Thread: Flat Black
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Old 12-17-2013, 12:32 AM   #176
Agemegos
 
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Default Re: Flat Black

Quote:
Originally Posted by martinl View Post
I would expect that particular scenario to result in only one settled pole, as it seems low tech would set in long before population pressure made colonizing the other pole attractive. Maybe some clever TL4 application of the colonial high biotech allows them to build and crew boats that can cross the equatorial oceans?
Yeah, that is troubling me, too.

It doesn't matter too much about the heat: it is sufficient to make the land unfit from permanent habitation, but currents and the thermal inertia of the oceans will mean that the crossing is survivable, especially if you take the quick route from Spring into Autumn. And since information from orbital surveys will be continuously available, you won't have the thing of explorers daring to sail no further down the coast of Africa for fear of passing their bingo point without finding anywhere to land safe.

Windiness is a worse challenge. Beta Hydri VI is a planet larger than Earth with a 13-hour day and a mean surface temperature 21 K warmer than Earth. The winds are going to be frightful, especially the westerly "Roaring Forties" and "Howling Fifties". Can TL 4/10 shipbuilding make something to survive and navigate winds five times as energetic as Earth's?

If not, do I have any historical tricks up my sleeve?

What say that when Navabharata's entrepreneurial conqueror showed up with his battalion of mercenaries some colonists fled to the other polar region not because of population pressure, but for political reasons. There was still scads of TL10 (delayed) stuff form Earth on Navabharata then. In fact, my cowboy model of development and population has Navabharata's capability gracefully declining over centuries. At one point in the Age of Isolation they had over 2.5 billion population and were still GURPS TL 7. It was the arrival of amateur conquerors during the Age of Piracy (when Navabharata still had 2.1 billion people and TL ~6) that really screwed things up. So perhaps the refugee states in the other polar regions were swamped by internal migrants during the Age of Isolation.

I think I have to note that there are a few political and cultural differences between the north polar and the south polar region, but I can assume that they are both populated.

Quote:
Divine monarchs: the history described above seems ripe for bizarre founder effects, so I can swallow it. I'm betting that the apparent monarch sacrifices are mostly staged (unless something has gone very very wrong). Rich aristos with TL10 knowledge and equipment are not going to routinely auto-immolate, they'll burn a convincing facsimile and take one of many high-tech-high-wealth escape hatches from the problem. (Some might out of religious duty, but most or all stretches my credulity.)
Oh, I expect all sorts of Vancean shenanigans with the royal sacrifices. I have — or any GM has — the entire Golden Bough to crib for that. There will be places where the king abdicates for a day every year and provides a son, chosen and anointed peasant boy, acephalic bioroid, fatted ox, or very large cake as a substitutory sacrifice. There will be kings who make a bolt for the border when they see the writing on the wall. places with a ceremonial "flight of the king" (pursued by potential heirs), with varyingly real chances of his being caught and fed to the mob: perhaps in some places this will be an annual ceremony, with the king reigning as long as he is fleet enough to maintain his lead. In some places the pretence will be overt, the symbolism recognised. In others the king or the aristocrats will be trying to deceive the populace. I'm trying to work out who if anyone has the incentive to roofie the king and get him to sacrifice himself.

One trivial note in passing: I am a bit linguistically old-fashioned; when I write "immolate" I mean "kill, as a sacrifice", not "burn".

Quote:
10,000 competing micro-states exposed to the Empire and the Suite in cultural and technological stasis:
It doesn't have to be in stasis. Just so long as its development has brought it to the state described by 606 PDT.

For what it's worth my cowboy model has Navabharata not static but in continued slow decline since the Treaty of Luna. The custom of the aristocracy getting themselves surgically transformed off-world can only be about 110 years old.

Quote:
er, um, I don't understand. You give historical examples, but the high tech contacts those historical examples had were not the Empire, they were colonial Empires out to make a quick buck. The Flat Black Empire will be applying it's TL10 social science to the colony looking for cracks and crannies to drive wedges of human misery reduction into, and with something so huge and balkanized there's going to be a lot of cracks. Since the Empire has really good social science, they aren't failing due to incompetence. Since they are inhumanly moral, they aren't failing due to corruption. Since this place is over 10^9 people and in the Core, it stretches credulity that they are unwilling to spend the resources. I suspect politics.
There is politics, of course. The Empire fixing places like this is just what the Feds want and the LRA exists to prevent. Figure that the Sons of Patrick Henry and the Bureau for Economic Development are playing a lovely great game on Navabharata, and the that LRA and the Feds are fencing over it in the Senate.

But as for the Empire, it really isn't as moral as you seem to think. The kind of people who get to sit in the big chair don't give an obscene metaphor about repression and human misery, they care about atrocities and mass death. No-one on Navabharata is starving. There aren't any endemic plagues. The wars aren't entirely bloodless, but they are small and pretty tame and the political department can deal with them. There are no death camps. There are no weapons of mass destruction. Population is below carrying capacity and static. The ecosphere isn't deteriorating. There is a little bit of concern that the economy might be drifting slowly backwards, which isn't good, but the TTAS can deal with that.

The whole universe ought to be like this, Imperially speaking. The benefits of social and political change and economic recovery don't justify the risk of starting revolutionary war, which would kill a lot of people outright and probably make things worse.
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Last edited by Agemegos; 12-17-2013 at 12:48 AM.
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