12-15-2013, 12:43 AM | #161 |
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Ronneby, Sweden
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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. |
12-15-2013, 01:32 AM | #162 | ||
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Flat Black
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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". Quote:
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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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. Last edited by Agemegos; 12-19-2013 at 10:04 PM. |
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12-15-2013, 08:36 AM | #163 |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: a crooked, creaky manse built on a blasted heath
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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. Last edited by combatmedic; 12-15-2013 at 08:40 AM. |
12-15-2013, 10:14 AM | #164 | |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: Flat Black
Quote:
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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12-16-2013, 09:55 AM | #165 | |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Stuttgart, Germany
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Re: Flat Black
Quote:
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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12-16-2013, 12:56 PM | #166 | |||||
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Flat Black
Quote:
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. Quote:
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. Quote:
This is part of a TL10 economy. It's just a poor one, producing in the low-sophistication part of the spectrum. Quote:
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. Last edited by Agemegos; 12-16-2013 at 02:47 PM. |
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12-16-2013, 02:04 PM | #167 |
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Ronneby, Sweden
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Re: Flat Black
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12-16-2013, 02:38 PM | #168 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Flat Black
Quote:
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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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. Last edited by Agemegos; 12-16-2013 at 04:21 PM. |
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12-16-2013, 04:45 PM | #169 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Flat Black
* 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.
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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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. Last edited by Agemegos; 12-16-2013 at 05:15 PM. |
12-16-2013, 06:31 PM | #170 | |||
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Flat Black
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Tags |
flat black, planetary romance, sci-fi |
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