Sta.sh
Remember that you are essentially collaborating on a story. Good stories have plot, and are much more interesting for everyone involved if the characters are engaging in an interesting conflict.
Welcome! Thank you for joining the One-Planet-at-a-Time (OPaaT) group project, a place where your dreams can transform into a reality.
The goal of OPaaT is to create a dynamic and sustainable science fiction story universe by focusing first on individual planets, and then slowly integrating them into a much larger intergalactic story. It will be a slow project at first, and there will be a number self-imposed limitations, but in the long run this will lead to a much more fulfilling and open-ended science fiction experience for decades to come.
The basic idea is that you either start out with your own world, or you contribute to an existing world (each world has its own folder in OPaaT's gallery). You may create a new world once a 100 deviation quota has been reached for your first one AND when it is at least a year after the previous one began. If you reach the 100 deviation quota early, you are encouraged to get involved with contributing to other worlds within the OPaaT project.
The first world may have a sentient population up to 10,000, and the subsequent worlds may have 100,000, a million, ten million, 100 million, one billion, ten billion, and 100 billion (in that order). For the first ten years of OPaaT (2012-2022) all new worlds will start in the Chaan Region (750 light year radius of a location 4,000 light years away from Earth). The timeline will correspond somewhat to our own: 2012 will be 10,000 AD, 2013 will be 10,001 AD, and so forth.
There are also a few more restrictions: no time travel, no blowing up planets, no viruses that infect every single cell type, and no blow-up-the-entire-universe scenarios (this is why we call this a SUSTAINABLE story universe). Many other science fiction universes have been irreversibly marred by the things listed above, and it is by agreeing not to engage in these creativity-destroying cliches that we can continue to keep this place as open-ended as possible.
Submissions that don't quite fit into the big picture for a particular planet will be placed in the Stand-alone Concepts folder, where they can be viewed by other group members for inspiration and ideas. The same holds true for older entries that are rendered obsolete by new entries within the same planet folder (i.e. an old concept sketch of a colony map could be rendered obsolete in some ways by a polished final map, in which case the original sketch would be moved to the Stand-alone Concepts folder). In order to qualify for the Stand-alone Concepts folder, the original submission must at least have originally been intended for one of the planet folders on OPaaT.
If you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments section below. We may get a forum sometime in the near future, and if we do we will post a link for it here.
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My planet is already pretty developed but I think it can work into your universe.
One of the main ideas behind the One-Planet-at-a-Time project was to create a world building community where members could have as much autonomy as possible while at the same time cutting down on petty arguments and encouraging collaboration. Welcome aboard!
I've been looking for something like this for a while.
I would love to see a star chart of peoples planets and the distances from each other.
My world had an ancient indigenous race that never developed space flight.
So, they've been colonized by humans and perhaps others.
It's infrastructure is in ruins at the moment but some factions are trying to rebuild.
The idea of forming alliances with other invented worlds sounds so inviting to me.
I imagine deep space flight is still a pretty monumental task in most places,
So the meetings of different emissaries might be a pretty big deal.
It'd be so neat if some of our planets story lines could cross over, and are you planning some kind of Galactic Federation?
The "One Planet at a Time Foundation" sounds like a good place to start.
Perhaps some interplanetary union could start as more of a research and reconnoissance project but eventually develop into
a more governmental institution.
I like the "No annihilation" clause! It's kinda like the Geneva Convention or the anti genocide laws.
As you can see, the key strength of OPaaT is that it's designed to allow preexisting world building projects to converge without butting heads too much. Back in the day, most of the collaborations I saw when I was looking around were either glorified collections or unattractive pyramid schemes. Can you imagine how much trouble I would have had if I had just started out with a Coruscant-like core world and then told new members to work on progressively smaller worlds surrounding it?
The best example of a successful integration of a world of a much higher population into the OPaaT starter world # (10,000 people) is Minerva ([link]). One thing that may be helpful for you to know about the Sierra Sector Block is that in order for it to be a frontier region, we're going on the precedent that humans didn't explore that area of space until 50 years before 10,000 AD. One idea for integration of Rodinia is to have the OPaaT Rodinia set way in the past before any humans ever got there to when the native tribes were just coming out of the stone age.
If you look in the group gallery there is a folder that has all of the star charts. Many of my deviations refer to a TriGalactic Federation. Instead of starting with a capital world and trying to get others to make vassal worlds I simply started with a remote colony world and planned to one day work up to a planet that could have the population size appropriate for the capital. The idea is to complete a series of eight planets in the Chaan Region, and then open up the Teran Region for literary development to others who finish the eight year challenge. That way you have a really complex scifi universe that has had time to evolve without being corrupted by the short term goals of media conglomerates or nauseating government-subsidized propaganda.
To complicate matters there are also remnants of an indigenous advanced race and their strange technology.(this is what got the humans in trouble in the first place)
So the planet is in no condition to colonize other world.
My interaction with other world builders would be mostly to have them come to Rodinia.
Perhaps there is a record of it on some dusty chart somewhere.
I also pictured it being kind of remote, maybe more of a refuge for smugglers and criminals rather than an organized colonization attempt.
I love you're decentralized idea of galactic government. It seems how it might actually be given the time and distance involved.
The borrow from Luke, "if there's a bright spot in the universe (Rodinia) is the planet that's it's farthest from.
If you're interested, I would be happy to include a mention of Rodinia, along with a link to it within one of my short stories
What role does old Earth play in your universe?
Earth obvious serves as a starting point for human history, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be in the center of the action. A lot of the details about the big picture history of the OPaaT universe have intentionally been left out in order to allow history to form in a more organic way, as opposed to having a detailed timeline that is set in stone from the very beginning.
Best regards,
-SC