Thread: Re: Got me thinking

Back on topic,
Why did the Solomni get wore down as fast as the Imp when they where not
fighting among themselves?/I mean they where fighting Imps and Hivers at
most? Not really Hivers cuze those guy make everyone else do the fighting
for them. So why didthey get tired out as fast as the 3I guys? Don't make
sense? Plus,SOlo=Space Nazi I don't see. Sword Word=Space Nazi I see with
clarity.

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 2:39 PM, Master Uxi
[Traveller_TNE] <> wrote:

>
>
> They completely screwed up the logic of writing and universe consistency
> to get everyone in. If you're going to "young Kirk" Chekov and probably
> Uhura & Sulu should be at least 10 years too young to be on the reboot at
> all unless they're Doogie Housers, which is the way they limply went with
> Chekov when there was no indication of that at all in TOS. Why not an
> Andorian at helm or Spaniard at Communications instead of troping
> ridiculous reunion instead of twisting nostalgia for no reason.
>
> Not that Trek was ever very good at a semi plausible character & career
> progression. Sulu was at helm for 30 years before getting a ship,
> skipping XO, etc. Then same lame thing in TNG with while bridge crew,
> including Riker. Ambition & professional development went with money
> apparently. Noone wants to go onto private life? None kicked out for any
> reason? McCoy preening a private practice or taking a university job?
>
> Then reboots period. Whole plot works better as new crew and ship set
> after DS9 and Voyager ignoring reboot pretensions.
>
> Quinto would have been better as son of Spock and T'pring than Spock
> himself. Pine wouldmake a great nephew of Kirk, but he shucked as the man
> himself. JTK never got beat once much less repeatedly. Would also hint at
> some sort of life of the ship, too. Etc
>
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2015, 12:09 [Traveller_TNE] <
> > wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> "Doomsday Machine" was definitely a good one, especially because
>> Constellation was a separate model, not just the Enterprise pasted in four
>> times as in "Ultimate Computer." The new digital re-dos are interesting.
>> Very nice, but I'm always conscious, when watching them, of "how much
>> improvement is too much?" I think they generally did a good job of not
>> going hog-wild. I saw "Operation Annihilate" yesterday, and the scene
>> where they warm up the satellites to cure the people of the dog-vomit
>> monsters, what did the original Trek have there?
>>
>> The JJ Trek was kind of jarring to me as well at first. How can Kirk not
>> be Shatner, or Rockford not Garner or McGarrett not Lord or Unger neither
>> Lemon nor Randall? But I think TV is getting old enough that we can deal
>> with characters as characters, not actors. Since TV has always been
>> thought of as the "cheap, low-brow" rung of the visual media I think it's
>> also a little harder to think of a TV show maturing into iconic art where
>> roles can later be reprised. NOW, let me riddle you THIS, Batman: who will
>> they cast when they re-do "I Love Lucy," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and
>> the "Bob Newhart Show?" That will really test our cognitive dissonance.
>>
>>
>>
>> > Now isn't that strange, we end up with ships and space again? My
>> personal
>> > favorite always has and always will be the Original Kirk and Enterprise,
>> > specifically, the episode, "The Doomsday Machine". But Elegance and
>> > originality have always been a hazardous course to collide on. Speaking
>> as
>> > a dedicated SFB fan as well as Travellers fan, I am sure we all have
>> > encountered those "grognards" who have the same 'apoplexy' every time
>> some
>> > young fool talks about star trek, and is refering to Chris Pine as Kirk
>> > and
>> > Zachary Quinto as Spock.
>> > My personal observation is that some issues simply MUST NOT be resolved.
>> > if
>> > they were, then the whole 'rason de guerre' would evaporate. some peeps
>> > need to bitch just to have a reason to wake up and smell the coffee!
>> >
>> > En Memorium, Commodore Matt Decker! the only other place you find a
>> > captian
>> > going down with his crew is on the bridge of an RCES ship!
>> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47WtDvlSGYs
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > "Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay
>> > for
>> > it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and
>> their
>> > kids pay for it."
>> >
>>
>>
>

What I see is that their population possibly weren't as invested in the outcome as that of the Imperium. Imperial citizens/subjects couldn't avoid the war, whereas the Solomani were seeing their children being fed into a 13 year long meatgrinder with little obvious benefit. That's plenty of time for war-weariness to take hold.

Furthermore, a lot of the fighting they were doing took place on and around lots of high population worlds. That's a rather different thing from the giant space battles that were the main event elsewhere.

To make it worse, right at the beginning they swallowed the poison pill of Old Expanses, where they took in an entire sector's worth of an essentially unreconstructed part of the Imperium. That was a major shift in the balance of power in the Confederation, which, after all, was previously only about four sectors in size.

And, of course, the Confederation was, despite SolSec's efforts, a confederation of what were in many ways rather loosely associated regions.

Essentially, they bit off more than they could chew.

At least that's my take on it. No, it doesn't really make sense.

I don't really think either can strictly accurately be described as Space Nazis.

In the Sword Worlds case, a better analogy would be something more like Imperial Germany or something of that sort. Militaristic, authoritarian and all that. Except not even that unified.

To me the Solomani more closely resembled any of a number of societies that offered "freedom" to part of the population, and something else to the rest. See the Confederate States of America, apartheid South Africa, the British Empire as a whole, Australia for most of its modern history, and, frankly the US prior to the Civil Rights movement.

And all of these could be distinctly authoritarian when their system was threatened. See SolSec.


---In , <captnchuck67@...> wrote :

Plus,SOlo=Space Nazi I don't see. Sword Word=Space Nazi I see with clarity.

I think Harold's later reply is a good analysis. There's a lot going on,
and all of those things taken together slow you down to inertia. And that
was really the whole point behind the way the "Rebellion&quot; broke up the 3I
("Rebellion against the notion of centralized authority" is probably as
good a description as any). None of them had the critical mass to take it
all back if the rest didn't want to be taken back, but most of them had
leaders who couldn't do that math, so killed billions demonstrating it.

One of the things about the 3I is that you're really talking about Mao's
and Giap's People's War, but instead of the people's army swimming as fish
among the population, you've got the people's spaceships swimming among
space. As big as China and a billion people are, in-system and
interstellar space is even bigger with even more places to hide. Traveller
knew that via SDBs, so it really all comes down to "consent of the
governed." Winkling them all out is a fool's errand, the real issue is
getting people to say, "oh, all right."

> What I see is that their population possibly weren't as invested in the
> outcome as that of the Imperium. Imperial citizens/subjects couldn't avoid
> the war, whereas the Solomani were seeing their children being fed into a
> 13 year long meatgrinder with little obvious benefit. That's plenty of
> time for war-weariness to take hold.
>
> Furthermore, a lot of the fighting they were doing took place on and
> around lots of high population worlds. That's a rather different thing
> from the giant space battles that were the main event elsewhere.
>
> To make it worse, right at the beginning they swallowed the poison pill of
> Old Expanses, where they took in an entire sector's worth of an
> essentially unreconstructed part of the Imperium. That was a major shift
> in the balance of power in the Confederation, which, after all, was
> previously only about four sectors in size.
>
> And, of course, the Confederation was, despite SolSec's efforts, a
> confederation of what were in many ways rather loosely associated
> regions.
>
> Essentially, they bit off more than they could chew.
>
> At least that's my take on it. No, it doesn't really make sense.

People want shorthand terms.

It goes back to standard SF and SFRPG tropes, where "aliens" and groups
are stylized aspects of human behavior, separated out into concentrated or
extreme examples so we can consider them, fiddle with them, etc. Since all
of them fall into the Venn diagram of human behavior, we focus on and
amplify the differences to speak of them easily. "Duke fans" and "UK fans"
are indistinguishable, unless your goal is to distinguish them, then you
can. The difference is Pantone 286 and 287, but that's not dramatic, so we
ratchet up to "elitist bastards" and whatever pejorative Wildcats prefer.

> I don't really think either can strictly accurately be described as Space
> Nazis.
>
> In the Sword Worlds case, a better analogy would be something more like
> Imperial Germany or something of that sort. Militaristic, authoritarian
> and all that. Except not even that unified.
>
> To me the Solomani more closely resembled any of a number of societies
> that offered "freedom" to part of the population, and something else to
> the rest. See the Confederate States of America, apartheid South Africa,
> the British Empire as a whole, Australia for most of its modern history,
> and, frankly the US prior to the Civil Rights movement.
>
> And all of these could be distinctly authoritarian when their system was
> threatened. See SolSec.
>
>
> ---In , <captnchuck67@...> wrote :
>
> Plus,SOlo=Space Nazi I don't see. Sword Word=Space Nazi I see with
> clarity.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>