Well, the other point is... we're making very focused Starfleet colonies. It's conceivable that the Starfleet portion of each of our colonies remains fixed while people doing non-Starfleet activity move in and grow around our little mining and research outposts. Not every one of them, but a fair number. This doesn't have to have anything to do with us, because there's no real reason for growth to increase Starfleet resources, it just provides Oneiros a guide as to what worlds he can make more important in the future.
To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
-
- Tags
- star trek exploration fully automated luxury gay space communism top level canon (canon) #hashtagcontent all-encompassing space amoeba cardassian boy bands cardassian magical girls darkest bureaucracy debate makes the qm cackle like palpatine hoh is an empire quest it has to be foreign infiltrators more ships ship happens singers delenda est starfleet this is not an empire quest ur waifu is collective?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
SWB's speculation is very reasonable. When Starfleet founds a colony we directly petition the Council to let us build a facility/base/outpost/whatever to do a specific thing. The value of that specific thing is more or less fixed, except insofar as new technology lets us get more mileage out of our limited license to do something like "mine this site" or "observe and analyze this spatial anomaly."
What other people choose to do in and around that place is their business, and has no major direct effect on us.
Realistically, if we're talking about colonies whose sheer population and economic diversity allows them to contribute meaningfully to our pp/rp income, on a scale where United Earth and all her nearby colonies only contribute 5rp and 10pp a year to us...
That's pretty ambitious.
What other people choose to do in and around that place is their business, and has no major direct effect on us.
That is yet another good reason to not worry about this for colonies we found.
Realistically, if we're talking about colonies whose sheer population and economic diversity allows them to contribute meaningfully to our pp/rp income, on a scale where United Earth and all her nearby colonies only contribute 5rp and 10pp a year to us...
That's pretty ambitious.
To be fair I would expect that by the time they grow that big we would actually loose control over those colonies since they should become independent members of the Federation and no longer satellites of Starfleet. Indeed I actually long suspected that Oneiros keeps that mechanic in reserve in case he ever needs to limit our rather impressive resource surplus.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Well, yes and no. When people move in to a Starfleet colony, you can be pretty sure they're using our infrastructure and our security services and the like. If you build a fort you will eventually end up with a town, and in the absence of other authority the fort will provide because the town is important to its smooth operation in a negative sense if in no other.
This probably holds true until the civilians outnumber Starfleet presence by times several, if not more.
This probably holds true until the civilians outnumber Starfleet presence by times several, if not more.
ClawClawBite
Mad Engineering!
- Location
- Seattle, WA
Well, if there is a need for more internal events, adding ones based on Starfleet supported colony growth to the table could be interesting.
As I believe I've theorized before, I don't think "Starfleet" colonies directly feed to Starfleet, because that would be super-fucked. Instead its more a rising tide lifts all ships scenario, where by establishing an outpost to feed resources into the larger Federation pot, we also gain a proportionate increase in resources. I imagine they're more "Federation" or "Federally-Administrated" colonies.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
...well okay but who's the Federation agency who can provide you technical people and security personnel and administrators and all the other things necessary for heat, light, and safety?
Starfleet. It's kind of what we do.
Now I have no doubt that some cut of this stuff goes to the parts of Starfleet under the hood like Medical and the SCE and Logistics Command but we are the Federation agency. We do the stuff. All of it.
Last edited:
In a way, it makes sense that the Council has said to us "if you need more resources, go find them".
Starfleet resources are specialized and I think it's likely that very few other people in Federation space use the same things we do. Research sites on stellar phenomena are mostly unique to us (and shareable), and Starfleet accounts for the lion's share of starship materials both bulk and specialized. The other users are civilian ships, member fleets, and groundside uses. Because interstellar trade seems to only involve shipping around rare materials anyway, it becomes kind of self-serving to ship rare materials for the purpose of building ships that use rare materials to so those ships can ship more rare materials. So you have this balance each world is making between their civilian allowance, their member fleet allowance, their groundside uses, and their Starfleet contribution.
Starfleet discovering a new colony site for resources and then using those resources themselves doesn't greatly affect the balance sheets or economies of the member powers. Those resources are not necessarily useful for the majority of government activity. When it does affect them, then they usually bitch about it or ask us to donate the site, which has happened in the past but is a minority of discoveries.
Basically, expenditure on Starfleet may only be 1 or 2% of government budgets, but may be 20% to 40% of specific types of resources. Keeping in mind that in post-currency economies, there would probably be specific budgets for each scarce resource rather than an overall budget.
Starfleet resources are specialized and I think it's likely that very few other people in Federation space use the same things we do. Research sites on stellar phenomena are mostly unique to us (and shareable), and Starfleet accounts for the lion's share of starship materials both bulk and specialized. The other users are civilian ships, member fleets, and groundside uses. Because interstellar trade seems to only involve shipping around rare materials anyway, it becomes kind of self-serving to ship rare materials for the purpose of building ships that use rare materials to so those ships can ship more rare materials. So you have this balance each world is making between their civilian allowance, their member fleet allowance, their groundside uses, and their Starfleet contribution.
Starfleet discovering a new colony site for resources and then using those resources themselves doesn't greatly affect the balance sheets or economies of the member powers. Those resources are not necessarily useful for the majority of government activity. When it does affect them, then they usually bitch about it or ask us to donate the site, which has happened in the past but is a minority of discoveries.
Basically, expenditure on Starfleet may only be 1 or 2% of government budgets, but may be 20% to 40% of specific types of resources. Keeping in mind that in post-currency economies, there would probably be specific budgets for each scarce resource rather than an overall budget.
Last edited:
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The way I figure it, when we found a colony in the Snakepit, we're persuading the Council to in some way allocate the fruits of that facility, or a fixed fraction thereof, to us, or to allocate other resources of comparable total value in recognition of our contribution. If we find and found a dilithium mine, Starfleet may not get ALL the dilithium that comes out of that mine, and may not directly administer and operate the mine. But it's probably getting a fixed percentage share negotiated for us by Kahurangi/Sousa/Whoever.
Also, what SWB said.
Could be the "Federation Colonial Administration Office." We do know that there are non-Starfleet governors of colonies as small as 8,000 as well.
It's highly likely that Starfleet does man certain, if not all parts of a small colony. But for stuff like mining colonies, they'd bring in outside specialists to do the 'dirty work'. Even research outposts, if TWOK is any indication, might be staffed almost entirely by civilians depending on what they're studying.
I know this might seem pedantic, but in a quest where we've already touched upon concerns about Starfleet's reach and lack of oversight, it's worth noting those colonies aren't 'ours,' they're the Council's. I have zero doubt that the resources that are pulled out of the ground are then distributed by some larger Federation agency at the behest of the Council, not just turned directly over to Starfleet. Because, again, that would be super fucked. That's like Iranian Revolutionary Guard-tier of meddling in the economy.
EDIT: as for research stations, open society, Regula I, etc etc. Not so much a concern.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
@Iron Wolf
Well yeah, which is where my point comes in, that when we "get" a resource colony what's actually happening is that we're negotiating for a large proportion of the total output the colony provides, or for special access to the technical data and scientific facilities the colony has to offer. It's the Council's pie, we're just persuading them to give us a big slice because we're the ones who found it and it's particularly useful to our needs.
A lot of the places where we get a flat +15br or whatever sound like places that could reasonably support a mining colony or something- it's just that, presumably, those aren't the sort of magnificently rich sites where we get to easily go to the Council and say "so, could you give us 10% of this bounty in perpetuity, to support our ongoing exploration and defense efforts?"
Well yeah, which is where my point comes in, that when we "get" a resource colony what's actually happening is that we're negotiating for a large proportion of the total output the colony provides, or for special access to the technical data and scientific facilities the colony has to offer. It's the Council's pie, we're just persuading them to give us a big slice because we're the ones who found it and it's particularly useful to our needs.
A lot of the places where we get a flat +15br or whatever sound like places that could reasonably support a mining colony or something- it's just that, presumably, those aren't the sort of magnificently rich sites where we get to easily go to the Council and say "so, could you give us 10% of this bounty in perpetuity, to support our ongoing exploration and defense efforts?"
You keep saying it would be "super-fucked" for Starfleet to be an independent economic actor in the Federation, but I don't agree. I think there's a lot of ways in which Starfleet is not just an arm of government, but is sort of an invisible "member world" of the Federation on its own. The role of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or the role the military of Pakistan has often played isn't the worse comparison, though it's probably not perfect either.
There's a lot bad about how that sort of thing has played out in the real world, but I'm not willing to go so far as to say it's an inherently illegitimate way of organizing a government. Inherently "fucked" as it were. Starfleet is a lot closer to the Revolutionary Guard in its degree of independence from civilian government than, say, the US military. I mean, take this quote.
So yeah, Starfleet having direct control over resource-producing colonies would not surprise me in the least, even if it sets off some liberal alarm bells in my head.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Given our economic system would be basically unrecognizable to anyone in this thread already, so what?
EDIT: Like, maybe this sounds super weird to you, but the Federation's economy is already a bizarre structure which has gone semi-post-scarcity in a lot of aspects in some places and in others is a recovering corporatist nightmare and in still others is somewhere between those two.
It would actually make a lot of sense that Starfleet's resource chain is deliberately set up to bypass the Federation civilian economy as much as possible, simply so it doesn't have to wade through the various member economies while dozens of economists and logistics experts commit suicide every day just trying to work out how to establish equivalencies.
Last edited:
- Location
- madison
except they are listed as Starfleet colonies, and there was a poison pill in a plan with delvopment where someone else would get them. Personally I think the term colony in this context means large mining or research complex rather than an actual city. I don't' think it would be that messed up for Starfleet to run it's own mining or research outposts.
Chaos Blade
Procrastinating Writer
- Location
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
That does makes sense, what we get in resources is not all that is produced, some would be traded to the rest of the federation and another portion would go to internal consumption, we get the same cut, modified by techs that improve the output but, again, that modifer might be fractional compared to the real modifer.
This makes it interesting and means it might be possible for these colonies to "graduate" to some other form(s), where we might get a smaller cut/or none a all, and start generation other resources (like Crew or pps) but on either case, if such scenario exists it might be ages away?
I don't even mean we get a cut. I mean we build a Starfleet facility. Like, literally a mine or a series of those outposts like where Kirk found Scotty was in the movie. It's only a colony as in it's a staffed facility to a specific purpose. Whether or not the Council wants to build additional facilities or settle civilians there is outside our purview, and would often happen but not always.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
This is also plausible to me. Having Starfleet just run a mine would make sense, though it might actually make MORE sense for Starfleet to contract the work out to some organization that specializes in "run mines" instead of "run spaceships."
Again, the ONLY specific crew and pp trickles we get from ANY planet(s) are from entire homeworld planets with estimated populations of 1-10 billion people. And even then it's implied that the overall crew/pp trickle is coming from that planet AND all the daughter colonies founded by the species which lives on that planet.
None of the colony worlds we establish in or around 2300 are going to be anywhere near that big and important any time this century, and likely not for another 2-3 centuries to come.
- Location
- Patriarchova
I do, actually. Letting the military create its own mining facilities is a sure recipe for a deep state.
SakSak
Unbound
- Location
- The Cold Wastes of the North
Every non-Hawk councillor ever: "But Starfleet isn't a military! It is primarily a science and exploration agency!"
- Location
- Patriarchova
Uh huh. And if you don't control its budget, how the hell do you plan to make sure it STAYS a primarily science and exploration agency?
It definitely is. The question is, is Starfleet being a deep state a deliberately calculated choice to help hold the Federation together?
- Location
- Patriarchova
So, when do you guys think we should appoint the next president?
So, when do you guys think we should appoint the next president?
Well, Kahurangi kind of did that with her diplo pushing.
e:
Last edited: