Re: [GZG] [OT] Books (Weber/White/Meier)

-----Original Message-----
>From: Oerjan Ariander <orjan.ariander1@comhem.se>
>Sent: Jul 21, 2008 7:54 AM
>To: gzg-l@vermouth.csua.berkeley.edu
>Subject: Re: [GZG] [OT] Books (Weber/White/Meier)
>
>Eric Foley wrote:
>
>> >> >>Further comments below Indy's original message with spoiler
warning 
>> here...
>> >> >>
>> >> >>
>> >> >>
>> >> >>WARNING
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>> >> >>
>> >> >>
>> >> >>
>> >> >>HERE
>> >> >>
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>> >> >>
>> >> >>
>> >> >>
>> >> >>THERE
>> >> >>
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>> >> >>
>> >> >>
>> >> >>
>> >> >>
>> >> >>
>> >> >>BE
>> >> >>
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>> >> >>
>> >> >>
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>> >> >>
>> >> >>SPOILERS....
>> >> >>
>> >> >>
>> >> >>
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>> >> >>

>>I think it's pretty obvious and, given that they wanted us to pay
money to 
>>buy two hardcover books of this at one point, even necessary for the
sake 
>>of making a good story:  make the Bugs more dangerous, both at the
start 
>>and long-term, than they were in the modules,

>I suspect that that would only prolong the agony. StarFire FTL travel
is 
>restricted to the WP choke points, and because it is StarFire combat is

>extremely attritional. That's the core of the StarFire background, so
if 
>you change that... it is no longer StarFire.

Well, there we go.  Either it just can't be told within the context of
StarFire's physics, or some other outcome than complete genocide would
have to be the result.	Personally, I think the latter would probably
have made a better story anyway.  At worst, the Bugs are not vastly
crazier than the Borg, just more gruesome and immediately provoking of
natural phobias, yet Star Trek TNG literally devoted an entire episode
to the philosophical debate in which Picard refuses to employ genocidal
methods against them even in the absence of any hope of peace with them,
simply because We're Better Than Them.	The absence of any such
reflection in these two books, where basically the initial melodramatic
resposne to the horror basically was taken on its face as ending any
(intelligent) debate on whether complete galactic genocide is an
acceptable solution, is perhaps a little disturbing, really.

Humanity is portrayed in these books as basically being taken for
granted as the most advanced civilization in space.  Somewhere in here
the idea that maybe they should be more civilized as well as being more
capable of mass-producing bombs might come into it.  Maybe that's a
little wild to assume in this case, but at some point somebody who
wasn't being lampooned as being obviously an idiot in the book probably
should have at least raised the rhetorical question as to whether
genocide was really ever justified.  Perhaps they'd already done it with
the Rigelians... but maybe this isn't necessarily something they
consider a proud moment.

So my latest alternative scenario is that the Bugs have a bigger tech
base, enough that the war is not necessarily a foregone conclusion in
either direction.  The humans pulverize some portions of a Bug planet,
the Bugs manage to break through and shatter a good portion of the
infrastructure of Proxima Centauri and maybe even nuke a significant
portion of one or both planets before they're driven off.  The humans
start to gain the upper hand, but their advantage is shaky enough that
the cost of final victory starts to tear into both of them, and despite
the mutual desire to kill each other both sides start to wonder whether
or not it's worth the cost even if they manage to win the wager of their
lives.	So then humanity manages to come up with a mechanism to
communicate, just as both sides are starting to see either stalemate or
a war that is no longer worth risking complete annihilation for.  And
then when the Bugs finally see a species that is willing and able to
talk to them, they reconsider their imperatives that all other life
forms must be conquered and eaten.  They're still xenophobic enough that
they'd just as soon humanity keep a nice safe distance across a warp
chain from them in a neutral zone arrangement, but they're willing to
honor it as long as the Alliance (both civilian and military) does in
exchange for the assurance that the Big Hairy Bags of Mostly Water won't
come in and stomp all their hives flat.

This even lends itself to potentially interesting follow-up stories
where the Bugs resume building their reserves in case they ever need
them again, while the humans act with homicidal paranoia against anybody
on their own side who thinks that mining for gold in the neutral zone is
really worth risking getting every human in the galaxy eaten alive, to a
point where there might be some awkward conversations where the humans
tell the Bugs that an unauthorized civilian has violated the neutral
zone and the two sides hash out a suitable punishment, whether it's the
humans simply killing them quickly or the Bugs adding the violators to
the menu.

See?  Second option, that might even break the StarFire rules a bit
less, and it's still a more interesting novel than what we got.  I _do_
like the books, for what it's worth... but I'm still a little
disappointed knowing what they could have been, and weren't.

>>Visualize this:  an Arachnid "egg infestation" fleet sneaks into a
star 
>>system that the Alliance has generally not cared about because they
think 
>>it's useless.

>Again we run into a problem with StarFire's WP travel: if it is a
system 
>inside surveyed Alliance space, "sneak in" means "using a closed WP"
since 
>the open WPs are already covered by comm relay stations. Given the 
>Alliance's policies of settling every habitable piece of dirt and then 
>some, the only "useless" systems inside Alliance space would be the
ones 
>having no planets with breathable atmospheres - but that would be an
even 
>bigger issue for the Bugs, since they'd have to build an atmospheric 
>environment to hatch their eggs in before they could do any serious 
>swarming, and then it is no longer just a few crates of stuff.

As far as bringing atmopshere goes... says who?  Use whatever PSB you
want, but let's just postulate that the Bugs don't need to bring
atmosphere _or_ food, they can just drop down on whatever rock with
almost any atmosphere or materials they want, and from there with
minimal or no external tools or assistance they can turn around a colony
to low level industrialization fairly quickly, to a point that with just
a little bit more help it could be used as a refueling base or a very
productive "boom town" planet that can ship out substantial amounts of
fuel, ore, and other materials that the Home Hives could then use even
without much other than shipping it from point A to point B.  If they
actually had real help in making a mature colony out of it, then they
could turn it into a minor hive relatively quickly.  Throw that on top
of their other advantages, and every bit of momentum suddenly becomes a
potentially big swing that is harder to turn around.

The warp point question is really the sticking point, though.  A few
years ago I experimented around with using StarFire's strategic system
somewhat (mainly GSF's galaxy generators) with Full Thrust storylines,
and I really didn't like the warp points in particular.  I wound up
PSB'ing that warp points weren't really hard and fast singularity
points, but constituted more of a focus point where, while it was
safest, cheapest, and easiest to calculate the FTL jumps as close to
those points in space as possible, you weren't _required_ to.  This
allowed more room for surprises, because at some point that whole
mechanism of space travel just restrains a little too much of the
possibility for unexpected things to happen when you know that everyone
who comes into a star system must come from a particular defined point,
which leads to a particular defined system, and nothing else will do.

Eric

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