2014 STGOD OOC Commentary Thread 1

[Steve]

I'm sorry for not posting more, but I'm very stuck until Thanas gets the Orion visit over and we conclude the Sheppard gala.

[madd0ct0r]

who owns the hinterland?

[Steve]

Hinterland of?

[madd0ct0r]

the big patch in Ausfrica that no-one really owns but siege is fetching pet monsters out of.

[Steve]

It's terra nullius for people to screw around in, writing adventurers finding lost civilizations and facing monsters and megafauna.

[madd0ct0r]

hmmm. this could be fun

[Thanas]

Just a note - who is actually planning to do something about the pirates? Because Großbremen is going to send in the Likedeelers and I'd like to know who else is planning something.

[Simon_Jester]

Since it'd been three weeks real time...

I'd explicitly figured that the immediate aftermath of "the Eck incident" was resolved one way or the other- whatever happened to the ship happened, and it doesn't really matter on the strategic scale.

In the longer term, the Umerians are dispatching their one amphibious battlegroup* and are going to start giving the pirates, warlords, and so on in the region a nice collection of black eyes for screwing around too much in the Bay of Indore, an area they regard as part of their economic sphere of influence.**

Within the next few years, they're probably going to try to carve out basing rights somewhere on the Lothali coast and make a permanent business out of antipiracy unless someone with more political muscle than the failed state that is Lothal tries to stop them.

*Flagship is USS Violet Crown, a sixty thousand ton oil-burning carrier converted to operate stupid-huge numbers of helicopters, VTOL fighters, and the odd antisubmarine warfare tiltrotor. She's escorted by about ten smaller warships plus a spray of assorted LSTs, some relatively modern with hovercraft tank-landers, others not so modern that work more like WWII designs. Also a couple of ships specifically designed to work with Violet Crown by providing basing for troops to be transferred to shore by Violet Crown's cargo helicopters.

**[This is not meant to imply that it isn't in anyone else's sphere of influence; the Umerian concept of 'sphere of influence' implies overlap. To an extent that only someone who's watched a Shinra national get tried in a Cascadian court for a crime committed against Umerian citizens on Umerian soil can. ]

[Eternal_Freedom]

Just a note - who is actually planning to do something about the pirates? Because Großbremen is going to send in the Likedeelers and I'd like to know who else is planning something.

If you are sending forces to deal with pirates we could make it our first joint operation. My surface-action groups haven't had much to do so far in the story.

[Thanas]

No, Likedeelers are our corsairs, they are not an official operation. Rather the city of Großbremen will take matters into their own hands.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

A shell here, a rocket there, and then we have a party...

[Simon_Jester]

WHOO! [blam blam blam]

Also, I put up the Umerian Air Force order of battle, at least in the sense of "how many and of what." You NOT want to know how much detail I went into to get those production numbers. Numbers for the Chariot light fighter (and its Super Chariot variant) are approximate because I have literally no idea how to estimate accident and combat losses for the types, but 2500 Chariots still in Air Force service is a fairly reasonable estimate in my opinion.

Numbers for the Comet, Revenant, and Marauder fighters, plus the bombers, maritime patrol aircraft, are firmer.

All aircraft are based on real designs or incremental improvements on those designs. The Chariot in particular is the Convair Model 200, which has some really pretty paintings circling the Internet.

http://up-ship.com/blog/wp-content/uplo ... -200-2.jpg

If you are sending forces to deal with pirates we could make it our first joint operation. My surface-action groups haven't had much to do so far in the story.

Oh, you want to operate in the Bay of Indore, do you?

[raises eyebrow, checks relative distances on a map, smiles slightly]

[Eternal_Freedom]

You wouldn't be thinking of testing those ballistic missiles of yours would you?

Nah I meant that Orion would contribute (heavily) to an anti-piracy force if others want a joint-operation type thing.

[Simon_Jester]

You wouldn't be thinking of testing those ballistic missiles of yours would you?

They're already tested.

Nah I meant that Orion would contribute (heavily) to an anti-piracy force if others want a joint-operation type thing.

Well, in this case Umeria isn't particularly interested in partnership, at least not with any nations outside of the Vedic peninsula and East Austrafrica. This isn't a joint coalition-warfare exercise like the ones SDNW4 Umeria kept getting into.

What they're engaging in is arguably a straightforward attempt at imperialism, moving into a disorganized territory to restore order and provide an anchor point to hang the western edge of their sphere of influence on.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Ah fair enough.

And for the missiles, I meant tested at targets that move and shoot back

[Thanas]

Can somebody outline on a map what we are actually talking about right now, i.e. what country is getting involved where exactly?

[Simon_Jester]

Ah fair enough.

And for the missiles, I meant tested at targets that move and shoot back

I wasn't planning that kind of test, no. If you'd like that, I'm sure we can work something out amicably.

Can somebody outline on a map what we are actually talking about right now, i.e. what country is getting involved where exactly?

I spent about five or ten minutes in MS Paint twiddling with the relevant part of the world map. This is from about 20° north to 30° south, and about 30° east to 100° east. Some nations have been recolored, as have parts of the ocean.



The actions in question have been taking place in the Bay of Indore, a name analogous to the real-life name of the Bay of Bengal. Indore is NPC #19 on the map, colored yellow.

The two shaded regions in the ocean off the coast of the Vedic Subcontinent (and the neighboring nation of Hakistan, colored orange, NPC #5) are two interpretations of what, geographically, the 'Bay of Indore' means.

The darker shaded region represents a more restrictive definition; the less shadowy one is a less restrictive one. Either is more or less consistent with a ship "898 miles north of Hakistan" being inside the "Bay of Indore" as per Siege's post.

The nation of Lothal, (colored red on THIS map, pale green on our main map, NPC #22) is the place the pirates are based from. It is essentially a failed state in the wake of repeated disastrous typhoons smacking the hell out of it.

Lothal is roughly 4000-5000 km away from the nearest Umerian naval base by sea.

Again, by the way, I am... not writing any assumptions about what actually happened in the immediate aftermath of the capture of the Maria Ecks. I am simply assuming that in the 2-3 weeks afterward, nobody actually declared a massive intent to invade Lothal and conquer it or anything. I figure that this probably isn't the first time a freighter has been taken by Lothali pirates or anything, so realistically this one incident would not spawn an immediate massive international reaction out of all proportion to whatever was in place before.

For Umeria, of course, the reaction is pretty massive- but then again, this is happening in the Umerians' backyard, and it's only in the past few years that they've managed to complete construction of the basic naval force level they'd been planning on since the early 1980s. Even ten years ago, acting on something like this would have been considerably more difficult for them.

[Thanas]

Ah, thanks. That leaves it right next (well, almost) to the rheinland protectorate at 24. Good to know.

[Simon_Jester]

True, although shipping going directly into and out of the protectorate of Cabelon from Rheinland proper would be well out of the pirates' way to harass, requiring a sea voyage of well over a thousand kilometers on their part and making it hard to scoot back to their own bases quickly after a capture.

[Thanas]

Yeah, I was more thinking that the Likedeler will use the bases in that territory.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

Considering that Jub just outed himself as a formerly banned member, we need a contingency to deal with Dreisgrond and Versahinveld in case he gets booted. Do they just become NPCs, or does the territory they occupy become terra nullius?

[Simon_Jester]

I would tentatively suggest that they NOT become terra nullius because then we'd have to explain why nobody's muscled in on that territory in centuries past. In the interior of Austrafrica we can explain that- the south coast of the continent is inhospitable, and the other coasts lead to nigh-impassible desert, jungle, or mountains as you move inland. While it's possible to fly planes and helicopters into the interior, there's so much of it, and the local powers are so poor, that penetrating the interior is more trouble than it's been worth for them.

[Plus any Bermuda Triangle or Lost woo-woo that may be going on, of course]

But Jub's nations are located on the eastern seaboard of our America-analogue. There is no way that the land there could have gone unpeople or unclaimed for the past few hundred years.

So the obvious step would be to retcon them in as NPCs. Probably NPCs undergoing enough political upheaval of an intense and goofy nature* that they become easy pickings.

*(say, entire government overthrown by outraged citizens after a sex scandal, then their successors overthrown a week after that, then their successors likewise).

EDIT:

Added naval aviation to my order of battle. Was planning to put up the actual warships but life intervened and I didn't have time.

[Siege]

Our original idea for dealing with states whose players fall off the Earth was to blow them up in interesting ways.

[The Romulan Republic]

What about an asteroid impact?

Incidentally, I am aware that I haven't posted in a while. I'll try to rectify that shortly. Apologies for any inconvenience.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, a conveniently localized asteroid impact would be nice from one point of view, but I'd feel a little funny being on a planet where that happened without a nuclear winter or whatever you call it. Even weirder if it were happening to someone on my border. Political chaos gives me a situation I can exploit and enjoy; megadisasters tend to cause splash onto the neighbors, which is not so enjoyable.

It's up to S&S, but just having the things turn into NPCs would be my reaction because it's a... call it parsimonious response, the one that causes the least kick in the teeth.



EDIT:

Aaand minor post. A little thing I put in, because wherever there is artillery fire, any Umerian military attachés in the country will be trying to send someone to geek out over it.