Quote
Originally posted by David Arthur:
**The "Confederation scientists beat the aliens and join the Rebels" thing has been done before (although not very well), but you could probably come up with a good plugin from this.
**
The idea is fine, but I have a problem with the underlying?sp? assumption about human psychology and motivation. I always assumed the EV universe was much larger than what was visible, and simply hadn't been explored.
If these Confed scientists and their offspring have been isolated from the rest of the human universe for a while, it makes sense that they have no problem in attacking Confed ships. Why attack, though? There's a whole universe to settle. Humans are like water and take the path of least resistance. I'd think it'd take more energy and resources to conquor inhabited space vs settling virgin planets.
Of course, if there were political, religious, or cultural reasons for attacking settled human space, then I'd buy it. Here's a potential subplot that might explain at least some motivations:
The original Confed research group had the additional mandate that they were to remain isolated in the fears that the aliens would totally overrun human space. Humanity must survive. They've been monitoring events in the rest of human spac, particularly the civil war. A renouned writer in the--what's you call them? the Plop? Anyway, a renouned essayest among the Plop writes a piece experssing his belief that the current war raging in the rest of human space is a threat to humanity as a whole. Not that the war will eradicate the species--there are too many settled planets for that. Instead, he feels that continued warfare will stop humans from moving from planet to planet. This self imposed isolation of planetary populations and planetary groups (Rebellion vs Confed planets) would eventually lead to divergent evolution and could make the species splinter into visibly different, hostile groups. This would take hundreds and thousands of years to happen, but the original mandate of the group was to safeguard "humanity", so it was their duty to bring order to all of human settled space.
At the time of the writing, the neutral systems between the Rebellion and Confed systems acted as genetic gobetweens. If the neutral systems began to disappear through alliance or conquest, the writer fears the results.
A decade after writing his famous essay, the neutral systems do being to be absorbed by the dominant powers. The writer's essay, already well accepted, begins to become official policy. The political and military arm of the Plop first drive the reminants of the alien forces into human space in the hopes it will unite the warring human factions. When that didn't work, they chose to intervene diretly in a war of conquest.
What they didn't realize was just how powerful their technology had become. They succeeded in uniting the warring human groups, but they have, ironicly created another set of two isolated groups of humans in which genetic drift had already begun.
While watching events in the rest of human settled space, they did not think about their own isolation and the impact it was having of their genetic makeup. After several decades there are indicators that the Plop, as a population, have begun to diverge from the rest of the human populations.
Within the Plot are factions that do not think divergence is bad, and promote settlement of virgin planets by small populations of Plot so accelerate local divergence.
So, what you'd end up with is an uneasy alliance between the Confed, Rebellion, and Artemis group against the Plop. The Plop are themselves dealing with internal divisions bewteen Purist and Divergent groups. The Purist/Divergent conflict could lead to civil war eventually, but not for at least 200 years.
Of course, the Plop could just be led by a powerhungry leader.... 
------------------
"Christ, what if the terrorists' base of operations turns out to be Detroit? Would we declare war on the state of Michigan? I suppose we'd have to." -U.S. Sen. John McCain, misquoted in (url="http://"http://www.theonion.com")"The Onion"(/url)
(This message has been edited by seant (edited 10-21-2001).)
