Lightminers

The year is 2052. After many trials, snares, and pitfalls, Humanity has developed an effective in-system motor for their spacecraft. With the new drive, spacefaring vessels are no longer limated by the orbits of the Earth and Moon to pick up gravatational "slingshot" assists. With this liability removed, as well as the massivly incresed speed granted by constant acceleration, massive "Leviathins" with self-contained farms go to Mars to colonize and the astroid belt to mine unlimated amounts of materials. Within this system, however, tensions have arived- Settlers of Mars, banding together and building a space force to protect themselves from the Hounerable Spacefaring Company's overt attacks on their settlements if exhorbent loans are not repaid in full; Corsairs, the pirate offspring of small and indepent miners looking for a way to strike back agianst threats; and the Lightmen, owners and operators of massive power-collecting space stations that are caught in the crossfire.

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Roleplaying Notes
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Make a new character, please. It just makes everything so much neater and tidier.

Because there will be combat in this roleplay, there's going to be space weapons. Sadly, because this is near future, there is a list of banned weapons. Specificly, any weapon that needs a laser or source of plasma is out of the question. Conventional weapons are suggested as mass drivers (or gauss guns, if that's what you want to call 'em) missiles, rockets, explosives, mines, nukes, and any reasonable kinetic weapon you can come up with.

Courtesey of the extreme distances, the speed of light gets relatively slow. This creates a relativly large lag time between when you send and recieve messages or scan data. And if anyone can tell me what an ansible does, then they get to use one for a post or two.

Just because your ships are the fastest things in the known universe right now doesn't turn them in to system-hopping lunatics. For  RP purposes, I have assumed it takes 90 24-hour days to get from Earth to Mars using one standerd drive at full speed and best course without a gravity slingshot.

For the curios people, your ship's drive works via a laser superheating loose radiactive particles and blasting them out of a magnetic funnel through a hole in the back of your ship. Seeing as Alpha particles are just helium, and this works perfectly fine with that, other material may be used as an accelerant.

Thanks to past experience, trying to roleplay multiple people on one ship does not work unless everybody knows the naval equivalent in terms of jobs and command structure. Ergo, everybody gets their own ship.

NO, WE DO NOT HAVE ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY.

Moaning, I woke up. Another day another date with destiny, and another day trying to figure out why the Spirits hated me. Rolling out of the wall niche where I slept, I pulled on one of the form-fitting jumpsuits any sensible spacefarer wore and glided out if my room. Grabbing a bag of coffee, I pulled open the valve and started sucking down the cold brew as I moved my way forword to the bridge. Taking the Captain's chair, I surveyed the view from the bow of my ship. Outside the plexiglass window, a field of stars shone upon us as the watch changesd and people dutifly strapped in to their consoles.

My ship was the Requiem, a three-hundred foot long Carowyn-class messenger and high value cargo hauler that I had turned in to a privateering corvette. With two large-scale gauss guns, eighteen missle batteries, ten CRAG implacements, and four torpedo tubes, few ships of it's size boasted such incredable firepower while having an equally tough hull. Courtesy of an experimental "directional force" dampner, we could take twice more beating then a ship with twice as much bracing as we had. Even without, the Carowyn-class was tough, fast, and could lower her largest feature, four massive solar pannels, to reduce combat and radar profile.

Watching the stars slowly streak by, I buckled myself in to the Captain's chair and pulled up the holographic monotors, apearing inside a half-viezar of sorts. Atached to my left ear, the small computer-microphone-hologram device was my interface to nearly all of the ship I didn't need to touch. Despite this nifty gadget most captains had in some form or another, I still had to pull out a keyboard and jack my headpiece in to the chair. Checking our course, I smiled. There was a large-scale convention of independent privateers in the lee of the astroid wandering planatoid Heracles. Any decent independent would come- we had all been loosing out with groups at Earth having finally figuring out how to make a cruiser that didn't fall flat on it's face. Our Mars-made destroyers and corvettes couldn't keep up with the Earth-made cruisers, and that meant we lost money as every cargo ship disapeered in to the void. Our letters of marque were only good for so long, and thwy would be revoked if we didn't start bringing down ships, and soon.