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Greetings, people of OA
#30
(08-18-2021, 11:27 AM)Drashner1 Wrote: Just to add to the excellent advice from Dfleymmes1134 has provided:

Given the scale of the Rho Ophiuchi system, it would be quite possible - and possibly more interesting - to have multiple polities occupying it. This could take the form of multiple independent polities with none really affiliated with the big Sephirotic Empires. Or multiple Sephirotics could all occupy different parts of the system. Or it could be some combo of this. A thing to note with OA is that the various political entities don't generally follow the traditional SF notion of entire volumes of space being the territory of a single polity. While this does happen as a side effect of all the stars in a given volume being claimed by a given polity, it is just as common for Star X to be part of Empire 1 while Star Y is part of Empire 2 and so on. Or even different planets, moons, asteroids or habitat clouds each being part of different empires within a system. The Sephirotics mainly compete with ideas rather than territory or guns, so this is generally not seen as a problem.

Note that you do not need to describe all of these polities in detail. You could just say they also exist in the system, probably with some mention of where (around which star, in some nearby nebula, etc.), but it need not be super detailed. Your main polity that you're describing here could be in a particular locale and be doing its thing while the other polities are off doing theirs. If you wished you could even make it an Asymptote System if you felt so inclined.

In terms of population - the archai do limit overall population but are generally subtle about it and there are plenty of systems with populations into the low hundreds of trillions and one or two in the quadrillion range. If you want to do a smaller population that's fine too, of course.

Finally, this system is deep in Terragen space - even though it's not in the Inner Sphere, it's very close to it - so is going to have been inhabited fora very long time and be very old. So room to add in a good bit of history if you wish (it's not required you document every event taking place over thousands of years) as well as odd cultural and historical artifacts and such.

Hope this helps,

Todd
Hello Drashner1,

I was essentially thinking that I would just start writing the polity at ~1700 AT when it was colonized, and just write each decade after the next, taking into account other events that were happening in the OA timeline. I actually have experience doing this - over the last year I wrote nearly a hundred thousand words describing just twenty years of the history of a single system on Fandom. Presumably this level of detail would be reduced by at least an order of magnitude.

Regarding population, when I start writing the population will probably be much lower, more like five thousand. Then, over the decades, it can grow. I wanted to know about the maximum the archai would allow so I would know when to stop the exponential growth curve. With all this in consideration I might just come back with the first century or couple of centuries of history when I am making the page, and just get it approved step-by-step. In the meantime, however, I am going to go figure out some biology stuff for the various lifeforms.

Regarding having multiple polities in the same system, I was thinking that basically the S2 would not really care what happened as long as the work it did not want to do itself got done - leading to political insurrections in various parts of the system every few decades, with periods of either prosperity or tense relations between factions in-between.

Sincerely,
Rho Ophiuchi
(08-18-2021, 11:36 AM)Dfleymmes1134 Wrote: yeah no worries about time. I and 5-15 others have been building up a rewrite of macrystis for most of the past year. Though you -can- try writing multiple articles each week (in which case editors might not be able to catch up Tongue)...You can move at the pace you want, though it's usually good to give -some- kind of response to folks within a few days to a week Tongue
Hello Dfleymmes1134,

Thank you for the advice and support! By the way, how much should be on the system's page? Should all of the information pertaining to it be on the page, or should there be sub-pages for the planets? Should there be sub-pages for the species, but not for the planets?

Sincerely,
Rho Ophiuchi
(08-18-2021, 07:01 PM)Rynn Wrote: Welcome to the group Smile

Seems like there's been a lot of good discussion and feedback. I'll only add a couple of points, which overlap a bit with Dfleymmes. Both are on the subject of how much work an S2 can do.

The 5 billion figure. This figure is illustrative of how many human-equivalent manhours of work a typical S2 entity can perform in an hour, all else being equal. These are important caveats, there are many tasks than an S2 can do that would take an infinite amount of time for a human to do (i.e. deriving ultratech models of the universe). The comparison only works for tasks that humans can do and even then it's an average. It also assumes a typical S2, meaning one that hasn't modified itself specifically to be better at things like this, one that isn't close to ascending, or one that has made use of hive mind tech to become multiple. Lastly "all else being equal" means that in a live experiment the five billion humans and the S2 get the same tools. In reality S2 can build significantly better tools for themselves than modos, further increasing their productivity.

Automation/Sophont labour. Automation is really good in OA, so modos don't need to be employed or have a job. Likewise an S2 doesn't need to have modos aid it, it could easily make its own vots (virtual bots, sapient but not sentient intelligent programs). With some effort it could even make "hyper-vots", capable of performing S1 or even S2 level tasks autonomously. Having said this it is entirely possible for a culture to favour using their own labour in cases where there wouldn't be a noticeable drop in productivity compared to a vot. If one person really wanted to make and serve ice cream for the community, they might be assigned that role rather than the habitat growing an ice cream bush in that area. In a system led by a transap the transap might assign tasks that could be automated, but it assigns them to modos because there is some learning potential that it thinks will be beneficial for them.
Hello Rynn,

I am sorry I did not get to your post when I was originally posting the message (this is an edit), but I started writing my message before you posted yours, so I did not see yours until after I posted mine. Thank you for the welcome, by the way!

I was sort of thinking that the system's S2 would, in the interest of being able to save energy once the system was fully disassembled, be a S2.0 intelligence that was just smart enough to reach the S2 level. The "interesting" tasks (the ones modos could not do) would of course be done by the S2 or its "hyper-vots", but the remainder, the tasks the modos could do, it would assign to the modos, so that they would know more or less how to maintain the system, and how to not break it (hence the learning potential it thinks might be beneficial). The goal of the system would be to have something that could probably maintain itself if either the S2 or the modos abruptly vanished, long enough for either one of the modos to ascend to S2 or for the S2 to recreate the modos. However some cultural aversion to total automation would probably work in this case too, possibly in tandem with the previous idea.

Sincerely,
Rho Ophiuchi
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Messages In This Thread
Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-17-2021, 07:49 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Drashner1 - 08-17-2021, 09:02 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-17-2021, 09:22 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Drashner1 - 08-17-2021, 11:05 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-17-2021, 11:22 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Drashner1 - 08-17-2021, 11:38 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-17-2021, 11:51 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by The Astronomer - 08-17-2021, 11:51 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by The Astronomer - 08-17-2021, 09:59 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Drashner1 - 08-17-2021, 10:49 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Worldtree - 08-18-2021, 12:26 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-17-2021, 10:53 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Drashner1 - 08-17-2021, 11:19 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by selden - 08-18-2021, 12:08 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-18-2021, 12:41 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Worldtree - 08-18-2021, 01:11 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-18-2021, 01:32 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by selden - 08-18-2021, 12:46 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Drashner1 - 08-18-2021, 02:04 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-18-2021, 05:35 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Worldtree - 08-18-2021, 02:28 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Worldtree - 08-18-2021, 08:10 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-18-2021, 08:57 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Worldtree - 08-18-2021, 09:43 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-18-2021, 10:52 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Worldtree - 08-18-2021, 11:36 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by The Astronomer - 08-18-2021, 10:48 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Drashner1 - 08-18-2021, 11:27 AM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-18-2021, 07:37 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by The Astronomer - 08-18-2021, 08:37 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-18-2021, 08:51 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rynn - 08-18-2021, 09:07 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-18-2021, 09:31 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rynn - 08-18-2021, 10:53 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rynn - 08-18-2021, 07:01 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by The Astronomer - 08-18-2021, 10:08 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rynn - 08-18-2021, 10:54 PM
RE: Greetings, people of OA - by Rho Ophiuchi - 08-18-2021, 11:33 PM

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