Quote:First off, not everyone in Fenspace is an American. The culture of weapon ownership is substantially different in the US than it is in the rest of the developed world, and that puts a fair bit of peer pressure on the American minority.
Firstly: guns. With all the American, libertarian, survivalist and post-apocalyptic, and military sci-fi fans around, I have a hard time believing that people wouldn't try to weaponize their cars, ships, etc. If you guys say no, okay. But why?
Second, there's the logistics element. You can only cram so much into a vehicle, no matter how big it is. Considering that there's no hostile wildlife (except for the American libertarian survivalist post-apocalyptic military sci-fi fans ) and no pre-existing source of food Out There, are you going to pack a chaingun that you'll probably never use or an extra day's worth of groceries that you'll definitely eat?
Third, there's the infamous and oft-cited Kaboomite Incident at Kandor-con. Who wants to be seen as being as big an idiot as the (insert expletive of choice here) who caused that, especially when you may need other people's help just to survive?
There's also the Trekkies' "I will not kill today" mentality, the Barsoomians' "using firearms is cheating" mentality, and so on. Some people just don't want anyone to use ranged weapons, and that ties back into the peer-pressure element I mentioned above.
Put together, this is enough to get people's habits formed in the first half-decade before OGJ, and habits can be very hard to break.
Quote:I think that's the wrong paradigm to go with, at least at the start of Fenspace. (And, as I said above, habits can be very hard to break.)
Especially something that is so tied in with ideas of self-defense, self-reliance, the "frontier spirit", etc. etc.
Instead of the "frontier spirit", consider the "right stuff" - the idea that the brave people who venture into space are able to rely on their own wits and talents instead of depending on the crutch of technology... such as weaponry. The closer you can come to this "ideal", the more "right stuff" you've got.
Quote:Yes, we know. Check out the background of the crew of the Pinafore for an early example.
There's, uh, there's more uses for slavery than just as labor. Sad to say.
But there's the logistics question again. When you don't have very much room to carry around food, are you really going to split your food with someone else? Or are you going to go with those "particular Internet videos" that don't take up space in the car and don't raid your supply of cheezie-poofs at 3 AM? (Those who just can't do without real person-to-person contact often end up patronizing someplace like Candy Apple Red's every now and then, but that's not a slavery situation.)
-Rob Kelk
"Read Or Die: not so much a title as a way of life." - Justin Palmer, 6 June 2007
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012