Future Tech Advice and Assistance Thread [O.O.C.]

[Kyrusia]

Thank you for the in-depth response, Kyrusia. I'll see what works and ask my RP partners in private what they think works best for the story. Personally, I've always like describing in detail what goes on in a character's head, and how their actions change and are motivated by that thought process.
I've never been a fan of the infamous single-sentence response, but I understand that some people like it short and sweet instead of savoring the content.

Perhaps it was my experience on my other nations that made me prefer longer posts with more character detail and descriptions of things.

In my experience, many NS RPers prefer a longer posting style - both of their own and with those they roleplay with. Usually this comes with the presupposition that "longer posts should be of better quality, flow well, and contain a greater wealth of detail and substance," but this is not always the case in practice, leading to some to presume that simply "longer = better" without making a distinction when it comes to substance, so, it's worth noting that distinction from time-to-time. Similarly, some roleplays can actually be bogged down by even quality, lengthier posting - ones that are dialogue heavy come to mind (though there are situational caveats and work-arounds for this). "Purple prose," as they say, just for the sake of it is usually not preferred; it need have a reason and merit, otherwise it can get burdensome for the reader.

So, again: substance > objective length.

Edit: Also, given this is FT, keep in mind that throwing in alien words can be good in moderation. They should be the finishing salt to your post, to make a food comparison: they're nice, add a bit of flavor, but don't get in the way of the meat. You don't need to give an alien word for every item in your post, especially if it's a common item; as an example: the RPer doesn't need to describe every mention of a tea kettle as a kha'wonsho-niphet. Just say "tea kettle." If it's a special, alien tea kettle that shoots sparks, lasers, and brews itself, then okay, make a reference to it as a kha'wonsho-niphet the first time it is brought up... then just call the tea kettle a "tea kettle." The reader will presume the alien characteristics afterward without needing to be beat over the head with the proverbial "kha'wonsho-niphet" every time Bob wants to pour one of his guests some tea from his gilded kha'wonsho-niphet.

[Glorious Terran Empire]

I can give my opinion, which is based on my fading memory of more-or-less objective ways of estimating reading difficulty ("reading grade level"). You seem to like long, unusual words; long sentences; and long paragraphs. All of these things increase the difficulty of reading a passage. That's not bad per se, and sometimes, all of those are the right answer. Sometimes I write that way, either because I have an academic style or because it's IC to do.

But, in my opinion, the unbroken strings of those long things makes your writing exhausting to read. You might want to consider varying the lengths of sentences and paragraphs more, and trying shorter or more common synonyms for words. In my opinion.

The colorful vocabulary I use is typically only relied on to make posts not repeat the same generic phrase when describing a lot of similar things. Otherwise I use it as dialogue from a character that uses a rich vocabulary.
I should probably keep a dictionary on hand to find a way of optimizing sentences with commonly-used synonyms to make sure there isn't any difficulty in understanding the meaning of a word. I definitely understand how vibrant language can exclude some people who don't want to read a novel to figure out what they should do in-character.

-snip for posterity-

Oh, I don't believe that a bigger post automatically means a better one, I'm aware that the core of the post should be the substance and plot relevant elements, things that other players need to know about what I'm doing in the thread.
As for alien words, I only use an alien word more than once if it is a proper noun, like an alien character or an alien world. I wouldn't be caught dead trying to write a language guide when I'm trying to roleplay. I'm a big fan of [translation brackets] if it's meant to represent alien speech that can be understood.

[Interstellar Planets]

So when it comes to military sizes, should I pursue a realistic scale with hundreds-of-thousands of ships and hundreds-of-millions of soldiers or should I go for the player-balanced, video-game-esque option of maybe a couple-hundred ships and a few million soldiers?

Because there seems to be differing opinions on that.

You can have thousands of dreadnoughts and billions of soldiers if you want, assuming people accept such, but you don't necessarily need to use them. They could just be background dressings, much like the inflated civilian populations that people in FT use these days. Perhaps you have a million dreadnoughts, but only 100 of them are on detached duty because the other 999,900 are permanently entrenched in some kind of civil war, and withdrawing any of them to deal with other problems would mean losing?

The problem with claiming huge numbers is that you risk coming across as bragging, or "playing to win". I know this isn't your first account here, but I don't know how long you've been around. If you remember Sephrioth and Hataria, you'll understand exactly what I mean by that. They are the examples I always hold up of how not to handle such things.

Further more, do I write posts that're too wordy and alienating? I've been thinking about that too.

I'm sometimes guilty of that too, and it can feel frustrating sometimes when responses to your posts are much shorter than yours - partially, simply because it gives you less to work with, and you find your own posts shrinking in turn. But I think that the length of your posts should vary like that really - there is no hard and fast rule, of course, and you should play it by ear. Sometimes it's necessary to go with giant posts, especially for scene-setting or describing complex manoeuvres. But on other occasions, especially if you're trying to RP a conversation in a thread without using some outside means of contact with the other author, they should be shorter by necessity. It's difficult to orchestrate a detailed conversation, one post at a time, without using some kind of external means of writing it.

One idea that I've seen, which I'm a fan of, is one participant writing their post in a Google Docs document, and allowing the other person to edit in their responses before one of them posts it. It does nothing for your respective post counts, but it does everything for fluidity.

[Vocenae]

Honestly the larger and more powerful you 'make yourself' right off the bat, the less likely people are going to want to have anything to do with you. Essentially the smaller you start off with, the better things are going to go for you because it shows that you, OOCly, have restraint and are not just here to try to 'win' the game'. Remember, in Future Tech, we're here to write interesting stories with interesting characters in interesting locations, this is not a military encounter dominant community and full blown wars are actually quite rare, only happening every few years and they tend to drastically reshape the astropolotical landscape of the galaxy. I'd also hesitate to call 'hundreds of thousands of ships and hundreds of millions of soldiers' to be realistic. Like at all. After all, most of the FT community typically plays pseudo 'realistic' and tries to portray their things as close to reality as they can with the flourishes of science fiction, but no insomuch as to shatter the suspension of disbelief from the sheer amount of handwave. Some people, for example, only have a handful of starships and very small nations that for the day to day populace life isn't much different than it is for us right now.

That being said, you can have millions of ships and billions of troops if you so please, but as it says in the OP of this thread...

In the Future Tech community, there are no real "hard" rules. There is not a thread somewhere that will define what "is" and what "is not" acceptable; however, with over a decade worth of community standardization and conventions, the Future Tech community does have a standard insofar as how players conduct themselves, interact with one another, and otherwise execute their creations within the world.

Though called by many names ("Rule of Cool", "Code of Bro/Sis", etc.), the standards and conventions of the FT community, in effect, boil down to this: be willing to collaborate with other players; be willing to compromise with other players for the sake of both the story and the mutual experience of existing within the world; be creative and do not directly rip from existing canon (such as those found in novels, video games, or films); and be consistent with the applications of the internal rules of your creations (such as how your technology interacts with other technologies, cultural rules within your societies, etc.).

These standards, in effect, mean "Don't be a dick." It is, really, quite that simple. If you, as a player, are willing to collaborate with others, compromise, attempt to be creative, and are consistent, you will find roleplaying partners and ventures very readily and very easily. Players that are not willing to abide by these very, very basic standards of behavior, however, might not. It is often said in Future Tech that you may "do as you will, because no one can stop you." This is patently true; however, players that act in a manner that is not congruent or complimentary to the community's, implement absurd creations that violate these standards or otherwise diminish the ability for other players to enjoy the roleplaying venture, or - in general - are simply "silly" with no caveat insofar as how that "silliness" might be applied - such is to say, "Silly for the sake of silliness" without any added enjoyment - are likely to find themselves with few avenues to interact with the community.

It's true, you can do as you please; no one can stop you. Just as well, you can't force people to recognize your creations simply by existing. Behavior and conduct is paramount to earning respect and merit as a writer and roleplayer in the Future Technology community; poor behavior tends to reflect poorly on the player and, ultimately, may lead to many individuals ignoring that player and his entities simply because it's not enjoyable to interact with the player.

Bolded emphasis mine. Something that myself and a number of other FT players do is simply not quantify the number of things you actually have and instead let our writing, as well as Collaborating and Compromising while planning to balance things out. Numbers tend to ruin things, so outside of having a number for the amount of star systems we control, most of us tend to not write down specific numbers of population, troop sizes, warships, etc. There are actually very, very, VERY few nations that actually have more than a dozen or so star systems, so that might help you understand the scale that most FT'ers play at. If you haven't already, you should definitely check out this (and the other player created Relevant Threads and Posts, Size in Relation to Future Tech.

[Glorious Terran Empire]

I will preface with this: I asked originally what I should use. I can see that the majority prefer smaller scale things, and I will consider this greatly in future threads. Thank you all for the input!

I will argue my thought process on the basis of this question to begin with, based upon the two most recent responses, and I will present counter-arguments. If this is to be a continued discussion, I guess the question has changed to "why?" instead of "should I?"
Feel free to move this to the discussion thread if you see fit, Kyrusia. I just like to think of these things in my off time.

---

-snip-

Well, I usually only let myself use low-triple-digit figures in any given fleet, and no more than a few million troops for ground engagements, I would never throw a full six-figure fleet and seven-figure army unless it was agreed that it was the adequate scale, but it seems crazy to me that during wars between empires claiming a dozen suns, only about two hundred ships are employed. An entire star system can only equate to maybe thirty vessels according to what I see from a majority of players, meaning that the resources exploited, per star system, by the ruling government are accurately compared to the available resources of a couple dozen asteroids, including rare-mineral and metal scarcity. That's where suspension of disbelief starts to get me stressed, because I have a hard time imagining, with the typical FTL-travel of FT civilizations allowing for quick resource management with huge territories, that they have yet to exploit the resources of any large celestial body other than the inhabited planet.

It's less wanting to play to win that forms the basis of the question, because I value the romanticized drama of the war that can be portrayed in RP, and in fact prefer the wars be hard-fought and losses be taken... Gives me more chances to make interesting characters and go through the hardships they face.
However, the inner bookworm says that the majority of NSFT warfare is like using gunboats and rafts to portray the entire US Navy, while also saying that maybe a hundred reservists are representative of the entire Army (As far as population and available resources are concerned to a post-scarcity civilization across multiple planets.) And any more than that is seen as just absurdly-too-much godmodding.

I'm not asking this to justify huge numbers, per-say, I'm asking if the numbers themselves, with the sense of scale involved being lightyears, are really that big.

-snip-

I've been around on other nations for a couple years, first taste of FT roleplay being 3 years ago, this is simply me trying to get back in the swing of things.
I say this to establish that I understand what the general outline of everything seems to be agreed upon. Working with others to establish some consistency and a setting which follows rules agreed upon between players. Rules which generally act as a code of conduct for what is and isn't cool to use in a given thread. However, I have some concerns. Feel free to respond or just ignore this, as I'm not the most intelligent man on Earth.

I'll divide them into portions under spoiler tags to avoid a page-long post.

First, in order to clear up my interpretation of the values that most players here seem to follow.

Collaboration, alright, I normally get a consensus on what is and isn't acceptable for the thread(s) in question. I've yet to field more than 200 ships in a single instance in-character. Work with the other players to weave together a coherent story first, and a thought experiment second.
Compromise, alright, usually I tone down things if my partners in RP want me to, and they usually do as well. For instance, I, at one point, was asked to tone down my ship's code-breaking capabilities. I did. Nobody got mad. Either everyone is happy or nobody is, and we all have to make sacrifices and understand each other first.
Creativity, alright, I respect and acknowledge within reason what players want to bring to the table in the(se) thread(s). I'm willing to RP with anyone not claiming access to other dimensions and StarWars-esque Death Stars. New Ideas and fun ideas can always help to stave off stagnation and open the creative process for everyone.¹
Consistency, I usually stick to my guns about what my nation is, how it acts and what it uses in response to different situations. Anything that I've retconned I've done on a vote with other players who were involved with making it in the first place. Keeping what is and isn't in an RP is vital to its longevity. Consistency prevents chaos, and lets everyone involved stay relevant without wasting their time trying to keep up.
¹ Within reason, which is usually agreed upon by compromising and making conventions in a thread.

I included this bit to clarify what my understanding of these principles are, more to elaborate on what I understand, feel free to clarify what I'm missing here

You say everyone plays Pseudo-Realistic, but I think that that's only when the sciences involved seems to be questioned, but the sheer quantity and scale of most interstellar nations seems... I dunno, lacking? It's like talking about Dyson spheres. People lose the sense of scale involved, when to be honest it wouldn't be hard, technologically speaking, just resource-intensive.
Human sense of scale begins to break down once it gets to the cosmic scale, which is normal.
The availability of resources in our own solar system are vast. If the entire solar system's resources were exploited, with modern technology and construction capabilities, we could make millions of ships like Star Trek's Enterprise with just the asteroid belt. Using all planetoids and the Oort Cloud? Maybe a hundred million.
As far as population is concerned, if all the arable land in Africa alone were used, a population of 11 billion could be managed with everyone having the same availability of food as the US.
Now apply that with things being researched today, like hydroponics and gene-tailoring to allow for healthier people, and life-extension technologies that people are currently looking into.
The population figure of Earth alone could hover around 12-15 billion without shortages in a unified society. Most FT nations seem to be unified and live as post-scarcity societies.
Unless Earth is unanimously-agreed-upon as some wildly unrealistically huge and bloated thing and I've just never been informed, then I guess just ignore what I have to say.

Now, I understand fair play, and I wouldn't be caught dead dumping a million ships and 10 billion troops on someone just to laugh at how big I am. That ruins the point of the story being told, and at that point you might as well play Sins of a Solar Empire or HALO for your kicks.
But I question less the feasibility of the technologies used in FT, and I instead ask is where all of the people are in these star faring empires. Because they seem rather... Sparse, and drained of resources.
Maybe I've just spent too much time listening to people dissecting sci fi tropes, but I think it speaks volume that you guys seem to assume I'm trying to numbers-wank when I'm posing the question of whether it would be realistic to use what would conservatively equate to maybe 5% of the resources available to the quantity of space that I, and most people that I've seen in the FT community, use in RP.
I understand that the way people think at this moment is with smaller fleets and smaller armies, because huge numbers are just not fun, and it's hard to visualize. I understand that if I do follow the principle of what I'm asking instead of go with what others think is reasonable, people will just ignore me and treat me like that kid who eats glue in kindergarten.
I don't wish to assume things of you, but it seems an awful lot like you're being condescending, pretty much running down the fundamentals that the thread's OP did, and not arguing against the idea that these figures could be realistic as much as simply stating that they're not.

Let's use the figure you stated. Around 12 star systems. That's what you claim the majority of players use.
A dozen systems, unless they only have a single planet orbiting the star and also lack an asteroid belt, would realistically speaking result in probably tens of thousands of mile-long ships with full crews.
In addition to a huge (Hundreds of millions) standing forces even if you only use 1% of the population that, say, 12 Earth-Like planets with a +-20% difference in size, resources, and population could support today.
For simplicity, we'll use Earth as the baseline:
~(7,000,000,000 * 12)*.01 = 840,000,000

"Unrealistically large" is not what I would describe this figure as using 7 Billion as a base with twelve worlds. Even a single 5 Billion population figure with only 1% enlisted, you'd have 50 million enlisted personnel, which is more than some players think is acceptable. Now, going off of resources, 50 Million soldiers cost their weight in manufactured goods to equip and supply for maybe 3 days in a combat zone. In a society where there're trillions of tonnes of materials at the disposal of these nations and billions of people that form the infrastructure needed to supply these individuals? It would be trivial for a civilization living in a post-scarcity stage.

Believe me, I'd never want to devolve a thread into some min-maxing let's-see-who-can-hit-harder thing, but I'm simply asking if we're all thinking too... Small.

Let's use a hypothetical example here, with the average you provided:
A nation trying to make a statement about their power projection during a diplomatic crisis, and try to act as a deterrent to another nation's aggression. They only use maybe a hundred mile-long ships. Which, presuming a similar atmosphere to Earth, are barely even visible from the surface, directly under where the ships themselves are. Ships which could probably level an area the size of Rwanda after an hour of bombing, on a planet with earth-like proportions. The nation being threatened has 12 star systems. The nation threatening them also has 12 star systems.
Seems like someone's threatening to lightly pat someone else, right?
OR:
A nation tries to evacuate a planet because its largest moon is about to hit the planet! They send a couple hundred of the largest ships they have and rescue maybe 500,000. The planet is struck, killing, let's say 5 billion.
The player sending aid has 12 inhabited star systems, each with maybe 3-4 billion people. The planet belongs to a nation with 12 star systems, which is too encumbered with the burden of war to devote its resources elsewhere.
Seems cruel, doesn't it? With all that manpower and all those resources, surely they could send thousands of vessels and save millions, right?

Again, the question in this case is more of a "why is everything so small-scale?" and not a "lol omg can I get away with super-big stuffs because I'm super-cool?"

[Neornith]

I will preface with this: I asked originally what I should use. I can see that the majority prefer smaller scale things, and I will consider this greatly in future threads. Thank you all for the input!

I will argue my thought process on the basis of this question to begin with, based upon the two most recent responses, and I will present counter-arguments. If this is to be a continued discussion, I guess the question has changed to "why?" instead of "should I?"
Feel free to move this to the discussion thread if you see fit, Kyrusia. I just like to think of these things in my off time.

---

-snip-

Well, I usually only let myself use low-triple-digit figures in any given fleet, and no more than a few million troops for ground engagements, I would never throw a full six-figure fleet and seven-figure army unless it was agreed that it was the adequate scale, but it seems crazy to me that during wars between empires claiming a dozen suns, only about two hundred ships are employed. An entire star system can only equate to maybe thirty vessels according to what I see from a majority of players, meaning that the resources exploited, per star system, by the ruling government are accurately compared to the available resources of a couple dozen asteroids, including rare-mineral and metal scarcity. That's where suspension of disbelief starts to get me stressed, because I have a hard time imagining, with the typical FTL-travel of FT civilizations allowing for quick resource management with huge territories, that they have yet to exploit the resources of any large celestial body other than the inhabited planet.

It's less wanting to play to win that forms the basis of the question, because I value the romanticized drama of the war that can be portrayed in RP, and in fact prefer the wars be hard-fought and losses be taken... Gives me more chances to make interesting characters and go through the hardships they face.
However, the inner bookworm says that the majority of NSFT warfare is like using gunboats and rafts to portray the entire US Navy, while also saying that maybe a hundred reservists are representative of the entire Army (As far as population and available resources are concerned to a post-scarcity civilization across multiple planets.) And any more than that is seen as just absurdly-too-much godmodding.

I'm not asking this to justify huge numbers, per-say, I'm asking if the numbers themselves, with the sense of scale involved being lightyears, are really that big.

-snip-

I've been around on other nations for a couple years, first taste of FT roleplay being 3 years ago, this is simply me trying to get back in the swing of things.
I say this to establish that I understand what the general outline of everything seems to be agreed upon. Working with others to establish some consistency and a setting which follows rules agreed upon between players. Rules which generally act as a code of conduct for what is and isn't cool to use in a given thread. However, I have some concerns. Feel free to respond or just ignore this, as I'm not the most intelligent man on Earth.

I'll divide them into portions under spoiler tags to avoid a page-long post.

First, in order to clear up my interpretation of the values that most players here seem to follow.

Collaboration, alright, I normally get a consensus on what is and isn't acceptable for the thread(s) in question. I've yet to field more than 200 ships in a single instance in-character. Work with the other players to weave together a coherent story first, and a thought experiment second.
Compromise, alright, usually I tone down things if my partners in RP want me to, and they usually do as well. For instance, I, at one point, was asked to tone down my ship's code-breaking capabilities. I did. Nobody got mad. Either everyone is happy or nobody is, and we all have to make sacrifices and understand each other first.
Creativity, alright, I respect and acknowledge within reason what players want to bring to the table in the(se) thread(s). I'm willing to RP with anyone not claiming access to other dimensions and StarWars-esque Death Stars. New Ideas and fun ideas can always help to stave off stagnation and open the creative process for everyone.¹
Consistency, I usually stick to my guns about what my nation is, how it acts and what it uses in response to different situations. Anything that I've retconned I've done on a vote with other players who were involved with making it in the first place. Keeping what is and isn't in an RP is vital to its longevity. Consistency prevents chaos, and lets everyone involved stay relevant without wasting their time trying to keep up.
¹ Within reason, which is usually agreed upon by compromising and making conventions in a thread.

I included this bit to clarify what my understanding of these principles are, more to elaborate on what I understand, feel free to clarify what I'm missing here

You say everyone plays Pseudo-Realistic, but I think that that's only when the sciences involved seems to be questioned, but the sheer quantity and scale of most interstellar nations seems... I dunno, lacking? It's like talking about Dyson spheres. People lose the sense of scale involved, when to be honest it wouldn't be hard, technologically speaking, just resource-intensive.
Human sense of scale begins to break down once it gets to the cosmic scale, which is normal.
The availability of resources in our own solar system are vast. If the entire solar system's resources were exploited, with modern technology and construction capabilities, we could make millions of ships like Star Trek's Enterprise with just the asteroid belt. Using all planetoids and the Oort Cloud? Maybe a hundred million.
As far as population is concerned, if all the arable land in Africa alone were used, a population of 11 billion could be managed with everyone having the same availability of food as the US.
Now apply that with things being researched today, like hydroponics and gene-tailoring to allow for healthier people, and life-extension technologies that people are currently looking into.
The population figure of Earth alone could hover around 12-15 billion without shortages in a unified society. Most FT nations seem to be unified and live as post-scarcity societies.
Unless Earth is unanimously-agreed-upon as some wildly unrealistically huge and bloated thing and I've just never been informed, then I guess just ignore what I have to say.

Now, I understand fair play, and I wouldn't be caught dead dumping a million ships and 10 billion troops on someone just to laugh at how big I am. That ruins the point of the story being told, and at that point you might as well play Sins of a Solar Empire or HALO for your kicks.
But I question less the feasibility of the technologies used in FT, and I instead ask is where all of the people are in these star faring empires. Because they seem rather... Sparse, and drained of resources.
Maybe I've just spent too much time listening to people dissecting sci fi tropes, but I think it speaks volume that you guys seem to assume I'm trying to numbers-wank when I'm posing the question of whether it would be realistic to use what would conservatively equate to maybe 5% of the resources available to the quantity of space that I, and most people that I've seen in the FT community, use in RP.
I understand that the way people think at this moment is with smaller fleets and smaller armies, because huge numbers are just not fun, and it's hard to visualize. I understand that if I do follow the principle of what I'm asking instead of go with what others think is reasonable, people will just ignore me and treat me like that kid who eats glue in kindergarten.
I don't wish to assume things of you, but it seems an awful lot like you're being condescending, pretty much running down the fundamentals that the thread's OP did, and not arguing against the idea that these figures could be realistic as much as simply stating that they're not.

Let's use the figure you stated. Around 12 star systems. That's what you claim the majority of players use.
A dozen systems, unless they only have a single planet orbiting the star and also lack an asteroid belt, would realistically speaking result in probably tens of thousands of mile-long ships with full crews.
In addition to a huge (Hundreds of millions) standing forces even if you only use 1% of the population that, say, 12 Earth-Like planets with a +-20% difference in size, resources, and population could support today.
For simplicity, we'll use Earth as the baseline:
~(7,000,000,000 * 12)*.01 = 840,000,000

"Unrealistically large" is not what I would describe this figure as using 7 Billion as a base with twelve worlds. Even a single 5 Billion population figure with only 1% enlisted, you'd have 50 million enlisted personnel, which is more than some players think is acceptable. Now, going off of resources, 50 Million soldiers cost their weight in manufactured goods to equip and supply for maybe 3 days in a combat zone. In a society where there're trillions of tonnes of materials at the disposal of these nations and billions of people that form the infrastructure needed to supply these individuals? It would be trivial for a civilization living in a post-scarcity stage.

Believe me, I'd never want to devolve a thread into some min-maxing let's-see-who-can-hit-harder thing, but I'm simply asking if we're all thinking too... Small.

Let's use a hypothetical example here, with the average you provided:
A nation trying to make a statement about their power projection during a diplomatic crisis, and try to act as a deterrent to another nation's aggression. They only use maybe a hundred mile-long ships. Which, presuming a similar atmosphere to Earth, are barely even visible from the surface, directly under where the ships themselves are. Ships which could probably level an area the size of Rwanda after an hour of bombing, on a planet with earth-like proportions. The nation being threatened has 12 star systems. The nation threatening them also has 12 star systems.
Seems like someone's threatening to lightly pat someone else, right?
OR:
A nation tries to evacuate a planet because its largest moon is about to hit the planet! They send a couple hundred of the largest ships they have and rescue maybe 500,000. The planet is struck, killing, let's say 5 billion.
The player sending aid has 12 inhabited star systems, each with maybe 3-4 billion people. The planet belongs to a nation with 12 star systems, which is too encumbered with the burden of war to devote its resources elsewhere.
Seems cruel, doesn't it? With all that manpower and all those resources, surely they could send thousands of vessels and save millions, right?

Again, the question in this case is more of a "why is everything so small-scale?" and not a "lol omg can I get away with super-big stuffs because I'm super-cool?"

I'd contend that most people play post scarcity utopias with a unified populace.

I certainly don't because to me as a writer they make things seem stagnant and boring. Internal conflict makes things exciting and much more fun I believe. There's plenty of political maneuvering within my nation where the different houses try to exert more political influence over the others and even bend and in some cases break the law in this attempt. I think personally that post scarcity creates one dimensional characters that are basically the same even if they have different names.

As to why I RP things smaller, it's much more fun for me. RPing a ship battle in a system with only eight ships has more drama and you can evoke more emotion from your characters than you would if you entered a system with thousands of ships I believe.

[Kyrusia]

Unless Earth is unanimously-agreed-upon as some wildly unrealistically huge and bloated thing and I've just never been informed, then I guess just ignore what I have to say.

It's not. Earth (and Sol as a whole) is generally accepted as being fractal. Anytime a new "style" of Sol is needed for an RP, fluff, history, etc., it spontaneously exists and is "true" at any given time as needed for the RP. Perspectives, styles, and expressions of Earth, thus, vary from player to player. This is more just to keep OOC conflict down about "what is the True Earth™" than anything else, while simultaneously not de-legitimizing any other player's own conception of it.

Again, the question in this case is more of a "why is everything so small-scale?" and not a "lol omg can I get away with super-big stuffs because I'm super-cool?"

Preference, mostly. Some players are bigger, some are smaller - again, boils down to their preference.

As to "why" with a bit of elaboration? If you ask ten different people, you'll get twelve different answers, to quote an old social studies professor of mine. The trend of number-gaming in roleplay on NS, and not just in FT, is a part of it. As is a preference for a certain range of science-fiction on NS that seems to focus on smaller-scale (still astronomical, mind you) storylines; most roleplays in FT are written, in some form, from a largely character-driven perspective; this tends to naturally frame the story within a lens that is possibly more limited in its scope. To quote Hyperspatial Travel: "How big do I need to be? [...] What sort of stories do you want to write?" I imagine popular media and fiction has a lot to do with this: writing about the hard-scrabbled soldier on a forgotten world fighting for survival, versus eldritch beings of trans-brane scope feuding over trillions of souls under their dominion.

Many, in my experience, cite a combination of simple preference and immersion; to explain this simply: at a certain point, in their perspective, a player operating on a significantly larger scale than their own, with a state of proportional scale difference, mechanically seems to trivialize whatever In-Character actions, history, and worldview their own, smaller scale star-state may have. As an example: if I roleplay as a 3-system state and run across an IC star-state that has 3 galaxies under their belt, that just sort of seems to make whatever my 3-system clunker does moot. There are ways it can work, certainly, and it's been done, but each given player does have a personal threshold where handwaved caveat doesn't save them from losing their ability to believe; in other words: their personal sense of immersion is lost.

Second to this is what I am now terming as "Sunset's Love Corollary" (Why? Seems fitting and I like the way it sounds! ). This, more or less, boils down to methodology and presentation of a thing than scale specifically, though scale is certainly a part of it. To likely bastardize how he wrote this... A player has spent ten years building-up a hobby train set from one station, a single loop, and one engine, to three full-blown model towns, dozens of loops, and countless engines, devoting time and love and intense dedication to it; that player will tend to prefer a player who seems intent on doing the same, versus a player who goes-out and buys a hobby train set of similar detail. As this relates to FT, it's a question of dedication, or, as Sunset says:

"That leaves you with two choices; Build your own set or buy one. Now the second might seem easier; Everything is there, it's all ready for you to plug it in and start playing. It even has a little Tom Cruise. But it doesn't have love."

With relation to scale in FT, this tends to relate in the following manner: if a player starts small and builds-up (regardless of where their "end scale" is), they will tend to prefer to roleplay with a player who does the same, versus a player who - to them - seems to be "buying a completed train set."

Also need be factored in that all FTers - myself included - don't necessarily factor in specific quantities of n-thing, be that population, the amount of vessels I possess as a cumulative sum, etc. Running off the top of my head (aka: without looking at my notes), I think the only thing I actually have as a hard, largely immutable value is the count of stellar systems with permanent habitation that my star-state possesses. Otherwise, I tend to work in description of a whole or percentages of an undefined whole. Beyond that, some like more numbers in specific; some don't.

For all of this, though, one can never really discount the fiat, "Because I prefer doing it like this," opinion. Folks like what they like and tend to do things how they like, in the end, after all.

Over time, that as more players grew to prefer one style versus another, others did the same because they wanted to roleplay with them, liked their choices, or simply preferred the same ("I like what I like."). That's generally what is meant by, "Depends on who you roleplay with or who you want to roleplay with." If a player (wants to) roleplay(s) with folks who RP at a smaller scale, its likely they'll adjust accordingly; similarly, if they (want to) roleplay with folks who RP at a larger scale, its likely they'll adjust accordingly as well. Voluntary association and consent, after all; people get to choose who they roleplay with, and any given roleplayer tends to congregate with roleplayers who share their opinions on any given thing on some level.

Of course, none of the above are universally applicable; as I said: ask ten people, get twelve answers. This is just based on my own experience and observation. Take of that what you will, as I've probably rambled enough. As I've noted above, though, Sunset has written what I feel is a rather interesting and enlightening piece about this topic that you may find interesting; I tend to recommend it in general.

[Lubyak]

-snip-

I'm going to avoid quoting individual aspects of the post, since my goal isn't to dissect individual bits of reasoning, but rather to discuss the key point you highlighted: why is everything so small? When even a single system contains enough in the way of exploitable resources to build millions of ships, and when even a single planet could support billions upon billions of inhabitants, why are the numbers and sizes of ships so small? Why doesn't everyone have billions of troops and hundreds of thousands of ships?

Perhaps you're right, and in a 'realistic', even a pseudo-realistic setting, there would be. However, in a realistic something, the primary design concern with ships would be how to deal with waste heat, there would be no fighters, and combat would be a long series of comparing Delta-V as Orion battleship boom-boom around and fire their X-ray pumped lasers at each other. I would say that the important thing here is that most players don't play as even pseudo-realistic. Most players go full space opera, and don't care about anything other than suspension of disbelief and aesthetics. To use myself as an example, my ships look like WWI and II ships in space, run off space oil in a technobabble space steam engine. Why? Because it looks cool.

Similar things apply to scale I find. There's an anime OVA series which likely does something more similar to what you're expecting called Legend of the Galactic Heroes. In that series, even a small fleet has a few thousand ships, and large engagements involve tens if not hundreds of thousands of ships on each side. It's a wonderful series, but the sheer size of the fleets always rubbed me the wrong way. It just seemed...silly, if I can use a word. As the saying goes, one death is a tragedy, but a thousand is a statistic. I think the same applies to how we work in FT. When we're allowed to focus on one ship, or even a small group of ships, the risk to each one is so much more real. It means so much more to read that the Enterprise has been heavily damages, as opposed to one fleet losing hundred of ships. And, when our protagonists are only one ship or a small group of ships, the same has to be true of their enemies. Otherwise, it becomes slightly silly, at least to me, and does not fit with the view of my nation (this will come up again later).

So, much like ships are designed based on aesthetics and suspension of disbelief is true. Scale remains small so we can maintain the stakes, and keep the threat to individual ships and characters to a 'believable', not realistic, level.

The four Cs are important here, since everyone is free to do everything, and there needs to be a way to keep everyone in relation to each other. Its one of the reason I often advise against using metric units for weapons/shield output and say everyone should travel at the speed of plot. Similar thoughts apply to the size of fleets and armies. Indeed, I often advise against using numbers for these too. I'd rather keep things in terms of 'major deployment' or something similar to keep a good level of abstraction, since applying numbers almost invites a one-up manship bidding war. Keeping things 'sane' in relations to one another is absolutely necessary, and that definitely applies to numbers. Yes, when you start throwing around big numbers for fleets, people are immediately going to become suspicious. You can point out all the maths available to say that it's entirely reasonable to have a million ships and a billion troops, and how it's weird that not everyone has that, but so long as the community in general considers such things to numberwanking, it'll likely to be dismissed as such. I know for one that if I was in an RP, and someone was running around with single fleets of thousands of ships, I'd shy away from RPing with that person. Why? It simply doesn't fit with the idea of the nation I have, and I think a good chunk of the general community would express some kind of similar opinion.

As for your examples, contained, the solution is simple: drama. More often than not, in order to justify an RP, coincidences and contrivances occur--all within the suspension of disbelief. For example, if you're trying to do an RP wherein a planet is hit by its moon, then it's likely going to ruin the RP if someone comes in and just says I have thousands of ships. Other contrivances are also common. For example, new resources invented to ensure that there's a degree of 'rarity'. After all, while the Oort cloud may contain all the iron and titanium you'd even need, there's a million varieties of unobtainium you could make that it doesn't. This creates excellent limits for your numbers of ships. I would also argue that most people play nations that are far from being able to universally exploit all the resources available in their system, nor are they post-scarcity. I know I'm not. The Earth itself contains more resources than we could imagine, but we are far from being able to exploit all of it, and there's no reason to believe that such difficulties in universal exploitation wouldn't endure into FT.

However, in the end, to go back to your question: Why is everyone so small? I offer a few answers: 1) it allows for greater drama, 2) community standards call for it.

Now, of course, the latter is cyclical. "People stay small since going too big likely to get you ignored so we advise people to stay small." Maybe in time that will change, but--for now--that's the situation we find ourselves in.

[Kassaran]

You can always circumvent the issue with growth by just recognizing that war in space doesn't work out well. That's what I lean towards, hence why the Kassaran are billions in population, but less than 4 million in that group are built up for the sake of defense of the Colonies. Admittedly there are millions if not billions of autonomous constructs working on the behalf of those millions of personnel, they are admittedly limited in ability as required by Kassaran consumer protection laws and AI-discrimination running rampant in a near-post-scarcity society, but the vast majority of those are various search-and-rescue/scout probes and drones built for advanced surveillance in the place of true Human observation. Thousands of ships in a fleet can sound funny or silly to some, but to me it sounds sensible because of how I envision my nation in the future which ultimately leads to my point in all of this. No matter what, no matter who, whatever you write in FT can be just as right as it is wrong. That's not what matters, what matters is how others can add to what is right or wrong in your story.

The thousand-ship fleets up-the-ante as a pitched battle leaves the main character's vessel (a frontline frigate) stuck in constant evasive maneuvers pulling hard-g's while executing full-salve plasma discharges along the hull to counter incoming blasts. Arcs of light and radiation across the darkness of space leading to the glowing trails of venting coolant from breached hulls, the misty-white clouds of lost atmosphere dissipating in the expanse, and the fear in the main character's eyes as they watch thousands if not hundred of thousands of their fellow soldiers and astronauts fall to the cruelty of warfare in space. Their bodies obliterated by the scorching heat of a critical reactor meltdown overloading life support and creating a heat burst which ultimately detonates the munitions depots and the very oxygen in the atmosphere. Their faces frozen in perpetual fear as they instantly die to the blood-boiling cold of space as their bodies slowly swell and expand in grotesque fashion leaving them barely recognizable as once being comrades of your protagonist before the viscera rips across their bodies and leaves nothing but tattered frozen remnants of what was once was their friend.

Space, is as cruel and terrifying, and abhorrently hostile to the Human body as it beautiful and mesmerizing and promising for our future. There is no question as to whether or not we will traverse it, we already have. The real question is, what can we do with it, that vast emptiness of anticipation and dreams of generations forgotten to time before us and promised to generations to come? Will you write stories to envision a future, or will you simply write responses you think 'work' with what everyone else 'wants'?

[Glorious Terran Empire]

All very thorough responses, responses I don't have the time to go into detail on at the moment. However, I think this has sated my curiosity on the subject, and I will consider what's been said here in future events.

Thank you all very much for your time and consideration.

Unrelated question: Is it considered gravedigging if I add a submission or two to the free use indices that Neornith maintains or are they considered as constant as this thread is?

[Kyrusia]

Unrelated question: Is it considered gravedigging if I add a submission or two to the free use indices that Neornith maintains or are they considered as constant as this thread is?

*Kyrusia dons his Modly-shaped hat.*

RP boards have relaxed gravedigging restrictions. For F&NI, especially for index/repository/survey threads like that, you're kosher.

[Sunset]

Just to chime in with my .003 cents...

While a single system could reasonably support millions of ships and trillions of people, it can also support millions of ships and trillions of people... And more importantly all of the industry, technology, imagination, and creativity they entail. Given the pace of our own rapidly increasing technological progression and importantly the industrial base chain required to maintain it, any species that manages to get from one star to another will likely be of a post-biological singularity nature by the time they make that first jump. That doesn't mean they won't - I'm a big believer in curiosity as a motivator - but unless a species (and I suppose -we- might be the slow ones) has an intrinsic biological mechanism to slow the rate of technological progress the very idea of conflict in a galaxy with eight hundred billion stars and their attending resources would be completely irrational.

Thus any idea of realism has been shot in the foot already; Lets write a good story instead.

[Pordlandia]

Just to chime in with my .003 cents...

While a single system could reasonably support millions of ships and trillions of people, it can also support millions of ships and trillions of people... And more importantly all of the industry, technology, imagination, and creativity they entail. Given the pace of our own rapidly increasing technological progression and importantly the industrial base chain required to maintain it, any species that manages to get from one star to another will likely be of a post-biological singularity nature by the time they make that first jump. That doesn't mean they won't - I'm a big believer in curiosity as a motivator - but unless a species (and I suppose -we- might be the slow ones) has an intrinsic biological mechanism to slow the rate of technological progress the very idea of conflict in a galaxy with eight hundred billion stars and their attending resources would be completely irrational.

Thus any idea of realism has been shot in the foot already; Lets write a good story instead.

Perhaps, but ultimately we can't really say. I like to point to "The Road Not Taken," by Harry Turtledove, as somewhat of an interesting example; in it FTL was simple all along and rather trivial for most races in the galaxy to the point where you had nations discovering it in their equivalent of the eighteenth century. Humanity progressed down another path technologically and discovered other things. For all we know a similar case could be here in real life as well - we may have been looking at things from the wrong perspective this entire time when it comes to certain types of technology.

I imagine that one can always find a reason to go to war - even in the future. A future with no conflict isn't something I'd dwell too long on, especially not for RP (not that you're suggesting anything of this sort). On the same token, however, I do find limiting the scale of fleet/army/what have you sizes to be... Unreasonable, at best. It is still very possible to have in-depth character development and interaction with a large fleet as one can with a smaller one; the existence of a more believable armada scale should not preclude one from focusing on characters. After all, even if one has only a dozen ships, most RPers are not going to be RPing out different people on each and every one of the ships - they tend to focus on a handful of characters on a vessel or two perhaps and the other ships in the fleet become fluff.

I'm not going to vouch for realism, but rather verisimilitude. Most RPs are not large scale combat operations, but when/if they do, and there are factions involved that have claims beyond, say, just their own star system, I will really question why they don't have a fleet that correlates to their resource base. Because to me, that is far more unreasonable than finding decent IC justifications for having funnels on your ships or fancy star-fighters. One can make any range of wild and fantastical pieces of technology to suit their needs, but scale will always remain whether you're using Orion battleships or Star Destroyers.

Of course, for me personally (beyond the issues of not exploiting resources) it's also part of the allure of FT. It is something different. We've already had periods in our history here on Earth where naval battles were fought between fleets with hundreds of ships. For space, the final frontier, it seems almost appropriate that something grander and more awe-inspiring be dealt with. You don't necessarily need millions of ships (although as has been pointed out above, it should be perfectly reasonable in some cases; my own fleet has fluctuated between a high point of four million vessels and somewhere around twelve thousand, and currently sits at around sixty thousand or so big-gun ships, considerably more numerous much smaller vessels, and an unspecified amount of supporting non-combat types) but something beyond the usual paltry couple dozen or low hundred count should seriously be considered.

My own thoughts on the matter.

[Lubyak]

-snip-

Of course, what's more 'dramatic' is going to be entirely subjective. As I said, when I watched Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and saw that every battle had tens of thousands of ships, I began to find it more silly that anything else. Another might find it refereshing and more engaging, but for me it severely stretched my suspension of disbelief, and lessened my enjoyment of the series. I hold similar opinions when it comes to RPs in NS where one side is claiming similar numbers.

It threatens my suspension of disbelief, and brings me to a scale that I'm uncomfortable bringing myself to. Why am I uncomfortable with that scale? A multitude of reasons, which aren't relevant here, suffice it to say that they exist.

Now, this is an entirely individual reaction to the proposed scale. As Pordlandia said, he finds part of the allure of FT in the grandeur of fleets thousands strong. Meanwhile, I find more allure in a smaller scale fleet, where individual ships have much greater value. Neither of us are wrong, and neither of us are right. We each have a 'vision' for our nation, and each other's scale likely lies outside that vision. Just as Pordlandia feels that a smaller scale threatens the believability of the RP, I feel like going to the kind of scale where each state has millions of ships threatens the believability of the RP. Fundamentally, there's a conflict between our visions of our nations and how we RP.

How we deal with that conflict is an entirely up to OOC discussion. Perhaps we simply avoid RPing with one another, so that the conflict never manifests, perhaps we enter into a compromise wherein we invent extenuating circumstances to keep the scale to one we can both agree on, or one of dozens of others methods we could resolve the conflict, but it fundamentally comes back around to the four Cs.

Now, I personally believe that a decent chunk of the community is more in favour of smaller scale RP, which avoid going the tens of thousands of ships and billions of troops. Personally, I also find the smaller scale RP more engaging and interesting, but that's just my opinion. As such, I am going to advise people to tend towards the smaller scale. Sure, there's plenty of good arguments for going the large scale, but--for me, and I think a good chunk of the overall community--we find it better to keep a lower ceiling when it comes to scale.

[SquareDisc City]

it seems crazy to me that during wars between empires claiming a dozen suns, only about two hundred ships are employed. An entire star system can only equate to maybe thirty vessels according to what I see from a majority of players, meaning that the resources exploited, per star system, by the ruling government are accurately compared to the available resources of a couple dozen asteroids, including rare-mineral and metal scarcity. That's where suspension of disbelief starts to get me stressed, because I have a hard time imagining, with the typical FTL-travel of FT civilizations allowing for quick resource management with huge territories, that they have yet to exploit the resources of any large celestial body other than the inhabited planet.

It's less wanting to play to win that forms the basis of the question, because I value the romanticized drama of the war that can be portrayed in RP, and in fact prefer the wars be hard-fought and losses be taken... Gives me more chances to make interesting characters and go through the hardships they face.
However, the inner bookworm says that the majority of NSFT warfare is like using gunboats and rafts to portray the entire US Navy, while also saying that maybe a hundred reservists are representative of the entire Army (As far as population and available resources are concerned to a post-scarcity civilization across multiple planets.) And any more than that is seen as just absurdly-too-much godmodding.

I'm not asking this to justify huge numbers, per-say, I'm asking if the numbers themselves, with the sense of scale involved being lightyears, are really that big.

I can think of a few possible "outs" to this problem:

The limit isn't raw materials, it's manufacturing. It's a tremendously complex process to construct a spaceship equipped with machinery that goes beyond real-world known physics, requiring costly shipyards and perhaps involving manufacturing steps that are inherently time-consuming.

The limit is some made-up super-rare material. That's not an uncommon thing in SF generally.

The limit is energy. Maybe your nation is building Dyson spheres, but it takes the power of an entire star for several weeks just to charge up the gadget for one single FTL jump.

The conflict being depicted is relatively minor, or is just one part of a bigger war that is mostly "off screen". This may work better in some stories than others.

The population isn't so big. Is there really any reason we can't have a multi-planet starstate with a few hundred million people. This could work for your own nation, though it doesn't help explain away other people's.

Lots of the investment is going into probes, drones, and small stuff, but it's the rare capital ships that get the limelight in the story.

[Thoricia]

Just to chime in with my .003 cents...

While a single system could reasonably support millions of ships and trillions of people, it can also support millions of ships and trillions of people... And more importantly all of the industry, technology, imagination, and creativity they entail. Given the pace of our own rapidly increasing technological progression and importantly the industrial base chain required to maintain it, any species that manages to get from one star to another will likely be of a post-biological singularity nature by the time they make that first jump. That doesn't mean they won't - I'm a big believer in curiosity as a motivator - but unless a species (and I suppose -we- might be the slow ones) has an intrinsic biological mechanism to slow the rate of technological progress the very idea of conflict in a galaxy with eight hundred billion stars and their attending resources would be completely irrational.

Thus any idea of realism has been shot in the foot already; Lets write a good story instead.

Perhaps, but ultimately we can't really say. I like to point to "The Road Not Taken," by Harry Turtledove, as somewhat of an interesting example; in it FTL was simple all along and rather trivial for most races in the galaxy to the point where you had nations discovering it in their equivalent of the eighteenth century. Humanity progressed down another path technologically and discovered other things. For all we know a similar case could be here in real life as well - we may have been looking at things from the wrong perspective this entire time when it comes to certain types of technology.

I imagine that one can always find a reason to go to war - even in the future. A future with no conflict isn't something I'd dwell too long on, especially not for RP (not that you're suggesting anything of this sort). On the same token, however, I do find limiting the scale of fleet/army/what have you sizes to be... Unreasonable, at best. It is still very possible to have in-depth character development and interaction with a large fleet as one can with a smaller one; the existence of a more believable armada scale should not preclude one from focusing on characters. After all, even if one has only a dozen ships, most RPers are not going to be RPing out different people on each and every one of the ships - they tend to focus on a handful of characters on a vessel or two perhaps and the other ships in the fleet become fluff.

I'm not going to vouch for realism, but rather verisimilitude. Most RPs are not large scale combat operations, but when/if they do, and there are factions involved that have claims beyond, say, just their own star system, I will really question why they don't have a fleet that correlates to their resource base. Because to me, that is far more unreasonable than finding decent IC justifications for having funnels on your ships or fancy star-fighters. One can make any range of wild and fantastical pieces of technology to suit their needs, but scale will always remain whether you're using Orion battleships or Star Destroyers.

Of course, for me personally (beyond the issues of not exploiting resources) it's also part of the allure of FT. It is something different. We've already had periods in our history here on Earth where naval battles were fought between fleets with hundreds of ships. For space, the final frontier, it seems almost appropriate that something grander and more awe-inspiring be dealt with. You don't necessarily need millions of ships (although as has been pointed out above, it should be perfectly reasonable in some cases; my own fleet has fluctuated between a high point of four million vessels and somewhere around twelve thousand, and currently sits at around sixty thousand or so big-gun ships, considerably more numerous much smaller vessels, and an unspecified amount of supporting non-combat types) but something beyond the usual paltry couple dozen or low hundred count should seriously be considered.

My own thoughts on the matter.

It's just as unreasonable to demand people RP higher numbers as it is for others to demand people RP lower numbers. To try and mock people for doing what they're comfortable with is really just poor RP etiquette honestly

[Northwest Slobovia]

The limit isn't raw materials, it's manufacturing. It's a tremendously complex process to construct a spaceship equipped with machinery that goes beyond real-world known physics, requiring costly shipyards and perhaps involving manufacturing steps that are inherently time-consuming.

The limit is some made-up super-rare material. That's not an uncommon thing in SF generally.

Since those are limits IRL, I tend to use them as limits for FT RP. I figure FTL engines are sophisticated pieces of machinery, requiring all sorts of rare elements and complex manufacturing. Ditto for starship weapons and defenses.

But I tend to play "mid-FT": none of my FT nations are post-scarcity, though for many, goods and services we'd find expensive are cheap. Only one has broad nucleosynthesis, and even theirs has limits, so all my nations need to mine or trade for some substances.

[Kassaran]

The limit isn't raw materials, it's manufacturing. It's a tremendously complex process to construct a spaceship equipped with machinery that goes beyond real-world known physics, requiring costly shipyards and perhaps involving manufacturing steps that are inherently time-consuming.

The limit is some made-up super-rare material. That's not an uncommon thing in SF generally.

Since those are limits IRL, I tend to use them as limits for FT RP. I figure FTL engines are sophisticated pieces of machinery, requiring all sorts of rare elements and complex manufacturing. Ditto for starship weapons and defenses.

But I tend to play "mid-FT": none of my FT nations are post-scarcity, though for many, goods and services we'd find expensive are cheap. Only one has broad nucleosynthesis, and even theirs has limits, so all my nations need to mine or trade for some substances.

FTL for Kassaran isn't hard, it's just dangerous as all get-out and likewise it's only used in emergencies, just like how it's used in BSG 2003-2008 or in Halo. FTL Jump drives were top-notch transportation gear that was only supposed to really be used in emergencies or when speed was needed to evacuate/move personnel from a bad situation (i.e. a sentient robot attack).

Not only if something goes wrong you might lose the ship (if you're lucky, you just lose the mount), but the inherently dangerous method of accessing the Void (or warp-space for commoners ) using black holes could potentially go wrong and rip the ship apart using violent gravitational turbulence which could feed the black holes with enough mass to effect nearby traffic (radiation interferes really effectively with drone tech, which Kassaran practically subsists off of for interstellar trade). There has to be well into a couple million square kilometers around the ship in all directions before a jump can be made, even though you can exit wherever practically in one piece.

[Stormwrath]

It's just as unreasonable to demand people RP higher numbers as it is for others to demand people RP lower numbers. To try and mock people for doing what they're comfortable with is really just poor RP etiquette honestly

He wasn't mocking any RPer doing that. Not at all. He just questioned the idea of having to play as a small nation in FT, something he thought didn't make sense in a realistic manner.

My two cents on it are simple: try not to intimidate the other player with your worldbuilding. That's it, really.

[Escalan Corps-Star Island]

It's just as unreasonable to demand people RP higher numbers as it is for others to demand people RP lower numbers. To try and mock people for doing what they're comfortable with is really just poor RP etiquette honestly

He wasn't mocking any RPer doing that. Not at all. He just questioned the idea of having to play as a small nation in FT, something he thought didn't make sense in a realistic manner.

My two cents on it are simple: try not to intimidate the other player with your worldbuilding. That's it, really.

Unless of course you are Lord Kyru, in which case if your worldbuilding doesn't carry intimidation, there's something rather amiss.

[Sunset]

It's just as unreasonable to demand people RP higher numbers as it is for others to demand people RP lower numbers. To try and mock people for doing what they're comfortable with is really just poor RP etiquette honestly

He wasn't mocking any RPer doing that. Not at all. He just questioned the idea of having to play as a small nation in FT, something he thought didn't make sense in a realistic manner.

My two cents on it are simple: try not to intimidate the other player with your worldbuilding. That's it, really.

I think that's a really valid point-slash-notion. When we are worldbuilding - through factbooks, maintenance posts, too much Conan Exiles, or even in-character posts that we may be using primarily as worldingbuilding (data dump, overly expositive nutritional anthropologist) we should be asking whether we're writing to add something to the universe or if its an attempt to impress or intimidate instead. To my reptile hindbrain large numbers are intimidating and something to be matched (side note; always write out numbers in IC posts IE 'one hundred thousand' not '100, 000' unless the character is actually saying 'one zero zero zero zero zero') though my incoherent forebrain realizes they may be there for description. That's one of the reasons I try to avoid using numbers myself - I know how I react to them.

Now as to Escalan's statement... Attempting to intimidate or menace in-character? Go for it. That's part and parcel of playing the villian. Honestly I would prefer it; A gorey regaling of the massacre of a million sophonts in retaliation for a cold meal (Little known fact: Kyrusia is very hot-blooded) is far more effective in my opinion than listing off how many men garrison a specific world. It takes more to write and create but you get what you pay for!

[Maljaratas]

I've noticed the discussion on fleet sizes, and I have a question.
When you're all mostly recommending against using giant fleets, are you referring to numbers of capital-like ships, or to all of the ships, whether drones, fighters, capital ships, or others?
I ask since my current plan for my FT nation has a general fleet structure of a single giant colony ship, with thousands and possibly tens of thousands of fighter/general use craft as a part of it. (This is a fleet for colonizing purposes. Inside the home system, there would just be lots and lots of fighters/general use craft.)

[Thoricia]

It's just as unreasonable to demand people RP higher numbers as it is for others to demand people RP lower numbers. To try and mock people for doing what they're comfortable with is really just poor RP etiquette honestly

He wasn't mocking any RPer doing that. Not at all. He just questioned the idea of having to play as a small nation in FT, something he thought didn't make sense in a realistic manner.

My two cents on it are simple: try not to intimidate the other player with your worldbuilding. That's it, really.

You're right, he said it was unreasonable to RP a smaller size and then went on to claim people that use funnels and starfighters are unrealistic.

My mistake

People can play however they want, if you don't like it don't RP with them

I've noticed the discussion on fleet sizes, and I have a question.
When you're all mostly recommending against using giant fleets, are you referring to numbers of capital-like ships, or to all of the ships, whether drones, fighters, capital ships, or others?
I ask since my current plan for my FT nation has a general fleet structure of a single giant colony ship, with thousands and possibly tens of thousands of fighter/general use craft as a part of it. (This is a fleet for colonizing purposes. Inside the home system, there would just be lots and lots of fighters/general use craft.)

It's up to you to do what you want. I personally don't see anything wrong with what you're describing though

[SquareDisc City]

I've always assumed that drones, fighters, missiles, and so on get ignored in the 'count' of a fleet, and indeed that kind of thing might be spammed. Although it's likely that something like Conservation Of Ninjutsu applies - one fighter takes out the battlestation with a critical shot but a thousand would be a largely ignored nuisance. Because that's how stories tend to go.

I also tend to think that a fleet should have a "bottom heavy" numbers breakdown. If there are twenty ships then it'll be something like 12 destroyers, 6 cruisers, one carrier, and one dreadnought. Not 19 dreadnoughts and a destroyer, which smacks of I-want-to-win wankery. But then again that's very dependent on what your own ideas of space combat are like - your nation might justifiably have 'flat' or 'top heavy' fleets, or even very little variation in craft size at all if you can contrive a reason for them to all be about the same.

[Maljaratas]

Thank you to both of you. Just making sure that fighters and whatnot aren't usually counted when describing really big fleets.

I've always assumed that drones, fighters, missiles, and so on get ignored in the 'count' of a fleet, and indeed that kind of thing might be spammed. Although it's likely that something like Conservation Of Ninjutsu applies - one fighter takes out the battlestation with a critical shot but a thousand would be a largely ignored nuisance. Because that's how stories tend to go.

I quite expect that at least the first the fighter craft fight an enemy not of their own civilization, there will be heavy losses for them.