Just one glaring problem here. The New Hope colony is founded by a sub-light starship. Presumably using cryogenic sleep, souped-up Stardreamer or a generation model. Either way, the initial journey itself will take an inordinately long time, and Earth will have nothing even comparable to regular communications for four centuries - until the invention of the hyperdrive.

Once that had been invented, how would colonists, whose great-grandparents weren't even born when the colony was founded, react to the new arrivals?

They'd treat them as foreigners. Such a colony would by default be a separate political entity, having had no effective control from Sol since the colony ship left. It's not weeks away, it's decades away - and that's assuming engines far more powerful than we know how to build today, and certainly better than those that exist in Pioneer in 3200. Decades in communications lag would effectively make management from Sol untenable.

Earth's diaspora would not help New Hope grow; it's been growing for centuries already, and is not going to take kindly to an influx of mouths to feed. The war shown a century later would either take place immediately, or the two worlds would become allies and trade partners.

Another possible route, and more plausible to me, would be that the Mayflower departs much later on, and that the timescale is compressed. A simple explanation for this is that the Mayflower was the first real-world test of the first generation of experimental hyperdrive engines, which might one day make interstellar travel possible. This drive is big, uses an awesome amount of power, and is a one-off, costing vast resources.

Ten years and a little over six months later, a communication is received from Epsilon Eridani. The prototype engine has worked, and as expected, it has melted a little. A colony is being founded, and preparations will be made to receive further colonists once hyperdrive technology has been refined. Constant transmissions are maintained by each system, but a conversation round-trip time is, of course, twenty one years. They maintain their status as a colony of the federated Sol system, knowing from the start that a technology exists which will enable realistic trade and communication.

Fifty years later (no longer; it should ideally be in one lifetime) the first truly affordable (although still laughably expensive), safe hyperdrive is matured, and more colonists arrive at Epsilon Eridani, a location where they know that (ten years ago, at any rate) facilities exist to receive them. They arrive, and are allocated their resources as appropriate, etc, etc.

Over the next ten years, the diaspora to other systems begins, spurred by E. Eridani's success.

Then, you can have your coup and your Sol taskforce, and Epsilon Eridani's declaration of independence.

I prefer the idea of the Federation being named the Solar Federation, since they're of Sol, rather than specifically of Earth. I envisage a unified Sol system. It certainly feels that way to me when I play.

Edit: Makes us stand apart from Star Trek, Blake's Seven, etc

Content aside, and it's a good start, there is one sentence that seems glaringly wrong to me.

I would change that to 'Fortunately...' 😀

I find it a bit unlikely that the first actual colony ship would be called "Mayflower" - to me it communicates a whole bunch of assumptions who sends it and who is it populated by. International collaborations tend to have boring names like International Space Station and Large Hadron Collider 😉

It had no connotations for me, but having now Googled it, I'm not sure it's a good name at all.

On securing the boundaries of a territory - we have practical experience to draw upon here. It's virtually impossible to stop a determined ship crossing a "boundary." If they don't just jump right past, they'll only stop for a few seconds. It would make more sense for military forces to defend as they did in the times of castles. Instead of a fortified boundary, as the world has become used to in the last two centuries, castles were used as defensible bases from which mobile squads of knights could be deployed to deal with reported trouble. Castles could control a vast area, without having any formal boundaries between states.

Our planets and starports are our castles, and our ships more like mounted cavalry. Creating borders or boundaries wouldn't be practical. This might affect our fiction; the systems between two belligerent powers might not be as vulnerable as we expect. Unless they have useful resources, forces aren't even likely to stop there. If they do, it'll be to group for an attack elsewhere by hypespace.

Hi Thanks for the feedback everyone.

The dates of the new hope colony, the independence wars, hyperspace, etc are all from the given system dato for the ep-er system, so I just used what was already there. in saying that its easy to change if everyone is happy with that.

Re mayflower, it was a placeholder name if anything, but being that it was launched from the western side of hte planet, I thought it appropriate. again easy to change.

I've got some for-profit projects I need to get back onto, but will keep updating this section with more info. Please keep feedback coming, either via here or the wiki.

Thanks!

John

All system data seen in the game so far are place-holder data. All of them can be replaced.

y'all should read the 'Gap' series by Stephen Donaldson, it's got some great jumping off points about the troubles with the expansion of man kind post warp drive and the conflicts and difficulties that arose at between being able to travel vast interstellar distances quickly but the flaws of real time interplanetary travel.

there's a lot more going on in the series than that, but it's really interesting in this context - and they're great books, if a little dark at times.

----

I still think we should let the GAME generate the population systems while it's in Alpha stage... from there , truly unique stories can arise... it's so easy with sci fi to fall into the stock standard story archs

All the dates and history in Frontier, and now in Pioneer, ever remained me Larry Niven´s "The Mot in God´s eye", and a bit the Asimov´s Foundation, it makes sense, because both novels are old SciFi classics that tried to construct solid historic events in their universe.

Were them the inspiration to Elite?, Pohl? (space merchants?)

Greetings

Hi Trumpet, you mentioned the game creating the population centres. I'm no coder so I don't really understand how this will work. I know how elite generated random systems but surely you are going to want some control on it? and what exactly would the game generate? Would it choose which system had which planets, and of those planets which were populated? And then wolud it choose governments? If so how could you allow for really individualised system designs in this process?

Wolud it not have to perhaps be a combination, where there is a hand coded element to give some distinction over a completely randomised galaxy?

Its easy to fall into science fiction cliche if you are prepared to accept cliches, but you don't have to. you can strive for that originality and accept nothing less. Can a computer choosing random population centres be any better than a person sticking a pin in a map and saying 'here there be people'?

I probably don't understand what the code is capable of, but I don't see the problem

Cheers

John

will the generated population centers away on the boundries be fixed or open to ingame factors and events both player and npc driven and as complex as u want to make that system should it go that way once the content gets a bit of a buff ingame rather than just the graphics

I'm not programming it either so my knowledge is limited, but from what I gather the game has a fixed random seed, so although it's spawned each time and 'random', because it's the same seed, it is 'random' in the exact same way as last time when you run the game. That's how Frontier Elite 2 was able to fit on a single disk back in the day. It's procedurally generated.

A popular way to create purely random on a computer (in quickBASIC at least (showing my age and level of skill here 😳 )) was to set the random seed to the computers clock (RANDOMIZE TIMER) .. as the clock ticks over all the time, it'd be a different number and so you'd get a different number each time. Otherwise it wouldn't! And that's the same concept I think they're using to procedurally generate Pioneer.. although it's got handcoded systems in it too like Sol and pretty much every near by real local star, which is marvellous...

So I guess saying 'let the game generate the pockets of civilisation' means just that, the game spawns Civ 1 and Civ 2 and they're at war... the usual storyline is involved... but after a few hundred light years away you discover Civ 3 way way out fro Sol.... hang on what's they're story???!!!

this is all just discussion, as I'm not a programmer (demonstrated).... I'm sure the guys programming this - who are doing such an fantastic job as I've said before- will have a plan eventually.

I just did like Fluffy's idea, and figured that procedurally generated populace spread far and wide would mean ample fuel for the explorers, and also tie into the no footprints in the snow ideal Tomm touched on...

but I'm just a forum poster.... So, I bow to the developers in this one...