The Question: What do you think of NPC Fleets and Faction Resources? Many factions use resources such as mines, fleets and NPC soldiers/guardsmen to accomplish many things that a small band of PCs normally could not. The Holy Fleet has the... the Holy Fleet. The Ordo Militius has their own armada as well as mines, factories and other production areas. The USCM has... well, the USCM has a rather large Fleet and ground force too, somehow. The point is, these forces make sense for military juggernauts and sovereign powers. A nation has a standing army, and in space, a standing army probably includes a lot of ships to move around with. The two main issues with armadas and armies are oddly polarized in most other situations. Those issues are realism and creative space. The Opinion: Such massive forces are hard to do, and should be well-controlled if they do happen. The two issues with having such large forces are as follows: Realistically, they would require massive amounts of resources and labor to create, maintain and support. Soldiers have to be fed. Ships have to be built and kept up to fighting status. The larger they become the more logistics that are necessary to keep them in check. The more forces that are necessary to operate them. The more food you need for your forces, the more farms you need. etc. The usual result is 'magicking up' some resources to explain away the size of a Fleet. The Holy Fleet was guilty of it in their support lines from Avos. While technically possible (and should war have broken out, they would have come up), such an excuse stifles opportunities for in-character trade and interaction. Which brings us to our second issue: Creative Space. What is creative space? In this case, the term simply means how much people and factions can do as characters within the universe. A Fleet of ships is an overarching barrier to conflict. And a faction that supports itself entirely internally is a barrier to interaction. While in reality, a barrier to conflict is a good thing, in an RP server, conflict on any scale should drive things forward and make interaction more interesting. When a Fleet goes from being a cool idea to a way to win any interactions ever, it becomes a problem along the same lines as NPCs. I suppose there is a third issue in simply the unwieldiness of such a large Fleet. Ship-to-ship battles can't be done serverside, large-scale invasions and mobilizations are limited by any number of factors. The number one being representation. (Although, some kind of forum-based ship-to-ship battles might work. Would be difficult, though.) In closing, it's characters that drive the stories of the server. Fleets are nice, but they should never become a barrier to those stories. They should be used to aid them.
I'd like to clarify and say the United Systems doesn't have an overly large fleet. It has been discussed internally and we've determined that it would be most fitting if we had a small fraction of the remaining ships the United Systems as a whole ever had. Not to say that the 13th Fleet(ours) itself couldn't hold it's ground against another similarly matched fleet, but the problem then lies on resources. The United Systems as it stands could not properly sustain this fleet during an extended conflict, we simply wouldn't have the resources.
I think Dreg can give more details about Ordo Militium's fleet, resources, trade network, tech-deals etc. he built up over the past 4-6 IRL months after he returns from his break, but we got our sources covered. As for any faction-to-faction trade, sharing the resources produced at Gryphon would be nice if factions we would trade with didn't f**k-up first contact diplomacy that badly... And I'm not only talking about the bigger factions here, believe it or not...
I believe part of the problem here is that any meeting like that is usually left to leaders, and sometimes it's just impossible making any meeting for several reasons (IRL, timezones, and etcetera). That should probably be left to the leading player who takes care of faction day-to-day. I remember Pixel (Lt. Daniel Graveson, R.A.) took care of some contracts and possibly some trade agreement, if there was any months ago.
The RA only managed to build up, because it acted as an intermediary for trade for numerous colonies. It never produced any goods other than ships and weaponry which were rarely traded, and mostly a byproduct of claiming Carolli Corp, and "convincing" Titus Shipyards to do most of it's business with RA and RA affiliates, and reject Stark. Back when TF, Alioth, Opportunity, and AE/Luminaria were active. They didn't trade with each other, but they all traded with the RA, including Liberty Mills. The trade bit even lead to an early tension between HolyFleet and RA, until the HolyFleet agreed not to interfere with the RA's trade with LM, and the RA agreed to retract some.. Destabilizing statements The whole reason the RA was ever capable of building/maintaining a fleet, was because of it's trade with other faction/colonies. That also allowed it to do it's more scummy deals. Like allowing the russian girl to clean up bodies from battlefields for some sort of drug production, (taxed) and bounties paid out to the Crimson Corsairs for any slaves they took, or people they harassed who were even loosely associated with with any colony or faction other than the RA, AE, Alioth, Opp, or TF. Trade RP/Interaction can be done. It's not always easy, trading/befriending the Astral Empire made it difficult to maintain trade and other deals with the other colonies at times and lead to fun negotiation RP.
The Drosera tribe has made many connections and sources of resources through mutual benefit trading, blackmail, kidnapping and forced labour under threat of being eaten... This all happened in secret of course so to the public eye they seem pretty cool overall. This was all RP'd out
