The Universe of Star Citizen Doesn't Work

[Music] some of you may be asking why undertake such a thing and i i can tell you in one word victory for if there's one thing the vandal has taught us it's that without victory there can be no survival [Applause] that's good i'll take your word for it but why should i care the templin institute investigates alternate worlds but as hard as i might try to remain objective i can't help but develop the odd opinion and when it comes to those alternate worlds that might be described as military science fiction i have a sort of checklist i think that certain elements and staples of the genre should be handled in a specific way and the more items on my checklist i can check off the higher the chance i'll be personally invested in that universe some items are worth more than others and some are nebulous and hard to define and my opinions are always subject to change but generally they're a solid foundation the universe of star citizen is one that has continually frustrated and disappointed me because while it checks quite a few of those boxes on my list it falls short in many others at times it's almost brilliant in the way it presents its world building but in other cases the deeper you dig the more inconsistencies and just plain dumb elements you find unfortunately i have to say that in my opinion at least the universe of star citizen just doesn't work and on this episode of incoming i'm going to attempt to explain why so reheat the leftover stroganoff and grab another can of vanilla coke because this one is a long one but before i go any further i hope it goes without saying that my checklist might be very different from yours and in a universe as vast as that of star citizen there is plenty to love and plenty to be critical of if you disagree with everything i'm saying all the power to you until i can prove my infallibility or get my secret thought police into action my opinion is every bit as valid as yours i should also say that i'll be approaching this universe from a realistic and grounded perspective because that's how it at least tries to present itself there's no space magic or psychic powers that might give it a bit of leeway in the realism department it is a future representation of the world we find ourselves in today so that's what i'll be comparing it to so let's get into it if you're a regular viewer of the temple institute it should come as no surprise that a great deal of the items on my checklist have to do with government and politics and how it's all organized i don't need an exhaustively in-depth explanation as to how a nation functions and the role of all its various institutions but whatever information there is should be at least credible it only needs to meet my barest expectations for how this government might function rather than make absolutely perfect sense in this star citizen doesn't do very well the united empire of earth or uee is the center point of the universe and i believe its biggest weakness its political structure and backstory comes across as neither particularly believable or interesting first it's obvious that a great deal of its government society and even history have been almost directly copied from the roman empire i think taking inspiration from history and crafting a futuristic society is a great idea and even necessary if you want something realistic but in the united earth empire's case the parallels it shares with rome are so obvious and heavy-handed that the entire nation seems anachronistic and implausible ideally this sort of inspiration should be subtle and nuanced not hitting you over the head the roman influences within the uee are blunt and most apparent in its name and the titles it bestows on its upper officials the nation calls itself a democratic empire and its leader is granted the title imperator now i've said before that i don't really like the term empire when it's applied as the official name of a futuristic human state the 20th and 21st centuries were marked by a wave of anti-imperialism where once the term empire evoked feelings of national prestige now it's seen as a type of oppressive regime forcefully subjugating foreign peoples and states when a nation in the modern world is described as an empire it is almost universally meant as a criticism and not something to aspire to this is not to say that empires can't exist in the modern world or in the future my point is that regimes that fit the definition of empire often go out of their way to avoid that association for example during the cold war both the united states and soviet union worked to create what might be described as worldwide ideological empires but since both those nations rose at revolutions and anti-imperialist sentiments using the word empire directly would not be in their self-interest in fact both sides would accuse the other one of being an empire so my point is modern empires don't call themselves empires they try and cloak whatever imperialist agenda they may have beneath some higher ideology we're not an empire we're a federal union he's not an emperor he's the general secretary that sort of thing the uee might fit all the definitions of a traditional empire but it sure wouldn't want to call itself one of course there's always a chance that the negative connotations associated with the term empire might fade away in a few hundred years in the future and it could once again be seen in a more positive light but generally though i don't buy it the negatives associated with the term aren't going away it's probably not going to be fashionable again to oppress indigenous peoples i think it's more likely there'll be some new word without the historical baggage the united empire of earth loses some points in my book for its name but it goes even further in the titles it bestows on its elected officials for all the same reasons that i don't think a modern state would call itself an empire i just can't imagine that anyone would support naming their head of government the imperator again modern heads of state often possess very strong autocratic powers but they make sure to use relatively innocuous terms like president if you're a dictator calling yourself one isn't a great move the uee naming their leader and imperator seems to have been done to further cement their already obvious connection between the united empire of earth and ancient rome rather than to create a believable government i find it very difficult to take seriously just as an experiment imagine if the leader of your nation announced tomorrow that they were changing their title to imperator and the name of the country to the your country here empire chances are they'd be laughed out of the room mere president will not do there are presidents of fire companies and cricket clubs does the vice president have a title in mind i do i do indeed sir i have several [Music] his highness the president [Music] his esteemed majesty the president his excellency the supreme commander in chief [Music] now something at the side the next big strike on the checklist i have against the united empire of earth is how its government is structured this is probably one of the biggest challenges in world building because governments constitutions and the structure of nations are enormously complicated they've been expanding evolving and reforming for thousands of years and even the smallest details can potentially drastically affect the entire nation there's the balance of power between the legislature executive office and judiciary its economic and political ideology and by what method power is obtained these are some of the most basic elements of any government but even they are terribly complex with this in mind the structure of the united empire of earth seems not to have been created by a scholar of constitutional law but rather someone who never pursued the subject beyond grade four social studies the whole thing reads at that kind of elementary school level of understanding but let's back up slightly across history the general rule is that with time governments have become larger more complex but able to provide more services hopefully this is obvious to everyone the government of the neo-babylonian empire didn't need a department of energy and the imperial dynasties of vietnam weren't too worried about regulating the internet but as technology commerce and industry evolves the types of services that can be provided expands as do the types of things that require oversight if we take this basic premise into a universe like star citizen where civilization is not limited to a single planet but spread across interstellar space we could make a few assumptions the first would be that whatever government controls that space would be enormously more complex and intricate than what we see today there would be dozens maybe even hundreds of different institutions and departments and branches responsible for interstellar colonization diplomatic relations with alien races extrasolar biology and things we just can't even imagine the complexity of the uee should be to a modern nation what a modern nation would be to a kingdom in the middle ages but while the united empire of earth has provided a relatively detailed account as to how the nation functions its government structure is presented as so drastically simplified as to make it seem almost cartoonish you call this a bicameral legislature rather than the intricate complex structure you might expect within an interstellar civilization you have this dumbed-down ill-defined system that doesn't seem to make any sense and again i don't need every intricacy of the system explained to me but if you're going to try make sure that explanation makes sense star citizen tries to explain details that maybe weren't necessary and then fails to make them credible this chart purports to show how the united empire of earth is structured i have to assume that this is a very basic version rather than a comprehensive breakdown because so much is missing the way this is structured it seems to me to be roughly equivalent to the chart showing the three major branches of a modern government the executive legislative and judicial so looking at this and trying to decipher it is a little difficult first you have the high secretary which presides over congress which i think consists of the uee senate it seems to be akin to the legislature but the role of this branch is described as the chief executive of anything structural that takes place inside the uee borders communications transportation sewage power agriculture bills and legislation etc this quote reveals a fundamental lack of understanding on what the role of a senate would actually be in their most basic form legislative bodies pass laws and depending on the separation of powers they might provide some sort of balance against the executive branch they are not typically in charge of communications transportation sewage power etc but rather they pass laws and provide oversight even in a more autocratic state they follow the same basic structure as an example within the united states legislature both the senate and congress have the senate agricultural committee and the house committee on agriculture respectively these groups are not in charge of all the farms in america but rather they draw together members of the legislature with relative expertise in agriculture who might not otherwise have a good way to share information or coordinate their actions they will provide oversight over the united states department of agriculture which is not part of the legislature but rather a federal executive department that is responsible for developing and executing federal laws related to forestry role development and food now if all that was just a jumble of words that made no sense multiply that several hundred times over and you should have a sense of the horrifying labyrinth that is federal government the point is it's complicated there is no chief executive of everything related to agriculture infrastructure and whatever else as that previous quote would suggest no one institution or person is in charge of everything in a modern democratic government my idea of a perfect government is one guy who sits in a small room at a desk and the only thing he's allowed to decide is who to nuke and women are brought to him maybe when he desires them what's also strange about that earlier quote is that it implies that the role of the senate ends at the empire's borders that it's only focused inwardly but legislatures are often concerned with things that happen in other nations outside their territory they often have bodies dedicated to foreign affairs armed services and trade it seems perfectly reasonable that the uee senate might have a senate executive commission on the vanduul for example it's not like they have any authority over an alien race but they'd still be concerned with things like national security if the legislature is completely ignorant as to what's going on beyond the borders of the empire how can it pass laws or implement policy to protect against threats or promote international cooperation ok but moving on the next major branch of government as described in that chart is the military this is already kind of strange as the military is usually a part of the executive branch and not displayed as an equal to the legislature or judiciary i'm going to assume that this is still the case and that chart was just poorly designed all in all though i don't have any real problem with this three branches army navy marine corps got it i think it's dumb that the head of the armed forces is called the high general that's gotta piss off all the admirals in the navy right it also implies that there is no civilian oversight over the military which any modern democracy would want but after the mess that was the legislature i'm happy not to spend too much time talking about this okay so next we have what seems to be the judicial branch known here as the advocacy and again the way this is described makes no sense in most nations the judiciary is a system of courts that deals with legal disputes and interprets laws in legal cases it is purposely separated from other institutions to maintain its objectivity and yet the advocacy within the uee is described as an inter-system police force under the high advocate while most planets are expected to police themselves the advocacy handles crimes that cross planets and systems what's being described here is not a judicial branch but a federal police force something that would be handled by a ministry of public or state security but what i think this actually most resembles is holy crap and i get it judge dredd is cool but if there is some dystopian system where mavic renegades are going around executing criminals on site there needs to be some explanation as to why that's tolerated megacity one was born out of the apocalypse the united empire of earth has no such rationale the reason why the police and the courts aren't the same thing should be pretty obvious courts are supposed to be at least in theory impartial the people that arrest you should not be the same people passing judgments and sentences under the uee system not only is this the case but the people who decide whether a law is constitutional are also the same people who track down drug traffickers the way it's described just seems confusing they're in charge of everything related to the law it's a mess of overlapping institutions again to equate the judicial branch of government to being the same thing as a federal police force betrays a fundamental lack of understanding this leaves us with the imperator a single individual who serves as the head of state head of a government and is granted sweeping executive powers they serve for a period of 10 years as basically a dictator i am clinton as overlord all will kneel trembling before me and obey my brutal commands end communication but while this sort of position isn't in itself that crazy there have been plenty of dictators and autocrats across our own history after all it seems incredibly unlikely that this sort of role could exist in the wider system of the empire let's again start with the basics for a country to have this style of dictator there are a few prerequisites the biggest is that it would probably need to be a single party state either only one political party is legally allowed to exist or all the other opposition parties have been suppressed to the point where they're too small to realistically threaten the ruling party instead the united earth empire is pretty evenly split between three political parties the centralists transitionalists and universalists so in this kind of environment where there is no guarantee that your political party is going to hold the position of imperator it's in the best interest of every party to limit the amount of authority the imperator has you'd want to make them accountable to the senate and decrease the length of their term and do everything that you can to make sure that if your party doesn't win they're not sidelined from the decision making for the next decade and maybe if somewhere down the road the centralists for example managed to overtake the other two parties they'd start trying to bring back those old autocratic powers but right now that doesn't seem too likely especially when you consider that the current imperator is an independent which more than any other example shows the ineptitude of this system none of the three major parties were able to get their candidate into the most important position in the government that's insane if the largest political organizations in human civilization with potentially billions of members and trillions of dollars in resources are being beaten by someone with no major political affiliation at all those parties have risen to a level of incompetence beyond my understanding this would be akin to some guy with no political affiliation whatsoever beating both the republicans and democrats and granted complete executive power over both of them as the new king of america i just can't see it happening it's true we are aliens but what are you going to do about it it's a two-party system you have to vote for one of us he's right this is a two-party system well i believe i'll vote for a third-party candidate go ahead throw your vote away and while we're on the subject those three major political parties the centralists transitionalists and the universalists none of them have a clearly defined ideology and their goals are often contradictory the centralists want to keep things the way they are except they also want to defund the military which lies at the traditional heart of uee society they want more government spending but lower taxes the transitionalists want to limit government power but increase government spending the universalists are the worst they want to expand government power but cut the government budget they want more government regulation but less oversight on the economy every single major party has a fundamental conflict within their own limited ideology not that political parties can't be hypocrites but it's usually more subtle and less self-defeating now i bet some of you might be saying to yourself ah but that's all part of the point while the united empire of earth says it's democratic and fair and all these nice things it's actually very authoritarian its parties say one thing and do another and the confusing inefficient manner in which its government is structured is all intentional now that might be but let me stress i am completely fine with a realistic practical system that's filled with hypocrisy and organizations that lack the power to implement change a nation where the justice system is corrupt and a variety of loopholes exist that the government can use to grant itself more power than it's legally allowed to have but the uee as it's being described is so thoroughly simplistic and dumbed down that even someone like me with no experience in constitutional law can find glaring holes in it this isn't a subtle critique of government it's just incompetent however intentional these issues might have been they weren't thought through but rather than spending the next 50 years talking about all the nuances of government allow me to condense it all down to this one point i have never visited the united empire of earth and for all i know that chart wasn't supposed to be interpreted in the way i did and there is a much better one out there that perfectly documents everything in a way that's practical and believable but at this moment with the information i have it seems like the government and politics of the uee was structured by someone with no understanding of how any of these things actually function it comes across as amateurish and cartoonish filled with a bunch of words and no understanding as to what they mean and again i don't need all these details spelled out for me you can just leave it to my imagination but if you're gonna give me these details make sure they make sense let's compare all this to the turians mass effect's own version of a futuristic roman empire now obviously not all my criticism applies here but they make a decent enough point of comparison rather than providing too many details into how their government functions you are instead presented with hints at touring society there is a tiered citizenship structure mandatory military service they control numerous client raises which pay the turian's tribute and overall their militarist and expansionist in this case having fewer details is better because there are fewer inconsistencies to poke at and i can just fill in the gaps the connection to rome is also very obvious but a little less heavy-handed so all the logical inconsistencies and cartoonish elements aside maybe this could be forgiven if the united empire of earth had some sort of really interesting hook something to set it apart from all the other interstellar governments out there next on my checklist is the hard to define cool factor now i realize it's hard to beat subjective on whether a nation is cool but to me the most obvious way this might be accomplished is with some distinctive emblems and national insignia if you got a great flag and some striking iconography well that's half the battle right there but again the uee falls so terribly short on this let's start with their emblem i've spoken about this before so forgive me for repeating myself but this is terrible tens of thousands of years of human history an infinite amount of symbolism from a vast array of cultures and the insignia of mankind is the letters u e e in english usually my criticism for logos like this is that you wouldn't include lettering on the flag of the united earth because among other reasons not everyone speaks english but for the sake of argument i'm going to toss that aside let's pretend everyone in the galaxy speaks english is this still the best design humanity can come up with aside from the laurels which are standard cliche design choices at this point there is absolutely no symbolism here national insignia is meant to evoke the character of its people its values goals and history they typically follow a heraldric tradition that dates back to the middle ages but updated to reflect modern ideologies and changing values this is just tremendously uninspired and generic sadly this same issue permeates through all the iconography of the uee let's take a look at its military insignia now i could repeat myself in saying these are all terribly generic and boring so instead let's compare them to modern day military emblems from a few different countries the united states army has a bunch of different emblems so we'll use the one on its current flag it displays a replica of the war office seal this emblem features a kind of roman armor an ancient symbol of strength and defense the sword half pike musket bayonet cannon cannonballs mortar and mortar bombs are representative of army implements at the time of its founding the drum and drumsticks symbolize the public notification of the army's purpose and intent to serve the nation and its people the phrygian cap often called the cap of liberty is supported on an unsheathed sword and the motto this will defend held by a rattlesnake which has a historical significance due to its use on revolutionary war era flags it also signifies the army's readiness to defend and preserve the united states now let's compare this to the uee army emblem moving on to the navy and just to illustrate that you don't always need enormously intricate meaning behind each element let's look at the emblem of the royal canadian navy its symbolism is relatively straightforward a blue field representing the sea and an anchor representing the navy atop is the crown of the british royalty beneath our golden maple leaves the national symbol of canada and the motto parathy vero parati ready i ready i probably pronounced that correctly right so let's compare this to the uee navy emblem okay so lastly the marines let's look at the united kingdom's royal marines for this one as with the american army emblem this one is designed to commemorate the history of the core the lion and crown denotes it as a royal regiment as conferred by king george iii in 1802. the great globe surrounded by laurels symbolizes its success in every quarter of the world and to honor the gallantry displayed in those campaigns and battles the word gibraltar refers to the siege of gibraltar in 1704 in which the predecessors to the royal marines captured the spanish fortress the anchor is the badge of the lord high admiral and shows the core to be part of the royal navy lastly there is the core's motto per mere per term by sea by land let's finish with the counterparts to this emblem in the uee all three branches of the empire's military have undertaken victorious campaigns fought heroic battles and can boast of a proud history yet their insignia is reminiscent of the results that show up when you search military logo on a stock image website there is nothing memorable or distinctive here and not to harp on this for too long but the lettering on the emblem of the advocacy hasn't even been properly centered how is this not amateur hour let's quickly compare the emblem of the uee to that of the helghan empire a personal favorite of mine here you have the three arrows known as the helghast triad it's meant to represent three interlocking arms each symbolizing duty obedience and loyalty but even if you had no knowledge of helgan society this emblem still tells you something it conveys a sense of martial spirit and evokes fascist symbolism the only thing the united empire of earth emblem tells me is that that's the acronym of the country okay so there's no cool insignia but what else might be looked to as part of my nebulous cool factor criteria how about the aesthetics of the united empire of earth it's cities and spaceships and everything else and you know overall i think it's excellent there is a dazzling amount of footage and imagery documenting every facet of this universe in a way that is truly impressive and most of it looks really good these starships in particular have this mostly ground and practical design aesthetic i mean sure if you take into account pesky things like realistic mass thruster design and aerodynamics they're not going to hold up too well but with spaceship design i can accept a small break from reality until our own world begins constructing a fleet of interstellar starships and i have something solid to compare these two who can say with a 100 certainty that futuristic designs won't look like this my only complaint is that by following this practical believable style they don't stand out too well in my research for this episode it was hard to sometimes distinguish what i was looking at was this starship part of star citizen or just some random design i couldn't always tell and this is an area where having some distinctive flags or insignia would have really helped out but i've already talked about that so let's keep going okay so i can't say with certainty whether the spaceship designs are realistic and practical they look cool and that's good enough to me but i can't offer that same excuse when it comes to things like tanks and armored vehicles these exist in our own world and they have a century of design behind them no matter what new technologies spring up there are still going to be some basic things you want in a tank and other things you don't but right off the bat i do have to give the empire some credit here for deploying tanks in the first place it's something that a lot of interstellar armies forget about insisting on using slow walking targets or just not using any type of armored vehicle at all but again unfortunately the nova the empire's main battle tank is a mess one of the critical aspects of tank design is its profile a low profile is better the smaller your tank the harder it is to hit hopefully i'm not blowing any mines right now but the nova is absolutely gigantic judging from the people standing on top of it it's gotta be about 16 feet tall and 60 feet long that would make it anywhere from four to eight times as large as any modern battle tank i can think of and where modern tanks maximize their interior storage as to fit in as much ammo and fuel and protection as possible the nova is just filled with wasted space it's not a fighting machine it's a luxury apartment on tracks with a gun a vehicle this size would have some basic issues just getting around but it does seem like the uee has solved these issues either that or these images have been faked but even for the sake of argument if we assume that there are no major mobility limitations on this thing there are still a number of reasons you wouldn't want your tank to be this massive the first is that it's just a giant target and this is compounded by its atrocious turret design tank armor is usually angled to deflect incoming shells and the nova is no different but the problem is the turret overhangs the main hull by such a massive amount that any physical projectile shot at this thing is going to deflect off the front armor directly into the turret mechanism one of the main places you don't want a shell fired in anger to end up the second big issue is that secondary gun on top of the turret the one that looks like a futuristic machine gun it's so high and that machine gun's so large that it looks like it can't be angled down it also doesn't seem like it could be angled that high up either any infantry that get close to this thing are going to be able to take their sweet time taking it apart and even a balloon hovering overhead would be able to float with impunity for this tank's secondary armament to actually do anything the enemy needs to be very accommodating the next big issue has to do with the kinds of environments that this thing would be effective within or lack thereof on anything other than a vast expanse of desert or rolling green fields the nova is going to have trouble just fitting into its environment it's probably too big for many of the streets and avenues of any potential urban battlefield at the very least you probably couldn't get more than one of these things to fit the width of an average street so only one of them is going to be firing on the enemy at a time most forests would probably be impassable as well i'm sure this thing could run over the odd tree but could it push through potentially thousands of them again not a great choice if you want this thing to be an effective fighting machine and lastly its enormous size limits just how many of these things you can fit onto a transport at a time given that the uee will likely be fighting any war across a variety of battlefields across a variety of planets and star systems being able to transport the nova tank effectively should be a top priority i'm sure the largest naval transports can probably carry quite a few but they'd be able to carry quite a few more if they were smaller overall the nova is just a dumb design okay so its starships are mostly cool if generic its tanks are wildly impractical the uee isn't scoring very well on the cool factor portion of my checklist well what about its cities who doesn't like a futuristic space metropolis and in the interest of being fair i'm going to immediately give a pass to all the extra solar settlements across the uee if you're telling me this is what a city on the world of terra looks like or that this is a floating city in the atmosphere of some gas giant it seems reasonable enough to me in fact i think they all look pretty cool so some extra points there but where you lose points on the cool factor is with earth i love looking over futuristic versions of earth across alternate worlds i think it's really cool to see how landmarks from our own time might evolve or devolve and how everything ends up but earth in star citizen it fails to inspire we're given three major points of reference here new york shanghai and moscow so let's discuss those starting with new york does it look cool well the image here encapsulates another cliche i'm tired of seeing star citizen is supposed to take place 900 years into the future and yet three quarters of the buildings are identical to our own time period and the new buildings are all exclusively these gigantic skyscrapers it's like no building under 100 stories tall was built in the last millennia and a good number of those new skyscrapers don't really even look like office buildings more like generic sci-fi props with random glowing bits one of them says u-e-e in a hundred foot tall neon letters i don't know it just seems kind of garish to me when was the last time you saw a skyscraper with the initials of your country plastered across it instead of having say windows this next image of new york is a bit more interesting if still somewhat generic everything is just really gray but the main reason i bring it up is because of one specific detail you'll note that several of these skyscrapers are surrounded by what looks like plastic wrap of some kind this is apparently sakura plating which protects ancient skyscrapers from the increased number of pollutants in the atmosphere i can't speak to the scientific accuracy of this but if the atmosphere is so toxic to the point where it has the potential to wreck the concrete and steel of the empire state building why would you treat the symptom rather than the root cause or maybe the pollutants aren't that bad but the sakura plating is meant to reduce normal wear and tear well in that case which really has more of an impact rain and wind or the tens of thousands of people walking around in there we already have methods of renovating ancient buildings and it doesn't involve encasing them in plastic wrap when the wrapping is completed it will look like this for two weeks i feel and i think that is not allowed to give the german parliament to this kind of show business in the end parliament did give its approval to what one newspaper has dismissed as a big potato sack well except for that one time i feel like i'm getting a little sidetracked here but my point is regardless of the necessity and efficiency of sakira plating i just think it looks dumb okay so next on to moscow as a russell file you immediately get some cool factor points for including it in the first place but again we see the same cliches that appeared in new york the city is more or less unchanged except for some new megatel sci-fi buildings with random lights on them i'm also bothered that all the signs seem to be in english instead of oh i don't know russian rather than getting too hung up on this though let's just move on to shanghai again my earlier criticism applies but i like this city the best of the three you get the sense it's expanded well past the boundaries of its current modern borders there's some cool illumination going on and hey the signs are in mandarin so at least that makes sense i'm definitely being a little hard on future earth here it honestly seems no worse than most other depictions but it's also not any better there's no sense of history or progression just a few extra buildings obviously i have no idea what the future of these cities will look like and maybe these images are 100 accurate but i'm grating them on cool factor and it would have been awesome to see a revitalization of the art deco architectural movement in new york or a resurgence of socialist classicism in moscow maybe shanghai could have been rebuilt around a giant crater hinting at some cataclysmic event in its past just something different from the same generic sci-fi shapes with glowing lights i'd like to move on but i also just have to take issue with how some of these cities are described new york moscow and shanghai in our own world at least are all major cities with hundreds of years of history and intermingling of cultures and social classes trying to describe the often ineffable qualities of these places is difficult and i can give star citizen some leeway here but their attempt is another mess of contradictions that remind me of the political parties from earlier new york is described as a bustling center of trade sure whatever i can buy that but moscow is described as having more of an urban blue-collar vibe than new york but also a taste for the opulent this seems to be a bit of a contradiction and it seems terribly reductive to describe one of the cultural hearts of mankind as having an urban blue-collar vibe but who knows lastly shanghai is described as having retained more of a link to the surrounding environment than the vast cityscapes of moscow or new york but i mean it sure didn't look that way in the image i just saw of it and that's my main issue the descriptions of these places often clash with the images provided or my own knowledge of these places earth in the uee doesn't feel like a real place but rather a mishmash of ideas that don't fit together it also just feels stagnant this is supposed to be a thousand years in the future a thousand years ago new york didn't exist moscow was a minor village in the vladimir souzdale principality and shanghai was a market town the three largest cities of that time were cordoba and modern spain kei feng in china and constantinople i'm not saying that a thousand years from now shanghai new york and moscow won't be important there are plenty of cities that have retained a place of prominence across history what i am saying is that a thousand years is a long time time enough for really any city on earth to rise to a place of primacy and yet we're stuck for better or worse with these same three none of them really just seem that cool to me but who knows let's move on to the next item on my checklist i want an interesting history something to give the universe some weight behind it like it didn't just spring into being five minutes before i got out of my spaceship the problem with military science fiction and the era in which it takes place is that if it's too soon in the future you don't leave enough time for technology to change and society to transform too far into the future and it becomes impossible to predict the types of advancements that might happen the current year in which the united empire of earth finds itself is 29 29.51 about a thousand but technically closer to 900 years in the future there are two major issues with this first the level of technology that i've seen does not reflect 900 years of advancements in our own world one thousand years was the difference between the earliest windmills and the fourth generation nuclear reactors and because of the exponential rate of technological development most modern advancements have happened in the last century let's not forget just 66 years separated the wright brothers flight from apollo 11. while the interstellar civilization of the uee certainly features an impressive array of technological and societal developments in the context of 1 000 years it almost seems like humanity is in a dark age of stagnation and yet there's not much in the history of the empire that suggests any reason for this relative lack of advancement no nuclear war that plunged civilization into chaos no great collapse that resulted in a terrible loss of knowledge and that's the second issue with this one thousand year time jump there should be a thousand years of history and there just isn't in trying to explain this point it seems appropriate to try to use the same type of argument that i did in explaining technological development talk about all the things that have happened in the last thousand years and then contrast that with the relative sparseness in the history of the uee the problem with that is a thousand years is a very long time where do you even begin the decline of the british empire the first and second world wars the ideological cold war between the soviets and the united states the development of the internet and the age of information all this occurred in just over a century add in the rise of the holy roman empire the expansion of the islamic caliphates colonialism the renaissance the industrial revolution it is impossible to properly describe just how much can happen in 1 000 years in the time i have available but within the history of the united empire of earth centuries of human development are given only a scarce few sentences there were some wars a government changed and that's about it it feels like a few decades worth of historical events were spread out over 1000 years and nothing much happened in between and again that wouldn't be so terrible if the events themselves were believable or at least interesting and again they're not the main focus of human history after 2380 seems to be the eventual transformation of the united nations of earth into the united empire of earth and it goes something like this in the 2380s human colonies were upset they lacked the influence in the government of the united nations of earth reforms were implemented and the united planets of earth were created in 2541 the upe fought a war against an alien species known as the teverin and during the war the exploits of a young officer named ivar messer became widely known messer exploits his celebrity to enter politics and harshly criticizes the government as ineffectual he lobbies for the creation of a prime citizen endowed with dictatorial powers surprise surprise he is named the first prime citizen and then uses his new authority to declare himself imperator and form the united empire of earth in 2546 this new empire becomes a hereditary monarchy the imperators of the messer dynasty are increasingly cruel and incompetent leading to a revolution in 2792 the new government has ruled ever since ignoring the hundreds of years or apparently nothing noteworthy happened i'd like to focus on the transition of the united planets of earth into the autocratic united empire of earth there are always exceptions but generally when looking at modern world history western style democracies are the most stable form of government they include checks and balances to prevent any one institution from harnessing too much power an independent judicial branch to prevent unconstitutional laws and multiple political parties to compete for votes and appeal to their constituents i've talked about this but don't take it from me take it from winston churchill who said many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe no one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time a democracy reforming itself into a dictatorship is rare but it can happen typically you would expect it to be the result of some major catastrophe like a prolonged economic collapse internal corruption reaching a boiling point or maybe the result of an internal coup d'etat or external invasion or maybe the subtle influence of corporations and political interest groups over decades this is also all much more likely if the nation in question doesn't have a strong history with democracy it can take time for democratic institutions to find their footing so to speak my problem with the history of the united empire of earth is that it doesn't seem to have arisen from any of these conditions there are vague mentions of internal terrorism and inefficient government responses to crises but nothing of the scale to make this kind of dramatic political shift believable in fact the united planets of earth seems to have been well structured to avoid this type of autocratic reform it was a stable democracy that had lasted for over 160 years its citizens were well informed and educated and evolved in the democratic process the entire basis of its original creation was to allow greater autonomy to its constituent planets just before its transition to an empire it had also recently won its very first interstellar war so you'd assume that its current political leaders would be enjoying some increased popularity again i'm not saying that this type of system couldn't fall into authoritarianism i'm just saying that the history of the uee has failed to make it believable a lot of this has to do with the contrived rise of ivor messer the uee's first imperator it just happened so unbelievably quickly during the first war against the alien teveran messer was an army captain and his unit contributed to a great victory in the year 2544. by 2546 he had risen to a position of high general okay so promotions do occur a bit quicker in wartime but for a captain to climb eight ranks or so in just two years to become the leader of the army is insane in our world for a soldier to achieve the rank of general it can take between 20 and 30 years there is also usually some sort of political oversight to the whole process what's even worse is that the rank of high general actually seems to be the equivalent of the secretary of defense so it's just that much crazier he also becomes prime citizen and then imperator in 2546 as well so captain to imperator in about two years vladimir lenin once said that there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen the united empire of earth takes us to the extreme there are centuries where nothing happens and then a few years where centuries happen lenin wasn't entirely wrong there but in my mind it would have been much more believable if ivar messer left the army after the war at some reasonable rank spent the next few decades climbing the political ladder and only started the nation's decline into autocracy that would reach its climax well after his death you would expect pushback from the reigning political parties opposition from judges in the supreme court divided public opinion the list goes on i find it completely unbelievable that the united planets of earth would transition so suddenly into the autocratic united empire of earth but it's even more insane that following messer's death the uee would become a hereditary monarchy as difficult as it would be for an established democracy to slide towards dictatorship this just seems impossible since the enlightenment and the whole idea that power derives from the consent of the governed the notion that a single person or bloodline has been divinely chosen to lead a nation has lost a lot of its followers in our own world every modern successful monarchy has been relegated to a ceremonial role absolute monarchies are rare and almost entirely unstable kept aloft through religion or outside assistance while revolutions in modern history have routinely overthrown reigning monarchs the restoration of monarchs has been rare and almost always brief and a nation is born now let us party like to a 1799. please sir you're destroying my establishment we just created the greatest democracy on earth you low-life commoner what's also strange is that after the revolution within the empire and the restoration of democracy the structure of the government and everything else implemented by the messer dynasty was kept intact after centuries of tyranny massacres and misrule nothing really changed the nation has the same name same flag and seemingly nothing has been done to make sure that the next imperator can't just start all this up all over again did none of the revolutionaries after achieving victory think to themselves that maybe they should try to fix the issues that they were rebelling against so many of my issues with this universe would be solved if that 900 year timeline was reduced to a few hundred years and the events elongated to fill it up the transition from a democracy to empire might be more believable if it took a hundred years instead of just a couple new york could be forgiven for looking mostly the same the lack of technological development would be more understandable etc etc but the further i look into the united empire of earth and star citizen as a whole the less i can tick off on my checklist even things i find pretty cool or interesting from a distance are full of unrealistic or just plain dumb details on further inspection i've chosen to focus on a few of my biggest grievances and it might seem a bit random some of my selections but there doesn't seem to be any aspect of this universe without some sort of issue this is the problem with the universe of star citizen every cool or imaginative idea has been weakened by this overwhelming aura of ignorance names and titles are chosen without any sense of their implications governments have been created by people who don't understand how governments work emblems are designed by people who don't understand what they're supposed to represent and cities are created without a sense of progression or history and what history there is is convoluted impractical and contrived if everything in star citizen was terrible i would feel a lot less disappointed but the worst part of this universe is that for all its failings it is sometimes absolutely brilliant showcasing new ships in a top gear style television show is inspired and something i have never seen done before the design and aesthetics of the ships stations and cities well maybe slightly generic are breathtakingly detailed but for someone like me who wants to live in an alternate world of the far future rather than just fly over one i could care less how perfectly the sun reflects off the hull plating of a spaceship when the universe that spaceship lies within is cartoonish dumb and just plain forgettable now after all this you might understandably ask why bother focusing on all these ultimately trivial details when you can just ignore it all and blast apart space pirates well my answer to this is that when star citizen was first revealed to the world it was accompanied by the quote i don't want to build any old game i want to build a universe and so far from what i've seen we haven't gotten much of either but that of course is just my opinion and even though i too rose to the ranks from an army captain to imperator of the templin empire in just two years i'd like to hear your thoughts star citizen didn't score very well on my personal checklist but maybe it did okay on yours is the united empire of earth actually a really well organized government do you like the emblems of its armed forces is ivor messer just misunderstood did anyone make it this far into the video let me know in the comments below and until next time actually you know what we're not quite done yet because i'm gonna be giving star citizen another shot it's been a while since i did anything but research its world and one hour after this video went live which might be about five to ten minutes after you finished watching it if you watch it as soon as that notification popped up i'll be live on our twitch channel playing some star citizen so head over there you'll find the link in the description now this has been incoming in incoming the templin institute discusses the theories and ideas found across alternate worlds if you've enjoyed this video and would like to join the temple institute consider pledging to our patreon page along with increased security access you'll be able to vote in polls to determine future topics get custom wallpaper every week and receive some other exclusive awards [Music] you

Channel: The Templin Institute

Views: 383,243

Keywords: Templin, Institute, star citizen, star citizen universe, star citizen lore, star citizen explained, star citizen doesn't work, star citizen backstory, star citizen does not work, star citizen worldbuilding, star citizen world, united empire of earth, united empire of earth lore, uee, star citizen uee, star citizen essay

Id: j2PGjGFrFZI

Length: 57min 21sec (3441 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/sonicmerlin]

9:15: "...the structure of the United Empire of Earth seems not to have been created by a scholar of constitutional law, but rather someone who never pursued the subject beyond grade 4 social studies. The whole thing reads at that kind of elementary school level of understanding."

23:15: "...it seems like the government and politics of the UEE was structured by someone with no understanding of how any of these things actually function. It comes across as amateurish and cartoonish- filled with a bunch of words with no understanding as to what they mean."

rofl I wonder who he's talking about. hahahaha

[u/jim_nihilist]

Oh it is Templin Institute. They know their shit.

[u/Lyamecron]

This week is so content-filled it's incredible

[u/keramz]

My favorite comment:

This alleged game is going to be a case study of how to get everything wrong. Terrible flight model, even worse performance and the universe itself nearly as bad as wing commander the movie.

[u/[deleted]]

I've posted a comment, got a response and now see it all clear as day: I don't understand game development.

Yo, since you are uninformed, they had to remove Delamar because there is no server-meshing yet. It anyways didn't belong (lore-wise) to the system stanton and removed it for increasing server cap because it is more important to test new features like xenothreat live-event with as many players as possible. The 3.0 patch was out almost 4 years ago, and game has come miles ahead of it. We didn't had city planet arccorp, or Microtech and Hurston wasn't fully fleshed out. We got caves, mining, bounty missions, prison, reputation system, now getting gas-planet Crusader with new cloud tech and finally we are heading this year towards physicalized inventory using i-cache and then mostly next year to first implementation of Server Meshing, that will begin to solve the problems of server-cap and limitation of planets and star systems. Now do tell me what is so hard to understand and which other game is pushing the boundary to this level?

Please tell me that was one of you guys. Please.

[u/mikan99]

Thanks for this channel. It's only in the last few years that I became a 90% single player only gamer. So for the first time, after I finish a game I just really want to dive into the story and world and discuss it, so I've been looking for more content like this. This channel seems like exactly what I'm looking for

[u/Bothand_Nether]

trope city

​

here, have a huge pile of cocaine

it'll make it so much better

[u/optimistic_prototype]

Brilliant, it's high time someone tackled the insipid lore as well. What are the chances for another rebuttal by the visionary Chairman?

[u/oopgroup]

This is pretty nitpicky. A lot of the points come from concept art too, which is kinda dumb.

I will agree with how pathetic the military symbols are, though.

All in all, I don't think 90% of gamers give a shit about the deep lore. They just want to play with friends and blow things up. There aren't really many RP players out there in comparison to the 'normal' players.