Note if you just want to read the story feel free to skip this background info. If you want to add a chapter though you'll probably need to go through it. Enjoy!
The story is set in the year 2209 AD, over 100 years after a nuclear war on Earth. A few 'Off Earth' colonies have struggled back from nuclear apocalypse and civilisation is now centered on these colonies. On Earth almost no-one survived the war, and the remainder are back in stone age tech. There are always rumours of old spaceships, bases or robots ships roaming about, left over from before the war, but most people rate these stories at the same level as bigfoot and UFOs are in the modern world. Certainly no government has admitted to finding any evidence of these. No-one knows if the pre-war governments ever sent a ship beyond the solar system.
The various current national groups around in the solar system now are:
Martians, proud pioneers, a hodgepodge of different central bases and huge numbers of ungoverned outposts. Think Wild West with a disorganized, multinational government that quarrels constantly.
Jovian Assembly, the remainder of several corporations that had bases at Jupiter when the war broke out. Possibly the most advanced culture, but only because they kept old tech going.. now very little of it is understood but the old automated factories still produce pretty well... for now. Their government is rigid and personal freedoms are few, but tales from those few that leave Jupiter have painted a surprisingly content people. Maybe they just don't know what freedoms they are missing!
Finally the four Lunar bases, loosely allied into a Federation. The bases here were founded by the US, Japan, European Union and Russia and have a long tradition of grand engineering works. They think big and bulky, a little lighter on safety than other nations, but they get things done, usually with a string of patriotic messages after a success, very little after a failure (Similar to the later years of USSR, though not as draconian).
The Lunar nation is where a scientist discovered a method of inflating Quantum wormholes up to a useful size to travel through, albeit at a huge energy cost to keep them open.
The prototype generator was so large that an idea for making a computer controlled 'probe' to test it was discarded early on. Instead a large crewed ship was built, taking over six years to complete. By that time Lunar factories were building smaller versions of the generator, making some people claim that the 'Great Project' is a waste of time. These small drives are too inaccurate for interstellar travel, but have greatly decreased the time taken to move around the solar system.
Amidst controversy over the 'Great Project', increased tension between the three major powers now that travel times have been drastically reduced, and fears that other nations are secretly building their own wormhole starships, the Lunar Fleet Command has rushed the ship to completion and drummed up a skeleton crew for it's maiden voyage. They hope it's first trip will discover enough (and be a good enough spectacle for the people) to validate the time and effort to build it, and persuade the economic council to put money down on further research and construction.
They named the ship LSS Aspiration.
On August 2nd 2209 AD it climbed into Lunar orbit and made ready for the first jump to the stars.
(Note feel free to add anything but try to keep to the general feel of the background, don't introduce any 'magical' technology, and keep the main characters (Lindhurst, Abi and Brandt) as much in char as possible.)
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