Glad to hear you at least agree with my first proposal!
In regards to your question @Maverick , you have to keep in mind how heavy materials like neutronium and magmatter are: even microscopic filaments weigh many, MANY tonnes, and to completely cover a ship with them to create a full armor, you’d be adding an horrendous amount of weight that would be quite hard to move. Of course, a warp bubble could easily move that weight (since technically the weight isn’t even really moving), but it would be extremely expensive to move such mass at sublight speeds without the use of other gravitometric-based transport. That’s why said materials can only be realistically used either as a building material for things that aren’t supposed to move or are supposed to move but at very slow speeds, and in extremely small quantities.
a- I mean, a Newcomer can claim to have all that stuff, but it doesn’t take much for the community to tell them that they either remove all of that and play fair, or they don’t roleplay at all. Not having a hard cap doesn’t remove the need to actually make the worldbuilding of nations make sense and be reasonable.
b- same goes for this point: if someone retcons 50 thousand dyson spheres and Nicoll-Dyson Arrays into their nation for power hungry reasons, we can do the same as before and force them to play fair.
c- I mean, megastructures being the essence of star nations might not be a bad thing at all, at least if I understand your meaning of “essence” properly: a nation that lives entirely in space habitats and megastructures might be a fun change, compared to the many planet-centric nations in A1-0.
These are just my personal opinions though, so take them as you will.
In my opinion ( i fully agree with mav on this issue) this is putting too much on the community self regulating which isn’t 100% reliable. Ever since i joined A1-0 I’ve noticed a steady power creep. Hell I’ve been forced to retcon things multiple times to actually keep the image of my nation, mostly caused by ooc reasons and not rp development. We need some hard rules to keep everything in check.
The power creep’s fine, as long as it’s handled properly
My intention has always been for Colonus to eventually become a stronger star nation, but I also understand that that has to be gradual and have sense-making reasons
Still frictions arise which may boom in this scenario. With the hard cap, you can relay to a community agreed upon rule to keep things balanced. God forbid we actually become toxic. I’m just Kwisatz Haderaching things. The rule itself ain’t broke, so why fix it?
Lmao if we need to regulate the community by power scale you will lose me eventually. This isn’t the kind of community I want to be associated with and doubt many others will. If the power balance is ever fluid, one cannot anchor good stories unto it. And how exactly would one force them to play fair? Not engage with them? One risks creating multiple A1-0’s by doing that and create segregated communities which go against the values of this NS region.
By essence I meant all the star nations is from a storytelling perspective are the megastructures. Which are bad vessels for storytellying as the people of siad star nations should be the essence of it. The Stoinian Star Kingdom remains a prime example of this as it gained renown not primarily through its tech, but through remarkable individuals.
Yeah, the thing with power creep is that it’s universal, like a arms race. That’s why i like irp power creep, it shows progress being driven by not wanting to be inferior, but ooc power creep is bad as it increases relative strengths for no visible reason
Again, Colonus is about 700 years old, and the Mandi have only been in space for about 1000 years. Different species will develop at different times and different rates