Greetings, people of OA

[The Astronomer]

Just to add to the excellent advice from Dfleymmes1134 has provided:

Given the scale of the Rho Ophiuchi system, it would be quite possible - and possibly more interesting - to have multiple polities occupying it. This could take the form of multiple independent polities with none really affiliated with the big Sephirotic Empires. Or multiple Sephirotics could all occupy different parts of the system. Or it could be some combo of this. A thing to note with OA is that the various political entities don't generally follow the traditional SF notion of entire volumes of space being the territory of a single polity. While this does happen as a side effect of all the stars in a given volume being claimed by a given polity, it is just as common for Star X to be part of Empire 1 while Star Y is part of Empire 2 and so on. Or even different planets, moons, asteroids or habitat clouds each being part of different empires within a system. The Sephirotics mainly compete with ideas rather than territory or guns, so this is generally not seen as a problem.

Note that you do not need to describe all of these polities in detail. You could just say they also exist in the system, probably with some mention of where (around which star, in some nearby nebula, etc.), but it need not be super detailed. Your main polity that you're describing here could be in a particular locale and be doing its thing while the other polities are off doing theirs. If you wished you could even make it an Asymptote System if you felt so inclined.

In terms of population - the archai do limit overall population but are generally subtle about it and there are plenty of systems with populations into the low hundreds of trillions and one or two in the quadrillion range. If you want to do a smaller population that's fine too, of course.

Finally, this system is deep in Terragen space - even though it's not in the Inner Sphere, it's very close to it - so is going to have been inhabited fora very long time and be very old. So room to add in a good bit of history if you wish (it's not required you document every event taking place over thousands of years) as well as odd cultural and historical artifacts and such.

Hope this helps,

Todd

Hello Drashner1,

I was essentially thinking that I would just start writing the polity at ~1700 AT when it was colonized, and just write each decade after the next, taking into account other events that were happening in the OA timeline. I actually have experience doing this - over the last year I wrote nearly a hundred thousand words describing just twenty years of the history of a single system on Fandom. Presumably this level of detail would be reduced by at least an order of magnitude.

Regarding population, when I start writing the population will probably be much lower, more like five thousand. Then, over the decades, it can grow. I wanted to know about the maximum the archai would allow so I would know when to stop the exponential growth curve. With all this in consideration I might just come back with the first century or couple of centuries of history when I am making the page, and just get it approved step-by-step. In the meantime, however, I am going to go figure out some biology stuff for the various lifeforms.

Regarding having multiple polities in the same system, I was thinking that basically the S2 would not really care what happened as long as the work it did not want to do itself got done - leading to political insurrections in various parts of the system every few decades, with periods of either prosperity or tense relations between factions in-between.

Sincerely,
Rho Ophiuchi

yeah no worries about time. I and 5-15 others have been building up a rewrite of macrystis for most of the past year. Though you -can- try writing multiple articles each week (in which case editors might not be able to catch up )...You can move at the pace you want, though it's usually good to give -some- kind of response to folks within a few days to a week

Hello Dfleymmes1134,

Thank you for the advice and support! By the way, how much should be on the system's page? Should all of the information pertaining to it be on the page, or should there be sub-pages for the planets? Should there be sub-pages for the species, but not for the planets?

Sincerely,
Rho Ophiuchi

1. Going by Gaia’s latest data release it seems Rho Ophiuchi is roughly 450 ly away. Starships during the early Federation can fly at around 0.2c, increasing to 0.35c towards the end. It being colonized by 1700 AT is impossible. For comparison, Spica, a star 250 ly away, was colonized in 2499 AT.
Disclaimer: I did the calc while lying on the sofa, I’ll do a more in-depth work, along with linking the data panel for the star system I just cobbled up, when you decide to make a thread on this project.

The population of the initial colony must be large enough to maintain a self sustainable economy. It’s not clear how many people is needed though, so I’ll leave the details to others, and/or later.

2. Feel free to check out the page on the Ran system to get a general gist of what you could do. If you write pages and pages about many of the elements within a system, you might consider a ‘hub’ page like this, with links to all relevant pages.