View attachment 524131
50's aesthetic meets space age meets radical expansionist America!
The Berlin Blockade goes hot. America and the USSR duke it out, leading to a catastrophic conflict which makes World War II look like a playground quarrel. Society fights itself into a modern version of the Dark Ages, where societal progress is null but military advancements makes technology go many decades into the future. The shattered remnants of Europe and the Soviet Union collapse into chaos as the United States plunges into a dormant isolationism.
This state of affairs remains until the 1980's, when a spacefaring mission to Mars comes into contact with an intelligent alien civilization which is technologically somewhere in the Bronze Age. War is inevitable: the United States leads a brutal colonization of Mars which is fairly similar to the conquest of the American West, in which these aliens (called "Martians" in true 50's fashion) are virtually exterminated, and the remainder are enslaved to serve human settlers.
It is soon revealed that the Solar System is populated with an enormous variety of alien species, each with a varying degree of technological progress, although humanity ranks very high in the stellar hierarchy. Increasingly militaristic and authoritarian, the United States becomes a radical Christian regime, in which "Manifest Destiny" is considered a mandate of God and a "New Inquisition" pretty much carries out interplanetary genocide in the name of "evangelization".
This here is a recruitment poster released by the National Evangelization Board of the American Space Exploration Agency, as part of the American New Pioneer Program. May expand on the lore later.
