Gaming w/Jemal : Star Drift

[Jemal]

I never said they were incomprehensible. I mentioned that they never responded to attempts at communication, took no known prisoners, and never surrendered. They were Enigmatic, unknown because they had seemingly no interest in anything other than the destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy.
Just because you don't know WHY, doesn't mean there isn't a why to know.

OK So, will be updating first post to include character creation rules. Since it appears to be the majority, we'll be going with the explorers theme, pretty much what I expected.

 

[Moon_Goddess]

[MENTION=63746]Binder Fred[/MENTION]
I gotta say the mental thing for me is the big thing with aliens, and yet at the same time something I know (having never left the USA, and never been outside of a 75 distance of my birth for longer than a week) I'll not be able to do justice to, but I'll just have to see what I can do

Without being racist there are websites that document the weirdness of a certain island nation, that's same species, same planet, with cross cultural influences! If I can make my aliens that weird, I'm happy.

 

[Shayuri]

For all the cultural variation in human civilizations though, the underlying minds are not so different.

I liken it to jigsaw puzzles.

The pictures that two puzzles show when assembled can be wildly, dramatically different. But the underlying mechanics of how the puzzles work is pretty much the same. Oh, the pieces are never the same...the specific little shapes...but the rules by which the puzzle is assembled is always the same. All human beings share the same basic senses, biological and emotional needs, and so on. How those things are expressed can vary, but no human being is ever truly alien to another human being. If it seems so, it's because we haven't looked deep enough.

And I posit...but obviously can't come close to proving...that even an 'alien' mind could be similar to human, if it was shaped by forces similar to those shaping humans. Similar chemistries, evolutionary backgrounds and natural environments could produce something that was not entirely dissimilar to us.

Of course, change any of those variables, and you get something potentially very different. That doesn't require an alien planet either. Look at animal life on Earth that has significant but inhuman intelligence. We still can't decide if things like cetaceans are 'sentient' or not, but that's because our definition of the term is based entirely on our own self-assessment of intelligence.

 

[Jemal]

Most importantly IMO: a similar mental structure makes for more easily relatable and narratable story.

 

[drothgery]

(ignoring the 'how weird should aliens be' talk for a bit)

FWIW, I really didn't have a lot of concept fleshed out for my 'Victorians'; for my purposes, the similarities with Imperial-era Britain could be superficial at best.

Hm. Well this is more Drothgery's baby than mine, so I'll let him work out his preferred sequence for his victorians. The victorian aspect doesn't really inspire me, really... Or rather, I think I'd prefer to be one of the 'barbarians'? Say one of the last system the Victorians "civilized" in their (re)expension? Just to be absolutely un-subtle about it, how about I give my PC a swarthy east indian complexion? (Alright, alright, so maybe that's too much. Keeping the Hindi theme though ).

I probably should note here that I envision that it is possible for 'barbarian' subjects of the Empire to become full citizens (not easily, because they want to make sure anyone they let vote supports their society). It's difficult but attainable for a 'middle class barbarian' (something like you have to be fluent in Imperial, pass a citizenship exam, pay a fee of about a tenth of what a 'middle-class' 'barbarian' makes in a year or serve a term in the Imperial military, and swear fealty to the Throne -- noting that there are things that are capital treason for citizens that are not for mere colonial subjects ... at which point you and your heirs will be a full imperial citizen with all the rights and responsiblities thereof. Conversion to the Imperial Church is _not_ required; unofficially, if you want to reach the higher ranks in the Imperial military or other government service, it's very difficult without taking that step, and only achieved by truly extraordinary individuals).

The way I viewed it, None of the current civilizations/governments really existed in a big way during the war. When I say civilization FELL, I mean it fell HARD. The Victorian empire could be one of the first to have clawed its way back up, or it's possible that some of the planets managed to survive partially intact.
The devastation caused by the extra-galactic Enemy was near-total. The majority of sentients that survived did so on less advanced planets that weren't targeted, or on mobile ship convoys(ALA Battlestar Galactica), only re-colonizing after the war. Perhaps the Victorian empire was stagnant, uninspired monarchistic planets that were skipped as 'unimportant targets' during the war. They're not advanced because they were important before, but because they WEREN'T, they're 'advanced' now because everybody who WAS more advanced than their slow-moving ways was destroyed.
Imagine everybody in the world today reduced to Dark Ages level technology - except some which were on the level of the Old West.. advanced enough to understand and maybe begin reproducing some of the 21st century technology even though they didn't have it before.
They may have been far behind before, but they're ahead of the curve now.
The more liberal recent leanings could come from the realization that they are now at the technological forefront, and have the opportunity to seize the day and expand. Possibly they could see themselves as the light of humanity destined to lead the rest out of the darkness.

How about this:
About a century before the Enemy was encountered, a colony was started by a group of wealthy investors and somewhat eccentric academics who had managed to acquire rights to a surprisingly earth-like world in a very resource-rich system (though on the periphery of human space in the 29th century, and on the other side of 'human space' than the Enemy). The colony had just about achieved self-sufficiency by the time the war started, and while the college that would later become the Imperial University was already developing a reputation in certain circles and drawing off-world students, it was one of thousands.

With the war cutting their contacts with the rest of the universe to a trickle, and then off completely, they were forced to build their own industry largely from scratch -- although with a solid base of theoretical knowledge in a wide variety of fields. The colony gained its independent interstellar capability while most of the galaxy was expereincing the chaos of the aftermath of the war.

When pirates -- not some last remnant of the Enemy fleet or some other aliens, but human scavengers -- seized an aid convoy they sent to one of their neighbors and massacred the crew, their perception of their fellow humans was radically altered. Guilt over having avoided the ravages of the war and a desire to help now that they could was infused with the notion that they could not let things like that happen again now that they could do something about it. Compared to the ships that fought the war with the Enemy, the fleet they sent to bring order to the system where their humanitarian aid convoy had been lost was hopelessly primitive, and the people that crewed it had no real experience. But it was the product of an intact industrial base, and establishing that protectorate was the beginning of the Empire.

 

[Binder Fred]

I never said they were incomprehensible. I mentioned that they never responded to attempts at communication, took no known prisoners, and never surrendered. They were Enigmatic, unknown because they had seemingly no interest in anything other than the destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy.
Just because you don't know WHY, doesn't mean there isn't a why to know.

Well, with a galactic war going on I'd sort of assumed we went a bit beyond politely asking (as in capture, interrogation, experimentation, dissection (all of those at Level 2 tech levels), rinse, repeat). Since that apparently didn't bring any new knowledge, I was thinking they were meant to be Unknoweable Aliens... Since that's apparently not the case, has the knowledge we gained gone missing in the War's destruction, or are they so good that we really never managed to capture a single one and *force* it to stay alive?

How about this:

A pretty story. Do I hear the bells of imperial propaganda jingling in the background?

Seriously though, I'd personnaly nix the "very ressource-rich" part. Hunger for ressources was a strong drive in establishing the original british empire, and is a powerful secondary motivator in any event, no matter what the original/continuing reality of the "civilizing" justification might be.

I posit...but obviously can't come close to proving...that even an 'alien' mind could be similar to human, if it was shaped by forces similar to those shaping humans. Similar chemistries, evolutionary backgrounds and natural environments could produce something that was not entirely dissimilar to us.

Well, I would argue the main evolutianary advantage of intelligence is it's predictive ability. That could help bring us closer to our alien friends, it's true, physical phenomena being universal (though, as VV mentionned, there's the question of time perception and how narrow our experience of practical physical phenomena really is (between this and that temp, grav, speed, scale). As modern science has and continues to show us, much of the actual physics of the universe is pretty counter-intuitive compared to what our own cluged-together instictive model would seem to suggest (do you know that the human brain assumes that the sun is always above its head when judging shadows, *not* correcting for being upside down, for example? We're full of evolutionary, case-specific short-cuts like that). We could conceivably share only theorethical knowledge of what it's like to be the other - i.e. *none* of the in-built wiring - with intelligent creatures evolving in conditions that don't exactly match our own window.).

Predicting/influencing/"relating" with other animals (other humans in particular), is the *other* big evolutianary advantage though (it's amazing how much of the human brain is involved with social functions), and that part would be entirely different/missing/unrecognizable in beings with significantly different bodies/evolutionary environments (see Cherryh again (Foreigner series) for what happens when you just *tweak* at the instinctual settings that govern how a race defines frienship/association). Daulphins don't even twitch the meter as far as that scale is concerned, being brachiated (fused by fleshy membranes, granted, but still), former land mammals. We might as well be twins.

So yes, I think it's probably going to be at least *possible* to attain some sort of understanding of an alien race, if it's evolved in conditions close enough to our own. Understand, relate, connect, on the other hand? Enough to let members of each race freely interact with each other? Much, much less likely. Aliens are probably always going to be black-boxes for us, and vice versa, only to be (safely) interacted with in strictly controled conditions by professionals on bothe sides... That's not what we generally look for in our sci-fi though, as jemal said, which is why I've personnaly set the bar of excellence at "alien can be considered a different culture".

 

[drothgery]

A pretty story. Do I hear the bells of imperial propaganda jingling in the background?

Well, maybe a little. I mean, they certainly wouldn't admit to actively working to hide 'under the radar' during the war (and in fact that they had intelligence agents systematically erase evidence of the colony from the greater civilization would be very embarrassing, if anyone still alive knew anything about it).

Seriously though, I'd personnaly nix the "very ressource-rich" part. Hunger for ressources was a strong drive in establishing the original british empire, and is a powerful secondary motivator in any event, no matter what the original/continuing reality of the "civilizing" justification might be.

Well, as I've said, I envision the 'Victorian'-esque and British-esque elements of the Empire to be pretty superficial.

An empire driven by a quest for resources doesn't make much sense for anyone with fast FTL and large-scale space industry. One relatively resource-rich star system is pretty much lost in the background noise of a network of civilizations as big as the one we seem to be setting up here... and the difference between a relatively rich one and a relatively poor one really wouldn't be significant over the timeframe we're talking about unless you're talking about Coruscant-esque worlds (and maybe not even then). So I guess I might nix the 'relatively resource-rich' bit on the basis of it just not mattering; one planet is going to have little trouble building a big enough fleet for a vest-pocket empire out of its own natural resources.

The biggest thing the Empire would lack out of its homeworld (as I envision it) is 'homegrown' manpower; they were pretty small when interstellar civilization collapsed and although their native population has grown relatively quickly over the last few centuries, it's still in the low hundreds of millions; without getting a lot of outsiders to 'buy in', they can't expand the benevolent arms of the Empire anywhere near as widely as they'd like.

 

[Binder Fred]

An empire driven by a quest for resources doesn't make much sense for anyone with fast FTL and large-scale space industry.

Uh, you lost me there. I'd maybe understand if you'd replaced "fast FTL and large-scale space industry" with "universal assembler nanoes" (where all you need then is feeder mass and energy (although you *do* still need both of those)), but as it is... What does the size and or speed of your fleet have to do with your home system's need for ressources? Without the aforementionned nanoes, you still need this much X, Y and Z to furnish your industry, meet basic needs and cover luxuries (and if the victorians are aiming to live by the same standards/duplicate some of the achievements of our, Type 2, forefathers (where we were on our way to using the entire energy output of our solar systems), those are going to consume *a lot*). Even if you have X in your system, if it's at the core of Mercury, you still desperatly want a system that has it readily available for extraction, *especially* if you have a large, FTL capable fleet. (I also suspect you might be under-estimating the energy/mass requirements of pretty much instantaneous zero to light-speed velocity engines, not to mention what potential exotics goes into building/maintaining/feeding one of those (micro-black holes? antimatter?). (I mention light-speed because we have some idea of the energies involved there. What FTLs and hypers consume: who knows? Experience seems to show that doing things faster costs more than doing it slow, so "more than a 10 year trip in a nuclear rocket/4 light year" seems a safe bet energy-wise though)).

I could be wrong, of course, but that's how I see it. Jemal?

 

[drothgery]

Uh, you lost me there. I'd maybe understand if you'd replaced "fast FTL and large-scale space industry" with "universal assembler nanoes" (where all you need then is feeder mass and energy (although you *do* still need both of those)), but as it is... What does the size and or speed of your fleet have to do with your home system's need for ressources?

If you can do large-scale things in space, that means you pretty much have access to an entire star system's resources. And that's... a lot (consider that everything the human race has used, ever, is a small fraction of what's available on earth... and that's a tiny percentage of what's just in the solar system)... and a lot of pretty much everything, in just about any star system. Add in fast FTL, and given that there pretty have to be lots of empty systems for every inhabited one, and then you've got at the very least dozens of star systems' resources. There's no reason to go after anyone else's resources; you can pick off uninhabited systems at will.

 

[Jemal]

But drothgery, you're forgetting about the wonderfully useful and only-appearing-in-somebody-elses-turf materials known as Unobtanium and Phlebotinum.

Seriously though, that won't be a thing with me.
I will be leaving the actual science and requirements of the FTL etc, and what type/how much resources they require as a behind the scene thing because the more detail you go into when trying to define/design something that doesn't exist yet, the more people will complain that you're 'doing it wrong'.

Well, with a galactic war going on I'd sort of assumed we went a bit beyond politely asking (as in capture, interrogation, experimentation, dissection (all of those at Level 2 tech levels), rinse, repeat). Since that apparently didn't bring any new knowledge, I was thinking they were meant to be Unknoweable Aliens... Since that's apparently not the case, has the knowledge we gained gone missing in the War's destruction, or are they so good that we really never managed to capture a single one and *force* it to stay alive?

A bit of both actually: There are very few surviving accounts of encounters with the aliens, and none detailing such things. There are second hand reports of the Enemy being exceptionally wary of capture, their ships self destructing rather than surrender or even talk. There are unsubstantiated rumours of contact, but nothing concrete. If there was successful communication or capture of an Enemy, either records of it were kept deliberately secret or they were among the vast swathes of information lost.

Honestly I hadn't originally thought about explaining it too much because I had just assumed people would roll with it.

It appears I underestimated how in depth everybody wants to be on the history, but that's kinda the point of this game is the whole 'nobody's really sure of anything' feeling.