Supercarrier

The supercarriers are a quartet of Earth-designed faster-than-light transport vessels which carried the ancestors of the Koprulu Sector Terrans to the Koprulu Sector.

A brilliant young scientist named Doran Routhe made plans to consolidate his power within the United Powers League by creating a colonization project to collect minerals and other resources from outside the solar system. It was very risky, but he had no problem with sending political prisoner lab rats to their potential deaths. Fifty six thousand prisoners were (secretly) prepared for transport, and of these, forty thousand were loaded into four sleeper-ships designated the Reagan, the Argo, the Sarengo, and the Nagglfar and loaded for a one year journey into deep space to Gantris VI, an outlying planet. Only the Nagglfar had a navigation system; the other three ships would follow it. The Nagglfar was also equipped with an artificial intelligence called ATLAS.

ATLAS scanned the prisoners en route, and discovered something unusual about them - a relatively high proportion of them had a mutation leading to psionic potential. While currently weak, it would manifest in only a few generations. This information was logged and sent back to Earth. This may explain how the United Powers League came to know of this experiment.

However, the guidance system failed, and the ships traveled at faster-than-light speeds for thirty years, travelling 60,000 light years. Eventually the warp engines failed, and the ships emerged within the Koprulu Sector in a star system which contained a myriad of barren, if habitable, planets. This event would become known as the Long Sleep.

The Sarengo and Reagan ended up on Umoja. The Sarengo crashed, killing 8,000 prisoners. The trench it left behind is known as Sarengo Canyon. The survivors of the Reagan founded the colony of Umoja, the survivors of the Argo founded the colony of Moria on a resource-rich world, and the survivors of the Nagglfar built what would become the main Terran colony in the sector: Tarsonis. When they awoke, the survivors had no idea where they were or where Earth was: all hope of making contact again was lost. Colonists on both worlds discovered that ATLAS had somehow erased all knowledge of their journey from their computer banks.

As the Tarsonians had access to ATLAS, they had a technological head-start on their stellar neighbours. Even so, it took them sixty years to build second generation subwarp engines and discover the other two colonies.