User:Logomancer/Isolation (BP)
This is based from written works of the Blue Planet team 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 time, 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 was collapsed, Sol lost both means of sustaining her bustling economy. The results were 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. This coupled with the end of the colonial trade 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 result were 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 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 Project Bifrost, an attempt to open the Sol-Delta Serpentis subspace node. For months, the GTA's nationalized conglomerates scrutinized every second of the sensor logs of the Lucifer's destruction, looking for the mechanism to allow the node to be restored. However, while the GTA and its formerly-corporate partners had experts on subspace propulsion, which had put data on subspace tracking from the Ancients to good use at the close of the Great War, it was not enough. In the spring of 2338, the GTA's experts had concluded that reopening the node was not possible with Sol's current technology.
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, Jovian habitats lived on a razor's edge, sacrificing citizens to maintain the integrity of the habitat for the rest of the populace.
