On Friday 2004-01-09 03:46, Alberto Monteiro wrote: > Trent Shipley wrote: > > There are two sorts of instability. > > > > One level of instability is at the level of the lineage. The other is > > the stablity of the inter-species political order. Moderate or serious > > disparities in wealth curves mean that a lot of lineages die out. Having > > lineages die out is not necessarily a problem for Galactic political > > stability. In real life lineages are usually short lived--even in > > lineage oriented societies like the middle east or in Samoa. Political > > instability results when MAJOR lines die out. When the King dies without > > issues you get wars of succession. > > Ok. But it seems that in the Uplift Universe few lineages die, or there > would be more aliances based on ancestry than on religious faith.
Why? In uplift a races primary alliance is (usually) based on lineage. Its secondary alliance tends to be ideological. Lineage is small but strong, "religion" is big but weak. > >> But it is _very_ unstable. I claim that the rate should be quite close > >> to 1 client : 1 patron, so that _most_ lines would be mantained for long > >> periods of time. > > > > Lets talk in terms of total clients uplifted during a patron's main > > sequence existence. In that case a replacement rate of one under total > > fairness gives this histogram. > > Ok, I get your point without the histograms :-) > > > I propose: > > So, you would have 35% of _all_ species failing to have a client? That's > too much IMHO. > What about: [ 0- 20) : 0 clients --- some don't want clients --- some shouldn't have clients (a form of uplift failure) --- some get cheated out of clients (the Uplift universe ain't fair) [20- 88) : 1 client [88- 92) : 2 clients [92- 95) : 3 clients [95- 98) : 4 clients [98- 99) : 5 clients [99-100) : 6+ clients Having more that 8 or 9 clients is quite rare. If I did this right it should work out to about 1.1 client per patron. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
