Re: India, GZG-style (LONG)

Thanks much, everyone. I'll be incorporating some of these suggestions
into 
the next revision, later this week.

Any double (or more!) postings are my fault, I think. Teach me to post 
after getting up with the kid in the middle of the night. :)

The class/caste divisions in GZG India are most certainly sharp, at
times. 
I wasn't sure how much to put in the initial writing, but I might note
them 
a bit more. The brahmins would lose caste by crossing the stars, but the

way I've imagined it, the distance is so far, and they're in a new land 
where they can be upper caste once again. I don't see caste ever really 
going away, especially not in 200 years. Maybe more flexible than today,

but who knows. I'm in the middle of a crash course in Indian and
regional 
history, as I work my way through this project - I may get some things 
seriously wrong now and then.

I do intend to mention more of the fundamentalist vs. expansionist 
movements in Hinduism (the division on the question of jump travel), as
a 
sidebar. As for the Dalits (untouchables), I'm not sure if they'd be
left 
behind in the lowest portions of the economy, or shipped off in bulk as 
labor for the colonies. The latter 'feels' right, from a story 
point-of-view, but I'll have to run at least a basic reality check on
it. 
The Sikhs, yes, they'd probably end up with a colony of their own, and 
maybe Amritsar as an autonomous region. As for the Tamils, this leads me

into Beth's suggestions. :)

Yeah, it is a little light on conflict for a wargame nation - I think 
that's an artifact of my tiptoeing around canon. The Pacification of
Ceylon 
will provide some more grist for the mill, and I do plan on examining
the 
clashes with the neighbors more. Some clashes with the ESU and IF in the

mountains, the IC on the India-Burma border zone, and around the 
archipelagos. The absorption of Bangladesh might make for some more
nasty 
little clashes. I didn't want to throw them headlong into the major
wars, 
as I saw their 'neutrality' as one of their defining factors, but it's 
really more of an independent stance, playing everyone off as best they 
can, than not intervening. Getting screwed by the NAC would be a good 
echoing of history, and I'm still fiddling with how the confrontation
with 
the ESU went down.

The population figures are fascinating, at the very least for their
-wide- 
range. The middle range stats 'feel' just about right; in the canon 
timeline, we seem to muddle along rather well, without trashing
everything 
- and by 2193, there's an economy that can support -thousands- of 
jump-capable warships - which produce nothing. I'm guessing the
spacelanes 
of the GZGverse are quite crowded with commercial vessels. :) I don't
think 
that taking India out of the ESU will change all that much. There won't
be 
quite the population base, but given the pace of development, the ESU 
should be just fine.

Indian naval architects, those 'cavalier' fellows (for some reason, I
see 
India as still being rather chauvinistic). Actually, 'cavalier' is more
of 
a placeholder word than any good description, but it's not terribly off
the 
mark. I'm not as yet exactly sure -what- they're going to be like, let 
alone able to come up with a good single word for it. To compare them to
a 
modern-day example, they're somewhere between modern Indian naval design

(buy Russian stuff, improve it with tech from the West), and Israeli 
military design theory (hey, that's a neat toy, watch what -we- can make
it 
do). They're shooting for the latter, but end up most times with more of

the former. There are indigenous designs, as mentioned late in the 
timeline, but they're still using a -lot- of modified ESU stuff. A lot
of 
this is also waiting for me to sit down and design out their ships,
too...

Noah

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