The Gearhead mythos starts their year system after an apocalyptic world war - The Night of Fire, And GH 1 is set some 11,500 years after said night with GH 2 set about 50 years after GH 1.
What I'd like to do is put some ideas on the table for discussion with the goal of trying to guess when the night of fire happened, And thus learning the setting of Gearhead in A.D.
Now we know that before "The Night", Humans possessed the technology to produce excessivley powerful Mecha, Had interplanetary travel and a stockpile of doomsday weapons, The fact that they had nukes does not help us (We have them now), But I think that we could take a bit of a stab at interplanetary travel and Mecha.
At the moment IP travel is near impossible because we use fuels that are not suitible for the great distances between say, Here and the Moon, At the moment however different fuels are being investigated and according to a Popular Science magazine I have on the table next to me a fuel that would fit the bill is undergoing testing.
So lets say that this fuel will take about 10 years to test, 50 years to bring into affordable mass production, But then what? Missions would be launched towards say, Mars and then out towards the far planets and perhaps even the asteroid belt for prospecting.
I think that no commercial or civilian presence would be established untill viable mineral sources were found, That would take at least 300 years to develop a good sized interplanetary trade network.
Why do I go off in tangents? Remember that the Night of Fire happened after ideological differences (Kind of like the Arm and Core really...) and for war to be possible, Mankind would have needed to be among the planets as a commonplace thing for hundreds of years before things like that become taken for granted, And then the old treaties of Earth might be forgotten and one faction might arm their ships, Only to start a paradoxal arms race that would spark off a war. If anyone here has ever watched the simpons episode where Bart and Lisa are watching the Itchy and Scratchy clip where the cat and mouse keep pulling out progressivly bigger handguns? Thats what I'm talking about.
So by now we have hit roughly 4500-5000 AD and have hit a need for more powerful non nuclear weaponary. This is where Mecha would come in.
With spaceflight being so common and buisinesses wishing to harness the power of trade with greater speed, A manhattan project if you will would have been inevitible - The race to make better engines and forge stronger metals as to keep the ships from crumpling, And perhaps enlarge the cargo hold.
With the materials, power source and engines being around, It would be no surprise for a military to snap up the idea of Mecha as the next big thing, And why wouldent they? They are mobile, Adaptable and look pretty damn cool. The initial Mecha would have been similar to Terminator or Dreadnought armour from the Warhammer 40K games (Think a 40ft tall killing machine), But as time went on and manufacturing processes become perfected, A need for a bigger, stronger and more versatile machine would be found and met.
It is my belief that it would take approximatly 500 years to progress from suits of powered armour to something similar to a Strongarm.
With the invention of true Mecha, Governments would natrually get nervous , One side of the ideological schizm would send an ultimatum, Confident in their military superiority and would then attack.
This is where a second manhattan project would come in, The first race would have been to make space the new cash cow, However with an imminent enemy threat traditional infantry and combat vehicles would become redundant in the face of Mecha, So we now have two or more superpowers fighting an arms race.
This is where I believe the age of superpowers would be named.
This is around 11,000 A.D and after space and indeed Mecha had become commonplace, With all that time two or more sides would become more strongly polarized by the day and war would be inevitable.
From here just piciture Interworld War One.
Deadly isin't it?
Look how far todays armaments have come in such a short space of time, How much damage would 9,000 years worth of millitary research do?
This is just my theroy, But all the same I think that it would be reasonable to assume that the absolute 0 in the Gearhead universes date/time system would be around 11,000 A.D
I would now like to hear your ideas on the topic, Post post and post away.
Edited to fix a few grammatical errors. Too bad I can't fix the title.
