[OOC] New Dawn Rising

[Jig]

@Inkdrop

If you look at our two claims, you'll notice they correspond quite highly: yours are all nordic islands, while my territory is a nordic peninsula which will also, I realise, have to account for its enormous coastline with some naval expertise. Crucially, the main shipping route (assuming sea travel) between my one tiny island off the coast of North America (my turf is coloured baby pink) will be... smack bang through sea that your territory will have dominance over.

Judging by the peaceful nature I'm getting from your character sheet, would it be fair to assume that our nations could have a friendly relationship (at least to begin with)? I don't want to set anything in stone, but rather than scattergun a whole sheet and hope it works, I'd rather work out what I'm dealing with beforehand. I'm not envisioning my nation (The Jodesian Empire / Jodesia) to be overwhelmingly (or even remotely) culturally compatible with yours, but nor is it stupid enough to be belligerent in the face of a useful trading partner. Given that Oceos appears to be focussed on naval military and it's making increasing sense for Jodesia to go in that direction, a formal alliance between the two nations could actually stand them in good stead.

Everybody

Could I maybe be cheeky and suggest that people include an indication of their territory on their sheets? It would save a lot of cross-referencing text with finding the person's claim-post.

[Willy Vereb]

<Snipped quote by Willy Vereb>

Excellent point; though, aesthetics and maybe history aside, my question is broadly the same - what is considered excessively powerful? While I'm not a warfare buff and don't know names of things, it's very much inspired by the monstrosity that Germany was trying to build that was considered technically stupid and impractical in the sense that nobody really knows how useful it would actually be. What I'm kinda hoping for is something that could legitimately scare off a ship that got too close - provided it works. But, as I ask - is that OP?

Zeppelins, if I choose that line, would be contemporary inventions. Only the tank (which for all intents and purposes is one big-ass stationary cannon) would be pre-Cataclysmic.

@Jig

Well, you can scare off warships with large anti-ship rockets for sure. In the 50s they were coming up as the new scary-scary thing. Soviets had anti-ship missiles that looked comically oversized on a ship.
Unless you make the super tank utilize futuristic super armor along with other super technologies there's no way a tank can outright match a warship.
Let me put it this way, battleships like the Iowa-class were so damn tough they could absorb literal hundreds of bombs and even from a battleship cannon they could take at least a few dozen before sinking for sure. That is because battleships are both big and heavily armored. Actually armor is almost meaningless next to the smart design choices they made in order to maximize survivability. Thus you could have nearly a hundred penetrating hits yet the battleship could be still seaworthy enough to return home.

You might try mounting battleship ordinance on a huge tank but it won't scare away a decent warship. For starters artillery are far from accurate, especially on moving targets. Your cannons WILL miss a ton before scoring any hits. Second, warships by their size mount more ordinance than a tank. Lastly and most importantly warships are damn tough overall. Prior to the modern doctrines which just prefer not being hit the warships were massive sponges of firepower, especially battleships. Your super tank won't be able to replicate this since all the critical parts are squished into a much more compact package.
Granted, a well-made big gun can each for 40-50km thus it could scare off anything but a battleship. And once a nation uses battleships you shouldn't rely on a single defense system to begin with.

So if you wish to stick with the idea of super prototype tank then try something like the P1500 Monster built of titanium-aluminum alloys. That'd cut back on the weight of the vehicle by 40% so it would be closer to "just" 900 tons. Add a flexible suspension and wide multi-track system and you get a workable device. You can also make it nuclear powered if you want (though it might be not as feasible for you). Even without a reactor the vehicle should do a flat 40 km/h without much problems. The main issue would be the sheer size of the thing. That and it'd cost quite a fortune to make thus explaining why you own only one such vehicle.

Alternatively you can opt for a pre-war find. How about an ancient railgun armed mammoth of a tank called BOLO?
Its a sentient vehicle which lacks many of its original function but self-aware enough to prevent tampering to its in-depth design. It's made of composites which in turn make it rather light. Its main weapon is a powerful railgun with over 300 kilometers of range. Since railgun projectiles aren't that complex to build you can supply it with ammo (although less effective than the original). The rest is on the advanced ballistic computer of the BOLO which allows you to fire shots with much greater accuracy than otherwise possible (though still not perfect). This would effectively make the tank worse than contemporary missile systems while cheaper to maintain. The outer hull and propulsion of the tank required replacement thus they aren't OP. The only super advanced parts are the AI and the railgun, and you can touch neither.
How does this sound?

[Inkdrop]

@JigI will create a map of Oceos when I get time using a cropped version of the GMs map. The Oceons might designate routes for your trading vessels and may occasionally monitor traffic,but they will have enough problems as island dwelling mutants, so they won't want any trouble.

[Jig]

Heh, you've really spotted my weakness in NRP's: this kind of technical, non-political history is something I just really don't have. I'm kind of aware that 'making sense' is great, but part of me has the attitude of 'this is fiction' - particularly given the maximum that sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic, and this is hand-me-down sci-fi from the nation's forefathers (ie: a pre-war find. Maybe you missed that?). Sure, in the real-world, blowing up a warship just isn't really a thing with a tank, and I take that as read - but this isn't the real world.

The reason I'd like it to be a stupidly oversized vehicle is because it's stranded on an island, both nerfing itself and seeming faintly ridiculous at the same time, while also guarding the vulnerable island at least by discouraging people from trying it on. If it was itself replaced by a warship, that's something that could actually have a practical offensive function, which isn't what I'm going for here. Meanwhile, if it was simply a big fuckoff cannon, somehow it loses something of the compensating-for-something vibe that I feel that a comically oversized vehicle that is also an archaeological heirloom has.

I'm reminded of the battleships that the UK has in the Thames; there was a headline a few years ago about how a boat in London could hit something in the North of the country, if it so chose.

For starters artillery are far from accurate, especially on moving targets.

@Willy Vereb

I feel like this might be the key line, assuming anything quite so powerful isn't off the cards by virtue of being OP: the reason it's impractical is because it's so unlikely to hit. But if it does land a hit, it's gonna sink something.

@JigI will create a map of Oceos when I get time using a cropped version of the GMs map. The Oceons might designate routes for your trading vessels and may occasionally monitor traffic,but they will have enough problems as island dwelling mutants, so they won't want any trouble.

@Inkdrop

Awesome. I'll peruse your sheet as I write mine and double-check certain things with you.

[Shorticus]

a big fuckoff cannon

That is the best phrase I think I'll hear all week.

[Willy Vereb]

Heh, you've really spotted my weakness in NRP's: this kind of technical, non-political history is something I just really don't have. I'm kind of aware that 'making sense' is great, but part of me has the attitude of 'this is fiction' - particularly given the maximum that sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic, and this is hand-me-down sci-fi from the nation's forefathers (ie: a pre-war find. Maybe you missed that?). Sure, in the real-world, blowing up a warship just isn't really a thing with a tank, and I take that as read - but this isn't the real world.

The reason I'd like it to be a stupidly oversized vehicle is because it's stranded on an island, both nerfing itself and seeming faintly ridiculous at the same time, while also guarding the vulnerable island at least by discouraging people from trying it on. If it was itself replaced by a warship, that's something that could actually have a practical offensive function, which isn't what I'm going for here. Meanwhile, if it was simply a big fuckoff cannon, somehow it loses something of the compensating-for-something vibe that I feel that a comically oversized vehicle that is also an archaeological heirloom has.

I'm reminded of the battleships that the UK has in the Thames; there was a headline a few years ago about how a boat in London could hit something in the North of the country, if it so chose.

<Snipped quote by Willy Vereb>

I feel like this might be the key line, assuming anything quite so powerful isn't off the cards by virtue of being OP: the reason it's impractical is because it's so unlikely to hit. But if it does land a hit, it's gonna sink something.

<Snipped quote by Inkdrop>

Awesome. I'll peruse your sheet as I write mine and double-check certain things with you.

@Jig

I said that a huge vehicle mounting an oversized cannon is unlikely but I also gave you two distinct ways to make it work.
P1500 is basically a vehicle mounting the 800mm Schwere Gustav railway cannon. It's pretty much the largest gun ever made. With some automatization and design not sparing the cost you can turn it into a decent albeit prohibitively expensive naval defense platform. If you use sabot shells with rocket assisted or base bleed projectile then I can see you increasing the range even up to 100km. Sabots also have the benefit of being lighter thus perhaps further improving the rate of fire (once a minute sounds fine to me).

Another option is that you literally dug up a damaged and mostly degraded BOLO, a futuristic tank from thousands of years ago. You couldn't save most of the systems but the AI is (barely) alive and the main cannon is very much operational thus you reconstruct the vehicle and then use it as tourist attraction while also acting as defense. Having an ancestral weapon with a quirky personality could be fun.

[Sigma]

First off, regarding nukes. While last night I did like the killsat idea, I would also super appreciate everyone staying clear of nukes, and focus on other, less controversial tech. If A nuke were somehow to be introduced, I'd rather have it as a RP event, something climatic for when the killsat strikes down.

Now on to shorticus.

Okay, so I'm just now starting to wake up.

I'd like to go ahead and ask what sort of technologies were present in the 22nd century (which is when the world went BOOM, right)? I'd also like to pass a few specifics by you for consideration.

So, my idea for the Malagasy Empire is that Madagascar was left virtually untouched by the nuclear war that gripped the world... because it's freaking Madagascar. Almost nobody thought it was important enough to bomb. People were too busy slugging it out with other nations. So, while a few nukes fell on the island nation, it was the rest of the world which took the brunt of the worst.

This means that at the end of the nukes and its own recovery, Madagascar finds itself in a unique position: unlike the nations surrounding it, and unlike many nations, a lot of its infrastructure and such is still standing. Of course, Madagascar in our spacefuture of mankind was never, ever at the front of the pack technologically, but it nevertheless started off with enough leftover pre-war technology to have generally good civilian life and more quickly prepare for its future role as a regional / global power. This is sped along by the fact that the island of Madagascar is seen at the end of the war as a sort of "hidden utopia" that a ton of people along the eastern coast of Africa go on a quest to find.

Lo and behold, Madagascar becomes overpopulated. Like Great Britain in the colonial era, that overpopulation and some discrimination between social classes, religious groups, and clashing cultures leads to colonial efforts on behalf of Madagascar, and its people start to take over the coastlines and islands of the Indian Ocean.

Is this all acceptable? And if Madagascar has a larger-than-average amount of leftover tech, what am I looking at for story purposes? One thing I'd seriously love to roleplay having is some sort of laser rifle that nobody knows how to rebuild because the metals involved were synthetically made in the 22nd century and nobody knows had to remake those materials. Or maybe, despite being generally outclassed by the Middle Kingdom, the Malagasy Empire stays in the game with a combination of advanced naval tactics (thanks to literature on the stuff still being around for them) and a few nuclear submarines looted from where-the-Hell ever they could be found? (Or would nuclear submarines armed with torpedoes and such be blown to bits by the Killsat?)

Oh, civilian technology would be Madagascar's real cookie, note. Skyscrapers and little lovely things in life (microwaves, air conditioners, etc) would still be around, probably with some solar paneling.

@Shorticus

While it is interesting, willy is correct in that a clean slate is the idea, however, you may integrate aspects of this idea to this Madagascar.

Edit: More replies to come.

@Jig I do find the idea interesting, whichever way you go with. A large defensive fort of vehicle sounds neat.

Edit 2: Did I miss anyone?

[Willy Vereb]

The Holy Hungarian League

Nation Name: A Magyar Szent Liga, The Holy Hungarian League
Alternatives: The League, Hungary, Balkan/Hungarian Empire (incorrect yet common name), League of Nations
Common Demonym: Hungarian, although nationalities tend to refer to themselves by those
National Flag: Red-White-Green
Government Type: Federal Kingdom
Head(s) of Government: King Mathias IV, Antony Witos (Prime Minister)
Persons of Importance: TBA
Race(s): Human, Abhumans, Beastmen
Population: 160 million
Religion: Neo Christian Ecumene (75%), 10% Other Religions, 15% Agnostic
Territory:

Bright Green in Europe

General Information

The Holy Hungarian League is a large federation of currently 21 states in Central and Eastern Europe. Described as the melting pot of nations with Hungary being the wax which holds them together the League is known to be a strange mix of tolerance and traditionalism. German or Slavic, human or abhuman it doesn't matter. Hungary welcomes them all. Technically a kingdom ruled by its elected king in effect the true power is concentrated within the League Council and the Parlaiment. Thanks to its size and level of development the Holy Hungarian League is one of the world's leading powers.

History

Hungarian is an ancient culture from the pre-war era, fell along with the rest of the nations during the Cataclysm. They remained forgotten for thousands of years until their rediscovery by the early modern age. Their culture and writings had considerable effect on Central Europe which was presently split up into numerous small states. Using the influence of ancient Hungarian culture as the medium Central Europe united as the Holy Hungarian League in 1848. The strength of the League was truly tested in the Great War during the early 20th century. Fighting in the Franco-promoted Entente the League proved victorious and reinforced its status within Europe.

Economy/Industry/Technology

The Holy Hungarian League is one of the leading economic powers on Earth. The combination of highly developed states along with sheer workforce of the undeveloped members gave room for a yet unparalleled growth. Their policy to allow abhumans or even the barely intelligible beastmen also gave them a competitive advantage as cheap masses for low skill labor. In addition Hungary did not neglect in science and they're the leaders in electronics, robotics and material sciences. In the recent decades they extensively built nuclear plants through the League in order to feed their increasingly power hungry industry.

Culture/Demographics

The League promotes universal suffrage and fair treatment of all its citizens. Yet in effect the diverse population leads to massive inequalities. One such clash is on the inter-state level as the more developed nations practically siphon out workforce from the poorer states, making their situation even more difficult. Meanwhile the citizens of developed states feel threatened by foreigners stealing their work. The relation between humans, abhumans and beastmen are similar. Certain abhumans are naturally better suited for certain jobs which makes regular humans feel pressured. Abhumans are viewed with mixed disgust, envy and fear. On the other hand beastmen are viewed as the primary wage stealers in low skill labor, a competitive advantage no one else could keep up with. Aside from this their barely sentient intelligence makes beastmen target of extremist who view them less than human and more like a type of livestock. In response Hungarian laws made several steps to protect beastmen from abuse or mistreatment. Although recognizing their gullible and easily manipulated nature these laws also somewhat reduced their rights compared to normal humans. The friction between different races,nations, ethnicities and social ranks is a neverending issue for the Holy Hungarian League.

Military Information

TBA

@Willy Vereb

@SigmaI also semi-finished my NS here.
160 million is a bit realist estimate for the 1950s population of the lands I currently occupy. Basically you can think of my nation as a weird mix between Russia and Germany with aspects of Austria-Hungary or the Holy Roman Empire. Add wage inequality issues combined with racial differences and things can get really interesting.

[Sigma]

@Willy Vereb Awesome :) and you're welcome to move it to to characters, for more easy access.

[Shorticus]

@Sigma Should I PM you more about this after class? About specifics of what I can have.

[Sigma]

@Shorticus Sure thing.

[Nerevarine]

@Sigma

Have you gotten a look at my sheet yet?

[Sigma]

@NerevarineYup, it looks great with me. You can move to characters.

[Brink_]

Seeing as most everyone has their plots laid out and there seems to be more than enough nations to get this going, I was wondering if anyone was willing to discuss the establishing of NPC states...

[Sigma]

@Brink_ I think that sounds like a good idea.

[Shorticus]

I'm about to head to class, but I definitely think there are some good opportunities for NPC states to be placed between myself and Nerevarine. I could see Australia being partly unified, too. Maybe the area from Ethiopia to Egypt is a nation?

[Brink_]

yeah i was thinking just that for the ones I have in mind for Africa, something along the lines of former protectorates of franco-iberia that had forcibly seceded and serve as the only semblance of civil society or reliable infrastructure in the region.

[Sigma]

Once everyone who wishes to contribute NPCs have done so, I shall update the map.

[Isotope]

I added some northern territories for myself (and maybe removed the ugly black lines)!



@Nerevarine Want to work together on an NPC Japan seeing as we both have designs for it?

Also @Sigma@Monkeypants We should add some in NA.

EDIT:Added Brinks African NPC's

[Sigma]

Here's some of my contributions, not quite sure what thay'll be yet :P



And excellent work on the African NPC's @Isotope :)

Edit: Although let's not goo too crazy everyone :p Gotta leave room for some potential new players.