The Coalition Universe

[Graham Kennedy]

In this thread I'm going to outline the universe that my various ship designs operate in. I'll be posting articles of all sorts here... mostly it's written stuff, occasionally augmented by images. Feel free to discuss, nitpick, or just ignore if you like!

[Captain Seafort]

Hooray! I think I speak for all the long-time members when I say we've been waiting and hoping for this for thirteen months.

Lucky thirteen, eh?

[Sionnach Glic]

Indeed, I look forward to this.

[Graham Kennedy]

The Milky Way Galaxy :

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

The Milky Way galaxy is a typical slightly barred spiral accompanied by smaller satellite clouds, part of a local group of 20 galaxies. The average diameter is 85,000 light years and the thickness varies from a maximum of 12,000 light years in the central core to approximately 3,000 light years in the arms. It thus has a volume of some 17.6 trillion cubic light years, and with 400 billion stars the average stellar density is one star per 44 cubic light years. The density at the core can be as high as one star per cubic light year, while at the rim and in the gaps between the two galactic arms it can fall as low as one star per 10,000 cubic light years. Within our region of the galaxy the average density is one per 125 cubic light years. The core contains at least six supermassive black holes totalling millions of solar masses.

The Midspace structure which overlies the galaxy is at least as complex as the normal space topography.

POPULATION

Statistically, approximately 2.5% of stars in the galaxy have a planet with life of some kind; some 10 billion planets in all. These range from planets with nothing but pre-cellular organisms on upwards to those with complex biospheres.

Of the planets with life, approximately 7% have intelligent life. This is estimated to be some 714,000,000 planets in all.

Of the planets with intelligent life approximately 95% are pre-spaceflight. The basic rule is that numbers dwindle as you go up the technology scale; most intelligent life forms exist in a state comparable to Earth's stone age. Only a small percentage exist in bronze/iron age type societies, and only 5% are spacefaring societies - some 35,700,000 in all. Most of those are interplanetary only; right now Earth would rank in this group, albeit damn close to the bottom of it.

Of the 35,700,000 spacefaring species, about 5% have interstellar capability; some 1,785,000 in total. What this means is, there is one interstellar species for every 224,000 stars in the Milky way. It means that interstellar species average about 190 light years apart, where we are. It means that for every interstellar species, there are more than 5,200 lifebearing planets that do not have intelligence on them.

Which means you can build yourself an entire interstellar empire comprising thousands of colony worlds, without ever meeting another civilisation. In fact in my timeline Earth did exactly this; they had more than a thousand colony worlds before they bumped up against the Saravan. Most starfaring civilisations are like this; isolated little bubbles of no real significance to the galaxy, the interstellar equivalent of Andorra. They typically use the Lanshati sail technology you see on my earlier ship designs, which limits them from tens to hundreds of light years or so.

About 90,000 interstellar civilisations have a reach extending thousands of light years or beyond. And about a tenth of these comprise the shakers and movers of the galaxy; those who have the desire to shape the galactic map politically, economically and militarily, and have sufficient technology to do so.

[Graham Kennedy]

GALAXY LEVEL POLITICS

There is no galactic empire, no galactic united nations even. Put simply, the broad span of the galaxy is run more or less on the court of public opinion.

What there is, is a somewhat series of conventions and "common practices". They are typically the things that the majority of the 9,000 find distasteful enough to act over.

The major rule is that you are expected to treat those who are wildly inferior to you with a fair degree of respect. As mentioned earlier, the large majority of intelligent life in the galaxy exists in a stone age state. Any major interstellar power could very easily conquer such people, and indeed this does happen. But if a MIP did go around doing that on a large scale, then its peers are likely to become upset with it, and take appropriate action. That might consist of anything from a loss of prestige and respect right up to a military spanking from somebody further up the ladder who wants to see how you like being in that position for a change.

It's important to note that these rules are not enforced at all rigidly or consistently. There are parts of the galaxy where the major powers just aren't that pro-active, and let things slide; the "bad neighbourhoods" if you like. There are others where it's pretty rigidly enforced. Most places a MIP could do what it liked to a few planets as long as it behaved the large majority of the time. With millions upon millions of planets out there, in many places you could destroy one and comfortably expect that most of your peers wouldn't even notice, or wouldn't do anything more than complain if they did.

As an analogy, think Russia invading Georgia. A major incident, certainly, but nobody is going to war over it. But if the entirety of that incident had consisted of one Russian soldier killing one Georgian, would anybody get fussed up over it? But if Russia started systematically invading and conquering the old Soviet states, it would likely be World War III.

As well as not being too destructive or exploitative, it's seen as bad form to go equipping primitives with advanced technology. Some take this to the extremes of something like the Prime Directive, and would literally stand by and let a primitive world die off rather than help. More commonly, the policy is something like "look but don't touch". You might visit the primitives, set up embassies, interact with them, tell them what's out there even. Some will donate resources; foreign aid, essentially. Where it would get chancy is if you turned up to 1950s Earth and gave them a complete guide to how to advance their society by a thousand years in the next fifty.

What you are expected to do is to encourage the lesser powers within your sphere of influence to behave themselves along more or less the same rules that your peers impose on you. So just as the majors encourage one another to behave, the localised interstellar powers within the sphere of influence of each major power are in turn encouraged to behave, and if there are species that are weaker still within their sphere of influence then they encourage those in turn. It's a pyramid of convention and power, all rather loosely defined and even more loosely enforced in many places.

Another rule concerns territorial claims. There is a standing convention that if you have a valid claim on a body within a solar system, the claim includes all space within a sphere centered on the center of gravity of the system, with a radius halfway to the nearest star. Hence you can't really claim a "block" of space as such. Most interstellar empires are a scattering of bubbles, each a couple of light years in radius and ten or so light years apart. The space between is considered to be free space, open to all.

In practice, a lot of the major powers cheat somewhat. Notice that phrase "a valid claim on a body within a solar system"? The convention is that to establish a valid claim real living people have to place a claim marker on the body - an actual physical marker - and then maintain continuous, unchallenged occupancy of the body for a good ten years or so. Abandon it at any point during that time and most would say you've abandoned your claim and have to start over.

If somebody disputes that claim during the ten years, then it's a matter of who can swing the most diplomatic pressure or, if it comes down to it, the most firepower. If you are at a disadvantage in that respect then you might be able to swing others to your side - having the kind of prestige which comes with being a good follower of the rules helps a lot with things like that, especially if your opponent is not.

What the major powers do is go to all the uninhabitable solar systems between their colony worlds and plant little outposts on them. That way their scattered little bubbles of space become more like a bag of marbles... still gaps, but with your territorial claims mashed all up together, it becomes difficult, practically speaking, for anybody else to operate in there.

And it's not always easy to maintain such a claim. It has been known that when little outposts like this appear in places that are inconvenient for others, their owners return to find that they have suddenly and mysteriously been replaced by smoking craters.

The sheer scale of the galaxy means that it's generally impossible for even a major galactic power to stake a claim to a large block of it. Claiming even 1% of the galaxy would involve siting settlements of some sort in billions of star systems! Very few have the resources to do something like that for what is essentially a prestige game.

There is also a general rule that "galactic scale warfare is not a good thing". The major powers do have their rivalries and even outright enmities, and wars do occur between them, even big wars. But by convention no more than five or so of the major powers should become involved in any given war. The scenario they really want to avoid is that a war grows out of control, with all the majors taking sides in a domino effect, and eventually becoming an all out, no holds barred thing. If that did happen it would likely end in total chaos; the fall of all the conventions, and the major powers all using their total power against one another without restraint. Such a conflict could literally lay waste to virtually the entire galaxy.

[Graham Kennedy]

THE COALITION

The Coalition is a galactic scale power, albeit at the lower end of that scale. Many regard it as a bit of an upstart power, because it is very new, and because it was assembled as an alliance of different species, and because it continues to grow by assimilating more. Typically the major powers are single species empires. Many of the majors regard the Coalition as little more than a bunch of minor powers who've grouped together to pretend that they are a major. And in truth, that's pretty much what they are. This, in many eyes, sets a bad precedent.

The main body of the Coalition is a roughly hemispherical volume with a diameter of about 3,000 light years. Satellite territories extend out far beyond this. The Coalition counts three million planets amongst its members.

The Coalition divides its planets into Full members, Associate Members, and Colonies. The legalities of Coalition colonisation efforts are rather complex. Legally, any habitable world discovered by a Coalition citizen belongs to the government - which seems unfair, but actually isn't. The government can keep new worlds for its own purposes, which leaves the discoverer high and dry, but in most the colonisation and development rights of a new world are auctioned off via sealed bids, with the winner being the viable tender with the highest price. The discoverer has an automatic right to bid, and receives a 10% cushion on his or her bid, i.e. they will win if their bid is within 10% of the highest viable bid. This right can be sold to others, and since most explorers are not in the colony development business they usually do sell the rights. Thus the discovery of new colony worlds is a highly lucrative business.

Once established, the development company are the government of the colony, with legislative and tax raising powers over the colony. The company is required to expend 95% of all taxes raised on the running of and improvements to the colony itself. It can take the remaining 5% as profit. In addition it can charge people a fee to move to the planet.

After sixty years as a colony, the planet becomes an Associate Member of the Coalition. The development company loses governorship rights in favour of a political government - the structure of which depends on which membership block the colonisation is being done under. It does, however, retain the right to charge a 1% tax on the economy. There are no more colony slots sold in this phase; immigration is open to all who can pay the normal transportation costs to reach the planet.

After a further forty years as an associate member, the planet graduates to become a full member of its membership block and the Coalition at large.

Politically, the Coalition is divided into the aforementioned "Membership Blocks". The largest membership block is the Turgran Imperium, with the Human Federated Worlds second. The Galth Republic and Arafen Union come in in third and forth place.

In fifth place is the Askelain Planetary Alliance. This is something of a "mongrel" block. Given the size and power of the Coalition, an interstellar empire a thousand worlds strong could join, and be totally swamped. It would be like your street joining the UN and hoping to deal on equal terms with China. The idea of the APA is that relatively small powers group together, argue the issues between themselves, and then speak to the rest of the Coalition with one voice.

There are smaller blocks, but they tend to be so small that they don't carry a lot of weight individually, and on any given issue they tend to be divided enough that they pretty much cancel one another out. So whilst they are there, from a practical point of view their effect on Coalition policy is negligable.

To gain a majority on any issue within the Coalition, what you basically need is the Turgrans and Humans to agree, or either one of those plus everybody else to agree.

[Mikey]

Indeed, we've been waiting for this. Keep it coming!

One question, though - is there an anthropological reasoning for the fact that races with increasingly advanced tech become increasingly scarce?

[Graham Kennedy]

The rate of advance of technology in the real world tends to be exponential. Think of how long mankind spent in the stone age, how fast that technology advanced, as compared to how fast technology is advancing now. If you spend 90% of the history of your species in the stone age, then statistically speaking 90% of civilisations you meet will be in that state.

There's a whole article to come on how technology advances, but broadly speaking for most every species it tends to be cyclical. The sustainability of technological progress is inversely proportional to the rate of advance; that is, a period of rapid advance is followed inevitably by a collapse back to a primitive state, with the magnitude of the collapse bigger as the magnitude of the advance is bigger. Whereas a long slow advance tends to be far more sustainable. For most planets, intelligent life will endure on it for hundreds of millions of years, but it spends the majority of that time primitive, with occasional rises of civilisation before a collapse. This is accepted by most as being just an inevitable consequence of the way that societies work.

One of the things that worries the Coalition is that various things have given Humanity a huge leg-up over the last millennia - inheriting tens of thousands of worlds after the liberation from the Saravan for instance. And the Coalition itself is assimilating a lot of other political groups, which leads to a high rate of advance as they cross-pollinate different viewpoints, different ways of doing things.

There's real concern within and beyond the Coalition that they're basically setting themselves up for a major, major fall because of this.

The behind the scenes reason for all that is that I wanted the galaxy to be a pretty populated place. But based ont he Drake equation, the only way you can do that is to have life tend to last for a very long time on average - hundreds of millions of years. But imagine where Humans will be if they continue to advance technologically for another million years, let alone another hundred million! It would mean a galaxy full of technological gods, something like the Q perhaps.

By doing it the way I have we get a the crowded galaxy I wanted, but without cluttering up the place with millions of species who are far beyond us.

[Reliant121]

Interesting....very interesting. And well thought out. I have thought about writing up the Ariel Universe. But i make it up as a go along. i just spent half an hour talking to myself bout the 4 main council races.

[Teaos]

This is very cool. We have been waiting a long time for this.

Although I do wonder how feable the coalition is. Something on that scale seems almost impossible to handle. The burocracy would be insane.

Also the one thing I found odd was how planets turn from colonies to assosiate members in just 60 years and the company loses a lot of their tax money. This seems like to short of a time. It would take a rather long time to set up a planet.

[Deepcrush]

Agreed, I would think there would be a population cap involved for a planet to be upgraded from company owned to government run.

Other then that, I love all of this. The scale of it is amazing. Not since Frank Herbert have we really seen a galaxy to match this. I really think you've got gold here.

[Graham Kennedy]

You mustn't think of these colonies as being something like a couple of hundred people living in a settlement, growing naturally through reproduction. They're more like - well I don't know if this will mean much to people but in the UK fifty or so years ago we had a problem with population growth in London. So what they did was build a bunch of "Newtowns" around the capital to handle the overspill. They were towns literally planned and built from the ground up in one go, rather than places which naturally grew because people happened to be moving there.

The first few years on one of these colonies, all you'd see is basically a company workforce building infrastructure; power systems, spaceports, food production, factories, shops, office space. Then they start dividing the land up into estates, building towns, and moving people in. Ten years after the colony was founded, there would be thousands of people arriving by the day. Eventually it would be people arriving by the millions. For the first fifty or so years, the colony would grow through immigration massively more than it did through reproduction.

This obviously takes a colossal amount of outlay, on top of the initial bid which would also be a very large chunk of money. Running a colonisation company is not something you can do unless you can sink massive capital in to begin with.

Your revenue comes from two sources. First, you can charge colonists for the right to live on your colony. How much you charge is entirely up to you; market forces, dictated by how many people fancy moving to a new planet and how nice and appealing your colony world is. But for probably thirty years of that initial sixty, you are moving people in at a rate of many millions per year, and you could be charging them (equivalent to) thousands of US dollars per head. That's billions a year, for thirty years running.

Second, the company and the company alone is the government of the planet. They have total tax raising power, and they get to keep a flat 5% of all tax money raised, on the entire planet, for sixty years. Even by the sixty year point a colony wouldn't have a population as large as Earth's is now, but imagine how much money 5% of Earth's total tax revenue would be - even a hundredth of that would be a shedload of cash for a company to be collecting, year after year.

By the end of the colony phase the company is expected to have orbital towers in place, if not the beginnings of an orbital grid (more on those later), cities, supporting infrastructure, a whole planet. Total population would be well into the hundreds of millions. So you have an economy equivalent to maybe the US right now, or more. Control is handed over to the civilian government, but the colony company now gets to keep 1% of all tax revenue for the next 40 years.

The US spent 2.7 trillion dollars last year; 1% of that would be 27 billion dollars a year. For forty years! And it will grow fast, because this lovely new planet is now just another world in the Coalition which anybody can move to on a whim, no fee involved. Talk about population boom! And the joy of it is, the colonisation company has handed over control, they don't have to actually DO anything for the money now. Just sit back and rake it in.

And there's more. For forty years, the company is in charge of everything. At the end of that time they have fingers in every pie, they know every contact, they've shaped the place to be a world built according to their customs, their business practices. For a while there, until others get in on the action, this world is a HUGE business playground for them. They make a fortune off that alone.

So yeah, colony development can be very, very profitable. But it's also a very long term business; you have to think in terms of decades. It can also be very, very risky. Not every world is a paradise, many are on the hot side, or the cold side, or have a sun that's a bit too bright to be comfortable, or don't smell quite right. Can the company sell this world to the general public? Expend all that setup money and then find that people just don't take you up on moving there very much... you're in trouble. Word gets around that your new world isn't a very good place to go (and boy do your competitors love to spread those rumours), and you can find yourself badly, badly in the red.

But that's how the Coalition does it. Others do it their own way, of course.

[Mikey]

The interstellar East India Company?

[Teaos]

Ok that sounds like it could work ok so long as to many colonies dont all happen at once. After all natural population growth has to feed these new colonies and then people have to actually want to move.

Also do planets have mixed populations? Different species ect?

[Graham Kennedy]

There's no law against moving from one planet to another within the Coalition. Some species like to wander, some individuals like to live amongst aliens, or find a particular alien way of living appeals to them. So yes, it does happen. But you would virtually never find a world with a thoroughly mixed population. Home planets like Earth or the Turgran's planet Kororra tend to be more cosmopolitan than most. Even there, aliens walking down the street would be rare, most places. Not unknown, just not common.