Sirius Subsidiary Retreats from Coalsack Nebula
03 Nov 2024Kasumi Goto
The terraformation-oriented subsidiary of Sirius Corporation, Sirius Atmospherics, has withdrawn from the Coalsack nebula and abandoned its holdings there, after several weeks of decline.The corporation's division arrived in the nebula during its original colonization toward the end of 3306, and focused on research to terraform ammonia worlds, a project first claimed to be promising, but which quickly ran into hurdles related to biosphere conversion and was criticized on alternative news networks as merely being a front for Sirius' corporate interests, and what they might gain by provoking a Thargoid attack. The terraformation attempts were also called out by Councillor Nakato Kaine as being responsible for them.
Several years passed with the subsidiary's position remaining relatively stable, and only a passing mention of the project in early 3309, in line with the Aegis campaign to collect up-to-date information on ammonia worlds to identify further potential arrival points for Thargoid Titans. However, in the recent months, with a victory against the Titans appearing likely, Sirius' position in the nebula became more unstable, with outside observers noting possible discontent and weariness of further conflict from the local civilian populace as a cause, with the project likely having caused Thargoid hostility in the past.
The company first lost its position in the Coalsack Sector VU-O b6-6 system early in October, and after another month of instability, withdrawal from the HIP 62154 system - itself colonized at a later date - finalized on November 2, leaving it only with its holdings in the Bubble and the HIP 18390 system near the California nebula, and the Alliance effectively in charge of the nebula by themselves, with four of five local systems under its control.
There are rumors that the situation may have had external influence as well, with one of the local Alliance corporations taking up the void left by Sirius' departure, while there had been no such movements in years, and due the mega-corporation having been under pressure from its opposition in the Bubble, driving it out of several systems. Others speculate that, with the recent loss of the FSD market monopoly and Li-Yong Rui's apparent erratic behavior toward Achilles' aerospace division, on top of political turmoil on the horizon, it was a move away from a risky project and back onto more proven business ventures, to reassure its investors.
It remains to be seen how this development affects the future and stability of the Coalsack nebula colony, and how the Alliance moves forward with its local projects.
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(OOC) Background on the project (and how I did it)
So, Sirius' presence has been permanently removed from the Coalsack nebula (providing Frontier don't godhand them back in), and you might be wondering, "But why?"... well, to that my answer is...
Recently, as in the last couple months, I was going through some of the older(ish) GalNet articles and one of those happened to contain references to this ammonia world terraformation madness (at least I think it's madness), which then led me down the rabbit hole of how Sirius were out there trying to do, well, that. And also the rabbit hole of BGS manipulation some more. Because, I figured, I'd have a shot at throwing them out of there, especially with some fairly obvious hints from Frontier that it was the project which provoked a Thargoid attack only days after Sirius had a try at it (not very successfully, which, considering where an ammonia world is located, is not surprising).
And then, well, just yesterday someone reminded me of that article - one of the links above - which calls out even more blatantly how terraforming the ammonia worlds is probably not actually, really the goal behind it. That same person links it to Sirius selling the Alliance into their anti-xeno defense pact, or, whatever it is they call it, which does make a lot of sense when you think about it. Annoy the Thargoids by trying to mess with the ammonia worlds, get them to attack, and oh look, convenient way to sell more weapons, ships and services to the customer you've suddenly made very reliant on those.
Though, truthfully, my personal motivation behind it is actually more to reduce the possibility of further negative Thargoid interactions, and to knock that nonsense of trying to terraform worlds with unique biospheres into something human-habitable just because an alien species that could inhabit them exists. Maybe if you weren't trying to set them off at every step, you wouldn't need to be reacting in such inappropriate ways to anything that could also interest them in an area of space.
Anyway, cutting back on some of the snark... I started working on this, I think... checks inara graphs around the end of August/beginning of September after some consulting with (much) more BGS-experienced people than I am to determine if it was actually a feasible project (which, as you've probably guessed by now, it was). The point chosen from which to run it was Betancourt Base in Musca Dark Region PJ-P b6-1, where I had to work quite a bit to push the faction which I needed - The Allied Commission - up from almost only 1% inf, with the controller (Alliance Vanguard Crew) in the mid-high 90s. For context, because BGS only allows a retreat if more than three factions are in-system, I had to go through this hoop, with no possible way around it. An election - it's all corporate Alliance factions out there - got going around the start of the second week in September.
Thanks to the local peculiarities of BGS - which is there are only a few mission types offered, deliveries (all to the Bubble, of course), credit/commodity donations, and megaship scans (which you can only do once because log uplinks do not reset unless the ship moves on weekly tick) - that election was an interestingly annoying process of throwing as much at the brick wall as I had while hoping that some random explorer didn't come along and dumped a few hundred million of data at the station. And there were certainly some because I lost one day to it, rather than a clean 4-0 victory. (While here I should probably also note the limited opportunities to hunt pirates for bounties, only one low res is in Betancourt's system and two high res in another, my first target system)
But the election did go through successfully, and so came the first expansion, started [pending] at around mid-September. It completed on the last week (26th, maybe - I didn't note the exact day down), and contrary to expectations or all known indicators, it went right to the first location - Coalsack Sector VU-O b6-6, station Cole Point. Sirius Atmospherics went into pending retreat there on the 29th, after some (not quite perfect) fiddling to get an election going between the Vanguard Crew and the Alliance Expeditionary Pact in charge of the station, so that I only had one faction to worry about pushing up. Though, realistically, it would probably have been fine even without that, as the system barely saw any traffic with no Universal Cartographics present. And I was able to keep the election conflict stalled until the day where the retreat concluded, on Sunday October 6, as well.
So it was on to HIP 62154, and... now, thanks to random traffic making the system go up to the threshold without my effort, it was just a game of waiting out expansion timers. Two of them, because while the first expansion had unexpectedly saved me about a week and a half's worth of time, there was no way around needing an extended range expansion here for this second one. Despite reassurances that the system could be reached just fine, I was a bit nervous about it not working - despite reassurances - because it was probably going to be the only shot I'd get at making this work. So, you can imagine, I was quite glad when I found that on the 21st, the expansion had in fact gone through successfully, and I was clear to move on with the second (or, depending on how you view it, third) phase of the project.
Fort Xeno presented some more interesting peculiarities to take into account. For one, it also has Universal Cartographics, meaning explorers are interested in it - but its commodity market was also quite favorable to throwing some gold and silver at it, which I am certain randoms were doing throughout. That worked both in and against my favor... plus, the mission board would occasionally throw up some "mining" missions for which the commodities could actually just be purchased outright in either the nearby Bering Port in Coalsack Sector KN-S b4-9, or for some of them Cole Point (now free of Sirius, yay).
While I can't say exactly if there was any coordinated opposition to the attempt at retreating Sirius Atmospherics there, some randoms definitely occasionally ran missions for them, which resulted in them being at around 10-ish% inf when I arrived with the Allied Commission in tow. Or the other way around, whichever you prefer. The point is, I had some work to do.
It took me about five days to push Sirius down to the retreat threshold, the first one more dedicated to ensuring the Commission's position in the system, and one of those days saw the Sirius faction actually go up from 3 to 4.3% instead of down (as I desired). Then they were at... 2.7% on the tick of the 25th(24th in US). Grr. Pending on the 26th (of October), with 2.3% influence. So I went on to try doing the same setup as I did with Cole Point, trigger an election between the Vanguard Crew and Expeditionary Pact. Except... that was not to be. While I certainly succeeded in lowering the Pact some, between their Boom state, randoms almost certainly bringing in loads of gold and silver that replenished at a surprisingly fast rate from Bering Port, and them being at 70+ inf(maybe even 80+) when the retreat went pending, the rate was not fast enough to really trigger even a pending conflict in the time frame I had available.
So instead of continuing down that route, while Sirius was back up to 2.7% on active day 1 of the retreat (then down to 1% on the following), I switched back to the previous 'modus operandi', and did missions for the Vanguard Crew and Commission, with occasional donations for the Pact, and armed with a Kill Warrant Scanner (that I specifically only got and engineered for this) went hunting for pirates, also bringing in some gold and silver myself when I had spare space from the "mining" and donation missions. Luckily, the megaship in Coalsack Sector VU-O b6-6 happened to be spawning assault scenarios, providing me with a quick (albeit not too easy) source of bounties for all three Alliance factions.
And it seems that was good enough to work. Sirius Atmos went to 2.3% on day 3, with the status panel indicating somebody had raised their economy and security status, but following that they remained at rock bottom 1% for the remainder of the retreat, and on the (very) early morning of November 2, were gone from the system, and thus permanently from the nebula. I may also occasionally have failed some missions for them in both systems here and there to help things along, but they don't quite hate me yet. I was eyeing up a system near their home of Mons for after this, but someone else paying attention to my endeavors gave them a little nudge there and they got retreated out of it while nobody was looking.
So, that concludes my - by all appearances - one-man operation to remove Sirius and their nonsense of terraforming ammonia worlds from the Coalsack nebula, and relatively brief stint into more involved BGS manipulation. Will it end up having any narrative significance or getting noticed by Frontier? ... I don't know. I do hope they won't just insert them back in there, I'd be annoyed. And then immediately get to repeating this once the annoyance wears off.
I guess I'm not quite done out in the Coalsack nebula yet, given that I plan to restore the original power balance of factions as it was before I arrived. Which isn't strictly relevant or necessary, and just some personal thing. Though, who knows, maybe I'll get use out of that at some point...
Thanks and credit goes to Rainbro for putting up with me as I figured this thing out and pulled through with it.
I'm sure the Alliance at least can't make it worse with Sirius gone... right?