The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
I think it's Potions classes you should really worry about.
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
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I headcanon that Earth had many low-level encounters that are only recently being declassified by governments or discovered by archeologists. These incidents are usually at the same low level of barely any societal interference that many civs face, though Earth probably has more of them than most civ's 0-3ish.
As a kid, it was weird figuring out that Halo's Halo was actually relatively small. The inner surface of Halo is about 1,227,600 square miles, compared to Earth's 196,936,994 square miles. Halo's planet-imitating surface area is about 160th the size that Earth has. Meanwhile, Ringworld (in addition to being way more epic in imagery,) is three million times Earth's surface area. Hollywood style sci-fi can be really boring and unimaginative sometimes, yeah?
@ The war debate. Again.
Look, I don't mind discussion about why the Licori or OSA or whoever feel like it's a good idea to have war. But trying to get everyone to accept the premise of "from my point of view, war is reasonable" is hitting a sore spot in that to some of us war is never reasonable. At all. It gives me the same knee-jerk reaction as someone saying "from my point of view, eating your leg is reasonable." To which my reply is "Ow, my leg!" I don't want to debate reasonaby, I want you to stop gnawing on my leg! And so most of the conversation I want to give on the topic is not going to be philosophically complicated no matter what the other side says. (Not to upset anyone, I'd like to make sure you all know that this is me making a comical comparrison. Ok?
)I'm not saying the discussion or the omakes are bad or shouldn't happen. You need that premise to be valid for any number of stories. But in this instance, where it feels close to me because of my involvment in the quest, this is what I feel is my and maybe some other's reaction to the repeating conversation. Also, I'd like to point out that my knees have very fast reflexes. Do not bite my foot.
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pheonix89
Wants to be Seven Of Nine
- Location
- North American Plaguelands
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The problem is that the position that war is never reasonable is objectively false in this setting.Look, I don't mind discussion about why the Licori or OSA or whoever feel like it's a good idea to have war. But trying to get everyone to accept the premise of "from my point of view, war is reasonable" is hitting a sore spot in that to some of us war is never reasonable. At all. It gives me the same knee-jerk reaction as someone saying "from my point of view, eating your leg is reasonable." To which my reply is "Ow, my leg!" I don't want to debate reasonaby, I want you to stop gnawing on my leg! And so most of the conversation I want to give on the topic is not going to be philosophically complicated no matter what the other side says. (Not to upset anyone, I'd like to make sure you all know that this is me making a comical comparrison. Ok?
Biophage war. Arcadian war.
War or fates worse than death for everyone, and war or gigadeaths, respectively.
Anyone operating from the premise that war is never reasonable is knowingly using false premises. And there's really no point in talking to such people.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The first wasn't war, it was pest control!
The second was a panic reaction to witnessing development of a new weapon of mass destruction. There are actual governments with access to WMDs; they have not all been invaded and forcibly subjected to regime change.
I have to admit, this sort of rhetoric is rather uncomfortable to read in a thread that revolves around a largely idealistic vision of the future.
pheonix89
Wants to be Seven Of Nine
- Location
- North American Plaguelands
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That's playing silly games with the definition of war for the Biophage.
And the Arcadian War wasn't just about the development. It was about the attempts at DEPLOYMENT against areas including the UFP core. Supernovae have huge kill zones.
There are AFAIK no governments that have tried to lifewipe the UFP core worlds and not been regime change'd.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
This bears emphasizing. The Odanner and Antinoc attacks are both well outside our profile for attacks SFI believes to have come from OSA corporations. It's entirely possible that the corporations didn't actually do it-the Licori evidence is pretty thin.
KnightDisciple
Love God. Do Right. Fear No Man.
- Location
- Midwest, USA
10/10 would play alongside Havenite Honor Harrington Quest.
I can't help but imagine this being taught by Snape as a guild navigator.
Me too. The one I think would be most fun is "to gloriously go" - a not-empire quest where the players are the Klingon IDF. The players could choose between starting at the dawn of the Klingon Empire, the revolutionary period (when the smooth-heads run the empire) or to start after the Praxis disaster has sent the empire into a deep crisis.
I have all sorts of fun ideas for why all the portrayals of Klingons over the years have been true, but running a TBG level quest is way more than I could ever manage.
"Facepunch princess quest" would make an excellent title.
fasquardon
Warning: Greetings
- Location
- Britain
greetings
In addition, I'll thank everyone to remain calm and civil, even in disagreement. If tempers get too heated, you will be infracted and removed from the thread.
If you have someone on ignore, do not declare it to the board, as that is a violation of SV's Rule 3. A Staff Notice has been logged against your account.
In addition, I'll thank everyone to remain calm and civil, even in disagreement. If tempers get too heated, you will be infracted and removed from the thread.
I'm still opposed to the Acadian War too. It was one of those things where we picked a far lesser evil for lack of choice, but that didn't make going to war right.
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@Simon_Jester while I agree with Mod Stormwhite that Glassware was somewhat rude, I have to agree with Glassware's frustrations.
Please keep your roleplaying and non-roleplaying posts separated with the roleplay posts clearly marked.
Please keep your roleplaying and non-roleplaying posts separated with the roleplay posts clearly marked.
We were told in character, at first through our character's internal thoughts, and then at great length through intelligence reports. We shared that information with the L&L - it was all over our interactions with them, including Thuir's logs, and your own omake! They were informed, that they don't believe it doesn't excuse that they're now committing a serious wrong. The problem lies not only with their judgment, but incredibly importantly with what they chose to do about it: general warfare. It might be okay if they were like "we don't believe that, we're going after the corps no matter what you say"*, but they didn't, they chose to go after the OSA people and the state.
Plus, your claim that the OSA promised to investigate but did nothing is explicitly false. Please argue from the facts, not your own made-up version. PLUS, if we had enough evidence to arrest the pirates, we could do so without even bothering the OSA about it - it is completely within our rights to go after pirates in this space. That we haven't arrested any corporate pirates is itself proof that even we don't consider the evidence enough to execute direct action.
If you looked at similar evidence in real life, and then decided that killing your way to regime change was the way to get your pirates, I would be calling what you were doing abominable too, and would attempt to do something in my power to stop you. Like, where I draw the line isn't what people believe, but what they choose to do about it, and what the LL are choosing to do here is wrong.
*Halkh even weasels his way around this point in your very own omake, his objection actually has no grounds because he knows that forcing the pirates into the open would mean the Federation can come down on them - refer to his other point about us tackling pirates independently.
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- Location
- alphen aan den rijn
"to gloriously go"
if this ever becomes a thing i am so there
if this ever becomes a thing i am so there
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Okay, before you sling around any more bad-faith accusation grenades, we need to break down this argument into its component parts, because there are several independent levels on which we may or may not disagree, and the debate is going around in circles in part because people are doing rhetorical two-steps back and forth between the levels. Here are the separate questions I've been raising:
(1a) Do the Licori and Laio have the absolute certainty we get from Word of God QM pronouncements, that the OSA government is decent and willing to rein in the pirates, just very hard to convince?
(1b) Do the Licori and Laio have the merely confident belief we get from in-character information, that the OSA government is decent and willing?
(1c) More generally, how much evidence do the Licori and Laio have that would lead them to believe that our 'basically a bunch of nice guys' portrayal of the OSA government is accurate?
(2) Given (1a) through (1c), is it reasonable for the Licori and Laio to have become convinced (contrary to our own view) that the OSA government is acting in bad faith? Again, this is based on what they know about the situation, not what we know based on our 100% trustworthy intel reports compiled behind the scenes by the best xenopsychologists and foreign relations experts in the quadrant.
(3) Given (2), is it reasonable for the Licori and Laio to doubt our own view that the OSA government is acting in good faith? We may be 100% confident in the quality of our information, but are they, and should they be from an in-character standpoint?
(4) In addition to, and separate from, all this, if the Licori and Laio believe the OSA government to be acting in bad faith, what is to be done?
I'm not saying we can't or shouldn't address (4), but at a bare minimum we need to settle what we can and cannot reasonably attribute to the Licori and Laio in terms of what they think. In terms of what information is and is not in their possession. Because we've swung around a lot. It would be unfair to characterize this as as people condemning the Laio and Licori for not having read what is clearly outlined in the Discord chat, but I'm not sure we're as far away from that end-state as we ought to be.
The rein in thing isn't WOG anymore. It's in the SFI report and in the statement by Magenta Aori in "Why We Fight". It was expounded initially on discord but isn't exclusive to there anymore.
What would be WOG is saying "The Licori think The Fed is giving the OSA too much credit and the Laio are inclined to agree"
What would be WOG is saying "The Licori think The Fed is giving the OSA too much credit and the Laio are inclined to agree"
Actually, I'll go back to the accusations of bad faith at this point, because we already went through this.
The LL have the information that the FDS gave them, which is something you specifically mention in your omake, and has gone from our intelligence reports to all Federation organs to the people we are negotiating with. Keeping going on about discord WoG is ridiculous, runs explicitly contrary to things you already know, and is why I feel you've lost a lot of credit here. We should be past that weeks ago and yet you keep on digging at it.
As for the LL, I don't much care that they may not believe it (it seems clear they don't), because for me having that information is enough that it should give them pause.
e: Pause doesn't have to be "okay we'll do nothing". It can be as extreme as "well, you give them too much credit, but we'll commit to an anti-piracy campaign instead of regime change... for now" or as tame as "well if we embed our inspectors in their police like they asked us we could prove how corrupt they are, justifying future action".
The LL have the information that the FDS gave them, which is something you specifically mention in your omake, and has gone from our intelligence reports to all Federation organs to the people we are negotiating with. Keeping going on about discord WoG is ridiculous, runs explicitly contrary to things you already know, and is why I feel you've lost a lot of credit here. We should be past that weeks ago and yet you keep on digging at it.
As for the LL, I don't much care that they may not believe it (it seems clear they don't), because for me having that information is enough that it should give them pause.
e: Pause doesn't have to be "okay we'll do nothing". It can be as extreme as "well, you give them too much credit, but we'll commit to an anti-piracy campaign instead of regime change... for now" or as tame as "well if we embed our inspectors in their police like they asked us we could prove how corrupt they are, justifying future action".
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Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The LL had every opportunity to pause and wait on the Fed to solve the problem once we pulled a 19-ship fleet (bigger than almost anything we've pulled for a single deployment) to fix the problem. The fact that they saw us deploy a massive fleet to solve the problem and still went "nah, we gonna start shooting anyway" doesn't make me take them that seriously.
In a war like this, preparation time helps the OSA more because they're playing defense. If the LL alliance was convinced that negotiations are ultimately going nowhere, then more time just gives the OSA more time to dig in. Or in other words, waiting isn't without cost.
Nervos Belli
Don't think this means you've won!
- Location
- Murica
Especially if their own intelligence departments had picked up on the number of mercenaries the corps were hiring.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Assuming, of course, the war is actually "like this" and the Federation is completely ineffectual, which is a pretty big assumption, and that if the OSA is presented with evidence by the Federation and nothing happens the Federation and the Harmony are not willing to commit heavily to reigning in the threat of piracy via force, which is an even bigger assumption.
Since when in this quest has the Federation ever been willing to go to war because a government was doing an insufficient job of controlling piracy?
*cough*Bigfootisacommunistpirate*cough*
EDIT: I mean, I've been debating whether to bring up the Yrillians because the last thing the discussion needs is another tangent, but they've explicitly had an issue for years of their government carelessly allowing its citizens to commit piracy with armed spaceships, and there's never been the slightest hint that the Federation would solve the problem with force of arms. We've tackled it entirely through slow diplomacy and gentle persuasion, plus some increased anti-pirate patrols.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
See, it's a binary decision tree.
If the Federation is right about the OSA, and the Licori and Laio are wrong, then delaying the war is a positive good, and every day of delay increases the odds of resolving the crisis without a war.
If the Federation is wrong about the OSA, and the Laio and Licori are right, then delaying the war will make it significantly harder to fight, and every day of delay increases the costs of the war and the likelihood of it turning into a brutal slog, without materially increasing the odds of resolving the crisis without a war.
To you, it's obvious that the Federation is 100% sure to be right. But to the Laio and Licori, the balance of probabilities will look different. For them, the calculation is something like:
"Well, if the Feds are right it's worth waiting, but there's about a 30% chance that they're right enough to justify giving the OSA another six months to get ready, so maybe it's not worth the risk."
And this becomes very complicated and contingent depending on their estimates of how likely we are to get involved and stay involved (at the potential cost of alienating the OSA). And how likely we are to take the issue super-seriously in the eyes of the Laio and Licori. And a host of other related factors. To us, it's easy to make this call because we're casually dismissing out of hand the possibility that the OSA government is complicit in the piracy, or that the Federation will be unwilling to 'interfere' by overturning the piracy at the cost of alienating the denialist/complicit/revisionist OSA government on the subject. We have great reasons not to worry about that.
The Laio and Licori may not be so sure.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Since when has Yrillian piracy been a problem at a governmental level? They are almost literally the pirates who don't do anything, and from what we can tell most of their piracy activity is either internal or was directed against the Gretarians (and even that took a sharp dropoff after a bit). They have very rarely been a problem for Federation members, and when they have been a problem that's come up a Federation starship has almost always jumped on them and dealt with it, frequently using violence when required. This isn't all that surprising since visibility to major powers is literally death when you're a pirate, and the Yrillians aren't new at this.
(Leaving aside the argument that going to war will actually control piracy, rather than make it worse by collapsing controlling authority.)
Meanwhile, we actually did go to war over, among several other incidents, Orion Syndicate piracy. Their charming habit of acting as both pirates and slavers actually give the ASTF its name. Or you could point to our reaction to the Hishimeri, which was not much short of actually declaring war in the end considering we conducted opposed boarding actions and crippled starships.
No, it's not "to me". This is a base canard.
The Laio are Federation allies. They know, from experience, that they can come to us with problems and we will try to help them, because we have before. They have demonstrably been wronged. They could get the Federation on their side with very little effort if they were willing to try. All the OSA preparation in the world wouldn't matter if Abigail Taggart shows up after putting TF Shield back together again and starts crashing Centaur-Bs into mercenary ships and sending over a company of Aerocommandos to ask "Excuse me, wtf are you doing?"
This also ignores that the Harmony is a player in the region and entirely known for their willingness to bring in peacekeepers and their rather broad definition of peacekeeping.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Not legally we didn't. The Syndicate war was officially nothing but the biggest policing operation in galactic history.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Let me clarify.
When I say 'to you' I don't mean 'to you and only you, with no other person sharing your assessment.' I mean 'from your point of view, which may well be shared by others but is still yours.' It is the result of the information available to you, interpreted through a lens you possess, with tools at your disposal. Someone else with a different set of information obtained in different ways, interpreted through a different lens, and with different tools to work with? They might well interpret events differently.
Well, then either Oneiros is just writing entire species being inexplicably retarded for literally no reason, or maybe the Laio have opinions and ideas about the world that don't align with your perspective.
I mean, it's hardly implausible that the Laio have decided that while we're willing enough to be publicly seen making an occasional antipiracy sweep, we don't consider this particular problem big enough to merit intense attention. Or that we care more about the OSA than about them and will embrace 'solutions' to the problem that tolerate Laio victimhood in an attempt to uphold and promote the OSA's future position within the Federation. Or that our 'war is always wrong' faction will keep the Federation from intervening meaningfully when there is no massive, imminent, direct threat to Federation survival.
These can be wrong beliefs, but they are plausible beliefs that could easily occur to someone with a touch of paranoia who's looking at the situation.