User:Logomancer/Isolation (BP)

This is based off of written works of the Blue Planet team, but has not been approved by them and is not necessarily BP canon.

The Isolation is the Sol system's colloquial term for the time between the Lucifer cataclysm at the end of the Great War and the arrival of the GTVA 14th Battlegroup. During this fifty-year period, Sol was cut off from the rest of the subspace gate network, effectively isolating the system from the rest of interstellar space.

A Farewell To Arms

At the time of the Lucifer cataclysm, the Sol system's economy was unprepared for peace. While Sol's infrastructure was bigger than the rest of the GTA combined, that infrastucture had been on a full-tilt war footing for almost 15 years. Some 60% of Sol's population was somehow invested in the massive military-industrial complex that existed at the time, either working directly for the GTA's armed forces or for one of Sol's many defense contractors. The biggest defense contractor, Han-Ronald, employed 15% of Sol's entire population, either directly or through subcontractors. Resources that weren't directly supporting the war effort went toward supporting the GTA's colonies among the stars. 40% of Sol's Gross System Product (GSP) was geared toward providing the colonies with food, water, shelter, consumer goods, and other supplies.

When the Sol-Delta Serpentis node collapsed, Sol lost both means of sustaining her economic expansion. The resulting demand shock was devastating. Dependent on massive levels of government funding to remain solvent, the military-industrial complex began to implode as defense contractors laid off hundreds of millions of workers to keep afloat. Within a year, the war economy was in a shambles. Coupled with the end of the colonial trade, this sent paroxysms throughout many smaller companies indirectly involved in the war effort, causing them to fail, which rippled to smaller companies still. By the end of 2336, billions of people among the GTA's three remaining planetary polities -- Earth, Mars, and Jupiter -- were unemployed, and soon became restless as their plight worsened.

Fifteen years of full-scale war had taken its toll on the civilian populace. To better direct the production of goods for the military, the GTA had established an authoritarian command economy during the Terran-Vasudan War. The GTA enacted strict controls on wages and prices, a low cap on the production of consumer goods considered "luxuries" by GTA Command, and the rationing of staple civilian resources not seen by many humans since Earth's Second World War. Coupled with this was an intentional lack of employment opportunities not directly related to the GTA's goals; for example, civilian research and development jobs were almost nonexistent by the time of the Great War. As long as the GTA provided its citizens with the infrastructure needed to survive, it was able to stem the unrest caused by such policies. In the face of economic collapse, these policies would prove to be the GTA's undoing.

The Collapse of the GTA

The GTA's twofold response to the floundering of its biggest civilian partners was typical. First, it nationalized the failing corporations and tried to restore them to stability, if not profitability. Second, it put these newly acquired resources to use in a massive government project -- in this case, Project Bifrost, an attempt to open the Sol-Delta Serpentis subspace node. For months, experts on subspace propulsion from the GTA's nationalized conglomerates scrutinized sensor logs of the Lucifer's destruction and the subsequent node collapse, looking for ways to allow the node to be restored. However, the GTA's experts had concluded that reopening the node was not possible with Sol's current technology. In the spring of 2338, Project Bifrost was shuttered. In the wake of this, the GTA decided to double down on their bailout efforts, nationalizing entire sectors of the economy.

The reprioritization of the GTA's resources toward Project Bifrost had dire consequences for its off-Earth holdings. Money that had been used to maintain habitats on Mars and the moons of Jupiter were instead being used to bail out corporations largely based on Earth. As maintenance budgets faltered, shortcuts had to be taken to keep the habitats livable. While Martian habitats were relatively well-off due to their partially-terraformed home planet and culture of self-sufficiency, Jovian habitats lived on a razor's edge, sacrificing citizens to maintain the integrity of the habitat for the rest of the populace. The hardest hit, however, were the habitats beyond Jupiter, which often received no supplies at all, causing a permanent humanitarian crisis at the edge of the solar system. In most of Sol's off-world holdings, the crumbling infrastructure soon gave way to famine, disease, and environmental disasters.

As conditions worsened, the cracks caused by the wartime government erupted into protests, riots, and other forms of civil unrest. The GTA's response was typical; martial law was declared throughout the GTA, and troops were dispatched to Mars and the Jovian system to restore order. It became evident, however, that the GTA military, having largely been organized for ship-to-ship combat, was not prepared for the massive police actions required to keep the peace. The police details of the 1st Fleet quickly became overwhelmed as entire nations rebelled against GTA rule, and funding for additional troops was not available.

As the GTA began losing control and legitimacy after the failure of Project Bifrost, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter began to pursue their visions of postwar Sol. The Jovians, angered at the loss of life and revenue by the GTA's mismanagement, wanted to declare independence and set up an anarchocapitalist regime based on free trade. The Martians and their trade unions started a neo-Marxist movement with a focus on democratizing the means of production while remaining conscious of one's impact on their greater environment. On Earth, there emerged a new class of oligarchs not seen since the early 21st century, the product of both the GTA's bailout program and massive profiteering exploiting the needs of the outer colonies. By exploiting regulatory loopholes and the GTA's lack of enforcement power, these oligarchical megacorps grew explosively in power and resources, and by the end of 2339, they had control over most of Earth's legislatures. On March 29th, 2240, the fifth anniversary of the destruction of the Lucifer, Earth declared her withdrawal from the Titan Accords, seceding from the GTA, and declared an end to the state of planetary emergency enacted twenty years before. Mars and Jupiter were quick to follow, reinstating the Martian Concordia and the Jovian Systems Republic, largely along the lines they had envisioned.

The GTA was still extant as a nominal power in Sol; however, her authority was reduced to that of any other megacorp, limited to the land holdings on Earth it effectively owned through the companies it had nationalized. Even so, the GTA was ill-equipped to manage what it had inherited, due to its lack of political control and its dwindling finances caused by its radically shrunken tax base. Faced with insolvency, the GTA started a radical re-privatization program, selling off its assets wholesale in order to maintain control over its own holdings. Most of these assets were bought up at fire sale prices by the oligarchs the GTA had previously made rich, and it still wasn't enough. In the autumn of 2341, the GTD Washington, once the flagship of the GTA 1st Fleet, was sold to a Russian scrap dealer; the rest of 1st Fleet had been similarly disposed of earlier in the year.

By 2342, the GTA was virtually defunct, with a few squadrons of Apollo and Valkyrie fighters to its name, patrolling the skies of rural China and India, lacking the authority or the means to do much of anything else.