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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. DraikNova

    DraikNova Spaceman Spiff

    Really, the most unrealistic thing about the cities/villages/towns is that aside from the occasional glitch or avian village, none of them contain so much as a small farming plot or even some sort of shipment system to get supplies from off-world. And seriously, why isn't there even a single Terramart anywhere besides the outpost? It looks like it's supposed to be a big brand, judging by the fact that they can even have people sell to them, but there's only one in the whole game.

    The population issue could just be chalked up to the fact that they're only 2d and that if rendered in 3d, they would be exponentially larger, but the fact that there are NEVER crops or some other way to get food besides through hunting in non-avian, non-glitch villages is a much bigger deal.
     
    STCW262 likes this.
  2. STCW262

    STCW262 Heliosphere

    Well, for all we know, all the cities we find have been built just recently, and, judging by how the Player's ship has a teleporter (Which means that it never has to land in a planet, except for probably repairs, which would explain why the Player's ship is so damaged after leaving Earth: The repairs weren't finished, so the engines couldn't take the strain of FLT spaceflight), they most likely don't need some sort of spaceport, as the ships would simply have to put themselves in orbit and synch their teleporters with the settlement.
    As for the factories, they likely are recent, so they still depend on outside trade in order to obtain processed products (Althrough that does not explain why practically NONE of them have so much as a small factory, or anything similar to the furniture found in Foundry biomes)
     
  3. DraikNova

    DraikNova Spaceman Spiff

    See, the whole "built recently" thing is kind of strange, considering that humans, who of all the main starbound species, are the most recently spacefaring ones by far, and still must have had interstellar spaceflight technology for 500+ years, given the age of the Protectorate itself. So there should be at least a couple of large Avian, Hylotl or Glitch settlements.
     
    STCW262 and Heartstrings like this.
  4. Heartstrings

    Heartstrings Giant Laser Beams

    I find this incredibly strange, to say the least. The first bit more because what are the odds that every single settlement in the universe has only been recently built, and the second bit because teleporters only seem able to take a human's worth of materials. Cargo ships and transports, for instance.

    And yes, there are plenty of justifications and hand-waves for why you only ever see small villages and towns at best, but there is no in-game explanation for it. It could be that all the important bits to these huge spacefaring civilizations are hidden away where they're not visible or even mentioned, but that seems awfully strange a thing to do.

    I have more issues with the Protectorate, upon further thought. Why was a giant organization based on but not exclusively located on Earth that sent out regularly dozens of ships to aid in conflicts and support and exploration, instantly annihilated when their homeworld was attacked? If I remember right, you're stated to be the last Protectorate member alive. If I remember right, there's a lore book that states that every Protectorate ship must have at least four crew members active at all times. Even if five measely ships were in the atmosphere of Earth and had the time to get away, or were off on missions in the universe, that's twenty members minimum that managed to escape. Did the entirety of the Protectorate take the day off from all of their work and missions to come sit on Earth to personally watch a graduation ceremony?
     
  5. ManaUser

    ManaUser Cosmic Narwhal

    A human's worth of materials: 40,000 each of bombs, logs, iron tables, gold bars and cactus. :nuruwink:
     
    YellowDemonHurlr and STCW262 like this.
  6. STCW262

    STCW262 Heliosphere

    Well, somehow, the Player has some sort of futuristic tech that lets them carry a continent's worth in blocks, a city's worth of materials, and enough weapons to supply a small army for a year, and that is just for a small teleporter (For all we know, there could be larger teleporters in other ships, and it's just that the PC has an exploration/combat ship, not a freighter), so it seems that the lack of a need for spaceports seems justified.
    Actually, that is a much better point: Even if we only see one homeworld (That is quickly turned into a pile of tentacles roughly equal to a hentai database), it doesn't make much sense for ABSOLUTELY ALL settlements to be so small, specially as they don't even have to take so much time: The colonists could have come with factory tools from the start (That is, ignoring technological advances. They could just as easily have 3d printers or similar devices, as shown by the Pixel Printer), some settlements could have had different purposes (Such as mining setltements, factories, trading hubs...), and, since the colonies would have an entire PLANET'S RESOURCES that are waiting to be harvested, it's not like it would make much sense for them to simply be unable to use the local resources.

    The Protectorate seems to have been little more than a ruse to make all storylines the same, as it is barely even MENTIONED out of the main storyline. Then again, it took them until 1.1 to add Novakid villages, so they may finally add Protectorate remnants later on.
    As for the PC being the last Protector, it's only said by Esther Bright, so it could be argued that she somehow couldn't contact any other surviving Protectors.
     
  7. Heartstrings

    Heartstrings Giant Laser Beams

    I figured someone would point this out. :D
    I'm reasonably sure that that's a gameplay abstraction made for the player's convenience, as 1) that'd be pretty absurd and 2) no other NPC ever really shows that it applies to them. Maybe it's a function of the Matter Manipulator to have a hyperspace pocket to stick everything you pick up in. I've been thinking that maybe a better way to do something like that is to have it go based on mass, rather than on slots, relating to the total number of atoms in each object, but that was for a different game concept and not really related to this.
     
  8. STCW262

    STCW262 Heliosphere

    Mass isn't a measure of the amount of atoms in anything, as atoms of different elements also have differing weights (For example, 1g of hydrogen has the same amount of atoms as 197g of gold).
     
  9. Heartstrings

    Heartstrings Giant Laser Beams

    Poor use of terms, I'm aware of that. I meant by protons/neutrons.
     
  10. Tlactl

    Tlactl Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    If Esther couldn't establish contact to any other Protectors after the disaster happened, it just proves the points people made earlier - for some reason people didn't use their space travel at all and just kept the Protectorate exclusively on Earth. So if something happens to Earth, they don't even have a "backup" of sorts to save themselves. I love the game, but I just find it dumb how the game literally revolves around space travel and humans didn't even use it that much. You literally see spaceships and flying cars in the background on Earth but somehow 99% of the human population was killed when Earth got destroyed.
     
    Pingeh and Heartstrings like this.
  11. YellowDemonHurlr

    YellowDemonHurlr Ketchup Robot

    Semi-random note: the death of 99% of humanity (at the current population, it would probably be larger in the future) would still leave 75 million people. Even if just one in every 10,000 people decided to pick up and move into space, that's still 750,000 people.
     
  12. Tlactl

    Tlactl Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    I thought that if I said something like 99.999% it would look like I'm adding 9s just for the sake of adding more 9s
     
  13. soldierfast90

    soldierfast90 Pangalactic Porcupine

    75 million people wouldn't be enough to sustain the human race as a whole. Essentially the human race in SB was doomed when Earth was obliterated. Even a billion would be a far stretch as humanity is spread out thin across the universe/galaxy (presumably a galaxy). Worse by the fact that in the lore books state the remaining human count is around 15 million. Bye bye humanity.

    Now what about anti-protectorate factions? We've all talked about how the Protectorate is pretty weak in terms of military power and 'encouraging' that humans stay on Earth. I mean, it'd be pretty easy for a bunch of angry militants to fight the Protectorate head-on and actually win due to how weak and unprepared the Protectorate themselves are. I'm pretty sure that there'd be a sort of "exploration" group that protests against almost the entirety of humanity whose best decision was to become hermit-crabs and not fund any major exploration mission. Or how would the Protectorate fight a group like the Syrian Rebels or even a bunch of poorly-equipped gunmen wielding "antique" AKMs and shooting down a bunch of civvies for no reason.
    Most AK-47's are actually cheap chinese knockoffs of the AKM-50 platform and contrary to popular belief, AK's aren't "unjammable", they can still be jammed, albeit more resistant. AK's resist most elements but doesn't fare well in the mud, which the AR platform actually does better.


    Hell what about the USCM? It's shown ingame that they no longer exist beyond derelict prisons occupied by insane prisoners.
    In my fanfiction-ish mod story, the USCM split into 2 factions, beginning a major war since the (omitted) Floran Contact War. The anti-Protectorate's (Rebels) purpose was to win and destroy the Protectorate to get the population off of Earth and ultimately return Humanity to its "Empire" status. The pro-protectorate USCM are exactly that, they fight for the Protectorate (although not as what one would expect). Just saying, a military with alot of power could very easily overthrow the Protectorate.


    Naw man, you don't just add 9's, you put a recurring in the decimals which now you technically have an infinite amount of NUMBER 9's.
    OOOOOOOHHHHHHHH
     
  14. Tlactl

    Tlactl Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    but if there are infinite 9s then there would be only be an infinitely small fraction of a person left
     
  15. YellowDemonHurlr

    YellowDemonHurlr Ketchup Robot

    You can absolutely sustain humanity with that reduced population. It might not be a galactic superpower, but 75 or even 15 million is way more more than the human minimum viable population (varying estimates, the highest of which tend to fall around 5,000, but they go as low as 160). Even if all human government collapses and their territory is absorbed by other empires (looking at you, Big Ape), there are still friendly empires for human populations to flee to (Hylotl would probably shelter refugees, and Avians like humanity).

    Like I said earlier, don't jump to conclusions about the state of Terrene politics. I've never seen any lore saying that the Protectorate encouraged people to stay on Earth (I have seen lore saying that life on Earth is so good no one wants to leave, but that seems unlikely). We don't know if the Protectorate is militarily weak because the player is the only Protector we ever see go into battle. The Protectorate may not even be a military organization, it may just be an NGO with a few hundred members that specialized in humanitarian aid and building up colonies. Or maybe it's a government agency like the US Peace Corps (which is resembles quite closely, come to think of it), and when's the last time you saw the Peace Corps go to war?

    Nothing I've seen in-game supports the idea of the Protectorate as an weak yet all-encompassing government that stifles humanity, mostly because we never learn much of anything about the Protectorate or humanity in general. The lack of human diaspora isn't the Protectorate's fault, it's just bad writing with no real solid reason behind it.
     
    STCW262, Heartstrings and Strangemind like this.
  16. ManaUser

    ManaUser Cosmic Narwhal

    OK admittedly I posted that mainly to be funny. But let me try and make a relevant point out of it. It seems to me that because of that abstraction, it's hard to say whether that teleporter limitation is canonical, or also an abstraction. I mean, imagine if the PC could only carry a realistic100lb or so. Goodness only knows how that would work in a building game, but suppose it did... I think Starbound would surely make some other provision for moving materials between planets. But since your inventory has the capacity of a cargo ship, actual cargo ships have never made an appearance.
     
  17. soldierfast90

    soldierfast90 Pangalactic Porcupine

    Eh fair enough, jumping to conclusions isn't always the best thing but yeah, just bad writing in total. I honestly just hate the oversimplified lore in SB 1.0+. Asra Nox is a shove-in character with cutscene powers (Invincibility during monologues(like
    KAI LENG in ME3
    )), the artifact collection is such a basic concept, all of the races being friendly with eachother isn't realistic and having a "big bad" with no other intention except for being "pure evil" is ridiculously simple. It's pretty much a fairy-tale plot!

    I dunno


    Yes exactly, we'd be splitting atoms here.
     
  18. STCW262

    STCW262 Heliosphere

    Actually, 15 million would be sustainable if they were grouped together, considering that human population has been at lower levels at some points, and, as pointed out in the Wikipedia article, there's evidence that all humans IRL descend from a small population (1000-10000 breeding pairs) so, unless they somehow wound up spreading too much, it would be rather difficult for humanity to die out, considering that there's a factor of 15000-1500 of difference.
     
  19. Lintton

    Lintton Guest

    It is perhaps a sad irony that, barring the implementation of actual human settlements, bunkers and any colonies we make, the mobile homes and penal colonies might play the biggest role in humanity's survival. :(

    I think I've found my next building project.
     
  20. STCW262

    STCW262 Heliosphere

    Well, it is stated that they weren't interested in colonization because of optimal living conditions on Earth (Which sounds quite strange, considering the MANY reasons to move, such as mere novelty. Then again, it's stated that most people who would do that tend to join the Protectorate anyways).
    As for the Protectorate's HQ being exclusively on Earth, for all we know, there weren't any ways to destroy a planet that wouldn't give a decent window of time to flee, so the Ruin was a threat that acted in a way nothing else couldn't. From perspective, it would be like saying that, IRL the Hiroshima bombing made no sense when, up until then, there was no way for a single plane to deal so much damage to a city (This is, of course, ignoring things such as the aircraft that was used for it being difficult to intercept in general).
     

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