Omnae:
I guess the biggest question I have is, Drayson, what do you hope to get out of this?
I expect some kind of recognition on the part of the GC that they cannot sustain this sort of indefinitie military build up and war.
It was continious, unabated military build up that bankruped the Soviet Union (as well as poor economic planning in general, granted, but many credit the nuclear arms race as the biggest contributor). And it is military spending that has so damaged North Korea's economy.
I am not suggesting nor looking for a bean counting policy wherein we assign specific values to planets and need a supercomputer to decide the exact size of our armies. That would be foolish.
And, by that same token, so is Jan's suggestion that I'm trying to make TRF into such a bean-counting faction. That accusation, to me, looks like he does not want to consider the facts.
My biggest issue is that, by and large, GC roleplayers ignore entirely the idea of history or economy. Joren's attack on Bilbringi, if his account is to believed, is made up of the best ships and soldiers from across the Coalition. Despite the fact that two wars have very likely left their military scrambling for good soldiers.
I do not think it is unfair to suggest that, because of the BDE war, the GC is lacking in high quality troops at the moment. Yet when I make mention of that in an IC thread, Joren's response is "oh, actually they're the BEST soldiers EVER, and they're PRETENDING to be bad".
There's absolutely no acknowledgment of the costs of war. It's just assumed that the GC has an endless supply of super amazing soldiers to fight all their many battles.
And for a community where our single rule is "realism", there seems to be a lot of hostility towards me when I point out this lack of realism (which could be construed as a breach of the single rule). And I wonder why. A lot of it comes from people partial to the GC, and very little of it actually has any merit. With the exception of Corise, the responses have been "you're trying to make TRF too numbers based" (untrue) and "you're a dick" (true).
Whether or not TRF as a community will push the GC to operate on a more realistic level I don't know, but I doubt. Because, it seems, the GC is exempt from explaining itself and the rules do not need apply.
Yet when it comes to TNO, which realistically should and does (imo) have a sort of "sphere of influence", we take flak because it's "unfair".
Which suggests to me that the realism "rule" is just a word, which means nothing. The GC is allowed to operate unrealistically, and TNO is not allowed to operate realistically.
So, what's the deal? Are we actually going to make an effort to play with some sense of realism, or not? Or do we pick and chose when it applies, in order to screw TNO?
[size=1]"So the woman asked me what I wanted on the sandwich and I said I do not care it is for a duck, and she was like oh then it's free. I was not aware that ducks eat for free at Subway. It's like give me a chicken fajita sub, but don't worry about ringing it up, it is for a duck.”
-Mitch Hedberg
[/size]