Oolite Bulletins

Svengali wrote:

JazHaz wrote:

Oh, and Galcop is not the name of the police force, rather its the name of the Galactic Co-operative that runs the trade of the Galaxy, owning the space stations etc.

It depends on the context, I'd think. The term 'GalCop' may be used for the Galactic Co-operative and for its police force (see [wiki]GalCop[/wiki]).

This has always been a bone of contention and for the most part seems to data to when people started playing Elite. The manual doesn't help as it leaves it all a little ambiguous.

Basically, those who started playing Elite on the BBC, Speccy or C64 tend to refer to GalCop as the Galactic Co-operative. Those who came later and played ArcElite tend to refer to the galactic police as GalCops and the Co-operative as GalCoop.

The general consensus here has always been (as far as I've seen and read) that GalCop is the co-operative itself and that the Galactic Police are referred to on occasion as "the GalCops" (although that is rarely used). It means a certain attention must be paid to the grammar of the context

Walbrigg wrote:

Disembodied wrote:

The assumption I make is that the Vipers are provided by the Co-operative [...] although the Co-operative provides the Vipers, their upkeep and maintenance is paid for by the planetary governments (or, in their absence, by collectives of planet-based traders) - so poor, disorganised systems have hardly any police craft, which barely ever leave the station aegis.

Ah, but then the economy of the system should have as much effect as the government type...

Not necessarily: a planet can be rich but disorganised, in terms of being able to summon up the political will and clout to decide to spend a pile of everyone's money on one particular thing. Corporate States, Democracies and Confederacies are better able to bring their planetary wealth to bear on paying for police patrols. Communist, Dictatorship and Feudal governments are increasingly prone to bureaucracy, inefficiency and corruption, Multi-Government planets might be rich but lack any single central authority (imagine a the UN trying to administer a Coriolis station and raise funds for Viper patrols from its member nations), and in Anarchies there's no government to speak of at all - just (probably) collections of local merchants at best, paying for a couple of Vipers out of their own profits.

I've always envisioned GalCop as being responsible for the relationship between different systems and for managing trade and economy in space but having no jurisdiction on the planet's surface. The only link between the two would be that GalCop would set the trade requirements for the system based on the needs of the planet and ensure that the planet gets what it needs, as hinted by the line in the manual:

Think about a planet's needs. Think what might make the society function. Don't trade
expensive trivia to a hungry world.

The Government Type generally refers to the planet itself rather than the space around it. The stations will reflect the planetary type by the sort of people who populate (as probably around half are going to be from the planet below) and work on it. They will thus attract a different "clientelle" as certain items are required, and this will have an effect on the type of people that will be encoutered in the planet's orbitspace. For example, anarchies will attract gunrunners, drug dealers and all kinds of dodgy chaps hence why more pirates/outlaws will be encountered. Also, the police or Navy will be more tied up dealing with those people than they would in more peaceful systems hence why you won't come across as many of them on your journey. I imagine that GalCop provides a standard service as part of the membership deal but that there could conceivably be a scheme to increase the terms of service. Who would the additional police officers be recruited from though? The planetary population? In an anarchy would that not breed a higher number of corrupt officers than those from a corporate state system?

Selezen wrote:

Who would the additional police officers be recruited from though? The planetary population? In an anarchy would that not breed a higher number of corrupt officers than those from a corporate state system?

That brings the in the question of cultural and species differences ... arguably, a cop from an Anarchy system which lacks any form of government, but whose population manage to get along pretty well through a series of cultural conventions based around e.g. honour ("Who needs laws? Good people don't need 'em, and bad people will just break 'em anyway ..."), might be vastly less corruptible than a cop from a Corporate State which views wealth as being the sole measure of worth, and where everything - including the law - is up for sale ...

Disembodied wrote:

That brings the in the question of cultural and species differences ... arguably, a cop from an Anarchy system which lacks any form of government, but whose population manage to get along pretty well through a series of cultural conventions based around e.g. honour ("Who needs laws? Good people don't need 'em, and bad people will just break 'em anyway ..."), might be vastly less corruptible than a cop from a Corporate State which views wealth as being the sole measure of worth, and where everything - including the law - is up for sale ...

A plausible interpretation is that the Feudal and Anarchy systems are the last hold-outs of free resistance against the all-consuming Galcop, which uses its control of trade treaties to crush them economically and technologically, and makes it difficult for them to obtain arms or to free the slaves used to run the Coriolis stations.

I like this thread.

Many good ideas and well thought out details around the most fundamental premise/background of the game. I really like!

Walbrigg wrote:

Once you start talking about realism, the thing that gets me is the actual volume of trade. I've sat by a station for an hour watching the ships go in and out, and I would say a couple of hundred ships a day capable of carrying a hundred tons or so of cargo each doesn't amount to an economically significant amount of interstellar trade for a planet with a population of billions.
If you choose to take that seriously, it puts space travel into context: after all, the nature of the game is that even very cautious trading is extremely profitable and extremely dangerous. Systems are practically self-sufficient, and GalCop's control of piracy and Thargoids is so limited that every interstellar journey is a life-threatening adventure. The way to look at GalCop is not as some supreme galactic government, but as an ad-hoc alliance of spacers just barely managing to make space travel possible.

Quote for emphasis.

This is an element of the scale-issue that is often overlooked. Indeed, compared to the trade on each planet, interplanetary trade must be negligible. Just as an additional information: in the original Elite the planets were supposed to be orbited by many stations, the one you were flying to was just supposed to be the closest to your point of entry. The real reason was of course the in the 8-bit era the number of objects that could be displayed and animated was much more limited than nowadays, so the players were supposed to add the missing stations in their heads. Oolite began as a re-invention of what was seen in Elite, therefore it kept the one-station-per-planet trope, even though it could spawn multiple stations. But, even if there were fifty stations around each planet, and fifty times more ships in the system (which would again choke even today's computers), they would still not make a significant dent in the planet's total GDP. Therefore it holds still true that the vast majority of trade in the Ooniverse never involves any space ship.

Commander McLane wrote:

This is an element of the scale-issue that is often overlooked. Indeed, compared to the trade on each planet, interplanetary trade must be negligible. Just as an additional information: in the original Elite the planets were supposed to be orbited by many stations, the one you were flying to was just supposed to be the closest to your point of entry.

At least on BBC Elite there were many stations, though it presumably only actually simulated the closest one at any time.

Commander McLane wrote:

But, even if there were fifty stations around each planet, and fifty times more ships in the system (which would again choke even today's computers), they would still not make a significant dent in the planet's total GDP. Therefore it holds still true that the vast majority of trade in the Ooniverse never involves any space ship.

Depends what you think the planet's GDP is. 20kTC of cargo a day per station would be perhaps 800kCr of import/export per day per station. If you take the "productivity" figures on the F7 screen as GDP (year=Earth year), then that's around 300MCr per year per station of import/export. Productivity varies between about 1,000MCr and 50,000MCr, so you depending on how many stations you have - and presumably more in the richer and busier systems - it wouldn't be difficult to get trade to around 10% of GDP.

However, there are serious consistency issues with that number being an annual GDP: essentially it makes the 100Cr. you start with enough to luxuriously retire on planetside. With one exception, you can just about get a plausible (and fairly pleasant) economy by making it the daily GDP figure instead, but then trade is very definitely low-volume and for things which can't practically be produced locally.

cim wrote:

there are serious consistency issues with that number being an annual GDP: essentially it makes the 100Cr. you start with enough to luxuriously retire on planetside.

There are probably ways around this ... perhaps one function of the Co-operative is to create a parallel economy which permits interplanetary and interspecies trade, but with serious economic "firewalls" between the stations and the planets they orbit. There might be crippling exchange rates between individual planetary currencies and the Co-operative Credit. Or maybe the Co-op Credit can only be used, or indeed earned, outside the atmosphere. That might go some way to explain why ships all have safes for precious metals and gemstones, as they could act as a relatively portable, relatively pan-species monetary reservoir.

Disembodied wrote:

... "firewalls" between the stations and the planets they orbit. There might be crippling exchange rates between individual planetary currencies and the Co-operative Credit. Or maybe the Co-op Credit can only be used, or indeed earned, outside the atmosphere.

<nods> The Great Co-operative Firewall... I like it!

El Viejo wrote:

<nods> The Great Co-operative Firewall... I like it!

It might be an explanation for the "127 unit maximum" rule, too (exceptions are made, presumably, for bulk haulage contracts).

Wasn't there something in canon/lore somewhere stating that spacers never go dirtside? <ponders canon - chortles>

Disembodied wrote:

There might be crippling exchange rates between individual planetary currencies and the Co-operative Credit.

I can't see how you'd enforce that and still allow station-surface transfers of goods, though. If you can convert credits to goods, and then convert goods to local currency, and anyone local wants to buy the goods, then there's a de facto exchange rate there and the official direct rate is largely irrelevant.

El Viejo wrote:

Wasn't there something in canon/lore somewhere stating that spacers never go dirtside? <ponders canon - chortles>

There is probably extreme limits on who is allowed to go dirtside, because they could in theory introduce hostile organisms/substances/diseases.

Most beings live their entire lives and die on the planet they're born on simply because space travel is so limited and expensive.

Colonizing a planet likewise could take over a century, just because moving 1 million people would take so long with such tiny ships.

(Battletech has many of these same issues, despite having larger-scale ships.)

cim wrote:

Disembodied wrote:

There might be crippling exchange rates between individual planetary currencies and the Co-operative Credit.

I can't see how you'd enforce that and still allow station-surface transfers of goods, though. If you can convert credits to goods, and then convert goods to local currency, and anyone local wants to buy the goods, then there's a de facto exchange rate there and the official direct rate is largely irrelevant.

It depends: it might be that only certain licensed traders/agencies are allowed to trade directly between the stations and the planets themselves. The volume of incoming trade is low, there's only one main station: it's pretty much a choke point, with a potential monopoly. Credits could be like some form of scrip. There's bound to be leakage, of course, and grey and black markets, but that's where the fun is ...

Disembodied wrote:

it's pretty much a choke point, with a potential monopoly

Only if Galcop has the forces to at least make smuggling risky, so we're looking at a need for near-total control of planetary orbital space, not just the station, even in high-risk systems. It would explain why they never have the ships to patrol any further out, I suppose. You'd also need to have some pretty thorough searches to stop people carrying a few grams of concealed gemstones through customs.

There's also the effect of the exchange rate on trade. If a credit would naturally trade at 1 Cr = £10,000 based on relative values of goods, but Galcop is forcing the rate to 1 Cr = £10, then that makes imports of goods denominated in credits extremely cheap and popular - but also means you get basically no money for exports, so where are these imports coming from? Or I guess it could do it with an incredibly high transfer tax, so both imports and exports are really expensive. This is definitely getting away from the popular view of Galcop as a facilitator of trade.

Okay... now we've got Galcop as an overarching imperial power, which uses superior technology aboard its Vipers to oppress billions on the planets below, and requires tithes of goods to be pretty much donated to Galcop "or we bomb you from orbit". Most of the goods just get used to maintain Galcop's technological superiority and the luxury of its leaders, but they'll drop a few back to other planets to reward local groundside sycophants. It's all strictly regulated to keep everyone in their place.

I think I might stick to believing it's a daily productivity figure...