The problem with humans

 Humanity poses a major problem for most other races in the galaxy. 

Most known species had a period of unification before they achieved sufficient technology and resources to make the jump outward to the stars. As such while there are variations within most sophonts they tend to share a common cultural base from which they derive. not so with humanity.

Herein lies the problem.

Humanity's jump to the star came about mostly due to the efforts of Largo Eximus and his effort to do an end-run around political and economic power blocks dedicated to their hold on mankind to their own benefit. This series of conflicts between the man who would eventually become Emperor is central to many questions historians have posed about his early years and the source ot the leverage he used to drive forth his agenda of taking Man to the stars.

Why, when all evidence points to his being born in the Western United States did he develop his first base of operation in Africa? Why are the ten oldest starports on Earth built outside the borders of the most technologically and economically advanced country on the planet at the time? If asked today the Emperor will most often give a quote along the lines of a prophet not being accepted in his own home and not elaborate.

But this lack of unity throughout most of his early career gave rise to the problem of humanity not having acquired a common cultural heritage that most other races have attained before they made the great jump. this was exacerbated by Largo making efforts to separate the most contentious groups by setting up cultural colonies in an effort to give them room and time to, as he often put it, grow out of a need to slaughter each other.

Now not all such colonies grew out of violence. Some were established to allow a number of cultures from being forced out of existence due to various advances. The best example are the three Amish colonies of New Goshen, New Cannan, and Prosperity. The colonies were funded by the Emperor to preserve what he called an important and significant cultural relic that was in danger of dying out due to an increasing impossibility of resisting change brought on by constant exposure to the outside world.  

In all close to 50 cultural enclaves were given colonization charters in the first century after the Jump. The resulting lack of cultural unity makes humanity confusing and unpredictable to most of the species we share the star lanes with.

As a Side note...

from this point going forward, I will abandon the timeline method of charting the histories in favor of telling the individual stories.

From the Ashes-The New York Megaplex-part two

Yes I know this has been hanging forever but I finally got around to getting it all straight so let's go 

Following the departure of the fleet for the Shaloi homeworld attention shifted to the huge scar on the Eastern Seaboard. 

A number of plans were floated as to the correct approach to moving forward from the destruction of one of our largest cities and much of our cultural history. While this article's focus is the rise of the New York Metroplex since so much of the bombardment has focused there it should be noted that every city and location capable of a spaceship launch was hit and neutralized save the elevator at Mombasa where they concentrated on capturing the upper hub rather than destroying the valuable resource.

The emotional impact of losing so many of the country's most famous historical locations drove much of the restoration but the fact that Long Island and much of the rest of the city had literally been blown away made any meaningful restoration of New York itself impossible. The final solution came from the Odysseus Group, a think tank devoted to engineering colony designs on less than hospitable worlds. Their solution was the world's first arcology. Given the desire to rebuild on the original location of the great city they proposed rebuilding literally from the ground up. After the excavation of the wreckage of the Shaloi ships and debris new foundations were built on a massive scale. Each submerged bunker was the building block for the next and within a decade a new foundation began to rise from the Atlantic and connected with the mainland.

Then the truly serious work began. For years a great deal of industrial might went into building modular units that would make up much of the new city structure. With the foundations set these began to be brought in and in short order the arcology began to take place. Despite the name, the structure would not have the appearance of a single structure but rather would be a multitude of structures connected on many levels to make transport throughout simpler. The new city would forgo skyscrapers and concentrate on unified community units that would be significantly larger at the foundation than anything that had gone before. In the end, a maximum height of 50 stories was agreed on and the new city growth became exponential as the original structures became the homes for those building the city.

While individual living units ranging from ultra-efficiency single units to larger family units were the norm the structures were designed around community designs with large areas given over to parks, malls, and arcades. there were miles of fiber optic lines devoted to piping natural light into the common areas and encouraging as much organic landscaping as possible.

Eventually, the growth slowed as the population of those choosing to live in the new city leveled out. This led to a new problem that would have threatened to destroy this new city if it had not already been foreseen years prior. As the expansion of the Metroplex slowed more and more individuals became unemployed since their skills were no longer required in the city. But as has been said, this was foreseen and plans were already in place.

While the Metroplex was being constructed life continued elsewhere and so did progress on many fronts. During the 50 years it took to construct the structure more and more heavy industry was transferred to orbital facilities and mining of both the moon and the asteroid belt was in full swing. As a result, more and more terrestrial jobs either followed the work off-world or were rendered redundant. It was decided by the Emperor to slowly transition to what he would eventually refer to as the Residenzi system with Earth being his first test case. Within a generation, the primary shift was complete by gradual retiring and subsidizing of those unable or unwilling to retrain to a new occupation. As the new system moved into place necessary adjustments were made to the housing and economic structure within New York to facilitate it.

Within another 30 years, the change spread outward and changed the structure of Earth itself. Much of the heartlands transitioned to rural agrarian trusteeships and the corn belt became more and more green as the huge agribusiness conglomerates slowly fell apart unwilling to change to the new business model. Small town America survived but as factories shifted to become more support for the agrarian communities and energy grids gave way to smaller more localized power sources they became more focused on the community and less on nationwide or global competition to survive. And what started in America crossed borders and took root everywhere.

For more details look Here.

Eventually, the new system was presented to other worlds in the Imperium facing similar growing pains and the Residenzi system became a common fixture of the cosmopolitan worlds.

In the end, the New York Metroplex would span much of the area from the former city of Boston to much of Philadelphia and become home to close to a billion people.

Smaller arcologies on similar models would rise in a number of areas including Delhi, Bombay, and Hong Kong/Macau but none would come close to the size and scope of this original project.

Law enforcement

One of the main problems when it comes to law enforcement within the Imperium is the fact that the Emperor set things up so each local government is given autonomy to set their own laws and see to their enforcement with certain limits. The Imperial forces' interest is confined to the Imperial enclave and their starports.

What this ended up meaning early on was that criminals could effectively commit a crime and once they were on a ship and out of the system the courts where they committed their crime had no recourse to bring them to justice unless the criminal landed somewhere that had extradition treaties with them.

Needless to say, the member states looked to the Imperium for a solution to this situation.

Faced with the nightmare of establishing an official police force that would be in the position of trying to enforce the mishmash of legal codes in existence or the alternative of reversing his policy of allowing the local governments to set their own laws he instead stepped out of the box and gave them something else.

What came into being were the Imperial marshals, a group of individuals who in return for a bounty set by the local governments were empowered to seek out and deal with these criminals. These bounties would be submitted to the imperial court system for vetting before being posted to the official bounty board. The system would not accept bounties for political crimes or fabricated charges intended to bypass that rule. Once the bounty was posted any licensed marshal could act on it and collect the bounty. Most bounties were for retrieval but for serious crimes of violence Dead or Alive bounties could be issued.

Aside from the sanctioning of the marshals, the Imperium set up what the Emperor called a "bounty wagon" circuit. Marshals need only deliver their prisoners to established imperial stations to collect their bounty and the prisoners would then be transported by the bounty wagons to their final destination.

Needless to say, the establishment of the marshals lead to the formation of its dark cousin the Bounty Hunter's Guild. This body would accept contracts of any sort as long as the funds for the bounty were placed in escrow beforehand. And while marshals work under authority granted by their license, bounty hunters do not enjoy that privilege. It is a matter of Imperial policy that anyone working as a marshal is forbidden to collect guild bounties on pain of revocation of their license. 

The present location of the Grand Guild Hall is the planet Nava. Being one of the so-called treaty planets established after the 4th Imperial war neither the Talosian nor Dark Imperium claims any authority there other than within their own enclaves. As a show of panache, the Hall includes the Big Board, a display 50m high and 500m long on which it is said every open bounty is displayed. In a morbid way, the size of the present bounty on one's head has become a sort of symbol of prestige among many of the rich and powerful. The hands-down king of the board is to no one's surprise Largo Eximus himself at a level that if one were ever to collect it and survive to collect it could buy several not so small planets.

As a side note the farther into the empire you go the more you find that the local governments maintain close ties and collateral law enforcement treaties which means an officer on Tropica can act on a warrant issued on Arion. This means that for the most part, you will rarely see marshals in the inner systems.

Another item of interest is that referring back to the entry on citizenship acting as a deputy to a licensed marshell is a profession that establishes credited at one hour for every 100cr of bounty collected. so a 12,000cr bounty will bank 120 hours toward citizenship.

Bureaus and Ministries

 In the infrastructure of the Talosian imperium, the job of keeping everything working together and organizing matters falls mostly to the Bureaucracy.

Now, this takes two forms both of which I have mentioned before, bureaus and ministries. 

But what is the difference if there is one?

The answer is fairly simple. Whether a body is a ministry or a bureau depends on who oversees their operations. Ministries as a whole are instruments of the Senate and ultimately answer to them when money is needed or things are brought into question.

Bureaus on the other hand are established as part of the executive authority of the throne.

It is not hard to see that these bodies have found it necessary to build links of cooperation where their authorities overlap. A good example would be the relationship between the Bureau of Cultural Affairs and the Ministries of Colonization and Trade. In the normal course of affairs, the Bureau passes to Colonization the evaluations of new uninhabited worlds ready to be either colonized or mined. Likewise, they give to Trade the limitations in the trade and social interactions with the new cultures discovered.

In a few cases, it would seem that there are bureaus and ministries serving the same function such as the Bureau of the Treasury and the Ministry of Finance. In this case, while the two bodies serve similar functions they do it with two different treasuries. 

The Bureau oversees the money and assets directly pertaining to the Emperor and his household. As a matter of interest, no taxes find their way into these accounts.

The Ministry of Finance oversees all the Imperil accounts from the Military to the Diplomatic Corps and Scout Service. They also oversee taxes and other income the Empire generates. The money flows into the General fund and moves outward to the budgets to support all the projects the Imperium has in motion at any given time. It is to be noted that there has been a high turnover rate in the positions of Lead Auditors mostly due to the stress of overseeing the coming and going of funds.

Recent events and internal politics

We have just come out of a time of great expansion and conflict where we may very well be in a position of being defeated by our own success. 

 In 2618 reports began filtering back from deep range scouts along the border between the Talosian Imperium and its long-time rival the so-called Dark Imperium. (the title drawn from some documents acquired where it was found that they referred to themselves as "The Empire in Darkness") The reports indicated that after close to 40 years of relative peace the Dark Imperium was massing several fleets in systems just beyond the jump range of most starships. 

Our response was swift and effective. The fleets of the 3 sectors on the border supplemented by taskforces from 7 other fleets staged a massive system hopping campaign where they would travel to the fortress systems, devastate the fleets found there and facilities to produce more then leaving a task force in place to hold down the fort head to the next series of systems to repeat the process. 

What was underestimated going in was how much of the Dark Imperium's forces had been committed to their eventual invasion. After the initial fleet engagements, the Imperial forces found only a skeleton coverage that was quickly dealt with before driving deeper/ At no point was any attempt made to occupy the captured planets only to secure their ability to leave their atmospheres.

By the time Central Command realized what was happening the effective border had moved close to 100 parsecs outward from where it had started. Orders were sent out to hold in place and to advance no further while the Emperor decided our next step.

That step came from the Dark Imperium in the form of an ambassador sent to sue for peace. While that was not totally unexpected what was unforeseen was the fact that the ambassador was one of the gold-skinned warriors known as the Immortals. While we knew about them and had found their corpses in the aftermath of battles no living member of the race had ever been captured. All we had ever been certain of was the fact that every one of them encountered had been in a position of command over the forces engaged.

The ambassador presented papers indicating he had the authority to negotiate peace and subsequent treaties to maintain that peace. While he would negotiate a cease-fire with the ranking military authorities he insisted that the formal binding treaties be negotiated with the Emperor himself. The request was granted and two standard months later the Imperium found itself in possession of over a hundred new systems most with existing populations who had yet to learn their new status. A new frontier had just come into existence.

Now up to this point, the task of evaluating new systems and first contact procedures had been the purview of the Bureau of Cultural Affairs, which had come about after unwise decisions made by a number of traders resulted in an entire world declaring a jihad on offworlders and the need of the Imperial fleet to interdict the world. What had originally started as a part of the Imperial Diplomatic Corps eventually became a bureau of its own and the sole evaluators of newly encountered worlds occupied or not.

The cultural evaluation teams were lead by a lead evaluator who most often ran his team as if he was nobility bestowing favors and making decrees. As may be expected the people who were given the authority to designate new lead evaluators were the existing leads themselves who were cautious about who they qualified since they saw such people as infringing on their exalted status.

There has been pressure from the throne for the Bureau to increase the number of teams since the last war due to the constant backlog of systems waiting to be processed and passed on to either the Ministries of Trade or Colonization.

At the same time, the Free traders League has commissioned a number of scout teams that are capable of performing the planetary evaluations of uninhabited worlds and submitting them to the League for subsequent sale to the Ministry of Colonization, this has raised protests from the Bureau and requests to the fleet to arrest these teams for prosecution. Oddly the fleet has been told in most cases to not get involved unless there is evidence of actual illegal activity.

With the recent opening of the frontier regions, the need for evaluation teams has become critical and the pressure on the Bureau to produce said teams has risen to a boiling point.

Rumors have been circulating that the Emperor may have exhausted his patience and may step in to correct matters himself, which never bodes well for a ministry or bureau that is at the center of such attention.

On a possibly related note, a number of individuals who had left the scout service after being passed over for lead evaluator certification have started to disappear from their jobs and homes with no explanation.

More than one individual has voiced concerns that the fleets are being spread too thin providing coverage for all these new holdings and new treaty or no that puts us in a position ripe for mischief from utside interests. We won the war but is the peace going to break us?

Warp drives in a jump drive universe. A Traveller challenge

This is an edited version of something I posted on Facebook but belongs here as well:

Up to recently, I have basically run the travel systems on a plot-based mechanic. i.e. things break when it drives the plot for them to do so. But I have had some pressure from players to actually set the systems to paper as it were so they can run their own stories in my universe. So I have been working my original notes into something Traveller friendly to that end.

What I have so far sounds good in my own head but I thought I would take advantage of our hivemind to see if makes sense to others or if there might be better ways of handling some elements. All I ask is that questions and discussion focus on these elements not on why you think warp drives “break” the game since I will humbly contend that I have hundreds of play hours proving it does not break the game.

First step

Warp drives are rated in a similar fashion to jump drives in that the rating expresses how far the drive can travel in one week. The major difference is that while both drives can be used to travel less than their rated distance a warp drive’s travel time is in fractions of its rating since it is not locked into a jump transit. For example, a W4 engine can make a 2-parsec transit in 3-4 days rather than a week.

The displacement of warp drives vs jump drives is similar with the warp bubble generator being larger than the equal jump drive but balanced out by requiring lesser fuel tankage so for simplicity's sake I treat them as a 1 for 1 displacement for building purposes. The warp drive is essentially two parts with a power supply and a warp generator. The power supply can be upgraded to the next rating but that does not move the drive to the next stage but rather becomes important when figuring overdrive problems.

Second step

Warp drives can be overdriven by one or two stages for limited amounts of time. W4 can run either W5 or W6 Overdriving an engine by one stage will require two malfunction checks to be performed weekly and an overhaul of the drive system to be performed afterward costing 50,000 cr per step of the rated engine. Failure to perform the overhaul means that any further overdrives are done at a penalty for each week running overdrive subsequently. (the overhaul resets the counter to zero as it were).

Overdriving an engine by two stages means the malfunction checks are made daily with a similar cumulative penalty and the overhaul cost is doubled.

There are two malfunctions related to overdriving a warp engine One is related to the power source and the other to the warp containment.

The power malfunction is called a cascade breakdown. If this occurs the SOP is to shut down the power unit and check to see if it stops. If it does not stop then the power unit must be ejected as it will eventually build to an explosion that will gut the ship.

If the shutdown is successful then it may be used at a reduced capacity. (drive rating minus 1d6) If the new rating is 0 to -2 then the effective rating is W1, -3, or lower and the power unit can no longer sustain a warp bubble and it is time to break out emergency beacons. Either way, the power unit must be replaced to restore the drive rating of the ship. ($$$$)

This can be reduced by an upgrade of the power unit to the next larger rating. While it does not allow the drive to go faster it pushes the test for a cascade breakdown back one step. With an upgrade power unit, one-stage overdrive does not require the cascade check and a two-stage overdrive need only be checked for overdrive malfunction once a week. This does not affect the other malfunction calculation though.

The other malfunction is less understood but closely related to the warp containment unit. It is referred to as wink out. It is not a rupturing of the warp bubble but manifests something like a misjump. The bubble collapses and displaces the ship in a random direction up to twice the rating of the drive. Aside from the fact that a number of systems will be damaged such as communications and navigation which will need to be repaired the effective drive rating is immediately halved until the warp containment can be repaired properly. ($$$$$) at a class B port or better.

FTL Communications

One of the main elements binding together the wide expanse of the Empire is its network of faster than light relay satellites. While each transmitter is only capable of pushing out a signal about 10 parsecs, by laying out a series of satellites spaced 5-8 parsecs apart a message can be sent to any part of the Imperium with a minimum of delay.
Several thousand relays and switching stations make up the network with approximately one manned station for every 20 relays in a region. The manned routing stations monitor the bandwidth loads in their region and assisted by the station AI attempt to keep the load of communication moving smoothly.
The vast majority of communications (approx. 90%) take the form of written messages, these take up a minimum of bandwidth and are very compatible with compression/encryption algorithms. As such these are the least expensive form of communications.
Close afterward are one-way audio tracks. These are also compressable and mostly are recorded music and speeches that make up the news and entertainment content broadcast across the Empire. Along with these follow the video transmissions.
Everything up to this point is one-way communications. Two-way communications across interstellar distances start expensive and ramp up quickly with the number of relays the message needs to pass through. Each relay adds a minuscule amount of lag to the signal but eventually, it grows to the point where between the lag and the high cost it becomes too expensive to maintain.
An added consideration is the sheer volume of data that needs to be transmitted on a daily basis. The cost of setting up the network and maintaining it is quickly recouped from the fees charges for its use but it still takes the time to deploy new units and personnel to both regulate the flow and expand the net. Since the network is built and maintained as a government function military and government communications take priority. Bandwidth is also allocated to the local governments for their use.It is possible to purchase priority to bandwidth but the cost of this makes it available only to megacorps and a handful of the wealthiest individuals. Despite the assigned priority bandwidth sold, 50% of the available bandwidth is reserved to carry regular communications. This prevents the megacorps and local governments from throttling communications to their benefit.
The efficiency of the net depends largely on where in the empire one is at a given moment. The inner systems, being the location with the densest concentration of relays, have excellent service both in availability and cost. As one travels outward to the frontier the density of relays decreases and malfunctions can result in greater loads on the relays and in some cases the isolation of entire regions until repairs are made. At present, the region with the most limited coverage is the region known as the New Territories. At present, the systems connected in this region are often sending the signal down a singular path of relays laid during the war that ended with this region ceded to the Imperium.
Many ships carry smaller versions of the communication systems with ranges of only a few parsec. These are expensive and only a small number of civilian ships budget the cost of maintaining them. Military vessels of frigate and cruiser hull sizes carry these sets while the battlecruisers and the handful of ships larger than that. carry their own full relay equipment.