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Old 12-15-2013, 12:43 AM   #161
Bengt
 
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Default Re: Flat Black

It seems like you would need very good organization and logistics to set up a planet of hats in the first place. If this was the result of pirates landing here and there and subjugating the natives I would expect a lot of diversity, sure most states would be autocratic fiefdoms, but their trappings would be very different. You would have both Peoples Democratic Republics with their Presidents for Life and kingdoms with divinely ordained monarchs.

I don't know anything about Flat Back though, so if hat planets is a setting convention, just ignore me.
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Old 12-15-2013, 01:32 AM   #162
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It seems like you would need very good organization and logistics to set up a planet of hats in the first place. If this was the result of pirates landing here and there and subjugating the natives I would expect a lot of diversity, sure most states would be autocratic fiefdoms, but their trappings would be very different. You would have both Peoples Democratic Republics with their Presidents for Life and kingdoms with divinely ordained monarchs.
I try to strike a balance between a plausible muddle and the vivid clarity of having planets of hats. When the rubber hits the road, I have only so much time and space in which to write, and players have only so much time and patience to with which to read, and we both have limited memories. The design goal for the setting is to reproduce Vancean rationalised planetary romance, not rigorously plausible futurism. And though I try to avoid being outrageously implausible the hats have to win.

As for the history of Navabharata, this path of development started eight hundred years ago. The colony was initially established as a national prestige project by the Republic of India, which sent a series of well-organised, well-staffed, and well-supplied expeditions over about fifteen years. But owing to the strictures of light speed travel this undertaking didn't produce any national prestige or even bad news. The voters lost their enthusiasm, the budgets were cut, and before the news of the first landing even got back to Earth the government declared that the proper function of government in such an undertaking had been discharged, the colony was now established, and passage was now open to "general migrants" prepared to pay their own passage. A little later they "privatised" the colony by selling off the settlement rights to a tycoon. The tycoon in question spent a fortune on subsidising a large number of well-equipped and highly skilled pioneers to go and then, with the last gasp of his resources, went there himself with a battalion of mercenaries. His business empire collapsed under a mountain of debt, and after they worked out what he had done no-one was prepared to go there after that. That fellow established a monarchy, which under the usual tendency of monarchies without divine sanction engendered an aristocracy. With the population growing and transport and comms failing to keep up that developed into a feudal government and then balkanised into a multitude of local monarchies. That was the state that explorers found Navabharata in in the age of piracy. Centrally located, technologically vulnerable, and with a suggestively romantic political situation, the colony tended to attract would-be conquerors with small high-tech forces during the age of piracy, and they were naturally drawn to the god gambit. The Eichberger Foundation put the place under an interdict to protect the locals when it could, but that was shutting the stable door after the horse had gone. Navabharata was left to stew in its own juice through ninety years of the Formation Wars: it was too economically backward to either support the Foundation or demand its attention. When the Empire eventually turned up it was a patchwork quilt of monarchies (of, as you suggest, wildly various origins and antiquities), but the monarchies were of the agricultural, not the pastoral type anyway, and the god-gambiting of a century and a half before had by now spread the "divine kingship" memes pretty widely. Renewed contact with the Empire, and interstellar trade, allowed the aristocracies to adopt the practice of cosmetic-surgical apotheosis about 495–500 PDT, and satellite communications installed by the ITSC let them drag their act together. The current institutions are about a century old, which is four generations for the commoners, but the aristocracy have access to eugerione and age much slower.

There is doubtless a great variety of idiosyncratic monarchical titles: devarajas here and aesirexes there, presidents and maharajahs, dewas and nawabs, kings and sultans. Rules of succession doubtless vary in detail, also the roles of the other divine aristocrats under the authority of the monarch. But I can't possibly specify it all. The planetary information sheet is going to have to generalise and to adopt a categorical term for everything from an aesirex to a zalmoxiarch: "king".

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I don't know anything about Flat Back though, so if hat planets is a setting convention, just ignore me.
It is and it isn't. It's a setting convention that planetary societies are vivid and perverse, but I try to demand as little arbitrary acceptance of the implausible as I can.

One thing that I do have going for me is that although these planets are poor and screwed up, they aren't actually primitive. Enough high-tech communications infrastructure to unify a planet memetically isn't really all that expensive, and can outlast the tech base to re-create it.
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Old 12-15-2013, 08:36 AM   #163
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Default Re: Flat Black

Flat Black is set up to support serial planetary romance, right? That, to me, indicates numerous worlds with fairly clear, strong themes or stylistic elements. Without a certain amount of 'planet of hats' stuff going on, the worlds would blur together.
This 'divine kingship' planet seems to fit well.
I like it.

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Old 12-15-2013, 10:14 AM   #164
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The thing that I was afraid might set off people's fertiliser detectors was the God-gambitting aristocracy subject to the restrictions of sacred kingship. And that has passed without comment. Good.
That's no weirder than anything that people have actually gotten up to in the name of gods and countries.

The only thing that now seems less than plausible is the homogeneity of the northern and southern polar cultures despite the geographic rift. I think that maybe having them diverge a bit during the Age of Piracy would be better.
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Old 12-16-2013, 09:55 AM   #165
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In this case the planet in question is stagnating at late TL4 industrial development and productivity because it has lousy government, deficient infrastructure, bad schools, etc.. There are 1.4 billion people and at least tens of thousands of kingdoms that barely co-operate. It is in contact with a TL10 (advanced) interstellar economy, but no-one except the ruling families can afford much in the way of imports, and they use their imports to support their masque of divinity. Young aristocrats are sent off-world for training in management, agronomy, civil engineering, jurisprudence, medicine, forensic science etc. While they are away that are modified using biotech to have divine features such as beast's heads, blue or green skin etc. When they come back they are inducted as gods and take up posts in the government of their kingdoms in which they use their education and imported tools to work the routine miracles. Those the do well may be promoted by the local king. When the king gets the chop (or defects) the gods elect one of themselves to be the new king.
I'm ok with the concept of a technological deity class getting eaten when they fail, but where my SoD fails is with the global society at TL4, unless a significant portion of that aristocracy and their support are at TL9-10.

1.4 billion people is a lot of people to feed and support at TL4, on top of supporting themselves they're also generating enough revenue for their rulers to go off-planet on holiday to get a full TL10 education, biotech enhancements, and import TL10 luxuries back. You're the economist, but that doesn't really sound in any way sustainable to me.

On the other hand, if they had themselves developed and maintained a higher TL biotech segment, at least TL8 and more reasonably TL9-10, along with infrastructure and support staff for the aristocracy in that TL8-10 region, then that sort of mitigates some of the issue and likely gives them a better shot at international revenue generation. Though, it'd still make more sense to me if there's more of a TL4-7 span of tech used by the general populace, especially in medicine/biotech and agriculture, instead of just a flat TL4.

Socially this also means an active global conspiracy and collusion by these aristocratic god-kings in order to oppress and knock down any uprisings or attempts to change the status quo.

That's tens of thousands of kingdoms who barely cooperate except in maintaining their aristocracy and on stomping down on cultural divergence, possibly some type of extra-governmental global inquisition?
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Old 12-16-2013, 12:56 PM   #166
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I'm ok with the concept of a technological deity class getting eaten when they fail, but where my SoD fails is with the global society at TL4, unless a significant portion of that aristocracy and their support are at TL9-10.
It's not really TL 4, any more than modern Ethiopia is TL 2. It's a badly organised and underdeveloped part of a TL 10 interstellar economy, where people are poor because they use TL 4 methods of industrial organisation, and can produce only corresponding unsophisticated components, but where they have a legacy of TL 10 genetically engineered crops and are able to import TL 10 products and components, albeit at a steep disadvantage in the real exchange rate.

I'm sorry to sow confusion by referring to TL 4 — I don't do so in FLAT BLACK's native documents, but referring to "Development level 3.9" wouldn't have communicated anything, and I did want to give a quantitative impression of backwardness and unsophisticated industrial methods.

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1.4 billion people is a lot of people to feed and support at TL4,
They have a whole planet, a little larger than Earth. They also have a legacy of TL10 crops, which are highly productive, perennial (they don't need annual tillage and planting, just harvest), and fix their own nitrogen. That cuts down the requirement to feed traction animals, and frees up agricultural production to support humans. And though the ecological engineers who terraformed the place probably had no choice but to include some things that would eat crops and stored food, they could leave out most human and crop diseases.

So they have more food and less need for agricultural labour than you are used to at historical TL 4, which means more labour free to make luxury products for the rich, and stuff to export.

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On the other hand, if they had themselves developed and maintained a higher TL biotech segment, at least TL8 and more reasonably TL9-10, along with infrastructure and support staff for the aristocracy in that TL8-10 region, then that sort of mitigates some of the issue and likely gives them a better shot at international revenue generation. Though, it'd still make more sense to me if there's more of a TL4-7 span of tech used by the general populace, especially in medicine/biotech and agriculture, instead of just a flat TL4.
Well, they have legacy crops, livestock, and microbe cultures, and they can commission and import more and propagate it locally. The aristocrats include some gods of health, gods of agriculture etc. who learned their stuff on Tau Ceti and can work minor miracles locally. There is imported high-tech kit here and there, like mobile phones in Zimbabwe or on the Malabar Coast. And Tau Ceti is only 21 light-years away. They keep their high-tech enclave off-planet.

This is part of a TL10 economy. It's just a poor one, producing in the low-sophistication part of the spectrum.

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Socially this also means an active global conspiracy and collusion by these aristocratic god-kings in order to oppress and knock down any uprisings or attempts to change the status quo.
They can suppress and knock down most uprisings and attempts to change the status quo in their disfavour by local action. To the extent that conspiracy might be required it can be called "diplomacy" and "international co-operation against banditry and terrorism".

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That's tens of thousands of kingdoms who barely cooperate except in maintaining their aristocracy and on stomping down on cultural divergence, possibly some type of extra-governmental global inquisition?
Why stomp down on cultural divergence? So long as the peasants eat the food and wear the clothes they are given, build the houses they are told to build, do the work they are told to do when they are told with the tools and materials supplied, and show a proper respect to their betters who cares if their culture changes?
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Old 12-16-2013, 02:04 PM   #167
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and stuff to export.
What can they actually make that someone in another star system value enough to have it transported there?
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Old 12-16-2013, 02:38 PM   #168
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What can they actually make that someone in another star system value enough to have it transported there?
That depends on the cost of transport, doesn't it?* If transport is cheap nearly anything will do. Even charming handicrafts. Australia's main exports are essentially dirt (bauxite and haematite) and rocks (coal). All we do to them is quarry and load them. And we don't even have an advantageous exchange rate. Or look at the typical petrostate: they all trade like crazy, and none of them except Norway could really manage TL7 production on its own, while some would struggle to make a steam engine without imported parts.

Remember that the profitability of trade depends on discrepancies between price ratios, not on absolute prices. (Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage). Navabharata doesn't need to produce anything that they couldn't make on Tau Ceti or Fureidis. It doesn't even have to produce anything more efficiently than they could on Tau Ceti or Fureidis. It just needs to be willing to give more for a smartphone from Fureidis than Fureidis could produce locally with the resources it puts in to making a smartphone. Tau Ceti has six billion people and TL10 manufacturing techniques. Its population density is eight times Navabharata's and its real exchange rate five times higher. Between the large incomes and the high population density land rents must be very high, and the real exchange rate puts that through the roof. Tau Ceti is much better off making speccy widgets and importing agricultural products than it would be diverting its capital and labour into increasing agricultural production.

Remember also that places like Navabharata can use high-biotech crops to produce valuable materials such as drugs and high-spec chemical feedstocks without having to do anything sophisticated to produce them. Kevlar is a bast fibre in FLAT BLACK; imiquimod capsules and ursaline tablets grow in pods on shrubs. The pods are on the tops of stalks, like lavender heads, for easy picking, and they have a sharp and dramatic colour change when ripe.

Navabharata could probably export monomer feedstocks to Fureidis and buy them back as polymer injection-moulded cases along with touchscreens, import power supplies and processors from Tau Ceti, and use the lot to assemble commgadgets which it then exports.
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Old 12-16-2013, 04:45 PM   #169
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* When it comes to cheap interstellar travel, there are three things to look at; three things that we usually fail to consider and therefore end up with gloomy conclusions about the likely price of interstellar transport.
  1. First you have efficient cargo handling. We just fail to appreciate how important containerisation has been in driving the last forty years of globalisation and reduction of poverty in human-resource-rich parts of the world. The growth of ships to more efficient scales goes in here too. Traveller and the Millennium Falcon make us think in terms of cargo handling methods that were obsolescent and expensive even in the late Seventies, and scales that were inefficient in the Twenties.
  2. Then there is launch costs. Chemical rockets with poor specific impulses give eye-watering mass ratios. These huge launch craft with tiny payloads have to be make of very expensive cutting-edge materials, which makes the price high and volume low so each one has to be hand-built at prototype costs. Scramjets or fusion-powered rockets with respectable exhaust velocities have the potential to drastically reduce the mass ratio, which makes weight less critical allowing somewhat cheaper materials, and progress in materials science makes those materials cheaper. Reduced prices (and the development of off-world destinations) increases volumes, which allows orbital lighters to be mass-produced and much cheaper. On top of that you get launch loops, space fountains, rotorvators, beanstalks, and other elevators to orbit further reducing launch costs.
  3. And finally you have the fact that true spacecraft can be pretty cheap. If you have cheap launch, or use materials sourced in space, they don't have to be made out of expensive light materials. Unlike aircraft or launch vehicles they don't need a minimum thrust-to-weight ratio to be able to do their jobs. They don't have to be folded up into a capsule on top of a booster. You need a platform to stack containers on, a low-spec motor, and a twenty-buck microcontroller, plus maybe an envelope of mosquito mesh, a layer of mylar, a half-millimetre metal can and some kevlar cloth to dealt with debris impacts. And since the mass of the platform and scaffolding is small compared to that of the cargo, it doesn't matter if you use cheap heavy materials such as asteroidal iron.

Interstellar transport can be expensive if you want it to be; but it doesn't have to be, given a suitable ^ for your FTL drive.
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Old 12-16-2013, 06:31 PM   #170
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Flat Black is set up to support serial planetary romance, right?
That's right, though I'm aiming for rationalised planetary romance, related to John Carter and Northwest Smith the way the New Space Opera is related to the space opera of E.E. Smith. Jack Vance's Oikumene, Gaean Reach, and Alastor stories are the sort of thing I'm aiming for. The Moon Moth, for instance. Less of the romantically unexplained and the quasi-sorcerous alien queens, and more of the weird but logical exotic human cultures.

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That, to me, indicates numerous worlds with fairly clear, strong themes or stylistic elements. Without a certain amount of 'planet of hats' stuff going on, the worlds would blur together.
Indeed. But I prefer RPG settings that are consistent enough that the players can extrapolate from, use, and even exploit the peculiarities of the setting. And that's hard to do while your SoD is hung on a skyhook. I like players to be confident that if whey grab a bit and twist it the knob won't come off in their hand. So "it has to be that way by genre convention" needs to have piers built up under it of good solid brick.

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This 'divine kingship' planet seems to fit well. I like it.
I'm glad.
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