On Wed, Oct 08, 2014 at 08:51:17AM -0400, Richard Aiken wrote:
> Of course, even my "drizzling" Siru Zirka was forced to stop growing
> eventually, since there was also an upper limit to how large even it's
> loose alliance could get, without passing beyond the point where it would
> be too large to control to *any* significant degree.

I find the "one government to one species" trope to be ridiculous,
frankly.  Traveller certainly isn't the worst offender in that regard,
as it holds only imperfectly there, but it does hold to an
uncomfortably large extent.

So why should the Vilani species have the one government implied by
your statement "too large to control"?  The people, planets, and
states don't need to be all under the control of the same central
authority.  When it gets "too large", sure it might develop into
separate states, some on friendly terms and others not so much.  That
seems perfectly natural.

The opposite of natural is a single state growing by orders of
magnitude but remaining essentially unified for 4000 years.  Then
almost as soon as they discover jump-2, they conquer all their
neighbours in almost continuous wars over the subsequent 1500 years
(without any serious internal divisions in all that conquered
territory) and nobody else reverse-engineers or develops jump-2
themselves for 3000 years despite being much more dynamic and
innovative (which was what half the wars were about, supposedly).
Then those pesky Terrans invent it themselves within a hundredth of
that time and exceed it in a twentieth, conquering the whole empire as
a result.  Go Terrans.  Yay.

- Tim