Interstellar empires and the pre-1850(ish) European experience in Africa

[Pomphis]

Originally Posted by ericthered

You could have the aliens prefer orbital habitats and leave your planet mostly alone, but I don't think that's the best setup for what the OP wants.

OTOH it´s a nice fit for "trading stations along the coast". And habitats have no uncontrolled weather, no earthquakes, floods etc, and once you are used to them you may never want to go back to a surface. And you can run a huge interstellar empire if you only have to man and defend highports and leave the natives on the surface to themselves.

[mlangsdorf]

My current sci-fi game assumes technological stagnation among all the various nations at roughly TL10. Eventually, everyone hits the limits of physical science and can't make better/smaller/faster computers, stronger materials, or whatever else. The algorithms are as good as they're going to get - fast data sorting will take n-logN time, but even quantum computer doesn't let you sort data any faster. And so on and so forth.

I admit things don't have to be that way, and the idea of technological stagnation runs contrary to the Western world's assumptions about how things work. But I find it a useful bit of background for explaining why there are a half dozen alien races all at roughly the same TL - because there is no where else to go from here.

Now if I could just get my players to stop describing their new alien race as "on the cutting edge of research in $SCIENCE." There is no cutting edge of research, that's the point.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I believe this scenario was in fact the inspiration for The War of the Worlds.

I'd wondered about that. I'd always heard the rationale as "what if the Americas, in reverse?" but the scramble for Africa happened within Wells' lifetime.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

This is just a minor twist on the Ewok/Stormtrooper problem where it is extremely dificult to nerf Gurps UT armor enough that native weapons will be at all effective.

Underperforming weapons are actually easier.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Nothing says you _can't_ call it "sci-fi" when it's actually fantasy but it is a courtesy to use words the same way your audience does. Universes where even TL8 body armor is _not_ possible are running on such divergent laws of physics that they probably shouldn't be called "sci-fi".

Aliens who simply don't "have" protective technologies weren't expecting any resistance. When confronted with resistance they will say "Oops! Sorry! Didn't recognize you as sapient!" and then go away.

Ultra-Tech assumes a huge jump in effectiveness in body armor between TL 8 and TL 9. This seems largely driven by a desire to emulate sci-fi settings—including relatively "conservative" i.e. TL 9 ones—where everyone us running around in full suits of armor. But in the real world, armoring limbs against bullets without overly restricting mobility is really hard! The vacc suits are also much lighter weight than the 200+ lb. suits used in the real world, again I suspect more driven by fiction than a realistic assessment of what will be achievable in the near-future. (NASA and Roscosmos have certainly investigated ways to make suits lighter, it's just not clear when if ever the ideas will be practical.)

Originally Posted by patchwork

I'd consider making it a reliability issue; perhaps the Starfarers evolved around a red sun, or even out in the Black, so that they're seriously unaccustomed to the amount of solar radiation a yellow star puts out and their electronics aren't normally hardened against it. Having to replace a sensitive chipset in your guidance system every few days, or even every few hours, seriously complicates your efforts to rule the place. Sometimes your tech works and sometimes it doesn't and the maintenance bill is nuts. Perhaps this includes focusing systems in their energy weapons, so that they frizz out and have radically reduced Acc by day 3. These are problems that CAN be solved, but they require tweaking your whole manufacturing process, which will take time and money* they may not want to invest. And then there's skin cancer. Perhaps they come from a not-tide-locked red sun planet, which we believe is rare; their options tend to be yellow sun worlds (hot, radiation-intense) which can be pains to colonize, or tide-locked worlds around red suns (narrow habitable band, never really homey). Discovering a world with liquid water and decent spin around a red sun really excites them, because it doesn't happen every century.

*whatever 'money' means to them.

Can you explain a bit more how this works? My knowledge of the relevant astrophysics is pretty minimal. Is the key issue solar flares? (I know nothing about red dwarfs and solar flares.) Or is it something else?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

I
Ultra-Tech assumes a huge jump in effectiveness in body armor between TL 8 and TL 9. ?

Not really. The +50% it assumes is about the increase between TL7 and 8. Sometimes it's smaller.

<shrug>Materials research is a hot field that's key to many things (like space technologies) and very active right now. Body armor might also be the area where we hit TL9 first. It's probably even closer than computer tech.

Speaking of materials you could make beanstalks the key to orbit. The uT peopel come in, build a beanstalk in orbit and then land one end on the planet. Then everybody takes a multi-day train trop to and from space. That part sounds kind of colonial.

If you don't like beanstalks you can get a broadly simiiar by relying on laser launch facilities built on equiitorial mountain tops.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Yeah, that's the other strong option.

A while back I built a generator that would randomly generate gurps space planets until it got a garden world, and then evaluate how habitable that planet was for colonization. The results are scary hostile.

gravity is usually wrong, temperature swings around wildly, getting seasons to grow earth's crops to line up right is nearly impossible, the spectrum of visible light is unreliable, And I even added fake biologies that can have different amino acid counts and those are a fun little wrinkle.

It is really not hard to envision "garden" planets as hostile environments you want an environment suit for, or that you have to ship in huge amounts of food or grow everything in greenhouses for.

Needing to import food, or grow it in greenhouses, strikes me as very plausible, but could you explain more about the need for environment suits? I assume by "garden" world you mean one that has organisms turning CO2 and water into O2 and carbohydrates, and that doesn't seem compatible with temperatures wildly different from Earth's. I'd expect the worst-case scenario would be "temperate" climates only found in polar or equatorial regions, for unusually hot and unusually cold garden worlds, respectively. Pressure might be more of an issue, but if there's enough pressure for liquid water to exist I'd expect that at worst you'd need some sort of breathing mask. It seems like the bio-threat is the more plausible reason to go for a full sealed (and/or positive pressure) suit, if it turns out immune systems have trouble coping with bacteria using wrong-chirality molecules or something.

Originally Posted by ericthered

So this is a thing, though it depends on your tech paradigm. You could have the aliens prefer orbital habitats and leave your planet mostly alone, but I don't think that's the best setup for what the OP wants.

Honestly that might actually work—make "orbital stations" the equivalent of costal trading ports in Africa. The TL9, no-superscience interface rates in Spaceships 2 actually aren't so high that it would necessarily make trade in exotic agricultural products unprofitable. It might be interesting if the aliens were mostly TL9 with FTL and TL12 biotech—perhaps being able to study life from a wide variety of worlds has unlocked major advances in biotech for them.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

I'd wondered about that. I'd always heard the rationale as "what if the Americas, in reverse?" but the scramble for Africa happened within Wells' lifetime.

I don't think anyone in Wells's time was aware of the epidemiological aspects of the Columbian exchange. I first started hearing about it in the 1990s as a new idea. I think maybe it's in Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I've also seen it in a couple of more specialized books.

I've also read that Wells thought of the English extermination of the Tasmanians as one of his models.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

However, just because I can dump rocks on you, doesn't mean I can conquer you. The present day USA, through an application of nukes, could kill most nations on the Earth. But taking one over to rule is another matter.

There's also the possibility that interstellar wars of conquest of a just too difficult and expensive to be worth it.

All things being equal, it's been suggested that you need at least one soldier per 20-50 locals in order to successfully put down a popularly-supported, well-funded insurgency. For a planet with billions of natives, that means that you need tens of millions of garrison troops. That could get expensive fast, especially if they're at the end of a long, slow, and expensive logistics pipeline.

The main reason that the Americas were conquered the way they were is because 90% of the natives died off due to disease, leaving lots of good land relatively undefended and unoccupied. That makes it the outlier when it comes to global colonization.

The African, Middle Eastern, or Central/East Asian models are more common: foreign traders establish trading posts on the coasts, initially trading manufactured goods for valuable raw materials and local commodities. Over time, the foreign elites get tied into the regional power structure and foreign business interests put down roots in the areas near the original trading posts.

Gradually, the foreigners take economic and then political control but remain culturally isolated from the indigenous culture. The locals are likely to be exploited and repressed, and occasionally abused or massacred, but they're generally too useful to kill outright. (Shocking examples like the Belgian Congo and German SW Africa excepted.)

[Rolando]

you can call it space fantasy, sci-fi, space opera, or just fiction, what is important is that it have the elements the user wants, in this case the OP, I think.

So, making advanced aliens desire terrestrial planets even if they are not good for them is great for fiction, just as fighters and navies ducking it in deep space. Also aliens wanting to take human women for their own purposes is fine. And aliens with underdeveloped armor is fine too. Handwaving explanations are great and the best tool for storytellers since the humans stared sharing stories around a campfire.

Most of the time this threads are bags of ideas, for those who want them, so the OP and anyone can take what they like and discus even those they don't like, but sci-fi, fantasy, etc are just tags with very little universal meaning, they mean something slightly different to each person. That is good I think, as literature shouldn't be constrained like that.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't think anyone in Wells's time was aware of the epidemiological aspects of the Columbian exchange. I first started hearing about it in the 1990s as a new idea. I think maybe it's in Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I've also seen it in a couple of more specialized books.

I've also read that Wells thought of the English extermination of the Tasmanians as one of his models.

The devastation wrought by smallpox on the native populations is something Europeans had in many cases witnessed with their own eyes. Not in every case—the disease sometimes outran the explorers—but in many cases. So even if people in Wells' time didn't grasp the full extent of what had happened, it seems wrong to say they were entirely unaware of it.

[Michael Thayne]

Okay, some thoughts on technologies the aliens definitely should have. Per GURPS High-Tech: Electricity and Electronics, were already basically at what Ultra-Tech calls TL9 computers (minus maybe the "genius" option), but we don't seem all that close to AI. I would add at least 2 to the Complexity of AIs beyond what Ultra-Tech suggests on pp. 25-28. Maybe add as much as 7