NationStates Jolt Archive

I am thinking about thinking about also rping FT. But I have a couple questions first.

1. With an MT pop. of 1.046 Billion, what would be an accurate projection for an FT pop.
2. What are the different levels of tech

If there is any more info that would help, please tell me.

1) 1.046 billion.
2) You generally have your choice between hard sci-fi (which strictly obeys the laws of physics) or soft (which doesn't). Other than that, up to you.

so you can't make a pop. increase projection?
And by laws of physics, does that mean no "Warp Drive" like in Star Trek.

1. Well, you have to work using your national population - as in, you probably can't have armed forces out of proportion to a nation the size of yours - but you can say you have, for example, four worlds and six billion people on each. You just can't use them. In any event, I would advise you to just take the number of worlds you have and multiply by six billion to get your civil population; 1.046bil or whatever is still your available population.

2. Past tech, modern tech, postmodern tech and future tech. Then there's fantasy tech, which denotes the use of fantasy elements; alternate tech, which uses technology derived from an alternate history but is mostly MT as far as chronology goes; multitech, which uses techs from several tech levels; and alltech, which uses all technology and damn well says so.

Hope that helped.

1. Well, you have to work using your national population - as in, you probably can't have armed forces out of proportion to a nation the size of yours - but you can say you have, for example, four worlds and six billion people on each. You just can't use them. In any event, I would advise you to just take the number of worlds you have and multiply by six billion to get your civil population; 1.046bil or whatever is still your available population.
The People's Free Democratic Socialist Communist Trotskyist Stalinist Maoist Titoist Hoxhaist Mutualist Anarcho-Syndicalist Republic of Surfeit says it has a population of 363 billion. Censuses nonetheless consistently reveal that it has only a few thousand.

You can say you have twenty-four billion people, but only as IC propaganda. Your population is the number on your nation page, or any smaller number you choose to work with.

Another general guideline is that you can have the military strength equivalent to 1000 starships for every billion inhabitants. So if you decide to have 2000 ships, they will be on average about half as strong as the ships of another 1 billion population nation with only 1000 ships.

Finally, nobody in FT uses hard sci-fi. Even V-N, which is comparatively hard -- it occupies only one star system, with no huge battleships, no planet-destroying superweapons, and realistic sublight engines -- has AIs advanced enough to be sapient (or a skilful imitation thereof) and a form of FTL travel based on rather dubious properties of quantum physics. I don't believe I've ever encountered anyone in NS FT who doesn't use faster-than-light travel or communication.

Finally, nobody in FT uses hard sci-fi. Even V-N, which is comparatively hard -- it occupies only one star system, with no huge battleships, no planet-destroying superweapons, and realistic sublight engines -- has AIs advanced enough to be sapient (or a skilful imitation thereof) and a form of FTL travel based on rather dubious properties of quantum physics. I don't believe I've ever encountered anyone in NS FT who doesn't use faster-than-light travel or communication.

Jeuna, Izistan, ZMI and myself have tried it more than once. I belief the three first RP Late PMT in an offsite forum or something.

Question is: why were the majority of FT NSes created? I have two answers which are interconnected:

1) Because MT restricts wanking and has less tolerance to godmodding.
2) See Oblivious Oaf, Twink, Wapanese StarWarz and sd.net and the last in this article (http://wikistates.outwardhosting.com/wiki/Anti-Munch_Project).

I think many of them do not wank, at least intentionally. It's more that its incredibly hard to wrap your head around everything in MT and get into it without being pwned and looking more like a moron.

Chosing a acknowledged scifi tech - say the tech seen in Star Trek, or Star Wars, or the Honorverse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorverse); or Battle Tech (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech) is not wanking and many here do it.

Look at Chronosia and his wonderfully aweful - and frighteneing - warhammer 40K nation; or CoreWorld who uses Star Wars - I can name any number of others.

Many of us mix and match and figure out ways to -with some semblance rationality, even if more than a little streched and warped, to mix a bit of many 'named' techs together along with what we come up independantly on our own.

There's nothing wrong with that - Playing a Future Tecxh society is fun, just as much as playing a MT one- and it certainly lets our imaginations run free.

Concerning your population - some one here once said that trying to say that you have an advanced tech nation with only x population ( even multi billion pops) was impossible -too small- and I pretty much agree. What I believe is imperative that you game your military as limited to the % portion of your population your ns page gives you.

Most players here seem to agree that any military holding more than 5% of one's ns population is not feasable, in any sort of reality that more would tank ones economy...

If I've set that too high or too low I am sure some one will come along and correct me :p

I.E. if you have an NS pop of 10 million then your military is 500,000

Like Vojvodina-Nihon, I have also heard this from a number of posters here:

Another general guideline is that you can have the military strength equivalent to 1000 starships for every billion inhabitants. So if you decide to have 2000 ships, they will be on average about half as strong as the ships of another 1 billion population nation with only 1000 ships.

I've never been entirely sure where that guideline came from, or whether it's still in use (it was similar to the 200 million population for nukes rule, now obsolete), but a few people have quoted it at me.


I've tried playing MT. I could never get into it for some reason. Most likely it was because nobody responded to my threads. (Of course, they still don't. I was born too late for this. :<)

Thank you Tanara, I do try my best :)

Most players here seem to agree that any military holding more than 5% of one's ns population is not feasable, in any sort of reality that more would tank ones economy...

If I've set that too high or too low I am sure some one will come along and correct me
I'm here to correct you! Yay! ;)

Your economy will pretty much already be tanked at 5%. North Korea, for instance, drafts 5% of its population, and look how much of a bastion of economic power they are. Most 1st World countries IRL will have less than 1% of their population under arms, although a few smaller ones like Switzerland and Israel manage to hit around 3%. However, they either operate under a siege mentality, or are freaking paranoid with an army more like a militia than anything else.

Another general guideline is that you can have the military strength equivalent to 1000 starships for every billion inhabitants. So if you decide to have 2000 ships, they will be on average about half as strong as the ships of another 1 billion population nation with only 1000 ships.
I've been under the impression that Chron came up with the idea behind that guideline. Mostly it reflects the theory that a given nation will have a certain amount of resources do devote to its military, and that a nation that puts said resources into ten ships will have vessels that will annihilate the ships of a nation that's operating a fleet of ten thousand. There's something of this in real life, but instead of a linear progression it tends to experience rapidly diminishing returns due to physics. In FT, people have tech that sodomizes physics with a wiffle bat, so the theory works a bit better here.

I only learned about that rule after giving myself a total of (about) 300 starfaring vessels, of average or lower quality, too. I justify it by saying my economy sucks and the military is buried in red tape and not a major priority. This possibly makes me unique among the NS community. :P Yeah, I know, the next poster is going to name some names of other people who do that, and criticize me for generalizing. I was not being serious, future dude. Chill out.

You can always claim something lower if you want (smaller population, smaller navy, less powerful ships, ect) but I would hesitate going above the accepted guidelines. They usually note the top of the accepted curve. Be sure to incorporate your decision somehow into your nation ICly for it to make sense.

1. With an MT pop. of 1.046 Billion, what would be an accurate projection for an FT pop.The point at which more people consider you a fairy tale than there are people who consider you an extant entity could be considered a cut-off. But naturally, this point will vary from person to person, meaning that you've essentially two options:

One, you accommodate the people you wish to interact with, and play by their rules.

Two, you start doing your own thing, by your own rules, and when people start flocking to you, they play by your rules. If there's no flocking, you play with yourself.

And this applies to everything, be it population, technology, ratios concerning economic capacity, military might, number of pretty, sacrificeable virgins & deities who consummate them, whatever.

Very good point.

I don't believe I've ever encountered anyone in NS FT who doesn't use faster-than-light travel or communication.

Vescopa has neither of those. At least, not so far. But they do have artificial gravity on their ships without using spinning doughnuts or anything, which is just as bad as FTL (if not worse).

I don't believe I've ever encountered anyone in NS FT who doesn't use faster-than-light travel or communication.

Well, it would be pretty slow communicating and travelling between systems otherwise.

Tech-wise, FT can generally include MT & PMT elements, for example Ustian Federal Law Enforcement (UFLE) Agents still use projectile weapons when lethal force is needed, rather than energy weapons like the Federal Guard and the Brotherhood.

Well, it would be pretty slow communicating and travelling between systems otherwise.

Tech-wise, FT can generally include MT & PMT elements, for example Ustian Federal Law Enforcement (UFLE) Agents still use projectile weapons when lethal force is needed, rather than energy weapons like the Federal Guard and the Brotherhood.

Another good example is BSG. Take away the Colonial FTL drives and what do you have? People runnng around with nukes and slugthrowers. That is one of the reasons the show is so "gritty" and full of atmosphere.

Why does nobody consider how gritty, interesting and challenging something like this would be as a premise for a RP? Where every battle is a gamble of estimations of how the enemies will be in the next n decades or centuries? Where wars might last thousands of years?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War