> @gradii said:
> Every organization tasked with keeping the peace/protecting people in space or elsewhere needs an extreme option for the occasional extreme situation. Starfleet and General Order 24 are no different. I don't know why this is even a debate.
>
> Should it be used if not absolutely neccesary? Of course not. but it exists for a reason. Same way a captain could do anything to destroy an omega particle -anything- I'm pretty sure because of the threat it poses.
Well, like I said, my objection isn't to its existence, just to the apparent lack of oversight on its use. Tactical orbital bombardment is one thing, but glassing an inhabited world is emphatically not something that should be left to the discretion of local commanders.
> @jonsills said:
> They weren't destroying a ship, they were destroying the human colony on LV-426. Given the nature of Weyland-Yutani's operations on that world, I'd be terribly surprised if they hadn't already pretty thoroughly dismantled the ship, both in recovering as many of the eggs as possible and in order to try to reverse-engineer the ship's systems.
>
> Besides, in order to cause damage to a ship in orbit (and Sulacco was fairly clearly designed as a space-only ship, never to enter an atmosphere), you'd need an explosion big enough to have a fair chance of cracking the entire planet. That didn't happen when the alien craft crashed; it seems unlikely that a nearby explosion, even one the size of a Tsar Bomba, would do it either.
There's a scene in the second Ciaphas Cain novel, Caves of Ice, where the heroes turn a promethium refinery into a giant fuel-air bomb to deal with a necron tomb. The shockwave actually buffets their troopship in orbit. Somebody on StarDestroyer.net calculated that blast into the multi-gigaton-range.
After the Horus Heresy, the Imperium carried out a purge of the traitor legions' home worlds in a campaign of exterminatus in an event called the scouring in which billions died. In 40K, any taint of Chaos on a world left alone will manifest in the loss of that world. The Imperium only use exterminatus sparingly (if a world has been lost to xenos or Chaos corruption and is not worth the cost of reconquest).
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
I have no idea how Chaos' taint spreads (good Lord above, that sounds filthy! ), but xenomorphs require a warm-blooded host to incubate their young. The reproductive cycle is based on the Ixtl from van Vogt's novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle, which in turn is based on the reproductive cycle of the tarantula hawk wasp. So, blowing up the LV-426 colony and then leaving warning buoys in orbit would be enough to contain the xenomorph threat there. (Of course, were any nests to be found on other worlds, the same would have to be done again...)
Chaos taint is... hard to explain. The forces of Chaos are less a faction and more an idea. An idea that spreads like cancer. Basically... its everything negative in a sentient being. Think of it like a drug problem. You get that first taste... and a part of it stays with you. Some actually try and push it away, others feed it. For the most part if Chaos gets a hold of an individual... itsw got you.
Chaos is... basically evil made manifest. In 40K, there is a such thing as gods as they are born from mortal beliefs and given form by the energies of The Warp or some other force (Don't know if the Eldar Gods have any connection to the Warp like the Chaos Gods do). Power of Belief is a very real thing. I mean look at the Orks. They're a species of low level Psykers, and their tech by all rights should not work because it is literally dumpster diving tech cobbled together from garbage. Yet it works as effectively as any of the Imperium's cutting edge technology. Why? Because they BELIEVE it works. And their belief, powered by their low level psionic power, is translated into the tech and makes it work.
Don't quote me for absolute truth, as I'm not an expert on 40K lore. But this is my attempt at an explanation.
Over the years we have seen many examples of the Federation making claims that aren't backed up by the reality on the ground. For example Nimbus III (from ST5) had on screen advertisements showing it as a thriving garden paradise but was in reality a failed wasteland shanty town. Tasha Yar's entire backstory pretty much spits in the face of the Federation's claims of being a post scarcity utopia.
I've never seen ANY reason to beleive the entire Federation was a utopia... just the core worlds.
Sisko went on a rant about just this subject to Kira in one of the maquis episodes.
If pessimistic dystopian fiction wasn't such a fad right now, it would actually be pretty interesting to deconstruct how something like the Federation would actually function if properly fleshed out.
A lot of the stuff in the War of the Masters setting here on the STO forum deals with that. A big part of the conflict there boils down to something resembling a "red state/blue state" divide (a rough analogy but it works for my purposes):
You've got the populous core worlds and homeworlds which, Earth in particular, trend toward Roddenberry-style moneyless secular/atheist-humanist socialism. Some of the underbelly of it is looked at, too: there are communities referred to as "welfare islands" where people live who essentially take the (equivalent of) universal basic income and live their whole lives on it without doing any of the self-improvement or communitarian stuff that we see from, say, Picard's or Sisko's families. (It's a small percentage of the population, but when the population is several billion people per planet...)
Worlds closer to the border tend to be less populous with fewer resources, including recently settled planets that are (in theory) fairly dependent on outside resources. People tend to be closer to what we would consider "conservative" (some of them would strike even us as extreme right-wing), and religious faith and nationalist ideas are more common and more accepted. There's also somewhat more acceptance of violence and weapons ownership, which is partly because planets out there are more vulnerable to predations by Orion pirates and other nasties: unlike with systems deep in the Federation, Starfleet can't be everywhere and often can't respond to attacks fast enough to do anything but count the dead. (The problem in this continuity being, as a reaction to the Maquis revolt, the Federation passed a law in 2371 that among other things significantly restricts arming colonies.)
There's weird ones like Bajor, too, which is a homeworld, but it's on the rim of the Federation and is culturally much more similar to other border planets than to "core" homeworlds: heavily religious, fairly agrarian, and fiercely nationalistic and independent-minded (but with the twist that, plus or minus a few percentage points, they tend to all follow the same religion instead of many different ones, which unifies them somewhat). Or Andoria, which is a core world but has universal conscription and requires all able-bodied adolescents to attend military training (we've interpreted the Andorians as something like collectivist Klingons, a "proud soldier race" comparable in many ways to Mass Effect's turians). Trill is a little bit of an oligarchy and trends toward centrism (by Federation standards), an effect of the Trill symbionts' memories and the fact only the best and brightest Trill humanoids are usually selected as hosts.
And the problem is, core and border don't really "get" each other. The core basically thinks the border is backwards and everything from their past they've tried to leave behind (the "old humanity", much as Diane Duane writes the Romulans as having tried to preserve the "old" pre-Surak Vulcan), whereas the border writ large considers the core authoritarian, careless and clueless. And to an extent, they're both right.
In-verse, the core worlds tend to have more political power just because there's more of them that meet the requirements for full statehood (and therefore direct Council representation, rather than representation by their member state of origin in the case of colonies), but since I started writing stories in the continuity I've been pointing towards a coming "point of inflection" where the rim starts to get enough Councillors to act as an effective counterweight.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Chaos taint is... hard to explain. The forces of Chaos are less a faction and more an idea. An idea that spreads like cancer. Basically... its everything negative in a sentient being. Think of it like a drug problem. You get that first taste... and a part of it stays with you. Some actually try and push it away, others feed it. For the most part if Chaos gets a hold of an individual... itsw got you.
Chaos is... basically evil made manifest. In 40K, there is a such thing as gods as they are born from mortal beliefs and given form by the energies of The Warp or some other force (Don't know if the Eldar Gods have any connection to the Warp like the Chaos Gods do). Power of Belief is a very real thing. I mean look at the Orks. They're a species of low level Psykers, and their tech by all rights should not work because it is literally dumpster diving tech cobbled together from garbage. Yet it works as effectively as any of the Imperium's cutting edge technology. Why? Because they BELIEVE it works. And their belief, powered by their low level psionic power, is translated into the tech and makes it work.
Don't quote me for absolute truth, as I'm not an expert on 40K lore. But this is my attempt at an explanation.
Chaos taint is the most insidious, all it takes is a few Chaos cultists and the corruption starts to spread. The further it spreads, the more dangerous it gets and once past a certain point, exterminatus is the only option left.
Two of the quotes on exterminatus are in my signature
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
@starswordc, sounds like the standard urban versus rural culture divide that permeates our real culture. I really wish that Star Trek would have taken the time to come up with some terminology to describe the home world and colony dynamics. "Core Worlds" is more of a Star Wars concept and it really doesn't fit with the geographical landscape of the Federation.
It would also be nice to know how political representation is divided up, as population-based and territory-based methods both possess inherent flaws that would lead to disenfranchisement. We saw with the Maquis border worlds that any guarantees of planetary sovereignty aren't worth the paper they are printed on.
Except Core Worlds still works if you look at it from a Faction Territory standpoint. Normally some of your more heavily defended systems will be those around your capital, which is typically around the center of your territory. It would be in the core of your territory.
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
In SW, as far as I can tell, "core worlds" refers to those planets closest to the galactic core (because Lucas never learned much about stellar physics, and was apparently unaware that the core of every galaxy we've observed consisted of one or more supermassive black holes), while in Trek (as in most other SF that uses the term) it refers to those planets closest to the center of whatever interstellar polity exists. Trek's core worlds are those that were founders of the Federation; they're in about the same region of the galaxy, and political power tends to radiate outward from them. Colony worlds were much more isolated during the 23rd century with its slower subspace ansibles, which is why places like Omicron Ceti III were settled despite issues that might have made them unsuitable (such as Omicron Ceti's Berthold radiation problem).
In the Masterverse, that seems to feed into the growing political issues surrounding the question of core and frontier worlds; some of the planets that version of the Federation wants to "rescue" people from are worlds that the locals' ancestors fought and died to tame, and they aren't about to abandon everything their people stand for. (Meanwhile, the folks "back home" in the Federation's core don't understand why these "primitives" aren't all clambering aboard any ship that offers to take them back to good old Earth/Andoria/Tellar/wherever.)
if lucas didn't know, someone else did, because the supermassive black hole at the center of the SW galaxy was brought up a few times in the EU - and the core worlds are all on the border of that uninhabitable region in the galaxy's 'bulge', which is called the deep core...but even the deep core has a few inhabitable worlds scattered about, particularly in the koornachet cluster
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
Well, the EU was written by a number of authors, some of whom wanted to write actual SF - but remember that none of that was part of anything Lucas wrote (he seemed to place Coruscant at the core of the galaxy, as well as making it a planet-wide city while ignoring the supply issue).
he never placed it at the core of the galaxy - the only planet that would even come close in media he personally had a hand in would be the Wellspring of Life from the clone wars show, as it mentions being located in 'the heart of the galaxy'
and as for cosuscant being an ecumenopolis...it's the capital of the galaxy - it would have no problem receiving supplies given the number of ships that visit daily, unlike other such ecumenopoli like taris or christophsis which likely receive far less traffic
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
Run the math. There simply aren't enough ships - there can't be, they'd choke the skies of Coruscant so thickly light couldn't get through, let alone any other sort of craft.
Asimov made that mistake with Trantor, too; he later rationalized it by saying that large sections of Trantor were abandoned, with homesteaders growing crops in whatever patches of subsurface soil they could manage to uncover. (And even then the entire society eventually collapsed, this being one of the major drivers toward the collapse of their Galactic Empire. Seldon's Encyclopedia Foundation served the same purpose for the galaxy that Irish monks served for Europe during its Dark Ages - minimizing the damage and shortening the period of barbarism.)
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
@starswordc, sounds like the standard urban versus rural culture divide that permeates our real culture. I really wish that Star Trek would have taken the time to come up with some terminology to describe the home world and colony dynamics. "Core Worlds" is more of a Star Wars concept and it really doesn't fit with the geographical landscape of the Federation.
I say "core worlds" for the reason Jon said: because they're worlds located towards the core of settlement of the polity in question, rather than towards the core of the galaxy. Although we still use the directions "coreward" and "rimward" as pointing towards or away from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole, with "upspin" and "downspin" referring to the direction of rotation of the Milky Way and "up" and "down" or "north" and "south" referring to the north and south poles of the Milky Way's magnetic field.
And you're exactly right, it's more accurately an urban/rural or capital/frontier cultural gap, but I'm an American IRL and our major political parties have tied themselves since about the 1960s to one half of that or the other, so I said "red state/blue state".
It would also be nice to know how political representation is divided up, as population-based and territory-based methods both possess inherent flaws that would lead to disenfranchisement. We saw with the Maquis border worlds that any guarantees of planetary sovereignty aren't worth the paper they are printed on.
The generally preferred version of how Federation Council representation works is laid out in the novel Articles of the Federation by Keith R.A. DeCandido, which is where STO got former President Nanietta Bacco from. It's one Councillor per major world, with the selection criteria left up to individual members (e.g. Betazed uses popular vote, whereas Bajor's is appointed by the First Minister and confirmed by the legislature), but the novel doesn't state the qualifications for direct Council representation (or the length of their term in office for that matter). In the MV the qualifications are mostly population-based, but there's also a question of whether the planet's culture is a "good fit" for the Federation (which, in 2412, Bajor introduces a bill to amend out).
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Comments
After the Horus Heresy, the Imperium carried out a purge of the traitor legions' home worlds in a campaign of exterminatus in an event called the scouring in which billions died. In 40K, any taint of Chaos on a world left alone will manifest in the loss of that world. The Imperium only use exterminatus sparingly (if a world has been lost to xenos or Chaos corruption and is not worth the cost of reconquest).
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Chaos is... basically evil made manifest. In 40K, there is a such thing as gods as they are born from mortal beliefs and given form by the energies of The Warp or some other force (Don't know if the Eldar Gods have any connection to the Warp like the Chaos Gods do). Power of Belief is a very real thing. I mean look at the Orks. They're a species of low level Psykers, and their tech by all rights should not work because it is literally dumpster diving tech cobbled together from garbage. Yet it works as effectively as any of the Imperium's cutting edge technology. Why? Because they BELIEVE it works. And their belief, powered by their low level psionic power, is translated into the tech and makes it work.
Don't quote me for absolute truth, as I'm not an expert on 40K lore. But this is my attempt at an explanation.
A lot of the stuff in the War of the Masters setting here on the STO forum deals with that. A big part of the conflict there boils down to something resembling a "red state/blue state" divide (a rough analogy but it works for my purposes):
- You've got the populous core worlds and homeworlds which, Earth in particular, trend toward Roddenberry-style moneyless secular/atheist-humanist socialism. Some of the underbelly of it is looked at, too: there are communities referred to as "welfare islands" where people live who essentially take the (equivalent of) universal basic income and live their whole lives on it without doing any of the self-improvement or communitarian stuff that we see from, say, Picard's or Sisko's families. (It's a small percentage of the population, but when the population is several billion people per planet...)
- Worlds closer to the border tend to be less populous with fewer resources, including recently settled planets that are (in theory) fairly dependent on outside resources. People tend to be closer to what we would consider "conservative" (some of them would strike even us as extreme right-wing), and religious faith and nationalist ideas are more common and more accepted. There's also somewhat more acceptance of violence and weapons ownership, which is partly because planets out there are more vulnerable to predations by Orion pirates and other nasties: unlike with systems deep in the Federation, Starfleet can't be everywhere and often can't respond to attacks fast enough to do anything but count the dead. (The problem in this continuity being, as a reaction to the Maquis revolt, the Federation passed a law in 2371 that among other things significantly restricts arming colonies.)
- There's weird ones like Bajor, too, which is a homeworld, but it's on the rim of the Federation and is culturally much more similar to other border planets than to "core" homeworlds: heavily religious, fairly agrarian, and fiercely nationalistic and independent-minded (but with the twist that, plus or minus a few percentage points, they tend to all follow the same religion instead of many different ones, which unifies them somewhat). Or Andoria, which is a core world but has universal conscription and requires all able-bodied adolescents to attend military training (we've interpreted the Andorians as something like collectivist Klingons, a "proud soldier race" comparable in many ways to Mass Effect's turians). Trill is a little bit of an oligarchy and trends toward centrism (by Federation standards), an effect of the Trill symbionts' memories and the fact only the best and brightest Trill humanoids are usually selected as hosts.
And the problem is, core and border don't really "get" each other. The core basically thinks the border is backwards and everything from their past they've tried to leave behind (the "old humanity", much as Diane Duane writes the Romulans as having tried to preserve the "old" pre-Surak Vulcan), whereas the border writ large considers the core authoritarian, careless and clueless. And to an extent, they're both right.In-verse, the core worlds tend to have more political power just because there's more of them that meet the requirements for full statehood (and therefore direct Council representation, rather than representation by their member state of origin in the case of colonies), but since I started writing stories in the continuity I've been pointing towards a coming "point of inflection" where the rim starts to get enough Councillors to act as an effective counterweight.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Chaos taint is the most insidious, all it takes is a few Chaos cultists and the corruption starts to spread. The further it spreads, the more dangerous it gets and once past a certain point, exterminatus is the only option left.
Two of the quotes on exterminatus are in my signature
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
It would also be nice to know how political representation is divided up, as population-based and territory-based methods both possess inherent flaws that would lead to disenfranchisement. We saw with the Maquis border worlds that any guarantees of planetary sovereignty aren't worth the paper they are printed on.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
In the Masterverse, that seems to feed into the growing political issues surrounding the question of core and frontier worlds; some of the planets that version of the Federation wants to "rescue" people from are worlds that the locals' ancestors fought and died to tame, and they aren't about to abandon everything their people stand for. (Meanwhile, the folks "back home" in the Federation's core don't understand why these "primitives" aren't all clambering aboard any ship that offers to take them back to good old Earth/Andoria/Tellar/wherever.)
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
and as for cosuscant being an ecumenopolis...it's the capital of the galaxy - it would have no problem receiving supplies given the number of ships that visit daily, unlike other such ecumenopoli like taris or christophsis which likely receive far less traffic
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Asimov made that mistake with Trantor, too; he later rationalized it by saying that large sections of Trantor were abandoned, with homesteaders growing crops in whatever patches of subsurface soil they could manage to uncover. (And even then the entire society eventually collapsed, this being one of the major drivers toward the collapse of their Galactic Empire. Seldon's Encyclopedia Foundation served the same purpose for the galaxy that Irish monks served for Europe during its Dark Ages - minimizing the damage and shortening the period of barbarism.)
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
And you're exactly right, it's more accurately an urban/rural or capital/frontier cultural gap, but I'm an American IRL and our major political parties have tied themselves since about the 1960s to one half of that or the other, so I said "red state/blue state".
The generally preferred version of how Federation Council representation works is laid out in the novel Articles of the Federation by Keith R.A. DeCandido, which is where STO got former President Nanietta Bacco from. It's one Councillor per major world, with the selection criteria left up to individual members (e.g. Betazed uses popular vote, whereas Bajor's is appointed by the First Minister and confirmed by the legislature), but the novel doesn't state the qualifications for direct Council representation (or the length of their term in office for that matter). In the MV the qualifications are mostly population-based, but there's also a question of whether the planet's culture is a "good fit" for the Federation (which, in 2412, Bajor introduces a bill to amend out).
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/