Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Gothars]

Man, sorry, this is becoming too much text. I'll just answer a few things.

The idea that they were more-easily manufactured is a bit hard to justify; if you've lost all of the tooling for bulding a WWI Dreadnought but you have all of the tooling to create a nuclear submarine, then it's not "easier".

There is no tooling, just orbital autofactories, resources and blueprints. I'd assume that Onslaught & co require relative simple metals, while high tech ships require far more sophisticated raw materials. Then they use different power sources, old tech has chemical, fusion, maybe fission reactors while you need antimatter to run high tech ships.  Than, even if you can build and supply them, you need experts for maintenance, which should be quite rare by now, too. But I'm pretty sure it's easier to maintain a steam engine than a nuclear powered turbine, so preserving the necessary expertise is much easier.

Galactic civilization with super-tech, remember?

Where does it say that? I only read that the Domain is vast and has therefore enormous resources at it's disposal. Let's see how mining in Starsector actually works.

If you're saying that everything in the Sector was planned so badly that the settlers were completely dependent on deliveries of manufactured goods... I just don't buy it and it breaks the rest of the backstory anyhow.  

Not completely dependent, but they had more people than they could feed and supply by themselves. There was just no reason to assume they'd have to. Why is that so hard to swallow? The first real space colonies will likely be dependent on supply shipments for a long time, too.

What about autofacs, for example?

Blogpost: Very few of the colonists were knowledgeable enough to even activate these massively complicated devices

As for the rest of the disaster of "losing our supplies", it's an emergency, sure, but not one a society like that can't handle.  Move all of the colonists from the marginal worlds to places with breathable atmospheres, juggle the logistics to put the industrial resources where they needed to go, fire up Von Neumann robots to increase industrial capacity exponentially, and trade some pollution and economic disruption in the present for survival.

You know...it's pretty pointless to talk about it that way, it's a question of quantity. Since we have no numbers, how can anyone know if it is realistic to move a unknown number of colonists with a unknown number of ships withing an unknown amount of time?

Again, you just can't kill information societies without killing their information.  Once people start rebuilding information, the curve is always upwards, in terms of industrial capability.

UACs are the currency of information in the Sector. New UACs can't be produced, most likely never could within the sector. The problem is, as long as any significant number of them is left, their is just no initiative for a planet to develop more traditional industry for space travel. It's products could not match even the oldest autofactory designs, resources are better invested in protecting and acquiring the remaining UACs.
Eventually they will probably start building independent industries and the information curve will bend upwards again, but at the moment it would be just uneconomical (and probably make the faction trying it an easy target).

There isn't a single example of this not happening in history.  At least, not in real history.

As said, not much point taking a pre-industrial society for comparison.

Most especially, you'd bring the things needed to establish local informational and industrial infrastructure as soon as possible, so that any accidents or a disruption of the Gate wouldn't cause a serious emergency.  In short, nobody in their right mind would plan this sort of thing without taking great care to avoid what supposedly takes place in the SS backstory.  If the Domain was that incompetent, it didn't run a galactic empire.

Uh, how come you now exactly what is "as soon as possible" when it comes to terraforming whole planets with nanites? Terraforming is a process estimated to take thousands of years in real life.
Besides, there is no hint that something like a gate collapse was thought even remotely possible. Speed is not the only factor to consider, there are e.g. also the economical costs, logistic capability and transport safety. So why would they prioritize speed so much? Only in hindsight you can fault them.

[Debido]

Guys! Guys! We can all eat cake...in sweden.

Xenoargh's back story took what was known of the domain history background and modified as necessary. Xenoargh's story in itself is self supporting within it's own assumptions as either explicitly or implicitly mentioned.

The original background story isn't "wrong" per say, but leaves a lot to the imagination and is unknown. It in itself is also self supporting and cannot be disputed.

The only people who can dispute the psuedo-factuality of the stories are the original authors of each story - no one else. Arguing with them is pointless as the author themselves is the source of truth. We can try to argue things and try to relate them to real life historical precedents, or common human behaviors - but they don't change anything about something that is entirely fictional.

Sweden!

All that said, whether it's a grimm dark ending or a hopeful ending - I believe that should be the choice of the player as determined by their actions. I want a hopeful ending and Gothars seems to want (I could be wrong), a darker twist that shows humans for all their failures and weakness??

I'm also drunk when I wrote this. I don't think any of it makes sense.

[Histidine]

I was going to write some stuff about how Ivaylo's story could be propped up with a bit of work, but I found some holes that just bother me too much. Anyway, some random bullet points:

1) Knowing (even exactly) how to make something and being able to make it are two different things, and only the loss of the latter is necessary for Ivaylo's lore to work. The former is really quite unlikely, anyway: did nobody in the Sector think to bring/keep a copy of the Encyclopaedia Galactica (or that there were few enough copies that they could all be destroyed)? As xenoargh highlights: Even if no living person has it in their heads, it's not that easy to destroy a body of knowledge.

2) The notion of the low-tech ships and weapons being competitive and even superior to high-tech ships developed centuries or millenia later is pure artistic license and I think we'll all be happier if we don't try to explain it away. No military today even considers fielding Sopwith Camels against an F-22 (or even something from the Vietnam War, like the MiG-21), despite the fact that one requires things like computers, jet engines, infrared seekers and composite materials and the other does not. And there's less than a hundred years between the two!

3) It seems to me that the entire premise of the setting relies on the UACs being secure enough that you can't find them all over the place like the latest Lady Gaga song on The Pirate Bay, but not so secure as to keep them out of the hands of "armchair historians, tinkers, and the insatiably curious." That's a very specific level of secure. It's possible that other people simply didn't bother collecting them because they won't do anything useful without an autofactory anyway, but then there's no reason for pirates and the like to be so greedy for them unless they can somehow access and feed one of the few autofacs in the Sector (that doesn't have half the Hegemony/Tri-Tachyon/League armada squatting on it) as well. Though I guess you could use the scarcity argument for why they're suddenly highly valuable.

Sweden!

What's it like being the neighbour of someone who gets peed on by Kenya?

[mendonca]

I don't think it is reasonable to assume society is particularly good at foresight - particularly with a setting that is (I'm sure) a bit of a social commentary on the world today.

Over the next few years we are going to see that in the UK as the power grid becomes many many times less reliable than it was a few years ago (predicted significant blackout rates will go from 1 in 13000 or so, a couple of years ago - to something like 1 in 12 in a few years).

Of course there are things that can be done about this, but they will take at least ten years, and I'm sure there are plenty of options available for importing / exporting power with neighbours - and blackout rates don't seem so bad (unless compared against recent ones) so the political will is not really there right now.

How does this analogy scale up from a little island full of people who don't like each other to several dozen planets who probably like each other even less?

Who gets to decide how and where the new power generation gets built?

[Developing planets] would be more likely to accept the presence of new nuclear power stations - and are the least able to build them. It would likely take several years to even convince the [wealthier planets] that there is even a problem to be resolved  - never mind filling their happy little backyards with pollution-belching generators.

What if something happens geopolitically in the next few years to put a stop to any plans?

-

The bit that rings true for me is not so much to do with a dismissal of individual enterprise, or individual thought, or even small communities of likeminded scientists and hobbyists keen to maintain knowledge - it's how that interfaces with the wider societal issues and the momentum of things like planetary political bodies, and cultural shifts.

An individual would not forget, but a society or a culture could.

Even with individuals acting on their own free will and doing something clever - how significant would this be on a planetary level? Over the course of time, during the time period we are involved in?

Why assume a culture that thinks this sort of thing is even important, when somebody else is looking after this for you?

3) It seems to me that the entire premise of the setting relies on the UACs being secure enough that you can't find them all over the place like the latest Lady Gaga song on The Pirate Bay, but not so secure as to keep them out of the hands of "armchair historians, tinkers, and the insatiably curious." That's a very specific level of secure.

I guess we are at the point of time - post-collapse - that organisations who realised early on the importance of these have been busy snaffling them up - and are likely trying to figure out how to get the rest - and there has been insufficient time or will or capability to figure out how to make new ones. At this point, other events have conspired to push society as a whole over a tipping point where it is not going to recover to more enlightened times.

Every man for himself, then. I'll race you to the Dark Ages.

[xenoargh]

@Mendonca:  I presume you're referring to this?  Eh, that's just about money.  It's not a fundamental lack of capacity.  Granted, societies that don't plan ahead do have problems with things like electrical capacity, here on Earth. 

But I can't buy that for the Domain.  In a society that has harnessed antimatter as a power source for starships, they're not ever running out of energy.

They're never running out of materials, either; they have FTL travel, huge starships, and can mine the asteroids and the Oort Cloud for all the metals, water and carbon they'll ever want.

So they aren't running out of power and they aren't running out of materials, and while they may not be able to operate their state-of-the-art super-factories (hand-waving there; operating a factory is not the same as building one) they can operate the rest of it, and their engineers have access to centuries of information, theory and practical applications, even if all they brought with them was technical manuals and what's in their heads.

They aren't staving to death.  They can build completely automated hydroponic gardens; they can manufacture oxygen from comets (if nothing else is available) and they aren't going to freeze to death, either.  If there are any habitable planets in the System they "randomly" picked out, they can ship people over in Atlases; an Atlas is roughly 1/4 KM in length, if we accept that it's 1:1 with Frigate scales (which Alex has said that they aren't- they're even bigger) so you can ship thousands of people per trip.

The only way I could explain away most of the contradictions of the story was through my explanation of the Domain.  It's about the only halfway-reasonable way that I could explain why things got so desperate, in a society that advanced. 

Moreover, it gets rid of the hand-waving about Task Force Pollux and all the ancient ship designs; they're ancient, but they're still militarily effective, because the Domain deliberately crippled military sciences, had pretty good control over technological progress and even the criminals didn't have access to complete designs for truly advanced military hardware (beyond, one presumes, really nice small arms- stuff that could be built with your local MakerBot).  Until the Sector's science gets back up to Domain levels, these designs will remain relevant.

It's really the only way to explain that away; otherwise, it's just ridiculous, because a modern missile boat (let alone a mere corvette) can demolish a WWI Dreadnought without any problems, with it's more-advanced detection apparatus and weaponry. 

It just doesn't wash; I only buy into the idea of an arms-race stasis if the society involved has enough power to keep things stagnant somehow, and in a society with the advanced technology and sheer size of a Domain, that required a pretty amazing piece of control technology.  We can't just hand-wave that away by saying "everybody was peaceful" or "weapons were taboo"- if all that's true, there's no Task Force Pollux and there isn't any need for starships bristling with weapons.  And no, the "they were kept around in case aliens showed up" explanation won't wash, either; it doesn't fix the "sopwith camel" problems.

The concept of UACs isn't even really necessary at that point, but it's a handy hand-waving explanation for why the few advanced design templates that still exist haven't been widely distributed and why they're really valuable, so I didn't retcon it out of existence, I just left it alone.

[Cycerin]

Thing is, all the old ships have been retrofitted and were already "sufficiently advanced" to do all the basic things a space warship has to do. You aren't comparing a WWI ironclad to a modern frigate. You are more.. I struggle to find a good naval comparison. Hmm. Comparing an F-16 to an F-22.

Even the oldest Starsector vessels have technology that are shared by every single type of starship in the setting, such as the "drive anchor" and reactors that seem to have almost unlimited power output. The Domain hasn't progressed all that much from the Core to Expansion epoch, especially not when the oldest vessels are easily retrofit with modern sensors, energy shields and weapons.

The idea also stands up to scrutiny simply because it's *** cool to have an Onslaught shrug off Atropos hits and shredding apart more modern frigates and destroyers in a fusillade of high-caliber rounds, TPC pulses and rockets. The only irony is that it's not really "tried and true vs new and flashy" because practically all Sector technology is more or less ancient.

[mendonca]

@Mendonca:  I presume you're referring to this?  Eh, that's just about money.  It's not a fundamental lack of capacity.

Derail:

Spoiler

That article certainly reads like that, but it is about fundamental lack of capacity (driven of course by money). It's not as simple as power stations refusing to run because they won't get paid.

The bit about gas power stations should elaborate - new gas power stations are not being built, because the current models to pay them money are based on how many kWh they generate. Gas power stations - being brilliant at being 'turned-down' - are the first part of the grid to get modulated down. This means there is no point in building them, as they are the first method of modulation of output, and its therefore difficult to estimate likely generation, and therefore financial returns are not guaranteed.

Things like old coal power stations are coming off line, as they can't meet regulatory emissions requirements.

Grid MAXIMUM capacity has not changed much in the last few years, and demand has generally fallen, but the bulk of new capacity being brought on to the grid in the last few years has been things like wind, which have a ridiculously low availability - so there maximum capacity is somewhat meaningless as it is directly tied to windspeed - which doesn't always align with 'half time at the superbowl'.

[close]

I'm not sure I'm taking part in the right argument here, there is so much interesting discussion going on I'm finding it difficult to compartmentalise all the points, but basically, what I am trying to say is:

Personally, I don't care why the gates failed (presumably along with a key part of The Domain?) - but they did and this is an important fact that I am happy to accept in order to engage with the ongoing narrative of StarSector (but I am certainly NOT saying that I don't enjoy reading discussion and theories on WHY the Domain / Gates failed or that it shouldn't be discussed);

My points are more about the atmosphere, culture and society IN the sector. It's only been 206 years since the gates stopped working, this sounds about right for me (as an expert on future far-flung societies ) for a society of this scale to have gone through a period of time where they HAVEN'T adequately prepared for self-sufficiency (because they didn't need to, the gates will open again soon - right?), subsequently wake up to the fact that they are in deep trouble, and possibly have passed the point where they are able to do anything about it.

I was trying to demonstrate by analogy how large organisations can happily ignore something that is fundamentally a huge part of their infrastructure - knowing that there are lots of options for mitigating this which means they don't have to act right away - but ultimately by leaving it 'til tomorrow - an event such as the gate closure could leave them up the proverbial creek. Something along these lines is how I imagine the Sector might have ended up snookered.

The idea also stands up to scrutiny simply because it's *** cool ...

This is actually my main internal argument, but it's fun to discuss otherwise.

[xenoargh]

Ah (on the power thing).  That sounds like it's largely a politically-driven hassle, though; there's plenty of capacity (those dirty old coal-fired plants), but nobody wants to pay for it to operate.

On the Gates; I left that a mystery because I feel like it's probably one of several resolutions to the game's story arc(s).

You are more.. I struggle to find a good naval comparison. Hmm. Comparing an F-16 to an F-22.

If we're talking Block-0 F-16s vs. Block-0 F-22s, it goes to the F-22 practically every time; it's simply better in every way (of course, even if we adjust for inflation, it's also a lot pricier).  Remember, the F-16 is nearly 40 years old; things have changed a lot since then, in terms of weapons and avionics and target-acquisition, ECM and ECCM.  A Block-0 F-16 with the weapons it had then isn't a Sopwith Camel, but it's definitely not competitive, unless you've got 3 of them and I have one F-22, in which case it's vaguely possible you might win (if all my modern missiles miss). 

People tend to forget that, on the inside, modern F-16s are practically new aircraft; all their avionics and electronics is new, their radars are new, they're using upgraded engines, etc.  Even so... read what the fighter jocks who fly these things think about that matchup.

So, er, let's call that "F-16 with maxed-out Hull Mods" for the sake of comparision.  There the contest is a lot closer, but still goes to the F-22, most likely, simply because of its low-observability features.  If the combat is BVR, it goes to the Raptor every single time, because of these things.  But it's at least an arguable point.

Unfortunately, when we're talking about the SS backstory the comparision kind of falls apart, though; the Vanilla ships represent their eras, and IRL, it just wouldn't happen.  Anyhow, I've always just let that one go under the Rule of Cool; the only reason I brought those points up is that we're having an argument that's fundamentally about what kind of setting this is.  It's kind of pointless nerd-war stuff, really; I don't really care all that much about the backstory one way or another; the gameplay is mainly what I care about, and this is largely about our expectations in that regard; the storyline stuff's just exploring the justifications, or lack thereof, for various gameplay fiats.

[Gothars]

Personally, I don't care why the gates failed (presumably along with a key part of The Domain?)

It might even be just one gate that failed - assuming there's only one gate in some remote Domain system that is in range of all the Sector gates, and acts as a connection to all the other domain gates. If this one key gate failed and could not be repaired (say, the hypersapce fabric itself was damaged or the star went nova), that would be enough to isolate the Sector. The remaining Domain might actually be completely fine, just out of reach.

The only small hint we have regarding the travel time through normal hyperspace between Domain and Sector is the Pollux task force. Assuming that they had more or less modern ships when they started, they needed from somewhere around the end of the mastery epoch until the year 2920. Assuming all epochs have roughly the same duration, that's about 600 years. Based on a lot of assumptions of course, but maybe the scale is about right.




Oh, and another thought about the small differences in destructive power between ships of different epochs: The domain might actually not be all that stable, it might have lost a lot technology between epochs because of some kind of crisis we know little about.
One hint is in the description of the Onslaught, that is rumored to have been build as a weapon in an war against aliens. How come nobody knows that for sure, would be a pretty huge event, right? Maybe the civilization went through major turmoils and historical data were lost or obscured.
One thing that is certain is that there were long periods of conflict and constant need for warships, so a lot of opportunity for devastating destruction on a planetary level.

So, maybe a new generation of ships was only developed after the civilization went through some catastrophe, meaning that they were only partially based on their predecessor from the begone epoch, but mostly newly developed. That would nicely explain why the ships behave more like another solution to the same problem than a straightforward improvement of older ships. They are the former!

[Cycerin]

Well, my point still stands. The difference between low and high tech in the sector isn't that big, so it's not really a stretch that old ships can threaten newer ones in the battlespace.

[Linnis]

lore discussion.  


On topic, I don't think we are gonna get something akin to sins galactic empire or such. I mean, we rank up in character skill and control individual officers... fit ships one by one.

Maybe we are just a fleet admiral and we can "convince" the great AI leader to do just a few things on grounds of military expertise.
But... what planets to develop and where to build, who to ally and such... perhaps that is out of the player's hands directly.

[Histidine]

So, I ended up going back to what I was going to post originally, and worked on it some more. It seems to have become a columnist-esque ramble rather than the sort of point-by-point argument I like, but meh. Anyway:

Spoiler

[...] Other than that, though, I think the story can be propped up reasonably well with some work.
My hypothesis: the Collapse is principally an economic and social phenomenon, and any technological regression is mostly if not entirely a side effect of these changes.

Picture the sector, pre-Collapse. Everything is made by autofactories, simply because they're so much easier/cheaper/faster/less labour-intensive than older methods. Very few systems actually have their own autofac, of course, but that's why the shipping industry exists. Presumably the Sector doesn't have the capacity to make its own autofacs or UACs.
Few of the colonies have self-sufficiency in terms of food production, relying primarily on imports. Many colonies are on hostile environments that require working high-tech equipment to keep alive. The Sector is a pretty safe place; if piracy or rebellion breaks out the Domain hears about it (eventually) and sends a fleet to step on it hard.

Then, the gates go silent. After a while, everybody realizes the Domain central government and the order and stability it brings are gone, as far as the Sector is concerned.

Suddenly, all the autofactories (the ones that don't get destroyed in the fighting, at any rate) are in the hands of any group with the guns to take and hold them. Trade and the economy crash, as foodstuffs and and key resources are raided by pirates or simply hoarded. Since nobody wants to sell (let alone give away) anything they can use if they can help it, when they have no idea where they'll be able to get replacements, the vast majority of people who were previously reliant on imports of such items will have a lot of trouble getting them and very little to buy them with. Any colony that doesn't have autarky and can't secure a trade route to someone able and willing to supply what they don't have is likely doomed, sooner or later. Things only get worse as time passes and equipment breaks down, faster if the technical staff who can maintain such things are all dead.

This is also why refugee lifts simply aren't going to happen on a particularly large scale - assuming they don't get seized by pirates or slavers on the way, the people fortunate enough to already be living on habitable planets are going to be quite reluctant to just open their doors. And even where such migrations succeed, the abandoned colony is, well, abandoned. As is consistent with the lore.

As xenoargh highlights: Why don't the colonies try to revert to previous-generation farming and manufacturing methods to support themselves, you ask? Well, they most likely do. But it's not enough, for several reasons:

• Most colonies won't be able to build up sufficient replacement food supplies and economic capacity in time before things like famine and civil war cause their societies to collapse. If all the physical implementations of Green Revolution such as nitrogen fertilizers, widespread mechanization, and the factories that produce these things disappeared tomorrow, even if we lost none of the knowledge involved, the world as we know it would crash - violently - and wouldn't recover for a long time indeed. This isn't necessarily going to cause the system to "go dark" - not even the Black Death could put Europe down permanently - but it's not going to help them deal with the following problems.
• Most colonies aren't going to be able to defend themselves from being sacked by raiders or annexed by warlords before they can even get back on their feet economically.
• Anyone who tries to build a homegrown fleet using de novo designs is going to have to deal with the fact that they're basically doing the equivalent of reconstructing military aviation from scratch, when competing powers can just ask the autofactory genie for a fully functional F-22. The vast majority of such efforts just aren't going to reach a level where they can compete with Domain designs before they lose everything they have.

So there you have it. You can't keep a civilization afloat when the chief emotions in the social atmosphere are greed and fear.

Is the Sector screwed, in the long run? Not necessarily; if they do have the ability to make new autofactories and designs for them given enough time, they'll stay afloat indefinitely. Even if Domain tech is somehow Lost Forever, it needn't be the end of the universe - notwithstanding the points I made above, if an established power with a secure position like the Hegemony or Tri-Tachyon commits to a program of pure research augmented by reverse-engineering the Domain technology they have,  they can rebuild to the equivalent of the pre-Collapse state in the long run, probably even fairly quickly.

The question is: with enemies on all sides and a Sector to dominate, will they?

[close]

[harrumph]

Again, you just can't kill information societies without killing their information.  Once people start rebuilding information, the curve is always upwards, in terms of industrial capability (let's leave issues like social justice and economic opportunity to one side; these aren't relevant).

Social justice and economic opportunity are absolutely relevant. You've completely left the human element out of your explanations. How, given your premises, can you explain the recent history of Africa?

The end of the colonial era in Africa makes an imperfect but instructive analogy to the Starsector backstory: the Sector was not populated pre-colonization, as Africa was; the Sector was cut off from colonial rule instantly, whereas the process took decades in Africa; and the Sector was cut off from colonial rule completely, whereas African nations have endured constant political and economic interference from Western and Soviet intelligence agencies and neocolonial entities (corporations, the IMF, the Chinese government, etc.) plus a serious brain drain. Another useful (perhaps closer) analogy would be the end of the Cold War. The fall of the Soviet Union meant the irreversible and almost-instantaneous loss of resources, technology, expertise, funding, etc. not only for Soviet clients (e.g. Afghanistan) but also for American clients (e.g. Somalia) who, once they were no longer bulwarks against Soviet clients, no longer registered as American interests.

Either way, though, there are some crucial similarities; in both post-colonial Africa and in the Sector, you have relatively new, inorganic social structures, unsupported by tradition or popular assent, imposed on diverse groups of people. You have an external authority providing most technological expertise, and you have an economy geared more towards resource extraction and exploitation than towards supporting a stable local economy. One important part of the "State of Affairs" lore to keep in mind is that very few worlds in the Sector were self-sufficient, even in terms of food production. Why should Joe Schmoe on Planet X care that some abstract set of rules imposed on him by a now-absent government say that the people of Planet Y, whom he's never met and shares nothing in common with, are his countrymen and that he shouldn't attack them and steal their food? Even the most high-minded of us would prefer not to starve to death, even it meant contributing to the onset of anarchy. And most of us aren't very high-minded at all.

After independence and the withdrawal of Cold War support, African countries still had the technology—important Cold War clients had a whole lot of extremely sophisticated technology plus well-trained technicians and engineers—but where was the "upward curve"? Information alone isn't enough; you need political will and organization to build an industrial base and then to maintain it. Some people in the "Dark Ages" still understood (some) Roman technology, but how many aqueducts did they build, when just owning a copy of De architectura—written by that infamous pagan Vitruvius!—might get you burned for a witch? Instead, they drank sewage and died of the plague; Europe wasn't able to support a population as big as the Empire's again for a thousand years. Even if some group does get its act together and takes steps forward, what takes decades to develop can be undone in a few months of war (as it has been many times in sub-Saharan Africa) or even just a generation or two of misrule. Ethnic conflicts, social or economic injustice, and religious differences have all been flashpoints for devastating wars in post-colonial Africa, setting countries back decades—why shouldn't they, or resource scarcity, do the same in the Sector?

[hydremajor]

About the game progression

If you're gonna make it a *** pseudo survival game where one must survive as long as possible then don't just dance around the bush and go all the way

I'll take that submitted story for basis of the idea, if someone can dig up an ACTUAL STORY OF THE GAME THATS CANNON feel free but don't ask me to care either way

...The idea is simple, the sector is cut off from the domain and whatnot or whatever...

HOWEVER you learn that the Domain is preparing to take the sector back, and you know exactly when they will move in to reactivate the gate and warp in loads upon loads of ships to storm the place


The goal of the game at this point is simple

choose a side with wich to side

conquer the sector

and prepare enough troops to keep the sector for yourself
OR
hand it over to the domain when they come in

The concept is much like the "Damocles" mod for mount'n'blade, in wich you are given a ultimatum until a "legion" comes marching in wich is effectively a unrelenting tide of flesh thats coming around to conquer the place

Effectively the game could be in two parts


The first half would be your humble beginnings as a indie captain of some random ship, and your climbing the echelons to glory after enlisting in one of the available factions and through this carry out their agenda or if you want a challenge you could live off loot and create your own faction to then grow in influence until you take over the sector

Once you've taken over the sector (by yourself or through service in a faction) the Domain will make itself known, preparing an armada to retake the sector by force, then begins the second half of the game where one must readying himself for an all out war against the domain, then the production/trading side of things will gain in importance as it will allow deployment of defenses, ressource gathering structures, and shipyards and then build up your forces to prepare for the oncoming onslaught of fleets pouring out from the gate and into the sector proper

[Megas]

That sounds like a sequel.  Today, take over the sector and turn it into your personal Mordor, without interference from meddling Domain kids.  Then, in Starsector 2, the power-hungry player gets to take his assets and attempt to conquer the rest of the Domain.