The Persean sector is fraught with peril for the surviving inhabitants who are trapped there, from the numerous pirates and religious zealots to the almost entirely unmapped outer systems that few return from. Not to mention that technology has been degrading over the past few centuries...
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The Core Worlds
While The Core Worlds are the safest place in the sector, they bear hundreds of years worth of scars alongside the rivaling factions fighting for dominance.
- Jangala, the planet you spawn next to if you choose to skip the tutorial, is a jungle planet that has an ecosystem and weather system so dangerous that quarantine measures are required for visitors. Even worse, the jungle needs to be burned away from orbit frequently to give colonists breathing room. Considering the decline of technology in the Sector, it might only be a matter of time until the jungle chokes out the cities on the planet.
- Mairaath used to be a beautiful world with three gargantuan Astropoli in orbit that provided fire support and additional living space. Visit now, and it's a ravaged desert with the remains of a single rusted Astropolis nearby. What happened? The Luddic Path rammed one of the stations into the ground, destroyed another, and kidnapped the third forcing it into a remote orbit from the local star.
- The capitol of the Sindrian Diktat is Sindria, a planet that's inundated with solar radiation from a red giant and requires anyone living there to reside deep underground. It has one of the highest populations in the Sector due to a refugee crisis, but the vast majority of inhabitants live in squalor due to neglected infrastructure which has lead to it also being the largest Wretched Hive in the Sector too.
- Askonia's gas giant Salus used to have a moon called Opis. Opis was a city world that was destroyed with a planet killer. Its remains continue to orbit Salus to this day. The worst thing is that no one knows who used the Planet Killer.
- There are multiple abandoned or decivilized worlds around The Core, where colonization efforts were extinguished for one reason or another. They've all been picked clean by scavengers and go to show how unforgiving the Persean Sector is to human life.
Factions
The Persean Sector was thrown into disarray ever since The Collapse, and even 206 cycles later it's still seeing heavy political and military conflict from the several factions present.
- The Hegemony posture themselves as the continuation of The Domain, and have committed multiple atrocities against their competitors such as using planet-killer weapons and using the Luddic Path as proxies to attack enemies such as Mairaath.
- The Sindrian Diktat broke off from the Hegemony during the 'Askonia Crisis' and supplanted control of the system by means of a military dictatorship. While they're only in control of a single system, they manufacture a significant amount of the fuel used in the Sector and have a lot of defensive power. Also, they train enough marines with their Lion's Guard HQ to effectively crush any sign of dissent on their worlds.
- Tri-Tachyon is responsible for the two AI Wars that plagued the Sector previously, and still control a considerable amount of territory despite being heavily punished by the Hegemony.
- The Domain of Man is the only known pre-Collapse society of any sort. So why were they building so many warships, and so many generations of them at that? Was there, as in-universe speculation supposes, some vast alien threat that necessitated the creation of ships like the Onslaught? Were there other human factions? Was it purely to suppress internal dissent and piracy (and good lord, either there was a lot of such, or the Domain believed in massive overkill)? And did the Domain deliberately suppress knowledge of what these formidable engines of war were being used on, or has it simply been forgotten over centuries, and especially since the Collapse? None of the possibilities seem pleasant, and very few paint a pretty picture of the Domain.
- As per the timeline, the Domain was simply the one polity that took over of the multitudes of them in the past. If they couldn't bring another polity to heel by diplomacy, they'd resort to military might.
Uncharted Space and Hyperspace
Outside of the relative security of the Core Worlds, the vast majority of the Persean Sector is a place most scavengers and explorers don't return from in one piece. Even without the multitude of Pirate and Luddic Path hideouts lurking amongst the stars, stellar phenomena is more than capable of tearing fleets to shreds.
- No-matter what stage in the game you are, the prospect of running out of essential resources remains one of the largest hazards while traveling in Hyperspace.
- Running out of anti-matter fuel will result in your fleet being dragged out of Hyperspace into the nearest—and usually largest—gravity well. Being deposited next to a giant star and its solar storms will obliterate your remaining supplies and likely land you into further trouble. A neutron star will blow you off-course in addition to bombarding your ships with intense radiation, and will almost certainly deplete your fleet's combat readiness beyond repair. Ludd help you if you get snatched by a black hole, because unless you have the fuel to E-burn from it's clutches, you'll be forced to watch your entire fleet be torn to bits.
- Not having enough crew will likely force you to mothball some ships and prevent you from safely activating Emergency Burn or Traverse Jump, meaning that hostile fleets or Geo Effects are much more difficult to escape.
- Having your supplies exhausted will result in your fleet's combat readiness rapidly declining. At low combat readiness, ships will be subject to random incidents and accidents that will result in the loss of crew, fuel, and if you're really unlucky, entire ships. Unless you scavenge some supplies in your travels, your ships will be doomed to suffer a slow and agonizing death.
- While exploring, you will inevitably come across a Distress Call coming from a nearby system. Problem is, you and other captains don't know whether the signal is legitimate or not. While you might find a scavenger fleet who's willing to pay extra for fuel, you are more likely to find Pirates lying in wait. Or you might find that while the distress signal was honest, the poor spacers who issued it are no longer alive.
- Investigating everything from derelict spaceships to Domain Era stations and abandoned colonies has a chance of getting random reports from your salvage teams. Sometimes these are mundane, sometimes they're even beneficial. But rarely, you'll get the notification that that a nearby fleet had trapped the area and are on rapid approach to your location. In the early game, it's highly recommended to leg it out of the system before whatever rigged the wreck finds you.
As your salvage crews begin their work, a transmitter inside the ship sends out an encrypted, broadwave signal. Whatever destination it's meant for, it has to be nearby.
- Dozens of unexplored systems will have warning beacons stating that the system is a Forbidden Zone and that exploring it is both illegal and highly dangerous. While low-danger systems are actually pretty lucrative to delve into, early-game characters have zero reason to brave anything more challenging... That is, unless you accepted an exploration quest where the faction involved chose not to tell you that your supposedly simple task of scanning a domain probe involved braving a high-danger system.
- Sensor Ghosts are objects in hyperspace that look just like fleets or points of interest from a distance, but there's nothing actually there. One variant will charge straight at you, seeming to perform an emergency burn (a maneuver used by enemy fleets to suddenly close the distance for an attack) only to fade away as it passes harmlessly over your fleet. Another phenomenon is a bunch of tiny sensor ghosts "dancing" around a random point in hyperspace, who seem to scatter as you approach. Yet another will simply keep a constant distance and direction from your fleet, tracking you anywhere you go like some sort of creepy stalker. Another creates temporary slipstream, and runs away from nearby fleets. Three Sensor Ghosts, however, will actually interact with you: One will orbit you, draining your drive field and slowing you down until you interdict it, at which point it flees. Another will move around erratically until you approach, revealing... a long-abandoned ship that, by all rights, shouldn't have been flying around. Understandably, everyone on the bridge is unnerved by this. The final one will chase you down, and once on top of you reveal themselves to be a dormant Remnant fleet that was disguising itself as a ghost. Excluding the last one, none of these are explained. Are they just the effects of hyperspace on the sensors? Aliens? Extradimensional life? It's not helped that none of these happen in the core worlds, except for the ghosts that maintain the same distance from you.
- Abyssal hyperspace is found in the bottom left corner of the sector, being the beginning of the Orion-Perseus Abyss. It's completely still, lacking any deep hyperspace or hyperspace storms, but it exerts pressure on your drive bubble, slowing you down to a quarter of your speed and seriously reducing your sensor range. The only things here are you, sensor ghosts, abyssal lights, occasional gravity wells, and a stray brown dwarf system called Limbo. Everything sounds muffled in abyssal hyperspace too, which adds to the creepyness.
- The gravity wells lead to rogue planets or black holes, and most of those are creepy. Black holes can have a pattern of almost-prime-numbers that the game notes is so unlikely to occur it approaches impossibility, rogue gas giants can have a sudden massive atmospheric upwelling as soon as you drop in with no obvious source, and terrestrial planets can be found to have been mined in such a way as to make it appear nobody was there at all, or have ships orbiting them with all sorts of creepy or horrific tales to them. Even weirder, transverse jumping is hypothetical until you do it or the Academy tells you how to, so how did those ships get there?
Omega (SPOILERS)
- First added by the 0.95 update, the Omega are highly advanced AI ships that guard the Domain's Coronal Hypershunts. Vastly more advanced than everything else in the Sector, the worst thing about the Omega is that next to nothing is known about them.
- Your TriPad is unable to show information on the ships when you encounter them. Trying to analyze them mid-combat is also impossible. Omega tech has no descriptions, instead having quotes from people who've encountered them before. These quotes revealed that even the Alpha Cores with their world altering capabilities consider Omega unfathomable.
- The sheer firepower the Omega ships have is horrifying, with strange and highly unusual weapons that can tear entire fleets to shreds. Even though their biggest ships, the Tesseract are just cruiser-sized, a single one is more than capable of taking on a fleet and win by itself.
- Even if you defeat a Tesseract, the ship will split into several smaller ships, each with powerful weapons adapted to destroy their full self's vanquisher. An Omega ship cannot be destroyed until every last fragment of it is defeated. If you fail to destroy that single surviving Aspect before it defeats you, when you return to the Hypershunt, the single, tiny fighter will have regenerated fully into its original Tesseract form.
