Pirates! Yar, aaargh! Criminal gangs and piracy are more egalitarian and honest for economic reasons, governments and corporations more rapacious and unfair for, again, economic reasons. This is not libertarianism; I consider it social democracy in action vs. seeking monopolistic advantage, corruption and the natural decline of the body politic. Grey has episodes on piracy and rules for rulers which elucidate on this and of which I approve, of course.
How does this apply to starships and strange new worlds? I’m glad you asked me…
You need starships to get to strange new worlds, unless they’re in your home star system, in which case a spaceship will do, the simpler the easier to go starfaring or spacefaring, especially outside of an atmosphere, among the asteroids, comets and icy moons and rings of the ice and gas giants, so most everywhere in the real galaxy vs. stereotypical space opera. If we’re talking about the typical star trek/wars ripoff, we need a doubletalk stardrive to get to other stars with those habitable worlds, planets or moons with large areas of arable land with just enough precipitation at tolerable temperatures with fertile soil and no or easily displaced, enserfed, enslaved or otherwise conquered local populations.
(Doesn’t seem so fun and glorious put that way, unless you get off on that sort of thing, which, ew..)
What I’ve been working on is world maps based on low polygon count spherical polyhedrons, often very low. I have been obsessed with a lot of ‘rabbit hole’ stuff, mostly making triangles and triangle meshes, when I really need to figure out more of a schematic, I guess. I have statted out worlds before, all the physical attributes, then when we get to land vs. sea and arable land, that’s where I go off the rails and could stand to leave it more generic, have a schematic going on. I start with a fraction of the world surface which is land and by default the rest of the surface is sea or ocean. The other way around is usually a fraction which is sea/ocean, a hydrographic ratio of something which averages around the square root of one half, about the same as Earth at 71%. I can have the page do some math functions, math.sqrt(math.random()+1)/2) for HR and subtract that from 1 to get the fraction of land. Then I want to portion up the world by blocks of longitude and latitude, representing more or less where the landmasses and seas are.
I don’t seem to be able to dynamically change the shapes of the divs; I can create and remove them, but I’m doing something wrong, somewhere. So I’m going to just write a page to randomly spit out some land and sea areas and general locations.
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