Why Do Kilrathi Not Exist?

err, i'm sorry but the exact opposite was the case...

sparta won many battles cos of its warrior mentality, but lost the war to athens exactly because it had no economy (or at least compared to athens)...

bloody interesting city-state tho... "come back in victory or on your shield"
 
smoore_500 said:
I'd just like to point out that about 500-600 BC there existed Sparta in Greece. The Spartans became a large power by slave labour and all their nobles had to successfully undergo gruelling military training from age 7 to 20, making their nobles the backbone of their army, although they did enlist other soldiers. Doing this made them one of the strongest military forces. They were beaten after they reduced their number of nobles to allow more wealth to be distributed among the surviving nobles, reducing their main military force from 10,000 men to 700 men strong.

I'm just pointing this out to demonstrate that the Kilrathi economy is viable and that mass slave labour, training nobles intensely in warfare and having a large warrior caste of nobles has historically worked before.

Cheers

This is incorrect - Sparta's CITIZENS were the soldiers; there was no 'noble class' involved. This was because they took over the Messenians, who had both enough land to feed the Spartan population and outnumbered them by ten to one. After nearly being wiped out by a successful revolt in 640 BC, the Spartans reworked their society to become more militaristic. Every citizen (not counting the foreigners - perioeci who were second-class citizens but who did a lot of the merchant-work and kept their economy moving - and the helots) was expected to defend the state, which is why they trained, lived in barracks, and had lives of self-denial and discipline, unlike some Kilrathi we can name.

After that, however, the Spartans began to form alliances instead of enslaving neighbouring states. What destroyed Sparta was not war, but ultimately the sudden expansion of their empire following the conquest of Athens and the Athenian League. The sudden influx of riches destroyed their effectiveness, as corruption and later attrition (see the Battle of Leuctra in 371BC) reduced them to a non-viable state.
 
wankski said:
err, i'm sorry but the exact opposite was the case...

sparta won many battles cos of its warrior mentality, but lost the war to athens exactly because it had no economy (or at least compared to athens)...

They had an economy, and didn't lose the war to Athens, unless you mean 'Athenian culture survived'. It was, ironically, the influx of wealth into their economy that finished them.
 
Well, for the purpose of demonstrating how slavery is inefficient and bad to economy, one can use another historical example which is closer to our experiences: the 17th-19th century period.
 
Well, just a few thoughts…

In a *VERY* generic sense, we could say that the Kilrathi are "oriental" and that confed is "occidental" After all, confed seems to encompass values like democracy, consensual government and liberty.

However, confed did win the war by a “trick”, not by sending all it’s forces on a decisive battle against the enemy. When Confed could win it on a decisive battle, it chooses not to and favos "pacifism". Later on, if both forces were to engage in a massive battle (WC3 Proxima and Sol), Confed would lose.

That’s could be one of the reasons to why Tolwyn said that confed’s victory over the Kilrathi was a fluke. Confed didn’t win how it was supposed to. Ironically, that how the Kilrathi was about to win the war as well. But that might be incidental, since I don’t think that kind of thing has any deeper meaning for the Kilrathi. But in a way, confed won the war according to the western way: by choosing the most lethal weapons available: the Behemoth and the Temblor bomb.

And I think what Tolwyn had in mind is the whole "weak species faces extinction" thing. But confed temporary "weakness" was cultural, not biological, so he was way off. That’s not to say Tolwyn didn’t admire aspects of the Kilrathi culture. Interesting, but I think Confed had the upper hand here, despite the problems that almost lead to its destruction. The determination with which Confed kept fighting against overwhelming odds speaks for itself.

I'm not entirely sure any of this makes sense. :)
 
I do agree with you Edfilho about slavery becoming bad after a population becomes too big, although I think the advent of technology is a bigger cause of reduction in the benefits for slavery. However the British did have huge huge opinion of themselves being noble and enlightened whereas the Kilrathi have managed to retain their feral nature throughout history, meaning that when it became unnecessary or even bad for them to keep slavery, they put up with the problems for their own sake, similar to South America embracing slavery when the North and the rest of the world was beginning to shun it.

Also the British Empire might be a bad example, even though they abolished slavery they still conquered other countries and set them up as colonies, leeching resources from them and became very powerful from it, although they were later stung by their colonisation.

However even though Sparta and the British Empire were ultimately a failure, they are still examples of this happening. Sparta was devistated by slave revolts only when another disaster struck, e.g. Earthquake or a Military Defeat, but otherwise it was very healthy. In the same way the Kilrathi would have been doing okay with slavery while they were expanding. It was only until their stalemate with the Confederation or the destruction of Kilrah that they found problems with keeping slave races.

Also even though Sparta was small and low-tech I though it best represents a historical example the the Kilrathi since it also seems to mirror the Kilrathi military system of the nobles being the strongest soldiers and the backbone of their military.
 
Haesslich said:
This is incorrect - Sparta's CITIZENS were the soldiers; there was no 'noble class' involved. This was because they took over the Messenians, who had both enough land to feed the Spartan population and outnumbered them by ten to one. After nearly being wiped out by a successful revolt in 640 BC, the Spartans reworked their society to become more militaristic. Every citizen (not counting the foreigners - perioeci who were second-class citizens but who did a lot of the merchant-work and kept their economy moving - and the helots) was expected to defend the state, which is why they trained, lived in barracks, and had lives of self-denial and discipline, unlike some Kilrathi we can name.

In terms of language, they were only citizens, however I simply called them noble because of the exclusiveness and hereditary qualities of the Spartan citizenship plus the fact that it was the highest class of their society, not including royalty, they are nobles in my eyes.

Disregarding that I do admit they do not absolutely mirror the Kilrathi

Haesslich said:
lived in barracks, and had lives of self-denial and discipline, unlike some Kilrathi we can name.

but they simply give historical precedence for the other posts that claim that there seem to be too many nobles fighting in Kilrathi society for it to be feasible or that their endless taste for conquesta can only lead to destruction.
 
I think there's one little reason why a slave revolt wouldn't work against the Kilrathi: the Kilrathi had the power to wipe out whole planets. Given a diverse enough base of slave races, the choice was basically between cooperate or extermination; in this respect, the situation more closely remembers the French or Jewish collaborators in World War II.

We actually see this situation portrayed in the final episode of WCA TV. The slaves ultimately do revolt, but only because they finally realize the Kilrathi don't intend to let them survive anyway--before then, survival was still an option, and they clung to that possibility. And without Confed protection, it's likely their revolt was futile anyway, and the Kilrathi will eventually come back and stomp them.

As for the Confederation's weakness, I think the Behemoth was actually a sign of the Confederation's strength. The Behemoth was the application of brute force; the T-bomb was a much more subtle device, and (according to one source) it only worked because of the top-down structure of Kilrathi society and its tectonic instability.

Paradoxically enough, however, the Behemoth's destruction through treachery was a sign of humanity's weakness: the Kilrathi probably would have been brutal and paranoid enough to maintain security on their black projects. Meanwhile, the fact that Blair had the guts to kill off Kilrah showed that humanity was brutal enough to survive.
 
I was thinking along the lines that the slaves held an absolute knowledge advantage in some area with my example of agriculture.

Exterminating a race you depend on for something you absolutely can't produce yourself, or something that is much to difficult to produce in large enough supply, pretty much screws you over. It would be as if the Vandals exterminated the Romans without learning engineering; in a few generations the Vandals would have gone back to their more primitive ways.

I thought the WCA TV episode had the slaves building a pyramid or something for the Kilrathi because they thought the kats were gods. I can't remember if the slaves growing stuff for them or not.

In spite of WC4, what would hardened warriors know about farming?
 
My example of slavery in modern ages was misunderstood. The British didn't abolish slavery because they were snobbish, it was simply bad for bussiness. Slaves are expensive to buy and mantain, are inefficient, tend to escape... It might have worked for a little longer in South America (especially, for my shame, in Brasil) but it didn't work in the LARGER picture of a Global economic system. Even though the British leeched their colonies, they needed free-workers with salaries to buy their stuff.

Slaves can't buy anything. They became a dead weight in a global commerce society.

A good example was the Secession (sp?) war in the US. The north didn't shun slavery because of it was evil or anything. Again, the North's economy was industrial and therefore depended on internal flow of goods, something impossible in a slavery+monoculture based society like the one in the South. Again, Slavery was bad for bussiness. Incidentally, the South lost in the long run, and one of the factors in this defeat was that it's economy wasn't nearly as efficient as the Northern one.

I may have some details wrong here, I'm no American Civil War expert, but the major point stands.

Slavery works in smaller, simpler societies, where the integration between countries (or nations or states or races or planets) is very low, almost limited to war.
 
I don't think we're looking at this the right way - it's an entirely different from of slavery. This isn't a case of "hey, I bought you, make me pies"... it's "hey, if your civilization doesn't give us half of what it produces, we're going to destroy your planet." The Kilrathi aren't carting slaves around the universe for specific functions - they're annexing entire, pre-existing planets and then simply taking their output.

A good example was the Secession (sp?) war in the US. The north didn't shun slavery because of it was evil or anything. Again, the North's economy was industrial and therefore depended on internal flow of goods, something impossible in a slavery+monoculture based society like the one in the South. Again, Slavery was bad for bussiness. Incidentally, the South lost in the long run, and one of the factors in this defeat was that it's economy wasn't nearly as efficient as the Northern one.

I may have some details wrong here, I'm no American Civil War expert, but the major point stands.

I don't think that's a reasonable summary of the Civil War - the differences between the economies of the North and the South has a lot more to do with variables like climate and who originally settled them (and why) than it does their use of slaves.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I don't think we're looking at this the right way - it's an entirely different from of slavery. This isn't a case of "hey, I bought you, make me pies"... it's "hey, if your civilization doesn't give us half of what it produces, we're going to destroy your planet." The Kilrathi aren't carting slaves around the universe for specific functions - they're annexing entire, pre-existing planets and then simply taking their output.

I agree. I was actually demonstrating why slavery is not usefull in Earth nowadays. Even while I wrote the previous post, I was beggining to see that some of the points do not apply to the Kats.

You can add that the Kats do not make commerce, therefore they are on a different level.

But we must remember, they are actually similar to the roman empire: i.e. An Empire built upon expansion and domination. They are not IDENTICAL, but similar. Who knows what would happen to kilrah if they conquered the know galaxy?

I don't think that's a reasonable summary of the Civil War - the differences between the economies of the North and the South has a lot more to do with variables like climate and who originally settled them (and why) than it does their use of slaves.

Again, agreed, BUT slavery is an important component in the economic model chosen by the southern states. Which, incidentally is quite similar to the one my own country had for centuries. Believe me, I have studied this to the point of being sick of it all.

Large monocultural areas, which based their whole economy on the production and commerce of a single item, generally a basic resource (cotton, sugar, rubber, coffee etc.) always depended on slaves. And that was bad for the opposing model, one with industries and consumer market. Note, this applies to those times, I'm NOT talking about present day.

Note, too, that this probably doesnt apply to the Kilrathi.
 
But we must remember, they are actually similar to the roman empire: i.e. An Empire built upon expansion and domination. They are not IDENTICAL, but similar. Who knows what would happen to kilrah if they conquered the know galaxy?

Eh, I think the Kilrathi are in a slightly better position than the Roman Empire - in the Kilrathi situation, there's absolutely no chance that a revolt on a slave world could succeed. The Kilrathi have a very, very high degree of control over their slaves.

Again, agreed, BUT slavery is an important component in the economic model chosen by the southern states. Which, incidentally is quite similar to the one my own country had for centuries. Believe me, I have studied this to the point of being sick of it all.

Large monocultural areas, which based their whole economy on the production and commerce of a single item, generally a basic resource (cotton, sugar, rubber, coffee etc.) always depended on slaves. And that was bad for the opposing model, one with industries and consumer market. Note, this applies to those times, I'm NOT talking about present day.

Note, too, that this probably doesnt apply to the Kilrathi.

On the whole, though, crops are just as important to the industrial whole as manufactured goods - you're not going to have the latter without the former. You won't get rich farming sugar... but it's still necessary to the economy.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Eh, I think the Kilrathi are in a slightly better position than the Roman Empire - in the Kilrathi situation, there's absolutely no chance that a revolt on a slave world could succeed. The Kilrathi have a very, very high degree of control over their slaves.

I was thinking about the internal and economic problem, not the slaves revolting. They need the conquering momentum to keep going... And I did state it was a similarity, not equality.

On the whole, though, crops are just as important to the industrial whole as manufactured goods - you're not going to have the latter without the former. You won't get rich farming sugar... but it's still necessary to the economy.

I'm not saying crops are useless. My country is the world's largest soy producer, and that's surelly good. But we also have industrial exports, steel, other agricultural items...

I'm stating that a monoculture (i.e. basing the ENTIRE economy in the production of a SINGLE product) is not efficient anymore. That happened in dozen of colonies in the colonial age. All the major land owners would only plant one single culture. In the 19th century, Brasil was a huge coffee plantation. And it needed slaves.
 
With a large enough empire, of sorts, it would be more efficient to have certain areas/planets focus almost exclusively on certain agricultural or industrial products, depending on what the planet could support; that way, you'd reduce their self-sufficiency, while exploiting their strength in one product. It's another way to keep control - if a planet cannot feed itself, then it's going to be harder to revolt as everyone's too busy trying NOT to starve to fight you, even if they should build up technology enough to do so.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I don't think we're looking at this the right way - it's an entirely different from of slavery. This isn't a case of "hey, I bought you, make me pies"... it's "hey, if your civilization doesn't give us half of what it produces, we're going to destroy your planet." The Kilrathi aren't carting slaves around the universe for specific functions - they're annexing entire, pre-existing planets and then simply taking their output.

Understood. But it’s still not a very efficient economic system. There’s no trade, so you are not selling anything. And the enslaved population has every reason to the worst possible job. In WW2 the Germans received weapons that with defects intentionally made by the people forced to work to them.

I understand that the Kilrathi didn’t care much about economics or that kind of thing. Their only values were connected to war and their concept of “honor”.

A good example of this is the Locanda system on WC3. Slaves they have no shortage of, and, without its resources, the system is useless. Since the population isn’t particularly “malleable”, they have a system with a workforce that they can’t use for anything. It would probably cost as much or even more to force the people to work to them, so it’s better to let go of the system.

Since of course it would be against their honor-system to surrender the system, and the workforce could be very useful for confed, he decides to go down that road. That’s bad, even for a Kilrathi, since at least until WCA both sides were refraining from using bioweapons. I’m not sure this is the case specifically, but by doing this Thrakkath could be opening the door for similar retaliation.

Edfilho said:
My example of slavery in modern ages was misunderstood. The British didn't abolish slavery because they were snobbish, it was simply bad for bussiness.

Edfilho said:
A good example was the Secession (sp?) war in the US. The north didn't shun slavery because of it was evil or anything.

Well, I agree that this is exactly what I remember they taught here in history classes in Brazil (and probably everywhere else). But personally I don't agree that the whole moral/philosophical issue is irrelevant and that economic interests are the only thing important in history or in human dimension.

That's not to say that slavery is bad for business and that it's an inefficient economic system, and those are very relevant factors. But there more to the world than just materialism.
 
Delance said:
Understood. But it’s still not a very efficient economic system. There’s no trade, so you are not selling anything. And the enslaved population has every reason to the worst possible job. In WW2 the Germans received weapons that with defects intentionally made by the people forced to work to them.

I recall that in Action Stations, a large number of the Kilrathi torpedoes were intentionally made defective by the assembly workers under similar circumstances. This resulted in a dud rate of something like thirty percent. While you can force a slave to do work, you can't force him or her to be competent at that work--it's too easy for a slave to pretend to be inept while the slavedriver has no way of being sure that the slave is NOT inept. That, I think, is the real argument against slavery in a technological society--maintaining your hold over the slaves depends on your keeping them powerless, but having effective technicians requires that you give them a certain degree of power and education.
 
I think the Kilrathi were pretty much doomed to eventually overextend themselves; expansionist empires always do. But I get the distinct impression that (save for the fact that they happened to run into an enemy bigger and badder than them) the Kilrathi would have been capable of continuing to expand for a bit longer, maybe even centuries. But I think it's mentioned in 1-2 of Forstchen's novels that at least some Kilrathi were convinced that the Empire would eventually collapse unless they adopted some of the human ways. You can put as much stock in that as you will.

I think we're fairly certain the Kilrathi do trade, it's simply not the sort of free market system that we have. Kilrathi traders are known to exist (in Action Stations, there are some Kilrathi traders--outcasts, admittedly), and there are supposedly tenuous trade links between the Confederation and the Kilrathi, and continue to be contraband links during the war. But the Kilrathi probably have a command economy (which are well-suited for quick ramp-ups of military production--even the US used a command system during WW2).

This means it's probably more a matter of the Emperor or the Great Clans or whatever deciding how economic resources are utilized. We definitely get the impression that certain clans specialized in one aspect or another of production for the Kilrathi war machine. Just because it's not a free market-style capitalistic system doesn't mean there's no trade or economy.

*edit*

About the torpedos... I think it's claimed somewhere that the Kilrathi eventually do get the kinks in their production line worked out. Probably by shooting all the saboteurs... sabotage can be a drag on a slave-based economy (or more like forced labor--is there a difference?), but considering the stigma against Kilrathi taking part in such activities, the Kilrathi were probably perfectly satisfied with a little sabotage, as long as the inefficiency could be managed by terrorizing the work force from time to time, or switching production to more compliant species and exterminating the troublemakers.

Rremember, we don't have any reason to expect that the Kilrathi worshiped efficiency as much as our modern industrial societies do... in fact, most highly industrialized societies are quasi-socialist, and tend to put a bigger emphasis on the welfare of individuals than, say, the United States, which has the most productive, and unhappiest, workers in the world (yeah, the economic figures surprise me, too).

We also have no reason to believe that any particular species is expendable. Once a weapon or technology is acquired or developed, it's likely that any sufficiently advanced subject race could produce it, given the plans. This means there wouldn't be much protection for "scientific" races; while this would slow technological progress in the long run, it's already been mentioned that the Kilrathi don't really think in such terms. As for agriculture, not just one slave species would have knowledge of agriculture, so again, no reason to terrorize one race or another. It's more than likely that the Kilrathi get collaborators before they've managed to chop off the heads of everyone who could do the work.

It's also likely that the Kilrathi are able to survive at least at a subsistence level, so they wouldn't be completely beholden to slaves to maintain their civilization; indeed, Kilrathi history is filled with cataclysmic civil wars, so it's probably not too far-fetched to believe that they've gone through several "dark ages", and emerged from them.
 
Now that's an interesting angle. Yeah, probably the Kats have had a lot more upheavals in their society than the Terrans, in the greater scale. I'm pretty much satisfied with this post of GeeBot, but for one point: Even if the Kats might easily adapt and learn new technologies, they would probably keep some alien scientists to research new stuff. And scientist are, sometimes, less worried about being slaves of another species, sometimes they are so driven on their search for knowledge that they'll gladly work fo the Kats, if that means a big lab with lots of useful equipment.
 
Whee, I satisfied Edfilho. ;) Err...

Yeah, I think it's pretty clear in some of the books that alien scientists are working with the Kilrathi. For example, they helped develop the torpedo... although you might think that the Kilrathi might kill them off, to prevent them from leaking the secret to their enemies. It would probably depend on whether or not the Kilrathi thought the potential for new discoveries outweighed the risk of a technology leak.
 
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