Athena Storm Science Fiction Romance

Hey Verse Vixens!

It's time for some world building today. I'll be using this space to drop world building so people can more fully fall into the Athenaverse with ease. Today, we are talking about the Trident Alliance:

The Trident Alliance traces its origins back to the early parts of the year 2015, before humanity reached the stars. Three Sapient Species with superluminal flight capabilities banded together in a loose mutual protection pact: The aggressive Vakutan, the prolific Alzhon, and the immortal yet dwindling Pi’Rell.
The Trident Alliance, usually abbreviated to the Alliance, slowly became codified into a government unto itself. Complicated political maneuvering has resulted in many murky legal areas. The Alliance power technically supersedes the authority of its member worlds. However, the Alzhon introduced a provision in 2075 ensuring that homeworlds would be sovereign domains unto themselves.
Things got even murkier when the Pi’Rell, who have no homeworld any longer, amended the provision to include colony worlds.


Alliance Governmental Structure


The Alliance was formed out of military necessity, but there is a civilian arm to the government as well. The military does not engage in the day to day governance of Alliance worlds. However, what the military needs/wants, it always gets, annexing territory and commandeering supplies with impunity.
When the Centuries War waged, mutual need and fear of the Ataxians kept tensions to a minimum. After the war ended, many civilian governments began to rankle against the absolute authority of the Alliance military when it was exercised, even if that happened only on rare occasions.
For convenience sake, and to make things easier on our readers, The Alliance uses Earth naval terms to rank their officers. (There was an attempt in the early Athenaverse to use many alien terms for greater immersion, but it was not well-received by readers.)


Ensign: Rank and file.
Lieutenant : Commands small squad of ensigns.
Lieutenant Commander : Oversees multiple squads.
Commander: First officer role, sometimes commands ships or stations.
Captain: Oversees a ship or station.
Vice Admiral: Oversees a fleet.
Admiral: Oversees an entire sector.
Supreme Admiral: The final authority, rarely leaves Alliance space.



Alliance Equipment



Hand-held weapons: There are a wide variety of weapons utilized by the Alliance military. This is a sci-fi setting, so it’s okay to have exotic weapons like plasma blasters, gravity cannons, etc.
The main thing to remember is that a lot of the action takes place on starships, and no sane being is going to use a weapon that rips a hole in the hull and sucks all the crew out into space, so choose wisely.
Slugthrowers: These types of weapons launch some sort of projectile, like a bullet or flechette rounds. Loud and considered primitive, they are also cheap and therefore most likely the weapon given to low ranking soldiers.
Energy Weapons: These are your more exotic sci fi weapons. Plasma, lasers, accelerated particles, and so on, these weapons are preferred by soldiers because of their effectiveness at dispatching the enemy. However, these weapons are fussier, more expensive, and have payload limitations compared to slugthrowers.
Explosives: The main ‘grenade’ in the Athenaverse is called a fusion block. They’re about the size of a cell phone and are designed to be stacked together for increasingly greater explosive power. There are also more exotic options, just remember the rule about not blowing holes in ships and killing everyone on both sides.


Athenaverse Trident Alliance Ships:


With three main member races, and many other smaller factions manufacturing ships, there isn’t as much uniformity with ships as you might expect. This is done partly on purpose to allow writers to be creative. However, ships do fall into certain classes based on the roles they perform.


Starfighters: The smallest class of ships, they are usually one or two person fighter craft. They are too small to carry a superluminal drive, so their range is limited. They often are carried by Capital class ships as a sort of aircraft carrier.


Starfighters resemble Earth fighter jets with a futuristic bent. This is because they are capable of entering atmospheres and therefore need to be able to fly in that sort of environment as well as space. They have tiny maneuvering thrusters all over their hulls to allow for three dimensions of movement in space. But in an atmosphere, the thrusters are simply not powerful enough to do more than make the ship turbulent. Starfighters have weak shields but mostly rely on speed and maneuverability in combat.


Scouts: These ships are larger than starfighters, capable of holding around a dozen to twenty sapient beings. They typically are lightly armed but do have a superluminal drive and shields. Alliance military police often use Scout class vessels.


Cruisers: These ships are the main frontline offense and defense in the Centuries War. Loaded up with weapons, heavy shielding, and one or more legions of crack Alliance troops, Cruisers are rightly feared wherever they arrive. Some of the larger cruisers might have a small complement of fighters in a hangar bay as well.
Capital Class: A Capital ship is more akin to a mobile city than a starship. There were less than a thousand operative during the peak of the Centuries War. Capital class ships are a mobile command center, and have the resources to support lengthy campaigns. They nearly always have huge hangar bays with hundreds of star fighters docked and ready to deploy.


A superluminal calculation, which normally takes seconds to a few minutes, can take hours due to the mass of these vessels. Nearly always an admiral commands a capital ship.
Exotics: These are ships that don’t really fall into any other category. The Penetrator and the Contra are two examples of exotic ships, because though they are the same size as a scout class ship they carry the same power as a cruiser.


Other Alliance Tech:


Zerbaru Matter Transporter: This is the classic ‘beam me up, Scotty’ type of device. The Alliance is, so far, the only ones who have access to the technology. It’s very expensive from an energy drain point of view, however, so it’s used sparingly. Zerbaru is working diligently to improve the technology.


Compad: While not unique to the Alliance, compass are ubiquitous enough to deserve a mention. Think of compada as futuristic cell phones but instead of a flat screen, there’s a 3D holographic projection. Compads come in a variety of types, with different software and hardware to make them suitable for different roles.


The Holonet: This is basically the Athenaverse internet. Access is granted through subspace and a series of satellites. During the Centuries war, both sides avoiding damaging these satellites because they relied upon the holonet so much.


Mechanicals: These are droids and robots (please note Droid is a trademarked word and we can’t use it.) Artificial Intelligence is legal in the Athenaverse, but AI are ‘shackled’ by a series of protocols that won’t let them harm organic life. Using robots for military purposes is supposed to be illegal but that doesn’t stop the underground from doing so. There was an unshackled AI named Legion who broke free of Alliance control and caused many problems for a time.


Cybernetics: Thanks to the Alzhon, cybernetics are frequently encountered in the Athenaverse. Nearly every veteran soldier has an artificla limb, eye, or internal organ. Many people modify themselves to deal with disease, injury, or just to stave off the effects of advanced age.


Nanotechnology: Nanotech is frequently encountered in the Athenaverse. Nanotech refers to nanites, tiny machines on a microscopic level. They are most often used for medical purposes, since nanites are limited by their mass. You can repair an aorta with nanites, but it would take thousands of pounds of them to seal a rift in a starship hull, for example.


Political Landscape of the Alliance:



For the most part, the three main species are able to get along for the greater good. However, there are some tensions.


The Vakutan are not overly fond of the Alzhon because they consider the Alzhon to be preachy. The Alzhon believe that their ‘version’ of Precursor worship is the only correct one, and constantly proselytize to the other species.


The Pi’Rell lost their homeworld thousands of years ago due to their own hubris, and now wander the galaxy. They do not age past adulthood and are immune to diseases both genetic and viral. However, their fertility rate is very low. They can only produce offspring with a jalshagar, a soul mate, which limits their population. They know they have the least amount of power in the Alliance and are not thrilled about it, but due to their low population and more limited collective resources they can do little about it.


Thrust into this heady mix of adversaries turned allies are the Earthlings. The humans have their own governmental body/military arm, the IHC. However, they sided with the Alliance against the Ataxians, and are therefore worthy of respect in the eyes of its member species.


Humans have also done something that the three main species in the Alliance envy: Earth is a utopian paradise, a hub for science and philosophy. Earth colonies are not always so rosy, but the fact that humans have achieved things the other species have not rankles, especially since humans are the ‘new kid on the block’ in galactic politics.

1 year ago | [YT] | 6

Athena Storm Science Fiction Romance

Hey Verse Vixens,

For half a decade now readers have asked me what the proper reading order for the Athenaverse books are. I've always demurred because for something as vast and intricate as The Athenaverse there really isn't an appropriate reading order. Depending on what you want (whether its dark, rom-com, or epic) you can find it. There are multiple entry points.

After a lot of thinking, I've finally come to the conclusion that putting the books in chronological order is the best way to come up with a simplified reading order. So here goes.

The books of the Athenaverse are broken up into 6 Ages: 4 billion years ago, a few million years after that, contemporary "now", the near future (2300s), the slightly farther future (2600s), and the far future (millions of years).

Each time period has several books and series that encapsulate it. You can read them in any order but if its a series I would read it from start to finish. But you can pick up any series really.

Whatever has happened before will happen again. And so it works with the Athenaverse - you will see places, people, concepts, and ideas begin in one age and take shape and grow and become truths in another. Then they will become legends as we move to a different age.

If you are really wanting to, you can pick a book or series in each age and read through the ages. There are multiple ways to enter. But once you come in, you'll never want to leave.



Full image is linked: imgur.com/a/athenaverse-to-e-ome-sImZDdR

1 year ago | [YT] | 4

Athena Storm Science Fiction Romance

Hey Verse Vixens,

With all the audiobooks going out I figured this is a good enough place to build the world and have it serve as a reference for what you see and hear.
The Athenaverse is a complex and intricately built world where things rest on each other. One of the biggest things that will obviously help is a star chart.

Granted, this is a pretty old map but its an accurate map of the the corner of the galaxy where a lot of the current stories are going on. As we progress, we'll have other maps and other pieces of world build that will help round out the stories.

As always, world build can also be found on my store, athenastormbooks.com

1 year ago (edited) | [YT] | 11

Athena Storm Science Fiction Romance

Hey Verse Vixens,

Welcome to my YouTube channel!
We have a lot of new and fun things coming. If you've ever wanted to dive deeply into the Athenaverse and live in a science fiction romance universe, this place is going to be for you.
It's all about the the immersion with stories that I will be able to tell here that will explore every facet of the Athenaverse that I never was able to do on just Amazon.

We'll have star charts, world building, reading order, miniseries, extended epilogues, and seize the magic that has made the Athenaverse such a wonderful place to the hundreds of thousands of people that have interacted with it since it went live in 2019!

I thank you for joining me on this journey! Onward!

1 year ago | [YT] | 9