How about AC is the breadbasket of Sol?

By David Lang (Dlang) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 07:49 pm: Edit

SVC, that works in the GW era, but especially pre-warp they couldn't have been so there was a transition. at one point they had their own ships, now they don't need them anymore.

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 07:58 pm: Edit

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AC went the way of "Let others do it for cheaper", and not keep a terrestial shipbuilding for ourselves.

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How about AC is the breadbasket of Sol?

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By Loren Knight (Loren) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 08:31 pm: Edit

How about AC is the breadbasket of Sol?

[in my Paul Riser voice] This is what I'm saying.

By Richard Wells (Rwwells) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 08:41 pm: Edit

Even breadbasket won't accout for the earlier fleet.

However, if we make Proxima Centauri orbited by a mineral/metal rich asteroid belt, it would be close enough for even a relatively limited industrial AC orbiting planet to reach and build industrial facilities there. Proxima has large flares that could make the AC willing to close manufacturing facilities there and relocate that to the adjacent Sol system once Earth is discovered to be friendly and working FTL makes it easier to seperate manufacturing from mining.

By Hugh Bishop (Wildman) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 08:44 pm: Edit

Boy did I open a can of worms! I think that we should leave everything the way it is with a special notation in GPD4e that the Alpha Centauran situation will be further clarified in GURPs Federation. That gives SVC time to recieve and analyze any potential solutions to the problem. The F&E situation could be resolved by creating an option rule that allows AC to be a minor planet, if the events that prevented them from being such did not historically happen, or to change the captial assault card to include a minor world for AC. The lack of prescence on the Big map could be explained as proximity to sol. Y1 should stay the same with the AC still historically having their ships but giving them up for a unified Star Fleet as all the other members did.

By David Lang (Dlang) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 08:54 pm: Edit

Richard and I have a fundamental disconnect in our understanding of things.

are the ACs native to their world or decendants of earth colonists?

in other words did warp 'reunite' earth and AC or cause them to 'discover' each other

By Hugh Bishop (Wildman) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 09:00 pm: Edit

According to everything I have seen they developed independently and are similar but not the same.

By Richard Wells (Rwwells) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 09:26 pm: Edit

The GPD version calls them "almost identical" with "recent common ancestry." The cultural shifts indicated would be difficult to achieve in the short period between human colonists arriving at AC and frequent FTL travel between Sol and AC which would renormalize the outlying society.

The older TFG published history included a much longer history (1200 years from the destructive wars) that would be incompatible with Terran colonizing efforts, barring time travel. But that history is so replete with a cliche piece of bad SF worldbuilding with destructive "Man Wars" leading to feminist reverse Gor. Having that history scrapped and replaced by almost anything else would be an improvement.

By Gary Plana (Garyplana) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 10:21 pm: Edit

I think I can offer a suggestion as to what happened to the AC shipbuilding capability: does anyone remember what happened to Clark AFB and Subic Bay Naval Base in 1991?
Hint (large economy size)

Answer in white:
A natural disaster knocked out their shipbuilding capability, and they decided not to rebuild.

The picture is NOT of a nuclear mushroom cloud, but Mount Pinatubo as a no-longer-dormant volcano. Both bases were destroyed by pyroclastic flows, and the decision was made to not rebuild.

By Richard Wells (Rwwells) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 10:59 pm: Edit

Gary: The Alpha-Centauri ships can't land on planets leading to the necessity of construction facilities in orbit and any natural disaster will be unlikely to have its damage limited to just the construction facilities.

By Troy J. Latta (Saaur) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 11:10 pm: Edit

A large-scale ion storm could render unshielded production facilities useless, while causing no more on the surface than really pretty auroras. If you're already a member of the Federation, Gary's right: Why rebuild?

By Andy Palmer (Andypalmer) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 11:11 pm: Edit

C. Leave Y1 alone. Have AC be minor planet in Capital Hex.

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 11:14 pm: Edit

The poor Philipeanoes really got hurt by that.

The US State Department ( upon hearing that Clarke airforce base had been Overrun ) declaried the Philipeanes to be a country with an unstable governement and all non essential travel was to be avoided.

The Philipeans had bought a Nuclear Power station from Westinghouse or G.E. ( I forget which one ) and were having the last item in the construction ( the generators ) being shipped to them. The ship was redirected because of that situation ( to Germany for an early deliver of their generators ) and the US company having received full payment for the power station has never since bothered to complete the job...knowing that if the Philipeanes governement tries to sue, they'll have to do it in a US court ( where they'll likely loose ) and just harm any chance they have of doing further business with any other US companies. So the Philipeanoes have a nuclear reactor slowly decaying that have never generated even a single watt of power.
And people wonder why the US has a bad rep' in the rest of the world...

By David Lang (Dlang) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 11:30 pm: Edit

MJC, you are ignoring the fact that the Philipeano government wanted the US to leave and had been vocal about it for some time (although they did think they would get intact bases out of the deal)

I don't know aobut the rest of your data (and frankly I don't think it's work doing the research to prove or disprove), but I'll point out that your political bias is showing and this is not the topic for political discussions

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 11:40 pm: Edit

Remember that since AC is our closest star, the closest star ( outside of the AC cluster ) to AC is very probably US.
Therefore they don't actually need a big fleet in order to find us, their Astronimers probably picked Sol as a priority destination for FLT 300 years before they got even W era ships.
Is there anything in Y1 that says they had more than 1 ship of each type? If not then they might have one construction facility and one ship yard does not an important military asset make.


You don't need a disaster, you just need a move in the culture and ecconomy.
It's like that line from the Goodies; "In order to balance the budget, I shall sell all our tanks, ships, bombs, aircraft & guns and buy a white flag."
So too there's a lot more money to be made by using that shipyard to manufacture small freighters than there is in using it to build the odd DD or CC, if you then have to turn around and pay the opperating costs as well.
To prove this, how many Mecinary Organisations inthe world own a warship and how many commercial shipping companies own freighters???

By Loren Knight (Loren) on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - 01:00 am: Edit

Andy Palmer: Option A doesn't change anything. Option C tarnishes the Large Scale Map even before it's printed. I've paid a bundle for my LSM and REALLY don't want option C!

Option A stay with everything as published but add an explaination as to the apparent discepancies.

To me it's the best option and one that's been mostly satsfied here on the board already.

By Hugh Bishop (Wildman) on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - 01:39 am: Edit

MJC you are forgetting about the Q era. Even though ships during the Q era (sublight battles) could only fight at sublight speeds, they could travel using non-tactical warp. So the AC's probably had a significant force of ships before unified star fleet. In fact consider this, if you suddenly discovered that you were living in a neighborhood populated by several alien races that had starships like yourself, and you knew nothing about them, wouldn't security be your first and primary concern? So you find out that these races have similar interests as yourself so you join them in a Federation. Yet this Federation does not have provisions for a unified fleet and there are huge ergonomic issues with integrating aliens into existing ships that were built to accomodate one homogenous race. Each member is expected to contribute ships to help secure and police the new Federation, so you need your ship yards to build these ships that will protect your nation as well as meet your obligation to the new alliance. Then there are still questions such as tech,social and cultural compatability. Finally the biggest question is do you really trust these new allies with the security of your race. Chances are you would choose to keep your ship building capabilities until events and time either force you to give them up or ease the decision as trust and integration disolve the initial misgivings.

By Hugh Bishop (Wildman) on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - 01:44 am: Edit

Loren, how does option C tarnish the Map? Are all the planets in a Capital hex actually named on that map? Or is it just labeled capital?

By Hugh Bishop (Wildman) on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - 01:57 am: Edit

I thought that the big map just put names on the outlying planets from the capital, so if AC gets minor world status officially that would not be on the already approved map, which incredibly has all the capital planets names printed on it?! I thought all the capital planets were named in a special box in the margin or some such. How did he get all of those names in one hex and legible?

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - 02:19 am: Edit

I don't think I am missing that ( Although I don't actually have module Y ) as I've said:- If you meet early on, in say the year Y10 and the game GPD covers the period of Y150-190, then you have this massive period of 140 year at least with which to become comfortable with the concept of "mutual defense" and start scrapping your ships.

Also there is no need to have a huge star-fleet with which to defend your planet if several things seem to be the case:-
1) Your new "enemies" arn't very interested in making war...and the Earthlings and the Vulcans arn't.
2) Your new enemies don't have very large fleets of their own.
3) You only have a few planets that actually need to be defended and thus "control limits" helps you by only requiring that many ships for all your planets ( thus 3 planets would only need a starfleet of no more than 30 ships at the absolute maximum ).
I would say of the above three, all three apply to AC.


You can learn that your new enemies are non-hostile in a period of time, maybe a week, maybe a month ( how long does it take you to make a new friend ), maybe the duration of diner ( although that will probably be proof in the negative that is they are not non-hostile) and that is a very very short period of time compaired to the time it takes to build a heavy cruiser and even shorter still if we are talking about the time it takes to build a "massive fleet".
The idea that the little you've got is minor in comparison to the massive fleet the "enemy" must have if we happen upon one of their vessels is journeying into the realm of paranoia ( no offense intended)...Although perhaps meeting one of their vessels and assuming they only have a small fleet is journeying into the realm of foolhardiness and wishful thinking.
I would say that by the time the governement of AC made up it's mind that it should build more ships to fight the possible threat that existed, the United Earth Ambassidor was already talking to the AC president about some-kind of mutual defense pact if not a unified fleet. The idea that the Federation would then ask the AC to PULL ITS OWN WEIGHT by providing its fair share of ships might not hold true either. The AC governement might choose to provide more money to the exercise or choose to provide personnel or technical assistance or maybe just food stuff untainted by earthly pollution...or maybe they were just recalcitrant in their end of the pact.
It doesn't have to be the case that the AC had a huge fleet and military shipyards to match.

By Loren Knight (Loren) on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - 02:32 am: Edit

Hugh:

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The choices are:

A. Leave GPD4e, explain Y1 somehow, Chuck's map is fine.

B. Leave GPD4e, change Y1, Chucks' map is fine.

C. Change GPD4e, leave Y1 as is with no explanation, Chuck's map is wrong (because I told him to ditch AC).

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By Richard Wells (Rwwells) on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - 02:46 am: Edit

Hugh: The sublight timeframe presents problems. If AC has working sublight interstellar craft, why did they fail to reach Sol? If they did not have sublight craft, why did a technologically backward society with limited industry and population develop their own significant space fleet after meeting the presumably friendly Terran expedition? Or we need to adjust AC views to reflect the aftereffects of any hostility.

I tend to prefer giving AC an existing space craft. Unlike the population of Earth which has a historical effort at exploring the nearest but unlivable object, the AC ignored the poisonous metal tainted worlds of the Sol system which lacked the solar tides needed for life to evolve. Instead, any major AC exploration went to other binary or trinary systems with appropiate stars. At least that is the basic history I will use for my SFU, with placement of original sublight AC colonies in the systems they would have sought out, and other species sensibly eschewed.

By David Lang (Dlang) on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - 04:42 am: Edit

remember that the sublight era is really the non-tactical warp era and from the discovery of warp to the Y1 timeframe is <100 years.

if Y1 was the first airplane then Y40ish (the 1st romulan war) was WWII era, but with the cold war delayed for a bit (until they bumped into the kzinti and klingons)

the time betwen the rom war and Y1 is enough time for a country to go from being the central power of the world to an important, but definantly secondary power (England for example) so you don't have to throw something out to explain why AC went from a founding member to 'not militarily significant'

By Andy Palmer (Andypalmer) on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - 08:03 am: Edit

So we impact GPD AND SFB(Y1) because of an F&E Map that 100 people will buy?