An SDNW Proposal

[PeZook]

That's an unmanageable level of consumption. Union citizens have it hammered into their heads from a young age that overconsumption and stuff like having too many kids results in scarcity and that scarcity means the end of civilization as they know it.

My point exactly. Scarcity is always going to be a problem, it will just shift around. Nobody in the developed world complains about a lack of socks, for example, yet even sixty years ago, it was unfeasible to provide soldiers with them. Do we live in a sock-scarcity society, or a post-sock-scarcity society?

Only because there's a profit to be made selling it. We could feed almost everybody, yet we chose a system that denies it to people because they didn't amass enough currency. I said "fuck that noise" and went with a technocracy (which is actually feasible with this game's technology).

Actually no, we couldn't feed everyone because of currently insurmountable logistical and distribution problems. Make these go away, and you will find out you still need energy and resources and industrial power and fuel and time to move it around and distribute it. It would take an utterly absurd level of technology to completely overcome these obstacles for all products everywhere.

You won't need to pay people to do it though. You can motivate them by threatening to end the gravy train if they don't occasionally go in and do a little maintenance when its required (if at all).

Even foregoing the fact that people are motivated better by rewards than threats, it's hard to imagine a situation where you will need "a little maintenance here and there" to maintain a complex society. What happens when a Bragulan battlefleet blasts your von neumann probes and facilities to shit?

You're right, but within the context of the game it's quite possible to create a society that is for all intents and purposes post-scarcity. Let's say one that has only a handful million citizens yet access to dozens of solar systems which are all being mined by swarms of Von Neumann probes, which feed the resources directly into some kind of matter-energy furnaces linked to fancy 3d-printers (or replicator, or what-have-you). Society would still be limited in that obviously not everyone can own their own planet, but on the personal level I don't really see why anyone would have to actually care about money when everything's self-replicating and self-sustaining.

These printers or replicator won't realistically be able to make everything everywhere, and you'll still need to transport the finished product and distribute it. The probes will need energy - for many products, way more energy than you can possibly acquire from simple stuff like solar panels. They will need the ability to self-repair, diagnose logistical problems and correct them, etc.

For the end customer it may be essentially a post-scarcity society in the sense that he won't have to worry about getting fed, clothed and entertained, but that just means scarcity will move into a higher level: for example, everyone would be able to affort your basic iSpacePhone (indeed, it's almost the situation today: you just sign a contract and you get a basic phone for free), but some people may want more functionality, or a particular stylization. So he calls up an AI managing a Von Neumann swarm in Zeta Reticuli and tells it it wants a custom phone, but the AI has to make phones, batteries, intelligent fabrics, military computers, other AIs...and so tells him to go screw himself, it has no spare capability. Call back in two years when my Von Neumann swarm expanded sufficiently to provide you with what you want.

Anyway, my basic point is: even a self-replicating self-managing and self-sustaining economy will still have a certain capacity at a given time, and thus will run into scarcity problems: if not for one good, then for another.

Especially when Bragulans come and wreck your Von Neumann iSpacePhone production facilities

[Ryan Thunder]

My point exactly. Scarcity is always going to be a problem, it will just shift around.

No, it won't. It's only a problem if you allow it to become a problem by fucking breeding yourself into it.

Actually no, we couldn't feed everyone [...]

Yes, we could. Of course it wouldn't be --sustainable-- because there's so fucking many of us at this point. I don't know how quickly anything could be done about that without resorting to the unthinkable, however.

[...] because of currently insurmountable logistical and distribution problems.

Pretend whatever you like. Logistical and distribution problems don't seem to have prevented us from doing a great many other things, like shipping trinkets across the goddamn Pacific Ocean from China.

The resources are there, but its beneficial to some to embrace the market system for its own sake instead of applying it as a tool alongside other methods to produce the greatest net benefit to society.

Of course the other thing preventing it is the utter lack of any sort of coordinating authority. And no, the UN does not do that.

Even foregoing the fact that people are motivated better by rewards than threats [...]

The reward is access to good food, water, shelter, entertainment services, etc.

[...] it's hard to imagine a situation where you will need "a little maintenance here and there" to maintain a complex society. What happens when a Bragulan battlefleet blasts your von neumann probes and facilities to shit?

We wage war against the Bragulans. What kind of useless, strawman dumbshits do you take us for?

[Siege]

These printers or replicator won't realistically be able to make everything everywhere, and you'll still need to transport the finished product and distribute it. The probes will need energy - for many products, way more energy than you can possibly acquire from simple stuff like solar panels. They will need the ability to self-repair, diagnose logistical problems and correct them, etc.

My technobabble Dark Energy reactors extract power directly from the fabric of the universe itself, and our Slo-Trans Engines have been perfected to such a degree that such engines are nearly immortal, or at least expected to last several thousand years. My point is, within the context of this setting we're entirely free to invoke the 'sufficiently advanced technology' mantra and because of this, scarcity shouldn't necessarily be a problem. Sure it's still technically a scarce universe because the universe itself isn't infinite, but there's so much stuff in it for us to exploit that for all intents and purposes it might as well be. If one chooses to write one's nation that way of course: grimly grim dystopian places lacking an abundance of everything but oppression have their place as well (and obviously we're expected to be restrained by scarcity in such a fashion that our nations can't magic up a new battlefleet of mile-long warships overnight).

[Sea Skimmer]

Actually no, we couldn't feed everyone because of currently insurmountable logistical and distribution problems. Make these go away, and you will find out you still need energy and resources and industrial power and fuel and time to move it around and distribute it. It would take an utterly absurd level of technology to completely overcome these obstacles for all products everywhere.

Not really technology, it just takes a lot of money and time really once you have useful interplanetary travel. Given enough money right now the world could build enough nuclear powered (for both light and nitrogen production) hydroponics farms in tunnels to effectively triple the growing area of earth and easily feed everyone. Enough work like this could solve the issue of clothing too, just grow lots of cotton the same way and keep adding more and more tunnels. Giant skyscraper sized farms would work too.

Running out of steel and plastic isn't going to be an issue, and those two materials will build most of the rest of the vital products and housing people need. Advanced technology items could be a bottleneck, except that the only reason for that should be is shortages of key minerals, which may not matter if you have a whole system anyway. Of course in the far future civilian technology demands may be less then they are today, because devices like TVs and Iphones will be so good and so all encompassing in software driven features you won't have nearly as much pressure to upgrade them every year or two. Once you can send robots to drill for oil on other planets, just to avoid switching an oil refinery over to some kind of bioplastic, a lot of conventional ideas about economics aren't such pressing limitations.

The vital thing would be to prevent peoples demands from inflating to an absurd degree, constantly pushing goals higher to make life unsustainable again, which seems to be the entire point of his power.

[Ryan Thunder]

EDIT: never mind

[Thanas]

Meh. In the end it should all be fluff anyway, it is not as if somebody would be a dick and exploit people giving themselves weaknesses without the mods slapping him down, rightP

[Steve]

Meh. In the end it should all be fluff anyway, it is not as if somebody would be a dick and exploit people giving themselves weaknesses without the mods slapping him down, rightP

Agreed.

[Simon_Jester]

Hmm, don't have any problem with my resolution .

Curse you and your superior technology!
[shakes fist]

It occurs to me that we're liable to end up with a lot of states that, fluffwise, have a thriving trade in exported weapons, ships, or other forms of technology... and precious few that lag the galaxy in anything to import all that stuff.

Not true, the Bragulans depend on the Sassanids for high-end goods, whereas we depend on outside sources for raw minerals due to being at the edge of the galaxy and a lot of stuff getting still settled.

I do not for a moment believe that there are no states that rely heavily on imports, or that lag the galaxy in certain areas of technology. I'm just saying this as a general note; weaknesses make for good roleplay material just as much as strengths do.

The Byzantine Imperium in general regards itself as self-sufficient in terms of technological development etc.

What one might make a killing, really, is luxury goods. I fear that we have forgotten how to make those, in our single-minded drive to develop technologies, we have forgotten how to do art...

Oh no... don't tell me you've forgotten how to do mosaics! How can you have a Byzantine Empire without mosaics?

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Oh no... don't tell me you've forgotten how to do mosaics! How can you have a Byzantine Empire without mosaics?

Treasured pieces of art. I think decades of warfare, and a century of rebuilding might have done that.

I suppose it could revived, but it won't be as good as it used to be.

[Steve]

I have added my "nation"'s history to the wiki. I think I'm settling on ORKS! as the nation's name

Since this is my first foray into one of these games, I'll focus more on the roleplaying/story writing aspect than on the empire building, hence why I'm building my race to be a bunch of loosely organized pirate/mercenary fleets for hire.

Regarding map location, is it possible/advisable to have small colonial sectors spread around the map? My idea is to have my boyz inhabitting rocks set in shoal areas, and usually moving around the back routes of the universe. I have plans for a home sector, though, since I need to jusitfy the ships.

As for comments on economic flaws, I'm setting my nation to be more of a "service" provider than an actual manufacturer, so they'll be pretty dependent on a wide range of imported goods (hence the occasional raiding).

Also, these are based on Wh40k Orks, but not exactly the same. I'm trying to make them less Grimdark, and play them even more for laughs.

Comments on the stupidity of my actions are welcome

Sounds like it can be fun. Though given you have 24 NCPs to spend and the Home Sector is free, I figure you should at least invest in a couple of Core Sectors and a GDP boost, then allocate the rest to Colony Sectors.

I mean, if you were to get 2 Cores to go with the Home Sector, you'd have 14 NCPs to spend, which amounts to 14 Colony Sectors. That would give you 2 for each major shoal region (though Wild Space is a tad cramped). Given how you want to write the Orks and the obvious issue of how Shoal sectors work, maybe you should represent them as not actual sectors but dispersed settlements and assets in all the major shoal regions? They would provide you GDP (reflecting the economic productivity of these places from valuable natural resource finds, piracy and other criminal sources of income, tribute/bribes from nearby nations or corporate entities to head off such piracy, etc.) as a normal colony sector does but would not be reflected on the map (as they're scattered throughout the various Shoal regions).

[Simon_Jester]

As for Shoal sectors... are we still talking about a roughly contiguous border here? Because giving someone a bunch of distant, disconnected sectors would have troublesome implications.

Treasured pieces of art. I think decades of warfare, and a century of rebuilding might have done that.

I suppose it could revived, but it won't be as good as it used to be.

NOOO! THE GRIMDARK!
[weeps]

[Steve]

As for Shoal sectors... are we still talking about a roughly contiguous border here? Because giving someone a bunch of distant, disconnected sectors would have troublesome implications.

As I stated, he wouldn't own the sectors per se, the points he spent on colony sectors would instead reflect the widespread network of Ork settlements, stations, and posts in all the Shoal Space regions of the map.

[loomer]

To go back to the trade discussion briefly, I figure I might as well make the Outlander's exports and their imports available here for anyone who wants to include trade with them.

The Arayna are still producing textiles and traditional handwork artworks, like rugs - which I expect would be rare by this point. This is their major export, but they also export some bulk quantities of difficult to manufacture medical supplies and equipment. The Mari export nothing but constantly import fuel and food. The Airaii mostly just sell off old artifacts from their past, and from time to time will offer up a weapon design, but that's rare.

The real workhorses of Outlander trade are the Angmarids and the Mechanicals. The Angmarids produce high-quality communications and power generation systems, and import a lot of specialty electronics and faster than light drives, while the Mechanicals make excellent industrial machinery, large scale and precision scientific research equipment, smaller scale transports and decent quality STL/low-FTL drives. They import a lot of different shit to do it - including other sentient AIs that are treated as property in other nations, other types of robot, and exotic small animals. They like having pets, which they've never been able to adequately explain to themselves or others, since it doesn't mesh with their cost:gain ratio style of thinking.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Treasured pieces of art. I think decades of warfare, and a century of rebuilding might have done that.

I suppose it could revived, but it won't be as good as it used to be.

NOOO! THE GRIMDARK!
[weeps]

"All things must be done for the service of Humanity, the destruction of xenos and for the glory of the God Emperor of Terra."

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Treasured pieces of art. I think decades of warfare, and a century of rebuilding might have done that.

I suppose it could revived, but it won't be as good as it used to be.

NOOO! THE GRIMDARK!
[weeps]

A light still shines amidst the darkness, no matter how dim it may be.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Kyon isn't frowning hard enough. Heresy.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Kyon isn't frowning hard enough. Heresy.

A properly trained Byzantine artisan would have depicted Kyon far more accurately. Like you said, the mosaic-making tradition may have been revived after the Great Crusade, but the new works simply can't compare to the classics.

[Bluewolf]

Treasured pieces of art. I think decades of warfare, and a century of rebuilding might have done that.

I suppose it could revived, but it won't be as good as it used to be.

NOOO! THE GRIMDARK!
[weeps]

A light still shines amidst the darkness, no matter how dim it may be.

Holy shit.

Anyway I am going to say I am getting there with my nation. College is being really tight but I promise to have it finished way before the July deadline .

[Grif]

Holy shit.

Anyway I am going to say I am getting there with my nation. College is being really tight but I promise to have it finished way before the July deadline .

Same here.

[Coyote]

Personally I want to place my Boyz in shoal areas just because it fits with their style, you know, thriving in lost rocks no one would bother settling in. They also feel like a natural fit for pirates anyway.

And I totally see them setting up the space equivalent of biker bars and trucker stops.

Sound slike you can have someone become the local Sawney Beane.

Heh.

[Simon_Jester]

As I stated, he wouldn't own the sectors per se, the points he spent on colony sectors would instead reflect the widespread network of Ork settlements, stations, and posts in all the Shoal Space regions of the map.

Fair enough, but that raises some issues. For example, I border a major shoal. If I have ork pirates charging out of the shoals and going all WAAAGH! on my internal commerce, what do I do if I want to take a Jeffersonian response to the piracy? Who, if anyone, do I wind up declaring war on?

As long as the pirates are a low-level threat that doesn't inconvenience my nation on a scale that would be an act of war if committed by an organized foreign power, I can live with that. But it's entirely reasonable for me to want to launch major antipiracy campaigns in a region where pirates are causing me economic trouble. If pirates are 'neutral' (independent actors who are the enemy of all civilized powers) I can do that without provoking an interstellar war. But if there's a power for whom piracy throughout galactic space is a major source of income... well, that's the sort of thing that people tend to organize international coalitions to suppress.

Of course, this could easily become tremendous fun, so I'm not necessarily opposed. But I'll be annoyed if I wind up in a situation where ork pirates are hopping out of the shoals and attacking my frontier settlements and I can't do anything about it without kicking off a lopsided war in which everyone gangs up on poor Oskuro.

"All things must be done for the service of Humanity, the destruction of xenos and for the glory of the God Emperor of Terra."

...But...but... how are mosaics not for the glory of the Emperor?

A light still shines amidst the darkness, no matter how dim it may be.
[cue Haruhiist religious imagery]

Hurray!

[Oskuro]

<Simon_Jester quickposted while I was writing this>

Given how you want to write the Orks and the obvious issue of how Shoal sectors work, maybe you should represent them as not actual sectors but dispersed settlements and assets in all the major shoal regions? They would provide you GDP (reflecting the economic productivity of these places from valuable natural resource finds, piracy and other criminal sources of income, tribute/bribes from nearby nations or corporate entities to head off such piracy, etc.) as a normal colony sector does but would not be reflected on the map (as they're scattered throughout the various Shoal regions).

That sounds good. I guess having sectors spread accross the map would make a lot of people uneasy anyway

Wait, if my assets have no physical representation in the map, yet they provide their usual economic bonus (rules lawyering, here we go), wouldn't that be an unfair advantage since they cannot be destroyed (since they technically don't exist as a cohesive entity to be taken over) and thus provide said assets indefinitely? Even if they cannot be upgraded like regular sectors, I think that'd be troublesome for the inevitable attempt to exterminate my Boyz


And what's the shoal space distribution? Is there a map? What's wild space? (I've read through the thread and the wiki and have failed to determine those)

[Thanas]

Wait, if my assets have no physical representation in the map, yet they provide their usual economic bonus (rules lawyering, here we go), wouldn't that be an unfair advantage since they cannot be destroyed (since they technically don't exist as a cohesive entity to be taken over) and thus provide said assets indefinitely? Even if they cannot be upgraded like regular sectors, I think that'd be troublesome for the inevitable attempt to exterminate my Boyz

As long as your boyz don't start shooting up my sectors, the Sassanids are quite willing to trade with them, so no issue on my end.

[Siege]

And what's the shoal space distribution? Is there a map? What's wild space? (I've read through the thread and the wiki and have failed to determine those)

Shoals are all the dark green bits on the map that surround various nations. There is a map; it can be found here. A smaller version is found on the list of PCs page of the Wiki. "Wild Space" is another term for shoal space, i.e. those regions of space not owned by large player states.

[loomer]

I could see some tension between the Outlanders and the Orks, Oskuro, if they've ever hit them. The Airaii don't like other raiders hitting their territory and they don't mind plunging headfirst into the Shoals, even if they might never see home again - so long as they set the record straight.