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Interspecies conflict in sci-fi campaigns
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6988505" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>1b(b) - Your original formulation implies most or all space faring species are looking for colonial worlds or value colonial worlds. I find this unlikely in a hard science fiction setting and is more a trope of space opera or space fantasy. But that doesn't mean that they could not come into conflict over resources, even ones that aren't scarce or hypothetical. Imagine two different 'slow ships' arrive in the same system within a century or so. Both want to harvest resources from the system in order to resupply and reproduce (make new slow ships). Each has been travelling for centuries, and one arrives not to the relief and excitement of a new settlement, but to find that the other has been spending the last 5 years staking claim to the best low-g easily harvestable resources and now they are going to have to start prospecting while the other has a head start in gearing up processing and production. That's going to be an intense situation even if neither side particularly cares about the high-gravity worlds. Or conversely, maybe one side did want to settle the high gravity world, and even if the other ones shrugs and says, "Ok you can go back to being animals, why should we care.", the ones that are colonizing start to realize the new comers are monopolizing/stripping the system of all the best low-gravity resources that are necessary for starship construction.</p><p></p><p>Actually, most of your examples seem like they come from 'space opera' and not 'hard sci-fi'. </p><p></p><p>And I'm a bit surprised by the fact you've not mentioned what would probably be one of the leading factors:</p><p></p><p>6) Xenophobia: One or both races find the other mutually disgusting for inherent biological reasons (one race practices child cannibalism, the other finds this disgusting/taboo; each race looks like an animal the other finds disgusting; each race has a dominant religion that reminds the other of its anti-religion, that is, each considers the other 'Satan worshipers'; each race uses a mode of communication that the other finds difficult to understand such as one using sound and the other using a combination of changing coloration and body language leading to extremely poor communication and misunderstandings). </p><p></p><p>However, if you are really going to do 'hard science fiction', you are right that the length and expense of inter-stellar travel makes a lot of the tropes of soft science fiction, namely 'space empires are just terrestrial empires but bigger' not make a lot of sense. Commerce? Not if it takes billions of dollars and centuries to travel between locations. And if there is no commerce, what is there to fight over? And if you do fight, won't you quickly hit the problem of its so much vastly easier to destroy things than build things, that both sides will soon be reduced to throwing sticks at each other - losing the economic and possibly the technical capacity to wage an inter-stellar war. </p><p></p><p>A lot of the answers here look like the technology you adopt as reasonable. Star gates? Warp drive? Slow ships? Can you communicate faster than light but not move faster than light? Can you move faster than light but not go faster than light? Do you have anti-grav or some sort of very high impulse reactionless drive or do you need to expend massive amounts of energy to get out of a gravity well?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6988505, member: 4937"] 1b(b) - Your original formulation implies most or all space faring species are looking for colonial worlds or value colonial worlds. I find this unlikely in a hard science fiction setting and is more a trope of space opera or space fantasy. But that doesn't mean that they could not come into conflict over resources, even ones that aren't scarce or hypothetical. Imagine two different 'slow ships' arrive in the same system within a century or so. Both want to harvest resources from the system in order to resupply and reproduce (make new slow ships). Each has been travelling for centuries, and one arrives not to the relief and excitement of a new settlement, but to find that the other has been spending the last 5 years staking claim to the best low-g easily harvestable resources and now they are going to have to start prospecting while the other has a head start in gearing up processing and production. That's going to be an intense situation even if neither side particularly cares about the high-gravity worlds. Or conversely, maybe one side did want to settle the high gravity world, and even if the other ones shrugs and says, "Ok you can go back to being animals, why should we care.", the ones that are colonizing start to realize the new comers are monopolizing/stripping the system of all the best low-gravity resources that are necessary for starship construction. Actually, most of your examples seem like they come from 'space opera' and not 'hard sci-fi'. And I'm a bit surprised by the fact you've not mentioned what would probably be one of the leading factors: 6) Xenophobia: One or both races find the other mutually disgusting for inherent biological reasons (one race practices child cannibalism, the other finds this disgusting/taboo; each race looks like an animal the other finds disgusting; each race has a dominant religion that reminds the other of its anti-religion, that is, each considers the other 'Satan worshipers'; each race uses a mode of communication that the other finds difficult to understand such as one using sound and the other using a combination of changing coloration and body language leading to extremely poor communication and misunderstandings). However, if you are really going to do 'hard science fiction', you are right that the length and expense of inter-stellar travel makes a lot of the tropes of soft science fiction, namely 'space empires are just terrestrial empires but bigger' not make a lot of sense. Commerce? Not if it takes billions of dollars and centuries to travel between locations. And if there is no commerce, what is there to fight over? And if you do fight, won't you quickly hit the problem of its so much vastly easier to destroy things than build things, that both sides will soon be reduced to throwing sticks at each other - losing the economic and possibly the technical capacity to wage an inter-stellar war. A lot of the answers here look like the technology you adopt as reasonable. Star gates? Warp drive? Slow ships? Can you communicate faster than light but not move faster than light? Can you move faster than light but not go faster than light? Do you have anti-grav or some sort of very high impulse reactionless drive or do you need to expend massive amounts of energy to get out of a gravity well? [/QUOTE]
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