Sure they do. You just replace the mysticism with guns and call yourself "Comandante" or "Premier" or "Fearless Leader" or whatever fanciful title you want. It really all comes down to being able to hang onto your monopoly on arms; lose that, and you start having to negotiate with the riff raff.
Have you ever considered how vast the 3rd Imperium is?
- Thread starter Chuck Anumia
- Start date
Sure they do. You just replace the mysticism with guns and call yourself "Comandante" or "Premier" or "Fearless Leader" or whatever fanciful title you want. It really all comes down to being able to hang onto your monopoly on arms; lose that, and you start having to negotiate with the riff raff.
It's part of the reason I tried to table adventures written in places OTHER than the Spin-March and Foreven. You read about the background material, but rarely, before Imperiumgames and before RPGRealms, were there any adventures in Aslan, Hiver, K'Kree or other reaches of known space.
Much of that was because the 3I was meant to be the generic empire for your RP session du jour; i.e. your Federation or Galactic Empire that your players could relate to. Even so, it would have been interesting to see adventures in those other areas to add flavor to the already rich background.
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BlackBat242
SOC-14 1K
"[strikethrough]Space[/strikethrough] The Imperium," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to [strikethrough]space[/strikethrough] The Imperium, listen..."
arbitrary.remora
SOC-8
"Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward among the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before - and thus was the Empire forged."
You forget about the strong and I mean STROOOOOONNNNNNGGGGG Vilani influence. They're ingrained towards nobility, even with millennia of Solomani contact.
No, they're predisposed towards merchants! No wait, it's millers!
No, they were nobles and merchants and food preparers long, long ago, but all three turned into bureaucrats. So, no, Vilani have no special cultural penchant for nobles over and above the natural human desire to lord it over your neighbors.
Hans
For the ultimate picaresque campaign: Aekhogh (2413/Listanaya) to St Albertine (2040/Amderstun) - 11 sectors = 440 hexes - hope your library prog has got a few good books in it.
Hkakhaeaw to Avereguar would be 16 sectors at 32 hexes per sector (going spinward to trailing) = 512 hexes.
Or, just join the next Core Expedition...
Hkakhaeaw to Avereguar would be 16 sectors at 32 hexes per sector (going spinward to trailing) = 512 hexes.
Or, just join the next Core Expedition...
The Vilani nobility, from what I recall, were essentially the elite ruling class. Then the Terrans came along and threw a monkey wrench into the works, which shifted the power base.
I seem to recall the Vilani are slow to change, and the ruling class actually appear to have a kind of tendency towards elitism.
The Vilani nobles were one of three equally powerful castes. When the Vilani expanded off Vland (or some time later), each group formed one of the three bureaux, at which point they all became pretty much alike, albeit with some individual biases arising from their respective origins. The nobles became Makhidkarun, the merchants became Sharurshid, and the cooks became Naasirka.
Hans
esampson
SOC-13
"Cooks" as I understand it is also something of a misnomer. They were the people connected with dietary law and so were closer to Kosher butchers than someone we would term "cook" or even "chef". Their position became associated with preservation of tradition and interpretation of traditions.
So in many ways they fulfill the role of priests in the sociological trinity of nobility, merchants, and religion, although in the Third Imperium they do it without a lot of the supernatural overtones of religion.
So in many ways they fulfill the role of priests in the sociological trinity of nobility, merchants, and religion, although in the Third Imperium they do it without a lot of the supernatural overtones of religion.
Yes. Since my players operate out the Spinward Marches & the Beyond, the furtherest they've gotten is Deneb.
Are you the same Chuck Anumia that's in SP?
DK
Are you the same Chuck Anumia that's in SP?
DK
Frankymole
SOC-12
I view it as much like the British Empire in the Age of Sail. It can take months or a year to check the frontiers of empire and report back. Local insurgencies or even major wars have to be handled locally at first. But the broad thrust of policy can be dictated by a diplomatic or aristocratic class over a period of decades. It's wide open for adventure and for personal gain or even social climbing (as GDW's En Garde before did so well before Traveller).
esampson
SOC-13
Actually much worse than that. During the 18th century the time it would take to sail from England to Australia or India had a lower bound of around 4 months.
At Jump-4 the shortest trip from Capital to Jewell is 42 jumps (http://www.joffrehorlor.com/Roleplaying/JRC/calculate.php?From=3209&To=1479&Profile=fast). If you never stop (which is highly unrealistic) that would take 9.8 months. If you assume a more realistic 1 day downtime between each jump (this would allow the arriving x-boat 1 day to transfer all its data to a ready x-boat which then jumps out. Considering the amount of data that probably has to be transferred that isn't highly unrealistic) you are adding an extra 41 days bringing your total to 11 months, or almost 3 times as long as it would take for orders to travel through the British Empire.
Frankymole was talking about an qualitative analogy with the British Empire, not quantitative. And who's to say that with more knowledge of the pitfalls of long-distance government, a TL 12+ empire can't manage a longer distance from the capital to the borders? Even the Age of Sail empires managed to work at the longest distance that they could possibly achieve on Earth. That various low-tech empires broke down at around 6 months' turnaround is certainly worth keeping in mind, but it doesn't PROVE that later historic empires couldn't have managed better, much less that future empires can't.
The X-boats are irrelevant. We know for a fact that the Imperial Navy has J6 couriers. Crucial reports and orders can and will be forwarded by navy couriers. At Jump-6 there are 32 jumps from Capital to Regina (Jewell is a county answering to Regina). Still twice as long as the 4 months you mention, but not provably impossible.
The X-boats canonically takes only a few hours (I forget exactly how many; 6?) to transfer their information to the next X-boat.
At a pinch, information can be divided into priority and regular, with the priority transferred as quickly as possible and the rest left over for the next departure, 6 hours later.
It's even possible to shave off a few hours of the average transit time by using multiple X-boats/couriers simultaneously (if just one of the couriers arrive in less than the average jump time, the information arrive in less than the average time), though the X-boats do not seem to have hit on that dodge. Perhaps they used to do it back in the old days and the practice fell into disuse when the invention of Jump-5 made the X-boats irrelevant.
Hans
esampson
SOC-13
Obviously they can manage the distance, because they do. I wasn't trying to say you couldn't have an empire where it took on the order of a year for information to travel from the center of the empire to the outer edges. I was simply trying to show that the people on the outside edges would be required to be even more independent than they were in the British Empire.
Not irrelevant because the impression I had was that the majority of information (and orders) traveled via the standard x-boats. The Jump-6 x-boats are a secret and the only way to keep something like that secret is to use them judiciously. If every single order to the outlying regions was transmitted via jump-6 ships (while regular mail was transmitted via jump-4) there would be so much jump-6 travel that it would be very difficult to keep it secret.
I would imagine that the jump-6 boats would be used for things like 'Strephon has been assassinated' or 'the Zhodani are invading'. General instructions for troop movements and the like would probably go through jump-4.
I was trying to see if I could find anything that talked about that. What I actually encountered was stuff talking about how quickly the scout services could refuel and send off the x-boat, but honestly that seems silly. Much better to transmit the information to a ready ship that takes off as soon as it is done then do your refueling and maintenance on the craft that just arrived.
Of course with the model of the jump-6 network that I mentioned above you wouldn't be able to do that because I wouldn't assume that each station would have an available jump-6 boat to be placed on standby. They probably would jump in, transmit their much smaller information package and get refueled and sent on their way.
If the next boat is able to jump within 6 hours then there probably isn't much point in multiple ships. Cutting out 6 hours per jump would make a difference of 10 days to the furthest reaches of the Imperium. So you would go from 294 days to 304 days, reducing transmission time by about 3% while doubling the number of ships needed. Likewise you probably would not send multiple ships just so that the first one that arrived could pass on the message faster. Your average time savings in that case would probably be less than 3% while you've at least doubled the number of ships.
That's what the story about how Norris got advance notice of Strephon's death says, yes. Unfortunately, the story is starkly unbelievable, precisely because of the existence of navy couriers[*]. In addition to Norris, at least 34 fleet admirals (plus any dukes said admirals might feel it their duty to inform) would get the news just as fast as Norris.
So if we ignore that story, what have we left? An X-boat network that has not been updated to jump-5 in 700 or to jump-6 in 1000. Navy couriers capable of jump-6. The only explanation for why the X-boats weren't updated to fulfil their function is that they had been superceded and made irrelevant. My take is that when jump-5 was invented, the Navy kept it a military secret for as long as they could. A couple of decades, perhaps. And during that time, the Imperial bureaucracy got into the habit of sending copies of reports and orders by navy couriers. No doubt the originals were still sent by X-mail, as the regulations bade; indeed, I'm sure the originals are still sent by X-mail by the Classic Era. But when the J5 drive were finally declassified, there was no urgent need to update the X-boats, and they lost out in the budget fights. Almost exactly the same happened when the jump-6 drive was invented.
[*] And also because if the Emperor can have a secret jump-6 courier network then so can archdukes, dukes, megacorporations, and high-population worlds. Maybe not as extensive as the Emperor's (though the megacorporations might well have), but certainly good enough to convey such momentous news as the death of an emperor.
The Emperor's courier network is secret (As secret as the existence of any intelligence agency, anyway). The navy couriers are public knowledge. There are a couple of TNS newsbriefs datelined on Regina that cites dispatches brought from Terra by Navy courier. They not only demonstrate the existence of jump-6 couriers beynd any doubt, the two runs are so fast that conspiracy theorists must be using them to prove the existence of jump-7!
Jump-6 couriers aren't that expensive and any fleet admiral will want a whole lot of them to manage his fleet in wartime. Using them for courier duty seems a natural way to employ them during peacetime.
That's why I mentioned them as an afterthought. Of course, if advance notice is as valuable as the MT text says, 10 days can represent vast fortunes.
Hans
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Why secret? Is there some canon reference that speaks to J6 being secret? We know there are J6 couriers. FFW also speaks to a few J6 cruiser squadrons, very long-legged but likely light in the firepower department. Only four worlds in the Marches are capable of building J6 ships, and they aren't useful for trade, but I don't know anything that says a company couldn't have a J6 courier built for its own needs.
J6 is potentially very useful for the Navy. Worlds can communicate enemy sightings quickly to rear bases and nearby fleets; in fact, a well-organized network of J6 pickets could provide fleets with a wider view of enemy operations within 6 parsecs of them. Fleets can communicate their needs, dispositions and battle results with rear bases at greater distances, and those bases can forward intelligence to forward fleets at a greater distance. It seems odd that the fleet would forgo those strategic advantages just to keep secret a communications link with the Imperial seat. Also doesn't seem like they could use J6 on that scale and keep it a secret.
esampson
SOC-13
I think it was a misunderstanding on my part. There's a reference in the Imperial Encyclopedia about how the Imperium publicly declares that the cost for increasing the network to jump-6 would not outway the costs. However the reference doesn't actually state that the jump-6 couriers are secret.
Most likely their existence is well known but people just assume that those naval courier's are too busy and lack the memory capacity for usage in general x-boat duties.
