A fleet. Ian’s unveiling a fleet, and I don’t know how to keep up with that. I like that it raises the stakes though. The trouble is that a fleet requires an opposition, and he’s not drawn anything like an opposition yet. Which I suppose gives me the freedom to create one for him—for me at least.
You have a fleet because someone else has a fleet. More accurately, you grow a fleet as your opposition grows their own. Or I suppose you grow a fleet to protect something large in anticipation that others would take it from your control. Stockpiling warships is a symptom of paranoia and planning. Insurance. It depletes a reserve of materials, time, money, and personnel which could have been invested elsewhere building commerce or peace or art.
Maybe the natives of Terminus have a bit more power than I’d first imagined they did. What kind of power might that be? They could control similar ships. They could post a biological fleet of some sort with animals like the honga or maybe nothing so huge, but just numerous.
My thoughts keep drifting to the planet excuse for answering this question of opposition. If I put these guys on a planet in a Star Wars-like universe I could just make this resource of flying material like spice on Dune or some such thing. Make these guys on Terminus the miners of the resource which powers all the hovercraft and speeders in the universe. I think this is the influence of Firefly on my thinking these days.
259 words on day 772