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The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) Complete Sequel Up

Investigate the Sea?

  • Yes

    Votes: 593 80.4%

  • No

    Votes: 145 19.6%
  • Total voters
    738
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Hey, you think we should like, make each resource colony turn over a small percentage of their output to the Imperial Trust? That way we can do things like dedicate Imperial Trust troops only to colonies that are already under attack while providing "lend lease" to lower priority colonies or support any sympathetic states that are not part of our Imperium.

Just more options you know.

AvidFicReader said:
For most of modern Avernus' history, reliable ground defenses were able to compensate for overwhelming enemy naval superiority, though how much of that can be attributed to the wildlife is up for debate among military historians and analysts.
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Well we smacked down the Necrons and Orks with . . . essentially trivial effort. I'm sure without the wildlife assistance we would have been fine anyway.
 
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AvidFicReader said:
For most of modern Avernus' history, reliable ground defenses were able to compensate for overwhelming enemy naval superiority, though how much of that can be attributed to the wildlife is up for debate among military historians and analysts.
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I can answer that, and it's very little.
The best defense we've had against naval superiority (only really used by Garkill) has always been Void Shields and Planetary Laser Cannons.
 
runes said:
**ps @durin, Defense is spelt with a s not a c.**
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Or so claims spell check. Drives me nuts because I always learned "defence" and I'm American.

DarknessSmiles said:
What do you guys think of my compromises?
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Ehh... I'd rather just pick the current compromise defence choice and have done with it.

On the legal protections, I think there is a major problem with requiring the government be a certain percentage born on the planet. We have Juvenat. You'd basically be forcing out the most experienced and well trained people who are the actual founders of the colonies in favor of their inexperienced children.

It sets son against father, and I'm not sure what advantage there is. Are the founding generation not going to care about their children's future?

I think that whole requirement should be removed.

Anti-No said:
I suspect Champion Surt actually knows best as he has historical data to work from on what worked the last time'. We have seen fleets come by that we could not possibly stop before landfall.
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AvidFicReader said:
For most of modern Avernus' history, reliable ground defenses were able to compensate for overwhelming enemy naval superiority, though how much of that can be attributed to the wildlife is up for debate among military historians and analysts.
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Yeah, basically people are letting their personal experiences focus their positions. Vanaheim and the Navy of course think that having a powerful Navy is the batter solution. Muspelheim and others that focus on ground warfare and historically have not had strong naval defences think ground is the way to go.

I think both can work. I lean towards the ground based defences... but that's natural for an Avernite.

I'd rather just vote for the compromise position and see if we can keep the disappointment to the minimum.
 
Elder Haman said:
I think that whole requirement should be removed.
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The requirement that x percent of the colony government has to be 'homegrown' is neccessary, as otherwise the government who set up the colony will make certain they have people in all key positions, forever. And for some strange reason the colony government keeps agreeing to do whatever the sponsoring goverment wants. Weird, right?

If there is no 'x percent of the colony government has to be homegrown' we basically set up a situation where a colony has to do some kind of revolution (armed or otherwise) to become self-governed. And whether said revolutions are successful or not - the colony inhabitants will have reason to carry a grudge.

On the military side, yes, you have a good point. Just go for the compromise.
 
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@durin - What do the various factions thing of adding a militia requirement, similar to the initial militia that Avernus raised. Say, four hours of training for some range between 25% to 80% of the population. This pointing out that Avernus did it around 35 years after founding.

Also, what would they think of adding the Defence Monitor and ADC requirement to the initial compromise position, with the requirement of doubling that every fifty years? Argue that we agree with leaning towards ground defenses, but at the very least one ADC is needed for anti-piracy measures.

Elder Haman said:
On the legal protections, I think there is a major problem with requiring the government be a certain percentage born on the planet. We have Juvenat. You'd basically be forcing out the most experienced and well trained people who are the actual founders of the colonies in favor of their inexperienced children.

It sets son against father, and I'm not sure what advantage there is. Are the founding generation not going to care about their children's future?

I think that whole requirement should be removed.
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I believe the idea is that the colonial government should be run by people whose loyalty leans more towards the colony, rather than the place they came from. Also, with Juvenat the "inexperienced children" can have been alive for decades and so won't exactly be inexperienced by that time.

Regardless, I don't think you're going to get rid of the idea given how many people are supporting it.
 
On defense proposals: we don't actually want all worlds to defend themselves in the same ways. Local conditions will favour certain methods of defense and having the same approach to defense on every world will create a mono-culture that will mean that an enemy which finds some unforseen weakness can exploit the same weakness in every Trust world they find.

fasquardon
 
Anti-No said:
The requirement that x percent of the colony government has to be 'homegrown' is neccessary, as otherwise the government who set up the colony will make certain they have people in all key positions, forever. And for some strange reason the colony government keeps agreeing to do whatever the sponsoring goverment wants? Weird, right?

If there is no 'x percent of the colony government has to be homegrown' we basically set up a situation where a colony has to do some kind of revolution (armed or otherwise) to become self-governed.
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Umm... what?

Look, you're basically saying that the founding generation of the colony, is going to put their loyalty to their home system above the interests of their own children.

That's crazy. Are you suggesting that Rotbart is more loyal to his birth planet than to Avernus?

Plus, you will be replacing the best and most experienced with people who don't have experience. How is that beneficial?

Colonies are going to be loyal to their colonizer for a long long time. That's natural. But at the same time, they are not going to sacrifice their own children's future for their colonizer.

The requirement should be that the government is 100% local. That's it. That way, whoever is running the government on the colony is someone who has made the colony their new home, and the focus of their future. Their children and their grandchildren are all there. It's where they have lived for 100 years.

How is that not "self-governed?"

I mean, let's reduce the time frame so that it's analogous to real life (no juvenat). You colonize a planet, and then you say that within twenty years, 75% of the government must be native born.

That means your government is going to be run by teenagers.

That's just crazy.
 
Enjou said:
I believe the idea is that the colonial government should be run by people whose loyalty leans more towards the colony, rather than the place they came from. Also, with Juvenat the "inexperienced children" can have been alive for decades and so won't exactly be inexperienced by that time.

Regardless, I don't think you're going to get rid of the idea given how many people are supporting it.
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I get the idea. I'm just saying it's incredibly stupid.

And with Juvenat the people they will be replacing will probably have 200 years of life experience. It's a clear anti-elderly proposal, and completely unnecessary.

It's just that most people on this site are younguns, and so you don't realize how absolutely horrific this proposal is.
 
[X] Support the compromise position put forward by Governor-General Aelfric
-[X] Point out that each proposal is built around the historical experiences of the various systems about what worked best for them. Each approach is valid, but here we are only setting the minimum requirements. It's quite probable that many colonizers will improve their colony's defenses beyond this minimum. Let us pick the compromise position, and then each colonizer can extend those defenses in whichever way they think best.

[X] Propose that each colony shall be required to give no more than half of its tax income to the colonizer, a number that cannot exceed ten percent of its total income. Propose that within a decade of the colony forming it shall have a local government made up entirely of people living on the colony. After fifty years, 50% of the local government officials must be native born or have 25 years of residency. After seventy-five years 66% of the local government officials must be native born or have 35 years of residency. After one hundred years 75% of the local government officials must be native born or have 50 years of residency, and the colonial government will be subject to an Inquisitorial audit to ensure that the colonizer has not attempted to set up a puppet government. Propose that the Governor of an independent colony must be a natural born citizen, or residing on the colony at the time of independence. Propose that within twenty years there must be a basic education system, and that withing sixty years a higher education system. Propose that the local government should have the right to present petitions to the High Council and that the High Council shall have the right to intervene in any colony with a two thirds vote.
-[X] Point out that requirements for native born government leaders would replace the founding generation with their children. Thereby replacing the more experienced and wise with young and less experienced leaders. Furthermore it would create hostility between parents and children. Nor do you think the benefits particularly great. Point out that while you still have great affection for your birth planet of Gallium, you would not sacrifice Avernus for Gallium. Similarly, you do not believe that the parents of the children of the colony are going to sacrifice their children for the sake of their colonizer. While there surely will be a long lasting loyalty to their colonizer, it will be as an adult child to their parent, and not as a slave or servant. Does a person sacrifice their child for the sake of their parent? The native born proposal is based on an assumption of conflict that should not be assumed to exist within a family. In being imposed it will create the very conflict that it assumes.
-[X] On the subject of the High Council interfering in a colony, point out that it will be a significant action, and should only take place under egregious circumstances. To minimize hostility from the colonizer, it would be better to require a significant portion of the Imperial Trust to take such a controversial step.
 
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Alex pears said:
Agreed as a teenager myself I will say without a doubt that we should never be put in charge of ANYTHING.

Seriously me and my friends can't even organise a literal piss up in a brewery without a two hour planning session.
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Well, in fairness, it is pretty hard to get a bunch of mates together and convince them to urinate into the air. :V
 
Elder Haman said:
I get the idea. I'm just saying it's incredibly stupid.

And with Juvenat the people they will be replacing will probably have 200 years of life experience. It's a clear anti-elderly proposal, and completely unnecessary.

It's just that most people on this site are younguns, and so you don't realize how absolutely horrific this proposal is.
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they are nearly a hundred years old, that is not children, they are not teenagers and comparing them to teenagers is insulting and shortsighterd
hell you were not a hundred when Avernus was founded and Drago was the only one of your advisers to be over a hundred
 
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Even the US constitution restricts only the office of the president to natural born citizens and has an exception for citizens at the time of its adaption. The idea that being born somewhere is a necessary requirement for being loyal is absurd.
 
Skewfiend said:
Well, in fairness, it is pretty hard to get a bunch of mates together and convince them to urinate into the air. :V
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Well to our credit some of it was stuff that needed to be thought out, like who was going to not get drunk and have the car key's and stuff like that, but then we got onto the nit picky stuff, and O BOY did that take a long time to figure out :D
 
@Elder Haman - a few things aside from what durin mentioned.

1. In Imperial culture it's frequently the case that government officials are often encouraged to not get married and have children so they don't have divided loyalties between the state and their families. Just look at our own heads of state on Avernus - only two of them have been married in spite of the amount of time that has passed, and Frederick only did because of political reasons. After that I think only one of our Lt. Generals have married as well. Most of them haven't, and I suspect most of them never will.

2. Remember that the government includes more than just the heads of state. It also includes the various bureaucrats and various staffers. As the colony grows the amount of civil servants and whatnot will also grow with it. Considering the first point, it's well possible for a colonizer to just send in people from their own world to fill these positions, and they could keep doing so for much longer than a century in order to maintain de facto control over the colonial government since that very government would already be loyal to them and continue the process of importing civil servants rather than home growing them. (Also on this note, the lower positions is an excellent way for the eventual replacements for any heads of state to gain experience)

3. Using Rotbart's loyalties to his own homeworld isn't quite a valid example. Rotbart's homeworld is far, far away and he'll never be in contact with it ever again. The colonies will be in easy traveling distance of their colonizers here, so maintaining ties of loyalty is a lot easier. You mentioned that the initial colonial government would have their children on the world being colonized, but given Juvenat they could well have had their children already on the colonizer's world. In such a situation, it would be easier to convince such people to exploit the colony for the benefit of the colonizer's world since that would actually be what's better for their children, both due to the prosperity of the colonizer's world and due to any bribes the colonizer might offer ("do what we want, your kids get juvenat and other goodies").
 
So, here's my ten cents on the ideas I've seen.

I'm tossed up on the birth requirement. I think that we might want to make it an advisory requirement honestly--just make sure people know that there will be questions asked if the colony isn't being run by a home-grown government after a certain period of time.

On that note, for the defenses, my take is that we should argue the compromise position--maybe with some militia--but leave the door open for specific colonies to petition if they think they've got a good reason to be an exception. Like, say, if the orbit of their primary world is too full of debris for effective static space defense, or if the population of the colony is small enough that supporting that many PDF regiments is an undue burden, but they're way above the minimum required space defense level.

Basically, we should set these rules up as guidelines, but we should also make a point that this is the minimum acceptable level of defenses to not be a liability, and that the goal of most reasonable governments should be higher than "not a liability".
 
durin said:
they are nearly a hundred years old, that is not children, they are not teenagers and comparing them to teenagers is insulting and shortsighterd
hell you were not a hundred when Avernus was founded and Drago was the only one of your advisers to be over a hundred
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200 years ago, the idea of "teenagers" would have seemed strange to most people. Once you were mature enough to do adult work and have children, you were considered an adult.

In the modern world, with longer healthy life expectancy, a need for long educations to train people up for the level of skill needed to manage our complex technology and society and the wealth for young strong people to gad about a bit before committing to a path for their adult life, we've developed this strange twilight childhood that we call "teenhood".

A few rare pre-modern societies had even longer twilight periods where a person could be fully physically mature but not considered sufficiently mentally mature to take on full responsibility.

To project modern ideas of maturity on a society over 40,000 years in the future, let alone a society like that on Avernus, where not only are people highly educated, not only is Juvenat life-extension becoming common, but the entire society is routinely defenestrated by high mortality rates for mature adults is, I think, foolhardy. Avernus in 500 years could quite easily have an extended idea of "teenhood" extending from 13 to 110, or no concept of "teenhood", or a tiered system of "baby, child, teenager, really young adult, young adult, adult enough to be given a basic level of respect, honored elder".

This is not to say that any of the above systems of age classification are "right". I just get the impression you may be mistaking how our culture deals with these things as somehow "natural", which just isn't so.

fasquardon
 
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