Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

For 'verse proposals, random ideas, musings, and brainwaves.

Moderators: Invictus, speaker-to-trolls

Post Reply
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

Could be they do the whole 'ten million K-bolters for the Imperator' thing not so much because it's the most efficient way to wage war, but because it's the proper way to do it. Something cultural, like it's not a victory for the people if the people haven't bled and died for it?
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Invictus
Posts: 1306
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 11:44 pm

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

I'm not sure if the Bragulans are meant to do clever things. Their schtick is to be able to steamroll any problem through the application of sufficient unthinking aggression, after all, and since this approach works well enough for them I can see them doing all kinds of civilizational min-maxing - just not anything dedicated to cleverness. So maybe yes - they just send bears into the meatgrinder because it works well enough for them as long as they toss enough nukes and overtanks into the mix, and it also has anciliary cultural and political benefits. Bragulan biology makes up for some of their technological and political shortcomings anyway - for example, they're bears, and their natural hibernation ability makes cryonically freezing them much easier, which means that they can literally sleep off any ill-effects of Five Year Plans gone awry.

My initial concern was actuall more prosaic, though. Even assuming that they grab bears straight off the street to go into the troop transports, can they achieve quantitative superiority over the USS, which can produce a replicant infantryman from scratch in as little as months? Or is the BSE just that much bigger?
"This explanation posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function. This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it's indeed the most brazen expression."
-
REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 1 - Rey Quirino Versus the Dark Heart of the Philippines
"...a literary atrocity against the senses..." - Ford

REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 2 - Advent Rey Returns: REVERGELTUNG
Coming NEVER
User avatar
Ford Prefect
Posts: 957
Joined: Tue May 20, 2008 11:12 am

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Ford Prefect »

I'm not sure you could actually maintain the Bragulan Star Empire through sheer aggression, even with the presence of external enemies. The entire situation is deeply more messed up than North Korea. Even in a setting which is more about literary statements than anything else, it strains credibility a little that the apparatus which marshals ten zillion angry bears isn't able to make the connection that ten zillion angry bears might be best suited doing something else with their time.

That's why I asked the question 'what is the Star Empire's goal?' You can ultimately justify anything, but understanding why the leadership does a thing shapes the whole polity. If the BSE exists as part of a 1984esque ploy to keep the people in line and Byzon the Invisible in power, then it may not actually matter that the Bragulans lack the quality of other nations, because the military won't exist to win. Siege raises an interesting point about culture, because what culture the Bragulans have will have been created by faceless beareaus to perpetuate 'the system'. That's the sort of thing I'm getting at.

e: It strikes me that the BSE is probably 'unconquerable' in the traditional sense. I mean, would you want to conquer it even if you could? Depending on its 'goal', even losing a war and never being able to expand could serve the BSE, in much the same way being surrounded on all sides has been useful to the Kim family, if you follow.
FEEL THESE GUNS ARCHWIND THESE ARE THE GUNS OF THE FLESHY MESSIAH THE TOOLS OF CREATION AND DESTRUCTION THAT WILL ENACT THE LAW OF MAN ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

Invictus wrote:My initial concern was actuall more prosaic, though. Even assuming that they grab bears straight off the street to go into the troop transports, can they achieve quantitative superiority over the USS, which can produce a replicant infantryman from scratch in as little as months? Or is the BSE just that much bigger?
Probably the latter, added by the fact that the USS might not like to wage war in the first place. As I played it, Replicants were created first and foremost because nobody in their right mind was going to join up as a grunt (and if you did that fact was a likely sign of mental unsuitability). So the Marine Corps created Replicants who were scratch-built for the job, but they were still people with rights, not disposable objects.

Maybe Replicants are viewed the way we might look at a beautifully engineered mechanical watch: superbly suited for their function, but the loss of each individual represents is a tragedy for all the hard work and potential that is lost with it (especially in a posthuman supersingularity hyperstate like the Sovereignty and all the possibilities for immortality that entails).
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Invictus
Posts: 1306
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 11:44 pm

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

Ford Prefect wrote:That's why I asked the question 'what is the Star Empire's goal?' You can ultimately justify anything, but understanding why the leadership does a thing shapes the whole polity. If the BSE exists as part of a 1984esque ploy to keep the people in line and Byzon the Invisible in power, then it may not actually matter that the Bragulans lack the quality of other nations, because the military won't exist to win. Siege raises an interesting point about culture, because what culture the Bragulans have will have been created by faceless beareaus to perpetuate 'the system'. That's the sort of thing I'm getting at.

e: It strikes me that the BSE is probably 'unconquerable' in the traditional sense. I mean, would you want to conquer it even if you could? Depending on its 'goal', even losing a war and never being able to expand could serve the BSE, in much the same way being surrounded on all sides has been useful to the Kim family, if you follow.
Yeah, I like this spin quite a bit. It's certainly better than the BSE being somehow bogged down in a hundred little Space Chechnyas without having rolled over them one by one as the reason why they aren't some inexorable juggernaut that their neighbors can actually survive being neighbors of. Because the BSE is content with fighting the occasional show war or two!

As well as explaining why they haven't capitalized on their apparent overwhelming strength, it also explains their paradoxical weaknesses - they aren't really that interested in optimizing themselves for victory. And I just thought it was because we decided to give Bragulans that milwanking X-factor protagonist glow, instead of the humans.
"This explanation posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function. This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it's indeed the most brazen expression."
-
REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 1 - Rey Quirino Versus the Dark Heart of the Philippines
"...a literary atrocity against the senses..." - Ford

REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 2 - Advent Rey Returns: REVERGELTUNG
Coming NEVER
User avatar
Shroom Man 777
Global Mod
Posts: 4637
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:09 pm
Contact:

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I like that. They've turned war, the decimation of entire worlds, civilizations and races, and obscene levels of societal militarization into a beareaucratic mechanism of further societal oppressionating control? Ala MGS4 Solid Snake monologues? Yes.

copy-pasted from MSN with Vic since as I was typing this, he asked me pretty much an on-topic question and I said on MSN what I wanted to say here:

I had this conception that a huge bulk of the brag military was as said, the unthinking obsolescent force of crusty conscripts, paleogear and overwhelming mass, but in the core-areas of brag territory you'd suddenly get strategic planetoids, nuclear-powered cybrag Universal Soldier Bears shooting atomic deathray wrist-cannons and such.

So perhaps while the majority are conscript trenchers, there exists... a Republican Guard type of setup where for regime security and for taking on outside-context problems that threaten the oppression-control-perpetual-war-balance system they can in fact throw things at people that can smash supertech stardestroyers with volleys of continent cracking FTL ICBMs seldom seen by those who only watch bragule from the outside.

For bragule a multi-system static warfare of attrition would be a "cold war", but when, for example, some extragalactic upstart power suddenly comes in and punches through bragule's peripheral territories that in space-scale would be as vast as mother russia is in the terrestrial level, after the aliens content themselves with crushing pitiful but endless braghordes, they suddenly encounter serious shit that actually messes them up when strategic planetoids start glassing alien-occupied worlds and bragulan subcruiser boomers surface behind enemy lines to carpet nuke their infrastructure and such. And then the braghordes that are still there also swallow them up.

And this is where the warhero brain-uploaded Yamato Cannon battle tank bolos come in.

Its like a 40k Imperium, but with the deranged technological disparities being an intentional institutional facet of control. Whole worlds at the Bragulan periphery, a backwater region which has a girth thicker than many star nations, make do with simple plutonium-enriched diesel engines for their vehicles while at the inner worlds the Brags use subnucleonics and cybragnetics and such, and this disparity is all because of some deranged and centuries old beareaucratic mechanism of oppression - ala 1984 with Winston and his razor blades.

Vic: "they toss braghordes at you the same way other polities issue strongly-worded condemnations"

Yes, if your interstellar power gets eaten, clearly you deserve to become fodder for the state totalitarian killwar mechanism. If you can resist it, ala the USS, then the braghorde "low intensity" interstellar trench conflict counts as a cold war and routine diplomacy. (and this really scares the shit out of people)

Those Space Chechnyas can vary from merely routine oppression mechanisms for the insane Bragulan society, to... diplomatic communication zones between the BSE and whatever neighboring powers it has. And these two have little difference. :D


Maybe in the inner circles of Bragulan leadership, between the militarist expansionists and imperialists, there are some or many who view that the Byzonic Revolution has already been won - and Bragulanity has been perfected, that society has achieved its goals, and so Bragule shall be and forever will be as it is. That they see the current state of the glourious Star Empire of Bragule and think that it's... perfect.

The monolithicness, the soul-crushing beareaucracy, the hours-long speeches, that for some of them is contentment.
Image

"Sometimes Shroomy I wonder if your imagination actually counts as some sort of war crime." - FROD
User avatar
Lelouch vi Britannia
Posts: 52
Joined: Fri May 18, 2012 10:27 am
Location: Ashford Academy

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Lelouch vi Britannia »

So, this is where it all originated. The Sovereignty, the Brags, the entire Koprulu Zone. I also see Fin all the way back on the first page trying to see where he could shoehorn the Byzantine Imperium in.

To be quite honest, I'm not so sure where the Holy Empire of Haruhi Suzumiya could fit into this dynamic either. Now that I look back on things, the Haruhiists were just as one-dimensional as the Byzantines. Just replace "crazy religious Warhammer 40k-ripoff fanatics" with "loosely-connected chain of butchered anime and video game references." My generally misplaced priorities throughout that entire endeavour certainly didn't help matters.

In any case, that's all in the past, where it should rightfully belong. One thing I won't easily forget, though, is the sheer vibrance and magic of the K-Zone as it was depicted in SDNW4, how it all just came together and worked, how it would just keep going on as usual even if the rest of the galaxy burned around it. And so it is with this new universe, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old.
I ship Eino Ilmari Juutilainen x Lydia V. Litvyak.

Image

"YOU JERK! YOU WOULDN'T KNOW SEXY IF IT BIT YOU!" - Erica Hartmann, Strike Witches
User avatar
Heretic
Posts: 1750
Joined: Wed May 21, 2008 4:45 pm
Location: IN AMERICA

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Heretic »

Welcome to 01, Lelouch, and be sure to keep your Geass in check here lol.
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
-Joseph Campbell
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

To be fair, it really is a leg up on the competition if you can lift a setting with years and years of work already done on it and transplant it into the game like that :). It does bear pointing out that technically the Sovereignty and Brags originated on the predecessor board to this, were then transmogrified to fit in the game, and this thread is subsequently a spin-off of that game seeking to reconstruct the older primary 'verse. It's all very convoluted...

It would be interesting to see if a Holy Empire-like state could be worked in here, I've always found the idea of a state run by centuries-old mentally exhausted and deeply war-scarred people who nonetheless look like they're only in their late teens very interesting. It evokes shades of Vampire Diaries, minus the blood drinking and so on, but the "yeah it looks great at first glance but there's a price you might not want to pay" thing is definitely there, at least in potentia.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Invictus
Posts: 1306
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 11:44 pm

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

I'm not seeing how anime references might not belong here, since we're on the verge of inserting psychic bodhisattva giant robots into the setting. :lol:
"This explanation posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function. This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it's indeed the most brazen expression."
-
REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 1 - Rey Quirino Versus the Dark Heart of the Philippines
"...a literary atrocity against the senses..." - Ford

REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 2 - Advent Rey Returns: REVERGELTUNG
Coming NEVER
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

... and that too yeah :D.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Lelouch vi Britannia
Posts: 52
Joined: Fri May 18, 2012 10:27 am
Location: Ashford Academy

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Lelouch vi Britannia »

Siege wrote:It would be interesting to see if a Holy Empire-like state could be worked in here, I've always found the idea of a state run by centuries-old mentally exhausted and deeply war-scarred people who nonetheless look like they're only in their late teens very interesting. It evokes shades of Vampire Diaries, minus the blood drinking and so on, but the "yeah it looks great at first glance but there's a price you might not want to pay" thing is definitely there, at least in potentia.
Going back to something Shroom posted back on the first page:
Others can be decaying empires striving for relevancy and with delusions of having retained their former standing. There can be those trying to replicate the ways of Old Earth, emulating how in other science fictions despite being in the far future it's still a bunch of representative democracies in space, with a United States Marine Corps in space, waging the Vietnam War in space.
A theoretical SotS version of the Holy Empire can easily be one of those decaying states struggling to find relevancy in the current age. They intended to preserve the knowledge and memories of the past through the attainment of eternal youth, and in that, they succeeded, perhaps a bit too well. The culture itself has stagnated, largely content merely with going through the motions and imitating the ways of the past. The people for the most part may be superficially young in body, but they have grown far too old in spirit; they've seen it all, and they've done a lot of it themselves.

Look at how Homura Akemi got adapted from Puella Magi Madoka Magica to SDNW4. You think she had it bad in her original series? Her SDNW4 incarnation was the spitting image of the centuries-old mentally exhausted, deeply war-scarred woman trapped in the body of a teenage girl. She lived through the Great Crusade and fought countless other battles in the centuries since, up to and including the MEH Stomp that ultimately did the entire game in. She knows all too well that war is hell, and she wants to spare her beloved Marines that hell. Her stated goal has always been to end a war as quickly as possible with the fewest amount of friendly casualties. However, she has taken that goal to the point where she has completely lost any conception of restraint; she would think nothing of depopulating entire planets or committing other atrocities against her enemies if it meant she could bring a swift conclusion to a war that way. She sees herself not as a heroine but as a necessary villainess, willing to do what others in the civilian or military hierarchies won't, for the sake of her people and her nation.
I ship Eino Ilmari Juutilainen x Lydia V. Litvyak.

Image

"YOU JERK! YOU WOULDN'T KNOW SEXY IF IT BIT YOU!" - Erica Hartmann, Strike Witches
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

Yes, I liked that about her character and wish we'd have seen more of her. There's something gloriously fucked up about a centuries-old war criminal responsible for the death of worlds and the butchering of millions stuck in a teenager's body. You can just imagine the self-loathing when someone like that, weighted down by the responsibility for innumerable crimes and centuries of survivor's guilt, looks in the mirror and sees a perfectly innocent young face staring back at her like a Barbie doll Colonel Kurtz.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Lelouch vi Britannia
Posts: 52
Joined: Fri May 18, 2012 10:27 am
Location: Ashford Academy

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Lelouch vi Britannia »

The current SDNW reboot has given me a bit of a second chance in regards to giving Homura and her comrades the characterization they sorely needed, because all five of them had a lot of story potential that went untapped in SDNW4. The other four Puellae Magi (or at least their SDNW4 incarnations) had their own immortality and warfare-related neuroses that were certainly worth exploring, even if I didn't go into as much detail about them as I did Homura the first time around. If the Holy Empire ever finds its way into SotS proper, maybe the work I'm doing there can carry over here.

But yeah, to a lot of people in SDNW4, the true face of evil wasn't that of Seth, or Emperor Byzon, or President Sinclair, or Dirad Kierger, or even Sasha the False Goddess herself, but this woman:

Image

Barbie doll Colonel Kurtz. I like that description.
I ship Eino Ilmari Juutilainen x Lydia V. Litvyak.

Image

"YOU JERK! YOU WOULDN'T KNOW SEXY IF IT BIT YOU!" - Erica Hartmann, Strike Witches
User avatar
Heretic
Posts: 1750
Joined: Wed May 21, 2008 4:45 pm
Location: IN AMERICA

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Heretic »

Bragulanity
That just made my tummy hurt from laughter. I can't wait until you guys make this into a series of stories or something.
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
-Joseph Campbell
User avatar
Invictus
Posts: 1306
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 11:44 pm

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

I certainly don't mind having a polity inspired by the HEHS flesh out the rest of the human sphere in SOTSS - especially since Shroom and I only have one polity idea between us so far.

I'm not too familiar with SDNW4 (except for the stuff on the wiki and the bits Shroom made me read) but I seem to recall that Homura (and the other Puella Magi, and Empress Haruhi herself) are all potent psychics. I think the whole psiocracy angle can be interesting to explore since the USS isn't much of one and psionic powers are much harder to come by in SOTSS compared to SDNW4.
"This explanation posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function. This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it's indeed the most brazen expression."
-
REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 1 - Rey Quirino Versus the Dark Heart of the Philippines
"...a literary atrocity against the senses..." - Ford

REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 2 - Advent Rey Returns: REVERGELTUNG
Coming NEVER
User avatar
Shroom Man 777
Global Mod
Posts: 4637
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:09 pm
Contact:

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Hey Langs!

To be honest I was toying with the idea of putting a few "SDNW4 homage" nations into the setting, once of which included some strange gratuitously animu nation of utterly bizarre cultural composition located somewhere near the USS. :P
Siege wrote:To be fair, it really is a leg up on the competition if you can lift a setting with years and years of work already done on it and transplant it into the game like that :). It does bear pointing out that technically the Sovereignty and Brags originated on the predecessor board to this, were then transmogrified to fit in the game, and this thread is subsequently a spin-off of that game seeking to reconstruct the older primary 'verse. It's all very convoluted...
Moby described a lot of our stuff from SDNW4 as basically director's cut ultimate edition digitally remastered HD versions of the things we made in the early 2000s. :mrgreen:
Invictus wrote:I certainly don't mind having a polity inspired by the HEHS flesh out the rest of the human sphere in SOTSS - especially since Shroom and I only have one polity idea between us so far.
We've got that Dual Star Kingdom thing, and the Hyperpacificans, though the latter are like a member nation of the Nexus.

Something else I've been toying around is a smaller power called the Trucial Stars, which is basically some kind of Space Arabian trading hub with interstellar caravans or something somewhere near Wild Space.
I'm not too familiar with SDNW4 (except for the stuff on the wiki and the bits Shroom made me read) but I seem to recall that Homura (and the other Puella Magi, and Empress Haruhi herself) are all potent psychics. I think the whole psiocracy angle can be interesting to explore since the USS isn't much of one and psionic powers are much harder to come by in SOTSS compared to SDNW4.
So right now we've got potential psionocracy, immortal mentally scarred war criminal leaders, and gratuitous animu references.

Psionic military junta authoritarian regime. I was thinking of making homages to the Foundation and the Second Foundation of Asimov. A small state that was originally an organ of an erstwhile great power, dedicated to the sciences and the preservation of thereof during some now-forgotten happening, over time this Institute emerged as a power in its own right thanks to the science and tech it preserved and kept after the fall and the ensuing breakdown. Maybe once, it ended up becoming a great power, before eventually also diminishing on its own to remain as a mid-tier player in the human sphere. Then its countepart could be the isolated psychic nation.
Image

"Sometimes Shroomy I wonder if your imagination actually counts as some sort of war crime." - FROD
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

Hmm, interesting. I suppose you could cast its Empress in the role of Hari Seldon, and replace psychohistory with extreme feats of clairvoyance.

If you wanted to you could also have the pseudo-Holy Empire and pseudo-Imperium both be spin-offs of the same once-great power, with their respective leaders being products of the same esoteric School run by that now-gone polity. They feud bitterly over what remains of its territories, and as both nations over the centuries built their successor identities around the weakly godlike abilities of their respective leaders the feuds over territory and technological relics slowly but surely garnered the trappings of religious quarrels, to the point where now they can barely even talk to each other because of all the crusading and religious zealotry that went down between two people who used to be brother and sister.

Also, for some obscene techno-magical reason no doubt to do with the aforementioned School these two polities are psi-hogs, tying up the vast majority of humanity's psionic potential in the Empress, the Emperor and the scions of their bloodlines. Thus neatly explaining why, when the Sovereignty wanted psions, it had to resort to freaky Apexai hybridization to even get started.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Shroom Man 777
Global Mod
Posts: 4637
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:09 pm
Contact:

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

The Institution dedicated to hard sciences and scientists turns into an inoffensive polity bit-player on the sidelines*, while their counterpart that dabbles in mentallics, the Second Foundation-analogue of psions, schisms into the pseudo-Haruhiists and the pseudo-Byzantines?

Hmmm... maybe the schismed psion polities could be total opposites of each other. One could be an oppressive fascist psion regime with mind-raping secret police in grey uniforms, while the other is some aristocratic but totally far out and strange and gratuitously animu and Frodian thing full of (sometimes aristocratic) magical girls?

Psi-hogs, perhaps. I wouldn't want to set the nature of SOTS psionics in stone yet, and if we want to bring in GEoM/Empress-esque characters, we ought to think it over first. Do we want all of SOTSS's human psionic potential tied to the fates of just two gnarly superpowered folks? Or will they just be really old folks, trapped in younger bodies, who have seen far too much in their lives, and have sired generations of likewise psionically powerful descendants?

Somehow I've got this rival mentors Magneto Xavier thing going on in my head in envisioning these two powers.



*The Institution can be all Star Trek Federationy and namby pamby. One of the "older" human powers now shrunk and in the sidelines trying to tell people to calm down and be reasonable while the Solarians and other polities, and the Brags and co., go full out whacko.
Image

"Sometimes Shroomy I wonder if your imagination actually counts as some sort of war crime." - FROD
User avatar
Invictus
Posts: 1306
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 11:44 pm

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

Shroom and I aren't sure about humanity's psychic potential being something that's hoggable, but I think it's uncontroversial that the Apexai hybridization process produces psions more reliably and with more finesse. While it's true that the Emperor and the Empress are both singularly powerful psykers whose powers and influence may be further amplified by the worship and adulation they receive from their subjects (because they have perfected memetic technologies that allow them to tap into the collective subconscious noosphere or something), such power also renders them...not quite normal in mind. On the other hand, hybrid psions inherit a little of the high and cold intelligence of the Apexai and as a result are more stable in that their not entirely human minds receive less interference from the human frequencies of the noosphere (and also find it harder to relate to people).

As for the pysker sibling schism that led to the founding of Byzantine and Haruhiist psiocracy analogues, the idea is a compelling one. Shroom and I coughed up a few ideas on MSN:

Firstly, some facile contrasts. Patriarchy versus Matriarchy, Puritanism versus Decadence (both are stagnant in their own way, though there's always the argument that everyone looks stagnant next to the USS), Singapore versus Hong Kong, etc. One side builds everything in art deco/socialist realism, the stern visage of the All-Father glancing down on everyone. Society is perpetuated in a state of quasi-Confucian leader worship where the bonds of social hierarchy are at once both pervasive and personal - it is even possible that the omniscient spirit of the Emperor does vaguely monitor everything. But at the same time, the All-Father is a figure of emulation; his personal virtues are an ideal that all must uphold in order to exemplify their duty and worth to the father-state, but there's no real aspiration involved. The state always guides rationally and technocratically, and the people always follow. God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. Their gung-ho space marines are pretty gung-ho.

On the other side however we have a materialistic, mercurial, quasi-pagan society where the cult of success rules. The Empress is a rock star. All worth flows from her. She is obviously the most worthy of all because she wields the unbelievable wealth and power that accumulates from being an immortal Empress; she should obviously continue being the Empress because she is the most worthy of all. Other, lesser idols are also venerated, and the common citizenry constantly strive towards joining their ranks. We're talking about rampant prosperity gospel here. Youth and beauty are also external signifiers of moral worth since such things can also be bought with biotech, but also tied inextricably with the unchanging fashions of the teenage Empress and her court. Warfare is treated with a bit of disdain, so all the heavy lifting is done by black ops magical girls.

They also use and view psychic powers differently. The Emperor's followers still deliver their worship in the form of directed emotion, but dress it up in hermetic and objective terms as part of a whole system of unreal sciences, an extension of their rationalism and technocracy. Their use of psychic powers is also highly ritualized and codified (and this is where a bit of 40K can seep in) and tightly controlled. The Emperor is no longer sane after receiving the endless rote, monomaniacal prayers of countless trillions for so long, suffused with such power by what are now purely mechanical systems. He is still functional and capable of statecraft perhaps, but hardly relatable as a human being. The Empress' followers perform gaily, ecstatically. Music is a universal pursuit, and psychics structure their powers thusly, with musical rhythm and tone and terms. Guitar-shaped psi-amps are still a thing. The Empress perhaps tours and throws extremely lavish concerts. She is inhumanly charismatic, but her mind is almost lost in the whims and passions of all her subjects.
"This explanation posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function. This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it's indeed the most brazen expression."
-
REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 1 - Rey Quirino Versus the Dark Heart of the Philippines
"...a literary atrocity against the senses..." - Ford

REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 2 - Advent Rey Returns: REVERGELTUNG
Coming NEVER
User avatar
Siege
Site Admin
Posts: 2563
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:03 pm
Location: The Netherlands

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

Yeah, I really like that, though it seems a little difficult to jive with Shroom's ideas of a Federation.

Although...

Let's say these two gnarly psychic giants and their offspring are, like, the products of some antediluvian precursor state that saw itself confronted with some great prophesized cataclysm and, in trying to avert it, went on a desperate search for some kind of esoteric Instrumentality. They overreached, created beings they couldn't control, and those beings promptly went Akira on said precursor state (bonus points for irony and Cassandra Syndrome if this turned out to be the cataclysm they'd initially set out to avoid).

Now, from the smouldering ruins of the Psychic Wars we get the pseudo-Imperium and pseudo-Holy Empire pretty much as 'Vic outlined... But also a Federation-ish organization that's sworn off violence and mostly sits at the cosmic sidelines shouting "but can't we all just get along!" as Karlacks and humans and Myrrans and Bragulans and magical space robot machines wail on each other. With Haruuhi and the Emperor acting as the Federation's KHAAAAAAN, I suppose.

Also, the people who divined THE PROPHECY! in the first place, and set up the whole Instrumentality clusterfuck that spawned the psychic demiurges in the first place, could've been a bunch of proto-technotheocrats. And their cybertech fetish descendants are totally obsessed with the POWER COSMIC (OF THE GODS) and all that good power-tripping stuff. Like a bunch of intergalactic Doctor Dooms frothing over the Emperor and Empress and constantly trying to abduct them for experiments and trying to replicate their feats (mechanically or psychically) so on*.

By the by, when I say "psychic potential" I don't mean that there'd be no other human psions outside the Imperial bloodlines but they'd be noticeably few and far between and really kinda puny compared to the two total psychic badasses because they have, for one reason or another, most of the mojo locked down.


* The Silver Shield and the hybrids could be one side project kinda-sorta run by one of their cats paws, although I suppose that might be pushing the conspiracy-inside-a-conspiracy thing too far...
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
User avatar
Shroom Man 777
Global Mod
Posts: 4637
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:09 pm
Contact:

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Yes, I really like that.

The Emperor and the Empress were the result of the Institution's Mad Science gone wrong! Yes! Instrumentalities, attempt to harness the Divine Electron, and all going horribly wrong as expected. Yes.

The Silver Shield and the Hybrids can be separate, as another conspiracy AGAINST the conspiracy of the Instrumentalists. Why have just a conspiracy, singular, when we can have conspiracies, plural? :mrgreen:

The Institution's folly could result in all sorts of things, the twin psychic progenies of good and evil - or at least decadence and authoritarianism - going off to carve their own powers, of mad scientists abandoning this human psychic thing after such traumas and instead going all cybernetic and trying to replace their humanity with cold objective reason (the technos), some of them turning into the Federation/Institution, and a few breakaways and renegades forming their own mad science genetics corporations and making Replicants and SinTeks and Tyrells and heading over to a distant and nascent nation that would centuries later become the USS. And then the Apexai come, and then the Hybrids, and here we go again!

Yes.
Image

"Sometimes Shroomy I wonder if your imagination actually counts as some sort of war crime." - FROD
User avatar
Shroom Man 777
Global Mod
Posts: 4637
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:09 pm
Contact:

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Maybe this psychic demiurge was what ruined Earth That Was. Maybe not.

I bet, however, that this probably undoubtedly resulted in all sorts of psychos and lunatics and anti-science luddites who have an inherent fear against radical genetic engineering, mad science, and psionic phenomenon, possibly degenerating into fundamentalist extremism beliefs.

In other words...

Fringe world yokels who dunno where their loyalties lie!
Image

"Sometimes Shroomy I wonder if your imagination actually counts as some sort of war crime." - FROD
User avatar
Invictus
Posts: 1306
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 11:44 pm

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

Also, the less extreme of those would have gone and formed those plain-jane space republics with space USMCs armed with space 5.56mm assault rifles. :P
"This explanation posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function. This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it's indeed the most brazen expression."
-
REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 1 - Rey Quirino Versus the Dark Heart of the Philippines
"...a literary atrocity against the senses..." - Ford

REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 2 - Advent Rey Returns: REVERGELTUNG
Coming NEVER
User avatar
Shroom Man 777
Global Mod
Posts: 4637
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 7:09 pm
Contact:

Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

:D

I think those probably existed before, during and after the psionic cataclysm independent of the Institution.
Image

"Sometimes Shroomy I wonder if your imagination actually counts as some sort of war crime." - FROD
Post Reply