The Scream

The Scream is the commonly used name for a galaxy-wide psychic event that happened in year 2665. A massive wave of metadimensional energy washed over the entirety of human space in only a few minutes. Later reconstruction places the origin of this event within the Veil Nebula, but no further records have been created, nor any exploratory mission sent to investigate.

Effects
The effects of the Scream was wide-ranging and apocalyptic in nature as this psychic energy washed over the galaxy. With psitech being an integral part of every central colony world, and with jump gates assuring the security and sustainability of frontier worlds, most worlds suffered greatly as the jump gate system collapsed. Separated from Terran Mandate protection, frontier worlds fell back several centuries in technological development, and countless colonies died of starvation as the agricultural commodities could not reach them.

With pretech spike drives mostly being considered archaic equipment, and only used in rare cases of exploration, any other way of contacting neighboring worlds were a rarity. Ships already in drive space was immediately obliterated, and riots occured for ownership of the few remaining spike drive ships. The lucky ones tended to band together into scavenger fleets, moving from planet to planet picking up any and all useful technology that could help with their survival.

As for the Psychic Authority, their training and education programs collapsed as psychics died or suffered incurable madness due to complete burnout. With psychic education falling back, psychics quickly became a rarity as many could not handle the strain of uncontrolled psychic emanations.