Endless Expanses

A fictional world of the people of the HF. Endless Expanses has been made into movies, games, books and more, as a popular franchise especially of the United Nations of Tebburus, Saelian Coalition and several other nearby cultures.

Endless Expanses is set in a strange world filled with massive precursor megastructures and an endlessly explorable map (hence the name of the world). The entire world takes place on a single massive flat piece of land (though there are many large seas and oceans as well), and the horizon stretches for immense distances, which only gets further as one's altitude increases. After one travels upwards for about 100 km, they will begin to enter space and the gravity will begin to reduce in a linear fashion until they reach an altitude of 110 km, where gravity stops completely. Space in Endless Expanses is unique as it harbors an atmosphere which is breathable, but space still carries its own challenges.

Due to the infinitely large nature of the world, megastructures can get extremely large. Some of these can span an immense altitude and make for an easy way to reach space (as the structures can be over 110 km tall). They can vary significantly in purpose, such as acting as massive defence stations, massive supercomputers, entire cities housed within a single structure, mining platforms and many more.

Factions

There are 5 different factions, each with their own technological specialties, cultures, wartime units and more. There are also a number of different sentient species around the map, including most known sentient species from the THF universe, such as suons, Yunkads, Banfranal (in space) and more. These species are not necessarily controlling or owning specific factions, instead being spread around the various factions for their unique abilities and traits. Endless Expanses also contains a number of fictional species, leading to a highly diverse world.

The factions are:

- The Federation, a low tech but highly populous faction with a massive industrial base.

- The Hive, which, contrary to its name, is not a hive mind. They specialise in bioengineering and biological science, having only very few technologies but Hive megastructures are essentially massive organisms. Even their space travel is done in a biological way.

- The Calculators, a high tech faction which seek to embrace the strength of metal and constantly employ advanced technologies to help them achieve their interests. Calculators are also quite obsessed with Shattered megastructures...

Endless Expanses also has a smaller number of precursor factions, some of their megastructures are left over from a time long past, and left to decay. No faction has the technological base to recover these advanced technologies and be able to replicate them, so precursor archaeotech is still quite valuable in Endless Expanses. 

The precursor factions are:

- The Shattered, who built many megastructures in many locations of the world attempting to turn themselves into non-corporeal beings with no physical body and the ability to defy entropy, living to and possibly past the end of time. This was often done with giant, partly organic living supercomputers which released a lot of heat and pollution (after changing to a non-corporeal form it was thought that the physical world would not matter to them any more). None of these attempts have been successful, mostly...

- The Complex, which is a massive AI faction which responds to massive existential threats that threaten to destroy the world. The Complex only awakens at the most crucial of moments, but otherwise exists merely as a sleeping giant. The only things they do is assess the environment for these threats and maintain their structures. Complex megastructures seem to be less decayed than other precursor megastructures but are entirely silent to all but the most dedicated of exploration teams, who might find the structures move to maintain themselves. Signs of decay are still seen though, so evidently these self repair protocols are not perfect....

Outer Expanses

Outside of the well managed lands of the various factions is unexplored land with long lost mysteries and unknown dangers constantly lurking. These unexplored regions are known as the outer expanses, and harbor some of the most dangerous locations in the world, but they would need to be explored as every faction must constantly expand or risk being overtaken by other factions. Although the outer expanses can be seen from space nearly endlessly, it gets significantly more difficult to see extremely far due to the sheer distance. Scanning the area from space can also be hard because of the clouds, so the outer expanses are difficult to observe from a safe location. Many exploration parties bring drones that can fly slightly under the cloud layer and observe a wide but practically limited area of land. These can easily detect precursor megastructures from very large distances. The megastructures are a key exploration point of interest, and they are highly sought over so this can be highly valuable! Of course, they can often also be seen through the cloud layer when there are no clouds covering a specific structure, and exploration parties are often sent to structures discovered in this way. Factions will often then look to properly explore and exploit these precursor structures, often by building railway networks to them with a large enough exploration camp built nearby. Recovered precursor technologies can help one side advance their science or just be used normally as the precursors would use it.

The Depths

As the world is flat, one can dig downwards and gravity will be constant. The underground continues nearly indefinitely, spanning many thousands of kilometers deep, until an impenetrable layer is encountered. The ground contains a lot of valuable ore, especially at deeper depths which can only be reasonably reached with incredibly advanced mining and boring technologies, and ever more useful resources can be found at deeper and deeper deposits. Deposits of common materials also often get larger and therefore more valuable. No modern faction has the technology to dig this deep but there are a few precursor mines which have reached the impenetrable metal layer, though no modern faction can use these super deep materials easily as they cannot refine it (the strongest materials require ever more advanced refineries to refine and manipulate it). However, the world does not rest on a continental plate so earthquakes will not happen, but volcanoes might. The ground pressure under the very deepest layers is immense and the rock at those layers is extremely hot, so pools of lava might be found. It is rumored that the very deepest layer is almost entirely lava but this rumor is not true. It is roughly half lava.

These deepest materials are what comprise most precursor megastructures. They have used a lot of this material, perhaps explaining why there is so little of it left. Its sheer strength is evident; many groups have attempted to cut through precursor megastructures for various reasons (e.g. to maintain them, to escape a particular room, to recover components)

Megastructures

Some of the more valuable and significant megastructures are:

- The Rectifier, a huge structure resembling a gyroscope that is almost 1000 km tall and spanning well into space. The Rectifier was initially built by the Shattered, but the Calculators took it over as their own. They found it to have an immense computational output even compared to other Shattered megastructures, despite not being partly organic like other Shattered megastructures. The Rectifier is an oddity which towers over the immense expanse it is built over. Of course, the Calculators use it as an immense data center and have also uncovered some precursor history mysteries using information contained inside, after a significant effort to decode this highly enigmatic information stored in barely understood technology.

- Hyperstructural Complex, a Federation owned and built structure acting as the largest city of the Federation. It is continuously expanded as its needs increase, and the Hyperstructural Complex also acts as a mine and industrial structure, which is necessary for the resources for expansion. The roof of the structure is designed to grow genetically engineered crops which can survive in space (The Hyperstructural Complex is about 300 km tall but the entire structure has gravity), but this is nowhere near sufficient to sustain its population. As such, there are also a massive number of farms located a fair distance from the city (allowing it to expand without damaging the farms) and food is transported from the farms to the city via large trains. The external farms present a somewhat vulnerable weak point compared to the rest of the structure, but it should be able to sustain a severely limited amount of its population with the roof mounted farms.

- Perimiter beast, which is a Hive megastructure which is designed to act as an immense fortress. With a large number of organs acting as weapons, it can rain destruction over a huge area of land. It defends the Hive against both outer expanse and Federation invasions. Though incredibly powerful, it must receive supplies (nutrients) via a number of large underground tunnels from various food producing megastructures which sustain the population of the Hive as well as its organic megastructures. The Perimiter Beast also projects a shield around itself, though it is a weak shield and the creature relies mainly on its armour (carapace) for protection against powerful munitions. Its armour looks grey and almost like a metal, so it could take some work for some individuals to identify it without a line of contact to a major faction. The Perimiter Beast also has giant railgun-like weapons designed to target starships at very long range, allowing it to also defend the Hive from space forces. As it is such a powerful fortress, some factions might prefer to attack other locations of Hive territory.

- The Gallery, a large Shattered megastructure now captured by the Calculators. It appears to be similar to most other megastructures of its kind, and located quite far from the Rectifier, though the Rectifier is visible from the highest points of the Gallery. Standing about 40 km in height excluding many smaller features and 80 km in diameter, it has a roughly cylindrical shape. It does have a number of large towers which span many kilometers towards space though, effectively increasing its total height to 60 km at the tallest point. The Gallery is unique for the single, massive structure at the top of its roof. Here is a massive art gallery of a huge array of precursor art, such as hologram depictions of various objects, art of the many species of the Shattered before they collapsed, and though this megastructure a lot has been learned about Shattered culture despite their written language being barely understood (only a few words are known currently, but some people outside the franchise have learned the language). This art gallery is, famously, non-euclidian. Though not contradictory with the laws of physics, its geometry appears to be impossible to replicate and shapes which are impossible to form can be seen in this gallery.

- CM-183-E, which is a code name given to an extremely anomalous megastructure. This structure is almost entirely non-Euclidian, which makes it incredibly difficult to navigate. With its extremely confusing layout, exploration parties have to place beacons every time they move a certain distance so that they can retrace the beacons and return home. Many parties have been lost on the structure for years, for another exploration party to discover them by accident only to find the skeletons of a previous exploration team who did not lay beacons. It was soon made apparent that they often die of thirst as they recover logs from those dead team members. Some parties even became lost when they religiously made sure to place beacons constantly when the layout changed after they went past a certain zone. Eventually, exclusion zones were established. If this technology can be learned, it could allow one faction to obtain an extreme advantage over others in battle, in more than 1 way.

- Bastion 47 A, which is essentially a fortress armed with a single, immense weapon. Mounted on a huge baseplate-like structure shaped like a cone that was cut so that the widest, bottom part was on the ground and facing upwards. The sides of which harbor many smaller weapons for other roles, usually for anti tank or anti air roles, but at the lowest layers, machine gun nests can also be found. The primary cannon of this structure is meant to shoot particularly large targets such as starships, but it can also fire large shells towards enemy nations as a weapon of very long range.

Plotlines

Many games, movies and more have been developed in the Endless Expanses universe. Each of these are known as plotlines, and can vary massively. There are FPS games, grand strategy games and even games about building and demolishing megastructures, logistics management, ect. To give each plotline developer more freedom to develop, each plotline is usually set in its own subcanon, so that the events of one plotline are usually not canon in another. Any plotline not in their own timeline are often labelled as on canon anyway, as it can be incredibly difficult to write events that do not conflict with those written by any other plotline. 

There is one plotline of a FPS video game where the train network between 2 neighboring megastructures failed during an attack and the player would have to fight their way from one megastructure to the other via the train line. The 2 megastructures came under attack by other factions and the player was tasked with recycling power to the ending megastructure to fight off this incursion. This game is known for some particularly interesting views from a variety of angles.

There is also a grand strategy game allowing the player to design their own faction or use one of the already canon major factions. The player can also design their own megastructures to take on a variety of roles like defence or as cities. The community of that game often gets creative and designs megastructures with many different properties and appearances, sometimes even designing megastructures from other plotline canons.