Twilight of the Long Night

Hinterlands Part 2

After the HPG Blackout of 3132, the Inner Sphere could no longer rely on Comstar’s Hyper Pulse network for interstellar communication. The Dark Age of the Inner Sphere had begun.

News at the Speed of Jump

The Blackout threw interstellar communication back to courier routes of Jumpships spreading messages by relay. In the 3130s, Interstellar states scrambled to gather enough JumpShips to develop routes and networks. However, most contracted JumpShips were simply too expensive to just deliver mail, further slowing the delivery of messages. Mail was added to regular trading routes as digital cargo. Any mail with military importance (even suspected) would make the Jumpship carrying it a target for rivals and intelligence networks.

In these early years of the Dark Age, Inner Sphere communications shrunk to individual States and sub-states. Communications was far more vulnerable to interdiction as they crossed borders, even between regions that are not suffering political tensions. Without Comstar’s monopoly, there is no longer a (perceived) neutral arbiter that can ensure communications travel freely throughout the Inner Sphere.

Further increasing the costs and delays of communications, Jumpships delivering mail have started running in convoys. Using numbers to defend against raids and piracy. This has lead to the development of “mains”, common well traveled routes between important hub systems. It is no longer economical for large commercial JumpFleets to run charter routes to individual systems. Thus, messages to backwater systems, have become yet more expensive and even further delayed.

The Clan Occupation Zones

In the Clan Occupation Zones, the breakdown in communications aren’t quite as bad. Though even their HPG Network is still suffering from the Blackout of 3132, the means by which the Clans resolve disputes removes many political obstructions. Instead of closing borders, interdicting systems, and threatening Jump Routes, the Clans’ culture of trials allows for a straightforward way to establish and maintain communication mains even despite traditional animosity between rival clans.

Over the past 50 or so years, Clan Sea Fox has developed an extensive trading network throughout the Free Worlds’ League, Wolf Empire, and Rassalhague Dominion. From these regions the Sea Fox Arcships and Cargoships have spread throughout the Inner Sphere, both as a merchant princedom, and as a developing communications network. With the Blackout, the Sea Fox was poised to fill the role left empty by the collapse of Comstar.

A Mirror to the Traveller Universe

As described in O God, Thy Sea is So Great and My Boat so Small, this new reality of couriers and mail routes resemble the Express Boat Network in Traveller’s 3rd Imperium. Without the reach and speed of an intact HPG Network, news takes weeks to travel through a small region, and months or years to cross the Inner Sphere. Entire regions are finding themselves increasingly far behind the events transpiring in the centers of power and politics. The Periphery is expanding inward, towards Terra.

This will cause political, cultural, and eventually technological fragmentation throughout the Inner Sphere. Worlds will die due to lack of resources that were once as simple to obtain as an HPG message to a supplier. Centralized protection and control from the cores of the various super-states of the Inner Sphere will dwindle and vanish. Even by 3145 this can be seen in the Free Worlds’ League, disintegrating into it’s component Duchies and regional powers.

Even if the virus that caused the HPG Blackout is solved and the communications network can be recovered. There is no protected, respected, Comstar monopoly to proliferate it. The Word Of Blake’s coup and their Religious War burned that trust in nuclear fire during the years leading up to the Dark Age. (Yes, I know, I know, there is an in-universe term for the Word of Blake’s war. But it’s 2026 CE while I write this, and I’m trying to avoid the term as much as I am able).

Traveller had a term for this breakdown of communication. The Long Night. Interstellar travel contracted, trade began to falter, and an Imperium that crossed most of Charted Space fell into fiefdoms where control was limited to a couple of small jumps. Xenophobia spread and the stars became distant again.

… for 1,776 years.

During these 18 centuries, Empires rose and fell, interstellar travel and trade continued, but on a scale that is a tiny fraction of the Imperium that had collapsed. The empires were pockets of interstellar civilization in a vast gulf of isolated, fragmented worlds. It was only following the formation of a stable trading empire in what would become the Core sector. A main of systems that were a single jump along the chain were able to develop the seed that could regrow to fill charted space again.

The Hinterlands are a Glimpse of the Future

The former Jade Falcon Occupation Zone collapsed when the Jade Falcon Touman perished on Terra. In the vacuum created by the collapse, pockets of power started to rise. Clan Hell’s Horses is the most coherent state, is able to take advantage of the region within their nearby territory. The Lyran Commonwealth, while traditionally a power in this wedge of the Inner Sphere, is also suffering from the Dark Ages and is unable to reclaim territory lost to the Clan Invasion a century earlier. As these pocket empires expand, the Commonwealth is under threat to collapse in the same manner as the Jade Falcon OZ did. Clan Hell’s Horses is dangerously close to over extending.

The Wolf Empire is also an empire in name only. The bulk of it’s power is currently in the corpse of the Republic of the Sphere and on Terra. The Free Worlds League is further into collapse than the Commonwealth is. The Rassalhague Dominion has just fought a Civil War over whether or not to join the IlClan’s new Star League.

Terra itself is still decades from recovery following the invasion. The ilKhan Alaric Ward only has the symbolic might of Terra herself to lean on with which to cobble together a new Star League. After three and a half centuries of Succession Wars, the Lords of the original Successor States no longer see Terra as the prize she was.

The cracks in the Inner Sphere are widening, and without the stability that the Hyperpulse Network provided, there may be no way to mend them. The Inner Sphere Long Night has begun.