This post is just a combination of my in-thread answers to various questions people have asked about Iwami and the Kitsune.
It's not especially organized aside from that, but can serve as a sort of background info post.
You may have seen some or all of this info already. Some of it has been edited slightly to factor in later decisions, though.
If you do not take Space Is For Everyone, you have early all-electric drives like ion drive and chemical drive systems with aluminum fin radiators. Power supplies for spacecraft are limited to solar cells and RTGs. If you do take Space Is For Everyone you have space-operable solid fission piles of somewhat decent efficiency and pebble bed thermal drives, as well as more efficient titanium grid/molybdenum pipe radiators.
Technologies from initial tech rolls:
80/economics/derivative
Choice Perception Value: The steady development of the Central Economic Plan computers has allowed for reduction in stockpiles and warehousing through use of demand prediction and increased tracking of every inventory item and every consumer's ratings of the delivered items. Newer theories in economic thought have begun to acknowledge that people find value and fulfilment in being able to make choices among similar goods and services, even if some are not technically optimally efficient. By using past usage data to predict what a citizen will want, the most resource-efficient or currently over-supplied options can be presented as the most desirable, driving goods delivery efficiency while still allowing actual choices when shopping.
86/construction methods/radical
Computerized Laser Welding: The joining of metal objects is often a time-consuming and high skill process in most conventional construction and manufacturing. An offshoot of metal printing technology, use of metal particles acting as a solder and computer-aimed pulsed laser emissions can serve as a quick and mostly automated way to join separate metal pieces without any notable loss of joint strength. The applications for fast automated welding are many, including assembly of complex goods and objects, vehicles, construction of building frames, and even space-based construction. Overall, most construction and manufacturing will at least slightly benefit. However, applications are somewhat limited by waste heat from current laser technology.
When global warming was discovered and proven, the great greening was a societal level megaproject that essentially everyone participated in- Ranging from cutting personal fuel use, to participating in industry-greening construction, and serious research efforts leading to mass production of light water fission reactors as well as solar and wind power to replace fossil fuel power and supplement hydro.
The Global Interlinked Power Grid allowed for the massive centralization of several industries. The entire world operates on the same standards for electricity, internet service, road and rail transport containers, etc. While total centralization of industries does not make economic sense in all cases, it does in many cases- Leading to huge factory-cities, especially for products that are value-dense such as electronics, nuclear fuel, or aircraft.
There have been multiple world-wide campaigns of aggressive quarantining and treatment to eliminate infections diseases and even certain species of parasites, most notably Black Cough, Bone Wasting Disease, and tail ticks. These are held up as a triumph of cooperation and coordination.
The creation of a Launch Loop for cheap space lift capacity in bulk has been proposed. If you pick Space is for Everyone, a site has been selected and construction is underway, expected to finish in 5-10 years. If you don't, it's still a proposal being evaluated for feasibility and design, for now.
The Tsu Sacred Grove is a 600 square mile arboretum-garden said to contain examples of nearly every known species. It's a global level tourist attraction and park where Kitsune come to marvel at the wonders of nature. (It's kind of suffering a downturn due to the whole creators thing.)
In Iwa there is an ancient clan compound known now as the Shadow Theater, carved into a series of stunningly decorated caves and said to be the oldest work of art in the world. It's a global protected site, and a large town surrounding it is a major center of the arts, including visual art, sculpture, music and performing arts, and more. Re-creations of the caves are used for life theater, especially the Iwa tradition of dramatic tragedies where all the characters have ultimately the same goal, but end up hurting each other and ruining things due to miscommunications, personal moral failures, and differences in worldview. Oh, to be Kalia and Jona- Their clans locked into feud by poison, despair, and murder, all thanks to Kalia's impulsiveness and Jona's envy. A tragedy more poignant than Romeo and Juliet.
Kitsune do not necessarily perform pair-bonding. It is irresponsible to have sex without a plan for how to care for any resulting children, but at the same time, a clan absolutely needs children to continue its existence. Marriage is a formalization of people moving between clans, just as often parsed as an adoption into the clan itself as a bond between two specific people. A marriage can have any number of participants being married to any number of others, so long as the end result is everyone involved in the marriage being from the same clan or a closely allied clan. Approximately 1/3 of Kitsune marry at some point in their life. Many Kitsune have children outside of marriage, having sex with fellow clan members or with people outside the clan/of allied clans and then having a child based on that, with a few traditions designed to avoid excessive inbreeding such as baby swapping.
In modern times, there has been a divide between 'heritage clans' consisting of biological family, I.E. parents, children, and siblings, and 'social clans' consisting of people's friend or work groups. It is profoundly uncomfortable to be without a clan, and it's also generally acknowledged that one can have a heritage clan and also a social clan that don't necessarily overlap. The social clan allows people to travel for education or work without being 'unrooted', though most Kitsune will frequently visit home.
A day in the life of a kit:
Naiko wakes up not with the dawn creeping in his window, but with an alarm clock. He was up late reading a book last night, even though Auntie Ju said not to. He is old enough to dress himself and brush his tail to get ready for the day, all by himself. On the way back from the shared bathroom he notices Uncle Po struggling with a large cardboard package. Naturally, being a responsible kid, he offers to help carry it for the four-tailed uncle. Uncle Po waves his tails and rubs them affectionately on Naiko, before laughing and giving up the box. Apparently there are NEW TOYS in it!!! They'll all be passed out later, at dinner when everyone's there.
After helping carry the box, he goes to the kitchen and asks Sis Gao for his favorite: Amaranth porridge with fruit bits and nuts. They're out of his favorite kind of fruit, but that's okay. He eats and then washes his own dishes plus a few more that people left behind, since he's already there. He doesn't have to be in class until later, so he goes back up to his room and keeps reading the book- The adventures of Space Princess Sakura! She's still chasing down the dastardly Storm King and he wants to know how it ends!
Some clans teach all the children themselves, but most send them to schools these days. He's out in front of the apartment building soon enough, waiting with everyone else for the bus to show up. It's a new bus- They changed from a loud grumbly one to a quiet electric one last year. The school building is a nice wooden structure. He has classes on biology (chlorophyll!), mathematics (triangles!), civics and language (the Central Plan!), and life skills (budgeting his goods-tickets!), and two elective slots that are meant to be fun and not educational (Kickball and Fiction Club!). He eats a packed lunch between classes.
Then, the bus takes Naiko back home and he talks to his aunties and uncles and sisters and brothers about what he learned at school. He plays with his siblings for a while, before the dinner bell chimes and it's time for everyone to clean up all their toys and eat dinner together, as one big clan. At dinner, all the kits are excited- The rumor (which he started) about NEW TOYS has spread wildly. Uncle Po hands them out one by one after dinner. Puzzles and bouncing balls and building blocks and dolls with shiny white tails and arts and crafts supplies and, for Naiko, a shiny new tablet computer, still in the box. His eyes widen as Uncle Po explains that he needs to treat it well and learn how to use it, since he's getting older.
The rest of the evening is spent in one of the adult lounge rooms where a bunch of older family are sitting and reading, talking, brushing each others' tails, or watching shows. He sets up his accounts on the new computer, answers a bunch of questions about his likes and dislikes, and then immediately installs Subway Slider and plays it for at least an hour- Until one of his Aunties shooes him out of the lounge and into the kiddie playroom because they're going to use it for adult things now. After that, there's not much left of the day, and soon it's time to go to sleep and get ready for tomorrow's school.
Video games and online discussion are a wonderful triumph of the modern internet- Moderated, of course, by traditional rules of conduct for socialization and acceptable content. Vtubers are required to have a real person behind them, and then they are considered like a mask or costume: A character in a play. Kitsune Vtubers have a strong persona or distinctive style they adapt when presenting, and it's flagged that the avatars are definitely just characters.
Vtubing is considered a niche performing art form. The most popular and successful ones can make a career out of it, but like many other art forms, there is a lot of Discourse about whether it's "good" or "bad" or "worth supporting". Most VTubers end up treating it as a hobby. Educational material or discussion and adaptation of traditional and respectable art tends to be the most accepted work of a VTuber, leading to most doing what they can to add a fig-leaf of "educational value" to their livestreaming, whether it be math questions, discussion of science and technology, or 'life skills' advice, to avoid the Algorithm's baleful gaze.
Removal of tails, major organs, or an arm or leg causes major metabolic dysfunctions as cell damage signals and hormones for regulation of cell growth and distribution are thrown out of whack. This typically leads to cascading metabolic issues that outwardly present as a variety of symptoms- Pain, weakness, excessive fever or chill, urinary issues and discolored skin, muscle spasms, difficulty breathing, and eventually massive tissue damage and death. Many types of drugs can also cause these failure cascades, and it seems that anything that majorly perturbs a Kitsune's body systems inevitably leads to these issues thanks to the lack of self-correcting balances. The primary focus of most medical research is dedicated to understanding the many, many different types of failure cascades that Kitsune cellular biology is prone to, most especially ways to catch them early and correct for them.
The classic companion animal is the Vork, a medium-sized omnivore raised for meat and milk. Vorks are herding mammals that weigh about 200 pounds- About the size of a big Great Dane dog or a miniature cow. They are playful and friendly, growing to maturity very rapidly and with large litter sizes. They have a tendency to eat approximately anything, including wooden or metal fences, which can frequently cause them to die from ingesting the wrong thing. They served as pack and farm labor animals for much of Iwami's antiquity, with teams of Vorks able to pull a primitive plow. They cannot really be ridden, and instead pull carts, wagons, or carriages. They have long fluffy tails, but not nearly as long as a kitsune's.
In antiquity most Kitsune lived part or all of the way through their third tail, with four-tails being fairly rare and five and six tails rarer still. Even a fairly small proportion of people not doing hard agricultural labor was unsustainable. In modern times, most kitsune survive through their fourth tail, and a good many through their fifth and sixth, even as they become nearly entirely immobile due to sheer mass of tails. Call it 50 years in antiquity and 75 years in modern industrialized times, with a useful workspan of age 16-50ish.
The first few inches of a new tail are a time for a vacation, reflection on your life, and preparation for what comes next. Typically it heralds a change in schools, careers, and many other things. Traditions differ based on local culture and region, but most Kitsune are guided by older members of their clan in all the expectations and duties their new tail-count entails. You're not really a two-tail until your second tail is about a third as long as your first.
The traditional way to exit life is to begin taking a well known drug called the Lilac Bridge, so named because it lets you travel towards the ancestors. It is hallucinogenic, euphoric, and a depressant as well as an extremely strong painkiller. It is also cripplingly addictive and consistent use leads to degradation and death in a matter of weeks. Your last few weeks are full of drugged out bliss and meetings with friends and family, seeing how they all have bright futures ahead of them or reminiscing.
Bodies are cremated and the ash spread around and mixed into the clan's land, or if your own clan's land is unavailable, in a public place such as a park, so as to allow the departed to join all other ancestors, who should be praised for their efforts in the past to build a better today.
The primary driver of the early space program was weather monitoring. Iwami faces continual problems of megastorms, typhoons, monsoons, and droughts- At first, getting a few days or weeks of warnings of such massive storms was considered entirely worthwhile for the number of lives it could save. After that, incremental progress mostly consisted of additional surface monitoring satellites, communication sats, and research satellites like space telescopes. The placement of kitsune into space is a relatively recent development, and the practice of sending up satellites and probes is considerably older.
One-tails traditionally do the hardest and most dangerous labor, including most active soldiery, mine work, and farm labor. Before your second or third tail is grown, the body is actually much more resistant to hardship, hard work, and drugs and poisons, as there is less useless mass of flesh and fur to support. One-tails are seen as bastions of youthful energy and vigor.
Most religions are polytheistic, attributing different sets of gods and spirits, though the notion of a restful afterlife is common and ancestor worship, praising those who have come before you and the massive legacy they carry and pass on, is near universal.
A tail coming in is a process that takes weeks or months. It is somewhat painful, but not necessarily completely debilitating. Certainly not on the scale of a single battle- However, those who increase in tail count during war will typically be promoted towards a more commanding position if they show merit, or recycled out of the army if they do not.
Farm labor is mostly mechanized at this point in industrial development, but most automation is still fairly simple- On the level of assembly-line robots and delivery robots more than Chat-GPT. The allocation of materials and work is mostly automated in the CEP computers, but there are still a large number of bureaucrats making decisions, and the actual work itself so to speak- Of driving trucks or trains, of operating machines or setting up feedstock and print queues in factories- Is still largely manual. The primary limiter on lifespan is now metabolic cascades and muscle, joint, and body health when trying to deal with an ever increasing mass of tails that act much like cancer in terms of how the body's resources are diverted.
Tails come about every 15 years, with the clock delayed from starting until late adolescence. So you get your second tail at around 25ish, third around 40ish, etc. Rest assured that kitsune medical science is focused and devoted on the subject. The social obligations are not going to be THAT much of a thing unless you choose that option in the current vote- But organ failure and muscle weakness and nutrition and metabolic issues tend to start causing major attrition too, and there's only so much that vitamin supplements manufactured on an industrial scale help.
What are the tails doing that is so metabolically and nutritionally intensive? Rapidly producing hair with exotic chemistry? Fully replacing their entire structure every so often without recycling? Nothing clearly evident?
Rapid hair growth and production of oils to keep a lustrous sheen. Also, homeostasis burden. Also, they're freakin huge. Like a whole extra person's worth of fluff.
Kitsune food-based plants are also affected by living on a negative Life-Seeded world. All of their food plants are like, decorative garden things like rainbow-colored lettuce that look beautiful but provide maybe half the nutrients if you're lucky, and requires precise amounts of the correct chemicals and large amounts of labor-hours tending them to survive. The closest thing they have to a cereal crop is "amaranth", a purple grainlike plant that needs watering twice a day to survive. It is the easiest of the Kitsune food plants to keep alive, everything else is far pickier and requires more work.
Other than that, the main source of meat is the Vork, which is like, five times the effort of herding Earth cows because they eat anything, including things that are poisonous to them, and give a fraction of the milk and meat of an actual cow. Also, given that they're a mix of pig, cat, and dog as well as cow in terms of overall position and role, they're presumably really good at escaping their pens and getting into the wilds (where they'll do something that upsets the delicate ecosystem and kill the entire wildlands if you don't get them back because the ecosystem is extremely delicate.)
Amaranth has been adequately bred into a staple cereal crop that can be industrially farmed. The extreme water demand can be compensated for by growing it in massive greenhouse complexes, which can condense released water vapor, greatly reducing watershed drain. While this has made expanding food production expensive, it is sufficient to feed the masses better than pre-industrial methods. It has a faintly sweet/nutty taste and tingles slightly on the tongue if cooked at a low temperature, but consuming undercooked Amaranth too often causes buildup of the toxin responsible for the pleasant taste, so it is an unusual treat.
The world is a Terran type, with geology and landmasses broadly similar to Earth's albeit in different shapes. The Great States of Tsu, Iwa, Kao, Nar, and Luo are only the ones that are most remembered and had the largest influence, including early industrialization and wealth, dominance of the seas, and trade and pseudo-imperial ties until the modern era. A number of smaller regional identities exist. There are three major continents: Iwa, Kao, and Tsu, with Kao and Tsu connected by a small land bridge, as well as a series of islands and archipelagos. Roughly 2/3 of the planetary surface is covered in water, and much of the major planetary landmasses lie near the equator, aside from Iwa which is famous for being a cold and northerly region.
The sub-continental landmasses of Hao, Shen, and to a lesser extent Bai suffer much more frequently from major storms and typhoons, which would often scour any construction within a dozen miles of the shore from the surface of Iwami, hindering buildups of the population. To an extent, the droughts and cold suffered by Iwa, Tsu, and Luo could be better dealt with thanks to construction of infrastructure and granaries over time. Early Kitsune societies were largely reduced to hunting and herding, with most plants on Iwami being only edible to a few species specifically adapted to consume them, and relatively few available to Kitsune. Every plant and animal seems to put considerable resources into displays and beauty over anything more survival oriented. The settling of clanholds and farming grew out of early construction of stone caches and granaries to store what few edible and medicinal plants could be gathered in the wild, and quickly grew with all the challenges of farming tackled diligently due to the difficulty that many-tailed Kitsune face when walking for long distance.
Map:
In terms of computing technology, the current mass production lithography process produces a 10nm chipset and relies heavily on large block printing, with relatively modern features designed to support multi-core operation and optimize available computing speed. Software is an active and flourishing competitive field of engineering with good standards observed, as there are a great many four and five tail Kitsune who can at least sit in front of a computer and design improved code. Particular emphasis is placed on failure tolerance and traceability of errors. Early neural networks are in use in some areas, including predictive maintenance and material/stock shipping and routing, safety and monitoring systems such as automatic vehicle brakes, and identification of signs of problems in the population. Neural networks are used cautiously and their recommendations are generally sanity-checked by an actual Kitsune in the Central Economic Plan computers, but so far attempts to make machine learning systems capable of explaining their conclusions have utterly failed. Even so, they are correct more often than Kitsune forecasters when it comes to predicting trends in demand of consumer and industrial goods, and especially when predicting traffic flow and logistics snarls.
Kitsune are roughly as physically capable as humans. They are a bit shorter on average than humans, typically 1.4m-1.7m (4'7"-5'7"). Kitsune bodies show a decent level of different morphology- Some are tall and buff, some are very lithe or thin, and there is broadly a flatter bell curve in body type than among humans. Worth noting is that Kitsune all display excellent facial and body symmetry, clear skin, any scars and injuries heal cleanly, a consistent pleasant-to-kitsune scent, and they fail to significantly change the storage of fat and muscle in response to dietary conditions. Instead of accumulating fat reserves, a strong suppression of appetite occurs when food has been plentiful, ensuring the body is consistent in form.
Traditional Kitsune representations of beings from other worlds tend to imagine them as humanoid and tailed, like them. Some consider more exotic body plans, but always ones that are symmetrical and comprehensible. They imagine aliens as attractive and highly colorful, and theorize that evolution has a consistent drive towards beauty as a runaway sexual selection mechanism. This has all been thrown out the window with the revelation of being a design species and nobody is sure what to think, though some have begun to posit more exotic alien existences such as spaceborne life, collective intelligence/hive minds, silicon based life, etc. The other planets in Iwami's star system are void of life, and space telescopes have failed to observe signs of life on any exoplanets thus far.
Pregnancy is actually remarkably easy for a Kitsune, health complications from it are fairly rare especially as the metabolic burden is not that much greater than that of an extra tail. It's sometimes considered to be a helpful preview of what the next tail will be like, so you can mentally prepare for it. Kitsune sexual mores are generally more relaxed than in modern day human societies, probably thanks to the early discovery of plants that can be used as birth control (and mild poison but w/e)- And communitarian traditions helping to NOT drive said plants extinct.
After thoughts and discussion on it, the current Kitsune world population is about 2 billion with a 2 to 3% growth rate per annum. In neolithic times, it was a few million as the issues with the janky life-seeding kept hunter gatherer carrying capacities very low. It crept up slowly during the agricultural ages, as it was slow and difficult for Kitsune to overcome the constant threat of famine, which required highly communitarian social technology as well as large scale (for neolithic people) early clay-and-rock technology to grow the cursed food plants with anything approaching reliability. At the advent of the industrial revolution Kitsune population was about 300 million, having crept up slowly as time passed and sophisticated states like Iwa, Tsu, and all the rest formed, with distinct cultures, traditions, etc. In just 60 short years after the beginnings of the industrial revolution, the population grew faster, up to 600 million.
Around that time, synthetic fertilizer production and greenhouse-growing methods were discovering, which REALLY shot up the population: For two generations (40 years) after that, population growth was fast and largely unrestrained, leading to a population of around 1.8 billion, tripling in two generations. That was about when the dangers of global warming were discovered, and the Great Greening coincided with austerity programs that also reduced the speed of population growth, including a minor population bottleneck as the baby boomers of the post-industrial agriculture age got older and older. Today, there are roughly 2 billion kitsune, and nuclear/renewable power ensures that fossil fuel burning is no longer necessary and population growth can now resume without major worries as more infrastructure is steadily built out and the world of Iwami is bent to the Kitsune's terms.
The largest features driving Kitsune home architecture are, first, the tendency toward large clans/families meaning that homes are either large clusters of connected structures/houses or a single massive mansion/apartment building. And second, due to lingering preindustrial traditions and food stress, EVERY single residence must have a pantry so large and well stocked that it may as well be considered a granary. It is shameful and low class to not have six months' worth of food within a 500 foot walk. Something is always cooking and available to eat, even in the dead of night (though outside of major meal times it will just be a fruit bowl or something). There are other traditional rooms and layouts too, such as the entry hall: A large room traditionally kept empty, just in case it is needed for some sort of emergency. They get used for parties sometimes, and occasionally for actual emergencies too.
A common thread speculation based on the nature of the modifications and biological failures that Kitsune face is that the Kitsune, being clearly designed by some intelligent designer, were created as a sort of 'Companion Species' meant to look pretty and add local charm and services to a sort of Resort World. As QM I am neither confirming nor denying this theory, but thought it should be included for context.
