I care about this a great deal because I have a great interest in political science. My aurora universe is mostly about the politics, not the warships:
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/board,200.0.htmlHere are some considerations for any given aurora universe:
- The civilian market obviously consumes transnewtonians, because their ships must be made out of TN materials. Also, they tend to grow at a much faster rate than my military, which is where about 90% of the drama in my own internal storyline comes from. My own personal workaround for this is that civilian shipping gets almost all its minerals and fuel from my alien allies, who are lucrative trade partners. Most universes are probably okay imagining that imaginary civilian mines grow up in tandem with military ones, but this doesn't work in my own universe, where transnewtonian elements are scarce and the military is relatively week compared to titanic corporations on the planetary surface that own all the mines and stuff. Another possibility is that civilian ships DON'T need TNs for the shortages you tend to worry about. I kinda doubt anyone has ever experienced, say, a boronide crunch or whatever. In my experience duranium and sorium, followed by vendarite, are my biggest concerns. Maybe civilians can build their starships out of iron or whatever and don't need duranium...they take a little sorium, and you can abstract the missing supplies of all other transnewtonians.
- Excepting shipping, it's not implausible to assume that "Most" transnewtonians would be in military hands. I can imagine my citizens carrying corundium-lined transistor radios around or whatever, but I bet if you took the corundium out of each one and piled it together, you'd only get a few tons.
Basically governments can't run positive balances.
Yeah this one has always bothered me, but I imagine around it in aurora. To be more exact I'd say
large institutions never run positive balances because it's dumb and in daily life we almost never dispute this. Were I to win the lottery, you'd probably think me a fool if I hid it under a mattress or even put it in a bank. A clever man would invest the money in something fun or that improves his life (infrastructure), invest it so as to reliably generate more money over a long time period (infrastructure again) or give it away to help people (tax cuts, social welfare). A government or big corporation running a positive balance will almost always invest in infrastructure (or advertising or laser cutters or research or whatever) or diversify an existing portfolio...or raise salaries/cut taxes/give their investors more money.
But I usually envision "wealth" not as an actual dollars and cents value, which doesn't frankly make a lot of sense in a post-scarcity economy like most auroran economies implicitly are (for civilians anyway, and that's not necessarily true in many campaigns like mine for example). Instead I visualize it as a measure of
Capital and
rents . Rather than get into the weeds about what exactly that means here's a system:
- civilian people who aren't you want things very much. You don't want these things.
- Shipping lines help people get things
- Orders and events from military people who are you can make shipping lines not do this ("deliver a mine to here" or "got shot by a missile")
- "Wealth" in aurora abstractly measures how effortlessly people can get things. A relatively high wealth means people can easily get things. A relatively low wealth means they can't.
- Orders from people who are you decrease wealth, because they occupy a shipping line's time that would otherwise be invested in helping people who aren't you
- when wealth drops below zero, the work involved in people getting things they want is so high that shipping lines would rather help the people that aren't you (for $$$?) than do what you say.
Conveniently this works regardless of whatever your economic system is in aurora.