Managing the bureaucracy of just one country is a nightmare IRL, but in stuff like Star Wars, the Empire manages millions of worlds with trillions upon trillions of citizens. The Romans were having a hard time holding onto the Mediterranean at their peak so I struggle to see how any one entity could hold onto an entire planet, let alone millions.
>The Romans were having a hard time holding onto the Mediterranean at their peakI also think holding onto a planetary civilization is hard when you're at peak Roman technology
You can't go faster than the speed of light so it wont work. Galaxy spanning empires... are fiction!
>>98246064>Galaxy spanning empires are fictionNot just fiction, which can include plausible falsehoods, but fantasy (which includes the impossible and highly improbable).
>>98245159Lightspeed barrier is your worst enemy. Your response time to revolts/rebellions has to be fast enough. You must figure out it happened or will happen, assemble a fleet/army to go there and sort it out, and travel. This can't take more time than months, a year maybe.If your communications and ships don't cheat by being FTL, you cheat by having oracle machines that predict problems and solve them before they get bad enough. Or maybe a time police going back 50 years to prevent the neglected social issue from being neglected so bad the unemployed masses become easily radicalized by power-hungry demagogues.You can try something different, like feudal autonomy based on captains being the lords/dukes/kings that can decide things on their own. The ship is the castle and the marines are the men-under-arms. The eyes and ears, agents of the King of Kings, might be watching, might come by 10 years from now. The captain's autonomy is tempered by the sort of paranoia seen on panopticons.Or instead of autonomous captains, nomad drone swarms act on programming that depends on the local system attending certain criteria, if it doesn't, the software triggers the correction protocols, going from lawfare to scorched earth. The swarm lacks sentience, has no personal interest to conflict with its programming. Lobotomized eunuchs.http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/09/crib-sheet-neptunes-brood.htmlhttp://web.archive.org/web/20110612062338/http://www.costik.com/inttrade.htmlhttps://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/empiredyn.php#canempireexist> [link for sharing] There are some practical question about whether a government on the scale of a galactic empire could function, mostly because bureaucracy has poor scalability.>For me, this is one of those gray areas in the writing of science fiction novels. Much like faster-than-light starships in fact. Yes, it may be impossible. But you want it, your readers want it, everybody's doing it.
>>98246102What about an empire spanning just multiple star systems?
>>98246199Cool ideas. Ty anon.
>>98245159>How would a galactic or even universe-spanning empire work?Travel, communication, and information processing, and it's associated technologies, would have to be at a completely insane level of development to manage an entire galaxy. Any bureaucracy is ultimately limited by its' ability to quickly communicate with itself and integrate all of its' moving parts. Modern countries have been allowed to become as big as they are, complexity wise, exactly because we've innovated so much in things like television, phones, internet, postal services, where it's actually possible to conveniently exchange messages with people across vast distances. HOWEVER, with all that in mind: if you want to scale up society you also have to scale/keep up with the production of "highly skilled smart people", or else you'll get what's called the "Baumol's Cost Disease". Sometimes called the *Baumol Effect, it's basically: innovations in first and secondary industries productivity rise and rise, but for whatever reason education, training, increases in the value and availability of human capital, lag behind, this in turn causes the cost of human-services (doctoring, teaching, nursing) to rise exponentially. *A more /tg/ related example of this phenomena is how in medieval times people lived in incredibly stratified societies where social development outside of your cast was extremely difficult or impossible. There were, however, still smart people: architects, alchemists, engineers, but they all either belonged to very insular guilds or were exceptionally individuals patroned by affluent nobility. This is how you could have most people living in cow-shit mud huts, but still have cathedrals, suspension bridges, and magicians making clocks and turning piss into cloth and metals.
>>98246328Just make all communication instant regardless of distance.The setting is already fucked from having faster-than-light travel, so you might as well remove "data lag" as well.
>>98246258You're welcome. I'm genuinely glad to be helpful.
