Agents Of Empire/Brainstorming

For random thoughts about stuff.

• If we restrict communication speed to lightspeed, then we get a courier system similar to Traveller's. Might be worthwhile from a game perspective.
  • Possibly a guild system for the couriers, outside the house politics by general agreement of the houses? Vimes 20:06, 3 May 2011 (PDT)
    • It seems that, given the state of the Empire, most vital-infrastructure things like the courier service, guaranteed currency, etc., would be the nominal purview of the Empire itself, and theoretically outside house politics -- but nobody knows how long this is likely to be the case, and most major Houses are quietly building up their own systems.Maga 20:23, 3 May 2011 (PDT)
    • So possibly empire-sponsored guilds for things like that, nominally outside of the house system and reporting to the Emperor, but in practical fact either not reporting to anyone or reporting to one or more houses with deep pockets. I'm thinking courier services, some form of notary / witness service, maybe a moneychanger system (tightly tied to the couriers, to handle the fact that currency has violently different worth across different planets), and maybe some sort of medical practice (thinking Dune's Suk school, basically). Vimes 20:28, 3 May 2011 (PDT)

• Millenia ago, when the colonization race was spreading through the galaxy at full tilt, countless human psychics were systematically hunted and slaughtered, during a time now known as the Mind Cleanse. But legends tell of a handful of heroes, the Psy Shields, who championed the resistance. A near-constant element of the stories is that the Shields used some sort of technology which could mask psychics from detection, strengthen the abilities of psychics, or possibly even enable non-psychic humans to practice some psychic abilities. Of course, modern metaneuroscience considers that sort of technology theoretically impossible. But new information supposedly linked to the Psy Shields (if such people existed) do sometimes gather a good deal of interest among the fanciful, or desperate, powers in the galaxy.

• The chainsaw-sword is an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

• The Imperial Archives, accumulated over five millennia, take up a cave-system the size of B*****m (actually, several: there are probably a number of backup Archives at varying levels of security clearance, scattered around the galaxy.) Innumerable shifts in data standards, administrative overhauls, half-assed re-organisations, theft, censorship policies, the increasingly hermetic culture of the Archivists and the sheer scale of the thing have made anything over a few hundred years old painfully difficult to retrieve. The flourishing trade of archaeospionage: finding the useful stuff among the seas of dross, stealing, modifying or destroying it before someone else does (or the Archivists catch you and use your skin to resleeve some data-handles.)
  • This is a family board, don't use language like that so incautiously.