Commodities

One of the results of the availability of nanotechfactories is the commoditization of many tools and devices. In Highland culture a commodity may best be defined as an economic good which has no quantitative differentiation across markets, i.e. it is fungible. In the case of created goods, that is technological objects as opposed to commodity resources such as minerals, agricultural products and other raw materials, it is the combination of nanotechnology and Intellectual Property Law which has resulted in commoditization.
Basically under Highland law the issuance of patents and copyright is severely limited as compared to the I.P. practices of the Progressive Era. Many types and classes of devices are excluded from patents entirely. Software is entirely unpatentable, although patterns and blueprints used by nanotechfactories may be copyrighted. Reports, liturgical works and performance media cannot be copyrighted, though properties like songs and plays, as well as written works may be, by the author, composer or song writer.
Copyright law in the Highlands allows for a single 15 year period of copyright during which the author of a work may have sole right over their work. This includes the licensing, but not sale of the copyright. Copyrights terminate upon the death of the owner.
Patents are even more limited, as items to be patented must be new, useful and non-obvious. Biological process, breeder designs and drugs cannot be patented. Patents are held for 10 years and cover products from the time the patent is registered.
Anything not under patent or copyright is considered in the public domain. The vast library of nanotechfactory patterns in the public domain may be used by anyone to manufacture commodity devices. Of course the typical Highland citizen is unlikely to own a nanotechfactory, with the possible exception of a food factory in their kitchen and possibly a small handyman's minifac. So throughout the Highlands it is much more likely that a Highlander will buy commodity products produced locally by a general fabrications establishment than that they will produce it themselves.
Cost of such devices is typically the price of the raw stock needed for the device and overhead for the fabricator. This makes commodity prices very low compared to the pre-nanotech era. For example a smartphone in the Progressive Era could cost up to a Parliament (about US$1000.) A CMC, the modern TLA equivalent which has many more features, can typically be had for P0.25 (US$250). Clothing, created by a fabric extruder nanotechfactory, is even cheaper than the twenty-first century equivalent, even though made of smart material and containing many enhancements not possessed by the heavily trademarked and patented Progressive Era clothing.
Typically art, excluding writing and the written scripts, music and lyrics, are not protected by copyright or other intellectual property laws. That means that performance artists are limited in their ability to record a performance and suck continuing value out of said performance. Artist may charge to view their work, be it the physical work of a painter or sculpture, or a particular performance, be it dramatic, comedic or musical, but recorded performances are not protected. This has resulted in the collapse of the media empires of the Progressive Era and the flourishing of both amateur and professional theater.
This has also resulted in the increase of patronage in all of the arts, not just in the support of artists by the very wealthy, but also through the voluntary support of designers, artists and performers through private donations. I can't but a copy of a recording artists performance, well I can, but I can also download or make a copy for free, however I can also donate to them because I like and appreciate their performance and want them to be able to afford to continue to perform.
A whole culture of such benefactors and patronage exists in the Highlands and there is a notable portion of workers, not just in the arts, but also in other fields who subsist on patronage rather than conventional employment.

Monitors and Forts

So one might say, if the Grand Human Union is such a peaceful, benevolent place why does the Star Legion have such devastating firepower as embodied in First, Second and Third Raters?
The answer is monitors and forts.
A monitor is a 10 to 30 million cuft warship. They are heavily armored with force fields and armed with massive energy weapons and missile launchers. Unlike battleships they typically do not embark battleriders or troops. They also typically do not have shunting capability. That means that they are limited to accessing subspace using a gate.
That means that monitors are used as both system defense ships and gate defense platforms.
The development of the battleship was a direct result of the deployment of monitors which greatly outclassed the frigates and battleriders that existed at that time.
However dreadnoughts and superdreadnouths were a response to the even larger and more powerful forts developed to defend systems.
A fort is a grav powered installation typically grav anchored on the subspace side of a gate or in orbit near the real space side of a gate. With BG engines typically only within the 4 to 6 g range a fort can move only sufficiently to move to its place of station and make a poor target for ballistic weapons (like unpowered missiles.) Because it does not have to mount a powerful BG engine a fort is not limited to 250 million cuft. As a matter of fact it usually mounts more powerful force field armor than all but the most powerful superdreadnought as well as having a massive structural frame supported by structural integrity fields and physical armor as well as internal armor force fields.
Forts also typically mount massive energy weapons, missile launchers (for use in real space) as well a numerous battlerider squadrons. Forts are often located near each other where they can provide mutual fire support.
Like other combat vessels forts deploy either sensor drone nets or purpose built sensor arrays to enhance their abilities to detect incoming enemies.
Enemies who defeat gate defense forts often find themselves facing another layer of defensive positions on the far side of the gate in real space.

Highland Department of Roads

The Highland Department of Roads maintains the system of gates, beacon stations, and waystations along the Major Routes in subspace. They also operate the hyperdrills that stabilize subspace and make possible the placement of gates in planetary orbit. Workers of the department are called roadies.
Along with members of the Grand Postal Service roadies also maintain and operate the hypercable system. They work with the posties in ensuring messages are delivered once they have exited the hypercable system for delivery to systems not connected.
As might be expected with such a wide range of responsibilities there is no typical roadie.
Within the Grand Human Union the department maintains huge traveling road camps in subspace, typically built on large 500,000-1,500,000 cuft ship platforms which contain quarters, workshops and hangars for hyperdrills, mining craft and other supporting vehicles.
Subspace contains no natural occurring bodies to provide construction material so road camps typically ferry raw materials from asteroid belts and gas giants in handy systems in normal space into subspace to provide stock for the huge industrial nanofactory fabricators located in the road camp workshops and for the portable fabricator machines used to construct the gates, beacon stations and  waystation frames. Much of the interior of these structures are constructed by follow on contractors.
Typically thousands of workers support the typical road camp and the camp supports dependents as well. Many couples work the road camps and spend most of their lives traveling along the roads.
Operating roads still require a cadre of specialist technicians to support the repair robots which maintain the beacon stations. Some live at one of the waystations and travel down their route in brakes or HUVs configured as repair vehicles, returning to family after a few days on the road seeing to their charges.
Others are under the care of technician couples working from saucer shaped ketches, 15,000-50,000 cuft vessels containing living spaces, workshops and stock storage holds, most commonly staffed by extended family. In many ways this class of roadies most closely resembles the lighthouse keepers of maritime days, living in relative isolation as they move down the road of their section, maintaining beacon stations, picking up repair stock at roadie depots on the waystations and repairing hypercable installations.
Another responsibility of the Department of Roads is the DOR stormwatch channel. Stormwatch sensors located in beacon stations transmit gravametric information to weather centers located at certain waystations in each road section. The weather stations analyze the information and post storm warnings to be broadcast from the beacon stations to local traffic on the DOR stormwatch channel.
Keeping the stormwatch sensors operating is a part of the job of the maintenance road crews. Most of the storm analysis on the establish network is done by AI, but on new roads or ones still under construction people still have to aid in storm detection.

Life in a distributist nanotech society

The most difficult aspect of adventuring in any society whose tenants are radically different from the players own is trying to imagine what life is like for the player characters. This is important because social norms color what kinds of choices are reasonable for the characters to make and so limit the options of the players. These limitations are most often enforced by the referee or storyteller or gamemaster, but automatic compliance of the players often is effected by how reasonable those limits seem.
Very few players would disagree with a GM who called a SWAT team in if their characters shoot up a police station. Their response might be different if the GM calls in a ninja hit squad because they've ambushed a Confederate scouting party in a U.S. Civil War era game.
So social environment is very important. If the society is radically different, say a devout Christian norm as opposed to the radical progressive secularism of the present day that still might not be that great a leap. The PCs could likely look back several hundred years to the societal norm of the pre-Reformation Christian eras. However such societies were very different from civilization in the Highlands, most notably due to the existence of nantechnology.
Now the limitations of nanotechnology quite put to rest the common fantasy of a nanite swarm creating a banquet complete with table, chairs, prime rib, and champagne cooling in its ice bucket out of thin air. Even so it is easy to see that a small group outfitted with a number of nanotech factories and the designs needed to utilize them would be quite independent of need for the economic structures typically organized along traditional capitalistic grounds.
While the economic structure practiced within the Highlands might be categorized as distributism, it is no more pure pure distributism than what is practiced in the twenty-first century United States is pure capitalism or what is practiced in twenty-first century China is communism or capitalism.
The very existence of nanotechnology makes old supply side economics obsolete. But even when anyone with a nanotech factory and a pile of materials can make just about anything there is still an advantage to a certain amount of specialization. Someone still has to design the patterns that factories use to create items. Metals, petrochemicals and other elements must still be mined, purified and transported. And even with nanotech factories it is still more efficient to grow a crop or raise a herd than it is to produce nano-tech food.
Some amount of capitalization, that is the concentration of capital for the purposes of investment still occurs. The difference being the lack of isolation from consequences which was inherent in the progressive era corporate system.
Corporations, as originally instituted, limited the liability of investors for debt beyond the amount of assets they had in the corporation. This shifted risk to the debtors of the corporation. In the 19th century this was extended to protect shareholders by limiting the corporation's liability in both contract and tort claims. This further isolated members of the corporation from accountability for the corporation's actions. In the 20th century, changing law served to concentrate authority for guidance of corporate actions in the hands of corporate managers, who were theoretically accountable to shareholders, but often beyond their actual control. This further isolated those controlling the actions of the corporation from the consequences of their actions, both moral and legal. Of course it was possible for governments to hold corporate officers accountable for illegal activities, and even for a corporation to be dissolved for a pattern of such activities. Such sanctions typically require extensive and expensive action on the part of government, with corporate officers often shielded from direct accountability and hapless shareholders punished through loss of asset value. This pertains to legal responsibility, attempting to hold corporations up to moral accountability was even harder. This ignored the inevitable corruptive effect exercised by many large corporations as they solicited beneficial laws from compliant political leaders in return for both legal and illegal bribery.
Like many types of destructive social patterns the initial consequence of the decoupling of cause and effect resulted in a temporary economic boom. Often such patterns extend for what in human terms is a significant span of time, making the inevitable consequences less obvious. But the cause and effect relationship is as true as the law of gravity. The consequences of the divorce of behavior consequences in the economic sphere would eventually lead to economic collapse.
As communism and socialism fail because they do not take into account the nature of man so to does capitalism fail when it too fails to take into account the concupiscence caused by original sin.
Adam Smith's "invisible hand" does not work when the natural balance of economic cause and effect is corrupted by government intervention, legal redirection of consequences or criminal intent. Corporations and capitalism on their own are neither morally corrupt or sinful. However in their original incarnation, that is chartered by governments, for the common good, rather than to realize corporate revenues for the state in the form of taxes or profits for the shareholders, corporations can produce enormous good and still produce profit, which is of itself not sinful. This is accomplished by keeping corporations closely regulated, focusing on the protection of the public good and limiting corporations to comply with the purposes expressed in their charters. This generally results in small corporations, which are closely regulated by government in the interest of the commons. Naturally this produces a lower rate of return than unfettered capitalism, but it also prohibits the fiction of the immortal corporate "person", beyond common morals and ethical constraints. It also tends to ensure profits over the long run, if limiting their unfettered expansion. In the Highlands this is considered an equitable trade.

Barbarians at the gates

It might seem reasonable that, in the Midlands at least, a world or group of worlds might arise to challenge the Grand Human Union's hegemony. After all domination has always been a strong characteristic of human interaction. Strength is often the determining factor of history rather than morality.
The propagation of superior technology from the Highland's center to its edges have resulted in a practical dominance of the Union of the worlds along its borders. They tend to be highly dependent on the Highlands and incorporation quickly becomes a foregone conclusion.
Most experts known that eventually a large enough group of worlds outside the Highlands will become organized enough and be stubborn enough to resist absorption, but this has not happened yet, and there are no polities within a hundred light years of the border organized enough or large enough to realistically worry about. Farther than that worlds tend to lag technologically behind the Highlands, so even a fairly large grouping of worlds are not really considered a threat, at least not to the Union.
These world groups are themselves sometimes targets of their less enlightened neighbors. The Union, and its Star Legion seldom take part in these conflicts, but their have been exceptions. The militant orders are more likely to take a stand, especially if the Church is threatened by these disagreements.

The Knights of St. Bix, Organization.

As with many successful orders holy founders were followed by devote organizers.
The Knight Guardians were formed along military lines. Small units formed around a cadre of officers, with each unit having a priest chaplain, assisted by deacons, instituted acolytes and brothers. Officers benefited only in having more authority.
Each member took vows of poverty, chastity, piety and obedience. Initially a recruit took vows for only a set period. After a period of time a Brother Guardian might chose to take vows for life, or they might return to the world.
St. Bix was styled as the Knight Commander of the order. The Chaplain General was the highest ranking cleric in the order, responsible for all of the order's priests and clerics. Initially the order was under the authority of the local bishop or other ordinary.
Bix was succeeded by Bl. Henry deVentille, a man of great talents in both combat and diplomacy. He succeeded in getting the Pope to place the order under the control of its own Ordinary. This protonotary apostolic position was not equal in authority to a bishop, but conveyed some of the privileges or pontificals proper to bishops, including the ring and pectoral cross.
In 2297 Pope Pius XXIV confirmed in the Chaplain General of the order the particular rights of independence from the local hierarchy, especially in the area of granting faculties to order priests.
Under the Knight Commander Unit Masters commanded order outposts or vessels. According to the rule each unit was to have at least one priest. Larger units were to have more than one priest. To ensure a supply of clerics the order founded its own seminary at it's headquarters on Primus Frost in the then Midlands.
The ownership of the land and building resides in the lay association Militarum Auxilium Christi. Militarum Auxilium Christi is directly tied to the Knights of St. Bix, but is a separate entity within the Church. The  organization forms a Secular Order which is associated with the Guardians. The Guard Tertiaries are lay members and consist of both men and women who are not bound by the vows of the order. They do make solemn and public promises. Members are permitted to marry, and many have previously served under temporary vows in the Knights. For the most part Militarum Auxilium Christi owns most of the land, ships and other facilities and equipment used by the knights.

The Knights of St. Bix

By 2247 humanity inhabited a growing sphere encompassing many thousands of cubic light years. Civilization made up a much smaller volume. As might be expected the Church spread almost as fast as humanity. As had happened too many times in the past, beyond the power of courts and police and peace-keepers some took advantage of those too weak to resist.
Initially travelers, pilgrims and colonists outside the boundaries of the coalescing Grand Human Union turned to private security companies. Such companies often hired personnel of dubious character themselves, and more than one group found their hired guards untrustworthy collaborators of pirates or criminals themselves.
Bix Woodforde  was a retired soldier who decided that there was a better way. He realized that a mercenary group inspired by payment, in the absence of civil authority, could easily slip into piracy or outlawry itself. He studied the still existing Order of Hospitallers, otherwise known as the Knights of Malta, as well as the Teutonic Knights, and the lay orders of the Knights of Columbus and of course the original Catholic order of knighthood the Order of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon, the Knights Templar.
He became convinced that only a group of soldiers who worked for a higher purpose, who took vows of poverty, obedience and chastity, and were dedicated to the protection of those in their charge might avoid that fate. He saw in the strict rule of the failed Templars the seeds of their failure, as well as a possible hope for a future order.
So Bix Woodforde needed a rule. Rather than the basing it on the Rule of Benedict, as did St. Bernard of Clairvaux, he based it on the Rule of St. Francis of Assisi. That made his Knight Guardians, as he called them, mendicants, that is, they neither individually nor collectively own property.  All must be donated to their use. Even ships and weapons belong to the Church, or still to those who have donated their use. In this way Bix sought to avoid the accumulation of wealth which was the downfall of the Order of Knights Templar.
The brothers would observe the Hours in their ships and bases. They would treat their foes with Christian charity and those under their care with respect and in such a manner as to guard their souls as well as their mortal bodies, or so was Bix hope.
Bix sought out a group heading into the Wilds, and with the backing of a number of priests in that group recruited men to join the band that he was forming for the group's protection.
This was the start of his order. Bix profited through the fact that some twenty years later one of those priest became first a bishop, and then a cardinal. Some fifty years later, with his order grown into the most powerful non-governmental military force in the Wilds, Blessed Bix Woodforde was canonized and the order of Knight Guardians became the Knights of St, Bix.

The Great Compromise

The Great Compromise is a symbol of both the imperfection of the temporal universe and the consequences of demographics on history. Some would also say it is an indication that a Pope's decisions outside the area of faith and morals are not infallible and might even be detrimental to the short term good of the Church. Others would point out that the Church should never impose but merely propose.
The Great Compromise is a legacy of the failings of the Progressive Era and the vast demographic shift of parts of Europe from Christian to Muslim. As secularism was squeezed out Sharia law became the predominate legal system for areas not traditionally Muslim. This did not sit well with all of the non-Muslim population, especially when coupled with the violence against Christians, Jews and non-believers that seemed to follow the Islamitization of most places.
This resulted in a long series of sectarian violence as Christians and secularist started taking reprisals for Muslim violence against non-Muslims in Islamic nations. For every church firebombed a Mosque was set ablaze. The Church spoke out against these actions, but was a lone voice as a combination of fear and survival instinct took over.
The remaining Secular/Christian nations, seeing the result of allowing Islamic groups to engineer demographic shifts through a pattern of emigration without absorption and eventual political manipulation responded by  passing reciprocity laws. That is Muslim immigrants were prohibited from practising their faith publicly because Christians were prevented from public practice of their faith in nations under Sharia law.
Eventually The Christian East looked to the Pope as the one man in the Christian West who could speak for the Unifying Church. At Dover a group from what was left of the European Union, the Organization of American States and various non-aligned nations met with the Pan Islamic Union under the oversight of the Pope.  Under much pressure from the national governments, the media and the Church the resulting treaty became the Great Compromise.
Under the Great Compromise the participants agreed that the reciprocity laws would be codified into international law. Christians would neither  seek converts nor publicly worship in Islamic territories. Likewise Muslims would no longer be allowed to raise Mosques nor establish schools or attempt to convert in Christian territories. A policy of ethnic cleansing would for all intents and purposes be allow by which groups would be "induced" to emigrate out of their homes and into the respective sectarian territories.
As might be imagined many Christians saw this as a betrayal of the Great Commission placed upon the Church by Christ. The Church's position was that Christianity should not be imposed at the point of a spear and rational argument was not possible with a philosophy which rejected rational theological discourse. Time was on the side of the Church, it was argued, and the problem should be left in the hands of the Lord.
While the Compromised reduced, indeed almost eliminated the violence in the First World, Africa continued to be a battleground right up until the beginning of the twenty third century and the invention of the Barnes-Gutierrez Hyperspace Engine and the diaspora.

Families

It should be no surprise that with the combination of thousands of worlds and faithful Christians and Muslims as the principle inhabitants of the universe of New Diasporia, that large families are the norm rather than the exception.
Family dynamics tend to be different from the historical trends. The Progressive Era tended to see the age at which couples initially married increase (as it also saw the duration of marriages decrease,  and eventually the total number of marriages diminish.) This was blamed on a variety of causes, but mostly on the requirement of increased education and economic factors. Historians agree that the real cause was a combination of unhealthy materialism and disordered self-absorption.
Modern Highland families tend to marry during their early twenties. This is made possible through the support of larger families which reduce the necessary economic burden of marriage. Marriages tend to last very long, since anagathic nanotech factories have extended human life far beyond earlier eras. Compatibility between prospective spouses is more readily assured by stringent Pre-Cana requirements for anyone contemplating marriage, as well as widespread moral support for the virtue of chastity.
Large Catholic families tend to include various members who choose not to marry, either for religious reasons or due to temperament. Not every man who chooses not to marry is suitable for the priesthood, monastery or hermitage.  Nor is every woman who chooses not to marry suitable for the cloister or religious life. Chaste single life apart from the formal orders of the Church is an honorable vocation, and one that carries no stigma. Some do eventually spend some time in discernment, but many return to the world to live on as ancillaries to their families as beloved aunts or cherished uncles or even to marry late in life.
Large families tend to accumulate greater wealth. They take better care of their older members, rather than pushing that duty off on the state or leaving it to the individual. Under Distributism many businesses are family businesses. A large number of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins tends to mean that there are always enough family members interested in the family business to allow some family members to choose the Church, military or government as viable alternatives without effecting the ability of the family business to survive.
From a game play point of view this means the the chances are the individual Player Character  has a large retinue of near and far relatives, the balance of which may be at their ancestral home, but many who might be in the bosom of the Church, military or government and stationed almost anywhere.
It also means the lone wolf, orphan or solitary character is likely to have an unusual background. Of course it is not unlikely that adventures are more apt than not to have come from such an unusual background.

So How Big is the Universe?

One question that is likely to come up is how big are the Highlands? How far do the Wilds stretch from Earth?
Humanity has had the Barnes-Gutierrez Hyperspace Engine for just over a century. Theoretically if someone left the Solar System the year the B/G Engine was invented and had traveled constantly for that whole time they could be over 9000 light years from Earth. In actuality the span of mankind's explorations are just over quarter of that number.
It is generally agreed that the Wilds encompass a diameter of 5000 light years. Of course the Milky Way itself is only about 1000 light years thick, so that it is really only meaningful to speak of the Wilds in the band of stars extending either toward Sagittarius and galactic center or in the opposite direction toward the galactic rim. The 1000 light year diameter sphere of the Highlands encompasses the entire thickness of the galaxy. Beyond there is only the Galactic Halo region, an area of gas and the occasional rogue star.
The Midlands are considered to consist of a flattened torus 2500 light years in diameter, a distance also only meaningful in the band along the galactic disk.
Every year the border of the Midlands moves twenty-five light years into the Wilds. This is effected primarily by Midland planetary governments suppressing piracy, imposing the rule of law-and-order, often brutally, and opening up worlds which have been isolated to trade and outside scrutiny.
Likewise the Highlands encroach on the Midlands primarily through political and industrial action at a rate of about a dozen light years a year. This is done by voluntarily incorporating worlds into the Great Human Union and tying them to the infrastructure of the Highland worlds. This is most often done by extending Blue Highways to worlds just outside the Highland borders. Soon Major Routes, with their more extensive superstructure and hypercable transmitter stations replace the Blue Highways and the previously independent worlds find themselves with a seat in the Highland Parliament and under the jurisdiction of a Highland Count or Countess, at least as far as offworld interests are concerned.
Those that resists soon become backwaters. It is a rare world which can resist the services of the Grand Postal Service and Department of Roads, institutions which tie humanity together.
Since incorporation into the Grand Human Union is the overt temporal agenda of the Church, a decision whose reasons are based on social justice criteria and prudential moral ethics most worlds face a great deal of pressure to join the Union rather than maintain independence.
The system is not perfect and from time to time a world will resist, but over a longer duration the benefits of membership simply overcome most resistance.

Distributism

One question that players are likely to ask about any game universe is what kind of economic system is employed in the game. In many games differing economic systems are even a stat of local worlds in the planetary design system. It may be imagined  by some that with its strong support of commodity money by the Highland government and humanity as a whole, that capitalism is the prevailing economic system in the New Diasporia universe. This is not accurate. In the Highlands, at least, the prevailing economic philosophy is distributism.
What is distributism? It is a third way economic philosophy which is neither socialism nor capitalism. Under distributism the ownership of the means of production is spread as wide as possible among the general populous, rather than being centralized under government control, as in socialism or in the hands of a few wealthy individuals as in capitalism.
In its purest sense individuals own the means of production. That is farmers work their own land, craftsmen own their own tools. Larger collectives of production do exists in the form of guilds. Guilds differ from unions in that guilds are made up of both employee and employer cooperating for mutual benefit. So for example while a ship builder might employ workers in the construction of ships by providing materials and shipyard space, the ship designers and builders will own their own tools and such intellectual property rights which exist to designs or processes, or they will be held by the guild.
Banks tend actually to be closer to credit unions or mutual companies, that is they are owned by their depositors, so rather than customers they are holders in stock in the bank by virtue of their deposits in it.
This cooperative approach at its heart is based on the Church's social justice principles of subsidiarity and solidarity. It does not prevent large scale partnerships with, for example, a whole fleet of merchant ships owned by their captains joined together in a single company, employing factors and agents through a region. It can easily be seen at work in any company which deals with the public primarily through franchises run by individual owners, utilizing employees who primarily own tools of production and are responsible for their own health care and retirement investment.
Distributism  promotes a society of artisans and creates a society with an emphasis on small business. Corporations and mega-corporations are not natural fixtures of human society. The existence of minifacts, that is nanotech run mini factories favors small production over mass production. Long range transport is concentrated on the movement of raw materials rather that the movement of finished products, which is to be expected in a society with nanotech capabilities. Legacy transport of finished materials, mostly nanotech factories from TL A worlds to TL B and below worlds still exists, as do exports to lower tech worlds off the highways. But even on these worlds local production is preferred, especially in food products and clothing, with imports limited to higher tech devices incapable of being produced locally.
Of course the true basis of human interaction in distributism is centered on the family, as the principle unit of the functioning distributist society. In this way the guild is a kind of extended family which promotes the ownership of property by family more than individuals.

Technology Timeline

Technology Level in new Diasporia is based upon a sliding scale. The most advanced Tech Level is always TL A. As new technology is discovered and widely distributed older technology slips to lower levels.
Worlds that tend to advance with the general level of advancement of technology, those on the Major Routes, maintain their TL A status. Those that stagnate slip to a lower TL. So as the timeline advances those worlds at the cusp of technological innovation remain at the highest TL
We can start our technology time-line in 1951. This is the approximate year when the first experimental power producing nuclear power plant was placed in commission. With the invention of the jet aircraft in the previous decade and the large scale electrical distribution network perfected in the decade before that Technology at this TL reached its peak.
The Progressive Era, with its great advancement in electronics, cybernetics and power producing technologies, nonetheless failed to produce stable technological advancement due to the economic chaos which resulted in the loss of much of this technology as humanity lost significant advances in space and physics technology due to an inability to afford the supporting superstructure and the move down many technological dead ends such as embryonic stem cell research and "sustainable" technologies.
Coming out of the Progressive Era a full fledged technological revolution finally blossomed with the perfection of fusion power during the second decade of the twenty-second century. This Tech Level marks the wide distribution of cheap power. Combined with the moral push back it opened the way for the renewed push of ethical research.
By the middle of the twenty-second century great enough leaps in medical and cybernetic technology has been made to push the Tech Level yet again.
The advancement in gravity theory by the beginning of the Twenty-Third Century results in a jump to another Tech Level with the invention of the  Barnes-Gutierrez hyperspace engine, followed quickly by associated gravity control technologies. This results in the start of the diaspora.
In less that two decades Hyperdrills make the Subspace Highways possible, along with the associated Hypercable communication system, causing another Tech Level jump.
Another three decades see the perfection of the transmat portal, a technology predicted as early as two previous Tech Levels, but unrealized until 2257. Along with force field technology, another spin off of gravity physics this pushes the technology level.
Public and Church acceptance of nanotech utilization, as well as active terraforming of worlds establishes another technology level jump thirty years before the present.
The past thirty years have seen advancements in the utilization of nanotech, the wide spread use of terraforming and the proliferation of transmat technology.
The diaspora of humanity has resulted in a slowing of the the propagation of technology, if not the advancement of it. Since most advancement is accomplished on the advanced, high population worlds of the Highland almost inevitably the worlds in the Wilds, which are both remote from the research centers in distance and decades away in time lag several tech levels behind.

Technological Morality

Many of the technologies available to the civilizations of the New Diasporia have the potential to be both socially and morally disruptive. Just as the technologies of contraception, in vitro fertilization and fetal stem cell utilization carried a grave moral price so can many of the possible utilizations of known technologies in the New Diasporia universe exact a grave moral cost.
One of the greatest lessons of Natural Law is that just because something is possible does not mean that it should be done. It is often possible to destroy human life or dignity, to exploit the poor, even to commit crimes against God and humanity. The possibility that such things can be done does not give license to do them.
In the Highlands at least, and to a lesser extent in the Midlands, a combination of secular laws and Church interdictions have kept most immoral and dangerous practices in check.  There are really no new evils. Abortion was known and practiced in the Roman Republic of Julius Caesar's time. Most of the evil practices of the new science are just new ways of committing the old evils of trying to subvert the authority of God. These ancient evils are banned. Education in the precepts of Natural Law are even more effective than laws and bands in preventing much of these kinds of actions.
The dangers of unlimited nanite replicators is well known to even the youngest school child. Like most technologies nanotech did not spring full grown at the TL A level. Science had worked for over a century on the construction of nano-machines. Constructing the first generation nanomaterials used biological processes to create molecular materials. Next came the construction of the first limited assemblers, able to create other nano-machines. Some of these were constructed to work in the construction of chemical and biochemical compounds, others to construct second generation nano-machines.
It was inevitable that eventually a sloppy or overly arrogant researcher would overreach and create nanites which were neither self-limiting nor incapable of replication. This grey goo apocalypse fortunately happened at the Grytotech orbital research station, instead of on an inhabited world. The resulting fifty year bane on nanotech research pushed commercially available nantechnology up at least a tech level.
The development of deflector force fields made protection against such out of control nanotechnology safe enough in the public and Church mind to allow its more general use. A very rigid system of ethical rules for the production and use of nanotechnology is enforced in the Highlands. Most places in the Midlands follow similar rules. In the Wilds less oversight has resulted in some horrific results, which have acted as a warning to some, but been ignored by others.

What kind of culture?

There is a certain argument to be made that Highland worlds along Major Routes are uniformly bland, or at least not terribly different from one another. There is certainly a small amount of truth about that, if the visitor limits himself to the orbital spaceport or one of the planetary starports or mega malls of the large cities.
Once one gets away from the port cities, even if one is limited to the transmat system, a much greater array of cultural opportunities become available. For example, on St. Martin there is a transmat portal just across the street from St. Barnabas Basilica which can take you to the Golden Beach on the South Continent, where reef diving is a major pass time. As good as the reef is it is vastly overshadowed by the Great Barrier Reef of St. Philopia's Wright Archipelago. Philopia's St Marys Hospital is renown throughout the County for its work in taking on emergent diseases.
Travel on Port San Benedict is a more arduous, and interesting task. No transmat system here, limiting options to high speed grav train, commercial aircraft or private omnivehicle. Large sections of the world are effectively uninhabited, with vast animal preserves for the native life and large ranches teaming with imported livestock. The Monastery of St. Dionysius in the Andreanous Mountains is well known, mostly for it associated seminary.
WoodSocket is a major pilgrimage destination due to the Shrine of Our Lady of WoodSocket, which is surrounded by the almost impenetrable Rothwell Wood. It is easily accessible through the transmat gate across Blakely Square from St. Martin's Cathedral. The Great North Forest continues to supply lumber for most of the Diocese.
The kinds of activities tourists (PCs) along the Major Route are likely to become involved in are varied, but not necessarily safe. Any adventure that can be played in a modern urban setting can probably be played on one of the Major Route worlds.
Also worlds are politically independent. While most Highland governments tend toward laissez-faire republican union governments there are pockets of Great Compromise Sharia Caliphates, where Christians are required to abstain from Proselytizing, and are not permitted to openly practice their religion. Of course, followers of Islam are bound by the same Compromise in Christian areas.
There are also pockets, sometimes even worlds, colonized by other fringe religious groups, though most have move beyond the Highlands and travelers are going to have to go to the Midlands at least to interact with those cultures.
In all these cases individuals accused of breaking the laws on one world are not likely to be extradited by the governments of other worlds. The reach of the Church is somewhat longer and individuals who have broken canon law are more likely to find retribution by the Church, in the form of medicinal punishments, some of which will have temporal as well as spiritual effects. For example, an excommunicated trader is likely to find a dearth of tradesmen who are willing to do business with him. Even governments might refuse to deal with his company, out of respect for the Church, and its position.
A world under interdiction is likely to wither on the vine, as no commercial outfit will do business with them. Such worlds have typically broken some serious precept of  Natural Law, of the sort that even non-Christian members of the Great Compromise believe they are a danger to themselves or others. Examples include approving of abortion, child sacrifice to a false deity (such as convenience or greed), involuntary  human experiments, dangerous culturally supported promiscuity, biological weapon experiments or free roaming nanotech. All of these practices have been shown to result in societal collapse, unnecessary human deaths, and dangerous moral pollution of other worlds.

Game History

The history of the New Diasporia starts near the beginning of the twenty third century. The worst fruits of the Progressive Era have started to pass. China has nearly recovered from its century of Communist/Oligarchy Capitalist despotism, whose death blow was the unbalanced male/female population ratio caused by its one-child policy. The destruction of European civilization, which contracepted and aborted itself to oblivion has result in a relatively stable Islamic state in Northern Europe balanced by a Catholic/Orthodox Christian state in the south, in Spain, Italy and Greece and to the east in the Russo-Balkan Confederation. In the New World the Hispanicization of North America has resulted in a stable Christian democratic republic, with a strong minority Mormon population. Africa remained a battle ground between Christian and Muslim.
The triggering event of the great human diaspora was a result of the collaboration of the world renown Jesuit physicist Fr. Borland Barnes and the equally obscure graduate student Joesph Gutierrez.
Man space flight had become extinct in the middle of the twenty-second century, deep in the collapse of the Progressive Era, when even the struggling Russian Republic could no longer afford the cost of sending people into space for no reason other than to say they had. Robots continued to investigate the solar system, but no human had been in space in a generation.
This was a problem for Gutierrez. As a boy he had eaten and slept Asimov, Straczynski and Norton. He studied all of the twentieth century manned space data from both the American and Soviet-Russian programs. He wanted to go into space. Intellectually he knew that he was unlikely to ever fulfill his dream. In his soul he rejected that.
Fr. Borlan Barnes S.J. shared that dream. He was determined to free humanity from the single globe that God had placed them on. Working at Argonne National Labs, while teaching at the University of Chicago, Barnes was attempting to overcome the greatest hurdle to manned space flight, the cost per kilo of lifting mass off of his planet.
His goal required that he solve the greatest mystery of physics, the so-call theory of everything, a unified field theory which would explain why the Standard Model did not work and how relativity and quantum mechanics fit together. This was a mystery that physics had been seeking the answer to for two centuries.
Gutierrez worked for Barnes at Argonne. A brilliant mathematician, Gutierrez was very good at seeing the relationship between the high level mathematics and physical experiments necessary to prove the physics. Even so, he always claimed that the idea for the product of this famous collaboration, the Barnes-Gutierrez hyperspace engine, came from a dream.
The B/G engine's most immediate effect was as a reactionless engine. That is a device that would produce thrust without mass. It did this by reacting with the multidimensional subspace below normal space. Once beyond the gravitational pull of a planet it allowed direct access to subspace itself.
This opened up the stars to mankind. Moreover it was cheap. Cheap in require power and cheap in construction costs. For the price of a private plane anyone could build a star going spacecraft.
As could be imagined the reaction of government was not favorable. But once out of the bottle the genie could not be easily returned.
So started the great human diaspora. In a year humans had reach every star within the solar neighborhood, while governments had barely been able to get a working arrangement in the solar system. Within five years humans were spreading out in a globe 250 light years across. Government was lagging a thousand light years behind. Within a century Humans had traveled to the edges of the galactic arms and beyond, and civilization was far smaller.
Any group, practically, could put together a colony ship and head out for the wilds. Some were dissidents, other just explorers. Some running from the Church, others from governments. Where ever they went they found planets and systems, some dead as space others teaming with life, some alien, some as familiar as an Earthen forest or jungle. What they did not find was intelligent life. Silentium Universi.
The Fermi-Hart paradox asks the question "where is intelligent life?" The B/G engine answered the question quite firmly. Only on Earth. At least until mankind dispersed among the stars.
At the era of the game, the early twenty-fourth century, mankind has had interstellar travel for approximately a century. Known Space can be divided into three great spheres, representing significantly different levels of technology and social interaction. Each of these will be covered in the next posting.