What are your opinions on the Protectorate?

Or maybe just a setup where you encase the shield generator in brain blocks and attach an external switch to it. Voila, invulnerable area.

 

I think you are thinking too narrowly on the gun ownership. With the large diversity of cabidates in the Protectorate It seems very unlikely that combat trained personnel would eschew firearms.

 

That, and the fact that even armor with large areas of exposed skin offers the same amount of protection as non-exposed armor (see also the Wiseman's Thinking Hat), which indicates that whatever these armors are doing, it's probably mostly shielding. Presumably, to breach that shielding, a certain amount of technology has to be put into a weapon. While you may be able to focus a lot more force into a gun's bullets than into a sword's strike, you can put a lot more technology into a sword than into a bullet, and you won't have to replace the bullets every five seconds either. So, yeah, that's my headcanon for why melee weapons are as effective as they are in Starbound relative to guns.

 

Wouldn't that fall apart when taking the Energy meter into account? Guns have infinite ammo, or produce their ammo inside of them... Either way, the point on logistics kind of breaks apart.

 

I always figured energy was just an abstraction of reloading and such. I mean technically a wooden bow "produces its own ammo" too but obviously that isn't supposed to be what really happens. Basically Chucklefish just decided as a practical mater not to make us worry about carrying around ammo, I don't think that should be taken to mean that it doesn't exist in-universe.

But back to the protectorate itself, I just can't get over how improbabe, and unwise it was that they have no presence beyond earth. Even if we assume the all Protectorate members showed up for the graduation (which is a bit silly) they apparently have no permanent bases beyond earth either. I know I'm stating the obvious, but it's just strange. It's hard to seriously evaluate whether the protectorate is a good organization they have such an odd structure.

If anything, I suppose it implies they were closely tied to other institutions, government or whatever. Or perhaps it relates to Humanity's apparent distaste for space colonization in general, which is pretty mysterious in itself. I mean that's something many people dream of today, why the change of heart? Bad experience maybe?

 

That's kind of my point. It's a lot easier to put shield-disabling tech inside of a solid sword rather than generate it inside of a ball of glowing plasma stuff.

 

as randomly generated structure (in-game) yes
it looks nice on moons

 

That would imply that, for some reason, the Protectorate expects it's nembers to supply themselves with their own gear, rather than providing it from the start (Apart from the MM).

 

It implies nothing, the soldiers of multiple factions and governments in Starbound's galaxy are using weapons that have their origins with xia-li, shade co, and other firearm manufacturing companies.

 

Essentially, running off of the assumption that the Protectorate is, in fact, the government of the human race (and, thus, of Earth), there is one and only one case in which it could go off with a great deal of success:
Perfect (or near perfect) law and selfless leadership.

This may seem like a ridiculously obvious answer, but you may have noticed that people haven't been talking as much about the quality of the people in office and the laws that they enact as they have about the system of government that the Protectorate would entail.

Simply put, it works like this: A wise and selfless governing body (sometimes as small as one person) with enough consolidated power can bring astounding amounts of prosperity to their populus.
Conversely, a selfish or foolish governing body with that same power can run any nation into the ground unless deposed.

There are actually many historical examples of leaders who have exemplified (or, at least, came as close as one can) these two scenarios.
King Henry III, for example, transformed the kingdom of England from his father's mess into one of the foremost nations in the world, and started the English Parliament, in addition to seeing his kingdom through the Black Death and a portion of the Hundred Year's War. His leadership led to many concepts of government still in place today.
Unfortunately, after the Black Death ravaged Europe, many of the more experienced members of the English government died, and Henry was forced to turn to his sons for help. These same sons ended up losing much of the land which he had conquered and filled the nation with internal problems. The campaigns of Joan of Arc ended England's control of vast areas of France, and, combined, the poor leadership of Henry's sons and brilliance of Joan as a commander undid much of the prosperity brought about by a strong and intelligent leader.

Of course, none of this would work without the willing cooperation of the people in a nation. Good leadership can only work as well as the populus.

These reasons are exactly why Communism failed. Despite looking good on paper (everyone works, everyone reaps the same benefits!) Even a slight amount of corruption within a communist regime would topple the balance of any system. Combining that with people who refuse to work if they are guaranteed a living simply by being a citizen, you get a recipe for disaster.

So, to sum up, or if you didn't want to read everything and just skipped to the end, the Protectorate could flourish under the right leadership, no matter how much power it has.

 

I'm going to have to go with STCW262 here, it does in fact, imply that the Protectorate don't supply their own weapons (except for the MM and the Protector's Sword) to their "graduates". While almost every major faction uses firearms, the lesser equipped factions (Occasus, Avian Radicals, Floran Hunters etc) use mainly melee-based weaponry. If we take into account the Protectorate Weapon cache found before the "first enemy" we see it's merely a damaged sword (soon-to-be shiny). We don't have much information though about their weaponry except that they most likely had to supply themselves with better weapons if they needed one. They also had terrible architects and overall military power.

This is an absolute logical point brought up on leadership along with historical evidence. A protectorate may very well flourish under correct leadership, however when logistics begin to fail there comes anger and resent. Poor military training (right after the graduation the player would've been given a sword and a ship), lack of space defense, lack of any assault vehicles and generally a failure in military defense logistics.

I'll say it: This was made to see how people would view my "story" on anti-protectorate factions. It's not the same as my mod's description since I can't be bothered right now to change it up to mention the fact the USCM detached into a pro-protectorate and anti-protectorate splinter group. I tend to show, not tell. Anyways, let's keep it friendly aye. Yeah I know my opinions (and probably STCW262's) are pretty unpopular.

 

That would indicate that the companies that those factions buy the weapons from those companies.
What I'm basing myself on is that we're ONLY shown the Protectorate Sword in what seems to be a storage room. Then again, it likely wasn't a weapons storage room, as, otherwise, there wouldn't be a damaged weapon.

 

It could probably work in a post-scarcity society, but we do not know whether or not that was the case before everything went to hell. As long as resources are still scarce, humans (and other humanoids) will compete over them, making a one-world government inefficient at best, downright dictatorial at worst, at least if it intends to function. Just my 2 cents though, I'm not an expert.

 

bottom line, if it takes place in a time where basically everyone has access to space travel, there should be no reason for them not to have large cities on other planets

 

Something that's always irritated me is that Starbound's space doesn't have any real coherence to it. There's no planets that are even stated to have livable cities (not even ones that you just can't access!). No signs that any species has attempted to claim space for themselves, no "This planet is colonized by the Avian Grounded." message when on the starmap, and so on. It makes me severely doubt the Protectorate's actual power, and in fact all claimed faction's powers, when the only people with actual cities (small ones, at that) are the Hylotl, and they're underwater.

 

I'm not sure what you mean. Every playable race except humans has some kind of permanent settlement. The hylotl undersea one's are the biggest, but Glitch castles are a close second, and Florans and Avians both have some significant vertical structures as well. I mean, I don't disagree that some bigger cities would be nice, but I'm not sure what makes the small ones "not cities" exactly. Avians, Apex, Glitch, all have what are clearly homes and places of business grouped together. Even the little Novakid towns have that, come to think of it. Floran places are a bit more alien and primative, but obviously that's intentional.

 

They mean that there are no large cities on any of the millions of planets you can visit. Your ships computer doesn't even acknowledge the presence of a city on a planet, the closest thing it says to that is something like "This planet is home to a wide variety of lifeforms, possibly even your own". Im pretty sure that a human codex said that the largest extrasolar colony has 19 people. There are no towns at all with protectorate themed furniture on other planets, so from what I see the only existing protectorate city was on Earth.

Im pushing it here but sometime in the future it would be nice if they should add cloud cities on gas giants, and removed asteroids above every planet. Instead of that they should have certain planets with rings that you can visit. (A dev on reddit said they were gonna add those but the comment was posted 3 years ago)

 

There is no recognition whatsoever that any species or group has control over anything more than small villages on planets. I don't think such tiny groups of people would be capable of interstellar travel, let alone colonizing nearly every star in the universe, and the random placement of species on planets doesn't suggest any real kind of organization between governments or claims to solar systems by, say, the Miniknog, or by whatever governments the Hylotl control.

Go to almost any other science-fiction game or film series or what-have you, and virtually all space colonies are at least able to produce starcraft of their own, or receive them from somewhere, if there isn't a reason not to (they're an abandoned colony, for instance). Starbound's villages are just that. They're villages. Beyond them, there's no indication that anybody's colonized the world. There's no spaceports, there's no factories, there's no resemblance of any kind of actual civilization at work beyond those small ten to twenty houses. SAIL doesn't even remark on the colonists present.

I could excuse this if, say, SAIL mentioned that there was a substantial presence of that species on the planet, and/or if notable structures and cities appeared in the space view and were visible in the background on occasion, or better, if you could occasionally land in sections of the occupied worlds and invade those same factories (presumably with the same retaliating force as one could expect from raiding a real-life factory), but as it stands those villages and businesses are the only sign of civilization around. Good luck finding anything more advanced than a blacksmith.

 

And in the intro mission it seems odd that there is only one spaceship in the entire building. Is it actually yours, or are you just stealing it? Im assuming its yours since it changes depending on your race, but why would there only be one spaceship there?

 

Same reason why there are no elevators in the buildings nor any railings. The Protectorate Graduation itself is a workplace safety nightmare and even if the Protectorates graduate, they're shipped off to fight something else in the depths of space just so they can throw some humans out of overpopulated Earth.

Now lets judge the Architecture and possible time period. Currently the tallest building on Earth is the Burj Khalifa, standing 828m tall. Now we have the Protectorate Buildings. Judging by the clouds, I'd say it's the Cumulus clouds, which are usually around 2km high. This could mean that these buildings are somewhere in-between 2-3km in height which is a major engineering feat (possibly assisted with anti-grav technology to stay level). Again, however, these buildings make no sense safety-wise and normally would've been shut down to install complex things like "railings" or "elevators" or even "staircases".

For the extrasolar colony, that refers to HUMAN off-Earth population, which is unrealistic as by the time we develop space flight us humans (irl) would be immediately trying to colonise every habitable planet and drilling for as much resources as possible to sustain the human race. This would inevitably lead to mass emigration off of Earth to explore the wonders of the Galaxy. Human are inherently curious and it can't be that everyone on Earth was somehow traumatised of space or something that made them refuse to even live on Mars. Can't just tell me that humans were made extinct because of a single space rock (Unlike the dinosaurs, the SB humans have space travel).

As for cities, yeah they're tiny. Cities should atleast contain 1 million residents, so the Hylotl Underwater City is more like a town. Although the worst part about cities in Starbound is that there's usually more residents then there are actual facilities to house them. Sometimes, basic facilities such as toilets don't spawn.

Now lets talk city defenses for no reason.
Although in my opinion the Hylotl Underwater cities have both a strategical advantage and disadvantage when it comes to defense from invaders. The shield generator prevents damage (although realistically, following the laws of Sci-Fi shields, have a limited amount of protection) to the outer walls, forcing invaders to use the airlock, which is a chokepoint that defenders can spray down with bullets. Their disadvantage is that with enough torpedoes, it could burst through the walls along with the fact there are no "internal airlocks" to seal off a potential flooding of an area. So a single breach can destroy an entire Hylotl City (although SB doesn't account for things like Water Pressure and the fact that most doors aren't water-tight).