Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

[ShaperV]

Taking a step back to look at the larger issues here, I think two of the major concerns Sophia keeps worrying about are a lot worse in her own head than in reality. Which is completely reasonable and in character, and I'm pretty sure this is intentional. But it's something for readers to keep in mind.

First, the total population and size of the Vilani Imperium is basically irrelevant. Even if they were completely unified and determined to crush Earth, the distances, communication delays and supply issues they have to deal with ensure that they could never deploy more than a miniscule fraction of their military to a single theater. But, of course, they're actually an incredibly fragmented society that's constitutionally incapable of uniting over anything. As long as Earth makes even token efforts at seeming reasonable and non-threatening they're unlikely to face anything bigger than the local sector governor's fleet, which is a much more reasonable matchup. The odds are still against them, but not impossibly so.

The other big worry is Vilani reverse-engineering. But if you look at historical examples, the time required for a big, insular empire to copy important innovations from elsewhere is typically measured in generations. The Vilani are a prime example of this, because they've systematically stamped out innovation to the point where they have more in common with Imperial China than a modern RL nation. If they wanted to copy new tech involving unfamiliar scientific principles they'd have to rediscover the entire process of how to do R&D before they could even get started. On top of that, Vilani society is a finely tuned stasis machine that can't handle much in the way of change, and is full of entrenched factions with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. So yes, if Sophia introduces one innovation and stops the Vilani might copy it in time to be a threat to her grandchildren. But if she just keeps going, introducing more innovations that drive technology forward at a pace somewhat like RL, the Vilani can't keep up. If they try they'll simply destroy their own society, and the Imperium will fall apart into a million warring factions.

Ironically, the biggest risk I see to Earth is actually Sophia's existence. If she gets too carried away with producing new tech, and makes it look like Earth could actually be a threat to the Imperium, that might just give the local governor the leverage she needs to get some real support from her peers. That could turn into a delicate exercise in aggro management - rolling out new advances quickly raises the risk of a big Vilani response, but doing it slowly means Earth is more vulnerable if you get bad luck and the Vilani act anyway.

 

[cliffc999]

Taking a step back to look at the larger issues here, I think two of the major concerns Sophia keeps worrying about are a lot worse in her own head than in reality. Which is completely reasonable and in character, and I'm pretty sure this is intentional.

Click to shrink...

It is entirely intentional. Her attitude towards the Vilani is also shared by the Confederation's intelligence analysts, because a lot of what's in that timeline and that quoted sidebar is not known to Terra. Obviously their information about Vilani society is nonzero (after all, Terran Free Traders and operatives have been traveling all over the adjacent subsectors for years by now), but the Imperial core is years away by starship and nobody's ever been there. Even if they know everything they've observed about Vilani society out here in the sticks, they only have the most indirect and fragmentary knowledge of how the Imperial Court and the Core sectors roll.

Hell, Terra doesn't even know the name of whoever outranks the local Saarpuhi Kushuggi, just the title they've heard the very occasional reference to. They've never talked to anybody that high.

First, the total population and size of the Vilani Imperium is basically irrelevant. Even if they were completely unified and determined to crush Earth, the distances, communication delays and supply issues they have to deal with ensure that they could never deploy more than a miniscule fraction of their military to a single theater.

Click to shrink...

This is actually incorrect. Remember that the Vilani system, for all its weaknesses regarding insularity and lack of innovation, is also really strong re: organization and unity. Forget almost everything you know from Terran history about span-of-control limits, because the Vilani actually have solved most of that problem. Even the dynastic infighting we've seen is a feature, not a bug (it's impossible to remove ambition from the human psyche, so the Vilani society is deliberately set up to channel it inward as opposed to outwards towards the frontier).

If the Vilani Imperium were ever convinced, as a whole, that Terra was an existential threat to them, then they would be able to project a huge chunk of their Grand Fleet to a single theater and support it. It would take basically the entire Imperium's efforts to be focused on a single point, but the Emperor has that level of authority if he chooses to personally invoke it and the bureaucracy underneath him can actually deliver it.

And this is canon, because I'm describing the Ninth (and last) Interstellar War, the one that happened after Terra had done enough damage that the entire Imperial Rim Province was in genuine danger of being lost and the Emperor finally came down off of Mount Olympus to declare a full mobilization of the Imperium. And Terra would have lost that war... if they hadn't invented the jump-3 drive around that time, and meson starship weapons, at which point the Vilani were basically about as outrun and outgunned as the Alliance fleet in Mass Effect was versus the Reapers.

 

[Blade4]

Odd question perhaps but do you know where i could buy gurps traveler pdf? Drivethrurpg coming up nothing direct and amazon has interstellar wars at 75 bucks for a hardback copy.

 

[EJH]

Try Steve Jackson Games' webstore at

https://sjg-warehouse-23.myshopify.com

I would have PM'd you with this, but it looks like you've set your account up not to allow that.

 

[Blade4]

Try Steve Jackson Games' webstore at

https://sjg-warehouse-23.myshopify.com

I would have PM'd you with this, but it looks like you've set your account up not to allow that.

Click to shrink...

Thank that looks like what I am after and yeah kinda have everything on private especially on this site.

 

[Duquette7]

"FTL communication, sir." I answered smartly, and carefully kept any expression off my face as I saw him literally jawdrop.

Click to shrink...

A society that has been so successful at keeping the wrong ideas from gaining any purchase for so long that most of us have forgotten how vulnerable we can be to them.

Click to shrink...

Oh, oh dear, If I'm reading the subtext of that interlude right, ftl coms might be a big enough threat in and of them selves for a extremis order to be issued.

If Imperial society, and more importantly, Imperial Order is maintained by leveraging the impact interstellar distance has on the flow of information and ideas, then just the existence of that tech could rouse a response from the core.

That would be bad.

 

[Prince Chrom]

that a later galactic era will label "The Ancients"

Click to shrink...

I've just realised that Sophia might be able to create things with the Forge that gives humanity a greater understanding of who and what The Ancients were.

 

[cliffc999]

Given that people are now thinking about buying the PDF to get their hands on setting info, looks like I'm writing more fact sections after all. You've already gotten a broad outline of the history, so for this one we'll tackle a bit about 'so how does this Imperium even work, anyway?'

Notes About The Vilani Imperium


Astrography

Galactic directions are traditionally given in terms of coreward (towards the galactic core), rimward (away from the galactic core), spinward (with the direction of the Milky Way's rotation), and trailward (against the direction of the Milky Way's rotation). Typically, coreward is 'north' or towards the top on star maps and trailward is 'east' or to the right.

The Ziru Sirka, or 'Grand Empire of Stars', covers a region of space shaped vaguely like a vertical rectangle that bulges in the middle, stretching approximately 250 parsecs coreward of Terra and 120 parsecs across at its widest point. Terra is located almost directly at the rimward tip or 'bottom' of the Imperium, and the Imperial capital of Vland is almost 200 parsecs coreward of it. There are over ten thousand star systems within the borders of the Imperium but only four thousand of them have major inhabited planets, with slightly over four thousand more of them having outposts (usually for purposes of allowing stopovers and support on a jump-route long enough to require way stations, or resource exploitation or military bases).

As interstellar expansion is limited by the number of viable jump-routes no single part of which covers more than a 2-parsec gap between stars, the vagaries of the starmap mean that quite often you have no direct route from A to B and have to dog-leg around quite a bit. So expansion outward from Vland was anything but even, especially given the navigational difficulties too far coreward.

The nearest provincial capital to Terra is Shulgiasu, seat of the Underking of the Imperial Rim Province (Saarpuhi Kushuggi). Shulgiasu is 11 parsecs from Terra in a straight line, but the jump route to get there requires a long dog-leg to spinward and then back trailward that encompasses 18 jumps in total.

The Terran Confederation is located in a vertical 'corridor' of stars anchored at the rimward end by Procyon and at the coreward end by Nusku. There are no jump-2 routes rimward or trailward of the Terran pocket, and only a few dead-end stars (such as Alpha Centauri) within jump-2 range. All viable jump-2 routes from Nusku lead into Imperial territory. Procyon is at the extreme rimward edge of a slight bulge of Imperial territory, and by traveling 'around the corner' from it you can reach an expanse of unclaimed star systems rimward of the Imperial border. All jump-2 routes from this expansion sector to Terra pass through Procyon.

The Emperor

Technically, the government system of the Vilani Imperium is an absolute monarchy. The Shadow Emperor (commonly referred to merely as the Emperor) or Ishimkarun is the only authority figure in the Empire that can make new laws or repeal laws.

Of course the affairs of so much as a minor polity, let alone the largest known interstellar empire in the galaxy, cannot remotely begin to be managed by a single individual. To the Vilani this is a feature, not a bug. They deal with the Emperor's mortal limitations not by delegation but by precedent - in the absence of a new ruling from the Throne covering a particular situation, the most relevant prior ruling stands. Having started from a carefully engineered system of laws to begin with and then having had 3000+ years of painstakingly gathered and recorded precedents since, this system actually functions; there are very few situations that don't already have a ruling that cannot be at least mostly adapted to deal with the matter at hand and by a lower level of the Imperial bureaucracy. Especially since some rulings actually are of the format 'In situations such as this, official X is allowed to proceed at his discretion... within broad limits Y to Z.'

Obviously this means that the Vilani system is set up to be extremely conservative and with a uniformity of method that reduces the need for different, widely-spread bodies to communicate in order to adequately coordinate their affairs. That was deliberate.

This also means that the single most valuable commodity in Vilani politics is the Emperor's time; if you cannot find a bureaucratic solution to your problem that can be executed by successfully applying prior precedents then you have to get the Emperor to hear you out and sign a permission slip for you to break the rules. Given that there's only so many hours in a day, this means that the Emperor can deliver serious sanctions to any particular department or faction simply by choosing not to pay attention to them, and likewise tip the scales in favor of any faction by picking their latest submission off of the top of his inbox. This is also deliberate, and one of the main sources of the Emperor's authority to begin with. Anybody who tries going their own way without him will rapidly be made vulnerable to the bureaucratic and administrative machinations of every competing faction by the Emperor's simply choosing to ignore them and devote his extra time to facilitating the requests of their rivals, and simple peer pressure will yank them back into line almost immediately.

This also means that the single most important skill for a Vilani official of almost any kind is how good he is at bureaucracy, because their chief and largely only form of dispute resolution short of threats and violence is applied rules lawyering. That was also deliberate.

Obviously of course the Emperor also has conventional sources of authority such as being the commander-in-chief of their military, unlimited powers of high and low justice at his effective whim, and the immense traditional reverence (immense by Vilani standards, a society that already places an extreme weight on tradition and precedent) held for both the legitimacy of his authority and the absolute sacrosanctness of his person. But the first, and usually the only, source of coercion that he has available to use is his ability to pick and choose what he actually pays attention to.

The office of the Shadow Emperor is not hereditary; when the old Emperor passes away a new one is elected the Isgiirdii, the Vilani high council, from among their ranks. Votes are held by open ballot and after each round of voting, the nominee with the lowest number of votes is dropped from the ballot and then another round of voting is begun. Eventually one surviving candidate will hold the majority of the votes, at which point the other candidate drops out and leaves the new Emperor standing alone. One more ceremonial round of voting is always held at this point, so that each new Ishimkarun is officially elected by a unanimous vote.

The Isgiirdi

The Isgiirdi, the high council of the Vilani Imperium, is composed of representatives selected by each branch of the Imperial government via what internal processes that particular branch favors. It's three functions are to propose legislation to the Emperor, to advise the Emperor upon request, and to elect the new Emperor from among their ranks when the old one passes away. There are 300 total delegates but only fifteen of them hold the office of 'Speaker'- one each for the Army and the Navy, three apiece for each of the three great shangarim (more on these later), and four at-large Speakers selected by the Emperor.

The office of Speaker is important because legally, they are the only members of the Isgiirdi actually allowed to talk to the Emperor at all. (And now you know why he's formally called the 'Shadow Emperor' - he's not a public figure.) Everybody else in the Imperium has to go through one of the Speakers in order to petition the Throne. The Emperor is of course allowed to be in contact with anyone he wishes, but that's a case of "Don't call him, he'll call you."

The Imperial Government

Although it has aristocratic ranks and dynastic houses for the purpose of ensuring long-term continuity, functionally the Imperial government is a corporate bureaucracy.

The three Shangarim, or "bureaus", are three huge agencies that collectively manage virtually all of the day-to-day operations of the Imperial government. They each ultimately descend from a power group among early Vilani society - the aristocrats, the shugili or what was effectively the old priestly caste, or the industrialists. Each of these bureaus both has direct administrative control of a portion of Imperial territory and bureaucratic authority over all activities within their bureau's broad specialty anywhere in the Empire.

Yes, this mixed control means that there's a tremendous amount of bureaucratic cooperation - or infighting - to get anything done on a large scale at all. That was also deliberate. (In fact, there's very little about the Vilani system of government that is not deliberate; they have spent millenia of effort socially engineering and fine-tuning this thing, and it shows.)

The section of Vilani space that encompasses the entire Imperial Rim Province and thus is the one ultimately dealing with the Terran problem is underneath the territorial supervision of Sharurshid, the Vilani bureau whose primary Imperium-wide bailiwick is shipping, commerce, and industry. Makhidkarun is the bureau whose bailiwick encompasses the administrative functions normally thought of as government functions - police, media, education, etc. Naasirka is the bureau whose function covers the 'basics of life' - largely food and energy production and distribution.

The Imperial Hierarchy

Parallel to the multiple interlocked bureaucracies of the three great Shangarim is the official Imperial 'noble' hierarchy, each member of which (save the Emperor) is a hereditary dynast of one of the great clans that traditionally compose the senior management ranks of one or another of the Shangarim. Usually, an Imperial noble in a given territory will be from a family of the same bureau that has been assigned that territory as a fief, but not always. An attempt to wrest the office of the Apkallu Kibrat Arban away from the Sharrikun family of the Sharurshid bureau and claim it for one of the ruling families of a rival bureau is the affair that so distracted Shana Likushan away from the Second Interstellar War.

Starting from the top - the Emperor - and stepping one rank down we have the twelve "Great Ministers of the Four Quarters", or Apkallu Kibrat Arban. These titles are traditionally reserved for leaders of the three great shangarim and their most trusted and senior subordinates. Each of these nobles supervises the activities of 2-4 sectors of the 14 or so sectors that collectively comprise the Vilani Imperium.

The next rank below them is that of Underking, or Saarpuhi, each of which supervises approximately 80-150 separate worlds, a number that usuallly comprises a significant chunk of a single sector. Simple astrography means that the Saarpuhi Kushuggi, the Underking of the Imperial Rim Province facing Terra, operates on a somewhat looser leash and with more discretion than a Saarpuhi in one of the Imperial core sectors would.

Beneath the Saarpuhi are the ranks of the 'supreme governors' or Sarriiu who typically oversee subsectors with a dozen or so inhabited worlds apiece, and 'provincial governors' or shakkanakhu who occupy a flexible level of the bureaucracy that can end up overseeing anywhere between one and half a dozen worlds as needs require.

Each of these titles, save that of Emperor, is hereditary - but with a twist. A Vilani noble title cannot be inherited by the first or secondborn child of the prior occupant of the title, but must be granted to a third or lower-born child. The first two children are still members of the executive or 'noble' class, but are expected to show merit, work their way up the bureaucracy, and find other suitable high offices to be appointed to. Furthermore, adoption for the purpose of gaining an heir is not permitted under any circumstances.

This is, of course, deliberate. It's intended to ensure that there is a slow but regular turnover of lower-ranking titles to new families as old ones fail to have a large enough number of heirs and leave the titles vacant for reassignment, as well as ensuring that any particular family dynasty spreads out in each generation to make new connections. This fosters more complex and multifaceted webs of obligation and prevents any one great family from permanently consolidating too much power.

Beneath the aforementioned hereditary are the equivalent of Life Peers in Terran aristocratic nomenclaure, non-hereditary noble ranks assigned at need that fill out the management ranks of the entire Imperial government bureaucracy. Some of these ranks, such as the high admirals and generals of the Imperium, are in practice wielding more seniority and prestige than all but the highest of the hereditary nobles despite being life titles.

Of note is that Vilani lifespans tend to run almost 150% of Terran lifespans due to certain variances in their evolution, which has a certain steadying effect of its own on the rate of social change and dynastic turnover.

Subject Races

Approximately 10% of the total population of the Imperium are non-Vilani humans of other offshoot races, and another 10% are nonhuman sapient races. Very few of them had star travel before the Imperium assimilated them, and even the largest and most advanced interstellar polity - the Vegans - still only controlled somewhat over a dozen worlds.

The Vilani treat their subject races with a mix of naked imperialism and generous inclusiveness. So long as a subject race shows even a moderate tendency to wish to conform to Vilani culture and government, they are treated identically under law as any other Imperial subjects. Obviously the hereditary and conservative nature of the higher ranks of the Imperial government means that subject races (human and otherwise) have very little direct representation there, but Vilani rule tends to be no less benevolently oppressive to conquered peoples than it is to their own population. Only the most incorrigible resisters have their worlds still under trade interdiction or forcible military occupation.

On the other hand, a subject world that doesn't want to follow Vilani law and culture is going to get pressured until it does, even if they have to use sledgehammers. The only exceptions that begin to made are for races nonhuman enough in their psychology that the Vilani have to settle for just having them conform to their legal and bureaucratic system and let their culture handle itself.

This legal equality combined with uncompromising cultural imperialism means that the Vilani have been having to deal with occasional uprisings and local unrest for about as long as the Imperium has existed. Given the immense advantages of size that the Imperium has against any single world, this is seen as no more than an inevitable but minor problem caused by quirks of sophont nature that would be impossible to engineer out of a population and are simply dealt with if and when they occur.

Of particular note are the Anakundu, a human strain that was one of the earlier races assimilated into the Imperium. Having been only at a Neolithic level of development when the Vilani made first contact, pretty much their entire culture and industry is the result of Vilani uplift. They are nigh-invariably strong Imperial loyalists and are one of the very few non-Vilani races to occasionally hold high positions in the Vilani government.

The current Saarpuhi Kushuggi of the Imperial Rim Province, Sharik Yangila, is an Anakundu.

 

[Bloodalchemy]

Thank you for sharing that explanation. That's much better designed then I would expect from a table top game.

Their government feels like someone with a relevant degree sat down and figured out what kind of government they would create if it could develop over 10 thousand years and also wanted it to last another 10 thousand years afterwards.

There are clearly going to be assumptions and biases in that creation but I would need a relevant degree myself to find and argue them.

 

[Taliesin]

It is well designed for the limitations they were operating under, but I confess I'm kind of surprised they didn't pursue further FTL tech to make the whole empire more centrally manageable so a lot of the extreme stability adaptations wouldn't be as necessary.

 

[cliffc999]

It is well designed for the limitations they were operating under, but I confess I'm kind of surprised they didn't pursue further FTL tech to make the whole empire more centrally manageable so a lot of the extreme stability adaptations wouldn't be as necessary.

Click to shrink...

Further FTL tech also makes it a lot easier for people like the kimashargur to actually outrun the Empire.

And rapid strategic mobility gives a smaller force a better chance against a bigger one, which is of course the absolute last thing the Imperium's designers wanted.

 

[beowolf]

It is well designed for the limitations they were operating under, but I confess I'm kind of surprised they didn't pursue further FTL tech to make the whole empire more centrally manageable so a lot of the extreme stability adaptations wouldn't be as necessary.

Click to shrink...

Consider the timescales of the development of that tech in the first place. They had Jump 1 for 3800 years before finally improving it, and the Consolidation Wars that started with the development of Jump 2 and ended with the creation of this system lasted for 1400 years. Without ever advancing to Jump 3. Under the assumption that progressing further would take multiple millennia more anyway, it makes sense that they wouldn't prioritize it over keeping their polity stable enough to last those millennia.

...Of course, Terrans apparently went from Jump 2 to Jump 3 in a mere 150 years, so that's certainly something to look at the RPG cliches for...

 

[cliffc999]

...Of course, Terrans apparently went from Jump 2 to Jump 3 in a mere 150 years, so that's certainly something to look at the RPG cliches for...

Click to shrink...

The Vilani evolutionary path selected for a lack of curiosity. Being curious about shit was a great way to get killed on their homeworld in their Neolithic era, because it had a relative dearth of land predators but a lot of poisonous plants mixed in with the non-poisonous, meaning there was a strong pressure to stick with what you already knew once you'd found the first safe thing to eat.

Terra, meanwhile, had its most extreme evolutionary pressure be 'how the fuck does my puny monkey ass figure out clever enough tool use to avoid getting eaten by sabre-toothed tigers'.

Not surprisingly, the Vilani average for creative intelligence is on one end of the bell curve, and the Terran average is on the other end.

 

[Narsil]

And rapid strategic mobility gives a smaller force a better chance against a bigger one, which is of course the absolute last thing the Imperium's designers wanted.

Click to shrink...

Or to put it another way, the limit to Jump-2 drives funnels military forces through strictly limited, easily predicted avenues of attack ... which, when it comes to the offensive, hugely advantages the side with the biggest Navy. The strategic situation would be enough to make a Sun Tzu or B.H. Liddell Hart weep with frustration.

 

[Bluesnowman]

What is it about their FTL that means they can't just do not sure how to put it but deep black exploration or travel with generational ships?

 

[gavinjon]

Terra, meanwhile, had its most extreme evolutionary pressure be 'how the fuck does my puny monkey ass figure out clever enough tool use to avoid getting eaten by sabre-toothed tigers'.

Click to shrink...

Love this, can I sig it?

 

[DIT_grue]

What is it about their FTL that means they can't just do not sure how to put it but deep black exploration or travel with generational ships?

Click to shrink...

That was answered back in chapter 3 (underlining mine):

Jumpdrive had first been invented in 2088, but it hadn't had the range to make an interstellar expedition practical. Since one of the limitations of jumpdrive was the inability to plot a course that doesn't terminate in a relatively large gravity well, even with double tanks to allow you to make two jumps in rapid succession without refueling you couldn't solve the range problem by simply using interstellar space as a waypoint. And our earliest crude jumpdrive fell short of even standard jump-1 technology, let alone jump-2, and hadn't had the range to make even Alpha Centauri in a single jump. And while artificial gravity technology and reactionless thrusters had already allowed us to launch several slowboat 'generation ships', in 2098 they were still nowhere near reaching their destinations, much less at the point of being able to communicate back.

But luckily astronomers had discovered a rogue - an object of planetary or near-mass drifting through interstellar space, independent of any individual's star's gravity well - in a position to where you could reach just reach it with StarLeaper One's jumpdrive both Sol and Barnard's Star, so by using that as a waypoint they were able navigate a route to Barnard's Star and back.

Click to shrink...

 

[anirocks]

While i like this fic i dont know much about GURPS. So can someone tell me why did the vilani invade us and other stuff about them

 

[Cheetored20]

What is it about their FTL that means they can't just do not sure how to put it but deep black exploration or travel with generational ships?

Click to shrink...

Basically with the ftl drive you have to jump into a gravity well.

 

[ryune]

Basically with the ftl drive you have to jump into a gravity well.

Click to shrink...

That actually brings up an interesting thought. What happens when you target an area that doesn't have a grav well? Do you just snap to the nearest grav well? Does it just not work?

 

[Anti-No]

Looks like this is a galaxy setting that simply does not have any of the absolutely massive amounts of brown dwarfs and red dwarf stars that our Milky Way has. But it does make for an interesting setting, so nevermind that.

 

[Faralis]

And rapid strategic mobility gives a smaller force a better chance against a bigger one, which is of course the absolute last thing the Imperium's designers wanted.

Click to shrink...

And knowing the end of the 9th and latest interstellar war, they were right to think so.

 

[cliffc999]

Looks like this is a galaxy setting that simply does not have any of the absolutely massive amounts of brown dwarfs and red dwarf stars that our Milky Way has.

Click to shrink...

They do, but there's no guarantees they're in a useful position either and there's also that they are hard-to-find moving targets.

Love this, can I sig it?

Click to shrink...

Sure.

 

[Anti-No]

They do, but there's no guarantees they're in a useful position either and there's also that they are hard-to-find moving targets.

Click to shrink...

Brown dwarfs? Sure they might be hard to find, but once you've found one you know exactly where it is basically forever. Sir Isac Newton guarantees that, as long as one has proper logs, timestamps, and at least a little math. Interplanetary trajectories are easy as long as you're talking just "a few years" into the future.

Dwarf red stars? All you need is a telescope, and proper astronomy charts. And yes, there are so many of them out there there would be no chance, no way, that they would not bridge those gaps. Not to mention that the game insists the galaxy map is... 2D.

For reference: The galaxy is around 3-5 000 lightyears thick, depending on where you check. Meaning that if you are continually really unlucky everywhere with how far it's between stars, you would have something like 300 maps (10 lightyears in height between each map) for the area of space the Terran Federation is on.

However, this is something most Sci-Fi settings and games do horribly wrong. Mostly because most people cannot actually conceive how utterly mindbogglingly large and full of stars our galaxy actually is.

Take theese closest 100 000 stars as an example. Zoom up to earth, then take a good look around. Yes, there are a lot of named systems.... but notice those tiny dots everywhere? Those are star systems too. And, logically speaking, should have been usable as at least "stops on the way", if we were using the Milky Way Galaxy as a map. But we don't, because if we did, basic astrophysics would have broken the Terran Alliance out of their current "no way out" dilemma.

Of course... considering how many systems there actually are over or under them (and in between?), they don't actually need to break out now that they have working, cheap terraforming.

But in setting and in story: Ignore the red dwarf stars and how easy it is to track an object in interplanetary space once you've found it once, know it's direction, speed, and have a timestamp on it. Because it would probably destroy at least parts of the story.

 

[cliffc999]

Brown dwarfs? Sure they might be hard to find, but once you've found one you know exactly where it is basically forever. Sir Isac Newton guarantees that, as long as one has proper logs and at least a little math.

Click to shrink...

The problem isn't knowing where it is, the problem is knowing where it is with a sufficiently high degree of precision to navigate a jumpdrive, and that's hard enough to do in-setting over a range of parsecs when aiming at actual stars.

And before you try to go 'but actually', we're talking about a fictional form of FTL drive here so it could not possibly care less about what you think you know about real-world physics.

Note: In the canon setting, the problem of how to navigate a jump into the deep black actually is solved... more than a few centuries later. It's not that it's physically impossible, it's that the current state-of-the-art in-setting hasn't advanced far enough yet to pull it off.

 

[Potato and Chip]

The Ziru Sirka, or 'Grand Empire of Stars', covers a region of space shaped vaguely like a vertical rectangle with a mid-bulge stretching approximately 250 parsecs coreward of Terra, and 120 parsecs across at its widest point. Terra is located almost directly at the rimward tip of the Imperium, and the Imperial capital of Vland is almost 200 parsecs coreward of it. There are over ten thousand star systems within the borders of the Imperium but only four thousand of them have major inhabited planets, with slightly over four thousand more of them having outposts (usually for purposes of allowing stopovers and support on a jump-route long enough to require way stations, or resource exploitation or military bases).

Click to shrink...

I don't think I really understand the size dimensions of the empire from the description. I'm going to assume its 120 parsecs wide and 250 parsecs long. Which would make it around 391.4 light years wide and 815.4 light years long. It sounds to me like Terra having access to HPGs and the KF drive will probably solve the original timeline's problem of Terra suddenly finding itself in charge of a massive polity that it can't manage because they're own basic policies undermine the very thing keeping said empire afloat.

There's a fan made interactive map that shows just how big the Innersphere is, as well as how long it takes to travel from one side to the other using safe jumps (IE: only jumping into populated systems instead of making a straight line) It takes a little less then a year to crossover around 1000 light years of space, and thats if you use the same jumpship instead of just daisy chaining or using a recharge station.

Link to map I'm talking about, in case you want something to reference.

That said though, while HPG stations and KF ships could possibly solve the issue of trying to manage such a vast empire that doesn't mean other issues won't crop up, or that it isn't just delaying the inevitable. I have to assume the Empire has some border enemies who wouldn't let any new governments get comfortable, and the Terran Confederation seemed intent on replacing the old order with their more democratic one which will always cause issues.

This also means that the single most important skill for a Vilani official of almost any kind is how good he is at bureaucracy, because their chief and largely only form of dispute resolution short of threats and violence is applied rules lawyering. That was also deliberate.

Click to shrink...

I wonder if that's also part of the reason why the Terran empire fell. The entire system is designed to have everyone inside of it constantly fighting to the point where things reach an equilibrium. But what happens when the new boss doesn't play their part? People still continue to undermine each other only there's no longer any "referee" making sure things don't escalate. The empire could have easily started to tear itself apart when the norms at the top were abolished.

The Vilani evolutionary path selected for a lack of curiosity. Being curious about shit was a great way to get killed on their homeworld in their Neolithic era, because it had a relative dearth of land predators but a lot of poisonous plants mixed in with the non-poisonous, meaning there was a strong pressure to stick with what you already knew once you'd found the first safe thing to eat.

Terra, meanwhile, had its most extreme evolutionary pressure be 'how the fuck does my puny monkey ass figure out clever enough tool use to avoid getting eaten by sabre-toothed tigers'.

Click to shrink...

It makes me wonder if the race that spread humanity everywhere did so because they thought we had no chance of survival as a intelligent species. Like they looked at earth and its predators, dangerous climate, and then looked at our hairless defensless bodies and thought we were doomed to die off unless they did something.

While i like this fic i dont know much about GURPS. So can someone tell me why did the vilani invade us and other stuff about them

Click to shrink...

The Vilani invaded because earth's presence is considered instability inducing. It spread ideas and knowledge that caused their territories to be less stable. There's also the fact that whoever conquers the Terran Confederation will get control over more planets, industry, and wealth. Meaning their social prestige will grow.

 

[cliffc999]

While i like this fic i dont know much about GURPS. So can someone tell me why did the vilani invade us and other stuff about them

Click to shrink...

Initially because the Vilani potentate nearest to the problem was a bigot who got a needless border conflict started with her arrogant disregard for 'insignificant barbarians'. Cue the First and Second Interstellar Wars.

After getting rid of her, the next one was an aggressive military commander who was also unusually perceptive enough to see the long-range destabilization potential of allowing a society like Terra to exist and continue to have trade and cultural relations with the Imperium but still maintain its independence and culture, but who wasn't good enough at internal Vilani politics to stay in power long enough to actually finish the job of beating Terra. Hence, the Third Interstellar War.

At this point the Terrans quite understandably started to believe that the Vilani were just out to get them, and proceeded accordingly. The next six Interstellar Wars in canon are a long and sometimes counterintuitive story, but the punchline is that the Vilani Imperium had always its weaknesses but that hadn't really mattered before because the situation wasn't such where those potential weaknesses would actually outweigh their genuine strengths. But Terra's unanticipated ability to stay in the game so long against a much larger opponent eventually gave those weaknesses a chance to grow and flourish until the whole structure was vulnerable enough that by-that-time superior Terran technology could deliver the knockout punch.

 

[Narwhale]

Honestly, it makes sense why the Vilani would get screwed over when facing an enemy with more potent technology then them. Think about it, everything they have is designed around the fact that they are in possession of what is the peak of technology and they've had it for nearly one and a half thousand years. Since everyone's playing the same game as they are with the same rules as them, the Vilani are at a distinct advantage, because they're the most experienced. They've got the most time playing, they understand the mechanics the best, they have the most in-depth knowledge of all the ins and outs of the system they operate under. With no-one getting ahead of them tech-wise, they hold all the cards, because they can predict more or less every move you can make. After all, Jump-2 can only take you so far, the weapons only do so much, etc.

 

[crazygrox]

I'll admit to some curiousity as to how this society coup-proofs itself, how it avoids ever changing to slack on the actually very important cultural imperialism, and how it stops the emperor from getting frustrated with and reorganizing the bureaucracy.
But those are more just not covered in a brief overview of current government structure, and don't need to be covered.

 

[ltmauve]

here do the other nine come from?

Click to shrink...

There are two miltary speakers, nine shangarim speakers, (three per and three shangarims) and four at-large.