PRIZAN TIMELINE PART 2: THE "SCRAMBLE" (0-40 YEARS POST-BATTLE)
This era of Prizan history is highly fragmented and apocryphal. Every station that survives it has their own personal chronicle- an oft-retold, semi-reliable narrative of heroism, innovation, desperate risks, and an exhausting dance from one crisis into the next.
Hopes of rescue dwindle quickly- every vessel that approaches the Graveyard in an attempt to render aid is either destroyed by mines or becomes trapped as well. With their resources and political will drained by decades of unsustainable military production, neighboring systems are in no shape to stage some kind of large-scale followup rescue operation.
As decades pass, countless TriSys vessels become hibernating derelicts- some in grimly tragic fashion, but through careful cooperation many crews successfully migrate to other vessels or even manage to transfer planetside. One painful exception is their onboard NHPs- forced to leave them behind, many crews vow to return and save them one day, refusing to abandon and forget their comrades the way their home systems have done to all of them.
10 years post-battle (4811u): The megaships go dark. Unable to stem the slow advance of countless shipcracker nanite fractures, even the most intact Toha megaship fragments are forced to permanently depower and vent their outermost sections to a depth of at least 500m- converting their exteriors into “dead zones” that starve the nanites of ambient energy.
This measure divides their people into two groups. The first is those now living a more isolated existence deep within their megaship fragments. The second is those who join and integrate into TriSys communities, adding their own language, customs and values to the blend that will become Prizan culture (something Prizans themselves can often be unaware of).
Seen from the exterior, the megaship fragments have now become something truly sinister - warped and broken shapes of terrifying scale, looming silently over the rest of the graveyard. Their exterior dead zones are now ripe for pirates, outcasts and any other desperate souls forced to seek shelter from the core graveyard’s elevated radiation levels- forming loose communities whose long-term viability requires raiding other Graveyard residents.
16 years post-battle (4817u): TCAS data network established. After early efforts to de-escalate signal jamming within the Graveyard cause disturbing shifts in mine activity, Prizans are forced to explore alternative means of transmitting data between habitats.
The solution turns out to be a separate project, a fledgling Traffic Collision Avoidance System- hundreds of orbital object tracking outposts linked by chains of needlecast comm relays. Built with great urgency using some of the best repurposed hardware the former TriSys fleet had to offer, the platforms now have their throughput heavily upscaled, giving all Graveyard vessels periodic access to a decentralized peer-to-peer data network.
Over the next century, the “Tin Cans And String” will slowly be expanded into a full planetary network, with thousands of comm relays linking every orbital station and planetside settlement- a network whose resilience is matched only by its inefficiency, built atop one the most comprehensive orbital tracking systems in the entire Orion Arm.
30 years post-battle (4831u): Salvage stations begin using artificial gravity. Guided by former Toha crew in their midst, Graveyard survivors begin to utilize gravitic field technology harvested from megaship fragments, a breakthrough which allows smaller orbital habitats to raise healthy children without attempting a laborious spingrav conversion.
39 years post-battle (4840u): Establishment of Wreck Academy. Having painstakingly cataloged 87 subtly different varieties of Orbital Mine, the JR-Rec Group releases a predictive model capable of “perfectly” predicting mine swarm behaviors “in the absence of external stimuli” (primarily solar radiation and all human behavior). While often mocked for its shortcomings, the JR-Rec Forecast handily outperforms similar efforts and significantly reduces mine-related fatalities.
The resulting acclaim and institutional support allows the JR-Rec Group to found Wreck Academy, the first of several Prizan colleges based in orbital trade stations.
