Gurguvungunit
25-12-2004, 04:09
How to Roleplay a Successful Space-Tech Nation
This guide appears to have several glaring errors, and so I'd advise you not to follow its population requirements. They apparently do not exist.
A Guide by Gurguvungunit
A Note on Prices:
Prices are done in United States Dollars, (USD) simply because that’s where I live, and that’s the money I’m familiar with. Sorry in advance for all you non-US Citizens about this.
Fleets
Intro:
The great desire of lots of new nations is to have a space fleet, preferably one bigger, better, shinier, and of course cooler looking than anyone else’s. The only problem is, most of these new nations can’t wait. So, at 16 million people, they go and build the Death Star.
That’s all well and good, except that no 16 million person nation would be able to develop, finance, build or supply even a single Heavy Cruiser type ship. An average Nimitz Class Carrier costs 22 billion USD. An Imperial Star Destroyer, for example, would cost many trillions. Even larger nations, on the order of 100-200 million people, probably can’t maintain a full battle fleet. We’re talking, at best, a few Heavy Cruiser types, backed up by several Frigates, with the main fleet being small, anti-smuggling ships.
Another thing: Economy does affect your space fleet, or lack thereof. Strong and above economies are important if you want to finance a space fleet, simply because the better off your economy is, the more money your people will have, and the higher you can tax them. It’s a cycle. Essentially, the better your economy, the better off your space fleet.
Starting Out:
This is the hardest part on your path to space-techyness. Basically, you have to wait until your population grows, preferably to 300-400 million people. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything, you can still happily take part in roleplaying as a modern tech nation, or a past tech one, or even fantasy. If you intend to do this, I highly recommend reading the other stickies on the International Incidents and NationStates boards.
Okay, lets assume that you’re now 300-400 million people strong, you have a strong-frightening economy, and you’ve done some putzing about on the forums. You know how things work, how to roleplay well, and you’re ready to venture into space.
Alright. First off, don’t simply magic a fleet out of thin air… or rather vacuum. Announce your plans to build a space fleet, and start small. I can’t stress this enough. You probably don’t start out with superluminal (faster than light) travel yet, nor do your intrasystem frigates have massive tachyon torpedo banks, or whatever. When I started my space exploration, I didn’t even build my own stuff. I bought it. Small, cheap ships out of other people’s mothball fleets. I had intrasystem raiders, armed with Gauss Rifles. I didn’t even have a colony yet. Just a big launch platform called Daedalus Alpha from which I sent my newly purchased raiders into space.
Getting Settled:
Gradually, you can expand to interstellar ships. In fact, you can do this pretty quickly, or even, if you feel brave, bypass the previous step altogether*. Many do. At this stage, I still didn’t make my own ships. I stuck with those built by others. My fleet, at this stage, consisted of several ships of the Homeworld universe, thoughtfully provided by the nations Lunatic Retard Robots and Somtaaw.
Okay, you’ve got a small fleet, and you’ve sent explorers out into surrounding space, leaving Mother Earth behind. Now, you think, would be a great time to start a colony. However, know that many nations have settled almost the entire Sol system (that’s our system, by the way), and the Alpha Centauri, Vega and all other nearby systems. You might have to go pretty far out, or not at all. I myself opted for the second. I built space stations instead. A tad more expensive, but they provided more freedom. Twice I moved them when I discovered that I had invaded another nation’s territory. In other words, if you plan to colonize close to our sun, put a thread on the forum, asking if anyone has a claim. It’s better than a war.
*If you do, though, remember to start a little later, say 400-500 million people, with a slightly higher economy.
Ships of the Line:
Now that you have some colonies, your resources have expanded. Consider this. Before, you were just one nation on a very crowded Earth. Now, you’ve got settlements in places never touched before. Thus, your space fleet can expand too.
At around this point, I ditched the somewhat outdated Homeworld ships in favor of Star Wars types. They had shields, more powerful weapons, and cost a lot more. However, now that I was in the quite comfortable 800 million range, I could reasonably support these very expensive ships.
Go ahead now, get a little crazy. Make a shipyard with a cool name. Build ships twice the size of an Oil Tanker. Just remember, you have to crew all these ships. So if you have fewer people than the crew requirement, no dice. Also, remember to stay real. Remember those Intrasystem Frigates? Well, you can build lots of them, they’re cheap, crappy and easy to put together. However, for the 200 of those, you get maybe one Imperial Star Destroyer, or like ship. So your fleet will actually get smaller, but be more powerful. Rather one Aircraft Carrier than Nelson’s entire Trafalgar fleet, for a modern/historical example.
Goin’ Galactic:
When you get really big, like 1 billion or more, consider going galactic. In other words, pick a planet that’s uninhabited, and move your nation there. It’s a lot more reasonable than the overcrowded Earth, and your people can live in individual houses, should they so desire. Your Vice President’s days of sleeping in his boss’ closet are over.
Your space fleet can expand too. Remember those three Star Destroyers you built a while back? Well, they’ve become ten, with twenty or more support vessels. You’ve got a real space fleet. Have yourself a beer. Or if you’re underage, have a root beer. I do not support underage drinking.
Goin’ Extra-Galactic:
Or, you can wait. This is an alternate step to the previous. Wait for the 2 billion mark or so, then go to another galaxy†. The Andromeda’s nice, it’s not crowded at all. Only 11 or so nations (that I know of) live there. And one of them’s mine. Now you’ve got serious room. Stretch your legs out. Or rather, your fleets. Colonize as much as you want, you’ll doubtfully find competitors. Your fleet gets bigger, with the added resources, you can create truly massive ships and stations. This is around the time you can consider yourself an interstellar power. Have a party.
†It helps to be able to say how you got to another galaxy. Invent something, and make sure you have the resources to build it. For myself, I built a large, nearly planet sized portal-ish thing. My ships fly through, they end up in the Andromeda Galaxy. Very convenient.
Technology
Intro:
This’ll be a somewhat shorter section, if only because it’s less focused on. Technology is really the only way that a human (or fairy, or elf, or vampire) can reasonably noodle about in space. Therefore, it’s pretty important, but tends to take a backseat to fleets, planets, and wars. That being said, here we go.
Pointy-headed Research Dudes:
It goes without saying that for you to have advanced technology, you have to research it. However, you don’t have to post every time your scientists think up something new. In fact, I encourage you not to. However, if in the course of your RP, you feel the need to introduce a new technology, a good way might be to introduce some scientists, and through them, the related tech. I. E, rather than posting a list of specs like so:
Galactic Transit Technology
It’s a big, scary ring in space. And my ships fly through it to get to the Hot Dog Galaxy.
Power Output: 200,000,000,000,000 Kilojoules
Transit Time:10 Minutes
Shielding: 500,000 Terawatts
Weapons: None
Capacity: 10 cruiser class or equivalent ships per trip
And thus breaking the RP’s flow, you could post something like:
Dr. Carlson peered out the window of the Research Vessel Copenhagen, watching the Transit Ring that he had designed send the first exploratory ship into the Hot Dog Galaxy. He sighed, thinking of the years spent in a whitewashed lab, building miniatures and trying to send objects from one point to another…
See? This fits a little better. It’s less contrived, and tends to flow better within an RP. However, there are some cases in which the list form works well. Say you’ve made a storefront in which you plan to market your technology. In that case, it is infinitely better to post a list, as it imparts information better.
The Infamous Tech Wank:
No, it’s not what you think. I am not about to discuss masturbation via machines here. A wank is a term on NS for the overuse of a particular strategy to give yourself unfair advantages. It’s a mild to serious form of godmoding. The one that we will focus on here is the Tech-Wank
NSWiki (http://ns.goobergunch.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) explains it best.
The most common and least offensive form of wank. It is abuse of high technology, either to break the laws of reality, or to enforce adherence to minutiae on an RP not concerned with technicalities of combat systems.
In general NS, most people are not technophiles, and will become irked when you proceed to explain to them exactly how your 8mm Tungsten-Carbide, Armor-Piercing, Fin-Stabilized, Discarding-Sabot fletchette firing assault rifles are perfectly designed to penetrate their mere level three kevlar vests. This would be considered wank because most players would not know about the benefits of TC/DU APFSDS Fletchettes, and would negate their infantry armor. This is NOT a godmode, however, since it does not change the rules of reality or break the roleplay. (And yes, I used my own weapon as an example of wank. It's the SAG ACR, if you want to know.)
However, announcing that, because your opponent only claimed to use "RPGs" on your tank, it did no damage (since the RPG-7 is incapable of piercing the glacis plate of a Main Battle Tank, and your opponent did not use an RPG-29 specifically) is tech wank AND a godmode, because it allows you to ignore their attack, and take no damage. Most players couldn't tell an RPG-7 from an SA-2, and they had the right idea (firing rockets at a tank), but not the intrinsic knowledge of weapons. In this case, assume that they are using the correct weapon.
Most blatant of tech-wank is the "impenetrable shield" and the "unstoppable bullet" syndrome, in which the technology becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card, allowing blatant godmoding to be disguised as legitimate gameplay. On a side note, the effect of an unstoppable bullet striking an impenetrable shield has proven catastrophic.
Thank you, NSWiki.
That pretty much brings to a close our Technology Section (most of which was NOT written by me, but rather by the good people at NSWiki). I highly recommend reading the entire wank section (http://ns.goobergunch.net/wiki/index.php/Wank).
Warfare:
Intro:
What’s an enormous space fleet for, if not for crushing your enemies to their constituent particles, then sending those particles into the sun? Well, here we discuss warfare.
It’s pretty much like your average war, but a few things ought to be said that pertain especially to space warfare. They mostly involve weapons, what they do, maneuvers, and expansion of territory.
There are several types of war that I will discuss, which I call territorial war, where one party is trying to take another’s land/planets, political war, where the war is motivated by the actions or lack thereof of another nation, and blood feud, where the war is motivated by the relations between leaders. Think Iraq War here.
This isn’t really a discussion of tactics, rather things that ought to be considered during a time of war.
Cold, Hard Cash:
It takes money to go to war. This might seem obvious, but it’s not what you’d first think of when you actually have a war. However, it’s one of the primary concerns when you do so. If you don’t have the cash to go to war, you can’t, and that’s final. Why does war cost so much? Well, ships will be destroyed or disabled, and you’ll have to replace or repair them. And that costs money. Your crew will be drawing danger pay, which costs money, and your whole economy will become geared towards war, which is not terribly efficient. So, you’ll need to deplete some of your cash reserves for this. There isn’t really a good figure regarding how much money you lose, since it’s not taken into account by the game, and by only some players. However, it’s a sign of good RP skills that in your postwar RPs your nation shows some strain as a result from its recent war. It’s up to you to decide how much you lose, providing you allow for losses.
Guns, Germs and Giant Laser Things:
Firstly, your weapons are your own. They can do pretty much whatever you want them to, as long as you stay reasonable. In other words, lasers, phasers, torpedoes, plasma guns and antimatter bombs are fine, bombs that take out entire fleets in an instant are not. See the Tech Wank section.
That being said, I’d like to address an annoying misconception regarding Nuclear Weapons. Nukes are big and scary in an atmosphere. They make a thoroughly badass shock wave that melts cities. In space, however, nukes are not nearly as deadly, where there is nothing to carry the shockwave. Thus, the main killers would be heat and radiation, and the blast radius would be much, much smaller. The radiation will dissipate fairly quickly, and the heat even more so. However, anything inside is still toast. While the heat and radiation dissipate quickly, they certainly stick about long enough to kill anything within the blast radius. If you’ve got a small, new space nation, nukes ought to make fine payloads for your missiles.
Space Marines V.S. King Henry V:
You can certainly roleplay space/future tech versus present or past tech. It’s been done before, and can lead to very cool RPs. However, should you choose to do this, remember that although your plasma rays may melt space ships, a catapult can put a biggish hole in one too. Your space marines may have teh uber death rifles, but King Henry’s bowmen can still put an arrow in your guys. You might have the advantage, but a disciplined enemy can still inflict damage on you.
No Man is an Island:
But it’s a great way to think of planets. Remember, there is a lot of… well, space in space, and you essentially rule an island kingdom. Your fleet is so important because it keeps safe the area between your islands/planets. And since space is virtually without resources, your planets become very important. They are your cities, your cash and your morale, all in one large and shiny ball. Protect them, because in any territorial war, people will try to take them away. Now, since space is three dimensional, you can’t easily stop them by putting your fleet in their line of flight, because they could go around. So you have to draw them to battle, or protect things that are stationary˚, such as planets or installations.
˚ Well, nothing’s stationary in space, but planets and stations tend to occupy generally the same bit of space, since they orbit things. However, if one wants to capture a planet, his/her fleet must go to it first, so place yours accordingly.
There and Back Again:
You’ve got a fleet, and you know where you’re sending it. You fly it off to Planet X, it gets there, it fights, right?
Wrong. You forgot to crew, supply and maintain your fleet. This is called logistics. Now, I’m not saying that you need to know exactly how this all happens, but at least provide for how your fleet gets its next meal. If you’re going to put it in deep space, you’ll have to re-supply it somewhat frequently. So you need a supply chain. However, your enemy will want to keep your ships from being there, unless you put them somewhere really stupid, so he/she’ll try to kill your supply chain. So you have to guard it. Pretty quick, this simple deployment becomes a bit harder to manage. Therefore, it’s easiest to put your fleet near a planet or base from which you can draw your supplies. Of course, if your people are robots, or some other form of being that doesn't require food, you'll have to supply electricity, or whatever they subsist on instead.
Okay, now you’ve figured out where your next meal is coming from, but what about getting there? You need to move your ships to their next posting. It’s easy, but it takes time. Space is a huge place. Even superluminal ships will take some time going from place to place, and you’ll have to make allowance for that. If, say your rhenium mines are being attacked, your fleet three sectors away probably won’t get there in time to save them. This, of course, means that you are faced with the task of having forces in place to guard everything you want to keep. This will limit the size of the area you guard, because you’ve only got so many ships.
The Conquering Horde Approaches:
This section is about conquering planets. Remember, they’re like islands, rather than nations with borders. You’ll need a fairly mobile force of warships, coupled with troop carriers. Remember, when conquering a planet, it isn’t enough to subjugate the space around it; you also have to do the dirty work of actually taking the planet.
This is hard. You’ll have to send flimsy landing ships filled with troops through hostile atmosphere, taking fire from defense forces, and then land and empty them. You’ll take severe losses in this stage, which is important to remember during an RP. It’s much harder to take a planet than it is to win a space battle, and you’ll have to lose men accordingly.
This ends the Warfare section, and pretty much the entire thing. Something to remember, in any RP, but especially space tech, is to use a common sense approach to warfare. It can be easy, with your newfound technological superiority, to forget that the main thing governing an RP is: could it really happen the way you describe? For a good RPer, the answer is almost always ‘yes’. Try to make that the case with you, lest the mods smite you for godmoding.
It’s been great; and I hope that you’ve learned something from reading this. A few more guides that new nations should look at:
What Godmoding Is (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=367578)
Guide to NationStates (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=357975)
Want More Respect on the Forums? (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=352036)
These are the basic stickies that’ll tell you most of what you need to know. From here, you’re on your own. You’ve learned much, young padawhatsit, now you must become a Jedi.
This guide appears to have several glaring errors, and so I'd advise you not to follow its population requirements. They apparently do not exist.
A Guide by Gurguvungunit
A Note on Prices:
Prices are done in United States Dollars, (USD) simply because that’s where I live, and that’s the money I’m familiar with. Sorry in advance for all you non-US Citizens about this.
Fleets
Intro:
The great desire of lots of new nations is to have a space fleet, preferably one bigger, better, shinier, and of course cooler looking than anyone else’s. The only problem is, most of these new nations can’t wait. So, at 16 million people, they go and build the Death Star.
That’s all well and good, except that no 16 million person nation would be able to develop, finance, build or supply even a single Heavy Cruiser type ship. An average Nimitz Class Carrier costs 22 billion USD. An Imperial Star Destroyer, for example, would cost many trillions. Even larger nations, on the order of 100-200 million people, probably can’t maintain a full battle fleet. We’re talking, at best, a few Heavy Cruiser types, backed up by several Frigates, with the main fleet being small, anti-smuggling ships.
Another thing: Economy does affect your space fleet, or lack thereof. Strong and above economies are important if you want to finance a space fleet, simply because the better off your economy is, the more money your people will have, and the higher you can tax them. It’s a cycle. Essentially, the better your economy, the better off your space fleet.
Starting Out:
This is the hardest part on your path to space-techyness. Basically, you have to wait until your population grows, preferably to 300-400 million people. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything, you can still happily take part in roleplaying as a modern tech nation, or a past tech one, or even fantasy. If you intend to do this, I highly recommend reading the other stickies on the International Incidents and NationStates boards.
Okay, lets assume that you’re now 300-400 million people strong, you have a strong-frightening economy, and you’ve done some putzing about on the forums. You know how things work, how to roleplay well, and you’re ready to venture into space.
Alright. First off, don’t simply magic a fleet out of thin air… or rather vacuum. Announce your plans to build a space fleet, and start small. I can’t stress this enough. You probably don’t start out with superluminal (faster than light) travel yet, nor do your intrasystem frigates have massive tachyon torpedo banks, or whatever. When I started my space exploration, I didn’t even build my own stuff. I bought it. Small, cheap ships out of other people’s mothball fleets. I had intrasystem raiders, armed with Gauss Rifles. I didn’t even have a colony yet. Just a big launch platform called Daedalus Alpha from which I sent my newly purchased raiders into space.
Getting Settled:
Gradually, you can expand to interstellar ships. In fact, you can do this pretty quickly, or even, if you feel brave, bypass the previous step altogether*. Many do. At this stage, I still didn’t make my own ships. I stuck with those built by others. My fleet, at this stage, consisted of several ships of the Homeworld universe, thoughtfully provided by the nations Lunatic Retard Robots and Somtaaw.
Okay, you’ve got a small fleet, and you’ve sent explorers out into surrounding space, leaving Mother Earth behind. Now, you think, would be a great time to start a colony. However, know that many nations have settled almost the entire Sol system (that’s our system, by the way), and the Alpha Centauri, Vega and all other nearby systems. You might have to go pretty far out, or not at all. I myself opted for the second. I built space stations instead. A tad more expensive, but they provided more freedom. Twice I moved them when I discovered that I had invaded another nation’s territory. In other words, if you plan to colonize close to our sun, put a thread on the forum, asking if anyone has a claim. It’s better than a war.
*If you do, though, remember to start a little later, say 400-500 million people, with a slightly higher economy.
Ships of the Line:
Now that you have some colonies, your resources have expanded. Consider this. Before, you were just one nation on a very crowded Earth. Now, you’ve got settlements in places never touched before. Thus, your space fleet can expand too.
At around this point, I ditched the somewhat outdated Homeworld ships in favor of Star Wars types. They had shields, more powerful weapons, and cost a lot more. However, now that I was in the quite comfortable 800 million range, I could reasonably support these very expensive ships.
Go ahead now, get a little crazy. Make a shipyard with a cool name. Build ships twice the size of an Oil Tanker. Just remember, you have to crew all these ships. So if you have fewer people than the crew requirement, no dice. Also, remember to stay real. Remember those Intrasystem Frigates? Well, you can build lots of them, they’re cheap, crappy and easy to put together. However, for the 200 of those, you get maybe one Imperial Star Destroyer, or like ship. So your fleet will actually get smaller, but be more powerful. Rather one Aircraft Carrier than Nelson’s entire Trafalgar fleet, for a modern/historical example.
Goin’ Galactic:
When you get really big, like 1 billion or more, consider going galactic. In other words, pick a planet that’s uninhabited, and move your nation there. It’s a lot more reasonable than the overcrowded Earth, and your people can live in individual houses, should they so desire. Your Vice President’s days of sleeping in his boss’ closet are over.
Your space fleet can expand too. Remember those three Star Destroyers you built a while back? Well, they’ve become ten, with twenty or more support vessels. You’ve got a real space fleet. Have yourself a beer. Or if you’re underage, have a root beer. I do not support underage drinking.
Goin’ Extra-Galactic:
Or, you can wait. This is an alternate step to the previous. Wait for the 2 billion mark or so, then go to another galaxy†. The Andromeda’s nice, it’s not crowded at all. Only 11 or so nations (that I know of) live there. And one of them’s mine. Now you’ve got serious room. Stretch your legs out. Or rather, your fleets. Colonize as much as you want, you’ll doubtfully find competitors. Your fleet gets bigger, with the added resources, you can create truly massive ships and stations. This is around the time you can consider yourself an interstellar power. Have a party.
†It helps to be able to say how you got to another galaxy. Invent something, and make sure you have the resources to build it. For myself, I built a large, nearly planet sized portal-ish thing. My ships fly through, they end up in the Andromeda Galaxy. Very convenient.
Technology
Intro:
This’ll be a somewhat shorter section, if only because it’s less focused on. Technology is really the only way that a human (or fairy, or elf, or vampire) can reasonably noodle about in space. Therefore, it’s pretty important, but tends to take a backseat to fleets, planets, and wars. That being said, here we go.
Pointy-headed Research Dudes:
It goes without saying that for you to have advanced technology, you have to research it. However, you don’t have to post every time your scientists think up something new. In fact, I encourage you not to. However, if in the course of your RP, you feel the need to introduce a new technology, a good way might be to introduce some scientists, and through them, the related tech. I. E, rather than posting a list of specs like so:
Galactic Transit Technology
It’s a big, scary ring in space. And my ships fly through it to get to the Hot Dog Galaxy.
Power Output: 200,000,000,000,000 Kilojoules
Transit Time:10 Minutes
Shielding: 500,000 Terawatts
Weapons: None
Capacity: 10 cruiser class or equivalent ships per trip
And thus breaking the RP’s flow, you could post something like:
Dr. Carlson peered out the window of the Research Vessel Copenhagen, watching the Transit Ring that he had designed send the first exploratory ship into the Hot Dog Galaxy. He sighed, thinking of the years spent in a whitewashed lab, building miniatures and trying to send objects from one point to another…
See? This fits a little better. It’s less contrived, and tends to flow better within an RP. However, there are some cases in which the list form works well. Say you’ve made a storefront in which you plan to market your technology. In that case, it is infinitely better to post a list, as it imparts information better.
The Infamous Tech Wank:
No, it’s not what you think. I am not about to discuss masturbation via machines here. A wank is a term on NS for the overuse of a particular strategy to give yourself unfair advantages. It’s a mild to serious form of godmoding. The one that we will focus on here is the Tech-Wank
NSWiki (http://ns.goobergunch.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page) explains it best.
The most common and least offensive form of wank. It is abuse of high technology, either to break the laws of reality, or to enforce adherence to minutiae on an RP not concerned with technicalities of combat systems.
In general NS, most people are not technophiles, and will become irked when you proceed to explain to them exactly how your 8mm Tungsten-Carbide, Armor-Piercing, Fin-Stabilized, Discarding-Sabot fletchette firing assault rifles are perfectly designed to penetrate their mere level three kevlar vests. This would be considered wank because most players would not know about the benefits of TC/DU APFSDS Fletchettes, and would negate their infantry armor. This is NOT a godmode, however, since it does not change the rules of reality or break the roleplay. (And yes, I used my own weapon as an example of wank. It's the SAG ACR, if you want to know.)
However, announcing that, because your opponent only claimed to use "RPGs" on your tank, it did no damage (since the RPG-7 is incapable of piercing the glacis plate of a Main Battle Tank, and your opponent did not use an RPG-29 specifically) is tech wank AND a godmode, because it allows you to ignore their attack, and take no damage. Most players couldn't tell an RPG-7 from an SA-2, and they had the right idea (firing rockets at a tank), but not the intrinsic knowledge of weapons. In this case, assume that they are using the correct weapon.
Most blatant of tech-wank is the "impenetrable shield" and the "unstoppable bullet" syndrome, in which the technology becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card, allowing blatant godmoding to be disguised as legitimate gameplay. On a side note, the effect of an unstoppable bullet striking an impenetrable shield has proven catastrophic.
Thank you, NSWiki.
That pretty much brings to a close our Technology Section (most of which was NOT written by me, but rather by the good people at NSWiki). I highly recommend reading the entire wank section (http://ns.goobergunch.net/wiki/index.php/Wank).
Warfare:
Intro:
What’s an enormous space fleet for, if not for crushing your enemies to their constituent particles, then sending those particles into the sun? Well, here we discuss warfare.
It’s pretty much like your average war, but a few things ought to be said that pertain especially to space warfare. They mostly involve weapons, what they do, maneuvers, and expansion of territory.
There are several types of war that I will discuss, which I call territorial war, where one party is trying to take another’s land/planets, political war, where the war is motivated by the actions or lack thereof of another nation, and blood feud, where the war is motivated by the relations between leaders. Think Iraq War here.
This isn’t really a discussion of tactics, rather things that ought to be considered during a time of war.
Cold, Hard Cash:
It takes money to go to war. This might seem obvious, but it’s not what you’d first think of when you actually have a war. However, it’s one of the primary concerns when you do so. If you don’t have the cash to go to war, you can’t, and that’s final. Why does war cost so much? Well, ships will be destroyed or disabled, and you’ll have to replace or repair them. And that costs money. Your crew will be drawing danger pay, which costs money, and your whole economy will become geared towards war, which is not terribly efficient. So, you’ll need to deplete some of your cash reserves for this. There isn’t really a good figure regarding how much money you lose, since it’s not taken into account by the game, and by only some players. However, it’s a sign of good RP skills that in your postwar RPs your nation shows some strain as a result from its recent war. It’s up to you to decide how much you lose, providing you allow for losses.
Guns, Germs and Giant Laser Things:
Firstly, your weapons are your own. They can do pretty much whatever you want them to, as long as you stay reasonable. In other words, lasers, phasers, torpedoes, plasma guns and antimatter bombs are fine, bombs that take out entire fleets in an instant are not. See the Tech Wank section.
That being said, I’d like to address an annoying misconception regarding Nuclear Weapons. Nukes are big and scary in an atmosphere. They make a thoroughly badass shock wave that melts cities. In space, however, nukes are not nearly as deadly, where there is nothing to carry the shockwave. Thus, the main killers would be heat and radiation, and the blast radius would be much, much smaller. The radiation will dissipate fairly quickly, and the heat even more so. However, anything inside is still toast. While the heat and radiation dissipate quickly, they certainly stick about long enough to kill anything within the blast radius. If you’ve got a small, new space nation, nukes ought to make fine payloads for your missiles.
Space Marines V.S. King Henry V:
You can certainly roleplay space/future tech versus present or past tech. It’s been done before, and can lead to very cool RPs. However, should you choose to do this, remember that although your plasma rays may melt space ships, a catapult can put a biggish hole in one too. Your space marines may have teh uber death rifles, but King Henry’s bowmen can still put an arrow in your guys. You might have the advantage, but a disciplined enemy can still inflict damage on you.
No Man is an Island:
But it’s a great way to think of planets. Remember, there is a lot of… well, space in space, and you essentially rule an island kingdom. Your fleet is so important because it keeps safe the area between your islands/planets. And since space is virtually without resources, your planets become very important. They are your cities, your cash and your morale, all in one large and shiny ball. Protect them, because in any territorial war, people will try to take them away. Now, since space is three dimensional, you can’t easily stop them by putting your fleet in their line of flight, because they could go around. So you have to draw them to battle, or protect things that are stationary˚, such as planets or installations.
˚ Well, nothing’s stationary in space, but planets and stations tend to occupy generally the same bit of space, since they orbit things. However, if one wants to capture a planet, his/her fleet must go to it first, so place yours accordingly.
There and Back Again:
You’ve got a fleet, and you know where you’re sending it. You fly it off to Planet X, it gets there, it fights, right?
Wrong. You forgot to crew, supply and maintain your fleet. This is called logistics. Now, I’m not saying that you need to know exactly how this all happens, but at least provide for how your fleet gets its next meal. If you’re going to put it in deep space, you’ll have to re-supply it somewhat frequently. So you need a supply chain. However, your enemy will want to keep your ships from being there, unless you put them somewhere really stupid, so he/she’ll try to kill your supply chain. So you have to guard it. Pretty quick, this simple deployment becomes a bit harder to manage. Therefore, it’s easiest to put your fleet near a planet or base from which you can draw your supplies. Of course, if your people are robots, or some other form of being that doesn't require food, you'll have to supply electricity, or whatever they subsist on instead.
Okay, now you’ve figured out where your next meal is coming from, but what about getting there? You need to move your ships to their next posting. It’s easy, but it takes time. Space is a huge place. Even superluminal ships will take some time going from place to place, and you’ll have to make allowance for that. If, say your rhenium mines are being attacked, your fleet three sectors away probably won’t get there in time to save them. This, of course, means that you are faced with the task of having forces in place to guard everything you want to keep. This will limit the size of the area you guard, because you’ve only got so many ships.
The Conquering Horde Approaches:
This section is about conquering planets. Remember, they’re like islands, rather than nations with borders. You’ll need a fairly mobile force of warships, coupled with troop carriers. Remember, when conquering a planet, it isn’t enough to subjugate the space around it; you also have to do the dirty work of actually taking the planet.
This is hard. You’ll have to send flimsy landing ships filled with troops through hostile atmosphere, taking fire from defense forces, and then land and empty them. You’ll take severe losses in this stage, which is important to remember during an RP. It’s much harder to take a planet than it is to win a space battle, and you’ll have to lose men accordingly.
This ends the Warfare section, and pretty much the entire thing. Something to remember, in any RP, but especially space tech, is to use a common sense approach to warfare. It can be easy, with your newfound technological superiority, to forget that the main thing governing an RP is: could it really happen the way you describe? For a good RPer, the answer is almost always ‘yes’. Try to make that the case with you, lest the mods smite you for godmoding.
It’s been great; and I hope that you’ve learned something from reading this. A few more guides that new nations should look at:
What Godmoding Is (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=367578)
Guide to NationStates (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=357975)
Want More Respect on the Forums? (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=352036)
These are the basic stickies that’ll tell you most of what you need to know. From here, you’re on your own. You’ve learned much, young padawhatsit, now you must become a Jedi.