SARP political theory time:

[Yuuki]

It promises immortality, but doesn't promise to make it 100% convenient.

I like that. it's like an anti-slogan.

The prestige system doesn't have much use for loafers being loafers for perpetuity.

Yeah, that's when they start saying "no" when you ask for things on prestige, and you're back to a micro apartment in a hive in outer Tokyo with enough LACY for food and clothes and that's it.

 

[Ametheliana]

https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=faction:yamatai:community_backup_center

https://wiki.stararmy.com/doku.php?id=technology:soul_transfer

to round out the misinformation presented here^

Only the Elysians (who interestingly created ST tech in the first place) don't ALL have access to backups, only those in dangerous fields of work.

 

[raz]

The Kuvexians targeted Yamatai's Soul Transfer infrastructure during the Third Battle of Nataria, resulting in billions of "final deaths" for citizens who would otherwise get a guaranteed respawn with haste. I feel like that event would have been far less impactful and probably wouldn't have existed at all if respawning and backups were a rarity of any kind. Additionally, every time a new civilian body is made public, Yamataian citizens are expected to upgrade. I've seen body upgrades spoken of as equivalent to getting a flu shot. This has always given me the impression that the right to ST and the realistic fulfillment of that promise isn't gatekept from the common citizen. The Star Army, of course, uses the technology more frequently but if Grandpa Neppy wants to finally become an immortal Minkan it's not like he's got to wait in some kind of bureaucratic queue. He just goes to the Community Backup Center and makes it happen.

just looking a this from the perspective of an in-universe political scientist. Mostly just saying hey, because of X, Y is the case. With military hardware and personnel being incredibly replaceable wars are necessarily more destructive. That's it that's the observation.

"It is not enough for Yamatai to be victorious. Her enemies must also be eradicated." - Maxim etched into a class building's façade at Melanchol University's Ketsurui Yuumi Memorial Department of Political Theory /s

 

[Ametheliana]

This thread started as "ST makes war strategically different" and is now "Here's how Yamatai has a caste system because of ST", which isn't really about war at all and isn't really what people write on SARP, either.

I think with what's been talked about on the thread's topic, I see a lot of interesting "well what if" opportunities. It's well what if you want to write a peerless enemy, how do you make that interesting when numbers-wise the faction and ours would likely slap each other with their giant armies. But I've never seen a plot do that. It happens in site-wide battles, sure, but we're playing ships of max 20 players and a handful of NPCs. To fight a realistic war of attrition isn't something we do often, so it becomes more about that tactical thinking, outmaneuvering, taking out sources of soldiers rather than soldiers like Locked_0ut said. Focusing on the strategy over the bulk.

I have a lot to say about this but it'd just give away my next plot arc, but know that even with thousands of soldiers on the battlefield, I still gave the enemy more because it's boring to be unchallenged.

Challenge is the reason some of us GM, it's like playing chess with yourself except every other turn, one of your players moves a piece from the good guy side. It's a thought exercise.

Speaking of, we're writing difficult situations for our characters where dying IS a consequence. But it's about HOW it's a consequence. I've written Hoshi and Eden dying. When Hoshi died, she lost memories for three months (see my above post, it's the maximum) and someone who loved her that she had started dating in those months was a stranger to her. It caused lasting problems for the character that she had to grow past in order to love again. When Eden died, her wife was the one to kill her because she had Mishhu babies phased into her and was now their nursery. If she lived, they did too. Thus she had to die at the hands of her loved one. An incredibly consequential death.

Moments like those are available to all because we have the gift of being challenged by ST. Those consequences are very individual-based. I'll get to the large scale consequence of relying on ST, Nataria, below. And it's above since raz just posted :x lol

I'd say it depends on what you're fighting over and why. You'd get really into theories of limited escalation. Can't see two star nations immediately jumping to knock out blows over a border dispute. (Gotta do the india china thing and make sure people only bring bonking sticks)
If the war is inherently an existential issue then yeah I can see that. But sometimes if say, I want X system, I might be willing to go far enough to take and try to hold those systems but not really planning on completely destroying my opponent. That said, it probably will escalate to that point as the enemy funnels more troops in to defend that planet and I decide I need to stem their ability to do so

When you're watching a battles in a movie, it's best to have an existential "of course we have to fight them" enemy. If the audience questions why the hero is fighting you've lost your audience. It's why we don't write border disputes often. The last time I did, it was actually a misdirect to a larger existential threat. Having your whole heart behind what the heroes are doing and not leaving any room for audience or player questioning motives as altruistic or valid is the goal and why we mostly write existential threats.

It's also why the next big bad enemy for all of SARP is such a difficult setting element to make. Everyone wants to feel like they're against someone they cannot beat but can (inherently hypocritical but such is military RP) and that they're up against an enemy that has to be defeated no matter what for deeply moral reasons or it's too morally grey and suddenly it's genocide to kill them all.

It's why the Mishhu worked, they pulled at the heartstrings of a human playerbase; they're taking women and inseminating them. I've never fought in a war of old, but For Whom the Bell Tolls is a good example of being driven to fight to avoid that very thing, it's a very deep innate desire to protect that. It's why not a lot of people jumped on Kuvexians. They were slavers but their threat was morally ambiguous. Nobody really cared until they deleted millions or billions at Nataria. In a setting with immortality, they stopped that. It was their biggest defining moment as truly evil, truly something that had to be defeated no matter what or else the way of life as our characters know it would be eradicated. And then everyone was on board.

I think I walked away from the point a bit there, but I'm really just trying to recenter the conversation on war and not how the healthcare system is conjecturally messed up. Either way, the latter doesn't matter while war does- for our setting at least. It's probably opposite in our real lives, but this isn't that.

 

[Yuuki]

"It is not enough for Yamatai to be victorious. Her enemies must also be eradicated." - Maxim etched into a class building's façade at Melanchol University's Ketsurui Yuumi Memorial Department of Political Theory

Temptation to use FM powers to canonize this increases

 

[Wes]

I had some further thoughts on the OP that the replies have got going for me, so here they are:

I guess Yamatai traditionally ends its wars when it feels like it won enough. Like, Yamatai didn't wipe out every last Mishhuvurthyar, but it killed the NMX leadership at the end of the Mishhuvurthyar War and destroyed enough NMX assets that NMX wasn't able to mount their military campaign anymore, so once the fighting was over Yamatai unilaterally declared victory. It wasn't like there was an official surrender signed or anything.

In the Kuvexian War, Yamatai blew up Glimmergold and the Kingdom of Kuvexia destabilized and fell apart because their economy took too big of a hit, and when the Kuvexian government broke down and the Kuvexian Navy wasn't able to do anything else to Yamatai, Yamatai again declared victory without bothering to completely destroy the Kuvexians.

I imagine this is kind of like when two guys fight, they don't necessarily kill each other, but once one is on the ground knocked out, incapable of continuing, you can safely declare the standing guy is the winner of the fight.

Why doesn't Yamatai kill the Mishhu or Kuvexian to the last life form?

• It's not really honorable or sporting to genocide sapients
• Some of them (Kuvexians) are civilians and the Star Army doesn't generally go after civilians
• It would take way too much effort for the benefits gained

 

[Alex Hart]

It's also why the next big bad enemy for all of SARP is such a difficult setting element to make. Everyone wants to feel like they're against someone they cannot beat but can (inherently hypocritical but such is military RP) and that they're up against an enemy that has to be defeated no matter what for deeply moral reasons or it's too morally grey and suddenly it's genocide to kill them all.

I think it's a bit silly to consider this last point a potential flaw. From a political science point of view it makes sense that the war must be waged to an extent that the enemy can no longer be considered a threat to your nation. However if you're putting players in a situation where they're asking "Did we do a genocide" after destroying the way of life of another nation, the very thing that they were fighting to prevent happening to themselves, then you've portrayed the act of interstellar war well, not poorly.

Because, while the players are fighting to prevent their own cities from being razed and their own way of life from being put to the torch, they've just done the same to their enemies. If the enemies are anything other than shallowly written caricatures, and the player base has decided that the only recourse is to "kill them all" then the reaction they ought to be having is, in fact, that questioning of morality and justice.

 

[Ametheliana]

I consider it a flaw that people throw the word around before trying to create an enemy so obviously in need of fighting that there is no grey. It's hard to do. I didn't say it's a flaw, though.

I mentioned the Kuvexians being something people didn't know if they wanted to fight. I wrote them as such for my plot. I think the biggest catalyst for me showing my players they are bad was when I wrote a station where the Kuvexians had cloned old religious leaders of potential Kuvexian allies, saying they were the real deal. And they had the religious idols telling them to join Kuvexia. It's twisted and dark and enough to make me want to take them out. [Edit: My point is, if your enemy isn't inherently awful like the Mishhu were, you have to create more complex reasons that they are.]

Real life example at timestamp at 2:50 where both of them admit "we did to them what they were doing to us"... It's not something you can wholly avoid in war.

I had my players do things they felt were morally upsetting. When we created a Neko with false intelligence and gave her to the Kuvexians, it allowed us to reroute their troops for a strategically important battle in Kuvexia, but it didn't feel good. I think it was a turning point for me realizing I wanted to write complicated stories that had player characters feeling some kind of way other than "We're righteous and just!! pwnd em!" in order to progress character development, not just to defeat random alien #4.

 

[Immortal Cyan]

However, there are only so many Mental backup devices, medical practioners skilled/authorized (the latter probably being as important, if not more) to handle such backups, and hemosynthetic tanks that can be dedicated to renewing new bodies, healing up people, platforms for medical advancements, and the making of new nekovalkyrja. And then, there's the storage space for said backups, which is enormous.

500 backups can be held in something about the size of a 50-gallon trash can, which isn't big at all. Quite easy to scale that up and you probably only need something the size of like...a small building to hold the population of a city. I don't think space has ever been an issue, nor has a lack of qualified professionals. We have plenty of veterans who were medics in the SAoY to draw from.

 

[Locked_0ut]

I think I walked away from the point a bit there, but I'm really just trying to recenter the conversation on war and not how the healthcare system is conjecturally messed up. Either way, the latter doesn't matter while war does- for our setting at least. It's probably opposite in our real lives, but this isn't that.

I'm going to try to respond to more stuff in a bit, but these are two tied together issues. STs or other "Respawn" tech pushing an enemy towards total war is tied to healthcare. If we can expect every soldier can easily get a respawn regardless of rank, that affects enemy's strategic goals. Same with civilian ST availability. Civilian populations are already extremely resilient in the case of strategic bombing. If a population can functionally respawn without limit it makes the bombing even less useful unless you're just glassing cities.
Also whether or not ST or other respawns are resource intensive processes matters. Could an enemy still eventually cause enough attrition because all the cloning vats are full? Do you have enough storage space for backups? Do we need to divert resources to protecting hubs of cloning and memory storage centers? What about production facilities for the necessary technology.

 

[Wes]

Consider that when it comes to information management, the professionals might be AIs that can attend to a lot of patients at the same time, and who can be copied. I'm talking about sapient Yamataian computers here, though you could also argue it's possible for Yamatai to print doctors too the way the Star Army prints Nekovalkyrja infantry by the millions. I'm not saying Fred is wrong but maybe the main barrier is that a lot of people don't feel like they need or want backups. Even in the Star Army there's characters who choose not to respawn.

The answer to Locked Out is yes, there's limits to how many people you can restore in X amount of time. And those people are going to need housing and food and all the other stuff living people need, so it's more than just printing them out and calling it a day if their houses and workplaces are blown up as well.

 

[Locked_0ut]

When you're watching a battles in a movie, it's best to have an existential "of course we have to fight them" enemy. If the audience questions why the hero is fighting you've lost your audience. It's why we don't write border disputes often. The last time I did, it was actually a misdirect to a larger existential threat. Having your whole heart behind what the heroes are doing and not leaving any room for audience or player questioning motives as altruistic or valid is the goal and why we mostly write existential threats.

This right here is really dependent on the type of story you're trying to tell. You've got tons of Movies like Hurtlocker and the Platoon or books like the black company or all quiet on the western front where the protagonists aren't particularly invested in the whys of the war. Often the why is stupid and above their head. They're invested in their survival and the survival of their friends.
Pretty much any Star Wars piece focusing on clone troopers falls into that category


And from a high-level perspective, border conflicts can be fascinating and stressful. I've participated in and run some decision-making simulations involving these sorts of situations when stuff like Nukes are on the line. And in a world where you can just throw a rock at a planet and cause an extinction-level event, everything is basically nuclear bargaining. Anything can go wrong, one side not budging, somebody misreading a signal, a rogue general doing some fuck shit. Yeah a lot of people can end up dead over an uninhabited stretch of mountain.

(Also, look up the Pig War for some boarder conflict shinanigans)

 

[Immortal Cyan]

The answer to Locked Out is yes, there's limits to how many people you can restore in X amount of time. And those people are going to need housing and food and all the other stuff living people need, so it's more than just printing them out and calling it a day if their houses and workplaces are blown up as well.

Okay but WHO builds houses? WHO makes food? People do!

There's this weird Malthusian trend in Western circles that people are always somehow a net drain on resources when that isn't true. Even in some of the most inefficient systems, people put in more than they take out. If you just start waking people up even after their cities have been bombed, then they'll make do with the rubble until they can start building real houses again. That's how a recovery in that kind of scenario would happen.

 

[Locked_0ut]

Okay but WHO builds houses? WHO makes food? People do!

There's this weird Malthusian trend in Western circles that people are always somehow a net drain on resources when that isn't true. Even in some of the most inefficient systems, people put in more than they take out. If you just start waking people up even after their cities have been bombed, then they'll make do with the rubble until they can start building real houses again. That's how a recovery in that kind of scenario would happen.

Nobody's claiming people are a net drain. I think Wes's point is that if a city of 20mil gets glassed and then every citizen is respawned there still needs to be food, clothes, medicine, and shelter for those people or they're just going to die slow deaths. Yes those people can do a lot on their own to make their own shelter but it would be better to get the resources in place first.

Basically like a housing first approach to homelessness. People aren't a net drain when they have the right societal support

 

[raz]

All of this demonstrates why the Mishhu were/are a great enemy. They're just unquestionably evil tentacle beasts controlled by unquestionably evil eldritch horrors, and you haven't really got to worry about whether defeating them amounts to some kind of morally reprehensible act. Fictional enemies are there to be a foil for our heroes. Which is to say that, at least for me, a good story never needs to let us know about Aragorn's tax policy, nor should the question about how many contractors died on the second Death Star be taken as anything more than the joke it was written to be.

 

[Fred]

I want to address that implication in a previous example of mine that a drugstore clerk's life is unimportant. Clearly, it's an ambiguous and debatable moral statement which I do not support. But an organization based on merit is going to bring about what merit has the most value... and Yamatai as an empire is most primarily a military institution. Said humble drugstore clerk is one of many gears running in the machine that makes it work, but he's at comparatively low-risk compared to a soldier on the frontlines actively working to help avoid anything being able to carpet bomb a world. The Prestige system may be a bit heartless in that respect, but it amounts to nothing different than the incentive parents give to their children to study hard at school so you can have a good job and live well in the future.

Was I offtopic? I saw this thread and I believed this was a thought-experiment with ideas on the topic of the impact of soul transfer and the actual loss being incurred. I wanted to explore how much loss actually hurt, and this depends on reliance on said technology, or accessibility to said technology. I thought we were world-building, and world-building sometimes takes a base idea and adds layers to it. Implications. Context. Sometime, that helps ideas become well-grounded if they were a little too good. It's a rabbit hole I would have happily gone into.

I take months to get a doctor's appointment - endocrinology, in my example - often it can get to once every 2 years. If my Drugstore clerk gets a backup every 10years, but one that's implied to give him potential immortality... that feels pretty great in my eyes. As I see it, the guy could decide 10 years later in his next appointment that he doesn't like the spots of graying hair and growing ailments and he's just going to transfer back to his body 10 years ago... and that's a darn cool perk to have. The same guy could 50 years later be on his deathbed with a terminal condition, and be real happy to have his 30 years old backup still around so to still have the specs of his body in that span of time. Then, his younger body is respawned and he's soul-transferred to it... and voila, effective immortality to the common class. Or, if his hometown and hospital was bombed in the past, he might need to have someone make him a new body, but at least soul transfer is still possible - if only less convenient.

I figure, when Yamatai's government intends to promote a new body type, it gears up in prevision of it, and sets up similar system to the COVID vaccination center we've seen during the pandemic. You can't drop in at a whim, but ideally the system is optimized so that everyone can actually do so once their turn comes, as swiftly as possible. Depending on circumstances new infrastructure is set up, or to save costs infrastructure is co-opted from elsewhere (with consequences).

I think even Yamatai's military may be stingy about it based on performance, because I've witnessed Wes' characters gruesomely destroy underperforming first-day-at-work PC characters with no implications that they would ever be respawned. I'm lead to believe since that Yamatai as a whole believes that life is cheap and that you might not even get your flu shot if you're part of the garden that is deemed 'to be weeded out'.

 

[Wes]

As the manager for Yamatai, I will say:

• Just because Yamatai can respawn you doesn't necessarily mean that someone will respawn you immediately, or ever.
  • Star Army members can request a respawn (or decline respawns) in advance in their orders, which is noted in the Star Army Personnel Database System
• Yamatai does keep use AI to track of how valuable it thinks its people are to Yamataian society and may prioritize services based on that.
  • For example someone who works at KFY and knows how to build ship weapons might be brought back sooner than a NEET who just plays MMORPGs all day.
  • This AI is also used for Prestige System requests - if you've got a good reputation you can request nicer stuff
• Backups are available to all citizens of Yamatai every 3 months if they want to go to their community backup center for that. It's common for people to go once a year when they do their annual doctor visit.
• In the Star Army of Yamatai, there exists technology to do remote incremental backups that will send your latest memories to the ship's backup storage, helping to prevent you from "losing time" if you're killed in a mission.

 

[Yuuki]

I feel like pretty much everyone in the thread seems to agree the bottleneck/obstacle is getting restored, not being backed up?

Edit: Reminds me of what the Ultimates did and how the Lunar society works in Eclipse Phase Lore

 

[Soban]

Eclipse Phase heavily influenced my thinking about STs, bodies, and AI in SARP.