A world, its citizens, and the Imperium

[Ulsyus]

On that same vein, corporate government, I'm the CEO of a megacorporation which colonizes a planet, spends bajillions in infrastructure, offers huge incentives for employees to travel and live there all so I can harvest/refine/manufacture whatsit rocks... now I'm going to let them leave? Hells no.

Okay, so does that make them indentured to the government, or just not permitted to leave without the appropriate (and almost impossible to obtain) authorisation?

If it makes them indentured to the government, where is the edge of the definition of slavery, which is illegal in the Imperium? If they're "just waiting for authorisation of for emigration, they can leave any time they want after that" and work on the Corp payroll until released, does the Imperium just accept that there'll be Nth class citizens on some world colonized well within it's jurisdiction?

 

[aramis]

Okay, so does that make them indentured to the government, or just not permitted to leave without the appropriate (and almost impossible to obtain) authorisation?

If it makes them indentured to the government, where is the edge of the definition of slavery, which is illegal in the Imperium? If they're "just waiting for authorisation of for emigration, they can leave any time they want after that" and work on the Corp payroll until released, does the Imperium just accept that there'll be Nth class citizens on some world colonized well within it's jurisdiction?

The canonical ban is on chattel and simple-property slavery; indenture contracts seem to be allowed.

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

Okay, so does that make them indentured to the government, or just not permitted to leave without the appropriate (and almost impossible to obtain) authorisation?

If it makes them indentured to the government, where is the edge of the definition of slavery, which is illegal in the Imperium? If they're "just waiting for authorisation of for emigration, they can leave any time they want after that" and work on the Corp payroll until released, does the Imperium just accept that there'll be Nth class citizens on some world colonized well within it's jurisdiction?

theirs a few ways it could go:

transportation in lieu of incarceration: like the brits did with Oz, instead of prison sentences, you ship the felons to another world as colonists with a fixed sentence......and then leave them to their own devices to get back.

fixed time service contracts: basically the same as above, but its strictly speaking a voluntary thing (though how much choice they had about "Volunteering" may be debateable)


theirs a few others, but its worth remembering two things about the 3I:

1) as has been shown on this board before, the "average" imperial citizen lives in a high pop, high law world with (by modern standards) a very intrusive, authoritarian government armed with sweeping powers, and that this is fine by the Imperium.

2) while slavery is banned, the 3i setting clearly has a (by contempory standards) a shockingly low regard for sophont life. I base this on the widespread use of low berth technology that, as written, kills a large number of people all the time, and this is seen as both routine and acceptable.

 

[Ulsyus]

The canonical ban is on chattel and simple-property slavery; indenture contracts seem to be allowed.

That leaves a lot of scope for the system to be gamed.

"Well Mr A, you're in luck. You now have a place to live, and work that we can assign you. There'll be a basic nutritional and water stipend, and we'll throw in your oxygen for free. The contract will have to be paid out over time."

"But..." he almost whispered as he scrolled through the Binding and Honourable Contract. The clerk waited patiently, attending to minor correspondence on their workstation as A worked his way through term after clause after requirement.

Eventually he thumbed open the calculator, and flicking between apps touched in number after number before looking up.

"This will take me 35 years to pay out! How do you expect me to make a life after that?"

The clerk almost looked sympathetic, an expression practiced on hundreds of new Employees and calculated to reduce conflict and tension while trying to convey empathy. "You can always get ahead by increasing your day to 16 hours, or consuming less than the basic stipend and gaining credit to the savings. There's also no reason you can't live a contented life while under contract, bearing in mind clause 137.D.(2) prohibiting offspring until the conclusion of the contract."

A looked at the clerk, not knowing whether rage or disbelief or simple abandonment of hope was what he should be feeling.

...

Of course, that could lead to any number of scenarios, from rescues to snatches to retrievals of contract-jumpers.

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

That leaves a lot of scope for the system to be gamed.

"Well Mr A, you're in luck. You now have a place to live, and work that we can assign you. There'll be a basic nutritional and water stipend, and we'll throw in your oxygen for free. The contract will have to be paid out over time."

"But..." he almost whispered as he scrolled through the Binding and Honourable Contract. The clerk waited patiently, attending to minor correspondence on their workstation as A worked his way through term after clause after requirement.

Eventually he thumbed open the calculator, and flicking between apps touched in number after number before looking up.

"This will take me 35 years to pay out! How do you expect me to make a life after that?"

The clerk almost looked sympathetic, an expression practiced on hundreds of new Employees and calculated to reduce conflict and tension while trying to convey empathy. "You can always get ahead by increasing your day to 16 hours, or consuming less than the basic stipend and gaining credit to the savings. There's also no reason you can't live a contented life while under contract, bearing in mind clause 137.D.(2) prohibiting offspring until the conclusion of the contract."

A looked at the clerk, not knowing whether rage or disbelief or simple abandonment of hope was what he should be feeling.

...

Of course, that could lead to any number of scenarios, from rescues to snatches to retrievals of contract-jumpers.

thing is, depending upon the world they are leaving, even such a contract might actually be a improvement. it would not be the first time in history a indentured worker had better rights and protections than a "free" person of similar social levels.


it wont even need to be as harsh as you make out. if you ship them over to your colony, then "release" them form the contract on the colony world and they have to scrape up enough money for a return trip themselves, then you both save costs on shipping people back, and you can have a "free" population on your planet that you can use to justify independence form your motherworld, or to start up secondry industries (with your approval, of course) .

 

[Chaos]

That leaves a lot of scope for the system to be gamed.

"Well Mr A, you're in luck. You now have a place to live, and work that we can assign you. There'll be a basic nutritional and water stipend, and we'll throw in your oxygen for free. The contract will have to be paid out over time."

"But..." he almost whispered as he scrolled through the Binding and Honourable Contract. The clerk waited patiently, attending to minor correspondence on their workstation as A worked his way through term after clause after requirement.

Eventually he thumbed open the calculator, and flicking between apps touched in number after number before looking up.

"This will take me 35 years to pay out! How do you expect me to make a life after that?"

The clerk almost looked sympathetic, an expression practiced on hundreds of new Employees and calculated to reduce conflict and tension while trying to convey empathy. "You can always get ahead by increasing your day to 16 hours, or consuming less than the basic stipend and gaining credit to the savings. There's also no reason you can't live a contented life while under contract, bearing in mind clause 137.D.(2) prohibiting offspring until the conclusion of the contract."

A looked at the clerk, not knowing whether rage or disbelief or simple abandonment of hope was what he should be feeling.

...

Of course, that could lead to any number of scenarios, from rescues to snatches to retrievals of contract-jumpers.

Even now there are places where people are held in worse kinds of indentured servitude - lasting until the debt is paid off, with the indenture designed in such a way that it is impossible to pay the debt off faster than the interest accrues.

There´s really nothing in that field that hasn´t been done in real life already.

 

[Ulsyus]

Even now there are places where people are held in worse kinds of indentured servitude - lasting until the debt is paid off, with the indenture designed in such a way that it is impossible to pay the debt off faster than the interest accrues.

There´s really nothing in that field that hasn´t been done in real life already.

I get what you're saying about worse conditions existing in the world. I see them most days when I travel about my current workplace.

So how much of the 3I is a dystopian future, and not a bright and shining city in the sky?

There may be tens of trillions of people living in TLC+ systems for whom this is not an issue, but has anyone crunched the numbers on how many worlds in, say, the Spinward Marches could be like this?

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

I get what you're saying about worse conditions existing in the world. I see them most days when I travel about my current workplace.

So how much of the 3I is a dystopian future, and not a bright and shining city in the sky?

There may be tens of trillions of people living in TLC+ systems for whom this is not an issue, but has anyone crunched the numbers on how many worlds in, say, the Spinward Marches could be like this?

well, the system generation rules point to a setting where the majority of the population are living in a small number of high pop, high law worlds. I don't know if they count as "Dystopian", but that's were most of the imperiums population and tax base live.

 

[Chaos]

I get what you're saying about worse conditions existing in the world. I see them most days when I travel about my current workplace.

So how much of the 3I is a dystopian future, and not a bright and shining city in the sky?

There may be tens of trillions of people living in TLC+ systems for whom this is not an issue, but has anyone crunched the numbers on how many worlds in, say, the Spinward Marches could be like this?

The really shitty conditions are probably *relatively* few and far between - as are the shining cities on a hill, in all likelihood.

I´d wager that, the further you are from the centers of power, and thus from the center of attention of those holding the power, the more feasible debt slavery becomes as a business model. New colonies located in the butt-end of nowhere, small-ish scale mining operations in otherwise uninhabited or low-pop backwater systems, that sort of places - anywhere they can keep these things under the radar. Even if they aren´t illegal, they´re bad publicity, and at the very least, publicity scares away the suckers who would fall for that sort of contract.
Besides, those debt slaves are still Imperial citizens, and the Emperor and his vassals have some sort of obligation to look out for their welfare to some degree. The Third Imperium and its nobles and government aren´t angels, but they are pragmatic (allowing this shit is just bad for society, overall) and have a certain basic sense of decency and honor. Sure, that thing is legal, but there are things feudal overlords (who also wield a lot of economic in addition to political power) can do to the perpetrator of sleazy-but-technically-legal schemes that persuade them to change their mode of operation while still falling short of clapping the malcontent in irons and leaving them to rot in the dungeon. Barring all companies involved from receiving government contracts, for example.

The Third Imperium has 11,000 worlds; if their populations were all randomly determined, that works out to roughly 3,000 low-pop worlds, 1,000 high-pop worlds and 7,000 worlds in between.
The high-pop worlds are too much in the limelight and too integrated into the Imperium-wide exchange of information to be good places for business practices that, while not illegal, will ruin the reputation of your company if it is even remotely involved in this - I cannot imagine that the press in the Third Imperium is any less inclined to publicize scandals than ours today is.
I´d say that the great majority of the mid-pop worlds and at least part of the low-pop worlds are out for the same reason, other than very limited local operations in remote regions of the mainworld, in asteroid belts or on planets far away from the mainworld - essentially places that can avoid the public eye, no passing traffic, as little outside contact as possible.

So, I can´t see a very large number of systems where some sort of debt-slavery is happening more or less system-wide. A couple dozen Imperium-wide, maybe? Add scattered little local operations here and there, such as the one described in "Expedition to Zhodane".

The total population of the Imperium should work out to something like 22 trillion. I´d estimate the total number of people who are victims of debt slavery somewhere either in the millions or low tens of millions. A relatively remote region such as the Spinward Marches probably has a somewhat disproportionately large chunk of these. So... I dunno... a couple dozen operations, total number of victims in the low millions?

 

[mike wightman]

The Imperium

Traveller assumes a remote centralized government (referred to in this volume as the Imperium), possessed of great industrial and technological might, but unable, due to the sheer distances and travel times involved, to exert total control at all levels everywhere within its star-spanning realm.

The lmperium is a strong interstellar government encompassing 281 subsectors and approximately 11,000 worlds. Approximately 1100 years old, it is the third human empire to control this area, the oldest, and the strongest. Nevertheless, it is under strong pressure from its neighboring interstellar governments, and does not have the strength nor the power which it once had.

On the frontiers, extensive home rule provisions allow planetary populations to choose their own forms of government, raise and maintain armed forces for local security, pass and enforce laws governing local conduct, and regulate (within limits) commerce.

We learn a lot about the frontier as we learn more about the Spinward Marches, but is that the elephant's trunk, tail or leg?

Consider what we learn about Imperial core worlds from A:1

Large numbers of colonists were recruited and shipped in cold sleep from the Imperial core...
An interesting aspect of such colonization projects is the recruitment method used to supply the personnel who will actually make the colony function. Since virtually no amount of money will entice an individual to leave his home and livelihood for the bleak desolation of a colony world, the Ministry of Colonization has established several programs to produce colonists. Most obvious is the colonize in lieu of prison term program. However, several other programs have also shown signs of success. In the unemployment insurance program, high population worlds have successfully used the colonization project as a means of reducing unemployment over the long term. In a similar medical insurance program, indigents unable to obtain medical treatment are provided with their needs in exchange for signing on to a colony.

Something that just struck me in that passage is the use of the word indigents rather than citizens...
all of the above suggests to me the Third Imperium core worlds are a lot closer to a dystopia - that's before adding in the evidence of imprisonment without trial, political prisoners, kidnapping/experimenting on/enslaving sentient beings etc

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

The Imperium



We learn a lot about the frontier as we learn more about the Spinward Marches, but is that the elephant's trunk, tail or leg?

Consider what we learn about Imperial core worlds from A:1

Something that just struck me in that passage is the use of the word indigents rather than citizens...
all of the above suggests to me the Third Imperium core worlds are a lot closer to a dystopia - that's before adding in the evidence of imprisonment without trial, political prisoners, kidnapping/experimenting on/enslaving sentient beings etc

?!?

what evidence?

I'm not doubting you, but I havnt seen anything to that effect, personally.

 

[mike wightman]

Adventure 1:
player characters end up imprisoned without trial in one adventure sequence
we learn the subsector government has locked up a dissenting politician and concocted a story that he has disappeared and are even offering a reward
Adventure 2:
IN Intelligence agents/troops kidnap sentient aliens to be imprisoned and experimented on in Research Station Gamma

 

[creativehum]

But you have to choose which Third Imperium you're talking about.

Or rather where you draw the line on when you stop adding in further and further sources of information about the Third Imperium. As others have noted the nature of the Third Imperium changed over the time as more CT products were released, and certainly changed in nature during different editions of the game -- even for the same periods of the OTU's history.

As far as I can tell the Third Imperium described in the early CT Adventures is not the same Third Imperium described in GURPS: Traveller... in many aspects.

 

[Chaos]

But you have to choose which Third Imperium you're talking about.

Or rather where you draw the line on when you stop adding in further and further sources of information about the Third Imperium. As others have noted the nature of the Third Imperium changed over the time as more CT products were released, and certainly changed in nature during different editions of the game -- even for the same periods of the OTU's history.

As far as I can tell the Third Imperium described in the early CT Adventures is not the same Third Imperium described in GURPS: Traveller... in many aspects.

You also have to be careful in distinguishing between "the Third Imperium" and some subsector government somewhere in the boonies or some group of intelligence operatives.

 

[mike wightman]

I've never been able to pin down exactly when the Imperium shifted from black hats to white hats.
If I had to pick an event it is the Fifth Frontier War which suddenly made the Imperials the good guys and the Coalition the bad guys.
There was then an airbrushing of Norris into a good guy - it was Norris who headed the government in the Regina subsector guilty of all the A:1 shenanigans.

 

[mike wightman]

You also have to be careful in distinguishing between "the Third Imperium" and some subsector government somewhere in the boonies or some group of intelligence operatives.

Imperial government begins at the subsector level - it is the government of duke Norris no less responsible for the behind the scenes corruption in A:1.
It is an Imperial Research Station, supplied by agents and troops from the IN Intelligence branch...

So where is the information on what Imperial core worlds are like?

Other than the quotes I gave there is practically nothing else in CT canon about core Imperial worlds.

JTAS TAS News bulletins provide some interesting hints - routine use of drop tanks on civilian shipping in the core sectors and the introduction of a jump 6 x-boat network based on drop tanks.

 

[McPerth]

Adventure 1:
player characters end up imprisoned without trial in one adventure sequence
we learn the subsector government has locked up a dissenting politician and concocted a story that he has disappeared and are even offering a reward
Adventure 2:
IN Intelligence agents/troops kidnap sentient aliens to be imprisoned and experimented on in Research Station Gamma

In the initial Traveller, Imperium was quite dark (I guess Influenced by Star wars). Latter it becamo more genle and benevolent, and some data seems contradictory (in A1, the political jailed in the Gash is a senator, while in the latter imperium there is no senate, and so no such senators).

I've never been able to pin down exactly when the Imperium shifted from black hats to white hats.
If I had to pick an event it is the Fifth Frontier War which suddenly made the Imperials the good guys and the Coalition the bad guys.
There was then an airbrushing of Norris into a good guy - it was Norris who headed the government in the Regina subsector guilty of all the A:1 shenanigans.

Remember, at this time Norris was uninvolved with IN, being just the Duke or Regina. IN chief was then Santanochev. As it is depicted, maybe its removal marked some inflexion point on this too...

 

[creativehum]

In the initial Traveller, Imperium was quite dark (I guess Influenced by Star wars)...

There is no doubt that movies and books that came out after the release of Traveller (like Star Wars) influenced the game line as it continued.

But we don't have to look to Star Wars for the influence of corrupt authority. And we can certainly look to the books that inspired the game, published before 1977, for direct touchstones for the kind of Imperium we see in Adventure 1.

Off the top of my head I'm thinking of the empire from King David's Spaceship, which is abuse, arrogant, bullying, treating the world's it conquers as children to be dominated and beaten without thought. (The imperial Naval officers in the first chapter are particularly set up for scorn.)

And then, of course, the Dumarest books (which Marc Miller always names in every interview on the topic as a core influence of Traveller) depend on a noble class of rules (all sorts of nobility) that toss their influence around at the expense of the less powerful, clutching to keep power, and treating their royal status as license to behave whatever they want.

Other examples of the sort of abused interstellar governments found in Adventure 1 can be found in other SF tales from the 40s though the mid-70s of course.

There's no doubt that the Imperium changed over time... but there are clear examples in the books that influenced Traveller to suggest that the qualities that Mike is quoting could have been drawn from many sources beside Star Wars, and that came out before Star Wars.

 

[aramis]

But you have to choose which Third Imperium you're talking about.

Or rather where you draw the line on when you stop adding in further and further sources of information about the Third Imperium. As others have noted the nature of the Third Imperium changed over the time as more CT products were released, and certainly changed in nature during different editions of the game -- even for the same periods of the OTU's history.

As far as I can tell the Third Imperium described in the early CT Adventures is not the same Third Imperium described in GURPS: Traveller... in many aspects.

I've been pointing that out for years...

There's a reason there's the Prototraveller concept and the 4-4-4 plan (B1-4, S1-4, A1-4).

The thing is, the bulk of CT is written by/for Big Ship Universe Big 3I.

Note that, on the 4-4-4 plan, you don't have the "3rd Imperium".... just the Imperium... (A reference in S3 mentions the Imperium as the 3rd human empire to hold the marches... but it's not the "Third Imperium" explicitly.)

In the early days (for me, 1983-1985, when I finally got S8 & S11), I thought the imperium to be considerably smaller than what the canon is...

Something like:
[link to COTI image page]

 

[creativehum]

I've been pointing that out for years...

Yup. As have I.

The thing is, the bulk of CT is written by/for Big Ship Universe Big 3I.

Absolutely. Because, in my view, once Book 5 is published Traveller as a game and a setting becomes a place of massive ships, incredibly powerful armaments, and rules that make several of the difficulties of space travel vanish. (Hello, fuel purifiers!)

The point I make about this is that Books 4, 5, and the other Books were optional add-ons to the game. (This is a point Marc Miller makes again and again in interviews.) If the Referee and Players want the additional details and new rules the are there to use. But if not, the game works fine with Books 1-3. Of course, Book 5 shifts the nature of so many things that it either takes hold of your imagination and redefines everything... or it doesn't. If it does it has a powerful grip on the setting, making a very powerful centralized government.

I always look at the early phase of Classic Traveller (B1-4, S1-4, A1-4) as GDW getting its bearings on what the setting will be like based on all the possible influences. (The settings and size of ships of The Demon Princes books and the Dumarest books are one kind of feel for interstellar society (with ships much more in the scale of Books 1-3) while "A Spaceship for King David" feels much more like a Book 5 setting.)

So in these early adventures the scale of how big ships in the universe are isn't quiet settled. The nature of the "Imperium" in the adventures isn't quite settled. What it means to be a "citizen," what rights the Imperium offers (if any, given the rumors floating around Adventure 1) isn't settled. How civilized and safe space is (given the difference in the ship encounter tables found in the 1977 and 1981 editions of the game) isn't settled. If you look at all the possible variations from '79 to '81 you can see the house setting GDW was making was under construction even as they were printing it. You also see that it could have gone several very different directions.

In a recent interview at Stargazer's World Miller said:

First, GDW designers like order rather than chaos, and even when they try to introduce chaos, they are also writing stories that work at reducing chaos. There is always a striving for order and peace rather than increasing disorder.

While I respect the impulse on the part of the GDW staff, disorder often makes for a better RPG environment. I'm not talking Mad Max chaos -- simply the disorder and political strife suggested in Adventure 1.

This desire among gamers for less order rather than more order isn't universal of course. But others see the initial premise of the OTU Traveller setting as terrific setting "soil" to engender situations and adventures.

This is why when conversation about citizenship and rights come up there is often a tension between what the Imperium became through GDW's staff's desire for order and peace... and the siren call some of us hear of the earlier, more chaotic politics and policies of a different kind of empire found in the early books.

And so, again, the question is: When speaking of the qualities and policies of "The Imperium" which "Imperium" is one talking about? Since "The Imperium" has been several things, with very different policies and qualities, over time.