First a note: I still haven't gotten _Rats&Cats_, so I may lack
some data available to you.
Bertil writes:
> Depending on wether you regard the Solomani Rim during the Long Night as a
>Frontier or an Outland different outcomes are possible.
I'd go for a Safe myself. Remember, The Long Night was a slow
decay, not a catastrophic event. Step 1 of Hard Times hits the
high-population, good starport worlds hardest, but that's
because they were specifically targeted. It takes a warfleet to
make an impression on a high-population world. Nothing else
will. Certainly not a band of half-assed raiders. Try working
out the defenses of Terra: 10 billion inhabitants @ 500 credits
gives a yearly budget of 5 trillion credits. The fleet is
equivalent to 10 times that. Even if you put 99% of those ships
in ordinary to reflect a depressed economy, you still wind up
with 500.000 MCr worth of ships. The fleet that can challenge that
is not a raider fleet, it's a 3rd Imperium fleet.
The S&A talks about
>raiders from the chaos inside the ROM, and some Aslan incursions, so I'm
>leaning towards Outland, but it is not certain.
ROM? What's that?
> While we should remember that Hard Times only talks about the Twilight
>period of a Night, 20 years out of 1800, I think that it shows that
>balcanization is a possible outcome. A prerequisite for balcanization is
>however that the government was a representative democracy before.
I don't dispute that balcanization is a very possible outcome,
just that it is the only possible outcome. And from what we
know it is, in fact, not the outcome. As for Hard Times,
Hard Times talks of the Twilight of a particular Night and I
don't think that it can really be applied to The Long Night.
Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
[email removed]
- ------------
"These are hard times in the Empire.
In the old Empire are very hard times."
Traditional song.