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What are your opinions on the Protectorate?

Discussion in 'Starbound Discussion' started by soldierfast90, Apr 24, 2017.

?

Would you instate a Protectorate-based Government?

  1. Yes - Galactic peace is a great idea.

  2. No - I don't want the Protectorate controlling Earth.

Results are only viewable after voting.
  1. soldierfast90

    soldierfast90 Pangalactic Porcupine

    As said, I want to hear people's opinions on what they think of the Protectorate as a whole, their policies, their movements and their motives.

    Fanfiction level of speculation below:
    For me, I would go against the Protectorates as they're an unrealistic Utopian semi-authoritarian ruling over Earth. With peace established with all races and humans no longer fighting, human overpopulation would run rampant with (sadistically) no wars to engage in (till The Ruin). I'd say that a global Military Force overwatching the whole planet would also cause fears and mistrust, emanating a layer of paranoia onto civilians. Not only that, but USCM Funding would absolutely just crash into the ground, reducing Earth's military capabilities into dust (as seen, Protectorate's seem to prefer swords AS THEIR MAIN WEAPON). Theoretically galactic peace seems great, if it weren't for the fact that Humans are the most individualistic (other species haven't been shown being diverse nor can we just say they're diverse because they don't exist) and each will have their own ideological beliefs. You got communists, neo-nazis, seperatists etc and yet all we see is Earth being nothing but either the Protectorate (sympathisers) or the terrible space nazi regime known as "The Occasus".

    Anyways, crashing the military budget into the ground would cause a massive unemployment burst, which would lead to protesting for an increase in spending. This in turn, would cause the USCM and other military factions to begin a coup d'etat against the Protectorate. This would obviously succeed because you never bring a sword to a gunfight, regardless if it's an anime katana.


    Or that's how I imagine the scenario anyways, what do you guys think of the Protectorate. Generally I'm not a big fan of oversimplified lore, where it's just a black and white morality kind of thing. I prefer a more realistic approach, or atleast grey morality.

    Also who builds those kind of highrises in the intro mission! Atleast 1 kilometer high and there's no railings on the outside or even an elevator in each building!

    On the topic of the roles, yes, we don't have any lore information on anything so the best we can speculate is from what we have. Saying that I'm not allowed to speculate because there is no information is kinda... I dunno.

    Now let's talk about the Protectorate purely on their military power with no outside influence. Their main weapons appears to be a sword (being of one design makes it easy to mass-produce). In terms of fighting a CURRENT DAY military would have the Protectorate lose as they don't appear to have any Armoured Vehicles of any kind nor any firearms. For space-power, they literally have no bases situated outside of Earth, making it incredibly prone (as LilyV3 said). These guys don't have any defenses and literally appears to rely PURELY on a bunch of poorly trained swordsmen who are expected to apparently keep the peace (didn't even intervene into the Apex-Rebellion War). Now imagine of a hostile faction (i.e Neo-Communists) sprung up with ARMOURED vehicles and firearms, hell a person could turn a bulldozer into a tank with composite layering of ceramic and metal. What about space cannons? None, they apparently didn't detect a large organic entity with all of Earth's radar technology homing in to destroy humanity which FOR SOME REASON decided that bunching together was a great idea.

    Protectorate Military Strength: Specialised swordsmen that are transported via frigate-class (armed) ships. Nothing else really. Actually according to Esther, the player character (singleplayer) is apparently THE LAST PROTECTORATE, which means that they were destroyed by a single strike to Earth. It's like the Bismarck's ammunition storage all over again!


    As for the "protectorate" using guns, remember that it's the player hiring crewmembers, essentially trying to reform an entire organisation that was just obliterated. This means that the player is canonically the new leader of a reformed protectorate and means that there's no formal training initiative.

    Although the Protector's Sword is of single design, so it's easy to produce.
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2017
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  2. WallyBW93

    WallyBW93 Subatomic Cosmonaut

    I think the Protectorate had a good idea, galactic peace is nice. I understand their is reality o consider but it is something people should strive for regardless.
     
  3. Jonesy

    Jonesy Sarif's Attack Kangaroo Forum Moderator

    I think the plot overall was mishandled somewhat, especially in regards to the human lore, but the basic idea is fine. It's significant to have an influential organization striving for interspecies cooperation when you consider that most of the others are ruled by less-than-amicable governments or no formal one at all. And while the USCM's lore is undercooked in the current version of the game, I'm not aware of any mention of the Protectorate interfering with their budget. Especially since wars aren't the only reason the USCM would be needed, with any number of hostile lifeforms out there.

    Also... you say it's a bad idea to have a global military force in control, but advocate the USCM declaring a military coup... seems a bit hypocritical, I'm afraid.
     
  4. Jilly Bob the Third

    Jilly Bob the Third Star Wrangler

    They didn't do to good a job at the whole protecting thing
     
  5. Hatsya Souji

    Hatsya Souji Parsec Taste Tester

    Remove Protectorate.

    As much as I'd like a utopian society ran by them, it might stifle creativity, and diversity among them. Plus, in my modded experiences of Starbound, I, as a Ningen (yes, humanity's anime-styled biologically-experimented descendants), don't need to take part to the Protectorate, yet I adhere to their common laws of a striving society / civilization.
     
  6. Heartstrings

    Heartstrings Giant Laser Beams

    I think the Protectorate should be further elaborated upon before I make any radical political decisions.
     
    Kveer, LtBlujay, SneakyBox and 3 others like this.
  7. Tlactl

    Tlactl Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Depends, in Rick and Morty the galactic government totally messed up Earth even though they had good intentions. It would still be pretty hard for a human to live on Avos or an Avian to live in a mostly human community on Earth (those are the only two homeworlds I know) because even with the protectorate theres still gonna be racism
     
    LtBlujay likes this.
  8. Gon009

    Gon009 Subatomic Cosmonaut

    I dislike the fact that Protectorate makes every protagonist(I mean the player) basically the same and every character basically starts as a protectorate member with no racial backstory. With this everything can be simplified to protectorate things and I dislike how the "story" is made so trivial and boring with this. I dislike black and white morality where Protactorate is a perfect thing and suddenly black characters appear to destroy everything because... they are just pure evil. Lots of greyness is a nice thing and encourages to playing story more to see what's next. I always thought that for example Nox will have an idealogical breakdown near the end even if it's still trivial(because seriously, seeing The Ruin as the way to fulfill dreams about destruction of all non-humans races, then seeing it destroy the Earth and making humans endangered and not changing at all, really?).

    And also from role it seems that protectorate didn't really do a good job(it seems that racial NPCs don't miss protectorate at all and they only mention it when talking with player, probably it has almost no impact on the life in starbound universe).
     
    Kveer, Tsukistar, Machofish and 6 others like this.
  9. Tlactl

    Tlactl Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    I would have liked for them to add the racial backstory intros they never got around to, maybe in a future update they'll finally finish and add those. I think they should make two game modes, one has your races' unique storyline and one follows the Protectorate story arc
     
    LtBlujay, Cen Silver, Pingeh and 3 others like this.
  10. LilyV3

    LilyV3 Master Astronaut

    it failed hard.

    So you want to act intergalactic for peace, and all you have is ONE big base on a single planet. So no one ever heard of single point of failure in that future? makes sense. Also repsonse time to the outer Systems is surely great. And then they couldn't even protect themsleves form one beeing that a graduate singlehanded killed a few weeks later.

    That is story stuff right out of one of those bad american action movies.
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2017
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  11. STCW262

    STCW262 Heliosphere

    I think that the Protectorate was too underdeveloped, as it has almost no presence post-prologue, even thorugh they're built as some sort of Space UN. In fact, it could have been made so the Protectorate is a small-time LARP organization, and that would have made more sense.
    As for their weapons, the Protectorate Sword was one of the things that bugged me the most: In an universe where all the other factions have guns, why the only Protectorate-related weapon is a sword. Then again, that sword could just be some sort of graduation gift, or it might be that technological advancements have somehow allowed melee weapons to be useful again, which is rather strange, as, if anything, guns would be the ones that would improve. Then again, those rather high-tech (Judging by their secondaries) melee weapons likely weren't designed by humans (The Hylotl treat combat as an art form, so they might have wound up making high-tech melee weapons for that reason. The Florans could have done that as well, as it would be easier for the Greenfingers to design a new weapon for their tribes to use by making it similar to their already-existing weapons (Which could result in them developing more advanced melee weapons instead of ditching them as soon as individually-efficient guns appear).
    As for their general military strength, are ANY factions other than the Penguins EVER shown using military vehicles? The closest is that it's implied that the Miniknog has tanks, as shown by the tank traps in Rebel Bases, but, somehow, the stronghold in which Big Ape is shown is only protected by a bunch of guards that get rather easily overwhelmed by the rebels, and, generally, it feels as if the entire purpose of the stronghold was to test Big Ape's combat abilities (Which is the case unless the Miniknog is full of idiots who can't backup data). Then again, the next update is going to add Mechs, so, for all we know, there may be NPC-controlled ones...But, unless shown otherwise, then it would still seem like most SB militaries would be beaten up rather badly by a RL army, considering that even vehicles such as aircraft aren't shown to be used at all (The closest are the spacecraft in the intro, and even then they're only shown to be taking off, and it's not stated of they're effective in an atmosphere, which they likely aren't), so even a WW2 army would be able to defeat them.
     
  12. Lintton

    Lintton Guest

    The protectorate don't really strike me as the "Coup d'etat", or "New World Order" type. A lot of the lore surrounding Human exploration, institutions and military history suggest that the USCM had a bigger footprint in the galaxy, and that the Protectorate, despite drawing in people of all races and talents, was still a small institution in the vast galactic stage devoted to peacekeeping(and also, subject to earth politics. Remember that colonization was not a hot commodity among the general public of earth.) and diplomacy.

    It didn't look like they were in position to rival the USCM when The Ruin decimated both institutions.
    Speaking of The Ruin... I don't think we need to worry about the Protectorate ruling earth ...

    As for why we, as the last and only visible face of the protectorate, was involved in galactic politics and resistance forces? Fate of the galaxy. We were dealing with a monster that could mince planets from another dimension in safety, bureaucracy was not on our side here.


    As for whether it is worth having a protectorate at all, I think that is an interesting question for a plot to ask, if we ever get (or mod) more missions in Starbound. I'm of the idea that it could be worth having, but it wouldn't be a human institution now. Where and how it intervenes might be up in the air in the wake of new leadership(hint:keep it far from the apex....)
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 26, 2017
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  13. YellowDemonHurlr

    YellowDemonHurlr Ketchup Robot

    You're making a lot of assumptions about Earth's governance. Some things I'd like to point out...
    1. We don't know what the Protectorate is, exactly. It could be a government agency, an NGO, a corporation specializing in building and assisting colonies, or a UN-like entity.
    2. We don't know who runs Earth. It could be the Protectorate, or some agency to which the Protectorate is responsible, or something else entirely.
    3. We don't know the role of the USCM. It may be the military branch of the Human government, it may be a leftover state, it may not even exist anymore and all that remains are abandoned prisons off-world.
    4. We never see Protectorate warfighters, so we don't know that they fight with swords, only that they have swords. So do the US Marines.
    5. We see practically nothing of Earth, so we can't say what the populace is like. A few skyscrapers in London are not representative of humanity as a whole.
     
  14. Lintton

    Lintton Guest


    Protectorate soldiers do use ranged and melee weapons, if the ship crew is anything to go by(military organization past that is not mentioned). Other classes of soldiers stick to firearms, so its not like they ever just had the sword to use. They certanly use firearms if a target is far away enough, though the repaired protectorate sword is fairly impressive.

    about 3. The new lore isn't very clear on what became of the USCM, but USCM settlers suggest it does exist. Though they seem to have fallen apart. Though when this happened is not clear, The Ruin likely did not help.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 25, 2017
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  15. LilyV3

    LilyV3 Master Astronaut

    this is what makes the entire game looks unfinished, they have made that new story probably very quickly, and so nearly all things that people expected to see were left out. vehicles in general didn't really existed and devs never add some. All we see are some camping vans in camping sites where no car ever would be able to go to.

    At some time the game was about a living universe, now it's just an asset random generator. If you ever have seen a camping site where people run around in t-shirts in the snow on a hill where no camper could drive to, then you know this universe is just slapped together and not living at all. The game was released in a state that I would just call unfinished. It may technically be done. But too many things are missing at all to make sense. Where are all the farms where food gets grown? only the glitch settlements somewhat look believable. All the other races? they have in best cases a small garden hardly enough to feed anyone. Where are factories? Whe eis just anything besides some stores and homes?
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2017
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  16. DraikNova

    DraikNova Spaceman Spiff

    I don't have many opinions on them, but I do have a headcanon:
    Despite the fact that they've existed for 500 years, they didn't have a noticeable influence on human society until 100-150 years ago (at which point they changed from being little more than a club to an actual organization), and they only began to influence human society as a whole 30-50 years ago, which explains how human culture doesn't make the Occasus impossible. That, and it would also explain how they were incapable of handling the issues the player character faces; without notable influence on human society as whole, influencing the politics of other species would be difficult.
     
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  17. soldierfast90

    soldierfast90 Pangalactic Porcupine

    This brings a tear to my partially functional tear ducts. This is a great response in terms of military power of not only the Protectorate, but the other races in a nutshell. As said before, armoured vehicles for any "faction" doesn't seem to exist except for the penguins, who have air superiority and ground superiority purely from their vehicles. If we had 100 Standard-Issue protectorates wearing their fabric uniforms and their (somewhat decent, but could be made more cheaper without sacrificing too much efficiency by stripping it of its power function) sword against a single vehicle (even a Mark 5), protectorate troops would get slaughtered. It's like their whole policy was just to throw troops at the enemy.

    Lorewise, it's pretty childish ever since 1.0 was released. Back then it was a galaxy full of racism and wars. Now it's about a UN-like organisation that actually operates worse than the UN itself.

    The apex ship has a lot of cannons though, so that proves something of their fleet firepower.

    But remember guys, nobody likes my opinion. Lol.
    Also USCM settlers don't exist. The USCM were completely removed with the only connection being the insane prisoners left inside derelict prisons.
     
  18. Lintton

    Lintton Guest

    Gameplay and story segragation. Of course any builder worth their salt could create a facility that would take a small army to infiltrate without the matter manipulator, if it could be infiltrated at all. The mission's level design has to be set up for the player to be able to accomplish it.

    Given the current performance tweaking needed, a real slog with armies, vehicles, and mechs would be problematic to do. I'm hoping giant mob implementation can help pave the way to real battles against giant mechs and tanks, though anyone expecting one hit kill, hardcore difficulty is likely going to be disappointed.

    That said, the theoretical situation involving Protectorate soldiers against a vehicle misses several points.

    1. The protectorate uniform is a dress uniform. its defenses are not indicative of the actual protection and punishment their soldiers are handling on the field. You have the option to change ship crew uniform and even then, their stats are not indicative to the defenses seen, this is not the same as say, Starfleet personnel charging in with their onesies, their protection is different. That is also not taking into account tech and augs, which would at least have the blink teleport ability.
    2. They use ranged and melee weapons.

    Keeping the ai out of it (because the ai is easy for every npc without question) a group of 100 soldiers against a vehicle would either get in close for the blade to mince the vehicle, or pepper it with ranged fire, in which case it's a situation more akin to rl gunfights, except armor and tech likely mean the soldier do not go down near as easily as you would think.

    Heck, I mince my own futuristic vehicles in a few hits, by accident, and I use spears!
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 26, 2017
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  19. DraikNova

    DraikNova Spaceman Spiff

    Yeah, you can make any fortress completely impenetrable using only one thing, arguably three if you need to be able to theoretically access it via way other than teleporters (in which case it's theoretically but not practically penetrable). The main ingredient is the shield generator. If you want to be able to access such a fortress, you need a ton of lava and an airlock. That way, you can use some sort of disposable armor to take the force of the lava and get inside, and the lava will be protected from being sucked up by the matter manipulator by the shield generator.
     
  20. soldierfast90

    soldierfast90 Pangalactic Porcupine

    Well for the first point, yeah, we don't have much to go off of. And yeah, it's a dress uniform, but where's the Protectorate armoured variant? Doesn't exist, game files say so. yeh.

    As for changing crew uniform and the fact they can use guns, I'll say it again: The Protectorate was wiped out by The Ruin and the "Protectorate" the player is part of Post-Earth is actually a reformed protectorate with no formal training initiative. This means that any formal training for untrained civilians wouldn't matter since Earth was already wiped so therefore whatever training the crew gets for their weapons isn't the result of the Protectorate using guns, it's the result of the player (last Protectorate) allowing guns and other weapons of external origin. The player is also technically AWOL, still part of the Protectorate doctrine however.

    Now you said you kept the AI out of this. Yes, the AI is awfully easy but I'm referring to an actual scenario of actual people fighting. If we're talking about 100 players, obviously a tank or such would be absolutely obliterated with the absolute spam of projectiles headed its way.

    In a realistic* scenario, not everyone would have access to matter-manipulating properties of the Dash tech or the other techs. It would take a higher level of training for people to both be physically and mentally prepared to use something like a pulse jump which doesn't have an external trigger.

    Now that I think about it, the Protector's sword could penetrate the Mark 5's armour pretty easily. Now what about an M42 Duster....


    For buildings and missions being easy it's always gotta be possible otherwise it wouldn't be fun at all (mapmaker here, let's get right into the noose).
    Except the missions could've been alot larger (Apex Rebel Assault was pretty disappointing as it felt more like a tiny skirmish than it did an "assault") and more difficult.

    Best fortress is a fortress on the asteroid layer of a large planet shielded with a generator protected by barbwire and mines layed out with the only entrance being a chokepoint hallway with nothing but mines.
     

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