Grayhome wrote:NuclearIceCream wrote:I think a confederation is the direction the TCA was actually heading in cannon. And why would it be an upgraded feudal society? The USA was a confederation before the constitution was written.
Er, as far as I know in Arioch's Terran cannon, governmental types besides Democracy were not supposed to survive to the beginning of the story. Democracy leaves the rest in the dust.
Confederation is the upgraded form of Feudalism, Arioch has confirmed that the Loroi have a Feudal society. Feudalism is bad, Confederation is... slightly less of a handicap.
Federation is the upgraded form of Democracy, Ariock has the confirmed that the Terrans have a Democratic society. Democracy is awesome, Federation is game breakingly awesome.
That's MoO. Outsider, and thereby this fan-fic, is inspired by MoO, but you should
not assume that what's true in MoO is true in either this fan-fic OR Outsider. In the real-world, for example, North Korea has a word translating as "Democratic" in it's name, but in many ways is actually Feudal. Words should not be trusted to actually mean anything in particular, because often they're used for propaganda purposes only.
Also, were it not that there are probably some historical aspects to it, I suspect that the Loroi Union would be more of a
Stratocracy than Feudalistic (though you'll never
entirely get rid of Feudalism in species such as Humans and Loroi that naturally drift towards some strength or another of tribe).
Grayhome wrote:I think the key point to take away there NuclearIceCream is that the United States was a loose confederation of states before they "upgraded" to democracy. The loose confederation of states was by design incredibly weak, ineffectual, inefficient and therefore couldn't do much of anything, hence the necessary upgrade. For the Terrans to go from Democracy to Confederacy would be a very significant downgrade.
Outside of the naive and simplistic concerns of any particular game, whether it's a downgrade depends on several things, including your goals. If you want to strengthen your family's/tribe's/etc grip on power, then Feudalism is a great choice, because it establishes a set of circumstances that reduce the vulnerability of your power base; at the same time, it can tend to break down if internal population ratios become imbalanced, reciprocity between levels is perceived to have collapsed, or external factors act contrary to the established circumstances. If your goal is to fight some enemy, or obtain some goal, or something else then some form of Dictatorship is great, because it concentrates authority in a very small part of the population, thereby reducing productivity-losses caused by distraction; at the same time, it can tend to break down if the passage of time reduces the leadership's understanding of the current state of things, a perception of the collapse of reciprocity between levels, and general failure or incompetence. If your goal is to keep the government aligned with the citizenry, then Democracy is a great choice, because that's roughly what it's designed around; at the same time, it is prone to instability via either backlash or a lack of understanding on the part of the citizenry, an inability to focus on problems due to the dispersion of authority, and a general complication of any action.
What decides which one is best isn't what the general system is, but instead what the goals, circumstances, and cultural tendencies are.
As for the US, it currently
is in a Confederation: it goes by the name of the UN, and has done a decent job of fulfilling it's intent of acting as a forum of democracy and diplomacy. It's current form isn't suited to fighting off an alien invasion, or even keeping Russia from muscling around everyone that it can, but the UN was never intended for such things. Similarly, the current US Federal government was designed to compensate for certain weaknesses encountered during the US Revolutionary War, primary among them being the relative lack of organization among the various US armed groups.
Grayhome wrote:PS. Looks like Dragoonfa is going with what I was thinking it would take for a confederation to take hold: disastrous, world ending conflict.
If you really want a Confederation to take the reigns from a Federation, then what you really need is for the high-level government to display clear misbehavior or maladaptation at the same time as the sub-governments have the ability to replace it (simple things like communications lag can do this: hard to properly govern a colony when a one-way trip can take a month, or maybe even a week, so you decentralize: the ansible, however, counters this), at the same time that there's no compelling reason to retain the more centralized form (a nasty enemy can sometimes be the only thing keeping a dictator's head on).
That's not quite what happened here, though: what happened here is that the 5 Garden-world colonies successfully rebelled, then the new colonies that they and the... let's call them "Old Terrans" formed rebelled in turn. Seeing their irrelevance on the horizon, they created the Confederation (the "New Terrans") from scratch, but because they didn't want to be ruled by each other they opted for only a Confederation: probably just as well, since it reduces the chances of one group's governmental failings dragging down all of them, as can happen in e.g. America's Federation. Afterwards there was more war, their only technological competitor started to win a fight against everyone else, and judging by implication the New Terrans once again saw the writing on the wall, and torched 3 planets to bring the war to a screeching halt: I assume these were all original Serene Republic worlds, as it's difficult to imagine anything except for a cold-war or hot-war emerging from any other option.
Also, I'd really suggest using "sphere" (in the approximate sense of "Earth Sphere" and similar, basically empires, hegemonies, and similar multiple-sub-component population groupings in some sense focused around a somehow-distinct core) or something similar when referring to "a world and it's dependent colonies". Using "world" everywhere makes it hard to grasp whether you mean an individual planet, or also mean the other population centers associated with it: the diligence of the Commonwealth and Serene Republics completely changes depending on whether they were wiping out only the primary planet(s) within each "world", or were destroying
all accessible population centers when they did it.
Grayhome wrote:I guess the Terrans have come a long way from their "Hobbit" like roots, as Arioch described them. Holy poop, theocracy?
Show me a theocrat, and I'll show you someone who took a sharpie to all of their holy books. It's honestly just an exaggerated form of party system, or nationalism, or of any of a number of other things. This one looks to be a variant of nationalism, after being twisted out of shape by war, history, and a strong conviction that people should do the Right thing instead of the Easy or Greedy thing. The Commonwealth appears to be a theocracy of sorts as well, but based around Humanism + Communism or something of the sort, instead of Christianity + Buddhism.
The ones that are
not corrupt are often the
harshest, because of that very lack of corruption.
dragoongfa wrote:Grayhome wrote:Outsider uses a modified GURPS in which the Historians who are up to tech level 12 don't seem to have telepathy. The same can be told about the Dreiman who were somewhere between around tech level 14 iirc. The only known faction who had Telepathy are the Soians who were at least tech level 15.
Ah, but Arioch has stated that there was a moon (or other planetoid, can't quite remember) that the Dreiman had moved around by unknown means. I took that as a hint for massive psychokinetic force.
Anywho, awesome story building and I cannot wait to read more.
Tractor beams are tech level 11, their tech level 14 evolution could be enough to do that.
Also, if you built an inertial distributor system of sufficient reach, you could move a planet (or star, or...) with literally no facilities being placed on the planet in question.
Grayhome wrote:As you say, such mundane methods might suffice. Yet I hold out hope for an alternative mechanism of more troubling implication.
Been playing too much Darkest Dungeon, everything I read is in the Ancestor's voice. Such dulcet tones!
Troubling implications? Ok, they moved it using a stable wormhole. To understand how this has troubling implications, imagine carrying one end in a freighter orbiting an enemy planet, and throwing the other end (which, remember, is stable even when things are moving through it) into a star.
Telepaths sleep, wormholes don't.