[Fan Fiction] Looking forward to the Mirror (Completed)

[raistlin34]

This image may sum the responde of the Human Confederation to the Loroi Union in the epilogue

[majorminor]

Well crap, now what am I gonna use to sate my need for more outsider?

[Grayhome]

Well crap, now what am I gonna use to sate my need for more outsider?

I suggest GURPS and Master of Orion 1+2. It has been my ally through many a dark day.

[dragoongfa]

Well crap, now what am I gonna use to sate my need for more outsider?

I am torn between posting something now or waiting for the next week...

You lot already got 3 parts this week so I will just spoil the basic premise of what I consider a mix of an unhealthy quantity of HFY and what a lot of people may have wondered about what would happen if the initial contact of Alexander Jardin with the Loroi was done on slightly different terms.

Terms which become obvious when one adds just 1000 years on every date in this timeline:

http://well-of-souls.com/outsider/loroi_timeline.html

This one will be far smaller, with irregular updates and written exclusively for fun so the quality of the writing may vary.

Still, I already got the prologue and 1 and a half chapters written so that's going to get done relatively quickly.

[raistlin34]

Well crap, now what am I gonna use to sate my need for more outsider?

I am torn between posting something now or waiting for the next week...

You lot already got 3 parts this week so I will just spoil the basic premise of what I consider a mix of an unhealthy quantity of HFY and what a lot of people may have wondered about what would happen if the initial contact of Alexander Jardin with the Loroi was done on slightly different terms.

Terms which become obvious when one adds just 1000 years on every date in this timeline:

http://well-of-souls.com/outsider/loroi_timeline.html

This one will be far smaller, with irregular updates and written exclusively for fun so the quality of the writing may vary.

Still, I already got the prologue and 1 and a half chapters written so that's going to get done relatively quickly.

Please, tell me it won't be some dark fic about Alex being tortured continuously and mercilessly by Stillstorm and co.

[dragoongfa]

I will only say that Stillstorm will be thinking about it.

[Krulle]

Wow, what a fantastic read.
I cannot express my thanks in the words you deserve for this story.
Thank You for taking me on this fantastic ride!

[dragoongfa]

@Krulle

Thanks I appreciate it.

Recognizing that the subtle approach was a little too extreme and counter productive with the epilogue I added in some more hints about Loroi internal tensions.

Going back to editing this out.

[Razor One]

Looking over the epilogue, it seems that the Loroi experienced a similar problem that Japan did at the end of the Sengoku Jidai; they had a bunch of warriors that knew only war. Japan 'resolved' the problem by banning their peasantry from having weapons and wasting lives in Korea. The Loroi solution seems to have been the opposite; remain at peace but throw out the 'useless' civilians and rabble rousers.

[dragoongfa]

Looking over the epilogue, it seems that the Loroi experienced a similar problem that Japan did at the end of the Sengoku Jidai; they had a bunch of warriors that knew only war. Japan 'resolved' the problem by banning their peasantry from having weapons and wasting lives in Korea. The Loroi solution seems to have been the opposite; remain at peace but throw out the 'useless' civilians and rabble rousers.

I haven't studied Japanese History that much but I think that it is obvious that the many billions of young warriors that have been born just to fight this war will be a root of societal friction in Loroi society. To be honest this was a 'last month' realization from my part when I actually started tinkering with post war scenarios in my head.

The huge number of young warriors who literally don't know anything other than war and death was something that stuck out as a sore thumb for maintaining a stable Loroi Union after the war. Not only do they not know how to function in peace but they are also very used in having regular access to males in order to cover the war casualties.

I toyed initially with humans being seen as an emergency outlet but since I had already pushed the Humanity Fuck Yeah factor with the Human malware and later Confederation era, I didn't want to have the 'fuck' be an excuse for the peace

In the end I had the Loroi take the 'hard' decision of exiling the problematic individuals from the various civilian castes via an 'immigration program'. The civilians lost some prominent problematic figureheads and their supporters, amounting to a couple hundred million, in a relatively short amount of time. Harsh and cruel treatment to those who didn't do nothing other than protest their marginalization after the war but necessary in order to avoid a violent over reaction of the mass of young warriors who didn't know how to deal peacefully with non warrior Loroi in such matters. Given time the still living elders would be able to reign the young ones in as they got older and used to the peace but they needed the time necessary in order to do that.

I could certainly put it down better in the final epilogue but I tried (and I think I failed in the initial iteration) to pass the subtle message that the Loroi didn't come out of the war with their collective minds right and this was the reason for the Human-Loroi antagonism.

[Razor One]

An episode or two of Extra History doesn't really count as studying the history, but it's useful to get the broad strokes, and the situational factors, if not the causes, were a close match. Postwar, lots of warriors with only one purpose, little to do.

Considering the alternative was to descend into a civil war, which happened in Japan, or turn on their allies, what they did was nasty but effective.

[JQBogus]

I don't know that there would be billions of extra warriors laying around.

Whoever controls space, controls (or sterilizes) the land. So the war was primarily a ship to ship thing.

It has not been made clear just how many ships the Loroi had, but it has been said (IIRC) that about 50% of the Loroi were warrior caste of one sort or another, and that there were about 50 Billion Loroi overall in the Union. So... you've got 25 billion warriors already. Even if 99% of those are for local control and support (land forces, base facilities, administration) that leaves 250 million warriors that can be deployed to ships. If the average Loroi ship has a crew of 500, then that 1% is enough to crew half a million ships.

Did the Loroi have 500,000 ships? Did they lose them all? Were they producing so many ships that they had to breed billions of warriors to provide crews? If they were producing enough ships that they needed to breed a billion warriors a year (that is 2 million ships per year) how is it that the ~30 ships in a Strike Group could have a significant harassing effect on an Umiak assault group at all? That group would probably be tens or hundreds of thousands of ships.

[raistlin34]

Are you sure you couldn't give us the premise for the next fic?

[dragoongfa]

I don't know that there would be billions of extra warriors laying around.

Whoever controls space, controls (or sterilizes) the land. So the war was primarily a ship to ship thing.

It has not been made clear just how many ships the Loroi had, but it has been said (IIRC) that about 50% of the Loroi were warrior caste of one sort or another, and that there were about 50 Billion Loroi overall in the Union. So... you've got 25 billion warriors already. Even if 99% of those are for local control and support (land forces, base facilities, administration) that leaves 250 million warriors that can be deployed to ships. If the average Loroi ship has a crew of 500, then that 1% is enough to crew half a million ships.

Did the Loroi have 500,000 ships? Did they lose them all? Were they producing so many ships that they had to breed billions of warriors to provide crews? If they were producing enough ships that they needed to breed a billion warriors a year (that is 2 million ships per year) how is it that the ~30 ships in a Strike Group could have a significant harassing effect on an Umiak assault group at all? That group would probably be tens or hundreds of thousands of ships.

Iirc Arioch has said that the Union has around 1000 ships at the moment of the story while the Umiak have a lot more but I would put their number to around 4 to 5 thousand. The difference in industrial capacity between the Union and the Hierarchy is offset by the significant advantage that telepathy and in particular farsense provide. Ships in the outsider setting are ridiculously expensive to build and maintain and due to their importance in war this means that only the best are assigned to them.

In the case of the Union the vast majority of the warriors are bound to be ground pounders who double as civil administrators and even provide certain civil services. These are the ones who suffered a lot early in the war when the Loroi lost almost the entire Seren sector and even parts of the neighboring ones. Iirc the Loroi population numbers went down from 80 billion to around 50 to 60 billions after the fall of Seren. Half of the loses could be civilians but judging by the evacuation of the Seren sector its probable that most of those who died were warriors who stayed behind or died during the ground battles while space was still contested. Any survivors of the battles and those who were left alive were later culled due to their continued resistance.

The Loroi recovered their population due to the high birthrate natural to their species and at the time of the story they should have bounced back to their pre war population levels. This means that between 20 to 30 billion Loroi know only war and have little knowledge of peace. Adding the fact that the civilians still saw little access to males this means that a great percentage of the bounce back population are warriors.

This means 20 to 30 billion Loroi Warriors who know only war, they probably outnumber the older warriors that are left and they should have very little in common with the civilian castes that average one child per female per Loroi lifetime.

[dragoongfa]

Are you sure you couldn't give us the premise for the next fic?

Fine here is an other hint:

http://well-of-souls.com/outsider/tech_level.html

Someone is at tech level 16 and is somewhat amused.

[Grayhome]

I can't believe there are still people who haven't played Master of Orion 2 yet. Go out and buy MOO 2 guys, awesome game and you will gain a greater understanding of the webcomic.

[raistlin34]

Are you sure you couldn't give us the premise for the next fic?

Fine here is an other hint:

http://well-of-souls.com/outsider/tech_level.html

Someone is at tech level 16 and is somewhat amused.

You mean... a Time Lord?!

[dragoongfa]

You mean... a Time Lord?!

Nope, no time travel.

Don't get your hopes up, remember that the next one ain't meant to be 'good' in the sense of me taking the story seriously but I think that it has its redeeming qualities which is why I am going to be posting it.

It's a 'what if' type of story and it took a lot of willpower to not make a certain someone too much of a Cthulhu.

[JQBogus]

Damn, I hate it when it logs me out while I am writing a response, then loses my response when I log back in to post it.

Anyway....

Long response short :

I accounted for most Loroi being ground troops, administrators, and so on by assuming only 1% were available for shipboard duty. That means 400,000,000 crew are available for a fleet that needs maybe 500,000. Even if the Loroi produced enough ships to entirely replace their fleet every year, they'd still have existing qualified crew dying of old age before getting a berth.

The holdup the Union has in fielding a larger fleet isn't crew, it is industry. Much of the industrial work in the Union is done by allied races, and that which is done by Loroi is done by civilian castes.

So... any Loroi population boom that makes military sense would be a boom among civilian industrial castes that contribute to shipbuilding. Dockworkers, parts assemblers, material processors, miners, and so on. Any boom in warrior castes would only be among those warrior castes that keep the civilians in line. Police, secret police, and so on.

A reason I could see for a general population boom among warrior castes : The Loroi powers that be were desperate for more Unsheathed and Farseers. 'Special' talents like that can't really be individually predicted, but they can be statistically. You need 1000 Farseers, and Farseers are 1 in a million? Breed a billion new Loroi, and worry about the social consequences after the war...

[dragoongfa]

I think that you should take that with Arioch but I think that I can provide a response:

The key problem I think you missed is logistics.

The logistics chain is, far more often than not, several times more manpower hungry than the combat unit it is servicing. I have read once that it takes more than 10 men to have a soldier in the field properly supplied. This doesn't cover just the pure logistics personnel but also everyone who is supposed to be guarding and manning the necessary logistics outposts.

The numbers needed are rising exponentially the more territory one has to cover. To cover a frontline of more than 200 light years adequately in order to allow for the operations of 1000 combat ready ships on most of that frontline then they would need to build and man the relevant bases, defenses and facilities. Then one would need to count the personnel needed for fully manning the various supply outposts that are should be scattered throughout the rear in order to allow for the quick shifting of resources. After that one needs to actually have the necessary personnel in reserve in order to expand the logistics chain in case of an offensive or repair it as quickly as possible in case of them being destroyed.

I wouldn't be surprised if the 1000 ships need a logistics chain that is manned by a billion warriors. Then one needs to keep in mind that the ground troops also have their own supply chain in place.

In the end it takes a lot of people to keep the front line fully supplied.

EDIT: To make my point clearer:

http://www.history.navy.mil/research/li ... stics.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_St ... rld_War_II

The US navy at its peak during WW2 had 1200 combat ships with a combined crew strength that shouldn't be more than 200.000 men.

The manpower that the US navy needed in order to fully operate those ships and support them peaked at a little less than 4 million men. That's a ratio of 20 to 1 in order to have so many ships operating in a total war setting.