Inside Scoop page 1

BUILD EVOLUTION... IT'S NOT JUST ACCIDENTAL

by Jezz

Perhaps one of the best moments in Fed is the day you link that first planet. It's a wonderful feeling. You then have to get to grips with all those new displays and start parceling out factories to all and sundry. You skim the builds pages for all the things you can build on agricultural planets and plough your groats into sparkling new infrastructure. But have you ever stopped to wonder why this particular build makes your planet more efficient or that build makes your population want to reproduce?

I thought it might be fun to look at the evolution of one type of builds as your planet progresses so I chose the communications builds. To start with, why are there heliographs and signal towers on agricultural planets when other planets have telephones and Tquark communications? To understand that you need to understand what sort of worker would want to colonize a new planet. They aren't going to be wealthy people, used to living a life of luxury. They are pioneers, people seeking a more simple existence, away from the politics and technology of their present circumstances. Or perhaps they are just seeking something to make their own, a plot of land from which they will grow a better life for themselves. Agreeing to colonize a new planet might be the only option for a poor person, living in Earth's Level Seven and wanting more than that squalid circumstance in the future. They sign up for that Agrarian Utopia, eschewing all that technology has wrought.

But even in an agrarian society there is a need for communication. While a farmer's life is hard with long work hours and little time for frivolity, they must still cooperate in times of need. Even with no spare resources to build complex communications systems and a feeling that too much technology leads to the evils of the decadent society they left behind, farmers still need to be able to send simple messages like "I need help" or "The harvest is ready, send pickers". Signal towers are the obvious solution, requiring hardly more than someone to keep a look out for a signal and a prearranged meaning. The benefit to production of this sort of communication is obvious. It allows farmers to signal for more workers when the crop is just right for harvesting or can warn of danger across distances that would take days on a slow canal boat, but it doesn't offend the anti-technologists or waste manpower and resources.

The problem with maintaining an Agrarian Utopia of that nature is that subsequent generations were not exposed to the problems that caused their predecessors to value the simple life. And once gold is discovered in them there hills, the younger generation will naturally want to seek their fortunes. As any resource planet owner knows, mining brings with it a host of problems that require more infrastructure to remediate the ill effects. By necessity, communications become more complex. A signal tower can communicate a need, but a telegraph message will communicate the specifics of that need. Mining communities are not self sufficient and need supplies. This means that a simple message of "send help" is not enough. Now the workers need to know whether to send two dozen shovels or three weeks worth of food or a train to pick up the ore. Of course if you haven't built railways for transportation, then efficiency will be severely affected. Canals don't work well if the miners find ore in mountainous terrain. Knowing exactly what is needed and where will greatly increase the productivity of a mining concern.

At first, the planet's resources are simply mined and sold, but it's not long before some of the population see that refining and packaging those raw materials will bring them more groats with less dirt under their fingernails. And so the industrial age is born. Communication from one person to another is no longer enough. Now there needs to be mass communication. Television doesn't just communicate ideas from one person to the masses. It also brings a glimpse of the good life to those who otherwise might have been contented with their lot, but now want everything that they see others have. Television might even be viewed as a massive slide down that slippery slope into the sort of world that the first agrarian pioneers sort to escape when they colonized your planet. And so it goes on, from analog receivers to digital technology and fibre optics to faster than light tachyon transmissions, until at last there is the practical application of the entangled quark, or Tquark. Quarks are elementary particles which combine to form composite particles such as neutrons and protons. If you have a pair of entangled quarks, spatial separation is inconsequential to the transmission of information between the two... or is it really one quark in two different places at the same time?... anyway, the practical application of tquarks brought about instantaneous, or as near to instantaneous as you can get, communication across the entire known Galaxy. There is a short write-up in the Encyclopedia Galactica about Tquarks and how they enable Armstrong Cuthbert to operate its business over thousands of light years. It is the ultimate achievement in communications technology. Once your planet has Tquark communications, the leisure industry has completely up-to-date information on items that can become obsolete almost as soon as they are invented (think computer software), thereby improving the efficiency by not shipping last week's hot new product when everyone is buying the one that came out 3 nano-seconds ago.

So...

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