I launched the spaceship (sans Alphabet) in 1876AD:
It was quite the game, I really enjoyed it. 
Now before I go into any more commentary, let me present some shots from the replay:
There are the starting positions. I must say, this continent was completely bizarre, even for the always-interesting Custom Continents. It looks like a giant letter S! Maybe that will prove to be good luck for me. 
Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, the player started out isolated in a great spot. Isabella took Buddhism early on, and that proved to be the only religion that the other continent ever got. They were all Buddhist the whole game. I suspect that's the main reason there were never any wars over there on the other continent... Kublai took both Hinduism and Judaism, which I definitely don't expect to see happening in other games. That should have been a benefit for him, but he eventually stuck with Hinduism while Qin went with Judaism, and the two of them went at it early on. That would end up helping me more than I probably realized at the time.
Here you can see the effects of the first Qin/Kublai war. Qin took two cities from Kublai, but more importantly the two of them generally dragged each other down and allowed me to dominate my continent that much further. I circled the location of the city capture for easier recognition. Kublai had been the early leader, but he never really recovered from his losses in this war and remained weak thereafter. Qin's involvement in war allowed me to get almost the entire north - along with my "persuasive" reminder not to trespass on what I had claimed! FDR managed to be surprisingly competitive given his start, due to his building of both Colossus and Great Lighthouse. Once those wonders obsoleted, however, he quickly fell back into the pack and disappeared from note. Huayna Capac was a perennial loser due to his start and never accomplished anything in this game. I would have attacked him if his land had been better - it wasn't worth fighting over, to be honest! On the other continent, Izzy grabbed most of the land due to the quirks of geography benefiting her borders. Fred and Asoka did extremely well in the tech race, though - I don't know how they kept up with me as well as they did!
This is the map from right before I fought Qin the first time. You can see that the borders of every civ have expanded out a bit, and Fred/Askoa have both settled colonies to the south of Izzy, but otherwise there's not that much going on. It does show you how much land I grabbed though (compare to the above picture from 500AD; Qin added one more city to the east, while I got everything else!) I'll be curious to see how much land everyone else got in the north. Will Qin push east more aggressively if he stays out of war? Will some players choose to ally with Qin and possibly get ahead that way? Should be fun stuff to see.
I also cut-and-pasted the Circumnavigate annoucement here just so Sirian will be sure to read it. 
And the final map. Once Izzy was willing to talk with me and I knew I could get peace, my transport full of tanks that had been sitting off her coast razed Pamplona to the ground. I arrowed the location on the map. It had no effect whatsoever, but it made me feel good.
I know that this is a fast finish. The question I've been trying to figure out since the game ended is just how fast. By everything I can tell, the answer seems to be "pretty fast." At the very least, pre-1900 launches on Monarch seem to be quite rare. Although we had a great start here, the variant rules did make the game a little harder (especially by ruling out the Great Library). The difficulty of conquest with no luxury slider likely will mean some people will try to avoid war entirely, so I don't think too many people will be mimicking my Chinese conquest. And yet I estimate I was getting about 1000 beakers/turn from those cities by the end of the game, so they were more than worth it. I managed to build the spaceship in 16 turns after finishing Apollo, and just 3 turns after finishing research on the last spaceship tech. I also launched an astounding 66 turns before my spaceship victory in Adventure Two! So I think that this is actually pretty good.
Maybe it's my turn to win a Realms Beyond competition for once. (I've actually never won any of our events before.) After all, the map is a giant "S"! Then again, it might also be an S for Sirian, or for Speaker, or for S-Kylearan or S-Arathorn. 
Regardless of what happens, I had a blast with the game. Thanks, Arathorn.
