One big question: How, exactly, so we balance things regarding freedom of speech? Like, even IRL we've been receiving lots of lessons about how Free Speech Absolutism is an untenable position, and in a setting with ChAoS that goes even harder. But having a system of censors and restrictions that both does what it's supposed to do, and doesn't do anything it's not supposed to do, is really really hard. I have no idea how we balance that... :/
To the extent we can, we want them to be able to think for themselves and set the on a path to grow stronger and self-sufficient while we're gone so that our friendly port in an unfriendly galaxy is still there when we get back - and ideally, able to contribute their own science and technology advances to ours.
Cooperative civilizations doing their own tech rolls, or adding bonuses to ours is a confirmed mechanic after all.
Nope. Strong disagree. We are building up to go into space, not building up to have a fitted world to start expanding from. Basic research can be done during the travel time between systems, not as a pre-requisite to getting off planet.
The basic research in my red line is what lets us know what the hell we're doing
for building stuff to get off planet and the biological side of psyker research. I've been saying that for multiple turns now, it hasn't stopped being true.
I also need you to understand that if we do not pluck the low hanging fruits of making Secondus self sufficient and able to grow on its own that it risks being chewed up and spit out by all the gribblies our char gen put in their neighborhood.
Why though? This is unrelated to any of our goals, and it's someone they can do themselves with what we are going to leave behind.
But, more pressingly in the short term, there is the need for our way of doing things to prove itself against the old ways in the mechanicus's day to day lives, and that needs a better effort than what produced organ replacements so inferior to admech standard that they eventually cause the patient's untimely death.
Everyone in the ad mech will be jockeying and working to prove their worth among themselves, and as ever, the disadvantage of science in rhetoric and reputation is that you need a lot of baseline knowledge before it
can prove itself against "just knowing what you need to know to do your job and live your life".
Any time a techpriest trying to work from first principles makes something clearly inferior - like what we did - to what a traditionalist can do by rote based on faulty knowledge, either:
- We or someone else shits out a good explanation and counterexample to discredit the comparison
- We or our delegates use force or the implied threat of force to silence the person bringing up the comparison, undermining our efforts to deprogram the culture of facism and totalitarianism.
- We do nothing to discredit the comparison, undermining our efforts to deprogram the cargo cult culture of "you only need to know how, not why".
This will play out thousands of times. It will be harder than helping Anexa was, and every time we or the people we taught fail such an interaction, more work is created to make sure the new world order we're trying to build doesn't hamstring itself as soon as we're gone.
This basic research is what we need to put Secondus on the right footing to survive, it's what we need to deprogram the mechanicus, and it's what we need to set
ourselves up for success during our departure.
Foundation is everything. We should not neglect it.
