NationStates Jolt Archive

At what point would a nation with a strong economy and gov't spending on both education and defence realistically be able to declare a major technological breakthrough. I don't want to be a godmoder. Here's a link to see my nation. http://www.nationstates.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi/target=display_nation/nation=nanotech_army

At the point you can roleplay it convincingly.

There are people who will tell you "You must reach X population before you can claim to have Y, otherwise you are a godmodding n00b and have no value".

Personally, I think it depends more on role play - basically, you can have whatever you want, whenever you want. You could have a nation of five million population flying about in the Celer Manus Dei if you wanted.

However, if you go too far out, you may find that people ignore you; it's one thing to have nuclear rocketplanes, and quite another to have a space fleet of Mk.2 Death Stars, Borg Cubes and Vorlon Planetkillers that cannot be defeated by any means whatsoever (I'm not implying, however, that everyone who uses that sort of technology is a godmodder).

So basically, it's all down to how you use it; use it badly and you'll get ignored (this applies for any tech, though). Use it well and people won't mind. Do what you like, and good luck!

Yup. You can have a major breakthrough as soon as you can roleplay it convincingly. It's just that a nation your size can't have *too* many breakthroughs in *too* short a time. Spread them out a bit or you'll risk being ignored by people.

Yup. You can have a major breakthrough as soon as you can roleplay it convincingly. It's just that a nation your size can't have *too* many breakthroughs in *too* short a time. Spread them out a bit or you'll risk being ignored by people.

...And you prove Tsar's point perfectly. Niiiice.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v453/GMCMA/Other%20stuff/reibann.gif

Bear in mind that many, many nations come into being and are FT (Future Tech) from the word go. As far as I'm concerned, if you got bored with being MT (Modern Tech) you could announce that you'd made contact with an advanced alien race and suddenly gone from all MT to all FT, with the hundreds of technological leaps that implies. Don't try and pull that one in the middle of a battle, though, eh?

Be aware, however, that MT nations don't really like to roleplay with FT nations and vice-versa. From my point of view, it's difficult to make a convincing story with that going on, whereas the war RP types just don't like the implication that they're going to get a kicking because their lads can't redeploy on anti-grav jet packs from sub-orbital lightspeed troop carriers (or whatever).

p.s. If you're reading this, and you are a war RP type, please don't flame me into the middle of next week. Thank you.

I'm not one who is a slave to arbitrary limits (such as 100 million population before you can develop a nuclear bomb), but essentially, the trick is as people said. As soon as you can RP convincingly that you've made a particular breakthrough, you can go ahead and RP it out.

One suggestion though: If you're going to use either RL technology or tech that is in the planning stages or is feasible now but not widely used yet, read up on it. Use Google to find websites. Go to your local library or bookstore to find books that mention the technology you're interested in using so you can at least have a basic understanding of the principles behind it. It will help you either explain the concepts behind a particular weapon you employ or accurately write damage in the event someone uses that on you.

Sarzonia is correct - research is always good. While it's spotty in places, I've generally found the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/) pretty good.