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Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 6:21 am
by entity2636
They are proportionally stronger than humans, that is, a loroi woman will be stronger than a human woman of similar height, weight and build, about as strong as a human man, again of similar height, weight and build (which would be a rather wimpy man in comparison).
I don't think they have thicker or more durable skin, Beryl probably has a bump on her head as well from encountering Alex's forehead, somewhere hidden by her hair. Thick hair actually works rather well in protecting one's own head from bruises.
Anyway, that's why seat belt use is mandatory also for those in the back
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 9:12 am
by Warringrose
Hey Arioch, what is Loroi Philosophy like? Do you have any notes you can share?
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 9:16 am
by Zorg56
Under what circumstances Loroi invented tanks?
In our world it was very specific WW1 trench warfare.
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 11:49 am
by GeoModder
It's a pretty big topic, as it's the history of not just one world, but three. I have a significant amount of notes on the details of Deinar history, and I can fashion an Insider entry out of them if there is interest, but it's a pretty big job, and a subject that's a bit of tangent from the story itself.
As for me, I certainly have interest to read more about Loroi history at some point.
Perhaps something to show between chapters?
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 2:32 pm
by Sweforce
entity2636 wrote:Anyway, that's why seat belt use is mandatory also for those in the back
I am blaming Talon for forgetting to light up the "fasten seatbelts" sign.
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 7:45 pm
by orion1836
Talon wrote:As we have lost artificial gravity, you are now free to float about the cabin.
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 7:47 pm
by Werra
If Enzin can't reach any of the buttons, he can't break anything.
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 11:01 pm
by Arioch
CF2 wrote:Are Loroi stronger, or more durable, than humans? Can we expect them to become injured from the same causes, or will they shrug off certain sources of injury more easily?
Loroi are slightly more durable, on average, than a human of the same size, and have a slightly better chance of resisting disease or toxins. But the difference is not dramatic. (This is reflected the GURPS sheets with the racial +1 HT.)
Warringrose wrote:Hey Arioch, what is Loroi Philosophy like? Do you have any notes you can share?
Loroi philosophy centers around the retelling of their heroic tales, which are telepathically conveyed rather than written. These span all of Loroi history, including some that purport to predate the fall of the Soia, and extend right up to the present day, to include modern tales of the fallen. These tales preach Loroi values: reverence for ancestors and their heroic deeds, duty, honesty, and valor ("From Duty: Unity; Through Victory: Ascension"). The telepathic sharing of these tales and discussion of their meaning and lessons is the common practice of this philosophy, and this is also how the Loroi honor their dead and keep their memory alive. These practices are aided by the work of the male Nedatan orders, which have Listel-like members who keep mental archives of the tales, and scholars who study them and help explain their meaning to laypersons.
Zorg56 wrote:Under what circumstances Loroi invented tanks?
In our world it was very specific WW1 trench warfare.
After the Deinar iron age, without suitable riding animals for cavalry, or missile weapons that could not be easily deflected by Teidar, most of the Loroi cultures developed a relatively static style of warfare that depended heavily on formations of ranked heavy infantry. As the ages wore on, combat became ever more formalized and subject to elaborate rules; this system of infantry combat continued well into the early industrial era. Even after the invention of gunpowder and the adoption of musket-like firearms, the same sort of rules stayed in force (ranked infantry using firearms instead of melee weapons). It wasn't until someone realized you could scale up firearms to create artillery that things started to change; by this point they were already up to ~TL5/6, and so the infantry suddenly had to contend with WWI style artillery guns, the response to which in many cases was probably defensive works and trenches. Around the same time, they started to experiment with vehicles to move infantry. Armored vehicles probably began as protective transportation for infantry rather than for breaching defensive works, and evolved into fighting vehicles in their own right once the Loroi had figured out how they could be used as cavalry (which they had never had before).
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2018 1:33 pm
by Zorg56
Is it possible, to use Beryl as a mele weapon?
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2018 1:55 pm
by GeoModder
Zorg56 wrote:Is it possible, to use Beryl as a mele weapon?
Didn't you know?
The tongue is mightier than the blade!
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 6:56 pm
by Werra
I tried comparing Loroi and human reproductive capabilities. These numbers are broad guesses. Did I miss something big or did I come close?
Let's say 50% of humans are female and of those 33% are of fertile age (20 - 45).
0,5 * 0,33 = 0,165 = 16,5% of humans are able to reproduce.
Of the Loroi, 87,5% (1 in 8 male) are female. Of those, about 50% are warrior caste. Loroi have a longer natural lifespan and mature quicker, so let's say 50% are fertile.
87,5 * 0,5 * 0,5 = 21,875% of Loroi are eligible to reproduce.
That means for 1 human birth, there should be ~1,3 Loroi births. Except...
A human generation is 24 years, a Loroi generation is 12 years.
So for 1 human soldier, there should be 2,6 Loroi soldiers. Except...
50% of those births are female humans and 87,5% are female Loroi.
So for 1 adult human fighter, there should be 4,55 adult Loroi warriors.
This is all at best an educated guess, of course. In a hypothetical war starting from an equal population, industrial and technological baseline, the human military would need to crush the Loroi at a ratio of 1 : 4,5 to reach a tie with these numbers.
However, this ratio requires humanity to draft every single able bodied male born to the war effort, while the Loroi leave out their civilian population completely.
Does this sound about right?
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 7:30 pm
by dragoongfa
Those numbers are about right but in case of a war you are mistaking raw manpower potential with war potential. Taking into account that a war would be primarily a naval one then the key factor in determining a wartime advantage would be stellar geography (location of planets and avenues of approach), technology, doctrine, industrial capacity and industrial potential. Having lots and lots of bodies around is all well and good in a ground war but in a naval war what really matters is raw fleet power and its application.
Raw fleet power is determined solely by the industrial capacity of combatant. It doesn't matter if the combatant has a far smaller population, if their industrial capacity and its expansion surpasses the numbers of their enemy then they can build more ships. Logic dictates that the one with greater manpower has 'more of everything' but that is not an observed rule, as a matter of fact it has been observed numerous times that a smaller nation can overcome significantly larger ones through the weight of superior industry and proper application of war potential. Imperial Japan and Nationalist China in the late 30s springs to mind. The Japanese were for all intents and purposes heavily outnumbered but they were ravaging the Chinese throughout the war.
In short, war is complicated and raw manpower is but one of the parameters.
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 7:59 pm
by Arioch
Werra wrote:Does this sound about right?
It's complicated to make these kinds of comparisons, because there are a lot of variables. Loroi have longer potential lifespans, but in practice a warrior might have only 1 or 2 children in her lifetime during a hypothetical endless war, since she will be busy fighting and may get killed. So the total number of offspring per female is probably not that different between humans and Loroi. The major difference is going to be the percentage of individuals able to give birth (~88% vs. ~50%) and the length of generations (~10 years vs. ~20 years). So in a hypothetical 20 year war, the Loroi can produce two generations of new people to Humanity's one, and each generation can be 56% larger. In 20 years, a group of 100 humans can produce a single generation of 50 children, for a total pop of 150. In the same 20 years, a group of 100 Loroi can produce two new generations, the first of 88 children, and the second of 165 children, for a total pop of 353. So over this span the ratio is 2.35:1 in favor of the Loroi. This ratio will increase exponentially as time increases, but it is unlikely that a war could last that long.
Naturally it's true that population size doesn't directly translate into war-fighting ability, especially in a war dominated by fleet combat rather than infantry combat.
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 8:06 pm
by Zorg56
Raw fleet power is determined solely by the industrial capacity of combatant.
This.
I dont get why warriors in Loroi culture way more important. I can understand why that was like that in middle ages, but now, when you can replace any warrior or ship without loosing anything if you have industrial capacity and it will take years to replace Industrial complex or engineer (Replacing expirenced engineers is nightmare, Russian space program is crippled because of that, and in one step from complete removal)...
Espically when half of your population sits on their asses on ground bases training in ground warfare (basically, doing almost nothing that helps in galactic war).
P.s. By the way is creating a clone army real option?
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 8:41 pm
by Werra
Arioch wrote:[A] warrior might have only 1 or 2 children in her lifetime during a hypothetical endless war
What's stopping the non frontline warriors from popping out babies every few years? Especially since many warriors don't even seem to serve in combat roles in the fleet.
Naturally it's true that population size doesn't directly translate into war-fighting ability, especially in a war dominated by fleet combat rather than infantry combat.
Definitely, this is just a thought experiment of a hypothetical war if both nations had equal capabilities starting out. However this number should allow us to gauge how quickly a nation can regenerate from war. Imagine what the Second Punic War would have been like if Carthago had this advantage.
Zorg56 wrote:
I dont get why warriors in Loroi culture way more important.
From what I understand, Loroi warriors also fulfill roles we think of as typically civilian. So they do produce war material.
Zorg56 wrote:it will take years to replace Industrial complex or engineer
The Loroi should be able to do this more than twice as fast as humans, no? Alternatively, they can increase their output more than twice as fast.
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2018 9:22 pm
by Arioch
Zorg56 wrote:P.s. By the way is creating a clone army real option?
If you mean
real clones, which must still be birthed by a surrogate mother and must still mature and be trained like a normal Loroi, there is no particular advantage here. Having all your soldiers be genetically identical is actually a disadvantage, because they will all have the same vulnerabilities.
If you mean Hollywood "clones" (that is, manufactured replicants that are fully adult at birth and have some kind of pre-programmed personality so that they are able to go into action immediately), that's not really feasible at this tech level.
I can imagine artificial wombs that eliminate the need for a surrogate mother, but frankly the Loroi have reproductive capacity to spare. The bottleneck is in their ability to feed and raise and train people to do useful work; this infrastructure is pretty much saturated.
Werra wrote:Arioch wrote:[A] warrior might have only 1 or 2 children in her lifetime during a hypothetical endless war
What's stopping the non frontline warriors from popping out babies every few years? Especially since many warriors don't even seem to serve in combat roles in the fleet.
Nothing, but the Loroi creches and schools and universities are all full, so there's not necessarily a benefit to every Loroi warrior having a kid every year in most circumstances. Also, I think being constantly pregnant will affect your job performance to some degree no matter what your job is.
I didn't mean that 1 or 2 children was the average for a typical warrior; a warrior might live 12 years or 400 years, and she might have 20 or 30 children in her lifetime, or she might have 1 or 2 or none. I'm just saying that it's hard to come up with an average, because the potentials vary widely. And the fact that some Loroi warriors might each have another 20 kids 300 years from now doesn't necessarily impact the current situation.
I think the chief advantage of the Loroi reproductive proclivity is, as you suggested, in their ability to quickly recover from devastating losses of population. I think the secondary advantage is in their ability to quickly populate a new colony world.
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2018 5:25 pm
by Hālian
Arioch wrote:It's a pretty big topic, as it's the history of not just one world, but three. I have a significant amount of notes on the details of Deinar history, and I can fashion an Insider entry out of them if there is interest, but it's a pretty big job, and a subject that's a bit of tangent from the story itself.
+1 interest.
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2018 5:59 pm
by boldilocks
I'd rather the focus be on more pages, tbh.
I got spoiled by the 2-3 pages a month summer we just went through.
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2018 11:24 pm
by cacambo43
boldilocks wrote:I'd rather the focus be on more pages, tbh.
I got spoiled by the 2-3 pages a month summer we just went through.
I agree. Sometimes I've worried that world-building could be the death of this comic. But Arioch seems to have gotten most of the important and relevant elements of the backstory done. Let's watch that world unfold.
CJSF
Re: Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread
Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2018 2:57 pm
by boldilocks
cacambo43 wrote:boldilocks wrote:I'd rather the focus be on more pages, tbh.
I got spoiled by the 2-3 pages a month summer we just went through.
I agree. Sometimes I've worried that world-building could be the death of this comic. But Arioch seems to have gotten most of the important and relevant elements of the backstory done. Let's watch that world unfold.
CJSF
Speak of the devil, just got 2 happy messages from patreon.