Setting Q&A
Posted: Sat Mar 30, 2013 7:16 pm
The universe is big. Really really big. The galactic federation is just as big, which raises some really big questions.
How many races are there? How important are they? How do people get information from place to place? How can the federation even be ruled if it is really that big?
There are a staggering number of races. It's a lot. I won't even go into them all, or even many of them. What is important about how many of them there are, is how many of them are involved. Wars have plagued the universe since people got the idea in the first place, first trying it out on their own races, then on their neighbors, and then really going after it across the stars. Some of these wars were about territory and resources, but after the first few arms of a galactic spiral have been conquered, one has to ask the question about 'why bother anymore' or 'how many blocks of gold do I really need anyway' and others of that sort. But not all races are so reasonable as to question these things, some races have fundamental needs to address. Take the Zorians for instance. The Zorian war threatened all life. Just because. Zorians consume life and only life, and they do so at a staggering rate. It would have certainly taken longer than your standard galactic afternoon for them to wipe out all other life, but the Zorian war prevented their spread and led to their apparent extinction. You see, they don't just consume everyday life like cows and tomatoes, they can only propogate themselves by converting intelligent life into Zorian life. The Skolians posed a similar threat, but thanks to Aternan intervention, did not spread to a universe level threat. The races that are left and making this uneasy peace that is the good ol' GF? Thousands and thousands of them, millions even, but not what there used to be. The ones that are movers and shakers? Far fewer.
People, and information, travel between the galaxies and within the universe in much the same way. They use a very important technology called "superwarp". The origins of Superwarp are not known at all to anyone outside of the most elite levels of government, and it is a technology far more advanced than Warp, or Rainbow Beams, or Trans-Mat, or any of the other daily miracles the federation uses day to day. While warp engines twist space to cause relative motion, and in so doing propel vessels many times the speed of light, even hundreds of times the speed of light, Superwarp twists space and *time*, and creates what is frequently explained as a "causality window."
Imagine that you are at point A, and wish to get to point B. Suppose further that point B is really really really far away. Prohibitively far away. Even with warp. At this point, you have to decide just how important getting to point B really is. If it's not that important, don't bother. If it IS that important, hitch a ride with Superwarp. What you'll do is twist space and time together to create a sort of tunnel through which you can cover millions of light years really quickly. Imagine your position in time and space like a fish swimming through a river. Not a literal river, not a literal fish, but follow me here. Warp lets you move the water faster than the fish can swim. Superwarp lets you open a gap in the water, like a vacuum tunnel, and suck the fish through to a later point. It lets you do so so fast in fact, that there is still a fish shaped hole where you got it from. If that fish then later crosses either the vacuum tunnel or the fish shaped hole, he'll meet himself, shake hands, and just generally agree to not be around anymore.
Superwarp is fundamentally a one way trip. The idea that you could move faster than yourself through time, and cause things to happen earlier than you intended to, is one that the universe is highly uncomfortable with, and occasionally throws a fit about.
More technically, superwarp violates linear causality, if it is ever folded back on itself. You can go one way without that much difficulty, but if you cross your path on the way back, if you intersect your path of travel at any speed, then your position in reality collides with itself, and is undone. This creates a paradox.
Paradoxes are bad. Really bad. The simplest ones just destroy you. Some of these can be really bad anyway, because it's not just people, it's things as well. Suppose you buy a second hand superwarp roadster and take it out for a spin and, without realizing it, cross the pathway that the same roadster had taken before. The roadster ceases to be anymore, but you don't. You're left without a roadster, and little explanation of how you got there, and possibly without a space suit (especially if the suit were on board the roadster when you bought it, tsk tsk.) The worst paradoxes undo everything you did after the point you cross in your superwarp pathway. This causes a great many headaches, and should be avoided at all costs.
In the modern universe, superwarp is used a lot, and for very good reasons. It allows a report to reach it's destination basically before it was sent, at least fast enough to be relevant. The superwarp courier industry thrives, and has since galactic federation hegemony. It allows people to travel to their destinations quickly, and be back before lunch time, as long as they haven't already had lunch before they left. It is considered by some to be trivially easy to avoid crossing a superwarp path and closing a causality window, it is considered by most to be fantastically dangerous to treat such things trivially.
Suppose I bring you a report about enemy fleet movements, and you tell me what to do about them. I then leave to carry out the orders, but I close my window on the way. This is bad. The worst case scenario is that not only do I cease to exist, but the *information* I was carrying ceases to exist, the fleet movements cannot be reported to you now, even by someone else, because I paradoxed out the report, and your orders in response to them. You now cannot learn of those fleet movements, and if you did, you couldn't move the instructions you wanted to give past the upper bounds of warp.
It is because of superwarp that things get along, and it is used a lot, but as sparingly and as carefully as possible. The universe is divided into smaller chunks that are governed basically locally, which are in turn governed even more locally still, ranging from several spiral galaxies down to your local voting district.
The federation can be ruled in much the same way as any country can be ruled; badly. Information moves, albeit slower than most people would like, and certainly slower than gossip. Gossip, mind you, seems to travel even faster than superwarp, and if we could figure out how then we might be able to avoid all of this causality window business and just get on with things.
Peace is difficult to maintain, particularly when everyone seems so dead set against it. The federation is ruled from the Core Worlds, a series of planet sized cities around a commandeered star, which also has the largest fleet of unused superwarp ships. At least one, if not more of these planet sized objects is a supercomputer that helps calculate superwarp trajectories for the couriers and tries to avoid windowing out information, such as census information, tax forms, matching socks, and the like.
Influential people have had to extend their influence father in the GF than ever before, as who really cares about Ursa Minor when we've got problems of our own over here in Zonk or wherever. Therefore, the pool of people available to vote for is unsurprisingly small. One of these people, occasionally called "The Immortal Emperor" or "Abe" if he's not doing anything impressive at the moment is an Aternan who seems bent on governing again. And again. He's held a staggering number of terms as galactic president, and keeps coming back for more. His personal power and influence even when he's not president extend through a great deal of the universe, enough to rival most other politicians.
And that's the basics of it. Please post questions or, if you like, criticism and profanity. As with most things, I'm not necessarily set in stone on every detail, though I'd just as soon not nobble about it more than we have to.
How many races are there? How important are they? How do people get information from place to place? How can the federation even be ruled if it is really that big?
There are a staggering number of races. It's a lot. I won't even go into them all, or even many of them. What is important about how many of them there are, is how many of them are involved. Wars have plagued the universe since people got the idea in the first place, first trying it out on their own races, then on their neighbors, and then really going after it across the stars. Some of these wars were about territory and resources, but after the first few arms of a galactic spiral have been conquered, one has to ask the question about 'why bother anymore' or 'how many blocks of gold do I really need anyway' and others of that sort. But not all races are so reasonable as to question these things, some races have fundamental needs to address. Take the Zorians for instance. The Zorian war threatened all life. Just because. Zorians consume life and only life, and they do so at a staggering rate. It would have certainly taken longer than your standard galactic afternoon for them to wipe out all other life, but the Zorian war prevented their spread and led to their apparent extinction. You see, they don't just consume everyday life like cows and tomatoes, they can only propogate themselves by converting intelligent life into Zorian life. The Skolians posed a similar threat, but thanks to Aternan intervention, did not spread to a universe level threat. The races that are left and making this uneasy peace that is the good ol' GF? Thousands and thousands of them, millions even, but not what there used to be. The ones that are movers and shakers? Far fewer.
People, and information, travel between the galaxies and within the universe in much the same way. They use a very important technology called "superwarp". The origins of Superwarp are not known at all to anyone outside of the most elite levels of government, and it is a technology far more advanced than Warp, or Rainbow Beams, or Trans-Mat, or any of the other daily miracles the federation uses day to day. While warp engines twist space to cause relative motion, and in so doing propel vessels many times the speed of light, even hundreds of times the speed of light, Superwarp twists space and *time*, and creates what is frequently explained as a "causality window."
Imagine that you are at point A, and wish to get to point B. Suppose further that point B is really really really far away. Prohibitively far away. Even with warp. At this point, you have to decide just how important getting to point B really is. If it's not that important, don't bother. If it IS that important, hitch a ride with Superwarp. What you'll do is twist space and time together to create a sort of tunnel through which you can cover millions of light years really quickly. Imagine your position in time and space like a fish swimming through a river. Not a literal river, not a literal fish, but follow me here. Warp lets you move the water faster than the fish can swim. Superwarp lets you open a gap in the water, like a vacuum tunnel, and suck the fish through to a later point. It lets you do so so fast in fact, that there is still a fish shaped hole where you got it from. If that fish then later crosses either the vacuum tunnel or the fish shaped hole, he'll meet himself, shake hands, and just generally agree to not be around anymore.
Superwarp is fundamentally a one way trip. The idea that you could move faster than yourself through time, and cause things to happen earlier than you intended to, is one that the universe is highly uncomfortable with, and occasionally throws a fit about.
More technically, superwarp violates linear causality, if it is ever folded back on itself. You can go one way without that much difficulty, but if you cross your path on the way back, if you intersect your path of travel at any speed, then your position in reality collides with itself, and is undone. This creates a paradox.
Paradoxes are bad. Really bad. The simplest ones just destroy you. Some of these can be really bad anyway, because it's not just people, it's things as well. Suppose you buy a second hand superwarp roadster and take it out for a spin and, without realizing it, cross the pathway that the same roadster had taken before. The roadster ceases to be anymore, but you don't. You're left without a roadster, and little explanation of how you got there, and possibly without a space suit (especially if the suit were on board the roadster when you bought it, tsk tsk.) The worst paradoxes undo everything you did after the point you cross in your superwarp pathway. This causes a great many headaches, and should be avoided at all costs.
In the modern universe, superwarp is used a lot, and for very good reasons. It allows a report to reach it's destination basically before it was sent, at least fast enough to be relevant. The superwarp courier industry thrives, and has since galactic federation hegemony. It allows people to travel to their destinations quickly, and be back before lunch time, as long as they haven't already had lunch before they left. It is considered by some to be trivially easy to avoid crossing a superwarp path and closing a causality window, it is considered by most to be fantastically dangerous to treat such things trivially.
Suppose I bring you a report about enemy fleet movements, and you tell me what to do about them. I then leave to carry out the orders, but I close my window on the way. This is bad. The worst case scenario is that not only do I cease to exist, but the *information* I was carrying ceases to exist, the fleet movements cannot be reported to you now, even by someone else, because I paradoxed out the report, and your orders in response to them. You now cannot learn of those fleet movements, and if you did, you couldn't move the instructions you wanted to give past the upper bounds of warp.
It is because of superwarp that things get along, and it is used a lot, but as sparingly and as carefully as possible. The universe is divided into smaller chunks that are governed basically locally, which are in turn governed even more locally still, ranging from several spiral galaxies down to your local voting district.
The federation can be ruled in much the same way as any country can be ruled; badly. Information moves, albeit slower than most people would like, and certainly slower than gossip. Gossip, mind you, seems to travel even faster than superwarp, and if we could figure out how then we might be able to avoid all of this causality window business and just get on with things.
Peace is difficult to maintain, particularly when everyone seems so dead set against it. The federation is ruled from the Core Worlds, a series of planet sized cities around a commandeered star, which also has the largest fleet of unused superwarp ships. At least one, if not more of these planet sized objects is a supercomputer that helps calculate superwarp trajectories for the couriers and tries to avoid windowing out information, such as census information, tax forms, matching socks, and the like.
Influential people have had to extend their influence father in the GF than ever before, as who really cares about Ursa Minor when we've got problems of our own over here in Zonk or wherever. Therefore, the pool of people available to vote for is unsurprisingly small. One of these people, occasionally called "The Immortal Emperor" or "Abe" if he's not doing anything impressive at the moment is an Aternan who seems bent on governing again. And again. He's held a staggering number of terms as galactic president, and keeps coming back for more. His personal power and influence even when he's not president extend through a great deal of the universe, enough to rival most other politicians.
And that's the basics of it. Please post questions or, if you like, criticism and profanity. As with most things, I'm not necessarily set in stone on every detail, though I'd just as soon not nobble about it more than we have to.