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Old 06-20-2017, 12:17 AM   #2
Proteus
 
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Houston, TX
Default Re: Radioactive Blogging: Putting thoughts on a GURPS world to bytes

Interesting stuff! A few initial thoughts:

Speeds of a parsec per day don't really limit a government's size all that much: consider the communications lags and travel times faced by the great colonial empires of Earth's history.

One factor that might limit political size is the mechanics of your star drive: do ships travel in short hops, or visibly through real space? If so, governments have a definite, defensive reason for establishing borders far from their capitals. If not — if, for example, a ship can spend weeks or even months at a time "submerged" in hyperspace, invisible to and untouchable by others until it reaches its destination after a long, invisible trip — then vast territory provides no defense against attackers who can emerge effectively from nowhere, and the only incentives to expand are economic (or religious, or nationalistic, etc.) rather than military.

How "deep" is the history of the setting? Is one race of beings the oldest and, if so, why don't they dominate the others? Was Earth visited by ancient astronauts? If not, why not? If a bunch of aliens all developed interstellar travel within a few decades of each other in a galaxy which has been capable of sustaining life for billions of years, that's going to cause some pointed questions and investigations (whether scientific or theological). Are there signs of Ancients / Precursors / Old Ones? How widespread and how recently?
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