Modern World STGOD Concept

[Beowulf]

Does anyone want to be the ex-colonial master of Nation 30? I was thinking that it would be the "border" of Cascadian and Orion influence in South America; that is, both nations have economic and political clout there and it's a potential tension point.

I don't want them to be ex-Cascadian as well, and I figure 12 and 13 will be Granadian, so I was thinking Tianguo, Dreisgrond, or Shinra.

Thanas, I think we should at least consider that some states would have lingering ties to their former colonies or countries in their proximity. You'd have such with the brown nation that would've been Kartr and your former colony in India, for instance. I'd have such in Patagonia and New Britonia.

I could be.

[Thanas]

Addendum: But yes to no M-D treaties, so we don't see such countries as extra sources of manpower.

Like i said, in reality it's Orion saying we'll protect them. They are focused on developing themselves with out help, not fighting wars. They've only been independent nations for ~70 years and they weren't well developed before then.

I probably used the wrong term again. Suffice to say, they are our friends and we vowed to protect them.

So basically they are your sphere of influence. Meaning you'd take a dim view of anybody attacking them, but they would be powerless to help you in return should you get attacked.

[The Romulan Republic]

Sounds like the relationship I was thinking of Corona having with its former colony.

[Siege]

While I'm at it here's my proposals for inverted-India. I'm going for cool and interesting more for than sensible and realistic, and as before I'm open to other suggestions.

18 Sehore
19 Indore

Once the proud unified kingdom of Narmada, ever since the old king went mad in 1990 a succession crisis has ripped the Narmada Valley in two. The capital city straddles both banks of the Narmada river; the Maharaja rules Indore from the part on northern bank and his twin sister the Maharani rules Sehore from the southern bank. They thoroughly dislike each other. In fact a local myth says they tried to kill each other in the womb, which explains how their mother died in childbirth. Meanwhile the mad king wanders the halls of his palace on an island in the middle of the river, shouting mad prophecies. It's Shakespeare: India Edition.

22 Lothal
Always sparsely inhabited and recently hammered by consecutive years of unrelenting tropical cyclones, Lothal is these days all but abandoned. Storm-ravaged cities and resorts litter its tropical shores, making fantastic hideouts for pirates who prey on the ships passing by.

23 Principality of Gujura
Princedom, de-facto power lies with the Administrator of the Realm who is technically elected but really the position is hereditary. Historically the Administrator's most important duty is who to decide who to buy off with the vast quantities of gold produced by Gujura's gold mines. Currently the Shinrans are in favor, as evidenced by a recent gift of white tusked mastodonts to Rufus Shinra.

24 Cabelon
Democracy, former Rheinland colony. Famed for making the most phenomenal beer on the continent, and also its worst polka music.

25 Travancore
Administered by the University of Travancore, whose council of deans took a page from the Umerian book and cheerfully assassinated their way into power sometime in the mid-eighties. Ever since they have been steadily turning Travancore from a moderately prosperous backwater into a dystopian wasteland of steel, industry and concrete for miles. Electronic billboards of the Provost-General are everywhere, bellowing out pro-science propaganda. But still plucky bands of Sikhs hold out in the sewers of Travancore's concrete wastelands, trying to bring down the regime and its roving patrols of death drones. (OK maybe not quite death drones and plucky Sikhs but you get the idea. SCIENCE! gone horribly wrong. Or right, if you're an Umerian.)

26 Coromandel
Federation of shady city-states on the coast of Peacock Bay. Local Zoroastrian beliefs are considered heretical by both Hindus and Omnians alike. Notorious for smuggling and other illicit operations. The Sikh underground runs ekranoplans from Coromandel into Travancore, much to the chagrin of the Provost-General (who may also be an AI. OK not an AI. Maybe.)

[Eternal_Freedom]

Exactly Thanas. Well, they would be unable to help militarily, at least not immediately, but we do have basing agreements with them and no doubt in a prolonged war many of them would volunteer for the Armed Forces...but that would take months or years.

They would be of limited assistance financially at least.

[Thanas]

If you got manpower problems in a modern war to the point that you need volunteers, you are already screwed beyond recovery.

[Eternal_Freedom]

If you got manpower problems in a modern war to the point that you need volunteers, you are already screwed beyond recovery.

True. Then perhaps they might volunteer to keep industry going whilst the Orions leave to fight, like women did the world wars. Suffice to say, I think they would do all they could to assist Orion, but that won't be enough to matter.

[Thanas]

Industry these days relies on heavily specialized people so it is very unlikely that would work. And if you need to mobilize factory workers you are already in deep doodoo anyway. I suppose there could be some volunteer formations to act in a purely defensive role to free up other troops.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That's what I'm thinking. It rather reminds me of Yes, Minister, the guy from the Foreign Office explaining what they'll do if such-and-such a nation appeals for help: "We'll give them every support, short of help."

[TimothyC]

When from the terrors of Nature a people have fashion’d and worship a Spirit of Evil,
Blest he the Voice of the Teacher who calls to them
‘Set yourselves free!’

Noble the Saxon who hurl’d at his Idol a valorous weapon in olden England!
Great and greater, and greatest of women, island heroine, Kapiolani
Clomb the mountain, and flung the berries, and dared the Goddess, and freed the people
Of Hawa-i-ee!

A people believing that Peelè the Goddess would wallow in fiery riot and revel
On Kilaue-ä,
Dance in a fountain of flame with her devils, or shake with tier thunders and shatter her island,
Rolling her anger
Thro’ blasted valley and flaring forest in blood-red cataracts down to the sea!

Long as the lava-light
Glares from the lava-lake
Dazing the starlight,
Long as the silvery vapour in daylight
Over the mountain
Floats, will the glory of Kapiolani be mingled with either on Hawa-i-ee.

What said her Priesthood?
‘Woe to this island if ever a woman should handle or gather the berries of Peelè!
Accurséd were she!
And woe to this island if ever a woman should climb to the dwelling of Peelè the Goddess!
Accurséd were she!’

One from the Sunrise
Dawn’d on His people, and slowly before him
Vanish’d shadow-like
Gods and Goddesses,
None but the terrible Peelè remaining as Kapiolani ascended her mountain,
Baffled her priesthood,
Broke the Taboo,
Dipt to the crater,
Call’d on the Power adored by the Christian, and crying ‘I dare her, let Peelè avenge herself ’!
Into the flame-billow dash’d the berries, and drove the demon from Hawa-i-ee.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson

The main capital ship of the Royal Hawai'ian Navy has historically been named "Chiefess-Apostle Kapiʻolani", and here is the most recent one in her most recent configuration (she was bought in the early 1960s from whomever had Alaskas):

[Thanas]

Not Rheinland, we never had Alaskas nor any of the US BBs. Mainly Rheinland BBs are German WWI analogues and from then on using springsharp designs by me including the final ships I never got around to officially build in SDNW3 (though the German Empire would have built them).

Could you change the names Saxon and England in Tennyson's Poem?

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

BTW, Shinn, can you name your islands and show which cities are on which islands? Especially the location of Tokyo.

Wait, Shinn got a Tokyo? How am I to name the cities of Ostrheinland then?

You could always use the old feudal names of the cities in question (Edo instead of Tokyo, Miyako instead of Kyoko, et cetera). Failing that, well... there's an Odessa in Texas, a St. Petersburg in Florida, and a Vancouver in Washington, not to mention the tons of place names shared by the Philippines and the various Latin American states. There is ample precedent for name-sharing.

[Thanas]

So Fuso was colonized by Nipponese? Because that is the reason for name sharing.

But yeah, I might use the old feudal city names.

[Skywalker_T-65]

At the moment, barring anyone else claiming them, Arcadia used US-analogues for our non-carrier heavy warships (sans a few I'm modeling myself if I find the time). So we probably used the Alaskas, and could have sold one to Hawai'i.

[Shinn Langley Soryu]

So Fuso was colonized by Nipponese? Because that is the reason for name sharing.

But yeah, I might use the old feudal city names.

Fuso and Nippon were once the same country (the Empire of Oyashima) before it broke apart in the 16th century. Many place names in Fuso were changed during the Viceroyalty of Fusang period, then again during the First Republic period.

As for the ship issue, no Scharnhorst or Bismarck for Rheinland? (Then again, they were rather suboptimal designs compared to their foreign counterparts, so it's understandable.)

[Thanas]

No, other names, other concepts as Rheinland is not Germany and doesn't have the same nobles.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Orion is using real-life British ship designs (plus one or two of my own extrapolation, like the super-Lion-class dreadnoughts) for everything other than carriers. We just love our sneaky attack subs

[Simon_Jester]

Fiddling with the history of military procurement in my country and wondering:

The typical late-WWII fleet carrier designs (the US Essex, the British Audacious, no others come to mind) tipped the scales at about 35000 to 40000 tons. This was about the minimum size of ship that was capable of flying the jet fighters of the 1950s and '60s, down the road.

Is there anybody who would have been looking to sell off such a carrier, one designed and completed right around the tail end of our WWII-equivalent, to Umeria in the early 1970s?

[Skywalker_T-65]

Arcadia probably would. We don't have much issue with selling old ships.

[Simon_Jester]

Question: would Arcadia have carriers of the appropriate vintage? We're talking big fleet carriers here, or what were big fleet carriers by the standards of the mid-1940s. I'm not sure what Arcadian naval doctrine looked like at that time, just checking.

EDIT:

General appeal to mods- could we get a sticky thread for major updates like "this is the latest iteration of the map, these are formal rulings?" Having absolutely everything in one thread is getting unwieldy; I'm having trouble just finding the latest version of the map now that I need to consult it.

[Skywalker_T-65]

We are admittedly more battleship-oriented than carrier-oriented, but yes, Arcadia would have carriers of the proper vintage and size.

[Simon_Jester]

Cool.

Also, in my search for the darn map, found this reply I'd missed:

Okay, so those last two paragraphs there? Those are completely off-limits in-universe, because that's A-grade top-end conspiratorial cult stuff at the absolute highest level of San Dorado's society. Like Freemasons on crack, we're talking people who will coordinate board policies to crash entire markets as a ritual sacrament here. But even on lower levels people ritually burn dollar bills and pray to little icons of the goddess of chance.

So, like, when you suggest that universities in San Dorado might teach libertarian economic theories as we know them I'm going to nope the hell out of that. That's not how we roll son. We got no time for that Austrian nonsense. Our economic universities run on chaos theory with a healthy dose of Grand Lodge.

OK. Sorry, I think I underestimated the importance of cult-of-Tyche in San Doradan culture, being as how I'd never heard of it until a month ago and hadn't caught many references until then.

The nonsensical prattling Austrianoid who accidentally killed this world's version of Mao Zedong can come from somewhere else.

Also, I DID find the map, in case anyone's wondering, linky:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/829 ... mes_6D.png

[Steve]

If Thanas doesn't object, I could justify Alaskas from Cascadia by saying that Nippon had developed a fast raiding cruiser that was too fast for normal battlecruisers and could outgun everything else fast enough to catch them. So Cascadia built the Lightning-class "Large Cruiser", but only completed three before canceling the others due to the need for carriers to fight Nippon and Klavostan.

[Beowulf]

Or I could justify the Alaskas as convoy escorts to stop cruiser raiding of unaligned shipping.

Simon: Tianguo has been a big fan of aviation for quite a while, especially naval aviation. It would have had a large carrier of the correct vintage. One that hadn't seen combat even.

[Steve]

An idea to bring up.

I was thinking that the turn of Klavostan from a quiet neighbor to an enemy of Cascadia comes about due to a territorial dispute. Or rather, one pressed by an expansionist clique in Klavostan that comes into power in the mid 1890s. The dispute would be centered around the old treaty Cascadia signed in 1830 with the New Granadians about the new border, marking a major river as the border. The issue? Along the region, said river splits into two at one point and then merges back together further down, and the land between them is fairly valuable. And the old negotiators, having never seen the layout, didn't definitively state the actual branch that counted as the border, but since Cascadian troops held the central area anyway it was considered the southern branch. Well, the Klavostanis will decide that the treaty language refers to the northern branch, and demand the central area be handed over, sparking the war around 1900 and then the rematch for the WWII analogue.

Does this make sense to anyone? Any idea on how I can express the mistake in the language?