If you feel the need to send people in there to mine this, I don't think you understand the risks. Even the utterly desperate would find no success in this field even with the use of unmanned equipment. The moment you try to extract mass from this kind of equation is the moment it decides to keep mass from somewhere else (that's you, the ship you sent in and any rescue efforts).
Even entering such an electrically charged environment half as hostile as this required an entire ship class designed from technology that had been obsolete for decades or hundreds of years (we're talking NASA/Interstellar esque here, with no advanced fields or high speed travel systems or space folding technology whatsoever and a very simple nuclear reactor) so the intense gravitational shifts and electrical discharges don't literally vaporize you with arcs of plasma that take hours to lash out at targets yet seemingly reach them instantaneously because of the shifting compression ratios of space-time. Even shutting down these systems on a modern ship wouldn't really work because the equipment used according to realworld physics given the massive amounts of energy we're talking about take years to power down entropically to a state where they would be considered safe. You'd basically have to remove them or have a ship that can detatch from those elements and leave them behind just to enter.
Even a short journey into this space is going to age someone hundreds of years and the idea that they'd escape if they tried to bring anything back with them is frankly laughable. That being said, if you wanted to put a secret installation somewhere with close to total isolation from the rest of the setting where unspeakable things happen, you have the added advantage of being able to do a century of work in the space of just one, assuming you can manage resources and feed yourselves sustainably without the use of super advanced field technologies that when activated would fry you to a crisp.
It is a hellish navigation hazard. If you're going to use it for a jump-off point for a story, the horror genre is the best I can suggest. Given that the conditions are ideal for the creation of self-sustaining patterns of space and time and that space and time move very quickly here, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if you came across a new form of life formed here that is made of space and time itself or if one from other folds of potentiality, possibility across different Einsteinian worldlines chose to visit because this posed such an interesting resource to them.
Pretty baffling that space should be considered frightening again, isn't it? Especially such a large amount of it with so many hungry greedy mouths eyeing it up politically within the story of this setting.
I don't play here anymore, but I do still read the stories. Some of them are pretty engrossing. Some of them aren't. Same as any publication really.
The intention originally with this big scary mess was to leave a jumping off point for horror stories. I had such a fun time writing one with Luca that I thought it would be good to leave behind something that is frightening, unconquerable and seductive so there is always a motivation from a writing standpoint.
Its so open-ended that literally any kind of unimaginable horror can exist here and no amount of incredible weaponary or technology will ever be able to conquer it. I found that really humbling and emotionally engrossing.
The capability for "things to go wrong" and be totally incomprehensible is the very backbone of horror and tension in a story in a space-setting, and its always been the one thing I missed here prior to leaving.
Anyway, that's my authorial intent so none of you go English Literature teacher trying to figure out why this thing existed or why all of us who departed agreed together that this was the best goodbye gift we could give you -- one which inspires storytelling of a kind seldom seen here. I put two months into the blood sweat and tears of the math that actually made this work so please appreciate the elegance of it as one of the harder science fictions element in the setting.
I hope you enjoy it and put it to good use for what it was made for instead of seeing it as a cake to be sliced up and served to hungry nations who already don't know what to do with themselves except to bicker at the dinner-table about who gets what.
I think I was here for about 12 years before I went my separate ways, but for what its worth when it was good it was great even though when it was bad, it was bad for all the wrong reasons. I can't really say if it was a good time or a bad time, only that it was a time and this was where I spent it.
Take care of eachother and remember that the fun you have comes before all else because everything else is dickwaving and meaningless. Whatever brings you joy or happiness, thats what you should pursue. Remember at the end of the day that its just a game and that any politics or egos don't make you happy, they just help you forget how sad you are. Put the energy you'd spend into arguing into being constructive and be good to eachother.
I wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy new year and wish you all well.
PS: As for the way my raw work is, its very fitting that I'm now a game-developer, not just someone who writes the rules of settings. A huge part of why my work was in such a raw form was because to soften it as you'd like it, I'd three articles for every one thing I wanted to submit and the NTSE was a huge bottleneck for my style of writing. You want to know every single kind of potential use of a thing based on its raw attributes -- there's very little room to say why something exists or what its for from a roleplay perspective, only an in-universe perspective -- so when you ask an engineering question insetting, I can only give you an engineering answer.
If you find someone's work is hard to understand, begin by asking what they want it to be used for. When someone overloads you with information, they're giving you bread-crumbs and clues as to a deeper purpose for the thing in question where they don't want it to be used in a way it was not intended to be used. Again, engineering questions result in engineering answers. Start asking authorial questions and you'll find these problems disappear almost instantly.
Good storytelling begins by saying what something isn't and by working within constraints. Walls aren't a cage: they're a room. Tools aren't limiting: They're set-pieces to tell your story. If an option is incredibly difficult or close to impossible, maybe its meant to be for the purpose of creating an atmosphere or a feeling.
