start 2013 and hopes to continue this way beyond 2020.
  • There are influential people within the communist party unwilling to allow the asteroid base to become completely self sufficient.
  • The two small stealthed cars have been using the asteroid base as a homeport for espionage and reconnaissance missions since 2016.
The CNSA are also suspected to be utilising low-orbit stealth drones for reconnaissance purposes, though nothing conclusive has ever been recovered.

One of these drones may have been the mystery object which collided the Dragon Wagon II just prior re-entry over the Pacific Ocean.

I suggest you change some of the language to reflect that most of this is unknown... or only suspected information. Or drawn from potentially unreliable sources. Maybe a defector? (Jesus Christ, there goes two plotbunnies in one post).
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Dartz Wrote:I suggest you change some of the language to reflect that most of this is unknown... or only suspected information.
That's what the "Meta" tag is for...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Actually... If there ever were to be a case with a defector from China, this would probably be it. Think about it. Would the Fen ever turn over a Chinese that requests asylum from the PRC? Even with as much propaganda as they like to produce, there would be plenty of people in the PRC that know better (this is why they have so much 'trouble' with political activists).

Now, who would this person defect to specifically? TSAB is right out because it's an US Airforce base. None of the 'civilian' factions because the defector would probably be worried about a military reprisal. The Soviet Airforce in Exile is risky because of its connection to the Russians. Which leaves Mars, The Patrol, and maaayyyyybeee the Roughriders.

I added Roughriders because: 1) 36 Atalante is probably on the way out there; 2) Ben would be the type to go on the record about the PRC and the DPRK - he appreciates Chinese and Korean culture very much, but he refers to their governing bodies with polite, but very unflattering words; and 3) 36 Atalante has repelled one direct assault and several sneak attacks - the tacticians at the PRC would have looked at it and probably said "You would have to be suicidal."
Then again, chances against a defector are pretty strong because there'd be a few people calling for rocks to be dropped on Beijing.  Ben might think of calling for something like that at first, but he'd check himself once he thinks of the collateral damage.  (He'd still call for some form of political retaliation, as well as their secret base getting flattened.)

HRogge

blackaeronaut Wrote:Actually... If there ever were to be a case with a defector from China, this would probably be it. Think about it. Would the Fen ever turn over a Chinese that requests asylum from the PRC? Even with as much propaganda as they like to produce, there would be plenty of people in the PRC that know better (this is why they have so much 'trouble' with political activists).

Now, who would this person defect to specifically? TSAB is right out because it's an US Airforce base. None of the 'civilian' factions because the defector would probably be worried about a military reprisal. The Soviet Airforce in Exile is risky because of its connection to the Russians. Which leaves Mars, The Patrol, and maaayyyyybeee the Roughriders.

I added Roughriders because: 1) 36 Atalante is probably on the way out there; 2) Ben would be the type to go on the record about the PRC and the DPRK - he appreciates Chinese and Korean culture very much, but he refers to their governing bodies with polite, but very unflattering words; and 3) 36 Atalante has repelled one direct assault and several sneak attacks - the tacticians at the PRC would have looked at it and probably said "You would have to be suicidal."
Then again, chances against a defector are pretty strong because there'd be a few people calling for rocks to be dropped on Beijing.  Ben might think of calling for something like that at first, but he'd check himself once he thinks of the collateral damage.  (He'd still call for some form of political retaliation, as well as their secret base getting flattened.)
Yes, I think this should be mostly meta information... a plot enabler for some "dark forces" in the background with enough resources to pay the bill, but not enough hardware to become a real force in Fenspace.

The idea does only work if its not known the the Fen and the SMOFs for quite some time...

I explicitly tried to build a scenario useful for story writing without forcing the issue between China and Fenspace.

HRogge