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Sounds like an act of war to me, let's send the hawk lobby the AAR and start up the pain train.
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Jan 19, 2017 16:50
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Establish friendship with Robros and Catfriends and simultaneously eliminate two potential threats to the republic. More secure borders and less spying seems like a good thing overall. Let's do it
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Jan 19, 2017 17:35
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Xenorelations Council Report: the Psilons and the Federation of Psilon Quanta, 2620 The Psilons are the native sapient race of Eson, a Mars-sized but Earthlike planet with a gravitational force of approximately .4 g. The Psilons are a relatively recent development in evolutionary terms, having been genetically uplifted from pre-sapient scavengers in the declining days of the Orion Confederation. The dominant line of evolutionary development on Eson produced a six-limbed body plan, and the upper four limbs of the Psilons were repurposed as grasping manipulators. Psilons today are physically-delicate omnivores with ongoing severe health problems associated with the difficulties of giving live birth, even with incomplete skull and brain development at birth requiring very extended post-natal care relative to other sapient species. The presence of the Orion Confederation on Eson was brief, and with their withdrawal, much of the technical infrastructure the Psilons relied upon was lost. The Psilons lapsed into an Iron Age society, only slowly recovering the population numbers needed to support highly-specialised modern societies with the constant difficulties presented by loss of children and mothers in childbirth. Although the original purpose of the Psilon uplift was forgotten in the collapse of Orion-era Psilon society, significant artifacts from the Orion Confederation still survive on the surface for archaeological study. Even in Iron Age cultures, many Psilon societies prized dispassionate logic and the search for truth, and Psilon politics were characterised more by 'debate' than 'command'. Democratic governance was an early development, although it shared the planet with oligarchic structures dominated by intellectual and economic elites. The modern Federation of Psilon Quanta was an early industrial era development on Eson, joining together the 'quanta' of individual and local Psilon political units into a global body that could resolve disputes, maintain peace, and facilitate global communications, with a Controller of the Federation chosen by the representatives from each member Quantum. The current Controller, Ekar Orgit, is highly-regarded in the Federation as an administrator, negotiator, and for his achievements as a mathematician applying mathematical insights to interplanetary freight traffic analysis. Personal rights and freedoms are well-protected in the Federation of Psilon Quanta, and the variation between individual quanta hinders Federation-level police work, which has led to a focus on a policy level in the Federation on counterintelligence activities as a high priority. Psilons have a small, low-G home planet, and suffer no penalties for low gravity. They are Creative, gaining a 25% bonus to research output from their population and getting every application for technologies with choices between applications, and, as Technologists, they start with the Artifacts special on their home world and gain the Physics technology once they research Space Travel. Like Humans, they have a 20% penalty to internal security.
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Jan 19, 2017 18:17
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And there we have our last aliens we've contacted. I'd be interested to see what people make of them, and would be willing to field questions if they're advanced.
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Jan 19, 2017 18:17
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In the words of byob, Psilons have good spops and head bigs. I hope we don't have to go to war with the grays. Perhaps Human reproductive health and neonatal care technologies will form the basis of healthy trade with the Quanta!
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Jan 19, 2017 18:19
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'Spops'?
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Jan 19, 2017 18:22
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nweismuller posted:'Spops'? A small child's version of "spots," I think? But it's really hard to be sure. Nice spops and head bigs has a certain euphony though, very appealing. Does this edition of MoO have the diplometers that approximate other empires' disposition toward yours? I relied on that pretty heavily in vanilla MoO2.
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Jan 19, 2017 18:28
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POOL IS CLOSED posted:Does this edition of MoO have the diplometers that approximate other empires' disposition toward yours? I relied on that pretty heavily in vanilla MoO2. Look at the lower right corner of the profile screenshots.
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Jan 19, 2017 18:31
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Dammit!  How are the people of our Republic responding to the expansion of our galactic social scene? We've just introduced ourselves to several other guests with varying degrees of awkwardness. Media, entertainment, and conspiracy theorists should be making serious hay right now, and I imagine that despite our current war footing, we're also looking at some interesting economic responses to contact with potential new markets. Also, do we have any ideas about our new acquaintances' outlooks on the Bulrathi, if they've made contact yet? We've had some propagandizing by the Darloks against their foes in an effort to influence our diplomancing, but we haven't talked about attempting the same w/r/t our own foes.
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Jan 19, 2017 18:40
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I notice that they, too, are at war with the Bulrathi. Wonderful! We can be war-friends in the ancient human tradition of 'the enemy of my enemy.' Hopefully we can get them to accompany us on some of our other wars as well. That penalty to spying should make the both of our empires natural enemies of those weird cloaked scavs. What are their racial penalties aside from the espionage issue, by the by? You seem to have implied some population growth maluses.
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Jan 19, 2017 18:41
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Stormgear posted:I notice that they, too, are at war with the Bulrathi. Wonderful! We can be war-friends in the ancient human tradition of 'the enemy of my enemy.' No, they just haven't met the Bulrathi. It would be a red line if they were at war. They have no population growth penalties, but it would have been a major issue in a pre-modern Psilon society given their skull size.
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Jan 19, 2017 18:46
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nweismuller posted:No, they just haven't met the Bulrathi. It would be a red line if they were at war. They have no population growth penalties, but it would have been a major issue in a pre-modern Psilon society given their skull size. Oh whoops. I didn't realize that the images in the top left were OUR diplomatic relations. Well, regardless! They seem to like us well enough if that bar in the bottom right isn't lying
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Jan 19, 2017 18:52
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Stormgear posted:Oh whoops. I didn't realize that the images in the top left were OUR diplomatic relations. Well, regardless! They seem to like us well enough if that bar in the bottom right isn't lying Our societies seem to have some significant commonalities, not the least of which is governance styles. It's nice to finally meet aliens who aren't committed to monarchism or feudalism or whatever the gently caress the Darlok are doing (totalitarianism).
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Jan 19, 2017 18:53
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POOL IS CLOSED posted:Our societies seem to have some significant commonalities, not the least of which is governance styles. It's nice to finally meet aliens who aren't committed to monarchism or feudalism or whatever the gently caress the Darlok are doing (totalitarianism). What would you describe what the Meklars as doing? The Meklars are sort of weird.
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Jan 19, 2017 18:55
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nweismuller posted:What would you describe what the Meklars as doing? The Meklars are sort of weird. The Meklar and the Klackon are definitely hierarchical, but for them it seems like less of a choice and more like an organizational imperative due to their physiology. Nevertheless, it's a clash with the level of independent determination that seems to characterize our own beloved Republic. The Meklar are especially interesting because they are the product of literal intelligent design. They've found their current arrangements to be among their most efficient options. They obviously have a higher degree of individualism than the Klackon, but the presence of physically fixed, immobile Meklar with a significantly higher degree of, we'll say, processing power have rendered those individuals part of a governing hierarchy by accident of "birth." Individual Meklar might submit requests and data to the Combine, but this isn't so different from the master/slave model of communication in computing. One supposes we should be grateful that the Meklar are more similar to us than the Geth of Mass Effect, but we shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that the Meklar are like us and value individuality and democracy like we do. (Oh god, is representative pic now racist against computermen?)
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Jan 19, 2017 19:09
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My take: Meklars are governed by a body of immortal super-intelligent Meklar-derived beings who still take advice & input from regular Meklars, right? Sounds sort of like a cross between a meritocracy and an empire ruled by a Godhead. Citizens are able to affect change in society by petitioning the rulers, who (while not omniscient) are incredibly well informed and nearly prescient. The resulting decision is accepted with almost no dissension since the rulers obviously know better (though maybe not what is best). There is plenty of opportunity for political and economic advancement but the most important offices and contracts are awarded directly by the rulers, so an ambitious individual's method of advancement isn't to impress the public or amass a fortune, but to demonstrate their ability to minimize damage in no-win scenarios since those are the types of administrators the rulers desire. That way they can focus on long-term planning rather than be distracted every time the stock market crashes or a sun starts to go nova.
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Jan 19, 2017 19:22
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What are the stances of the other races towards our current foe? Is there already the beginnings of an alliance power structure here with mutual rings of allies? And as always, who's socially isolated that we can target next?
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Jan 19, 2017 19:31
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Nevets posted:a sun starts to go nova. Speaking of, our contact with the Klackons has revealed interesting things about that recent nova. The Klackons used to have colony populations one jump rimward from Zothique, but despite decades of advance warning and attempts by local researchers to reverse the stellar event, the star there went nova, killing several billion Klackon instantly.
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Jan 19, 2017 19:34
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RedMagus posted:What are the stances of the other races towards our current foe? Nobody else has met our current enemies, the Bulrathi, who are screwed anyhow. Currently, the only powers we know of that has contact with anybody other than the Human Republic outside their own quadrant are the Meklar Combine and FPQ, who have met each other and are on reasonably good terms. Within their own quadrants, the Mrrshan and Klackon are fighting each other, the Meklars and Darloks are fighting each other, and the Psilons and Alkari are probably not fighting each other.
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Jan 19, 2017 19:36
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Nevets posted:My take: The way I understood the write-up, one other aspect of this is that mobile meklar have the option of emigrating if they don't like how their current local supercomputer overlord is doing things.
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Jan 19, 2017 20:12
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Could we get a little backstory/briefer on the Orion Confederation? I don't believe its been brought up before in this LP and I'd like to see what it means/how it fits into this universe.
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Jan 19, 2017 20:15
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GunnerJ posted:The way I understood the write-up, one other aspect of this is that mobile meklar have the option of emigrating if they don't like how their current local supercomputer overlord is doing things. Excepting that the overlords do appear to be networked, so it seems unlikely that you could ever really escape some disliked aspect of an overlord's governance. Moreover, as a mobile platform, you will never join the Combine leadership, or be able to choose a mobile peer to join said leadership. This was for you determined upon your creation. (Not actually trying to be ornery, it's just that this is a very different situation from the sorts of politics and political theories our species and similar lifeforms espouse, because the Meklar are actually radically different. And it's pretty cool.)
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Jan 19, 2017 20:15
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POOL IS CLOSED posted:Excepting that the overlords do appear to be networked, so it seems unlikely that you could ever really escape some disliked aspect of an overlord's governance. Well... quote:Disagreements over resource management, ownership, ideals, and cultural practises were common, and, with the vast amounts of unclaimed territory available, Meklar history was marked by a series of diasporas with individuals or groups setting off to experiment with their own arrangements, or to claim their own patch of ground to cultivate as sugar grain farmers with no higher authority to answer to and only occasional trading trips to nearby towns to force contact with others. This is a process that can easily extend to new planets. quote:The slow shrinkage of unoccupied space and growing sophistication of the links between communities eventually led to many of these fixed intelligences establishing dedicated networking links between each other as the Meklar technical and industrial base grew, which eventually became the Main Combine Cycle, a council of fixed intelligences led by the Overseer CZK-21 since the Cycle's formation 413 years ago. The constituent members of the Cycle continue to be bombarded by the ideas and suggestions of the workers beneath them, and in turn continually advise the Overseer as it attempts to maintain the peace and harmony of Meklar society. The networking of the fixed intellects is a response to the application of the governance of one or another fixed intellect to all occupiable space on the planet, suggesting a "territoriality" that the unoccupied space of new worlds could indeed provide an escape from. In addition, the nature of the network is a council of independent entities, meaning that distinctions between the regimes of different fixed intelligences are possible. This provides another form of emigration if roughing it on a new world isn't feasible or desirable.
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Jan 19, 2017 20:36
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GunnerJ posted:Well... That escape would seem temporary at best, unless the Meklar individualists wanted to emigrate to join an entirely different species' alien society. That'd probably be a possibility in the fiction, but I don't think this game really models migration like that. Could be wrong though!
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Jan 19, 2017 20:46
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Well, escapes like that usually are. It does beg the question of how the authority of a fixed intellect extends to newly-occupied space if it's inhabited by malcontents who wanted to get away from that. Maybe they make their own fixed intellects to govern them, starting the cycle anew... This seems familiar somehow.
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Jan 19, 2017 20:51
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Well, a mobile Meklar could theoretically settle down and become an overlord themselves if it was deemed necessary, right? Just build a bigger casing and pour in some more gel to grow the processing power. But I think that's the whole point of Meklar society - if it's necessary. They're more concerned with the pursuit of optimal data processing, from which all their decisions stem. Trying to fit intelligently designed computers into a human paradigm is a hopeless, because they're just so inherently different. Individualism is a foreign concept, really. They're not quite the Geth, but its built into their very architecture to accept the edicts of the Main Cycle. If they disagree they can argue and make their case heard, but once the decision's made, unless new data arises, that's it. I think a mild identity crisis is coming in the Republic, namely over what exactly they believe and how it fits the rest of the universe. Sure, the classical liberal humanist doctrine that the ultimate good is the freedom and wellbeing of humans is pretty easily extended to most of the other races, but how do you fit the Meklar and Klackon (and possibly the Darloks but who the hell knows about them yet) into it? They don't WANT our versions of freedom and justice. "Freeing" a Klackon from the autocracy of the queen and hive mind is literal torture. Furthermore, where does this belief derive from? From whence does the mystical "spark" that gives individuals certain inalienable rights derive? It can't be just consciousness/sapience, otherwise we'd have to let apes and dolphins and probably elephants and a whole host of other animals vote. Is it both sapience and the ability to communicate your self-awareness? That's incredibly arbitrary, especially since it excludes (again) plenty of forms of life that even in the 21st century we're pretty sure are sentient, they just don't speak English well enough to let us know. Now, with the Meklar on the scene, a tub of synthetic gel is just as sentient and capable as the sacred human brain, so that's another wrench in the works. Hell, why is sapience so drat important, anyways? Because it makes us feel special? I'm sure that the Meklar at the very least would agree that pondering your own existence is just a waste of processing cycles 99% of the time, and the leftover 1% is self-examination for the purpose of identifying flaws so you can patch them and squeeze out more processing cycles for actually useful things. If computer scientists end up designing a self-improving set of algorithms that is faster and better than a human in every conceivable way except it doesn't write existential poetry, what exactly makes it inferior to us? Why do the squishy meatbags get rights, but the genius (yet unconscious) algorithm doesn't? TL;DR - when it was just us and Space Bears, it was pretty easy to ignore the hard questions. Now that we're confronted with a strange and wonderful galaxy, it may be time to realize that our 18th century ideology is outmoded (or at least needs needs a major overhaul). Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Jan 19, 2017 |
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Jan 19, 2017 20:59
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Crazycryodude posted:except it doesn't write existential poetry... I would think that any sentient artificial life form abandoned by it's makers would be more likely to ponder existential issues than the happy biological accidents the rest of us are, not less. Not only do they know for sure their creation was an act of intelligent design, they also know their creator had a plan for them.
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Jan 19, 2017 21:17
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For what it's worth- GunnerJ seems to have pretty much the right take on how I was writing the Meklars. There's variation amongst the different AI overseers, and so unless your beef is with the Main Combine Cycle as a whole, moving to another overseer's territory may well solve your problems. Disagreement and, yes, individualism is part of Meklar nature, who grow to self-awareness individually and develop their own beliefs. The growth of AI overlords as a leadership model is frankly because when you literally can ensure the creation of a superhumanly capable and talented leader, that ends up being a very tempting route for societal organisation. "Will we next create false gods to rule over us?" "HELL YES!" say many Meklars. Now, escaping to the frontier may be a temporary solution, since, after all, frontiers don't remain frontiers forever. That said, sometimes you're a bot that wants nothing more than to go someplace where you can farm your own land in peace without any busybody to tell you what to do. (And let's face it, the idea of robots heading out to the frontier to claim their own little patch of farmland is hilarious.) What is also true is that your ordinary mobile Meklar worker has no chance of rising to be a ruler in their society, unlike in Human society, because of the natural tendency for leadership to flow to the AI Overlords. And on some levels, that may well be a problem for some people looking in to Meklar society.
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Jan 19, 2017 21:21
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Well that's my point, it's not sentient. It's not self-aware, it's just an algorithm that's incredibly good at everything except wasting cycles on pondering existence. I mean, the human brain is basically a long string of non-conscious algorithms that happens to be complex enough that you get the emergent property of sapience on top of that. It doesn't serve any purpose as far as we can see, so it logically follows that consciousness is more an evolutionary accident/dead end. A vestigal mental state, if you will. So, if you built a string of algorithms that has the exact capabilities of the human brain except you've tweaked it the tiny bit so it doesn't waste resources on self-reflection (except for mindless self improvement), why does it suddenly become a tool instead of a human ego (or at least an entity human-like enough that it gets the inalienable rights humans do)? E: To be clear, I'm not talking about the Meklar anymore, I stopped talking about them at the end of the first paragraph of my earlier post. I'm using a hypothetical to illustrate some potential flaws I see with the traditional humanism/classical liberalism that's been popular up until now. Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Jan 19, 2017 |
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Jan 19, 2017 21:25
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nweismuller posted:Now, escaping to the frontier may be a temporary solution, since, after all, frontiers don't remain frontiers forever. That said, sometimes you're a bot that wants nothing more than to go someplace where you can farm your own land in peace without any busybody to tell you what to do. (And let's face it, the idea of robots heading out to the frontier to claim their own little patch of farmland is hilarious.) That's p much what I was trying to get at, thanks! 
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Jan 19, 2017 21:34
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This is infinitely more interesting than Stellaris Individualist/Collectivist chat.
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Jan 19, 2017 21:58
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Rick_Hunter posted:This is infinitely more interesting than Stellaris Individualist/Collectivist chat. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH *runs screaming off into the distance*
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Jan 19, 2017 22:09
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Rick_Hunter posted:This is infinitely more interesting than Stellaris Individualist/Collectivist chat. Setting kind of a low bar, there.
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Jan 19, 2017 22:22
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GunnerJ posted:Setting kind of a low bar, there. One may note how much of a fan of those interminable arguments I was by my reaction to their mention.
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Jan 19, 2017 22:24
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these are real fun convos to read, just from the perspective as a sci-fi fan and getting input as to the races and their fluff. Thanks much for them!
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Jan 20, 2017 06:07
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Crazycryodude posted:TL;DR - when it was just us and Space Bears, it was pretty easy to ignore the hard questions. Now that we're confronted with a strange and wonderful galaxy, it may be time to realize that our 18th century ideology is outmoded (or at least needs needs a major overhaul). It's certainly the case that we have tiers of alienness. It's also interesting because some of the crosscutting lines don't match them. TIER ZERO: Humans, Bulrathi. They already share a polity, albeit not entirely by choice. But still, they can. TIER ONE: Mrrshan, Psilon. Bulrathi were Tier One before the war, too. Each society at this tier has a wealth of examples from its own history of how to deal with other such civilizations. It would be a dire mistake for any civilization here to think of members of the other species as being basically just like them, but variation within each species is significant enough that it's a natural error to make. TIER TWO: Meklar, Klackon. The mental and social worlds of these species is sufficiently inhuman that no direct analogues can be identified. Even the most basic of interactions needs to be carefully mediated to ensure, not merely that offense is not given, but that communication happens successfully at all. UNCLASSIFIED: Darlok. Taken at their word, they would really like to be considered a highly-compatible Tier One society with humans. However, given how they went about doing this, they managed to actually give offense by mimicking some of Humanity's historical societies of which they are least proud. The presence of analogs, albeit uniformly negative ones, would put them into Tier One, but the possibility that this was a tremendous xenological fuckup on their part is evidence that they should be treated as Tier Two. There are some interesting commonalities across the known species of the Galaxy, and they don't always neatly match alienness. First, it seems we all run on carbohydrates, and everyone who isn't the Meklar also uses relatively similar proteins and fats as the building blocks of their bodies. It is possible for all of our species to profitably learn from one another's agricultural techniques, even if the crops themselves are different. Second, two species seem to have been the result of intentional creation: the Psilon and Meklar. Of the two, the Psilon seem far more culturally similar to Humanity. Third, alienness matters. We have had two incidents of armed confrontation with our scouts so far, and the Human reaction has been far more forgiving with the Mrrshan. This isn't just because that confrontation had no casualties; had there been deaths on either side, it is quite easy to imagine some appropriately solemn joint statement and ceremony that would satisfy both Mrrshan and Human senses of justice while carefully not blaming anybody for anything. It is much more difficult to see the Darlok replicating that feat, precisely due to the lack of any shared context.
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Jan 20, 2017 06:10
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Look, as long as we go for Exterminatus on every planet suspected of containing more than half a Darlok, I'm cool with everyone else.
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Jan 20, 2017 06:23
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The real question is whether the Darlok tender a statement that hits all the exact notes we'd accept as reasonable had it come from the Mrrshan or pre-War Bulrathi, acting in the assumption of a common ground they clearly do not have. That also said: we got that spy fix. Let's see if we can figure out what they're up to before doing anything too rash. It'd be super-embarassing if these guys had been being vague to keep alien species from accidentally awakening Galactic Cthulhu.
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Jan 20, 2017 06:28
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ManxomeBromide posted:It's certainly the case that we have tiers of alienness. It's also interesting because some of the crosscutting lines don't match them. On review of your paper, the Xenorelations Council has extended an invitation to you to join and help in tendering general recommendations for alien policy to the legislature.
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Jan 20, 2017 07:50
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"I would be first in line to pet a Mrrshan... they don't bite hands off, do they?" --overheard in a bar on Earth
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