Why Do Kilrathi Not Exist?

Bob McDob

Better Health Through Less Flavor
An interesting thread about Klingons led me to wonder: Why do the Kilrathi exist? Ignoring the "iT's n07 r34l s0 i7 c4n b3 a3n371ng i7 w4n72 2 B!!!!!!!" argument, we haven't seen any Kilrathi agricultural development, and their entire culture is built upon war and the love of hunting. Without a stable agricultural base, which in turn leads to stable society, what makes them different from, say, the Mopoks?

Another point: are the Kilrathi truly wired for war and aggression, or is it simply such a major part of their culture they believe it to be true?
 
Bob McDob said:
Another point: are the Kilrathi truly wired for war and aggression, or is it simply such a major part of their culture they believe it to be true?

I think Baron Jukaga (sp) and the Kilrathi colonists that defected could be a good indication that it's probably a social construct of the warriors.
 
I've been curious about this myself. I think the solution lies in the fact that all we really see are nobility and military. We rarely have any view of kilra'hra, and so we don't get to see the farmers, machinists, teachers, and other such types in the Kilrathi culture. I think that they exist (in the ficitons, not in RL, obvoiusly) and that humanities view of Kilrathi culture is askew because of a lack of real contact.
 
Freedom Flight talks about Ralgha wishing he'd taken up the life of a herdsman, so we know that there are faming Kilrathi around the Empire SOMEWHERE. However, given the caste-based nature of their system, these farmers would be ranked lower than the warriors whose lifestyles they supported - and on top of it, they can always get slaves to produce food.

Beyond that, there's also the minor issue that their development into high technology was accelerated by the arrival of the Utara, who gave them advanced equipment and science in order to uplift them, at least to judge from what little we know of their history. They're not stupid, but they were, as a culture, tampered with to prevent them from settling TOO much into the agricultural-based civilization. I remember a reference that mentioned that, if not for the Utara giving them the stars and other cultures to enslave, they'd probably have wiped out themselves once they developed atomics.
 
It's kinda like that episode of the Simpsons with the Screamapiller. "Are you sure God doesn't want them to die?"

As we "hairless apes" have seen, cultures that base themselves too much on war will, in the end, destroy themselves.

The thing about kilrathi is that they 'evolved' from primal hunters (even though I'm no proponent of the theory of evolution). When we compare them to our own earthly cats (big or small) we see that, aside from being hunters, they are also rather territorial. However, in our felines, we don't generally see males from differing clans hobnobbing. Usually, unless they're sibblings, male felines will attack each other with little or no provocation, for the purpose of keeping the she-cats all to themselves. And possibly feeding. But we see Kilrathi males of differing clans congregating rather commonly. Just something I'd noticed.
 
You can have an agricultural society and wage war, like the japanese or the roman empire. The Kirlathi on WC3 were modeled after the former.

overmortal said:
The thing about kilrathi is that they 'evolved' from primal hunters (even though I'm no proponent of the theory of evolution).

Well, Darwinism couldn't really explain most sci-fi races anyway. A predatory race like the Kilrathi would have no "reason" to "evolve" into a civilization.
 
overmortal said:
But we see Kilrathi males of differing clans congregating rather commonly. Just something I'd noticed.

That could simply be due to higher cognitive functions. They may realize they don't need to do that to keep their females. Also, they seem to have a high regard for what's best for the species, even if they occasionally get it wrong. They may have simply learned to live together somewhat peacefully, at least enough to conquer other species as a unit. On the other hand, they are also constantly trying to take power away from other clans.

Another thing to consider is that they're not truly felines in the way that we're hairless apes. Or so say the books.
 
Bob McDob said:
Why do the Kilrathi exist? Ignoring the "iT's n07 r34l s0 i7 c4n b3 a3n371ng i7 w4n72 2 B!!!!!!!" argument, we haven't seen any Kilrathi agricultural development, and their entire culture is built upon war and the love of hunting. Without a stable agricultural base, which in turn leads to stable society, what makes them different from, say, the Mopoks?

Another point: are the Kilrathi truly wired for war and aggression, or is it simply such a major part of their culture they believe it to be true?
This is a silly question, really. Given that the Kilrathi are based on the Japanese culture, which did have some pretty impressive cultural achievements, there's really no question that the Kilrathi could also evolve. How quickly their civilisation would develop is a different matter, but we know that the Kilrathi - again, like the Japanese - had a few technology jumps thanks to knowledge obtained from other races.
 
I'd like to point out that human beings are also predatory creatures--we didn't get our stereoscopic vision, omnivorous teeth, and taste for meat and conflict for nothing, you know. Actually, the only thing that really separates the Kilrathi from humanity is a matter of degree, and the comparison with the Japanese is fairly apt. I think that's part of the point behind WC4: we have the potential to be just as sinister, or worse. When we still have genocide in the 21st century, let's not give ourselves too big a pat on the back for our sophistication.
 
overmortal said:
I've been curious about this myself. I think the solution lies in the fact that all we really see are nobility and military. We rarely have any view of kilra'hra, and so we don't get to see the farmers, machinists, teachers, and other such types in the Kilrathi culture. I think that they exist (in the ficitons, not in RL, obvoiusly) and that humanities view of Kilrathi culture is askew because of a lack of real contact.


You can make the same argument for the humans, too. While we (the players) get to see some of the supporting cast (such as mechanics), we see very little else other than the human military machine (except, maybe, the agricultural references at the end of WC-3 and the start of WC-4). The Kilrathi, likely, never see these folk.

While the cultural systems are certainly different between the Kilrathi and humans, your standard Kilrathi soldier, like your standard human soldier, probably knows little else about the other's culture aside from their war-waging capabilities and tendancies.
 
overmortal said:
But we see Kilrathi males of differing clans congregating rather commonly. Just something I'd noticed.


I think this is due to the fact that they have evolved into some form of society...stupid Utara.
 
Speradon said:
While the cultural systems are certainly different between the Kilrathi and humans, your standard Kilrathi soldier, like your standard human soldier, probably knows little else about the other's culture aside from their war-waging capabilities and tendancies.


I doubt this...for one reason, really. As you play through the games, the situation only gets worse, for Confed as a whole. They start to recruit anyone they can for any duty that needs filling. So that means they have farm boys and other just "regular" people running these awesome fighters and fighting hand to hand combat against Kilrathi, who have only nobles fighting. I guess the upper-class in kilrathi society is the largest...
 
Sabre said:
So that means they have farm boys and other just "regular" people running these awesome fighters and fighting hand to hand combat against Kilrathi, who have only nobles fighting. I guess the upper-class in kilrathi society is the largest...

The roman legions were composed by farmers. Only noble Kilrathi fight? They must have a lot of them... Well, it's a sci-fi warrior race, there's no need for any realistic economic background. They even use slave labor, which is not very efficient.
 
No, not every kilrathi military unit is nobility. Just the elite ones. I'm sure we do actually meet Kilra'hra in the games, but only as the pilot of a short-lived flyer, or perhaps the guy doing his best to fix the Fralthi II engine that you just blew off.
 
Sabre said:
I doubt this...for one reason, really. As you play through the games, the situation only gets worse, for Confed as a whole. They start to recruit anyone they can for any duty that needs filling. So that means they have farm boys and other just "regular" people running these awesome fighters and fighting hand to hand combat against Kilrathi, who have only nobles fighting. I guess the upper-class in kilrathi society is the largest...
That actually seems to be the reverse of what really happens. According to Fleet Action (and, IIRC, some vague comments in Freedom Flight as well), the Kilrathi were very short on combat pilots, and they had to rush the replacement pilots through as quickly as possible just to keep up with the losses. This situation would have been made even worse after Fleet Action, with the Kilrathi elite virtually disappearing during that battle. Notice, for example, that we never see a single Drakhai in WC3.
On the other hand, if Confed has similar problems, they're never mentioned.

We can also assume that most of the crew and pilots on the Shiraak (Armada carrier) were low-born - the reward they were promised for their suicide mission was partial nobility for their descendants. There is no reason to believe that the Shiraak would be an exception, so presumably this is the case on most Kilrathi carriers in 2669.
 
They were Drakhai in the WC3-era, we just didn't see them specifically. The WC3 CCG lists Darket, Dralthi, Vaktoth, Paktahn squadrons that were Drakhai crewed. The Kilrathi ace "Deathfang" was also a Drakhai pilot (because the Vaktoth squadron "Deathfang's Warmates" he led was Drakhai).

I'm guessing the Drakhai was held directly in the Kilrah Sector to help the Emperor fend off any political coups and assassinations (and they were a couple, especially after that fuckup at Earth). I'm guessing the reason we didn't see them in WC3 was because the Kilrathi didn't want to commit most of their elite Imperial Guard against a second-string light carrier that was the worst in the Fleet.
 
I agree with Quarto here. There are the obvious (and IMO, overworked) parallels to imperial Japan, but you also need to consider that the Confederation doesn't technically have a warrior class. Every citizen is a potential soldier, and as the war dragged on, patriotism and the need for revenge/defense against a terrifying enemy probably drove a lot of people to enlist. If we assume that combat ability is distributed evenly through the populace, it's not likely that all your best warriors are going to get killed in the first few years of the war.

For the Kilrathi, however, they had an extremely rigorous training program, with a constant focus on war, and a distinct warrior class, trained from childhood for only one vocation. It's likely that the cream of the crop, so to speak, was fielded early on in the war. As they took the inevitable losses, the overall quality of their personnel degraded over time.

On the other hand, we need to reconcile this with the fact that the Kilrathi would have won WC3 if Blair hadn't dropped the T-bomb on Kilrah. This clearly seems to indicate that the Kilrathi have superior combat power in the WC3 era. We have a ready explanation for this in the form of the Battle of Earth; but I think this points more to a materiel disadvantage on the Confed side, rather than a personnel one. This would seem to indicate that the Kilrathi industrial machine was not woefully inferior to the Confed one (perhaps the loss of industrial capacity on Earth was a major factor, although I tend to discount the Forstchen theory that Earth was the major industrial center of the Confederation), or that the Kilrathi force superiority was large enough to offset any new production that Confed was able to field.
 
That is a few valid points. However, just because the Confederation has citizens doesn't mean that most of them are going to enlist. While the Kilrathi have their warrior caste and a society that emphasizes on honor and combat, they also have their lowborns and their utaks. Just like the Confederation, they had great military men and citizens who aren't in the military who was 100% behind the war effort, but they also had fools like Mandarins, anti-war protestors (like Dr. Torg from fleet action), Kilrathi sympathizers, and other forms of idiots (Forstchen gave his novels a very Republican feel, to give a political situation of the Confederation).

And even though the Battle of Earth did screw the military over, Confed had one chance to keep the war from going bad. This was said in the False Colors novel, in which Tolwyn said that right after the Battle of Earth, the Terrans should have followed up with a "strike that knocked the Kilrathi back to the stone age". This blow, given while the Kilrathi Imperial Throne was in total disarray would help keep the stalemate, if not turn the tide just a little bit. With the new carriers brought online and new equipment, this would have helped. But as Tolwyn said, the political leaders screwed it up by wasting away their resources on useless targets until the Kilrathi had a chance to "rebuild everything they had lost, and more".

And the Terrans did have other shipyards. The Trojan IV shipyards was untouched during the BoT (it was on the other side of the solar system in Jupiter), and they had "valuable" shipyards in the Tamayo system. But I don't think that, taking the 2669 situation in account, that they even rivaled the Kilrathi's. In all due effect, all the new Confed capital ships, carriers, and fighters didn't turn the tide of war in their favor - they just merely postponed the inevitable by about a year.
 
I again draw parallels to WW2, where we're fighting to make the world safe for democracy against the likes of Hitler. And safe for the likes of Stalin, but that's another story. In any case, we're clearly talking about a war of survival here, not some foreign intervention which may or may not have been a good idea; for most people, there comes a point where ultimate victory is not debatable.

Also, it seems like everyone serving in Confed by WC3 has some grudge or another against the Kilrathi as their reason for serving, judging from their dialogue (whether this is realistic or not, I leave up to you).

One thing that I feel is completely unrealistic about novels written by authors like Forstchen is how they portray the vast unwashed masses as being a bunch of peacenik morons without the resolve of the military classes.

In general, I think the unwashed masses get a short thrift from pundits; they also serve who just stand and rivet carriers. I think the Confederation people (and even their politicians) are willing to make much larger sacrifices than Forstchen's own perspective gives them credit for.
 
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